I think it’s too hot for sharks.
Watched: Murder Drones 1-3: The first episode makes perfect sense, but then ?!?!?
Written: 118/1168/9177.
Author: Trip the Space Parasite
Fortunately we did not have beans ‘n’ franks for office lunch. We did have sandwiches, but there wasn’t even cake to celebrate the end of our time in this office. Next week, no office; the week after that, new office. I guess I should figure out what trains to use to get there and back home.
Emptying the sea isn’t rewarding, so I switched to trying to get bees, but managed to mess up both smoking the bees and harvesting honeycomb from the hive. Bah!
Read: The Mandroid Murders (Robin CM Duncan): It’s the future. A private eye who is a horndog and a fashion plate gets stuck with a teenaged mob heiress. Together, they fight crime, although really those guys had it coming.
Written: 274 for the day, 1050/1000 for the week, 9059 overall.
Office, with burgers. Since this is our last week in this office, I piled a bunch of stuff into a sack to bring home, where I will probably throw it away.
I found my copy of the Nimona comic, which I still had, but looking through my storage room did not really reduce my urge to throw everything into the sea.
Written: 388 words again. I guess the range of possible values there is small enough that a repeat isn’t that surprising. 776 words for the week, 8785 overall.
Not sure why World Population Day is less than nine months after International Kissing Day.
Early morning meeting for the CEO to tell us how we all have to suffer because the board set higher goals than Sales could reach. No layoffs this time, though, and probably my team’s hiring will not be affected.
In Minecraft, I built a hole to the bottom of the sea with the power of SAND, but it’s very slow and uses a lot of shovels, and even though the fjord out front of my great hall is allegedly a submerged ravine, I’m not finding much in the way of mineral wealth. Also I forgot to find and watch the Minecraft Musical.
Played: Lancer. I contributed nothing and also mistook a tree stump for a giant robot, so apparently I might as well have not bothered to show up. I should probably be writing on Tuesday nights anyway.
Written: FAIL, because I was wasting time gaming.
Most of this post has been transformed into electromagnetic vibrations.
Watched: Another couple of episodes of Estab Life. They were very silly.
Written: 388 for the day and week, 8397 overall.
Played: Dark Matter, for the first time in a million years. We snuck into the Abyss until we got spotted, then we charged. The giant tentacle did not make our job any easier, but it didn’t make the demons’ job easier either, because Chaotic Evil Teamwork. Then we made it to the Infinite Bureaucracy Room, so we were able to take a long rest as long as somebody filled out some forms for the desk clerk to throw into the lake of fire every so often. Level UP! (Level 7 is not that great.)
Read: Angelina (Joel Shepherd): A teenager Italian wizard-slayer comes to NYC where the last two archmages are engaged in a cold war in search of terrible revenge, but everything is way more complicated and also there’s a boy and a nefarious plot and stuff. Looks bad for pretty much everybody by the end of the volume.
Written: 119 for the day, 611/1000 for the week, 8009/10000 overall.
Weirdly, I was on call only in the morning. Customers attacked, but they could not defeat me before I escaped to do grocery shopping.
Read: Amelia the Level Zero Hero vol 1 (VA Lewis): MC got sucked into a hell dimension where she fought monsters literally 24/7 for years, so when she escapes to LitRPG World, she is already more powerful than anyone without having a class or level. Drama and cultists ensue.
Read: Ships of the Line (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This episode is all about ramping up the new technology obtained from an unsavory source which definitely does not have any trojan horses or other hidden bugs.
Written: 206 for the day, 492 for the weak week, 7890 total.
If I looked up what day it is ahead of time, instead of much too late, I could have eaten way more chocolate today. Instead, I went back to work to cover the late shift and then Marith came over for watching.
Watched: Nimona. It was swell! Recommended for all creatures including children.
Written: FAIL. Why am I so dumb?
Accomplished nothing today, but it’s nominally okay because I’m still on vacation?
Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 25 (Tomohito Oda): The entire volume is a Nerf war of grade against grade, full of new characters that I cannot keep straight. Maybe I shouldn’t have started a series that was guaranteed to have at least 101 named characters.
Written: 286 for the day at week, 7684 overall. Past the three-quarters mark!
It was a nice vacation. There was a baby, who is very cute and likes stealing glasses and saying “babababaabbbbaabababa”. There was air conditioning, so we did not die when it was 42C outside. There was the traditional Chinese food and grilled stuff and splashing in the pool. There was conversation. (Our hosts recently went to Japan and returned with tales.) There was a long stretch of sitting in cars, with a brief interruption to sit on folding chairs and watch fireworks at close range. (Nonny had a comment for each one, because he hasn’t seen a lot of fireworks.) There were board games. There were so many snacks. Eventually we got our act together and returned to San Jose.
Played: Everdell. We played this twice, so I have enough data to conclude that I am terrible at this game. I’d say the dual use of cards as discardable currency pushes it into Race for the Galaxy territory, but I’m sure that’s quite right. Mostly I’m just dumb. I’m sorry, cute forest creatures!
Played: Roll for the Galaxy. I came in second, which was also last.
Played: Pandemic. We also had the On The Brink expansion, but the extra roles didn’t save us. I came in last, along with all of humanity.
Played: Sagrada. I managed to get my tableau complete, but failed on all the victory conditions, so I came in last.
Watched: I totally thought I was going to do something useful when I got home, but instead I got chicken with too many bones and watched the start of a ridiculous anime called Estab Life. It’s the cyberpunk fantasy future, everybody has to live in their cultural burbclave, cute girl shadowrunners help them defect in pursuit of their unapproved dreams.
Written: FAIL. I had my laptop, and my current draft is in Dropbox, so I could have written, yet I did not. Pretty sure I can still make my overall goal, although this may not be my strongest week.
Zooming away to Roseville (which has not actually been in Roseville for quite a few years now). Someone told us there would be a baby.
I’m not writing this until the 5th, so I don’t remember what, if anything, I did today. I think I bought a sandwich for lunch, because it’s Too Hot and then died in a sweltering pit. Also probably I packed for tomorrow. And read the new batch of short SF commissioned by Amazon to entice people to Kindle Unlimited.
Read: “The Long Game” (Ann Leckie): A squishy short-lived species is oppressed by capitalist humans, but possibly not forever.
Read: “How It Unfolds” (James SA Corey): When you copy yourself, the copies all have the same history with the same people, but maybe they don’t have to have the same future.
Read: “Void” (Veronica Roth): Murder mystery in the locked room of a relativistic passenger liner. It may only shuttle between Sol and Centauri, but the time adds up…
Read: “Falling Bodies” (Rebecca Roanhorse): A young human is stuck between the colonialist aliens that conquered humanity and the human resistance.
Read: “Just Out of Jupiter’s Reach” (Nnedi Okorafor): Seven people given bonded bioships meet for a week after five years of solitude. Actually I expected even more drama.
Read: “Slow Time Between The Stars” (John Scalzi): An AI capable of managing a sub-relativistic journey might not be as much like its human creators as they hoped. I suspect the AI was based on engrams from my friend Dave.
Written: 562 today, 1982/1000 for the week, 7398/1000 overall.
We went to the park to see Jus’s Shakespeare camp production of Twelfth Night, Abridged Cowboy Version. Obviously she was brilliant, but also it was 897582 degrees outside so we all died and I didn’t come back to life until Marith came over for pizza and anime.
Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.9-12: This time, Mob must face… his own heart! The end (of season 3).
Read: Micchi vs The New World vol 4 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): We finally find out why the long-lost senpai of the main character has been doing all these terrible things, and everything is resolved. Also a lot of people get severely clobbered because seriously, don’t fuck with Micchi. The end.
Written: Only 176, but that’s more than my daily goal, and brings me to 1420 for the week, 6836 overall. More than 2/3 of the way to my 10-week goal!
Went to the office again, so Former Coworker A could meet up with us for Costco food court lunch, which people had been trying to do for weeks in memory of the old days. Costco is only a block form the office, so I guess in the old days before we had fancy bribes to get people in the office like delivered lunch, everybody would go to Costco for pizza and hotdogs.
Now I am on vacation.
Read: Kelcie Murphy and the Academy for the Unbreakable Arts (Erika Lewis): 12-year-old with special parentage and secret magical powers finds out she’s going to magical fighting school, weird teachers, puppy love, war in the magical world, Celtic mythology edition. Some disability representation, more authentic modern-orphan backstory. Doesn’t seem entirely well-edited.
Written: 419 today, 1244 for the week, 6660 overall.
Went to the office, it was annoying, ate a sandwich, it was okay.
Written: 347 today, 825 for the week, 6241 overall.
No Lancer, Kelsey and Vivian are both out of it, so Brooks and Ken and I played a few rounds on Board Game Arena. Innovation is fun, but it turns out I’m terrible at it. I’m also still terrible at Race For the Galaxy but this comes as no surprise.
Written: FAIL. Because I am dumb.
Having the twelve hours of special on-call split six and six is much better.
Written: 478 for the day and the week, 5894 overall.
After sleeping in forever like a stupid lump, I went over to play Minecraft. I ran into the wilderness, then burrowed into the depths of the Earth in search of dripstone, then died horribly in burning lava. After that Nonny switched to Geometry Dash for his Youtube channel, so Ayse and I made our own world. We have bamboo and a verdant cave and a house that’s more or less zombie-proof and a desert village right next door and a paddock to lure animals into. After that, we ate delicious pork chile verde that Jus and Ken made and then I came home to write.
Written: 578 words, for a total of 2035 this week and 5416 overall. Only three weeks out of ten and I’m already halfway to my goal!
Didn’t accomplish much of anything today, although I did go shopping early enough to successfully get more quarters.
Read: Minami’s Lover (Shungiku Uchida): A somewhat strange manga about a girl who shrinks to 1/12 scale and secretly lives in her boyfriend’s room with him. Did not have the ending I was expecting.
Read: Prison of Sleep (Tim Pratt): Conclusion to The Doors of Sleep, in which everything is explained. I got confused by the parallel narratives, and not less confused when they joined, but I think that was just me. Probably also me that I liked traveling through all the different worlds during the setup phase of the story than I liked narrowing down to the conclusion. Although I seem to recall not being impressed with previous Pratt endings.
Written: I could not get my brain going until it was time to go to bed, but then I squeezed out 189 words. 1457 for the week, 4838 overall.
Went to Shakespeare in the Park with Ayse & fam and Marith who is back from France. It was Twelfth Night, telenovela edition with dramatic music stings, so that was pretty fun.
Written: FAIL, the play went later than I expected.
On call for special customers from 7-19 again, so I didn’t go into the office. Coworker K is back from getting married. Young people these days, I swear.
Work was okay, if blah, but then as soon as I wanted to do my own stuff on my own computer, my keyboard completely freaked out. Whichever function key shrinks the windows so they all fit nonoverlapping on the screen kept spamming as long as the keyboard was switched on, so now I’m back to my old keyboard, with the dodgy C key and the however-many-years’ accumulation of grot. Not sure how writing is going to go.
Read: The Dos and Donuts of Love (Adiba Jaigirdar): A Bangaladeshi-Irish girl enters a baking competition reality TV show. There is star-crossed gay romance! Donut-shop rivalry! Intrigue! Betrayal! Racism! Only a little fat-phobia and hardly any homophobia, though.
Written: 256 today, 1268 for the week, 4649 total. I guess that was okay.
Went into the office, found out the office is moving to about a five-minute walk from the place I lived before I moved to San Jose, ate some fairly satisfying Reubens.
Written: 459 today, 1012/1000 for the week, 4393 overall.
Got cleaners in to make my apartment slightly less horrible. I need to get a whole bunch of stuff off the floor or into the trash if I want to have cats in here, though.
Played: Lancer. Nobody remembered how this game works after Ken cancelled three weeks in a row, but Vivian has brain electrodes, so that’s cool.
Written: FAIL.
Started off the week by having to be available for twelve hours straight, but only the part that was during normal business hours had any activity, so I guess that was okay.
Written: 553 today, 553 for the week, 3934 overall.
Sorry, all father points are revoked upon becoming a Trump voter. I don’t make the rules.
Since there isn’t Sunday gaming for the next however long, and this would be an off week anyway, I swapped with somebody to take their oncall shift today. I think they’re a father or something. But the customers did not attack, so mostly I was useless all day.
We did some Minecraft in the afternoon. I mostly harvested cobwebs and vegetables from the abandoned village, and flailed about in caves looking for dripstone. I replanted the vegetables, but I have no idea if the cobwebs regenerate.
Read: Shadows of a Dying Sun (Alan Bahr): An OSRish game with several tables of dying-earth genre stuff, lots of resource tracks to manage, and an inexorable progression toward death instead of hit points per se. Also there’s an event where someone predicts that the world will end tomorrow and there’s a 10% chance they’ll be right.
Written: 144 tonight, 1734 for the second week, 3381 for both weeks so far.
I slept in forever, but felt slightly less useless afterwards, so maybe that was good? Probably not, though. Only one of my four errands failed due to lateness, anyway.
Written: 375 today, 1590 for the week, 3237 overall.
At least VP B isn’t pretending that losing a big chunk of our team doesn’t suck. But he’s a much better manager than departed Boss R.
Written: Apparently this is my failure day for the week. Hopefully I can keep it to one.
In the office again, for Chick-Fil-A and meetings about support for the ~Special~ customers, which the now-sacked Boss R was supposed to have gotten sorted and which is not sorted. Also my custom of commuting home in the middle of the afternoon is now officially approved.
Read: Ruby Finley vs The Interstellar Invasion (K Tempest Bradford): An 11-year-old black girl who likes bugs finds a mysterious bug and trouble ensues. Even though it’s set in the present (smartphones, Twitter, etc) the main character gets to ride her bike around the neighborhood and visit her friends without having an adult and a car and a schedule.
Read: “The Star-Bear” (Michael Swanwick): I think I’m not Russian enough, or not Russian-lit-reading enough, to get this one. Pretty sure the bear is a metaphor, though.
Written: 102 today, 1215 for the week, 2862 overall.
Back to the office for no good reason. American restaurant pasta for lunch. Light customer activity, which would seem lighter if we weren’t missing so many people.
Read: Spell Sweeper (Lee Edward Fodi): It’s the anti-Harry Potter, where the main character has tiny magical powers so instead of learning real magic at Secret Magic School, she’s on the janitorial track, and her hated rival is the Chosen One, a magical prodigy, tall and beautiful, beloved by everyone, etc. Naturally they have to work together to save the world, despite the unhelpfulness of the adult wizards.
Written: 229, 1113, 2760.
Did I do anything today? I don’t think so. Just blblblblblbl.
No gaming, because after cancelling the past two sessions for work, Ken is now on vacation.
Read: Drew Leclair Gets A Clue (Katryn Bury): A 7th-grader who wants to be a criminal profiler tries to unmask her school’s cyberbully while also dealing with health issues, meatspace bullies, friends who might be into kissing, and her mom having run off with the school counselor.
Written: 302 words today, 884 for the week, 2531 overall.