Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Hey! That’s me!

Read: The Dragon’s Soulmate is a Mushroom Princess! vol 1 (Hanami Nishine, poporucha): Light novel, the main character has been so emotionally abused by the fiance who just dumped her that she doesn’t believe anyone can love her, the prince who keeps trying to spend time with her must be insane to appreciate her objectively disgusting power to sprout mushrooms on things, etc. Fortunately this is a light novel, so romance therapy >> antidepressants (which haven’t been invented). Also there are interludes from the PoV of the summoned mushrooms.

Written: 259, but I don’t like how this scene is going in this new draft. Maybe my refusal to engage in second drafts all these years has been well-founded! Or maybe I’m just, you know, a bad writer.

I hope everyone is aware of all nearby velociraptors at all times!

Went to the office again, sat on the phone with a customer, ate a falafel and a hummus.

Read: #DRCL vol 1 (Shin’ichi Sakamoto): Despite the hashtag octothorpe in the title, it is set in Victorian England and the height of technology so far is the typewriter. It is an extremely cracktastic, possibly even hallucinatory, boarding-school AU of Dracula with alternate personalities, crazy foreigners, excessive interpersonal drama, the first girl at the boy’s school, inexplicable supernatural weirdness, and general bizarre creepiness.

Read: The Remarkable Journey of Coyote Sunrise (Dan Gemeinhart): A twelve-year-old girl and her dad travel the country ina  converted schoolbus after the rest of their family has died, never talking about the past or going back to their old hometown, until Coyote hears of something she has to get home for on a tight deadline, and hatches a Cunning Plan. Emotional roadtrip hijinks ensue.

Written: 213.

I don’t recall interacting with the librarians much, but the one at my first high school would let us hang out in the library and invent space wargames during pep rallies.

Yay bats! Bats are great!

Went to the office, ate Mayan-Chinese fusion cuisine (Pollo Pibil Bao) and felt very futuristic.

Read: Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 1-2 (Yodokawa): A manga editor breaks up with her girlfriend, looks for a new place to live, finds a house that is suspiciously cheap and turns out to come with an eccentric yet beautiful live-in landlady, lesbian hijinks ensue. The landlady’s colorful past is a big deal.

Read: Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc vol 1 (Sekka Iwata, Yu Aoki): Monsters randomly appear in future Tokyo, transforming technomagical heroines to exorcise them are big business, a college grad with no talents except pluck and speed-reading and eidetic memory falls in with a magical girl startup company populated entirely by weirdos, life-threatening hijinks ensue.

Written: 119.

Another one I’m in favor of!

Exciting news at work, possibly good, more likely neutral, definitely unexpected.

Played: Lancer. The horrible plan that could not be avoided is put into action, and goes okay, although not well enough to avoid the set-piece battles, and we are far too late to save the future of the colony. Finally, we reach the scene of the crime and gaze upon extremely distressing sights. Next session, the Final Boss!

Written: 123. We haven’t gotten to The Mushroom yet, but the MC finally made the terrible decision. Next: the consequences!

As long as you don’t try to measure it too precisely, anyway.

Played: Librarians Errant. The field trip continues, but while checking out a famous bridge for Grumman’s research paper, the team is accosted by talking goats and “rescued” by a dashing troll vigilante. All is revealed when Thaïs is knocked off the bridge but rescued by troll stagehands (and kissed by a troll, about which the less thought, the better) working for the troupe of troll actors who have been hired to play a prank on someone crossing the bridge that day, who is not the team. Everything is straightened out, but Thaïs will forever use this as an example of the terrible things that happen when you get up too early in the morning. After some additional travel, they arrive in Yartar, make contact with the Water Baron who is only too happy to show them her library, and help the Popesses of the Church of the Crystal Dragon (from the previous campaign) with their recurring Bane problem. Walking into a trap is a perfectly good way of dealing with it, right? (Thaïs used Flirt. It wasn’t very effective. But she did get a minor magic item of the goddess of Death and Rebirth, which is entirely fitting for her background.)

Written: 187.

Plants are good! They make oxygen and food and paper!

Played: Minecraft. After not playing since last Saturday, I am way behind everybody else, but whatever. I still like trundling around mining things and crafting things and seeing things. I found ice, but have no Silk Touch equipment to collect it, and found powder snow to experience the fun of hypothermia. Still not sure where that surface lava is.

Watched: Nothing. Marith wasn’t up for going places, so we all stayed home and played Minecraft more.

Written: 195.

 

Humans have flying into space, however clumsily, for about sixty years. I wonder what it will look like after another sixty? (“Spaceflight? Oh, yeah, we used to do that before World of Warcraft XXXVII came out.”)

Used a fact about shark eyes in the meeting today, but I’m running low on facts.

Read: D&D5e Monsters of the Multiverse (Jeremy Crawford, et al): I usually like monster books, but maybe corporate D&D books don’t count. It wasn’t bad, but most of the monsters were familiar from previous editions (gnoll flind, Zuggtmoy, etc) and 5e writeups are kind of boring because they have to be very mechanical for the proper videogame feel. I do like that the new PC race writeups don’t have stat modifiers, only size/move/darkvision/special powers. Now you can play any class as any of these races without hamstringing yourself.

Written: 252. Main Character, why are you not making the terrible decision? Do I need to put the flashback off until later?

Now Sage is also one year old! She is extremely bb for such a grownup cat.

Went back to the office, ate eggplant stir-fry, did a work. First day this year I have not felt the need for a jacket.

Read: Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 2 (Yoichi Abe): The world is completely different again, fragments of the boy’s personality are looking for fragments of the witch’s personality to reassemble, but this may not be as straight-forward as hoped, and the results might not be entirely positive.

Read: Wartorn Stars (Glynn Stewart): Having reached the stars of the aliens who need help, the humans save as many days as they can, which is not all of them, but enough to get acclaim from the aliens and their allies, and also find out a lot of confusing things about the enemy.

Read: Dai Dark vol 2 (Q Hayashida): Finally the main character and his skeletal buddy have their own creepy spaceship so they can fly around looking for trouble meatball spaghetti and bones.

Written: 176.

You can do it, young writers! Don’t listen to the haters! Especially not if the hater is you!

Went to the office, ate a barbecue, did a work. Got an urgent customer call at the end of the day, but was able to make the customer happy by quitting time.

Read: Sheeply Horned Witch Romi vol 1 (Yoichi Abe): Rereading, because I tried to start vol 2 and had no idea what was going on. Depressed high-school girl gets the power to reshape the world into the metaphor of her psyche, the only person who isn’t in a coma is the boy she likes, at the end she’s entering a new instar or something. Right!

Read: Dai Dark vol 1 (Q Hayashida): There’s a teenaged kid in a wacky grim space setting full of disgustingly organic tech and necromancy, he has a skeletal life-support back, everyone is hunting him because they think his bones will grant any wish, ultra-violent space hijinks ensue.

Read: Raven’s Flag (Glynn Stewart): Number 6(?) in the series about trying to put together the remains of the alien empire that was just overthrown, starting a new arc where aliens from far across the old empire have come to ask humanity for help because they are getting their asses handed to them by mysterious attackers.

Written: 165.

 

I no longer use libraries that much, but will always defend and celebrate them, because libraries are awesome.

Boss B is back from vacation, so I had to get up early for 1:1, but all is well.

Played: Lancer. The PCs talked to the historical war crimes NHP in orbit and found out some about the other historical NHPs, but mostly spent a lot of time talking about what to do next and coming to the conclusion that they’ve only put off the thing they didn’t want to do, not found any way to avoid it.

Read: The Abandoned Heiress Gets Rich With Alchemy and Scores an Enemy General! vol 2 (Miyako Tsukuhara, Satsuki Sheena): Road trip to another kingdom that has dragons, but also has demon problems. Further tsundereness.

Written: 120. Meh.

Played: Zoomwarts?! How did that happen? I blame Jus and her spring break. Anyway, I wrote off the entire game so far as a dream, which gave the players the opportunity to fix everything wrong with the setting, but they did nothing except move it forward to second year so they could feel superior to the new first-years. Marith had a great idea that I will have to implement if we manage to play again, and also I guess I should find a summary of book four (since that’s the year they’re in) since they want things to be the same-ish.

Written: 141.

Played: Minecraft on our shiny new server! We all logged in at the same time to start off the tree-punching, but by the end of the session, I had barely made a tiny house of plain planks, and other people had enslaved entire villages and mined diamonds. I am really very bad at video games, even ones I enjoy. (So like everything else, really.) We have a lot of cherry blossoms at spawn, though.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 9-11: Anubis and a lot of other beasts still don’t like Sariphi, but so far the king is keeping her safe. Maybe Anubis will eventually come around.

Written: 296.

Did Chicago write this?

Even though I didn’t go to the office yesterday, I had to get up early to see the new shade of yellow, so today my brain was very small. Smaller than usual, I mean.

Read: “Olga” (CT Adams): Youth and stolen artifacts are still no match for old age and cunning, especially in a wizard duel.

Read: “Sweetheart” (Abbey Mei Otis): In case you missed the memo, bigotry sucks, even when it’s against literal aliens.

Read: “Fare Thee Well” (Cathy Clamp): A summer internship at a morgue is unusual, but MC did not expect it to be that unusual.

Read: Deadly Weapon (Adira Slattery, Fen Slattery): A strange game about having a magic gun and there being demons that you could shoot, but the more bullets you’re holding on to, the greater your superpowers

Read: “Dislocation Space” (Garth Nix): I think I read this one before. A WWII Russian sniper with a circus contortionist background (would anybody buy that for an RPG character?) is sprung from the gulag to explore a very unusual tunnel.

Read: Descendant Machine (Gareth L Powell): I dunno, I feel like the entire civilization of post-human entities should have been able to figure that out without needing a random wild-type human who’d barely been thinking about the problem for a few million seconds. Also, C20 cultural references, although the humans were abducted from Earth in mid-C21 or so, so it’s not quite as bad as some.

Read: “The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree” (Michael Swanwick, Eileen Gunn): Faerie crimes and childhood and adulthood and memory. It reminded me a bit of Diana Wynne Jones.

Write: 192.

Also National Burrito Day. These should not be combined, unless you’re sharing your burrito with a rat friend.

Did not go to the office this, time, as we had an early all-hands to celebrate the fact that Marketing has changed all our colors and private equity owns a chunk of the company and somebody needed to cover while most people went in to make the office look busy.

Read: Starfire: A Red Peace (Spencer Ellsworth): It’s not actually Star Wars, but probably in the same subgenre. Vat-grown hybrids of the now-extinct psychic aliens rebel and overthrow the evil human empire, instituting their own genocidal regime, giant planet-eating spiders lurk on the frontier, a hapless smuggler and a renegade hybrid soldier stumble across a secret and must save everything while fleeing from the new empire, space battles at improbably low range and velocity with manual guns, etc.

Written: 225.

I count, at least according to my HR profile.

Went to the office, ate a deep-dish pizza, did a work.

Read: I Married My Female Friend vol 1 (Shio Usui): Marriage is something everybody should try, so two friends agree that if they aren’t otherwise attached by five years after college graduation, they’ll marry each other, and they do. One of them is obviously much more into this than the other, at least initially, but there is affection and cuteness.

Read: God Bless the Mistaken vol 1 (Nakatani Nio): In a world where the laws of nature are always making an exception (giant plants growing everywhere, then the plants disappear and people can walk on air, then people are earthbound and everything is mirror-reversed), a high-school boy runs errands for his landlady who studies the glitches. I have trouble believing a society so much like ours could happen in such a world, but it’s cute.

Written: 309. This is working better.

Are you sure about that?

Played: Lancer, although we had no Kelsey. The spiderbots that were placed on the mantelpiece in the last session were definitely used against us, and it hurt a lot, although we were chewy enough that the station scuttled some of itself to try to get rid of us.

Read: From the Red Fog vol 1 (Mosae Nohara): Unrepentant tween serial killers in Victorian England, with the occasional spot of rape. Do not want.

Written: 122 terrible words. I’m not just saying that, they actually aren’t working. I think I need to back up a bit and approach this scene from a different angle.

Joke’s on you, I’m a fool every day!

You can tell by the way I engage in capitalism.

Read: Beastrings (Shikaku Yamamoto): Japanese fantasy characters (witches, elves, beastfolk, bards) in a modernish city (skyscrapers, cell phones) doing stuff that eventually ties back to the huge disaster that destroyed the original fantasy city. The mayor is a D&D barbarian with a hands-on approach to resolving civic issues, there are various other superpowered characters with various personal motivations and whatnot.

Written: 337.

Played: Librarians Errant. The team, which is now 5th level but still has no cool team name, goes through the Elemental Plane of Books to get to their next stop on the hunt for The Magical Education, instead of walking on muddy roads in the rain and cold like normal people, which saves like 3 days but does get them jumped when they cut through the bad (Dewey decimal) part of the stacks. Fortunately the rabid bat-books and book-lizards (yes, absolutely, you are correct about what they are, no question) are not that much of a problem, and soon the team arrives at the Kryptgarden Branch Campus. Somehow Thaïs is beaten at cute girls by Lily, of all people. Also they meet an absolutely terrifying dragon, find a suspect who is actually a victim, and stop a foolish professor from sacrificing his grad students to bring horrible monsters through a portal from the Feywild. Thaïs finally gets to use both of her new 3rd-level spells, but neither of them helps at all, because this is D&D and there’s no “play to find out what happens”. Bah!

After that I went with Dave back to his lair, to have Easter dinner with everybody. It was very nice because friends and ham and glazed shallots and friends!

Played: Uno Flex. It’s like regular Uno, but you can make the cards do extra stuff if your checkmark is right-side-up.

Written: Only 188, but I had lot of socializing today.

Did a supervillain write this?

I managed to do most of the things I needed to do before being on call in the afternoon, and then I managed to fix the customers enough that I could go over to dye eggs and eat sushi with Ayse and Ken and fam. Marith insisted on driving me over, but could not stay because she was feeling poorly, which was very sad.

Written: 237 words. I was having too many infodumps, so I guessed that it was because I started the story too early and have jumped ahead to where I started it the first time. Will my greater knowledge of what’s going on make it better, or was it better when everything was mysterious?

Nightvale is one (1) years old today! That makes him a grown-up cat, not a kitten! He might still be kind of bb, though.

As usual after going into the office two days in a row, I am pretty blah, but I did a work and snuggled one or more cats.

Played: Ayse wants to play Minecraft together, so we spent some time tootling around the proposed seed in creative mode until everybody decided they like it. Someday, when we are not all busy with Easter, we will reboot it in survival mode and punch trees together.

Read: Edges (Linda Nagata): Start of a follow-on series to Deception Well and Vast and all those. One of the explorers returns home in a stolen ship, recruiting for an expedition back to the origins of humanity, where the people Deception Well left behind made Dyson spheres and then unmade them and now nobody knows what’s there. “The Inverted Frontier” is the title of the series.

Read: “The Speed of Time” (Jay Lake): Well, what do you expect, when members of your species listen to the voices from space?

Written: 226 words.

I told them how beautiful and chompy they are, instead of reminding them that their brains are the size of walnuts, so I’ll count this one.

Went to the office, got almost the last desk, ate some Chinese(?) food, did a work. I’m not sure how this is going to work when the whole company is supposed to be in the office on Thursdays.

Read: Blood Blade vol 1 (Oma Sei): Vlad the Impaler returned to life as a cute young vampiress and protected her corner of Eastern Europe for hundreds of years until steampunk mad scientists send their minions to annoy her. Ultraviolence ensues. No, I don’t think it’s supposed to make more sense than that.

Read: Whoever Steals This Book vol 1 (Nowaki Fukimidori, Kakeru Sora): Book-hating youngest member of a famously book-loving clan discovers that when people steal books from her family’s private library, they get cursed, and she’s the curse. Adventures in surreal book worlds ensue, with a helpful dog-girl-spirit-thing.

Written: 428 terrible words.

HI JUS!

Went to the office, ate some Ethiopian mushrooms and injera, did a work, came back home.

Read: Soara and the House of Monsters vol 1 (Hidenori Yamaji): After spending her entire life training to fight monsters, Soara goes to sign up on the very day the war is cancelled. Distraught, she wanders the wilderness until she falls in with a band of dwarves who are going around doing bespoke construction for monsters who want to use this new human idea and live in houses instead of found dens. Very much the sort of manga with double-page spreads of the monster houses with the fantasy materials and monster-specific features called out. Soara’s character arc is obviously going to be learning to value herself for anything other than monster-killing power.

Read: Free Period (Ali Terese): Two middle-school troublemakers get sentenced to do something constructive with their energy, and end up coopted into/coopting the project to get period supplies in all bathrooms. It’s like 50% period equity, 50% nobody knows what to do with these girls who have so much energy, and 20% fart jokes. Having never been a middle-school girl, I have no idea whether this is accurate, but it seems plausible.

Read: Blade of the Moon Princess vol 3 (Tatsuya Endo): Look, it’s another faction on the Tainted World, and they also have a grudge against the Imperial family. What were the odds of that?

Written: 279, although maybe I should have written less and gone to bed earlier.

Sigh.

Also a day of work, or at least attempted work.

Played: Nothing, Ken has class from 4-8 in the morning all this week.

Read: The Scratch Daughters (HA Clarke): Sequel to The Scapegracers, in which Sideways tries to get her [SPOILER] back without going mad or alienating her gorgeous and increasingly [SPOILER] coven, and also makes off with one of the enemy. Her dads are the best.

Written: 259, but they are probably all the wrong words.

But I lack fandom, so I will have to leave that to others.

I guess I wasn’t completely unproductive at work today, although it kind of felt like it. Petted some kitties, did some laundry, stuck a new thing in my arm, checked that I’m not coughing because of COVID.

Read: Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou omnibus 4 (Hitoshi Ashinano): Human boy is growing up and leaving, mysterious aircraft is leaving, human girl is thinking about growing up and leaving, Osprey is still there. At this rate, the next volume could be a proper conclusion, although I don’t know what it would look like.

Read: Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 3 (Yu Yoshidamaru): It’s hard being Ogami and dating Yaginuma. It’s also hard being Yaginuma and existing in society, what with people having bodies all over the place.

Written: 156. I blame capitalism.

I did not have any cheesesteaks today, but I did have a bunch of leftover barbecue and also pie, which was probably at least as unhealthy.

The one useful thing I did today was get supplies. I also avoided buying unnecessary books, so, uh, go me?

Written: 453. How did that happen? Does knowing where I’m supposed to be going with this story actually help? Weird!

I did successfully observe this, so intensively that I could not get out of bed until after 10! Although next year Nightvale and Sage will both be officially grownup cats.

Once i was able to escape, I did the shopping and the other shopping and the pastrami and the additional shopping and a lot of crafting in Shop Titans so I could complete my bounty before the deadline and some writing (not last thing at night!) and reading, instead of being a useless lump all day.

At dinner time, Marith and. went to Monkeycat Towers to eat many barbecues and bask in the affection of friends. People said many nice things about me, just because we were celebrating my birthday or something. I am not as good at eating barbecue as I used to be, but I’m better at accepting compliments. About even on accepting parasite-rated chocolate cream pies.

Read: Spy x Family vol 11 (Tatsuya Endo): Of course Anya used her powers to get through it

Read: The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 1 (Hachi Inaba): Once upon a time(?) in a land where beasts can talk and sometimes take human shape, a tiger brings down a young dragon. She decides he’s too small to eat now, so she should raise him to be a more suitable meal, and that’s where things start to go wrong. The beasts have clothes in their human forms (suspiciously modern ones in the dragon’s case) but there’s otherwise no sign of civilization or humans, so I guess it’s like a fable.

Written: 227. Could have been more, but I caught up on this instead.

I feel like my youth has a slightly higher number than it did on Tuesday, oddly enough.

Did some capitalism, although as usual after two days in a row of going to the office I was not that swift.

Watched: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2.5-6: More personal drama, of students Chise already knows and ones that are new to her, but so far it has not bubbled over into violence in the halls. Snakes are friends!

Read: “The Chatbot and the Drone” (Geoffrey A Landis): What it says on the tin!

Written: Finally decided that even though my outline isn’t done, the last line is “need better plan” and I can revisit that once I’ve gotten the characters up to that point for real. 275 words of actual text.

Yay me, I guess? I could have justified taking the day off work, and in fact should have since I have twenty days of vacation to use up this year, but instead I went to the office and ate beef and eggplant and fried rice and helped some customers.

Read: She Professed Herself Pupil of the Wise Man vol 1 (dicca*suemitsu, Ryusen Hirotsugu, fuzichoco): VR game, can’t log out, but the best summoner in the game is flung thirty years into the future and stuck in the girly avatar he was fiddling with as an alt to his Srs Bzns Elder Sage avatar. Now there’s one or more wars coming, his buddy who lived through the entire thirty years has spurred a military-industrial revolution, etc. Feels very choppy, probably because it’s only taking the high points from the original light novels and isn’t meant to stand on its own.

Read: My Happy Marriage vol 1 (Akumi Agitogi, Rito Kohsaka, Tsukiho Tsukioka): So far very similar to the anime. Maybe we’re getting lore in different spots, but it’s the same lore. Maybe the trip to town went differently? Or maybe what I’m remembering is from a later trip. Anyway, Miyo-ella and her horrifying abusive family and her beautiful fiancé.

Read: Cascade Failure (LM Sagas): It does successfully have some A Long Way To A Small Angry Planet found-family energy, but it’s all betrayals and murder plans instead of interspecies romance. The world-building is not great, planets are bigger than that, which means slower; no future character ever needs to make more than a single C20 cultural reference per series in which they appear; and even though we here in 2024 are in a consolidation phase of the capitalist hellscape, I am dubious about a single megacorp owning the entire galactic arm. On the other hand, I stayed up until a million o’clock at night to finish it.

Written: 130 more of adventure, the parts the PCs wouldn’t see if they sat in town instead of engaging with the adventure. Seems unlikely they’ll do that in practice, although I really need to test it before taking it to a con. For a change.