How is it already only Friday? Why have I not accomplished anything all week?
Read: “Haley’s Cozy System Armageddon” and “Haley and the Catfish Invasion” (Maggie Hogarth): Aliens wander by and transform Earth into a LitRPG world complete with information popups, so one young woman does the best she can with calligraphy and cooking in her small town and gets a class not usually seen in LitRPG stories. CW: overt Christianity.
Written: 268 kitten words.
Thursday the 13th, most cursed of– wait, that’s not right. It’s just Thursday, although it is also only a couple of weeks until I have to run Dungeon World for strangers who will hate me. I should also get ready for NaNoWriMo and probably more stuff that I’m forgetting now.
Written: 643 kitten words. Not really a lot, except compared to recent days. Putting the Shop Titans pad in the other room just makes me look at monsters on artstation instead, but perhaps that is less disruptive.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.10-14: Hah, I’m not the only one who thought Marco and Hekapoo had chemistry! Not that it did him any good in the end, because he’s a doofus.
Written: 295 kitten words.
I’m pretty sure I should have been smarter today.
Played: Lancer. We finished off the mysterious mechs from last time, who did not yield any more information, and then tried to help Kelsey recreate the mech that Comp/Con ate. Despite the number of people helping, she eventually succeeded, and we all stomped up to the boss fight together.
Read: Obie Is Man Enough (Schuyler Bailar): Slice of life about a Korean-American trans boy who just wants to live his 7th-grade life and swim competitively, but extreme asshats keep trying to stop him. He does triumph in the end, but man, people suck. (Author is also a trans guy, so presumably the transphobia is realistic or even toned down.)
Written: FAIL.
Happy happy Marith Day!
We celebrated by going over to Monkeycat Towers to eat Thai food and watch the first three episodes of Revue Starlight. The Thai food was delicious, the anime was not what we expected. Things it reminded us of include: Revolutionary Girl Utena, Kaleido Star, Princess Tutu, Star Driver, AKB0048, and Strawberry Panic. It is of the inherently cursed yuri-for-boys genre, and also seems to rely on knowing the characters from other parts of the sprawling multimedia franchise, so we probably don’t need to watch any more.
Read: Crusade (Glynn Stewart): Completes the trilogy with Exile and Refuge. The humans and their friends defeat the great enemy with the power of archaeology, while also dealing with first contact with assholes.
Written: 348 kitten words.
I did manage to go grocery shopping, eventually, but that’s about all I accomplished today.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.9: Okay, those princesses weren’t so terrible. That time.
Read: Exile and Refuge (Glynn Stewart): First two of a series I had not previously read, seem like earlier works. Dissidents and rebels have to set up their own society on an unknown but suspiciously habitable world and deal with all the things they find in their new section of the galaxy.
Written: 424 kitten words. I need to get my act together for NaNoWriMo, though.
I meant to get up early and go grocery shopping in plenty of time for going to see Jus’s soccer game, but none of that came to pass. Then I was on call all afternoon, and customers rudely wanted me to fix their problems. It wasn’t intense work, but anything else beyond pad games and light reading wouldn’t have worked well anyway. Bah.
I didn’t have anything else I wanted to sign up for, so I forgot, but the final round of signups for Big Bad Con was tonight. I’m up to four people in my Friday session and five in my Saturday session, so I better get this glass mountain filled with [SPOILER] and [SPOILER] and DOOM.
I don’t know whether it was the weird mayo-chicken-salad filling of the arepa I ate tonight or the ranch dressing I put on my chicken nuggets last night, but for a bit it looked like it was going to be a sad night. Fortunately it cleared out quickly and I did not have to spend the night with my forehead on the cool bathroom counter.
Read: Spy x Family vol 8 (Tatsuya Endo): An army of hit men trapped on a cruise ship with Yor. That’s definitely going to end poorly for someone.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 3.4-8: Wait, wasn’t that the end? No, apparently Marco has to be a doofus and also the writers have to ship him with Star for no good reason. Hmph.
Written: 330 kitten words.
Huh, Friday.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.22, 3.1-3: No more hanging around Echo Creek having teenaged hijinx, it’s all Mewni adventure now! Also, new opening and closing and more tadpoles.
Read: Chapter 8 of “Rodeo Clown“: No death can be so impending that Blitzo and Stolas will keep their pants on.
Written: 274 kitten words. Remember when my daily goal was 250 and I made it almost every day? Me neither.
How is it already only Thursday? Why has nothing useful happened this entire week?
Read: The Genesis of Misery (Neon Yang): Star travel and mecha based on mysterious artifacts and substances, excellent. Declaring them holy, making a Catholic-style religion around them, and murdering everybody who regards them in a different light… yep, humans suck. In fact, almost all the characters are pretty terrible, including the MC. Sure, she honestly believes that she’s the next messiah, but everyone around her believes it too, and history shows us how that goes. It looks like the next book will be a lot more about her enemies, which honestly seem somewhat less terrible, so I’ll probably read it.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.18-21: There’s starting to be more plot, not just wackiness.
Written: 383 kitten words.
Got up early for a training that was cancelled at some earlier date, only the external vendor was too incompetent to remove it from the calendar. I’m sure the training will miraculously be a good use of my time when it finally happens, though.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.16-17: So all of that experience Marco gained is just dropped between episodes? At least he gets to get rid of the mark of Hekapoo along with it. Which is too bad, Hekapoo seems like quite a catch.
Written: 677 kitten words.
It’s a good thing that Ken is too busy having fun in Portland to game, because I got stuck at work forever. I think we need to explain to New Guy M about knocking off when shift is over. But maybe he’s angling for a management position, which does require working 24/7.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.13-15: Wow, actual progress! And not just in Ludo’s evil plan!
Read: Yashahime vol 1 (Takashi Shiina, Rumiko Takahashi): The daughters of the major characters of Inu-Yasha have adventures. Unfortunately I either didn’t watch far enough or wasn’t invested enough in the original series to care deeply.
Written: FAIL.
Tried to sign up for more Big Bad Con events, but as usual, their backend was not up to handling a few hundred requests in the same minute. It took about 45 minutes to get things sorted, but I got into the Leverage-only-getting-revenge-for-non-supers. It was enough of a mess that I should wait until tomorrow before obsessively checking to see if anyone signed up for my games.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.12: Disembodied flying unicorn heads are kind of the worst.
Written: FAIL. I still don’t know how to do horrible revelations. Or feelings.
I realized today that ice cream costs like a dollar an ounce at the ice cream place. But, ice cream!
Played: Dark Matter episode 4. Beat up more undead that were minding their own business, had drinks with another underdead who was minding his own business but very politely, went back to the first faction to try to broker a swap but they had too many yellow question marks, set out for the library and got ambushed by the faction that everybody hates. Jeremy told me to draw a battlemap like that time Obi-wan and Whatsisface got jumped by Darth Maul, and all I remembered of the scene was that it made me think of live-action Roborally so I drew a bunch of catwalks and moving platforms and pneumatic tubes and waterfalls of molten metal. It was difficult to justify being in the bowels of an asteroid ship (ammunition manufacturing?) but made for a great fight scene. It might have been more glorious if I had remembered Bolt gets to reroll natural 1s, but it all worked out in the end.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.9-11: Disembodied flying unicorn heads are kind of the worst.
Written: 575 kitten words.
Jus is now a teenager, so she got enormous quantities of sushi, and then we went back for cake and presents. The clear winner was signed original art and pins and stuff from the creator of one of her favorite webcomics. Did I have feelings that strong when I was 13? Then we played some Super Mario Party and dispersed, because Jus and Nonny and Ayse and Ken have to get organized to leave for Portland tomorrow.
Written: FAIL.
The knocking off at 17:30 seems to be meeting with general approval, so probably it will continue. Oh the other hand, my rent is going up.
Read: The Shorter Part of Valor (Tanya Huff): Small collection of short stories in the world of the “Valor” and “Peace” series.
Read: Chapter 7 of “Rodeo Clown“: Blitzo has a plan and is taking charge. Surely everything will be okay now.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.5-8: Nice to see Ludo coming back to cause problems. Not that he’s needed.
Written: 476 kitten words.
Read: Galactic Thunder (Cameron Cooper): Start of a sequel series set thirty years after the main character and her band of ragtag misfits completely upended human society in the process of saving it from an insidious threat. Now there’s a new threat, which is extremely mysterious, but probably didn’t need an entire book to get to this point.
Read: The Golden Enclaves (Naomi Novik): This was a good conclusion to the series. My pocket friends have convinced me that it’s not perfect, but I really liked it. It was full of horrible revelations that I possibly should have seen coming, but totally didn’t. No, more horrible than that. Maybe some of them weren’t strictly necessary, I guess. Also I like Liesel, she’s excellently obnoxious.
Written: FAIL, too busy reading and being reminded that I shouldn’t bother to write anything ever.
Yeah, okay, knocking off work earlier is nice.
Watched: Our Flag Means Death 9-10: Well, one of them dealt with that a lot more constructively than the other. Good thing season two is shooting, or there might be riots.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.4: What, why would you expect either Ludo or Star to learn anything?
Read: Remnant Faction (Glynn Stewart): Fifth and probably last of the missiles-in-space series about a navy commander and diplomat trying to put the galaxy back together after overthrowing the alien conquerors broke everything.
Written: Knocking off work earlier did not make me any productive.
Played: Lancer. There was an attempt by too many people to explain the game to Kelsey, so we didn’t finish this combat. Or maybe it’s the fact that none of us except Brooks could roll for beans and Vivian’s audio went out again. Also people are unavailable next Tuesday so it will be two weeks until we can finish beating these guys up.
Read: Chapter 6 of Rodeo Clown: Blitzo should have suffered more.
Written: FAIL.
So the new plan to avoid burnout at work is for everybody to get kicked off-shift at 17:30 except the person who has to do the handover at 18:30 (unless everything is terrible, of course). Admire how I just switched my after-work activity to the day when I have to do the evening handover. (It’s fine, it’s not any worse than before, it’s just not any better.)
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 2.1-3: We do get to see what happened to Ludo after the last season finale. Also Star is definitely her own worst enemy.
Read: I Became a Succubus, and the Only Way to Level is to… What?! vol 1 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): It is exactly what you would expect, and full of what seems like the tropes from mainstream porn (which I actually don’t consume, being a failure as an American bachelor, but it seems like the stuff I hear about.) Meh.
Read: “These Alien Skies” (CT Rwizi): I mean, yeah, colonists of African descent refusing to have anything to do with people from the Earth they left is legit.
Written: 301 kitten words.
Bizarrely, people signed up for my events at Big Bad Con, so I guess now I have to come up with an adventure. I have several elements, I just have to put them together into a small point-crawl with some kind of ending.
Endings, my old foe, we meet again.
After fighting with the signup system, I ran to play mini golf with Nonny and Dave and Ken. It was very sweaty, but I think I did better than before. At this rate, I may someday be as good as the nine-year-old. (Except he’ll have leveled up by then.) Then I hung out at their place for a while until talking about food in Portland made me want to crawl home and eat Chinese food. As always, they gave me so much bonus food I didn’t even make it to my entree.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 11-13: End of season 1! A surprisingly strong showing by the forces of evil (now under new management)! Star is still her own worst enemy, though.
Written: 405 words, not all of them kitten words.
Seems to be a generally lethargic day. There is no visiting, only Zzzuul.
Tomorrow is the first round of signups for Big Bad Con. I need to figure out what to sign up for. The pickings seem slim, but I guess that’s to be expected the first year back after the pandemic outage.
Watched: Star vs The Forces of Evil 7-10: I remembered how to watch this because Jus is also watching it, although she’s probably finished all seasons by now. It’s still extremely ridiculous.
Read: “Quandary Aminu vs The Butterfly Man” (Rich Larson): Modern cyberpunk: crime, drugs, climate catastrophe, astounding levels of technology used for the most sordid purposes.
Read: Silver Under Nightfall (Rin Chupeco): Vampires vs vampires vs humans, courtly intrigue, romance, battles, unwholesome biology, romance, horrible old men, trauma, and of course doom.
Written: 659 non-kitten words. Some of them were apparently from before and didn’t get logged, but whatever.
The week is over. How did we get to this point so quickly? How did it take us so long? Time, what even?
Watched: She-Hulk 5-6: She definitely won, but I don’t think she enjoyed it. Nikki, on the other hand, enjoyed winning, even if she then was thwarted.
Written: 530 kitten words.
Customers, how do they even?
Played: Nothing, gaming is on Tuesdays now. Weird.
Written: 492 kitten words. Possibly not very good ones.
Only the regular getting up early today. Still don’t like it.
Watched: OFMD 7-8. It’s really happening! But the other thing is happening too. Also Lucius is the best.
Written: 579 kitten words.
Had to get up two hours early for a meeting, but then managed to take a shower before starting normal work, which was surprisingly nice. Not nice enough to make me a productive participant in capitalism, though.
Probably today’s best thing was that we got to hear Kelsey’s voice (and see a picture of her doggo) for the first time in… half a year? two years? Since the Earth cooled from its primordial molten state? Anyway, she is not dead and can game, so that’s all good!
Played: Lancer, because gaming has moved to Tuesday! This time we had a fight that ended before we had to knock off for the evening, in which we triumphed, so good job us. I did not try to be clever at all, I just ran into a good position and worked on chopping the enemy to pieces, and it turned out great. I should probably switch out my one ranged weapon for a longer-ranged one, though, in case I come up against someone like that flier without enough support. Also we need to investigate this mysterious energy phenomenon, but the grad student is all over that, so probably my character should concentrate on getting the ship fixed to get us and our data out of here.
Read: Chapter 5 of “Rodeo Clown“, in which Blitzo finally can’t even.
Read: What If? 2 (Randall Munroe): It is very similar to the first volume, but I still read it instead of eating lunch.
Written: FAIL.
The customer that there kept us on calls 8-12 ‘ours a day every day last week finally admitted that there it been their own damn to the depths fault, an’ once they stopped punchin’ their NFS servers in the face things be mostly okay.
Written: FAIL
Apparently gaming will make me get up on time, even if the sky is threatening rain.
Played: Dark Matter. After languishing in the brig for a good twelve hours, the PCs are sprung by a previously-unsuspected faction, who are kind of sketchy but at least have a plan for getting off the asteroid, even though the plan relies on finding people dumb enough to go into the zombie-infested decks in search of drive components. It turns out the zombie-infested decks are also full of giant space rats, and the zombies are smart enough to make use of doors and terrain hazards, but this time the noncombat characters (cough Sesamina cough) stay back instead of rushing in to get beat up, and things work out much better. We still complained about almost running out of hit points, so Jeremy let us level up. Yay, level 2! But there are undoubtedly more zombies, and probably the gelatinous cube will get loose at some point. I bet it knows how to use that blaster, too.
Absorbed: Only a small amount of rain, really.
Written: 396 kitten words.
I was backup on call in case the customer who said they wouldn’t call over the weekend called, but they never did. Good on them for sticking to the plan.
Marith’s car is not actually on fire yet, so we went to wave to Ayse as she lay in bed practicing viruses and eat beef mushroom sweet potato dandelion green beets. Then Marith had to go home because of capitalism, but I stayed to play Minecraft and Sneaky Statues and then went home. It was pretty nice.
Written: FAIL.
Brief team meeting first thing in the morning and then right back to the customer. They are not going to make us sit on the phone with them all weekend, at least, which is good because I have no brain cells, or at least no caring, left.
Watched: She-Hulk 3-4: A good mix of problems that can be solved by punching, problems that can’t, and fourth-wall breaking.
Read: Third Time Lucky (Tanya Huff): Seven stories about the most powerful wizard in the world, who can do almost anything but would rather lie in her hammock on a tropical coast with a cold drink and a hot guy than anything else and therefore is her own worst impediment.
Written: FAIL.
Same customer, all day. They may finally be accepting that it’s their infrastructure and not our product, but only very slowly.
Played: Lancer. This is a very sand-tasting group, but we managed to get shot down so we can start the combat next week.
Read: “Vilcabamba” (Harry Turtledove): Titled for the last town of the Incas after the conquistadores destroyed their country, a story about the remnants of the US+Canada after aliens conquer Earth. It is not any more cheerful.
Read: “Choke” (Suyi Davies Okungbowa): I didn’t understand this story, but it definitely had a sense of creeping dread from creepy white people.
Written: FAIL