Panic is unquestionably called for this year, but seems like a lot of work. Maybe I should celebrate Barbie Day instead?

Schlepped up to Mountain View to get phlebotomized, returned home with boons for all catkind. Apparently I’m great at not knowing how long extremely predictable things will take, but I still had enough afternoon left to take a stupid little walk for my stupid mental and physical health. I meant to walk farther, but my legs wanted to go home after only an hour and a half.

Read (graphic novel): Codex Black: Bird of Ill Omen (Camilo Moncada Lozano): Further Mesoamerican adventures of the girl with the magic shawl and the boy with the magic wings. They meet the thief with the skull again, get involved in the machinations of a secret cult, save an emperor, etc.

Read (short): “Rhizomatic Diplomacy” (Vajra Chandrasekera): The experience of a modified fork of a human mind sent to talk aliens out of the thing they’re doing.

Read (short): “What It Means to Be a Car” (James Patrick Kelly): Conversation between an autonomous car and a visitor to the estate of the person primarily responsible for inventing personality uploading, which some attention to what happens on the way to uploading being a polished, reliable process.

Read (short): “Ceffo” (Jonathan Carroll): A woman gets an unusual way out of an AITA-worthy relationship.

Read (short): “Headhunting” (Rich Larson): A PI plagued by hallucinations is hired to discreetly retrieve a mummified monk’s head from a cathedral and finds out the hard way why somebody would do that.

Written (game design): 129, although it’s just questions to myself that probably don’t even need to be written down until they have answers. Like, how much should PCs die?