Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Working from home is definitely much better in every way.

Read: Be Prepared (Vera Brosgol): Semi-autobiographical graphic novel about a 9-year-old Russian-American girl going to Russian culture summer camp and having some wonderful times and some awful times. It’s hard being a kid.

Read: Alcyon vol 1 (Richard Marazano, Christophe Ferreira): Two teenagers in ancient Greece set out looking for a divine artifact to save their city-state. Named for the boy, who presumably is supposed to be the mainest character, but he’s a dumbass and the girl is much braver and more competent. Bah.

Read: “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Reporter” (Daniela Tomova): Zombie sled racing, and then it gets weird.

Read: Aposimz vol 1 (Tsutomu Nihei): A tale of survival, revenge, and advanced murder technology on an artificial planet. So far we’ve only seen the ruined and barely habitable outer layers, but the mysteries of the core have been hinted at.

Words: 687 kitten words. No revising.

I got up two hours early (which is actually three hours early because it’s still Spring Forward Week) to go to the office, and it was worse in every way than working from home. I’m sure there are some jobs where being together in one place isn’t worse, but mine is not one of them. Home is more comfortable, has better food, has fewer interruptions, and doesn’t pointlessly waste four hours of my day on commuting. If I want to communicate with my coworkers, I will ping them on Slack like someone who lives in the 21st century.

My boss, who is from India, asked what St Patrick’s is about. I told her it was just white people nonsense, which is not an answer I’m sure she was happy enough, but “beer” was enough of an explanation.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. More of Nom’s ghosts (she will never live that down, ever), more shooting of zombies, and now the people we left safe at the base camp are freaking out. Yet, somehow, all the Marines are still alive and nominally sane.

Read: “The Backbone of the World” (Stephen Graham Jones): Mysterious prairie dog issues, uncanny strangers, impending doom on various levels, a clever plan.

Read: The Kaiju Preservation Society (John Scalzi): Just what it says on the tin. There are kaiju, somewhere, and they need preserving. It’s a little implausible that the secret is kept so well, but that’s fine. It’s a good romp and terrible people get their comeuppance.

Read: Ogres (Adrian Tchaikovsky): Sadly, the setting twist was obvious from the very beginning, although there is also a plot twist that I did not see coming.

Read: I Can’t Belive I Slept With You vol 1 (Miyako Miahara): A (hot, young) out-of-work game developer gets offered forgiveness of her back rent if she’ll sleep with her (pretty, even younger) landlady, and free rent if she lets her move in and rent out her old apartment. Super-problematic, obviously, but the leads get along and honestly seem to like each other. The twist I thought was going to be there seems to not be, but maybe it’s just unreliable narrator?

Words: FAIL.

Three meetings before 10:00, but at least the work I did yesterday contributed fungibly to a graph in one of them. That’s like success in our capitalist dystopia, right?

Tomorrow I have to get up even earlier so I can have meetings in person, because management doesn’t like it when they can’t see labor laboring.

Watched: Turning Red: When you’re 13, everything is the most important thing. Especially giant red panda.

Words: FAIL. I watched Turning Red to inspire me to delete the project I wrote about a 13-year-old instead of revising it more, but I don’t think it worked. I do need to revise some more, though.

There are definitely some people in the Senate who could use a good stabbing.

Somehow I did some work today. What’s up with that?

Read: “The Latch Key” (Olivia Atwater): Backstory of the Lord Sorcier and why he’s like that.

Read: “Baby Teeth” (Daniel Polansky): Vampire hunters: not necessarily nicer than vampires.

Read: Vampire Blood Drive collection (Mira Ong Chua): Complete collection of all the VBD stories, including some I had not read before. All cute and sexy and somewhat ridiculous.

Words: 495 kitten words and a tiny bit of revision.

Daylight Monday, the worst day of the year! Although, perhaps as a result of sleeping a million hours night before last, it was not unspeakably horrible this time. Just fairly horrible.

Read: The Misfit Soldier (Michael Mammay): A soldier, or maybe we should say, an extremely sketchy guy who happens to be in the military, has a plan to do well by doing good. A caper combined with military action ensues.

Read: “Sleepover” (Alastair Reynolds): Surprisingly similar setup to the “Laundry” novels by Stross.

Words: 604 kitten words, although I’m not entirely happy with them. Maybe DST has made me too stupid to write. Also did some revising, and am happier with that, although I probably need to go over it about a million more times before showing it to anybody.

An hour was lost to the maw of Daylight Savings Time, so despite what the clock said, I was only in bed for like eleven hours! I did eventually get my act together and go grocery shopping, which was like taking my stupid mental and physical health for a stupid walk, but otherwise, nothin’. I thought walking was supposed to make my brain work better.

Read: Yotsuba&! vol 15 (Kiyohiko Azuma): Rocks and books and friends and Yanda and banana smoothies, but also Yotsuba is almost ready for first grade!

Words: 465 kitten words and a tiny bit of revision.

I didn’t really get up earlier than usual for grocery shopping, but I did it with less whining, so that’s good, right?

On-call in the afternoon, but the customers were blessedly quiet.

Read: Rackham Vale (Brian Saliba, Craig Schaffer): An OSR sandbox based on (and including many examples of) the art of Arthur Rackham, featuring many faeries of various scales, mutant alligators, curses, ambitious witches, and party trees, among other fey goings-on.

Played: Zoomwarts. Surprisingly, trying the same plan again worked better. Everybody got killed, but some of them got over it, so that’s good, right? Possibly we’re going to start alternating Zoomwarts with D&D run by Ken, so that Nonny can fight monsters.

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.7-8: Beach episode! But more importantly, we find out what Rikka’s deal is. Also, both positive and negative examples of romantic behavior which may be of use to Jus now that she is a middle-schooler and practically a teenager.

Eaten: Ribs! (Also brisket, burnt ends, collard greens, etc.) Apparently Jus took a break from wanting sushi 24/7 to demand ribs, and nobody was going to object.

Played: Laser tag.

Watched: RWBY 1.1 for Jus. She liked it, and we aren’t even to the trauma part yet!

Words: FAIL. I did a little revising because I figured out what one of the slang terms should be, but not very much.

Made it through another week of capitalism, yay. I need to find some round tuits to get more of these document conversions done, though.

Read: “The Visit” (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie): An alternate timeline in which women are in charge, but act like men do here, so everything is still terrible.

Read: Colostle (Nich Angell): A solo journaling RPG using cards as randomizers, set in a castle so large entire landscapes fit in its rooms, with castle-themed robot monsters that can be dismantled for bonus limbs or pets or what-have-you. I am unlikely to play it, since I already have more things to write than I have brains to write them with, but it’s charming.

Words: 344 kitten words.

Another meeting cancelled today. I’d be happier if it wasn’t because the bosses were off somewhere consuming conspicuously and plotting against labor.

Played: Nothing. Ken is dead of capitalism or something. We tried to come up with something for the rest of us to do, but nah.

Read: ZomCom archives (Emi MG): Zombie humor. May feature too much dismemberment for some, but is bizarrely heartwarming anyway. Also features a vampire and a werewolf, and a background cast of monsters.

Read: The Little Trashmaid archives (s0s2): A comic about a mermaid who lives in what we’ve made of the oceans. Somehow it manages to actually be funny, if you can avoid dying of despair. Much of the proceeds from merch goes to ocean cleanup orgs, so that’s something.

Read: Call of the Night vol 5-6 (Kotoyama): MC has a fellow vampire-wannabe now, although the vampire coven is so ridiculous maybe one or both of them will change their minds. Vampire Lead is also ridiculous, but is not being terrible.

Words: 874 kitten words.

Early morning meeting was cancelled, yay?

Read: “The Black Pages” (Nnedi Okorafor): Modernish Timbouctou, a local boy returns from abroad and gets mixed up with a djinni while the Taliban are burning libraries and shooting people. Not a lot of plot, but lots of doom.

Read: Dark Matter (Mage Hand Press): I am conflicted about this game. It’s fun to read, with laser swords, giant space amoebas, screwdrivers that make noise, saucer-flying cattle mutilators, jumpgates with mysterious maintenance crew, etc, etc, plus D&D in space, but it explicitly includes everything ever published for 5e, which is some TFOS-level nonsense, and it’s all spindled, folded, and mutilated to balance with people waving sharp sticks in caves, which makes the character options that have appealing flavor text a lot blander in practice. Plus it’s D&D, so roll a d20 every five minutes and maybe if you do it long enough, you’ll get to do something meaningful. Maybe.

Watched: Encanto. It was very sweet, and 0% romance! Could have used more capybara, though.

Words: FAIL. I’m not doing a good job of protecting my writing time.

Watched: Cowboy Bebop 8-10: If there had been a second season, that would have been a good low point, but as an ending it’s pretty dark.

Read: Spelunking Through Hell (Seanan McGuire): After seeing the person who has spent fifty years searching the multiverse for her lost husband make cameos in all the other Incryptid books, we finally get her story. It’s pretty grim!

Words: FAIL.

I did work, but is that really accomplishing anything, in the cosmic scheme of things?

Read: Hell Hounds Don’t Heel (Kim McDougall): After three books, the main character finally got her guy, and also saved future Montreal from the magical conspiracy, although it could have gone better. There is at least one more book in the series, but once I return the omnibus to Kindle Unlimited, I don’t know that I’ll get around to reading it.

Words: Did a little revision. Need more slang. Probably counts as FAIL.

Double gaming weekend! There was some doubt, but Jeremy’s dad seems to be doing well so the Gollubs and their unending gaming food were available.

Played: Lancer. No combat this session, but we saved the world anyway. I think Kappa has to buy up her Charm trigger next level, since she did so much diplomacy this mission. Not that the mission is over yet, since Dave accepted our suggestion of mutants inhabiting the engineering spaces of the blink gate we need to repair. It was a pretty satisfying session.

Words: Only 294 words, but I finally implemented the fancier (kinda) calendar for kitten words, and made a link in Writing. Then I thought about revising and didn’t.

I should have gotten up much earlier, but was too useless. I guess it worked out in the end, though.

Sought: The lost art of conversation.

Eaten: Fried chicken, shaved fennel, salad with home-made ranch.

Played: Underhand dodgeball and sneaky statues.

Played: Zoomwarts, at long last! We played late into the night because Marith doesn’t have to work tomorrow. In fact, she is on vacation! But that did not help Rosamund, Bella, or the lizards, because their plan to destroy the magic circle was foiled by a simple forgetfulness potion! Muahahahaha!

Words: 406 kitten words.

The new project at work involves a lot of cutting and pasting, but hopefully the end result will be worth it.

Read: Dervishes Don’t Dance (Kim McDougall): Sequel to Dragons Don’t Eat Meat, further conspiracy and slow-burn romance in a returned-magic Montreal, with many strange magical creatures.

Read: See You, Space Cowboy (Tidal Wave Games): It’s kind of a simplified PBtA, with some Cowboy Bebop frosting. It’s simpler than Scum and Villainy, but not nearly as appealing. I feel bad saying that, since I know it was someone’s labor of love and fandom, but apparently I suck.

Words: 576 kitten words, which are now readable.

I was less useless at work today than yesterday, so that’s something, I guess. Maybe.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. More wounds, more trauma, but then the marines got to do real marine stuff instead of bored marine screwing around and were triumphant. Not that it really helped anything.

Read: “Bhatia, PI” (Shiv Ramdas): Incompetent wannabe PI with competent sidekick, modern Indian supernatural version, by the author of that hilarious rice guy twitter thread.

Read: I’m A Wolf, But My Boss Is A Sheep vol 1 (Shino Shimizu): Gender roles and unrequited lovein Japanese corporate culture. The carnivore(-descended otherwise perfectly normal human)/herbivore(ditto) divide is not used to particularly illuminating effect, alas.

Words: FAIL.

Another weekly meeting before my usual start time. Maybe I should give up and just always start work at 8:30.

Read: The Labyrinth Index (Charles Stross): The one where Mhari and her crew have to go to the US and it’s horrible. More than usual.

Read: Dead Lies Dreaming (Charles Stross): The one about petty supervillains living under the reign of Nyarlathotep.

Words: FAIL. I tried to do one last revision pass but my brain stopped after just a few paragraphs, because it is dumb.

Plenty of work, especially in the morning. Blugh.

Watched: Cowboy Bebop 7: Faye’s con mom!

Read: Escape From Yokai Land (Charles Stross): Novella about “Bob Howard”‘s visit to Japan briefly mentioned in the beginning of The Delirium Brief. A mere brain-eating demon seems quaint compared to everything that happens after it in the series.

Read: The Delirium Brief (Charles Stross): The one where the UK gets completely boned. No, not the interdimensional invasion, that was nothing compared to this.

Words: FAIL, but I gave out the URL for the kitten words to the writing channel on the slack. Also an actual book published by a slack frond came out today!

I slept way in, but then actually did some errands, so I guess it was okay.

Eaten: Gyoza and tempura and sushi. I made it through eating in a restaurant, but I’m not sure it was a good idea. I really wanted gyoza and tempura, though, and now I am sated.

Read: Dragons Don’t Eat Meat (Kim McDougall): It’s the future, magic has returned and messed up everything, our half-valkyrie heroine makes a living as freelance animal control, which inevitably leads to an apartment full of weird supernatural critters, and then there’s a horrible conspiracy and a hot gargoyle.

Words: 730 kitten words. Still haven’t managed to make a system for publishing them, or work on anything else, or have even two brain cells to rub together.

Although I was on call today, I managed to have a fun day anyway by staying within 15min of my computer and only getting texted once. Whee!

Played: Minigolf and air hockey. I am terrible at minigolf, but we weren’t keeping score, so nobody knows exactly how terrible, and that’s like winning, right? Also I got to display my maturity by not asking if it was my turn to putt every time someone else went.

Played: Catch. It’s a classic for a reason!

Eaten: Muslim Chinese food. It was really good

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.6:

Played: Super Smash Bros. I am also terrible at this game. I just try to face somebody who’s not on my team and mash the basic attack button until I get kicked off the edge three times. But I’m willing to be useless if it makes Nonny happy.

Read: FAIL

Words: FAIL

Today I took time off work to eat buffet and see KITTENS with Ayse and Jus and Nonny. We ended up having to wait an hour for the kittens, because pandemic, but after a lot of escalators I got to pet a grey tuxedo kitten named Vixen, and had my fingers almost chewed off by a a kitten named Madden, and also petted a sleepy void kitten who never came out of their cave to let me read their collar. There were many fewer kittens this time than over the holidays, which made the visit less exciting, but it’s good to know so many kittens got homes.

Read: The Promised Neverland vol 20 (Kaiu Shirai, Posuka Demizu): The end! Also substantial denouement. Sometimes a redemption arc only takes a few pages.

Words: 875 kitten words. Also more scripting.

Work, bah. I would rather sleep.

Read: Serious Trans Vibes archive (Sophie Labelle): Very trans and generally queer slice-of-life in Canada from 5th grade to high school, plus lots of side material about trans rights (posters and such). Some autobiographical, some only inspired-by.

Read: No Matter What You Say, Furi-San Is Scary! vol 2 (Seiichi Kinoue): I don’t see how Male Lead can still think Furi-san is scary, she’s such a cinnamon roll.

Read: Pink One (Daniel Rose): Starts off with “What if humans were small and fragile-looking compared to all aliens?” but then ruins it with “…and also superior in every possible way, both mental and physical?” as well as bad writing. Serves me right for reading self-published Kindle Unlimited books.

Words: A little more scripting, although really I should be done by now.

No work, but I did manage to do a couple of chores today, including figuring out how to run CGI scripts on the new site.

Read: The Sheep Dragon (LG Estrella): Another volume of side stories and backstory. The title story is about a baby dragon making friends with magic sheep, so I approve.

Listened: Ludonarrative Dissidents 9: 13th Age: They agreed (or at least didn’t disagree) that if you must play a D&D, 13th Age is the one to play, which is pretty much how I feel about it.

Words: Not words as such, but I did work on publishing stuff (to the web, not real publishing) so it’s not actually a failure.

Marith is still too sick to do things, so I made my way over to Monkeycat Towers all by myself. I mostly remembered how it works!

Eaten: Pozole! Ken used a new recipe! It was super-tasty! Possibly I should not have eaten a second bowl of it right before playing time, but how could I not?

Played: Ball tag, noodle hockey, volley-soccer, shrieking, doll fashion design. No Zoomwarts, because Marith has the Illness. (No, not that illness.)

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.4-5: Dekomori vs Morisummer!

Read (to Nonny): Meet The House Kittens and A Bridge Too Fur (John Patrick Green): Adorable kittens try to get into the construction business, but no one takes them seriously because they are too adorable. Then they need the help of some dogs, because water, but cannot take the dogs seriously, because dogs. In the end, many people learn better!

Words: 422 kitten words.

I need to find some more biology facts for these meetings. The new support website looks pretty good, though.

Read: Two Necromancers, A Dwarf Kingdom, And A Sky City (LG Estrella): Like all books in this series, has what it says on the tin (plus all the OP weirdos the two necromancers collected in previous books), plus the impending war against the country that never got over their country breaking away centuries ago, and extradimensional horrors. Although there’s plenty of setup for another book, there doesn’t seem to be one.

Read: Dungeon Bitches (Emily F Allen, Sarah Carapace, Mxtress Khan): Another game I am not qualified to play, never mind run, but I wanted to see what they did with it. PbtA, queer women and their trauma explore dungeons because it’s better than trying to live in heterocentric patriarchy. The playbooks (called Deals, as in “so what’s your deal?”) include runaway nuns, renegade princesses, witches, Frankensteinian undead, virgin huntresses, shapeshifting monsters, and revolutionary firebrands. Despite being fairly recent, it still has AW-style sex moves, although there’s always an option to switch out for the intimacy moves favored by later PbtA games to support ace characters (or vice versa in the case of the Virgin Huntress). Emotional and physical trauma are use the same hitpoints and get healed the same way, frequently through sex moves. The text has lots of cussing, and the art and layout reinforce that this is a hardcore game.

Words: FAIL.

Surprise, we were the studio audience for a training video. No one told us to laugh, though.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Oh no, is this the part where we have to be clever? We’re not clever, we’re meatheads by design! How about we give Nom more shit about ghosts instead of being clever?

Read: FAIL. (Hey, if not writing is a failure, how can not reading be better?)

Words: FAIL.