Tag: dark matter

Played: Dark Matter. However, after leveling up to level 7, for all the good it did us, we finished the campaign! Space hamsters were saved from the Abyss, the guardians of the threshold were able to retire, etc. Not sure what we’re going to do now, but we have two whole weeks to think about it. Is everything I run terrible? Yes. Am I likely to end up running anyway? Probably.

Read: Karen From HR ch1-8 (Unpretty): Batman fanfic about an employee of WayneCorp, who has a hard and unusual life and then meets Bruce Wayne in person so things go sharply downhill. Kind of harrowing, but also Corinne is great for some extremely dark comedic value of “great”.

Written: 295 today, 1542/1000 for the week, 11089/10000 overall.

Played: Dark Matter, for the first time in a million years. We snuck into the Abyss until we got spotted, then we charged. The giant tentacle did not make our job any easier, but it didn’t make the demons’ job easier either, because Chaotic Evil Teamwork. Then we made it to the Infinite Bureaucracy Room, so we were able to take a long rest as long as somebody filled out some forms for the desk clerk to throw into the lake of fire every so often. Level UP! (Level 7 is not that great.)

Read: Angelina (Joel Shepherd): A teenager Italian wizard-slayer comes to NYC where the last two archmages are engaged in a cold war in search of terrible revenge, but everything is way more complicated and also there’s a boy and a nefarious plot and stuff. Looks bad for pretty much everybody by the end of the volume.

Written: 119 for the day, 611/1000 for the week, 8009/10000 overall.

Played: Dark Matter. Getting to the dragon’s lair required the PCs to blow up a trash compactor full of gummy worms and fight robot duplicates of each other, but I was totally right about which surprisingly powerful NPC was really the dragon and of course they were on board with defeating the space mold kraken. Now we really have to break into the Abyss, rescue the mutated space hamsters, and finish the plot arc in triumph. After that, who knows what we’ll play.

I spent a lot more time playing Minecraft after that. Finally tried fishing, got some fish and a book of enchantments, built an orange terracotta causeway across to the spawn island with the big cave, dug down in the cave to find a bunch of coal and copper and a little island, finished up the side hall that opened into a cave and put up the rest of the hovering lights, got eaten by zmobies, hunted a squid for ink sacs to make black terracotta, the usual.

Written: Still FAIL. I can actually think about what happens next, at least a few paragraphs, but it never goes into a keyboard.

 

Played: Dark Matter. The conclusion of Death Race 800! Brina got to drive the wrong way around the track to play chicken and rescue the mysterious NPC who we now think might be a mutant red dragon in disguise, Bolt got to throw a bomb into the VIP seats, everyone got to crush the demons when they inevitably refused to accept a loss, level UP. Now we have one hour to get the dragon on-side before the chaos kraken eats everybody, no pressure.

Blblblbl.

Written: FAIL.

Played: Dark Matter. Turns out Death Race 800 isn’t just a race, we have to stop at three (or maybe more) points to engage in minigames. Being first to the field is definitely an advantage, though, so it’s not not a race. The first minigame was capture the flag, set in an industrial catwalk maze with no safety features whatsoever. There were unfortunately rules about what we could do to the other flags before the second and third teams arrived, but none of them said we couldn’t weld a cable to it one of them for yoinking or stick the other one on top of the flame vent. The cable didn’t work as well as I hoped, but it did slow down the other teams stealing the flag enough that we could get all three and open the exit lock. Also a couple of the larger demons got discorporated, which should make things easier going forward. Next session, we have to rescue one of the NPCs we like before she gets tattooed drunkenly.

I tried to foil the Chinese restaurant’s attempt to give me bonus soup by getting different soup as part of my order, so they gave me bonus fried rice instead.

Watched: Shadow & Bone 2. Yeah, yeah, chosen one, reluctant hero, whatever. When does she get to be a living laser cannon?

Read: Against All Odds (Jeffery H Haskell): Missiles in space, but way too much heroic Christian Americans-in-all-but-name who don’t trust this out-of-control technological innovation vs degenerate swarthy Muslims who only want to rape white women and also all media and civilian oversight of the military might as well be working for the enemy.

Written: Eventually it added up to 157 for the week, but at least I’m not that much of a MAGAt.

Rachel is apparently feeling much better, so we had gaming.

Played: Dark Matter. We had a fight with a bunch of different poison AoEs in a confined space, but survived by letting the least-aggressive demons watch their movie in peace. In fact we even won, although our vampire buddy might have been permanently corrupted by cinematic torture. He was very grateful and gave us paper to use for books to try to bribe the dragon with. (The paper we made from the evil mushrooms was also evil.) But then it was revealed that one of the four Maguffins was with the Mad Max faction and the demons knew, so after getting healed of the demonic afflictions, we headed over there and arrived just in time to enter the race.

Written: 235.

I seem to be much less sick today, so I went to gaming. I did not die from walking, so that’s good. I guess. I did have a fright when it seemed my phone had died a week after my pad died, but actually it just somehow to glitched to the lowest brightness setting, and when I got somewhere without direct sunlight I was able to set it back.

Played: Dark Matter. Nobody was very focused, so all we did was planning for a ridiculous quest that we got in exchange for Jaseen’s body not falling off. Ridiculous like “ahahahahaha you fools are actually going to try that?!”. It’ll be great. Maybe Jus will join us, although she might have to play Ninja Goat.

Read: Katalepsis ch 11.1-14, ch 12.1-6 (Hungry): They just can’t get away from those guys, even in [SPOILER], although maybe they can drive a wedge between them. I dunno, maybe trying to obliquely summarize each  chapter is pointless, I should just say I still really like it.

Written: FAIL. Energy flagging.

Played: Dark Matter. We’re just trying to walk a couple of miles to take a long rest at the Lawful Good faction’s clubhouse, and so far we’ve had two fights with demons and teamed up with one group of barnyard animals from the Abyss who all have musical numbers. The players got banana bread and singing GMs instead of singing goats in berets.

Read: The Agartha Loop first ed ch 2.1-2.15 (RavensDagger): Apparently this is a discontinued version and there’s a new edition! I guess I’ll go read that.

Written: 235 words.

I went outside, twice, and never got rained on. Go me!

Played: Dark Matter. We finally discovered the mysterious secret at the heart of the asteroid (it’s a hellaspud), but then we talked our way out of getting our memories wiped and/or being spaced, so I guess the campaign will continue. The librarian turned out to be an actual fiend, much to Sesamina’s dismay.

Written: 229 words.

Played: Dark Matter. We fought our way through the decoy treasure room full of exploding robot spiders and other fun stuff, discovered the hidden drive component (2/4), and then found the real treasure room which was full of the books we were looking for and also ANCIENT DRAGON!!! We beat feet back to the librarian to let her know we had found the books, but although Sesamina was rooting for her, she did not seem to have enough Hit Dice to do anything about it at this time. We do get to level up to 4th level, though.

Read: “The Garden” (Tomi Champion-Adeyemi): Part verse, part prose, all literary, only arguably spec-fic.

Written: 223 kitten words.

Today, the one thing I did was go over to the Gollubs’ to game and eat my body weight in cheese.

Water was still out all day.

Played: Dark Matter. Our castaways befriended two more factions, the Engineers and the Farmers, restored four whole books to the Library, checked out three books and had one of them immediately vanish, and collected a gang of kobolds who worship Jaseen. Then they broke into the mysterious room covered in warnings and craziness, and almost got the snot beat out of them by a giant metal skeleton and its radioactive ooze. Sesamina is still not getting anywhere with the librarian, but we probably have one more session this year.

Watched: The Owl House 2.11-12: Oh yeah, Luz and Amity are the cutest thing ever, and the emperor has a terrible plan. Also, I have a suspicion about the emperor’s background. And what happened to human solidarity?

Written: 101 kitten words, which is technically not nothing, but only technically.

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.

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.

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.

Accomplished absolutely nothing today.

Played: Dark Matter. This time we found the rest of the asteroid we were hiding in, got beat up by the most pathetic mechademons ever to leap out of a hatch, got beat up again by police drones, and ended up in the brig. However, no one holds that against us, so once we’ve been locked up long enough to satisfy the drones we can start getting them organized to get out of this dead end. First we should probably do something about the sphere of annihilation in the engine room, though. Also the gaming munchies were excellent.

Watched: Our Flag Means Death 5: Good job avenging your husband’s honor, Stede. I think some of the crew are going to get reminded that Izzy is the kind of pirate who murders people the old-fashioned way, though.

Read: “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather” (Sarah Pinsker): A story told through unordered posts and comments on a folk song website, complete with obnoxious troll. I think it was up for some award.

Written: 409 kitten words. I thought about other words but was too dumb.

Played: Dark Matter. Jeremy volunteered to run, so that’s what we’re doing. We each made two characters, so there were six people crammed into a stolen three-person ship, making a desperate escape from the Elf Police. Somehow (ie, GM nudging) we escaped into an abandoned secret base with a six-person ship that can probably be fixed, and sent our original ship out into the enemy’s fire to fake our deaths. I have a bomb-throwing union goblin as my combat character and a mothian noble duelist as my noncombat character. We’ll see how this goes.

Read: My Cottage Was Transferred To Another World vol 1 (Sebastian Guzman): After wreaking a terrible revenge on his allies and befriending his enemy, the Summoned Hero retires and is immediately thrown into another, even more horrible world, but is still completely OP and starts defeating the toughest monsters and accumulating a harem. Meh.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 7 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): Katarina has to rescue her brother, but all the adventure gets in the way of her being fawned over by beautiful girls so I think it’s serious misjudgement on the part of the author.

Written: 280 kitten words. No other words, because I still suck.