Author: Trip the Space Parasite

I’m short on bears, though. Also, shouldn’t this be shortly before Fat Bear Week? I’m sure party snacks are dense in calories!

My mucus is decreasing, but possibly asymptotically and not necessarily to zero, so still not in the office.

The new Murderbot is out, but it seems to follow on directly from the previous situation, so I had to reread.

Read: Network Effect (Martha Wells): This is the one the new book follows on from, I could tell even though I apparently didn’t remember it very well until I read it. I thought there was a lot more stuff with [SPOILER], but no.

Read: Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells): Published after Network Effect but set earlier, when Murderbot was hanging out on Preservation keeping an eye on Dr Mensah. I therefore did not have to reread it right now, but I did anyway, because Murderbot.

Written: FAIL. Only reading.

I mean, I kind of do, I’m just really bad at it!

Skipped going into the office to avoid sharing my mucus, although possibly I could have gotten away with it.

Read: She Who Became The Sun (Shelley Parker-Chan): It’s fantasy China, the Mongols have invaded, tragic backstories for everybody, but tragedy spawns ambition that will not be denied, which in turn spawns a whole lot of murders. There are a lot of terrible people, including the protagonists, but also a few good people and a lot of people who are just trying to get by. There isn’t any magic per se, but there are definitely supernatural elements to the world that can be taken advantage of by the few people aware of them. There are So. Many. Feelings. I was afraid this would be too hard to read with my 2023 brain, but although a lot of terrible things are done, it was not too much to deal with.

Written: 189 words, which is almost more than nothing.

Happy birthday, Nonny!

I had to get up early for bonus meetings, which are actually a feature of every normal Tuesday now but that doesn’t make me like them any more. I had no brain, I did some work, I read some more GLOG stuff, I coughed up a bunch of mucus, I read an essay about how Tolkien orcs and D&D orcs are in fact still racist no matter how much you say “it’s right there on the page they aren’t human” or “Professor Tolkien would never”. It also convinced me that D&D-style stats are bad, even if you manage to avoid racial modifiers (which hardly anyone does). All the “natural ability” or “innate potential” type stats are like thinking your IQ is what matters, instead of what skills and decisions you actually make with it. This does affect my game design thoughts, since I was already tending toward BitD-style actions or Castle Falkenstein-style skills for the Champions thing.

Played: Nothing. Not only is Ken busy with Nonny’s birthday, Vivian got her brain electrified today.

Written: FAIL. Too many snuggles, not enough free hands.

 

Yeaaaaah!

Of course Monday the 13th is also the most cursed of days, but that’s on theme. Probably explains why Coworker T brought COVID back from vacation, so he’s still out and Coworker K just left on vacation.

Still kind of coughy and generally disgruntled with biology.

Read some more GLOG stuff. BONES gives up on stats as chance of success entirely and uses them only for slot-based inventory capacity. A sword, a spell, a best friend, a bag of gold, a recurring nightmare, each one takes up a slot in the appropriate inventory. Wounds and stress and madness take up slots too, and kick out what you already have if there isn’t enough room.

Written: FAIL.

I had pneumonia when I was a smol, so will never say anything against antibiotics or modern medicine.

Gaming was cancelled because plague and infirmity abound, so once again I did nothing useful. I read more GLOG stuff and like all OSR stuff I have very mixed feelings (not even counting my growing dislike for hit points). It is (or can be) way cooler than the Hasbro (or wannabe Hasbro competitor) focus group product. Roll twice on this list of vaguely goetic, extremely specific extradimensional entities to see what you can summon. Oh, you want them to be useful? Sounds like a you problem! Anyway, the world is composed of four elements: ash, bones, blood, and fish. Artificial fire is the divine element and will not burn the righteous. Dogs are sacred because they’re warm! At the start of every day, tell us which saint’s day it is, who they’re the patron of, what they help with, and how they were martyred, and get one miracle die for each one you tell us! But on the other hand, I want my characters to be cute and successful and have to roll on the Death and Dismemberment table just because the d20 hates me. I know, that’s definitely a me problem.

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 3 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): And now Kasuga (the one who likes to eat) has put a name to her feelings for Nomoto!

Written: Continued, unending, FAIL.

I don’t feel at all qualified to comment on what’s happening in Israel, but pretty sure an armistice would not be bad. Alas, when all you have is a nation-state, everything looks like a rival nation-state.

I was well enough to eat chicken tenders and buy groceries today, but not to do any braining, so it’s good that customers didn’t want anything from me. Instead of braining, I read a bunch about GLOG, which is a (more) minimalist, (more) DIY submovement within OSR, or something. The first rule of GLOG is obviously that there are no rules to GLOG, but if there were a rule, it would be that classes only have four levels worth of stuff, so there are no boring levels, and if you don’t die (which you probably will, because OSR) you will end up multiclassing. Other commonalities among  Many Rats On Sticks (Skerples), Runaway Princesses (Alcoops), Nuclear Ooze (Micah A), Moonhop (Type1Ninja), Vain the Sword (Phlox), and Ultraviolet Gloglands (Skerples) are slot-based inventory, copious random tables, and a magic system where you spend some of your precious few magic dice on a spell, the parameters of the spell are based on how many dice you rolled and the sum of them all, doubles and triples are bad, and only dice that roll low come back for reuse. Roll under your stat instead of vs target number is common but not required. What happens when you get to zero hit points usually involves a Death and Dismemberment Table.

This is irrelevant to my own game design struggles, since I want no hit points and do want superpowers and mostly nonlethal combat and the ability to play vampires, robots, goo monsters, tulpas, living black holes, or whatever other craziness can happen in Champions, which is an entirely different paradigm, but I’ll pretend looking at any game design is helpful.

Written: FAIL.

My theory: Everything wrong with the US today is a result of insufficient Sesame Street.

Watched: My Happy Marriage 6-9: It was nice to see the random rich guys who thought they were so great pick a fight with an actual military monster hunter, but Cinderella still needs to communicate better!

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 2 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): It’s kind of adorable how Nomoto (the one who likes to cook) is just “Welp, guess I’m a lesbian, I should check the Internet to find out how that works” and now she has a pocket friend to discuss things with. Plus, new character with a completely different relationship to food than the main couple.

Written: 184, although it took me like two weeks to accumulate what should be half a night’s work. Neither kitties nor germs are conducive to writing. (Also I suck.)

I like nachos in theory, but they never seem to be as good as I remember the nachos of my (relative) youth and make me vaguely ill. Maybe it’s because I’m not eating them with the stomach of my youth, which had a much better capacity for Mexicanish food. But I did not have nachos today, only work and kitty snuggles.

Read: “A Sign of the Times” (Joe Hill): What if the process of the Great Old Ones destroying the world involved Youtube videos about the benefits of branding yourself with the Elder Sign?

Written: FAIL.

I went back to my usual grocery store this week, which is next to my usual bookstore, which was full of things to buy, because I haven’t really converted to reading manga digitally, because I’m dumb. Also I ate chicken tenders to prepare my digestive system. I was on call in the afternoon to cover for coworker M who was trapped by the perfidy of automobiles, which boss B made a big deal of appreciating even though it was only for like 45 minutes.

In the evening, Ayse finally came over to meet my cats, and then we all* went to Brazil Meat Center (which is actually called Taurinus) for meat and more meat and grilled pineapple that tastes like peach pie and more meat and dessert because Marith hadn’t gotten a birthday celebration yet. Happy Lizard Day!

*Except Nonny who is sick and Dave who was keeping an eye on him and doesn’t like eating out much anyway.

Written: Still FAIL.

It me. But it’s also one-week Cativersary Day! Sage and Nightvale and I have been living together for a whole week and hardly any of us are dead!

Later in the day, I went over to visit Ayse and everybody for pizza and conversation and Glow Stick Party (which involves rings of light zipping back and forth on the smooth floor of a dark room) and it was very nice.

Written: FAIL.

Ovodiablerism is the best!

However, office lunch was Nepalese(?) which included two or more types of paneer plus garlic naan(ish) and no deviled eggs. Still good!

Read: Dandadan vol 5 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Another bizarre encounter with cryptids and cultists and aliens, most of them dumb or horny or both.

Read: Omega Morales and the Legend of La Lechuza (Laekan Zea Kemp): A twelve-year-old from a magical family but with defective(?) magic of her own and her annoying cousin and friendly ghost are stalked by an owl-witch-monster and also annoying middle-schoolers and racist buttheads and family that is not as helpful as they think. It’s hard being twelve.

Read: Me and My Beast Boss vol 1 (Shiroinu): A human (and therefore marginalized) office lady gets promoted to work with the terrifying lion-guy CEO, who is terrifying but also appreciates her abilities. Possible romance!

Written: Still FAIL.

As opposed to yesterday, which was just my personal cat day!

The cats are still very feline. Sage is remarkably energetic for a cat who has never had a single morsel of food in her entire life, ever, although after eating an entire cat of wet food she cuddled in my arms for an extended period. Nightvale jumped onto Marith’s shoulders when she came to visit, which I can only interpret as a sign of approval.

Played: Librarians Errant. After being manipulated into alarming situations by professors and/or sororities the library had offended, and finding that the eldritch tentacles unleashed by Flint and Shia in the first episode had taken to nibbling on the town’s supply of fine confections, our librarians junior library staff head back to Koboldtown only to find it being bullied by bullywugs! There’s a big fight, but the important parts are that Flint leaps down from the rooftop and chops the bullywug leader right in half, and Lily gets swallowed by a giant frog and carried off. Once they track her down, there’s another fight, but the leader of the bullywugs escapes with the book that was the entire reason they came down here. Thaïs only used one of her spell slots, so this was obviously a less strenuous adventure than last time, no matter what the other characters say.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.7: Another Fizzarolli episode, so sadly lacking in Loona or Millie, but otherwise good. Because seriously, fuck that guy!

Written: FAIL. There were cats that needed snuggles! But I did get caught up here and even figured out how to post pictures, so apparently the cats are less distracting.

With the help of Ken and Jus and Nonny (heroes of the revolution, all), I managed to get some cats into my den of squalor (instantly rendering it 1000% cooler).

Nightvale (“Mostly void, partially stars”)

 

Sage (Named by Jus, for her greenish eyes)

They are so much younger and more rambunctious than any of my previous cats!

Sage is mostly teeth, partially even more teeth. Nightvale is 1000% more chill. Augh I have cats what if something happens to them? What if they happen to something? Augh!

Read: Buffomet (ed Nero O’Reilly, Iris Jay, Mia “Hye” Mardikian): A collection of sexy pictures of everyone’s favorite infernal androgyne and/or other demons (possibly goat-like), diabolists, etc. Turned out to mostly not be to my taste, alas.

Written: How can I write? I have cats to distract me!

Ah, maybe that’s why I failed to obtain a black cat today, I’m in the US. Which is built around cars and the adoption people would not hand over the cats when I said I was going to carry them on the bus. I will have to make a better plan and try again.

Fortunately work was pretty quiet so my taking a few hours off to fail miserably wasn’t a problem.

Watched: Marith and I tried watching some Adventure Time, because apparently it is still a huge cultural phenomenon, but even with what Marith could remember of the curated episode list, it was still pretty uninteresting. Then we tried watching the pilot of the new cultural phenomenon, The Amazing Digital Circus, which was also not very interesting. It was just weird things happening to the main character that she can’t do anything about.

Written: FAIL.

It’s good that werewolves get some recognition!

Also no office today, I didn’t want to risk being late for the team meeting due to transit betrayal. That’s probably a pretty terrible reason, except that any reason to not commute is a good reason.

I exchanged email with the cat adoption person.

Read: Muted (Miranda Mundt): A webcomic about pretty gay witches in Louisiana and family trauma and demons and plants and family trauma and unwise decisions and also some family trauma. It is actually complete (125 episodes) so I can list it here.

Written: 186, which isn’t much, but at least I had a positive number two days in a row.

But isn’t that every day?

Apparently it was also sleep day, or more accurately, forget to set an alarm day, so I slept through my 1-to-1 with my boss. Fortunately he is cool, so it was okay. I even did a small amount of work.

Played: Lancer, kinda. We still had no Brooks, so we were able to wrap up the previous set-piece mecha battle and reap the rewards, we didn’t move onto the next one. I think we did make a couple of dice rolls, though, maybe?

Written: FAIL.

There’s one that didn’t age well.

Weekly reminder that you don’t hate Mondays, you hate capitalism.

Read: The Extremely Inconvenient Adventures of Bronte Mettlestone (Jaclyn Moriarty): A whimsical middle-grade adventure, in which a 10-year is sent across the secondary world to visit all of her many aunts, which reveals many interesting things about her relatives and also about the geomagipolitical situation. It gives me a Hilda vibe, despite also somehow feeling Australian.

Written: FAIL.

I have two of those!

I did get up at 6 to ride the bus for a long ways, and it paid off because there was almost no wait to get phlebotomized even without an appointment. Then, after a short break to recharge my phone and caffeine levels, I went to visit kitties. The one Ayse recommended was not particularly impressed with me, but there were two others who sat in my lap and purred me for various times. They are very nice cats, but now I have to overthink whether they are the right cats.

Written: 345, accumulated half a sentence at a time over the past however long.

There’s Marith right there! Also International Day of the Nacho, but nachos are something I seem to like more in theory than in practice,

I know I often write that I did nothing with a day, but this seems like even more nothing than usual. I didn’t even manage to read anything except webcomics, which I never manage to put on my reading list because they usually aren’t complete.

Customers apparently attacked before I was on call, but that wasn’t my problem.

I had to stop eating early because my brilliant plan to finally get the blood drawn that I’m supposed to by the end of the month might come to fruition tomorrow and I’m supposed to be fasting for that.

Written: Yep, more FAIL.

Within a reasonable confidence interval.

Brain? Brain? What is “brain”? If I had anything like that, I would not have had the cleaners come at the same time I was having a meeting.

Marith and I wanted to watch the new season of Our Flag Means Death, but it’s on some streaming service somewhere, not the streaming services on my TV. Fuck capitalism.

Watched: One Piece 1.1-2: I’d say it must get better later, or else there wouldn’t be 1087 episodes, but the first two were not good enough to make us want to watch any more. Maybe it’s just the bias of seeing it first, but I liked the opening of the live-action series way more.

Written: FAIL. Maybe I need to go back to 100 words per day.

 

Nailed another one!

Office lunch was Chick-Fil-A, which was not healthy, but also not that great (not even counting the homophobia thing). Cold fries.

Read: The Cruel Stars (John Birmingham): It has the buzzwords for modern SF, neural augmentation, space-time manipulation, a little Eclipse Phase (bioconservatives vs transhuman civilization), some Culture (obnoxious hovering ship AIs), but the SFnal elements don’t quite stick together, not even counting “geostationary orbit over the northern hemisphere”. Hundreds of years of enormous AIs should have made things weirder, IMHO. But I guess milSF is always like that.

Read: Life With an Ordinary Guy Who Reincarnated Into a Total Fantasy Knockout vol 1 (Shin Ikezawa, Yu Tsurusaki): On the upside, “total knockout” doesn’t mean breasts bigger than her head, and people struck by her beauty propose marriage or worship her as a goddess. However, massive heteronormativity (the whole schtick is because the leads could not recognize their feelings for each other if they were both men), and the MTF lead seems pretty young for all those offers of marriage.

Written: FAIL. Will I ever write anything again ever?

Slime for everyone!

I guess I did a better job of sleeping, so I was up to my usual level of uselessness.

Office lunch was “acai bowl with nuts”, which was some kind of superfood berry frogurt with granola and banana slices, or something. I ate it, but I feel no need to repeat the experience. It might have been cursed.

Read: Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens (Tanya Boteju): A queer teenager struggles with crushes on various girls, her self-perception as completely boring and lame, other people’s trauma, inability to hold her liquor, a missing mother, and the possibilities of drag.

Read: Blade of the Moon Princess vol 1 (Tatsuya Endo): The violent, unrefined teenaged princess of the Moon Kingdom gets stranded on Earth while escaping a coup and must try to not be a terrible person under difficult, even ridiculous, circumstances. Has a similar mix of violence and humor to Spy x Family, unsurprisingly.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 6 (Chorisuke Natsumi): Further adventures of the tall, busty, shark-toothed frosh and her shrimpy sempai. It’s okay, but I don’t know that I need to read much more of it.

Written: FAIL.