Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Took the afternoon off for dentistry, which turned out to be more dentistry than I had remembered, but now I have a shiny new crown for chomping.

Read: Family Ties (BR Kingsolver): This reminded me of the Amber books a little, interdimensional family intrigue with magic and extensive murders, in a matter-of-fact tone. It is more generic fantasy, though, with elves and goblins and pretty generic magic.

Read: Trolled (Lindsay Buroker): Also dwarves and elves and orcs, but in modern Seattle. Third book of the series and the protagonist is definitely falling hard for the guy she has extremely valid reasons to not trust, even though he hasn’t betrayed her yet and also is a good kisser.

Read: The Scarab Mission (James L Cambias): Set in the same far-future, slightly Orion’s Arm-inspired, solar system as The Godel Operation (which I inexplicably failed to record reading, probably because it was over the holidays and I am very stupid), with one overlapping character. This is more like survival horror than action-adventure, scavengers on a dead hab that might not be entirely empty.

Written: 124 words. I count anything above 100 as “not zero”, so…

Power went out at 2 this morning, and didn’t come back until after 15, so I spent a lot of the day wandering around trying to find a place to work from. All the coffee shops were full of WFHers, so I ended up in the Campbell Express Library, but it is teeny and had only a chair, no power. When I ran out of battery, I got lunch and then went to the nice big coffee shop in downtown Campbell, which by that time did have some room and some power outlets, and also coworker S from my previous job! It was very surprising and also nice to see her.

I was afraid the power was going to be out for ages, because the outage page never gave an ETA, but it was because they couldn’t be arsed to tell us, not because they didn’t know, and suddenly I got the notification that power was restored so I trundled home to sit with my electricity and my hydration and my computer.

For whatever reason, I did not sleep well without power (lack of fan noise?) but I was still somewhat productive.

Played: Lancer. Once again, downloading supertech off the space internet turns out to be a bad idea (except when Abrakyl does it, obviously), and we had to chase down the parts of somebody’s base, which had turned into a swarm of weird little robots and wandered off. They were extremely annoying little robots, so we’re looking forward to next week when Tinca will be there with her area-effect missiles.

Written: FAIL, only gaming.

I went outside, twice, and never got rained on. Go me!

Played: Dark Matter. We finally discovered the mysterious secret at the heart of the asteroid (it’s a hellaspud), but then we talked our way out of getting our memories wiped and/or being spaced, so I guess the campaign will continue. The librarian turned out to be an actual fiend, much to Sesamina’s dismay.

Written: 229 words.

I went grocery shopping, answered one question from a coworker, and leveled up my Dark Matter characters for tomorrow.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 5.1-35 (RavensDagger): Oh no, now I’m caught up!

Read: Red Equinox (Douglas Wynne): Modern-day Mythos adventure, has some good spooky description, but there’s apparently some sort of counter-force to the Mythos, which is a wimpout for cosmic horror.

Read: Lever Action ch 1-23 (RavensDagger): Fantasy Western with D&D races plus mecha. It’s not clear how much colonialism is going on as opposed to warfare between existing inhabitants, but meh.

Written: Ongoing FAIL.

Company is open for business as usual, so we all had to be there at the usual time, and the customers were there too. Not in force, at least, and the early Tuesday meeting seems to have been dropped for now. We have two new coworkers who will be doing a specialized thing, but I don’t know whether they’re cool yet.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1.27-77, 2.1-8 (RavensDagger): Our heroine not only survived but was reunited with her girlfriend and family, and then got a quest from a fellow participant in the alien points scheme.

Played: Lancer. Finished the fight fairly quickly, found out unregulated NHPs were involved (which made Abrakyl and Early happy), then found out some people are onto other people, which might be us or might be somebody else. But the people we defeated let us use their printer to fix up our mechs, so that’s all good.

Written: FAIL.

Back to the answer mines! I wasn’t at work today, but I was on call. The thing for the customer was finished during my shift, so I got to announce it to them, and will take all credit for it.

Also managed to go grocery shopping this morning, which made me hate life and time but otherwise worked fine and I should be able to eat almost every day until Saturday.

Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1-26 (RavensDagger): Dystopian cyberpunk future in which hungry aliens invade and allegedly benevolent aliens pick people to enroll in the kill-invaders-in-exchange-for-hyper-technology program. Feels a little like a video game in that guns and medical gear and cyberware appear out of nowhere the instant points are spent, but there isn’t any more to the system than that, so I’m not sure it counts as LitRPG.

Read: Butts: A Backstory (Heather Radke): A little bit about butts physically (bipedalisms, endurance hunting, etc) and a lot about butts socially, from the Hottentot Venus to Twerking on Tiktok. Spoiler: the answer is always sexism, and usually misogynoir.

Read: The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses vol 1 (Koume Fujichika): Therefore she has to lean in really close to share the male lead’s textbook, which is hard on an innocent manga boy’s heart. Cute, but very slight, and the female lead seems to mostly exist to be klutzy.

Written: 157 words. Two days in a row!

I don’t think I did anything whatsover today. Just stupid pad games and web serials.

Read: Hive Minds Give Good Hugs ch 1-41 (ThundaMoo): Starts off stranded on an alien planet with amnesia and major anxiety, gets even more traumatic but with increasing lack of human frailty and limitations from there. What could go wrong with nigh-infinite power? A whole lot, as it turns out.

Written: 304 words.

Got up way too early at a sensible hour for the cleaners, then went back to bed, then got woken up by Ken texting that he is still sick and NYE fondue party is cancelled. Festive food was a 90-minute wait and it was raining out, so I stayed home and ate food from the fridge and did nothing. I was on call in the afternoon, but nothing happened.

Read: Love Crafted ch 45-80 (RavensDagger): The end! Pretty abrupt and the commenters didn’t like it, but whatever. Omnipotent tentacles can only go so long without solving the Inquisition problem for good.

Read: Dreamer’s Ten-Tea-Cle Café ch 1-44 (RavensDagger): Spin-off, mostly for the purpose of crossovers with other web serials, but also to follow the personal development of Dreamer’s pamphlet-distributing clone.

Written: FAIL. No more words for 2022.

Got up before noon, although not significantly more useful today than the rest of the week.

Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 4 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Our old old- school yakuza isekai’d into the body of a teenage princess continues to clobber people and demons who do crime wrong and befriend people who do crime right, this time including pirates. mermaids, and dwarves.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 330-371 (RavensDagger): Oh no, I’m caught up! Fortunately there is obviously a lot more mostly-wholesome adventure still to come.

Read: Love Crafted ch 1-44 (RavensDagger): An aspiring magic school student uses an off-brand summoning spell and ends up with a relative of Azathoth, who fortunately only wants cuddles, hugs, snuggles, naps, and the occasional nap. Somewhat incoherent because it was guided by reader votes while it was being written

Written: Unending FAIL.

Wasted the whole day either abed or reading web serials again. Managed to step out in the evening to look for steamed pork buns, but neither the Chinese restaurant I normally go nor the sketchy-seeming one near Marith’s work had them, so I ended up with pizza slices instead. They were okay, but not what I really wanted.

Yes, I am aware that being unproductive is a powerful anticapitalist action, but 1) I want to do my own stuff, not work, and 2) that only applies to other people anyway.

Read: I’m the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire vol 1 (Kai Nadashima, Yomu Mishima, Nadare Takamine): The isekai MC, having died broke, betrayed, and alone on Earth, determines to make the worst (for everyone else) of being reincarnated as the ruler of a planet, and the entity that reincarnated him is entirely in favor of this plan, but somehow he’s not being a terrible ruler or a terrible person.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 269-329 (RavensDagger): Time to grind the Hugging skill! And save the world by telling people to stop being so mean.

Written: Continued FAIL.

With nothing on the schedule, I ended up sleeping until after noon and then not doing anything at all, because I fundamentally suck. I guess I did manage to go grocery shopping, but that hardly counts.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 194-268 (RavensDagger): Continuing wholesome adventures. The wand of cure hysteria has shown up a few more times, but nobody can bear to explain what it actually is to the MC, so she continues on in innocence, leaving appalled expressions in her wake (which is what she does most of the time, regardless of whether any magic items are involved, because PCs).

Written: FAIL.

Due to a massive failure of vacation-scheduling on my part, I had to work today, but customers were relatively undemanding.

Read: Cinnamon Bun ch 67-193 (RavensDagger): Continued LitRPG adventures of a very innocent teenager and assorted friends. It’s not her fault she has to commit the worst crimes imaginable!

Written: Apparently people on Royal Road write a million words a year. That’s like 3000 words per day, or about two NaNoWriMos per month, every single month. I can barely write 3000 words in a month! Probably less, if I keep staying up until 2:00 reading.

Or, this year, “Christmas (observed)”. I thought about going grocery shopping but instead did absolutely nothing.

Watched: The School for Good and Evil: Apparently I read the book several years ago, but either I don’t remember any of it, or the movie is heavily modified, but it was entertaining anyway. Who even needs Gryffindors and Ravenclaws anyway? (Not that the Hufflepuffs would want anything to do with the Evers and their fake goodness.)

Read: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious vol 4 (Wakame Konbu): It’s good to see the maid’s schtick breaking down in the face of growing feelings.

Written: FAIL.

And a Nifty Newtonmas to all!

Marith and I went over to Monkeycat Towers for dinner and presents and children and happiness, and it was very nice. Earl and Cat were also there, so we had morbid dinner conversation because we’re a bunch of weirdos. I did not get any presents in wrapping paper, but I did get delicious food, delightful company, and the Hug Assortment Pack. Also we played some Goose Goose Duck, which is like Among Us with more complicated maps and more character roles. I did not manage to be so sus that I got spaced even when that was my victory condition, which was a little disappointing.

Read: Icebreaker (Glynn Stewart): Standalone fantasy of a kind that used to be more common. Not sure about some of the worldbuilding (that seems like an awful lot of information loss), but I enjoyed it anyway.

Written: FAIL.

Stayed in bed forever, gave Marith her eggs and milk so she can make brownies and hot chocolate, wrapped a bunch of presents. The roll of wrapping paper I bought like five years ago hasn’t run out, and was almost wide enough to wrap the big present, so I guess next year’s presents will look very similar to this year’s.

Read: A Very Meowy Christmas (Zoe Chant): An extremely goopy book by the Kit part of Zoe Chant. There is one (1) bad thing that happens in this book and it is off-screen and several years in the past. Otherwise, everything is wonderful, and arguably the HEA starts around chapter 2. If you want to be full of cynicism, this is not the book for you. It even addresses one point I’ve wondered about with the Fated Mates trope, although not in a way that makes it any more palatable to heartless killjoys.

Written: 133 words.

Hurray, I’m on vacation! Boo, I’m on call!

The customers were worse than I hoped, but not nearly as bad as I feared, and I wasn’t even on call until after I managed to go grocery shopping and get lunch, so I guess it wasn’t that bad.

Read: The Grand Conspiracy (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This volume is all about inter-human conflict because there’s a break in the alien onslaught, and what human would work with other humans to survive when instead they could die with slightly more toys than that other guy?

Read: Holstaurus Magic (Warren Thomas): Extremely raunchy smut. Not really LitRPG even though set in a VRMMORPG. Does cater to certain specific interests, but there is a lot of regular banging too.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 22 (Tomohito Oda): Further NYC adventures. Also, only 22 volumes into the series, Komi is communicating almost entirely in speech! Whispers, but definite speech, not writing!

Written: FAIL. No brain.

 

Last work day of the year week! Except for tomorrow, when I’m on call in the afternoon and have no idea what customer activity will be like.

We exposed the new manager to the weekly technical training meeting. He may be reconsidering his life choices.

I think I have all the presents I planned on-hand and just need to wrap them. Except that I’m sure I’ve forgotten someone/something and it will all turn out terrible.

Read: Azarinth Healer vol 1 (Rhaegar): A young kickboxer gets isekaied and ends up with a mysterious OP class that enables her in pursuing her favorite activities in a new world: fighting, training, fighting, eating, fighting, sleeping, fighting, sex, fighting, and fighting. Not everybody is as nigh-invincible as her, though, so there is also some trauma. There is not particularly any plot.

Written: 206 words.

Don’t want to work. Want to sleep. But sleep pays so poorly.

Played: Lancer. As usual, we ended in the middle of a fight, but it’s pretty close to over. Then we get to start grilling the other team to see if their story matches. Dave mentioned a twist, but I bet that will be on the third data point we try to gather.

Written: FAIL. It’s not like I even went to bed early after gaming, I just suck.

It’s only 90% of a Monday, because I have Friday sort of off! But this did not get me more functional.

Read: Betrayed (Lindsay Buroker): Further adventures of the half-dwarf who just wants to know what happened to her mother and live her life, and the unfairly hot elven assassin she totally doesn’t have a crush on. Also conspiracies and bounty hunters and overfunded villains.

Read: SHWD vol 1 (sono.N): Extremely buff women hunting down outbreaks of brain-melting monsters and having interpersonal (but pretty good-natured) drama. No, buffer than that.

Written: 374 words.

I got up and went grocery shopping and got lunch in a timely manner, and then didn’t manage to do anything the rest of the day. I am really not good at getting anything done, ever.

Read: Ophelia After All (Racquel Marie): After getting a crush on a new boy about every month since she was in third-grade, a Cuban-American high school senior has to face that she might not be as straight as she thought, while dealing with love polygons, prom and graduation, and general friend-group upheaval.

Written: 281 words.

Nobody likes going into the office in 2022, but Ken very kindly gave me a lift to Mountain View, so I did not have to get up so early, and I hid in a small conference room most of the day so I did not have to breathe with people. I did come out and unmask to eat holiday lunch (salad, roast veg, mashed spud, roll+horseradish+roast beast, so not sure what holiday tradition that is, maybe British? Tasty, though.), which hopefully did not fill me with plague. I also got grilled a lot in the training meeting, because I was sitting right across from the instructor, but fortunately I knew many answers.

Read: Magister’s Bane (Yvette Bostic): The main character starts off ugly to the point of deformity but then is revealed to be actually super-hot as soon as she is brought into the magical world. I am not sure what think about that plot twist. At least she still has severe self-esteem issues from spending her entire life with people avoiding looking at her face.

Read: “Haley and the Miraculous Potion” (MCA Hogarth): Christmas episode, so of course it’s even more overtly Christian that usual. (IMHO, it’s super-weird how Christians take Jewish scripture telling ancient monoloatrous Jews not to worship the gods of other tribes and try to make it relevant to their monotheism, but this sentence could have ended after the word “scripture”.)

Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 3 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Old-school yakuza reincarnated into a fantasy princess continues to beat the snot out of people doing crime wrong.

Written: 385 words, no kittens.

I really need to do more, better, works. Instead I did some works and then went over to visit Ayse and Ken and Dave and Jus and Nonny. We had vague intentions of watching something but instead we just ate Thai food and searched for the lost art of conversation and chased Nonny around. It was very nice.

Read: The Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy and the Snobs; Good-bye Stacey, Good-bye; Jessi’s Secret Language (Ann M Martin, Chan Chau, Gabriela Epstein): vol 10-12, which is all that currently exists. Stacey really did leave! I guess Kristy can’t go all class warfare if she lives in a mansion too. Jessi’s language is not all that secret, although I’m sure it was more so in back in the day. She uses it for good, though.

Read: Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village (Maureen Johnson, Jay Cooper): Spoiler: The only way to win the game is not to play. Includes Goreyesque illustrations.

Written: 134 kitten words, finishing the entry I was working on. Tomorrow, if I am not dead from working and commuting, I will write things that are not that.