Tag: dave

Doctors are great, it’s the rest of the health care system that needs to be guillotined.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon is called into the boss’s office to find out that Gladys’s minions got busted swiping all the books from the secret crocodile library and not storing them properly. Since the squad didn’t notify anyone, their punishment is to take the books to the Island of Evil Books that Shoggoth Bob came from at the beginning of the campaign. They do get to use Mesoluna’s portable hole to carry the books, at least. Despite the books technically being in a different dimension, though, they get spotted on the path across the bottomless abyss by a manifestation of eyes formed by books placed on shelves on a minor islet, and attacked by flying books and a horrible flaming book golem. Despite Grumman almost being flung to his death, they defeat the minions of whatever it is, and make it to the island where they begin chaining up the worst books and shelving the others. While they are fashioning Library Standard Containment Podiums, a similar manifestation of eyes occurs in the evil books already there, complains about Godwin not having stopped the squad, and makes one of the books in the stack reveal that is actually a draconic frog, or maybe a batrachian dragon. Whatever it is, it swallows Thaïs, who only barely manages to teleport out when it opens its mouth later, leaps about the island, stinks up the place something awful, and absorbs a lot of abuse from the squad. However, there’s only one of it, and librarians can be very abusive, so the second or third time someone tries to banish it to another plane, it fails its save and uses its legendary save power to not come back. We leave our junior librarians on the Island of Evil Books in a frightful state, but surely nothing will happen before they can go home and get cleaned up, right? Right?

Read (manga): The Do-Over Damsel Conquers the Dragon Emperor vol 4 (Anko Yuzu, Sarasa Nagase, Mitsuya Fuji) Jill is infiltrating the dragon empire military for not-entirely-clear reasons.

Written (catgirl): 135.

I presume US National, so imported pandas.

Jus went to Davis for a robotics competition, and her team got second place! YAAAAYYYY JUS!

VTA management has not gotten their act together since yesterday, so I walked to gaming. Fortunately, it was not raining. The app for that said it would take 1:34 to walk there, and I felt like I have been getting slower since I stopped leaving my apartment, and then since I got Covid, so I allowed two hours. It actually took me somewhere between 1:05 and 1:10 to get there, which was very surprising to everyone except Dave.

On the way back, I walked with Dave, which was faster walking but we deviated from the app route to see other streets in Northwestern San Jose so it took a little longer.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant: After a night of crocodile dreams that are surely not important, the Reshelving Squad decide to backtrack the purple worm to see what else might pop out of that hole to annoy their kobold friends. After numerous ups and downs, and many dents shaped like bullywug helmets, they find a huge cavern with a literally Cyclopean ruined city. All the treasure has been taken, but whoever was there before kindly left the swarms of stirges and brains-with-legs in place. This is annoying, but the real problem is that the last brain-with-legs ran off toward the exit with a definite Timmy-fell-down-the-well vibe. (It’s a brain with legs, all it has is vibes.) When Lilli scries out the area with sketchy divine magic, she spots some mind flayers, which nobody likes. Since the brain-legger didn’t deliver its message, they don’t seem to be coming into the cyclopean ruins, and nobody wants to pester them. Unfortunately, while the Reshelving Squad is finding the dead end, the mind flayers do advance, and set up for an ambush at the tunnel entrance. Since sneaking past is obviously not going to work, even not counting Grumman and his Steam Colossus, they decide to have Grim teleport to flank them, carrying Thaïs to a position where she can freeze all three of them. Of course the mind flayers knew to the minute when Lilli’s scrying magic would give out, and changed position, so they and their attack brains are able to counterattack more effectively than planned, but it’s not enough to save them.

Read (novella): The Orb of Cairado (Katherine Addison): Also in the world of The Goblin Emperor, soon after the Big Airship Crash, but it’s a sketchy academic solving murders and looking for lost treasure.

Read (manga): Call the Name of the Night vol 3 (Tama Mitsuboshi): Cursed Girl has some more magical adventures and develops a little more self-confidence when it could involve a book signing.

Written (catgirl): 165.

This day is for both Sage and Nightvale! Also Marmalade and Ghirardelli and Aspen and Dani and Benny.

Played (D&D5.5E): Librarians Errant. While their boss and his love nemesis confer over the disposition of volume III and other vital matters, Reshelving Squad Upsilon is accosted by a message from Crimefrosh Tokda Snir. The kobold refuge is under attack, and Novo Reek alone has been able to return to the upper world to seek assistance! With no orders to the contrary from Martin, the squad sets out for the upper margins of the Underdark. Everything goes well until they come across the halfling scout who led them into traps earlier pretending to look for a secret door. Proving once again that none of them has ever majored in Common Sense, they chase him into a pit trap full of ochre jelly with bonus otyugh, which Thaïs resolves by filling it with cryogenic mist, and then into a cave inhabited by a cloaker and some tentacle slugs, which is a little trickier to get through. However, one grick is banished and the halfling exits stage left pursued by a hound of ill omen, and the squad finally arrives in the kobolds’ backup village. The first thing they see is the halfling sauntering across the cavern, and the second is thirteen bullywugs riding a purple worm. It looks bad for a moment, but Thaïs banishes the worm, the bullywugs are taken prisoner, and everyone sets up for some ultraviolence when the worm is freed from its dimensional prison. It still swallows Flint, who sacrifices himself to save Lilli, and the squad is almost entirely out of magic by the end, but the session ends with a massive worm BBQ party.

Read (manga): My Girlfriend’s Not Here Today vol 3 (Kiyoko Iwami): Cheating is as good a reason for smut as any! Also none of these girls is any good at communication, because teenagers.

Written (catgirl): 263.

Also National Pork Rind Appreciation Day, which sadly has more relevance to my life. Where did I go wrong?

Played (D&D5E): Librarians Errant: The room that Grim and Thaïs disappeared into seems dark and quiet… too quiet. When the other reshelvers venture in, they find that the entire sanctuary has been covered by Mordenkainen’s nose exclusion zone to hide the extremely loud and obvious fight going on. Their teammates and Glady’s three henchmen are facing off against a horde of cymbal-banging clockwork crocomonkeys and a giant steam-powered robot crocodile, with the aid of a summoned water elemental! Things immediately get even worse as the Mechacroc blasts Mesoluna with a gout of steam and he loses control of the elemental, but somehow, despite steam and cymbal-banging and gigantic metal teeth and more steam, so much steam, the robots are put down and the contents of the secret temple library can be loaded into the extradimensional bookmobile and taken away for Martin and Gladys to haggle over. The wreckage of the nave and sanctuary are even cleaned up, so hopefully it will be some time before the hypothesized body-swapper figures out exactly what happened and who to come after.

Read (manga): Yakuza Reincarnation vol 9 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Huh, looks like the isekai protagonist really is there to save the world!

Written (game design): 339, but mostly questions and not answers.

I absolutely do not understand quantum chromodynamics, but I hear it’s very important.

Despite confusion due to email failures, we did gather for food and gaming today.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon now knows where they want to go, they just need a plan to get there. Several possibilities are discussed, but before implementing any of them, they decide to scout out the sewers for a way into the Temple of Sobek. Although no crocodiles have been seen in the temple for years, there is at least one large one in the sewers beneath, which chomps Grim and Thaïs good before being driven off; nevertheless, they persist in looking for more trouble. There is a manhole into the temple compound, all locks or traps long gone, so with their usual discipline and professionalism, the squad abandon the scouting mission in favor of rushing toward the book. The courtyard clears out while Grumman is being hex-wrenched out of his steam armor, so they make it all the way to the outer hall before running into anybody. There, a colorful bullywug in a revealing harness introduces himself at length as Inigo Frogtoya and declares his vendetta against Grumman for disrespecting the team’s recurring nemesis, Admiral Bigbugs. An extremely swashbuckling and fairly sticky battle ensues, during which Grim disappears to look for the third volume, but although it’s not easy, the rest of the squad manages to defeat Señor Frogtoya and he surrenders with honor. After getting frightened, Thaïs fled into the next room after Grim, but they haven’t come back with the book…

Read (manga): Witch Hat Atelier vol 13 (Kamome Shirahama): Continuing the arc with the city and the disaster and the Brimmed Caps and the ethics of magic that affects people.

Written: Not sure how to count when part of the changes are reorg because my script can’t separate that out, but I’ll call it 223.

Librarians Errant, shrunk, amnesia volume 3, silverfish, mice, roomba banishment

Wait, are birds real after all? I wish the Internet would make up its mind!

Played: Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon find themselves in a mysterious, probably artificial landscape of cyclopean edifices. Why are they there? No time to figure out, exceptionally loathsome arthropods are attacking! From the way the squished bugs flutter down lightly, Thaïs deduces that the squad is very small, rather than the silverfish being very large, but trying to remember why and how results in visions of ink and origami, and San loss. Lili divines that they are there for the third volume of The Magical Education, and also that they have letters folded into(?) their heads. Rearranging themselves to spell out words does produce magical effects, but doesn’t get them any closer to the book, so they explore the regular way. They are in a library off a crocodile-themed temple, so probably in the temple of Sobek, where the possession issue is centered. At 1/60th scale, they can’t easily check the books on the shelves, but a magical tome wouldn’t be in the accessible library anyway. Checking around the baseboards, they find mice, but also a magically-warded secret door, and beyond it, a much smaller library guarded by an automatic dust-sucker that wouldn’t even come up to their ankles if they were full size, but now can swallow Grumman whole and carry him to another plane when banished, Fortunately its insides are not constructed to stand up to a determined engineer with a steam armor maintenance kit, and it returns inoperable. And, on an upper shelf, the third volume! The squad manages to knock it to the floor by spelling LEVER, but LARGE only breaks the spell and returns them to their bodies in the library. Still, now they know where the final volume is.

Read: The Summer You Were There vol 2 (Yuama): More feelings, and also popular girl knows depressed girl’s dark distressing history. Can she overcome it?

Read: The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Matt Dinniman): Turns out Carl isn’t the first to think, “fuck this entire system”, and they probably didn’t even have an evil subway system to figure out at the same time.

Written: 117. Writing a second draft was like pulling teeth, so I switched to writing in a summary mode, about one paragraph per scene. Not sure if this is better or worse, in either the long or short term.

Gaming munchies included chocolate brownies, so all is well.

Well, maybe not all, since it turns out Rachel was friends with the health care exec who was shot this week (if you’re reading this in the future, hopefully there’s enough of an Internet you can look it up), and some of her and Jeremy’s kids were near the earthquake and tsunami warning this week (ditto). Too much, 2024! Too much!

Played: Librarians Errant. Back from their dragon-robbing expedition, Reshelving Squad Upsilon picks up the trail of BODASHUS COW from where an actual cow belonging to the Ag Department was eaten. Plotting the incidents on a map indicates the main quad, so they search around there and find feathers leading to a window into the basement of the Student Center. The meeting room is not full of terror turkeys, but is reserved for “SHU” at 8, so the squad stakes it out. At 7:45, the TA who has been with Beasley Knees at all of the Interdimensional Cow incidents, Nick, and a couple of his fellow grad students show up for their meeting of the BOvine De-Apparition Society of Humanoids and Ungulates Standing Collectively in Opposition to Wizards. Lili barely waits for them to explain about Beasely being a menace and the anti-cow energy before joining. Their experimental manifestation of anti-cow energy is suspiciously feathery, and the Humanoids admit that some might have escaped, but surely they’re too small to have done any real harm, pshaw. With confirmation that feathered abominations are stalking the campus, the squad stakes out the Ag Department barn in case the growing monstrosities come back for another snack. They do, but then scarper cross-country to a sewer culvert and vanish beneath Waterdeep, maybe somewhere beneath the university. However, they didn’t get a cow this time, so the next night the squad stakes out the beef barn again, only to be interrupted by an unmissable summoning special effect from the direction of the main campus. The light show ends, leaving the Student Center apparently unharmed, until Lili (who had stayed behind with the SHU) bursts out the front riding a tyrannosaurus! Theropods of various sizes as well as a brontosaurus stampede out and begin attacking the students who have assembled to watch the excitement! Thaïs, realizing that this flood of dinosaurs isn’t going to stop as long as the portal is open, looks for a way into the basement while everyone else fends off the prehistoric onslaught. Beasley Knees shows up with his own summoning tarp to add with the chaos with gorgons and minotaurs as anti-anticow forces, which arguably helps the students, if not the landscaping, and another contingent of Medium-size raptors like the ones seen at the Ag Department starts setting up their own ritual in a corner of the quad. Anywhere else this would be a disaster, but at Waterdeep U… it’s still kind of disastrous. The first batch of smaller dinosaurs are wiped out pretty easily, but the tyrannosaurs and the next wave are more of a problem until Thaïs closes the gate (ending up with half a tyrannosaur all over her, the basement, and everything) and the mystery novoraptors suck the rest of the dinosaurs into their portal. Time for T-rex BBQ!

Rachel was definitely MVP with her extensive collection of dinosaur figurines, Lego and otherwise.

Read: Dandadan vol 9 (Yukinobu Tatsu): That’s an unexpectedly Ranma-esque plot twist! I wonder if it will turn out to be a translation error.

Read: Library System Reset: Rebound (KT Hanna): Librarian is leaning into her fundamentally OP nature, and only going a little mad with power. The conspiracy against the Library keeps being exposed as of greater and greater extent, though.

Written: 200.

Literally, “Day of the place in the other direction from bears”.

All vacations must come to an end unless you’re rich, so we drove back to San Jose this morning in the haze and glare, and only got slightly lost around 80/Business 80/50. Got home around noon despite Dave’s attempt to kidnap me, adored my cats who Marith took very good care of, delivered a cooler full of leftovers to Marith because Sherilyn found the right containers to actually fit the cooler, replenished all the cat nourishment, cleaned all the cat litterboxes, went to buy more cat supplies, paid my rent, sent email to my doctor, and caught up here.

I think this is the energy I’m supposed to bring to work after a vacation, but I like my cats more than I like any customers.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.11: Wow, there is actually some kind of consequences to blatantly and repeatedly breaking the rules. I wasn’t sure there was ever going to be. Time for Octavia to overthrow Hell, I guess!

Read: I Can’t Belive I Slept With You vol 3 (Miyako Miahara): The secret past meeting is revealed, everything is okay, lesbian smooches forever, the end!

Read: The Hunters Guild: Red Hood vol 1 (Yuki Kawaguchi): A young boy whose village is threatened by werewolves defeats them and joins up with the organization that hunts monsters with cleverness and special weapons. The art and worldbuilding remind me a lot of Soul Eater and Jing: King of Bandits and probably other shōnen manga from that period.

Written: …20…40…60…VACATION

Nice for those people who have talents, I guess.

Played: Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon is notified that a forbidden tome, On Putting Things Back the Way They Never Were, has been stolen from where it was misfiled. The only clue is the mysterious phrase BODASHUS COW in red paint behind the now-empty bookshelf (apparently unrelated to Beasley Knees and his Cow of Ill Repute). Although not assigned specifically to look for the missing book, the squad does check with their underworld contact Tokda Snir, who is aware of two other BODASHUS COW thefts, involving all the food from a dorm kitchen, and all the feathers from a turkey. When questioned, the turkey claims to know nothing, but there were huge saurian footprints all around the scene of plucking. With not many clues and no mandate, the squad decides to go back down into undercity and look for the halfling who was spying on their friends the kobolds, which so far has been intermittently painful but extremely lucrative. This time, they find a trapdoor that drops them into a wave-battered sea cave where a black dragon lairs with her mud mephit retainers and a black ooze garbage disposal. Daisy rejects the squad’s sincere apologies, so there is nothing to do but fight. It is the way of the world. As it turns out, since both Thaïs and Grim know banishing magic, the major threat is not from the dragon, the slow-moving ooze, or the splattery mephits, but from the huge waves that fill the cave every quarter-minute or so. Despite the environmental hazards, and possible future complications due to the idiosyncracies of Thaïs’s whirlwind of banishment, the squad prevails and makes off with Daisy’s treasure of a handful of potions and several statues of herself.

Read: Versus vol 1 (ONE, Kyoutarou Azuma, bose): Humanity is being overwhelmed by the demons, so the wizards hatch a plan to use a planet-size summoning circle to connect with another world and get help. Too bad the people they contact are not in a position to help…

Read: After God vol 1 (Sumi Eno): Japan is invaded by beautiful monsters that kill humans by their mere presence. Thirty years later, a girl with a mysterious power falls in with a team of crazed researchers bent on defeating the monsters without regard for IRBs. Looks like there’s going to be plenty of body horror.

Read: The War of Greedy Witches vol 1 (Homura Kawamoto, Makoto Shiozuka): Thirty-two women from history, redrawn as cheesecake with deliberately one-dimensional personalities, in a fight to the gratuitously gory death for the amusement of the half-dressed demon queen.

Written: 116.

Fortunately, Waterdhavian frogs do not get the bonus today.

After way too long, we played Librarians Errant again. Although in fact both Reshelving Squad Upsilon and Gladys’s musketeers are playing the exchange completely straight, as soon as they meet at the ice cream shop, everything goes off the rails. Poison-skinned bullywug acrobats launch themselves through the store window from mangonels and immediately trampoline back out with the books in their sticky fingers. Fortunately, Thaïs is also stuck to the books, so the bullywug escape doesn’t make it as far as planned. The bullywug Grand Admiral Bigbugs and his henchfrogs appear, and moments later, Celsian mercenary librarians rappel down from their airship to join the battle. The books change hands a few times, mostly remaining also in the appendages of the Celsians’ invisible stalker, various bullywugs are defeated, the airship is set aflame and has to be evacuated, a froghemoth crawls up from the sewers to provide an additional obstacle (not necessarily to anybody specific, just in general), until after three rounds of this, one of the musketeers gets hold of the books and makes his escape with skedaddling magic. With the objects of contention gone, the combatants disperse and/or get arrested, but later the musketeers do return the promised original of vol 2 to the reshelving squad. Level UP!

Written: 297.

 

Originally for teenage ninja turtles, but I’m sure anybody with a genome can get in on the action.

Since the bus I take to gaming is always late, I tried taking the one before that, which of course was right on time, but being early gave me a chance to get a sandwich before going to eat 95849 servings of gaming munchies.

Played: Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon goes to find Kars Hevel and ask him about Volume 3 (and maybe very cautiously allude to the possibility that he is a Masked Lord), but the kobold village has migrated to the depths, leaving only a few guards to pretend to build defenses. They’ll send word to the depths, but in the meantime, the squad decides to poke around the sewers like adventurers even though they have day jobs. They do find the lair of someone (probably a hobbit halfling based on the gourmet trail rations) who has obviously been keeping an eye on the kobolds, but he legitimately outwits them and escapes, so they continue on and find a soggy fungus-filled cave. Some of the fungi scream, some are infested with giant centipedes, the corridor has a trapper that falls on Grim, and the stagnant pool is full of froghemoth, so it’s an exciting few rounds, but although Thaïs can’t banish the froghemoth, she can electrocute the Flint out of it, and blast the trapper off of Lili before it crawls away to digest her, and then everyone can gather up a surprising amount of loot. Now they understand why people become adventurers! However, they still have a day job, so they go back up to finish tracking down Gladys’s Musketeers and offer them the deal of Volume 2 in exchange for a copy of Volume 1. This isn’t hard, as musketeers are known for frequenting pawnshops, of which there are a finite number, but before the Reshelving Squad can offer the deal, the Musketeers offer the real Volume 1 in exchange for a copy of Volume 2. Huh.

Written: I forgot to count up, but apparently today and tomorrow are 212 total, so call it 106.

I guess the idea is to do all the things one has been promising to get around to “someday” but I didn’t do anything at all useful.

Played: Librarians Errant. After Shia was disintegrated into a pile of pages and then eaten by a shoggoth in the form of a book last session, the team wraps up their visit with Professor Demigod Wick and returns home without being further assaulted by bibliospace fauna. Martin gets the shoggoth to disgorge a person, but it’s not Shia, it’s somebody who claims that Grim Abyss is his real name, despite sounding like something Thaïs would called herself when she was fourteen. He offers to join the team to repay them from freeing from death or whatever it was that befell him on his last adventure, and after they learn (but do not tell him) that he is a fictional character from a series of adventures novels dating back more than two hundred years, they decide they need to keep an eye on him after all. Since their goal seems to require the text of The Magical Education of Beatrix Fogtower, but not the volumes themselves, tasty a magic item set as they are, the new plan is to try to get the third volume, copy it, and then trade it to Gladys for a copy of the first volume. Divination magic (4th-level spells, baby!) points to Tokda Snir, their kobold acquaintance and crime lord of the freshman class, but before they can track her down, things with the appearance of Grim’s fellow book characters show up and try to steal him, then blast everybody with extremely meta antibackstory powers before being reduced to ink and inscriptions. This will need to be investigated, but first they finish meeting up with Tokda Snir, who upon hearing that volume 3 may have once been given to a Masked Lord of Waterdeep, mentions that her grand-relative, the kindly kobold priest, is a Masked Lord. Talk about a cliffhanger!

Read: The Masquerades of Spring (Ben Aaronovitch): Another non-Peter story from the Folly, set in 1920s New York where a young gentleman who would be perfectly at home in the Drones Club is trying to live his fabulous life abroad in the land of jazz but his old school chum the Nightingale shows up asking for his help.

Written: 174.

An excellent invention, and also slightly relevant to the scene I’m writing.

Played: Librarians Errant. Our librarians successfully travel through Bibliospace to visit the professor/popular author/lich/demigod they want to consult with, but must face his tests to prove their worthiness. Unfortunately, the quest to retrieve a specific book ends with Shia being disintegrated into their own life history by an undead beholder, and reassembled incorrectly, while the rest of the team discovers that the book in question is the cursed shoggoth book that Lili has been carrying around since like episode 3. If only emojis had been invented, this would be the perfect YAYSOB. At least they can be level 7 to deal with the fallout of this next session.

Written: 119.

Instead of going to a waterpark, though, I went to a birthday party. HAPPY HAPPY RACHEL-DAY (observed)!! There were some people I hadn’t seen for a week, some people I hadn’t seen for a year, and then some people on top of that. Also foods and conversation. I was definitely the lamest person at the party.

Written: 153, all terrible.

I don’t seem to like chicken fingers (strips, tenders, whatever) anymore. It is very sad.

Did several shops today, so the cats can continue to feast upon gooshyfoods. Also did some more landscaping and copper-oxidizing and whatnot in Minecraft.

Read: United Fleet (Sean Fenian): More improbably-successful wish-fulfillment with alien shipyard and asking people to be reasonable.

Written: 149.

Definitely a good day for ice cream, at least in the Northern hemisphere!

Played: Librarians Errant. After missing two sessions because I was first full of Covid and then full of hubris, we are back to Jeremy’s game. Tracking down books, fights with summoned cow monsters, kobold crime lords, the usual. Thaïs got uglified which was extremely mortifying, but not beyond the power of remove curse to fix, fortunately. Now the team has a case that looks like possession to stick their noses into, so they have to take presents to a lich who was involved in magic jar research and find out who might be responsible. Surely this will be a simple and safe trip with no complications.

Read: I Ran Away To Evil vol 1 (Mystic Neptune): A heroic princess (raised by quite abusive parents) goes to die trying to defeat the Dark Lord but she never gets around to fighting him because they’re too busy getting very wholesome crushes on each other and also administering his socialist paradise. Since they have heard of the birds and bees but never seen any, they are pretty awkward but adorable. Also there’s some plot stuff with her former kingdom trying to invade the Dark Enchanted Forest and recapture her. LitRPG, but the genre has reached the point where they don’t have to explain much, and blushing has no level requirements.

Written: 145. That’s not how to write either.

On the one hand, I feel like this should be a global holiday, and on the other hand, what impact has it had? Humans still suck.

Managed to get up and go shopping not too late, so I could do the other shopping I failed at last weekend and still be at home to sit in front of a fan and go blblblblblblbl. Played a little Minecraft, but the lag was awful so I logged out again.

Watched: Bungo Stray Dogs 4-6: Murder! More murder! Weirdos! More weirdos! Occasional bits of serious plot in between the comedy!

Written: 170. How does writing work? Not like this, apparently.

Possibly every day is chocolate day.

Now that I am not full of Covid and despair, I was able to test my Perils & Princesses adventure on the Sunday gaming group. Some problems were revealed, but people seemed to mostly enjoy it, so I will move forward with making myself unable to escape.

Need to figure out how much extra prep is worth doing for something I’m only going to run twice. Like, of course it would be easier at game time to have cards to hand out and fight over than to have players roll dice and write down the table lookups, but enough easier to justify figuring out how to make cards?

Written: 126 of scribbled notes for improving my adventure and/or its presentation.

 

No mermaid sightings today. Not even manatees.

Tomorrow I am on call in the afternoon, so I had to run all my weekend errands today. Food for me, food for the cats, drinks for me, lying in front of the fan.

My Minecraft character now has a good bow again, since even a terrible bow will give a fair bit of durability, and anybody who fishes (Dave. Dave is the one who fishes) will have a million bows with very low durability. Also I went to see the Ice Spikes biome (spiky!) and then delved into the depths to get diamonds to make armor and a sword now that I have enough bookstore credit to enchant them.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 19-21: Well, that seems bad.

Written:182.

Hi Earl!

Also Writer’s Rights Day, but that sounds like it’s probably a thinly-veiled move for copyright maximalism.

Played: Librarians Errant. Another quick expedition into Bibliospace, another tussle with mad books and thesauri, the life of a junior librarian is always intense. Then an assortment of tasks that all collide with Club Fair Day, where Beasley Knees is once again performing a summoning that can be interrupted by Lily’s pet monster book, resulting in crocodiles and mad cows everywhere. (The book definitely has some beef with Beasley.) Filling a campus quad with crocodiles is more impressive than filling a vault with crocodiles, but the lack of novelty reduces it from “holy shit, crocodiles everywhere” to “ugh, crocodiles everywhere”. The one crocodile Lily gets to talk to is actually very nice, but the rest are just a big mess that have to be put down. Sadly, the Entrepreneurship major who scammed the team’s kobold friend Toctasnir out of a bunch of money by monopolizing textbooks is not eaten, because Thaïs is not a murderer.

Did some flattening of hills to make my Black Castle of Blackness stand out more and also have room for expansive carrot farms. Mining out one block at a time takes forever, though. Maybe I’m supposed to be making TNT?

Written: 116. This is the worst.

Really, shouldn’t 259 days out of the year be World Oceans Day?

I managed to do some errands (but not all) and fail to get temporary checks printed out and still get home in time to play Minecraft be on call. The customers were quiet so I finished the exterior of my castle and the art installation/8-channel lavamatic in the basement, and made a proper setting for my Nether portal. Muahahahaha.

Ayse did not Minecraft with us, because she was busy publishing fanfic on AO3! (It was about a Minecraft actual play or whatever they’re called.) I am very proud of her!

Watched: Nothing, Marith doesn’t want to fall out of the habit of Saturday Night Anime but she also doesn’t want to die.

Written: 127. Still all terrible.

Did I remember to text my mother? I did not.

I did tell Rachel Happy Mother’s Day when I went over to game, at least.

Played: Librarians Errant. Jeremy made us do a bunch of world building about historical Masked Lords of Waterdeep and their families/heirs/successors. We might have been slightly ridiculous. Then the team made it back to the University with the second magic item and we leveled up. Now Thaïs can send a howling monster of shadow to annoy her enemy. Also I have to choose between fly (generally handy for a ranged combatant, similar to the leaping and skydiving magic she already has) and thunder step (escape and attack as a single spell, similar to the thunderous magic she already has but most similar to the one she never uses). Or of course another spell, but those seem like the two best that fit her affinity.

Played: Minecraft. I finally built a nether portal and experienced the horror that is the Nether. I had a shiny hat so the piglins were whatever, but hoglins and ghasts crushed me like the insect I am. I did mine some polished blackstone bricks from a bastion remnant, and lots of quartz and netherwrack and a surprising amount of gold before I gave up for the day.

Written: 239. My head is almost 1/30th as magic as Kit’s!

So I should be writing!

Played: Librarians Errant. It turns out Gladys’s minions have wangled the Water Baron’s permission to be there under cover of being itinerant book shelvers or something, so the team has to offer to help them and try to find The Magical Education first. Which they do, but they stick around for a while to make sure all the books are correctly tagged in LoC, not Dewey Decimal and also to throw off suspicion. Alas, the Alexandrians figure it out, and as the team is taking in the Troll Experience before leaving town, the Dewey Decimal Trio busts in with a bunch more hobgoblins. Circus fight! Fortunately the trolls are not best pleased by this, and help fend off the invaders while Shia slips away with the book. Once it’s clear the book is no longer present, the fight is abandoned in favor of beer.

Written: 115.

I keep thinking I could try edibles, just for the experience, but have never managed to actually do such a thing. It would probably make my face fall off or something.

What I did do today was go to the very last Spring Fling for Nonny and draw lines on many elementary-school children. Some of the people who were supposed to show up to help Ayse check off kids as they completed laps didn’t show, so I had to help. It was fine, the kids were hardly even traumatized by my appearance, but standing in the same facing for a couple of hours during the middle of the day got me a sunburn on the tops of my calves.

Played: Minecraft. We had another session during which I was super-lame but got to listen to people being super-cool on voice chat, so that was fine. I found a bunch of beehives and managed to both smoke them and not irritate them, so I ended up with a bunch of honeycomb and honey bottles, which I will later use for something clever. Candles, probably. I also found the big pool of surface lava I had seen earlier, which was further inland than I thought. I think it’s actually close to Jus’s homestead.

Written: 164. This isn’t going in the way it should if I want it to sync up with everything else, but I think I know how to fix it.

As long as you don’t try to measure it too precisely, anyway.

Played: Librarians Errant. The field trip continues, but while checking out a famous bridge for Grumman’s research paper, the team is accosted by talking goats and “rescued” by a dashing troll vigilante. All is revealed when Thaïs is knocked off the bridge but rescued by troll stagehands (and kissed by a troll, about which the less thought, the better) working for the troupe of troll actors who have been hired to play a prank on someone crossing the bridge that day, who is not the team. Everything is straightened out, but Thaïs will forever use this as an example of the terrible things that happen when you get up too early in the morning. After some additional travel, they arrive in Yartar, make contact with the Water Baron who is only too happy to show them her library, and help the Popesses of the Church of the Crystal Dragon (from the previous campaign) with their recurring Bane problem. Walking into a trap is a perfectly good way of dealing with it, right? (Thaïs used Flirt. It wasn’t very effective. But she did get a minor magic item of the goddess of Death and Rebirth, which is entirely fitting for her background.)

Written: 187.

Plants are good! They make oxygen and food and paper!

Played: Minecraft. After not playing since last Saturday, I am way behind everybody else, but whatever. I still like trundling around mining things and crafting things and seeing things. I found ice, but have no Silk Touch equipment to collect it, and found powder snow to experience the fun of hypothermia. Still not sure where that surface lava is.

Watched: Nothing. Marith wasn’t up for going places, so we all stayed home and played Minecraft more.

Written: 195.

 

A good holiday to ignore, really. I don’t need beer, green or otherwise.

Played: Librarians Errant. The team had a brilliant plan to heist the manuscript full of old secrets that their boss wanted, but were thwarted when the people they wanted to offer their book-cataloging services to were out of town for the season. Fortunately(?), the house was in the process of being robbed by bullywugs and other such undesirables, so the team was able to look good by saving the surviving the guards, defeating a recurring bullywug villain, and then rushing down to prevent a hag and her lizardman flunkies from rifling the vault. The lizardman shamans had obnoxious spells like heat metal and roomful of crocodiles, but Thaïs managed to do 65 points of damage with a second-level spell slot (not even a second-level spell, it was upcast!) and also realized the hag had not actually phased through the wall but was lurking invisibly. It was painful and messy, but victory in combat and a victory in refraining from stealing anything except the one object thney were there to steal (unless somebody passed the GM a note and I didn’t notice). The manuscript told the team many salacious and useful things, so now they are packing for a trip to Yartar by way of the Kryptgarden Forest, in search of further volumes of The Magical Education. Level UP!

I tried to get ice cream on the way home, but I had actually eaten so much gaming food that I didn’t want any.

Written: 114

I like to think I’d still be okay, because my cats are sweetie pies, but probably it’s mostly because if they were able to open cans they would be too round to attack me.

Played: Librarians Errant. This session was pretty much one huge set-piece battle, with the players getting to also control their allies. The githyanki I played was clearly the best, but she did lose a few hit points to friendly fire (from my primary PC) and so did not make it through entirely unscathed. A lot of people got pretty beat up, but you’d think the area would be running pretty low on goblinoids by now.

Read: “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!” (William Tenn): Future Jewish argument. I am not the target reader, but I hope those who are liked it.

Written: 150.

The dwarf planet with surprising amounts of geology, or the Sailor Scout? Both good!

Played: Librarians Errant. Another two-fight session, first against goblin and hobgoblin mercenaries sent to hunt down the PCs get their wolf-riding asses handed to them, and then against whatever hideous cow monster Beasley Knees missummoned when Lily’s shoggoth book bit in him the middle of the incantation. There was a lot of dwarf-trampling in that fight, but literacy prevailed in the end, and Thaïs got to play hero to the local girls. Nobody even got ridden out of town on a rail!

Written: 183.

Another one that should be every day.

Successfully made it to gaming despite the weather, then successfully made it home despite the intense weather. It, as they say on the Internets, fucken WIMDY.

Unfortunately, when I got home, I had neither Internets nor electricity. Usually PG&E gets it fixed pretty quickly, but everything was still out after I took a nap, so I went back to sleep. This was probably not the best thing I could have done, but it was easy.

Played: Librarians Errant. A two-fight session! First, as the team was seeing off the astral pirates, their ship was attacked by a dragon made of evil books and its sycophants in a literal flame war. They drove off the dragon and saved the books, but now the githyanki are stuck in Waterdeep trying to arrange transfer credit at the university. Then Shia was accosted by an origami butterfly that led the team cross-country to a deserted mill/smuggling den where Gladys’s minions were up to no good. They managed to set an ambush instead of just charging in, which was only partly successful because 5e doesn’t let you block enemies’ movement but did involve Grumman stealing a coach with a hootin’ and a hollerin’. The villains escaped, but the senior librarian was rescued in good shape and admitted the team might be worthy to be called librarians, but only very junior ones and only until next time they screw up.

Written: THWARTED.