Work was not particularly more annoying, but Monday the 13th is definitely inauspicious.
Read: Revealed (DI Freed): Second in the series about a girl who starts off with no martial arts powers and then starts becoming increasingly OP for unclear reasons. Also she remains mostly not a jerk, at least compared to most martial artists. This book, she goes to martial arts death college, now with 32% more murders.
Written: FAIL.
Grocery shopping worked so well yesterday that I was able to sleep in until it was time to get ready to play Minecraft. Then I went over and played Minecraft and did not die hardly at all. Also we had a barbecue and stayed up partying and fighting off zombies all night. I still don’t dare go underground yet, but I chopped down a bunch of trees and dug up a bunch of sand and stuff. Then we logged out and ate Thai food.
Read: The Ascension Game vol 1 (Ace Arriande): LitRPG apparently based on some game that’s like Minecraft with more boss fights, but I’m pretty sure the ridiculous smut parts were added later. They do not help.
Written: FAIL.
Slept in forever, but then went grocery shopping in the afternoon and miraculously it worked out! The store was full, but things were not particularly sold out. In fact, I was able to stock up on the bird meat that’s usually out of stock.
Read: Backpacking Through Bedlam (Seanan McGuire): Alice, having finally found her long-lost husband in the depths of the multiverse in the previous book, finally gets him home and straight into a war with the monster-killers their family defected from. Alice’s choices continue to be pretty questionable.
Written: FAIL.
Was I smart today? Only vaguely, I think. Mostly I read Nebula nominees, and probably didn’t appreciate them enough.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.16-17: Backstory for Hawks, additional backstory for the Todorokis. I understand that regulating parenthood would be nothing but wall-to-wall abuse, but some people really should not be allowed to reproduce.
Read: Wild Massive (Scotto Moore): Artificial multiverse, colonization/assimilation, genocide, theme parks, revenge, sufficiently-advanced sorcery, unethical experimentation, higher powers, sufficiently-advanced technology, mayhem, shenanigans, narrative warfare, and no romance. It was a pretty wild ride.
Read: “If You Find Yourself Speaking to God, Address God with the Informal You” (John Chu): An actor meets basically-Superman in his secret ID at the gym. Slice of life.
Read: “Two Hands, Wrapped in Gold” (SB Divya): I figured out which fairytale this was as soon as we saw the MC’s full name, but I don’t think it was supposed to be a puzzle, just less Eurocentric.
Read: “The Prince of Salt and the Ocean’s Bargain” (Natalia Theodoridou): Original fairytale with a modern sensibility.
Read: “Rabbit Test” (Samantha Mills): I really hope Christian fuckfaces aren’t still going to be denying women reproductive freedom in a hundred years…
Read: “Your Eyes, My Beacon: Being an Account of Several Misadventures and How I Found My Way Home” (CL Clark): Kind of Beauty and the Beast, but sapphic and there’s a lighthouse and it’s different.
Read: “The Calcified Heart of Saint Ignace Battiste” (Christopher Caldwell): Young priest spies on a spooky ritual in Spookytown and learns that the orthodoxy is a lie.
Read: “The Goldfish Man” (Maureen McHugh): Homeless lady has a hard life for a while and then meets a strange person on the streets.
Read: “Ribbons” (Natalia Theodoridou): Another modernish fairytale, in a world where fairytale things happen. Not sure what the ribbon is a metaphor for — there’s already plenty of queerness.
Read: “This Village” (Eugenia Triantafyllou): Welcome to Wicked Witch Town.
Read: “The Coward Who Stole God’s Name” (John Wiswell): The most beloved man in the world reveals his true self to a reporter. Chaos almost doesn’t ensue. Read to me like a direct commentary on celebrity/billionaire adulation.
Written: FAIL.
Brain, why are you like this? Surely you can do more than read Tumblr folklore all night.
Written: FAIL.
Written: 119.
New boss definitely likes to talk a lot more in meetings than old boss.
Played: Lancer. I think we got through three whole rounds of combat this time.
Read: Beauty and the Besharam (Lillie Vale): An Indian-American girl who absolutely refuses to shut up, downplay her talents, or otherwise be modest, and her childhood friend/rival have extremely intense feelings over the summer between junior and senior year.
Read: Lazy Dragon Queen vol 6 (Ace Arriande): Even more ridiculous and somewhat lewd, to make up for the strange inclusions of seriousness.
Written: FAIL.
My big accomplishment today was getting the corporate control software installed on work laptop and updating the OS to something not multiple years behind.
Written: 289.
No gaming, Rachel is sick enough to go to urgent care (although apparently not with anything exotic). Since my day was suddenly free, I went over to play Minecraft with Nonny and everybody. I accidentally cut down Ken’s prized birch trees, but also cut down trees from the forest and built a wooden house to keep monsters out and got killed by zombies and spiders and drowning. You win some, you respawn at home some, I guess. Also we ate food and played “IRL Among Us” which works surprisingly well.
Written: FAIL. Maybe a couple of hours of Minecraft is all my brain is capable of in a day.
Accomplished basically nothing today except buying unhealthy food.
Read: Eco-Mofos!! (David Blandy): A post-apocalyptic OSR game with unexplained magic. Very simple, very random.
Written: 271, surprisingly.
Somehow made it to Friday, but I must be doing something wrong. I’m pretty sure a very mild workweek like mine should not lead to such bleargh. I barely had enough energy to eat Chinese food and watch anime with Marith.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.13-15: Well, that was inconclusive, except for all the people who died. Setbacks are par for the course in shonen, though.
Written: 148.
Read: Death in Irish Accents (Catie Murphy): It’s another Kitbook! The main character really will never be known as anything other than the murder driver, no matter how much her girlfriend doesn’t like it. (I saw someone complaining about the “unsupportive partner trope”, but “murder is bad and you should stay away from it” seems like a pretty uncontroversial position to me.)
Read: “We Have Always Spoken Panglish” (Suzette Haden Elgin): Colonialism and the loss of indigenous language and culture and the resentment of that loss.
Read: Lazy Dragon Queen vol 5 (Ace Arriande): More shenanigans, including the fluffiest possible sheep and increased undead lewdness.
Written: So much FAIL.
How is it March already?! (I know, one second at a time, same as every year.)
Read: Shield of Humanity (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): After last book was all about the human infighting, the alien problems in this three-front war get some attention, and a potential fourth front opens up. I’d say the protagonists can’t catch a break, but they actually can, they just need even more breaks than they’re catching.
Written: FAIL.
I thought there was an early-morning meeting, but there wasn’t, so I went back to sleep, but it didn’t work very well. Getting up is the worst.
Played: Lancer. Went to a new location, started a new fight, got through two whole rounds before we had to call it a night. Because Lancer.
Written: FAIL.
Read: Dusk Gate (Benjamin Medrano): Not litrpg, but extremely D&D. Not even lesbian romance can save it.
Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 23 (Tomohito Oda): Finally, after twenty-three volumes: love confessions! At least after all that build-up, they took up pretty much the entire volume. I suspect we’re near the end of the series and this is the final configuration, but I’m still hoping that even though the male lead is a pretty good guy, the two girls will run off together.
Written: FAIL.
Oh yeah, I don’t like going grocery shopping on Sunday because it’s way more crowded and things might be sold out. But the salads are fresher…
Ayse has germs, so Marith stayed home but I went to play Minecraft in person with Nonny and Jus and everyone. I’m still really bad at it, but at least I can go to sleep when it’s night. I put my smoker down somewhere with part of an earthen-walled compound and forgot where I put it! Then I ate some of Ken’s delicious cooking and petted three cats and heard about Jus’s love life and went home. There was rain.
Written: FAIL, but I have an idea, it just needs a bunch more ideas and an actual plot.
I meant to get up and shop a grocery, but instead laid in bed until noon. Surely this cannot be related to being sick and yet staying up every night to read web serials, right?
I wasn’t actually caught up on Katalepsis, there were a couple of chapters on Patreon, but now I am, and all the other web serials I’m following too. Should I start another one? (No, I should not.)
No customers attacked this afternoon, which was nice even though I am awake and theoretically capable of dealing with them.
Written: Still FAIL.
It may have been a three-day work-week for me, but somehow being sick is not like an actual long weekend, so I am perfectly happy with it being Friday.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.10-12: Dabi’s big reveal! Immediately undercut, but still, fuck that guy.
Read: Katalepsis ch 19.1-14 (Hungry): Oh no, I’m caught up!
Read: Past the Redline (RavensDagger): A spaceship racer from Earth is flung across the galaxy by a mysterious technobabble accident and runs roughshod over all the aliens there by virtue of advanced technology and a massive suit of plot armor. Many poorly-justified murders ensue.
Written: FAIL with FAIL sauce and a light dusting of FAIL.
Still not quiet back to normal, but not much worse than usual, I guess. Today’s accomplishment was laundry, which is not much of an accomplishment, but is what I did.
Read: Katalepsis ch 18.1-8 (Hungry): More bad decisions all around! But not apotheosis.
Written: Blugh FAIL.
Back to capitalism, although maybe not very competently. Really I was pretty useless all day, but I did manage to brave the freezing Californian cold to get Taiwan special beef noodles. They were really good, although possibly I shouldn’t have eaten them all in one meal. I think not eating for a couple of days shrank my stomach.
I am too lame to clean up my own mess (also I have no cleaning supplies) but I got the regular cleaners in a bit early and now all my floors are walkable again.
Read: Katalepsis ch 15.1-19, 16.1-9, 17.1-15 (Hungry): Back to Earth, then lots of new friends (although friendship means different things to different entities), and another appearance of a rat bastard.
Written: FAIL.
My symptoms are pretty much gone, but I had no energy at all when it was time for work, so I took this as a sick day and did a lot of nothing. Well, I tried to clean up some of the mess from yesterday and stuff, and some of the household objects I ordered arrived, but mostly nothing.
In the afternoon I went grocery shopping, because I didn’t do that yesterday, and now I need things to eat. It was, as they say on the Internets, FUCKEN WIMDY. First the wind tried to kill me with a tree branch, then it threw my hat into traffic to get run over repeatedly. I did manage to buy food, but it was much too adventurous and exhausting for such a mundane errand.
The wind also took out Ken and Dave’s power, so no gaming.
Read: Katalepsis ch 14.1-18 (Hungry): Back to [SPOILER] and surprising information and annoying side characters and DOOOOM.
Written: Still FAIL.
Oh no, I am not better at all, as I found out in the middle of the night. The events are too horrifying to relate, but I think it’s norovirus. I hear that’s going around, and the symptoms match. Anyway, I spent all day half-asleep, neither eating nor drinking, and not being much use for my on-call shift. New Boss R couldn’t find anyone to cover, but fortunately the customers were all observing the holiday too.
Read: Katalepsis ch 13.1-14 (Hungry): Yep, I still really like this.
Written: Ahahahaha FAIL.
I seem to be much less sick today, so I went to gaming. I did not die from walking, so that’s good. I guess. I did have a fright when it seemed my phone had died a week after my pad died, but actually it just somehow to glitched to the lowest brightness setting, and when I got somewhere without direct sunlight I was able to set it back.
Played: Dark Matter. Nobody was very focused, so all we did was planning for a ridiculous quest that we got in exchange for Jaseen’s body not falling off. Ridiculous like “ahahahahaha you fools are actually going to try that?!”. It’ll be great. Maybe Jus will join us, although she might have to play Ninja Goat.
Read: Katalepsis ch 11.1-14, ch 12.1-6 (Hungry): They just can’t get away from those guys, even in [SPOILER], although maybe they can drive a wedge between them. I dunno, maybe trying to obliquely summarize each chapter is pointless, I should just say I still really like it.
Written: FAIL. Energy flagging.
Ugh, I don’t want to be sick. But I am anyway, so at least I didn’t have to feel bad about staying in bed until mid-afternoon.
Read: 6 Times We Almost Kissed (And One Time We Did) (Tess Sharpe): Two girls take years and years to admit they love each other, although to be fair there is a lot of drama with their moms and rural medical access and whatnot.
Written: 173.
The meeting I have to have facts for is cancelled, so I can save my facts for later.
Watched: My Hero Academia 6.7-6.9: Well, this is going about as well as one might fear. But Aizawa is METAL AS FUCK.
Read: Katalepsis ch 10.1-10 (Hungry): Wow, that guy is obnoxious.
Written: Eternal FAIL. Unless you count recreating D&D character sheets, which I wouldn’t. Maybe creating them the first time.
No training meeting today, so I didn’t get to be either smart or dumb. I did accomplish a few of the things I meant to do yesterday, though. I also got a new task, which was to ask the pharmacist whether I need to replace the refrigerated prescription that got left out all night. Sounds like not, but I’ll call the manufacturer tomorrow to make sure that the expiration date on the box really does assume room temp.
Read: Katalepsis ch 9.1-13 (Hungry): Everything is better with more monsters living in your house, right?
Written: FAIL.
I meant to do a whole bunch of things today, and accomplished zero (0) of them. No, that’s not true, I did get to the drugstore, so that’s one (1) thing accomplished. I guess technically that’s a win? Doesn’t seem like it.
Read: Katalepsis ch 7.1-15, ch 8.1-6 (Hungry): Wow, MC definitely has A Type. But most of her friends don’t fit it so this doesn’t seem likely to become a harem story. Anyway there’s probably too much murdering for that.
Written: Still FAIL.
Happy Discount Candy Eve to all who celebrate!
Played: Lancer. Finally we finished escaping the Cave of Infinite Robots, but Droid’s mech got completely trashed. It was a little embarrassing, but there were a lot of enemies, so whatever. Sadly, we probably cannot steal the printers that made the infinite robots and will have to follow the leads we got to the next stage of the adventure.
Read: Victory’s Bright Dawn (Eric Thomson): Fourth book in the series, main character has gotten upgraded to a larger and less rules-oriented ship, but humans are still the problem.
Read: Katalepsis ch 6.1-9 (Hungry): More friends does mean more problems, yes, but MC is taking a few steps in the direction of her end goal.
Written: FAIL.
Monday the 13th, most accursed of days! Unsurprisingly, my iPad did not come back to life, so I had to trek down to the Apple store. I got Popeye’s in the food court while I was waiting, and it wasn’t bad. Eventually I got a time slot and the technician tried to make my pad live again but could not, concluding that it’s the board rather than the battery. Since it’s ancient and out of warranty, I had to replace it with a shiny new one. I guess it’s good to be up to date, but I’m not sure what I think of this face ID thing, and now I need two kinds of charging cables. Magnetic pencil is nice, though.
Read: Like Stars in Heaven (Eric Thomson): Third in the missiles-in-space series. As usual, the conquering space orcs are far less of a threat to humanity than humans are.
Read: Katalepsis ch 5.1-8 (Hungry): Finally, we get to see some of Evelyn’s backstory and yes, it’s just as terrible as she made it sound. Also Praem is getting weird.
Written: FAIL.
Hm, my pad suddenly shut down and won’t start up or reboot even after charging for a while. That seems bad.
Ayse is feeling better, so I went with her & Ken & fam to Korean barbecue and became extremely full of meat. So much meat. My body is composed of at least 80% meat now.
Read: Katalepsis ch 2.7-12, 3.1-13, 4.1-7 (Hungry): Romance, rival magicians, assorted monsters both under the control of rival mages and not, terrifying extra-dimensional spaces, violence by means of magic, self-harm as a side effect of magic, more cute friends. All the important positive characters are women or at least female-identifying. I approve.
Written: Despite not having a pad to distract me, FAIL.