Author: Trip the Space Parasite

No gaming, Jeremy has to go to his dad’s 98654932nd birthday. Instead I slept in and went grocery shopping and did nothing whatsoever all day. And yet, tomorrow is still work. At least the grocery store people were amused by my procrastination shirt.

Read: Sex Ed 120% vol 3 (Kikiki Tataki, Hotomura): Final volume, more about the frame story than the education.

Read: Stand Up, Yumi Chung! (Jessica Kim): A Korean-American girl wants to be a comedian, but her parents want only an American Success Life for her. Conflict and minor identity theft ensue.

Read: “And What Can We Offer You Tonight” (Premee Mohamed): Working in a cyberpunk brothel isn’t a good way to have a long life, but then one unlucky worker comes back to life and turns the whole city upside down. It is not a story about explanations.

Read: Anastasia Krupnik (Lois Lowry): A ten-year-old girl reacts to normal 1970s life in slightly ridiculous ways, but her parents are also kind of ridiculous, so it all works out.

Written: 649 words that are still not NaNoWriMo. I made the mistake of reading too much and got infected with real writers’ styles.

I finally got my act together enough to go and see Jus play soccer! Her team did not win, but she did strike the sphere decisively with her foot. Also, based on her team name and colors and her uniform number, she is apparently some kind of witch monster, which comes as no surprise. I am terrible at yelling, because for all those years of school I only mouthed along with the cheering. Probably related to my inability to sing.

Avalon’s system is visiting Ayse, which was a little weird but not too awkward. We interacted like grownups and then went our separate ways.

After that, I accomplished nothing useful whatsoever.

Read: Did I Seriously Just Get Reincarnated as My Gag Character?! vol 1 (Kanade Otonashi): Sometimes isekai light novels are entertaining, but sometimes they are just full of grossness.

Written: 513 words, none of them NaNoWriMo.

Read: Enemies (Svetlana Chmakova): More middle school adventure with a main character who was a side character in previous volumes, and is having a rough time because getting things done is the worst and everybody is always getting upset and she has a little sister. It does work out in the end, though.

Read: The Cool Code (Deirdre Langeland, Sarah Mai): A homeschooled girl goes to middle school for the first time, but fortunately she wrote an app to tell her how to be cool. Trouble ensues, but it works out in the end.

Read: The First Rule of Punk (Celia C Pérez): A Mexican-American-Punk girl has to go to middle school in a new city where everybody thinks she should be more Mexican, with only punk music and hand-made zines to cope. It works out in the end.

Read: Mihi Ever After (Tae Keller): An elementary(?)-school girl who really wants to be a princess despite not being thin or blonde or white makes a couple of new friends and gets sucked into Fairy-Tale-Land, where they offer to train her to be a princess, but things get much worse before it all works out in the end. Something about the style made this very unengaging, but maybe that’s just because it was younger than I usually read?

Written: 769 words, but mostly not NaNoWrimo. You’d think reading about middle-schoolers would make me more able to write the travails of my middle-school-aged protagonist, but apparently not.

Read: Ocean’s Echo (Everina Maxwell): Same universe as Winter’s Orbit, but not otherwise related. A disaster of a politician’s kid gets drafted because nothing else will keep him out of trouble and partnered with an extremely dedicated and honorable complementary psychic who wants nothing to do with him. Together, they fight crime, and also find out what their powers are made of and change the course of history. There might be some romance, too.

Written: 511 words, although they weren’t all NaNoWriMo words.

I did manage to do some work, although probably not as much as I should have, and also got a flu shot so I’m immunologically qualified to go to Thanksgiving and see Finley. I scheduled a fourth covid shot as well, which I probably should have done before Big Bad Con, but some weirdo in a long scarf hijacked my time machine so now I can’t do that then. Anyway, time to begin stressing about how I am a failure at life due to having no children or child-related activities to talk to real grownups about!

Written: 410 NaNoWriMo words. So trending in the right direction, but still very feeble.

I could not find any helpful information on the judicial confirmations, but was able to form opinions on everything else up for a vote. (The partisan offices were easy, because the time to go “well, even though he’s a Republican, he seems reasonable” is long past.) Looks like many other people nationwide also declined to vote for fascism, possibly even enough. Also nice to be able to point and laugh at the (rich, male) pundits who said abortion wasn’t important to people.

Written: 326 NaNoWriMo words.

I should be doing more work but instead I am going blurgh. I should be filling out my ballot, but instead I am going blurgh. I should be writing a terrible novel, but instead I am going blurgh.

Read: The Iron Gate and The Flood Circle (Harry Connolly): Hurray for more Twenty Palaces! Annalise is becoming almost human, but Ray… not so much. Also everything is on fire and we don’t know when the final book will come out!

Written: 205 NaNoWriMo words, which is at least going in the right direction compared to yesterday. Blurgh.

Grocery shopping worked okay, except that I skipped going to the bookstore so I could get back in plenty of time for minigolf  and then the buses are all different so I turned out to have had plenty of time. Not that I have any shortage of reading material and anyway I should redo my list of things to buy.

We had a Marith and a Jus for minigolf, so that was nice. I might even be getting slightly better at it. Afterwards I went to play Band Hero extremely badly (I just cannot sing, vocals don’t come out, because I only ever subvocalize along to music) and eat some pretty darn good hummus. Jus sang a lot of Joan Jett, which is good.

Written: 175 NaNoWriMo words, which I am supposed to celebrate even though it’s basically nothing.

Too lazy to go grocery shopping. I hope tomorrow isn’t terrible.

Watched: Alex Roberts: advice on designing prompt-driven games: That’s not the sort game I’m interested in, but things like character creation often use prompts in the games I’m interested in. Three key things for prompts: provide interesting information; leave a gap in the information; add a twist. “You think you may be the queen’s favorite. Why do you think this? Why does this worry you?” Two questions for game design: What is your game about? What experience do you want people to have playing it? One key thing for playtesting: note how your players react in the moment, more than what they say after it’s all over.

Read: Lich, Please (HJ Tolson): Third in the series about a village witch who inadvertently becomes a lich and totally retains her human perspective and morality. In this volume, she finally has a showdown with her rival lich, and murder ensues.

Read: Twilight Kingdom (HJ Tolson): An oppressed girl who seems to lack the magic all humans have runs away from home and finds new friends and a long series of revelations about how the world actually works. Also, numerous murders.

Written: 286 NaNoWriMo words. That’s not going in the right direction at all.

For a change, I didn’t have to get up early! Well, not earlier than usual, which still seems too early, except that if I stay in bed any longer, it’s definitely too late.

Read: “Skeleton Song” (Seanan McGuire): Another quick portal fantasy, full of love beyond death and spooky beauty.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.17-19: On the plus side, all plot all the time! On the downside, still the wrong ship.

Written: 649 NaNoWriMo words. Still not very many, but if I keep increasing at 300 words per day per day, I should finish in plenty of time! (That would be 18 days of writing, with the last day being 5400 words, which is totally an amount a real writer could do. Just not an amount I could do.)

Another early-morning meeting, bah. Also customers.

Read: Candy & Cigarettes vol 1 (Tomonori Inoue): A cop reaches mandatory retirement age but still needs an income stream for medical treatment for his grandkid, so doesn’t put up much fight when he gets recruited by the secret government agency in charge of murdering bad people and partnered with a terrifying 5th-grade assassin. It helps that all the targets are super-sleazy.

Read: Command Authority (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): Fifth in the series. New discoveries continue to be made and tested without mounting a scratch battleship, the military continues to be entirely corrupt.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.15-16: What the heck, Hekapoo? Did you do that on purpose?

Written: 385 NaNoWriMo words, which is not even close to a NaNoWriMo day.

Apparently there was a super-extra-early departmental meeting at 7. I guess I was still on vacation until 8, when I did attend the normal early meeting. Then I got a bunch of cases to replace the ones I handed off when I went on vacation. Some of them are the same ones.

Played: Lancer. We leveled up and did downtime and that was pretty much the entire session. At least I got a spaceship out of it.

Written: FAIL. Not doing too great at this whole NaNoWriMo thing.

Someone I went to college with is now a grandparent. (Probably more are, but this one I still know!)

Also, it’s Halloween, so I saw a lot of costumes while I was out trying to run all my weekend errands, but although I had candy, no one came to get it.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.13-14: All hail the queen!

Written: FAIL, just stuff about Big Bad Con.

Everybody is usually pretty zombified by the third day of a con, and we had a bonus Fire Alarm Incident at 1am, so today was not a bright or energetic day. I got into a Slugblaster game in Games on Demand, which is something that I’ve wanted to play for a while since it looks like the new generation’s TFOS. There were only two players and the GM was kind of out of it, but we did get to stream us doing skateboard tricks in another dimension while a giant robot launched from a silo, and isn’t that what it’s all about?

The afternoon game was a playtest and apparently the previous run of it showed too many problems, so it got switched to a different in-development game, Gallant. This put off some of the players so again it was only two of us and a GM, but we buckled the swashes and retrieved the stolen documents from the vile Comte. This game’s mechanical gimmick is that you need to decide on three things you want to accomplish each turn, and then once you’ve rolled your pile of d8s, you have to assign them to the three goals, so you may get any combination of success, mixed success, and failure. When it comes out, I will probably buy it for Jeremy, because he is all about swashbuckling in fake France. No idea when that might be, though.

And that was it! I trundled back home and was very blargh.

Read: Gahi-chan! vol 1 (Tirotata): Tentacled yōkai that eat human art to take the shape of the characters therein could be interesting even if lewd, but here it’s just lewd.

Read: Hot Reset (Elliott Kay): Extremely male-fantasy space opera about a down-on-his-luck guy who uses the power of not being a complete dick to get a harem of hot, bi, poly girls and a sweet spaceship, and also blow up the bad guys and save the day.

Written: FAIL.

Oddly, getting up at 7 isn’t any better the second time. It probably doesn’t help that DDP is one of the things I forgot to bring.

This session’s players were less energetic, and I was not up to making up for that, so less fun was had today than yesterday. I did not manage to keep everyone engaged, and also did not learn anything from yesterday’s experience. Plus I forgot how random DW combat is, so the wooden boar running roughshod over the party yesterday was no indicator of future performance. It was still better than not gaming, but not by as much as anyone would like.

Since my evening game started at 18:00, I decided to skip the 14-18 slot in favor of napping. This left me time to get dinner, but I ended up not bothering. I also perused the dealer’s corner, but I mostly don’t want physical books any more. Sorry, publishers of indie games!

The evening slot was Leverage, with the twist that we were helping people who had been screwed over by a corrupt superhero. Because right was on our side, we made pretty much every roll for the whole game, even against the security guard who had a d10 gut telling him something was hinky and the d12 superhero. I was playing the tiny thief, so I got to sneak into the bank data center through the HVAC ducts that no one could possibly fit through, and then later into the museum to get an old costume for the grifter to impersonate the superhero in front of his coconspirators. It was obviously not as smooth as real Leverage caper, but we had to do it in one pass with no revisions, so I think it turned out pretty well all things considered.

Despite my nap, I didn’t mind ending before the scheduled time of midnight.

I set my alarm for 7 and that turned out to be a good move because I was so slow-moving that I would not have made my 9:00 game if I had slept much later.

As usual, I did a terrible job of GMing, with bonus failure in the context of a 4-hour slot, but people had fun anyway, probably because it was the first gaming slot of the con and everyone was still hyped up and full of sleep. They gave me backstory hooks that I could weave in, too. Everyone seemed happy with One Shot World over regular Dungeon World, so I think I’ll stick with it next year if nothing better comes along. I would still prefer something FitD, but it’s not like that would make up for my deficiencies.

After lunch, I played an in-development game called In Her Footsteps (PbtA, but there are only four moves so we just had a rating in each of them instead of separate stats) with a bunch of nice and very gay ladies. We started by making a magical world, which ended up being a river delta that was a crossroads to many worlds of varying levels of magic, then made witches to inhabit that world, and finally had to deal with refugees from one of those worlds bringing us a horrible hungry curse. We got everything sorted, though, and the overworked chairwitch got a hot date with the witch we revivified. (Not my character, I was a giant beaver of lurking comfortably in mist and darkness.)

Evening game was Hello, World, criminal shenanigans in a mysterious virtual universe FitD. It seems to have a lot of lore, most of which we skipped over, but we ended up being catspaws in a three-way conflict among criminal factions, luring one into a trap while they were doing crimes during a surveillance outage and then betraying them. However, while setting up clocks, the GM mentioned all the terrible things previous groups had done to the opposing bruiser, and our bruiser decided we should defeat her with smooches. The climactic showdown ended up being “let’s you and him step outside and fight” while the PCs tried to keep things under control and arrange the collapse of the partially-restored-from-backup building to trap the two bruisers together. It all worked out in the end!

Will buy Hello, World when I get back to my computer, and In Her Footsteps when it comes out (and not just because the GM so kindly shared her It’s-Its with us).

I did not manage to do anything at all useful today. I stayed in bed reading until well after noon, and didn’t leave the apartment all day. That would be fine if I were just vegatating for my vacation, but I should be getting ready to go to Big Bad Con tomorrow. I guess making sure my vaccination record is packed and also taking a picture of it counts as prep, but only barely. Fortunately I don’t have to be there until tomorrow afternoon.

Read: Bonds of Blood and Alpha Strike (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): Having finally gotten their giant space battleship moving, the heroes now have to do extremely unwise stuff with it, so the opponents this time are mostly physics and time, with a bunch of politics and crime and even a little space combat.

Read: “Haley and the Spooky Dungeon” (Maggie Hogarth): Well, what kind of dungeon do you make at Halloween, if not a haunted house?

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.11-12: That wasn’t suspicious at all, Eclipsa. Also, did Marco just deprive Mewni of most of its knights?

Written: More pointless notes, nothing else.

It’s like Friday, except I have to get all my customer cases in order to hand off to other people while I’m out. Also I had to get up too early for the weekly meeting.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.8-10: All Mewni politics all the time! Except the callback to when Marco and Star started getting shipped.

Read: The Last Hunter (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): It’s a Missiles In Space setting, but the enemies for most of the book are neglect, corruption, and logistics. Points off for society, gender roles, etc being very C20, but still entertaining.

Written: More gaming notes, I guess. They’re very stupid and my game will be awful, though.

Just because we could, we gathered at Ayse and Ken’s place to eat delicious lamb date stuff and cake and tell Ayse happy birthday some more. Also we watched the antepenultimate episode of Sailor Moon Stars and clobbered people with rubber balls.

Watched: Sailor Moon Stars 198: Everybody’s dead, next two episodes will just be drifting petals and sad music.

Written: Nothing, although I made a few notes for the con.

Today, the one thing I managed to accomplish was printing out character sheets and move references for the con. There’s still some folding that needs to happen, but together with the pens and pencils and index cards, I think the player supplies are sorted. If I were clever, I would have gotten dice, but it’s way too late for that now.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.5-7: Gee, it’s almost as if restitution isn’t popular with the colonizers. But Kelly seems pretty cool.

Read: Black & White: Tough Love At The Office vol 1 (Sal Jiang): Up-and-coming corporate rivals Shirakawa and Kuroda have to work together while plotting against each other, but when they’re working late, their rivalry devolves into fist-fights and extremely rough lesbian sex. It’s not really my kink, but I’m hoping they’ll get married and become masked avengers beating up all the high-ranking men in the corporate world, or something like that.

Written: 370 kitten words.

I was 1000% useless and didn’t make it to Jus’s soccer game. I didn’t even manage to go grocery shopping until the afternoon, when things are sold out and the store is crowded. Also some badly-trained fraud-allegation algorithm decided only a criminal would try to buy books after noon and I had to waste a bunch of time waiting for my card to get turned back on, and that put me into the time when the bus was late and generally the whole experience was slower and stupider and less successful than planned. And that’s all I managed to do today, other than play FrogComPosBand until a million o’clock at night.

Read: Orbs of Wisdom (Lindsay Buroker): Sixth and last of the “Dragon Gate” series. All the major threats got dealt with, all the couples (sadly all het) got HEAed, the end. Always good when Science is the solution, though.

Written: FAIL.

I did not have to get up earlier than usual today, but I still had to get up. Hmph.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 4.2-4: Now we know more about Eclipsa’s moral compass.

Read: Hitomi-chan is Shy With Strangers vol 5 (Chorisuke Natsumi): A very slice-of-life volume in which not much happens except that Usa finds Hitomi’s hotness very distracting.

Written: 316 kitten words.

Had to get up early and go into the office today so we could have a team lunch with boss3 S. The office was just as hot and inconveniently located as usual, but I was able to hide in a conference most of the time and mostly avoid humans and their virus-spewing face-holes. I also drank canned coffee milkshake stuff that was probably very bad for me.

Apparently boss3 is persona non grata in Switzerland after running afoul of their draconian anti-speeding regime, which I would not have known if I hadn’t come into the office today.

I cleverly (not really) got pizza on the way home and watched TV with Marith, which was definitely better than being in an office.

Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.1-2: Uh oh, Mob is thinking about his future. That can’t be good for Reigen’s business!

Read: Fluff (RavensDagger): LitRPG but superhero instead of D&D. An extremely anxious and repressed college freshman gets superpowers, gets randomly assigned to be a straight-up villain, and discovers that her power is summon little sisters who have actual powers. It’s all sideways from there.

Written: 214 kitten words.

Had to get up early for another meeting, although at least this one isn’t repeating. It also wasn’t that useful, possibly because I reject the very notion of being a leader.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.2, 1.0-5: Ugh, the new episode, although probably beloved of Loovia fans, is not at all good. Did the new writer even watch the preceding episodes? I had to go back and rewatch some to remember just how sordid and bizarre and hyper it’s supposed to be.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 21 (Tomohito Oda): Komi abroad! A little more of Komi and Rumiko’s friendship, but not one of the more exciting volumes.

Written: 636 kitten words, somehow.

The meeting that used to be in the late morning on Monday is now before the day starts on Tuesday, and is more interesting (this time) but less useful. Pretty sure I don’t approve.

Played: Lancer. Boss fight! Arguably Vivian’s character won the fight by ignoring the opponent and disrupting its power source instead, which worked better than my character mugging the person who set in motion. At least we got to give her drugs.

Read: Chapter 9 of “Rodeo Clown“: Awww!

Written: FAIL.

Ate so much banana bread today. Also cheese.

Played: Dark Matter episode 5. As usual, Jeremy apologized for not having an adventure and then it was pretty great. This time, our hapless PCs met two new factions (the Bridge Crew and the Librarian, who is a faction all by herself), were almost eaten by spiders, accidentally damaged several books, were almost eaten by kobolds and alligators, seized a plasma launcher +1 for one of the gadgeteers to integrate into their exoskeleton, and brought a book back to the library in triumph. LEVEL UP. One of my characters finds the Librarian horrifying and thinks she’s probably a system of oppression all by herself, the other finds her moderately terrifying but apparently is into that. Next session, they have shake down the door guards for late library books and also go to the Farm to get materials to repair the books that were damaged in the Great Spider Fight. Also there was banana bread.

Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.21, 4.1: That was arguably the right thing for Star to do, but I think they’re treating the legitimacy of the monarchy as more of a thing than it deserves.

Written: 565 kitten words.