Author: Trip the Space Parasite

Another early-morning meeting, although at least this one was somewhat regularly scheduled.

I tried doing some email wrangling during the slow parts of work, and feel better this evening. Not necessarily a lot smarter, but like I maybe could have done something if I had tried.

Read: Two Necromancers, A Dragon, And A Vampire (LG Estrella): Book 3/4, in which the exploding elf gets a baby dragon who helps the group break a vampire out of jail and completely obliterate an enemy research complex. Includes every necromancer’s favorite: zombie pirates.

Words: 495.

Surprise all-hands meeting! But it was just for the old and new CEOs to speechify, the company’s not going out of business or anything.

It’s not like I was doing great at my work desk, but moving to my own computer definitely made me feel less useful. Maybe I need to turn the desk around so it’s not so enclosed? Or get better light somehow? More windows? Maybe it’s just that I backed so many kickstarters that my email takes forever to deal with. Or that after spending all day doing computer stuff for capitalism, additional computer stuff is Too Much. Whatever it is, not being able to get any of my own stuff done in the evening is annoying.

Read: The Hungry Dragon Cookie Company (LG Estrella): Short stories around and between the series about a bunch of completely OP weirdos having adventures at the behest of the government they want pardons from. Maybe I should go back and read the rest of that series, I remember it being about what my pandemic-addled brain could handle.

Words: FAIL.

Complete uselessness.

Read: “The Chronologist” (Ian R MacLeod): A village with an uncertain relationship to time, a restless young lad, and a predictable outcome.

Read: “The Tale of Ak and Humanity” (Yefim Zozulya): Early Soviet story, very Russian, much purge, excess government, cynicism. Pretty much all atmosphere.

Read: Summer Frost (Blake Crouch): It’s tempting to blame the viewpoint character, but it’s not like she ever had a chance. She was only human.

Words: FAIL

On call, but nothing happened, so that’s good.

Played: Zoomwarts. Bella is probably not a vampire yet! Less clear about Baby Lizard.

Eaten: Assorted tacos from the taqueria that the burger place turned into for lunch, and then carne asada burritos for dinner.

Played: About 5000 steps of assorted roughhousing.

Read: The OP Lich Is A Returnee vol 2-4 (Stuart Grosse): Mostly infodumps about the magic system, interrupted by the OP Lich steamrollering anyone who puts themselves in her way.

Words: FAIL. I’d say I used up all my creativity on Zoomwarts, but that’s making an assumption that’s probably not borne out by evidence.

Metaboss B is back from feeling poorly with Covid, hurray! Also got reminded to submit expense reports for phone/internet

Read: Sisters (Raina Telgemeier): Autobiographical graphic novel about sisterly strife and a road trip.

Read: Ghosts (Raina Telgemeier): Not autobiographical, but about two sisters. These ones move to a town on the North California coast which is supposed to be good for the younger one’s cystic fibrosis, but the people talk about ghosts a lot…

Read: Three Immortals (Bert-Oliver Boehmer): Space opera about mistakes, betrayals, immortality, mistaken wars, megalomaniacs, people trying to do the right thing, people trying to take over the galaxy, mysterious technology from before the collapse of civilization, etc. I’m pretty sure it’s slaughtering QM, but whomst among us, etc.

Read: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious vol 2 (Wakame Konbu): The Beautiful Maid with Purple Eyes and her Young Master are still mostly thinking only of each other, but now there are other characters, and also dress-up sequences. Still not much in the way of socially-redeeming value.

Words: 731 kitten words. Which I still haven’t figured out how to publish.

More customer calling, but we got The Expert (former boss M) to explain things to the customer. Now they have action items, instead of just waiting for us to come down from the mountain with stone tablets.

I went on another walk to get gaming food, but when I got home with my satay and eggplant (and finally, brown rice), I wasn’t hungry. I don’t think that’s how that is supposed to work!

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Release the duckling-bot! Also, what is with Nom and all these ghosts? Maybe ghosts like cigars too.

Read: Bad Moon On The Rise (Annie Bellet): A weretiger hitwoman kills a bunch of people, most of whom probably deserve it, rescues the girl, somehow keeps her not-very-elite team alive, etc. I think this is a spinoff of another series, or maybe the furniture of urban fantasy is considered sufficiently well-understood at this point that settings don’t need to be explained.

Words: FAIL.

Got up early to learn the thing, then there was an unending customer call that didn’t end up going much of anywhere. Did not manage to leave the apartment.

Read: The OP Lich Is A Returnee vol 1 (Stuart Grosse): Forty years after twenty students are abducted summoned as heroes to another world, the lone “survivor” returns to find that the summoning spell made her homeworld magical, but the practice of magic is somewhat different than she’s used to.

Read: The Children of Old Leech (ed Ross E Lockhart, Justin Steele): Tribute anthology to Laird Barron, cosmic horror in modern prose. Few of the stories were striking, but none of them were bad. All of them were full of doom for puny humans.

Words: 344 kitten words. I should at least read one of my other projects, although perhaps I would rather die.

This day would have been better if I had slept more competently. I did take a stupid walk for my stupid mental and physical health, though.

Read: Best Laid Plans (Cameron Lund): High school romance, including angst about not having sex, hot older guys, friends with questionable taste, guys who are terrible, etc. Sadly het.

Read: Sunny Side Up (Jennifer L Holm, Matthew Holm): Graphic novel about a 5th-grader who gets packed off to Florida in the 1970s, which is full of old people, comic books, and alligators, yet not actually an escape from family problems.

Read: Call Me… Dee (Ralts Bloodthorne): Expansion of the horror segment of one of the main books of the series. Meh. Characters too powerful when released from their genre.

Words: 437 kitten words. My attempt to suck less in February is really not going anywhere.

Played: Lancer. We got bonus licenses so we could put up an overwhelming show of force against some scrubs that thought they could mess with Unity, and it went really well for about three rounds (yay gravity cannon!) until we found that the enemy was also bait, and we all got sucked through blinkspace to an unknown planet that is having some kind of military conflict. Apparently we’re going to have to pick whichever side is most aligned with fully automated luxury queer space communism, or failing that, whichever side is most likely to be able to produce exotic matter, and use our mechs to assure their victory. Also, at the gaming table, I was thoroughly encroached upon by a dog.

Words: 432 kitten words. Does anyone care? Probably not.

Surprisingly, I’m not on call for any part of today! Not that it had any impact on my complete uselessness.

Played: Zoomwarts. Bella, Rosamund (now conscious), and the lizards are making progress, but nothing is ever easy. Now they’re all in the vampire room (aka morning solarium), although only Baby Lizard and Bella are actually chained to the wall.

Eaten: Instant coq au vin, romanesco (not tesco fresco), goat brie, etc.

Watched: Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions 1.3: Rikka has a minion!

Played: Murder Mystery until Nonny got frustrated, then Sneaky Statues.

Words: FAIL.

Once again, it is simultaneously both “whew, made it to Friday somehow” and “how is it already Friday I’m not prepped for the weekend”. Thank you, Pandemic Time.

Words: 756 words about kittens. Everybody loves kittens, but this is not the right trend in writing. On the other hand, I am not writing an actual book that is available from real websites, so what does it even matter?

HAPPY HAPPY VIVIAN-DAY!!

I, sadly, had dental cleaning, but it was pretty quick, which I think is a good sign. Still don’t like the fluoride gunk all over my teeth for the rest of the day, though.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. We finally got a PC fatality, mangled internally by a strong magnetic field(TM) yanking around and heating up his highly sus cyberware. Also an intimate view of Nom’s surgically-installed cigar-smuggling organ, replicated dead commanding officers, and late-night ghosts hallucinations. So far my character is mostly fine (thanks to drugs) but I should probably have a replacement character ready.

Words: FAIL.

If you don’t believe in either zeroes or centuries, it’s 2222!

Early-morning company all-hands meeting was kind of fuzzy, but once again it failed to be an announcement that databases are impossible and we’re all fired, so I’m not complaining.

Read: We Were The Lanaktallan Of The Atomic Hooves – A Memoir (Ralts Bloodthorne): Heroic tanker on one side of the three-sided conflict does his best to protect

Words: 995. I think that’s actually a good stopping place for the project I’ve been revising, so I just need to revise the new stuff I wrote, and then maybe I can show it to people. Then I’ll have to leave the writing channel on the slack forever.

Morning knowledge transfer canceled again, because too many customers. Sheesh.

Read: Fizzybrew and Fear (Ralts Bloodthorne): An alien teenager has to survive the sudden attack of brain-sucking alien robots. Sadly, the aliens are almost indistinguishable from C20 American humans: patriarchy, sex-negativity, individual automobiles, convenience stores, etc. I think they’re only alien so that the humans can heroically save the day.

Words: 1024. Only kitten words, and I didn’t manage to do a Pomodoro, but it’s better than January, right?

The customers lost their chill again.

Read: Girls Weekend (CM Nascosta): Three elf ladies go to an orcish nudist colony in hopes of being in the shameless smut genre for a weekend, but oh no! Feelings!

Read: P’Thok Chronicles (Ralts Bloodthorne): Stories of the hero of the giant, homicidal, mantis-doofuses who wrested from humanity the secrets of ice cream, vaping, and birth control, returning with great boons for his species.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 17 (Tomohito Oda): But in this volume, Komi does communicate! In complete (whispered) sentences! About strong emotions, even! Go Komi!

Words: 478 kitten words.

Both the cleaners and I were off a week, so I told them to go ahead and show up this morning. I had to get up for all-day on-call anyway, so it worked out okay. Marith was dead from having to come in on her “day off”, though, so I could not travel to Monkeycat Towers. It turned out that some customers were breaking things working this weekend, too, so it wasn’t just a theoretical tether to my work computer.

Played: Zoomwarts! There was another big fight against the evil vampiric teacher and her minions, but at the point where we left off, Bella and Baby Lizard seemed to have the upper talon. Surely there is no factor they have not considered.

Eaten: Not Ken food, and also not a final burger from the burger place which is turning into a taco truck. There are many other restaurants on my street (which is not actually mine) but none of them are quite as portable as burgers. And they were even Impossible burgers!

Words: 453 assorted words.

I feel like I understood a thing today. I guess that’s good. Maybe I’m actually providing a value in exchange for my ridiculous salary. (Yeah, right. This is capitalism, the company is making way more off my labor than they would ever think to pay me. But revolting is a lot of work.)

Played: Nothing, Ken had to do parenting.

Read: Thou Shalt Not Fall… (Ralts Bloodthorne): Like the first three books, a collection of linked stories, this time veering off into horror (okay) and cartoon slapstick (meh) for different parts of the overall conflict.

Words: 331.

This time getting up early at least lead to doing the thing, but I still don’t approve of mornings.

Read: The Pool Is Reserved For Podlings (Ralts Bloodthorne): More MilSF, more gooey bioweapons, more full-contact live-ammo LARPers volunteering to fight the aliens, more aliens adopting American attitudes when freed from the hoof of oppression.

Read: Camp and Act (Kayla Miller): Sequels to Click, with lots of summer camp friend drama and fighting against the oppression and political action at a 6th-grade level. Go Olive!

Words: 485 kitten words about snow.

Got up for the early thing, but it got rescheduled for tomorrow, too late for me to go back to bed at all. (It’s only a half hour earlier than usual, so that was never really much of an option. But still grumpy.)

Read: Do You Need Assistance (Ralts Bloodthorne): The three-way battle is really getting stuck in, lots of missiles in space and hovertanks in murderjungles, smol aliens stepping up to be almost as cool as the humans, capitalist oligarch aliens not understanding how hosed they are.

Words: 458 kitten words.

Okay, these customers are not so bad.

Read: May We Come In? (Ralts Bloodthorne): MilSF with many pop culture references, in which glorious warlike humans come to the rescue of the underaliens of a stagnant galactic civilization being attacked by killer robots. The humans are very American, despite America having been vaporized and all records lost in a previous war against aliens.

Words: 339 revision.

Played: Lancer. After holidays and plague, we finally reconvened to continue showing the mad scientist in his cockroach lab that his abominations aren’t all that. Not even if they are being piloted by quick-grow clones of my characters. As a player, I like the Horus stuff, but I don’t have any trouble playing a character who is “thanks, I hate it” about every single thing we learned.

Read: My Dragon Girlfriend p1-525 (Fawnduu): Cute slice-of-life-with-secret-magical creatures. Simple art, extremely gay, no, gayer than that. (I think there is a total of one male character in the first 500 episodes, and he doesn’t last long). The pictures are not particularly risqué but those ladies are definitely making the cryptid with two backs in some scenes. So are those ladies.

Read: Admiral’s Oath (Glynn Stewart): Spin-off from another series that ends with the protagonists smashing the antagonists’ military-industrial complex, focusing on the fallout of that smashing and how honorable soldiers (in space, with missiles and also massive charge imbalances that should vaporize their ships) try to protect their nation.

Words: FAIL.

I have finally taken a rapid test. It came up negative, so there’s a distinct possibility that I don’t currently have COVID!

Played: Zoomwarts, in person. I oppressed Bella and the lizards a lot, but they did make progress toward their goal of everybody not being dead. Except the vampires, who were definitely dead.

Eaten: Leeks! Romanesco! Lemony chicken potatoes!

Played: Steal the ball, by any means necessary!

Read: Between Kings (WR Gingell): Everything was very confusing in the first book, but now, in book 10, everything is actually wrapped up, even the things that we only discovered in the middle books. Victory: Pet!

Words: 331 words about kittens.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Somehow, all the Jovian Marines are still alive, possibly because they dragooned the guy who’s been there for ages into leading the day trip into hell. Also because my character can curl a pickup truck.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 5 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): More ridiculousness, but then kidnapping! Oh no! Will Katarina be okay?

Words: FAIL.

Apparently all the customers woke up from hibernation today.

Read: Smile (Raina Telgemeier): Sequel to Guts, biographical middle-school and high-school anxiety around horrible dentristry, horrible earthquakes, horrible peers, ….

Read: The Girl of Precinct Five (Jonatan Håkansson): Grimdark, or maybe just povertydark, a girl survives an interdimensional disaster and somehow stays alive for several more years, struggling the whole way. Needed a lot of editing of various kinds.

Words: 313, because I am very dumb.

It’s like Monday, but subtly different!

Read: Shark Girl (Kelly Bingham): Blank verse? short book about recovering from losing an arm to a random shark attack at the age of 15.

Read: Guts (Raina Telgemeier): Autobiographical graphic novel of 5th grade anxiety about gross stuff, but anxiety leads to puking, so soon there is only doom, and therapy, and best friends leaving, and parents who don’t understand.

Words: 321 meh.