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: Lancer. Everybody was healthy enough to game, so we finished the conceptual combat in the depths of blinkspace, and will find out what that was all about next session, which will be the end of the campaign.
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.
Yep, more customer meeting. Why will they not just fix the thing?
Only played a little Minecraft today. My farm is full of soggy zombies and I can’t figure out how to get water in a bucket.
Played: Lancer. We got through one round of combat because people were feeling under the weather. Without that, we might have made it to the middle of the second round.
Read: Assorted Entanglements vol 1 (Mikanuji): A 28-year-old office lady who thought she was straight and an 18-year old semi-delinquent somehow fall in love after a one-night stand and begin a life together despite their weird families and different personalities.
Read: “The Imperfection” (Mae Murray): Also queer, but mostly yikes.
Written: FAIL. I probably could have written some, but I have to get up and go to the office tomorrow.
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 did not eat delicious pie today. I did some work, though. Customers, manne.
Played: Lancer. We almost didn’t play because of power outages, but PG&E came through for Dave. Ken was busy packing for a business trip, so next week he will be very surprised at where Tinca could not talk the PCs out of ending up.
Read: The Grief of Stones (Katherine Addison): Second of the spin-off from The Goblin Emperor about the detective-priest who gets mixed up in the most appalling schemes. This time: the depravity of photographs!
Written: Continued FAIL.
New boss definitely likes to talk a lot more in meetings than old boss.
Played: Lancer. I think we got through three whole rounds of combat this time.
Read: Beauty and the Besharam (Lillie Vale): An Indian-American girl who absolutely refuses to shut up, downplay her talents, or otherwise be modest, and her childhood friend/rival have extremely intense feelings over the summer between junior and senior year.
Read: Lazy Dragon Queen vol 6 (Ace Arriande): Even more ridiculous and somewhat lewd, to make up for the strange inclusions of seriousness.
Written: FAIL.
I thought there was an early-morning meeting, but there wasn’t, so I went back to sleep, but it didn’t work very well. Getting up is the worst.
Played: Lancer. Went to a new location, started a new fight, got through two whole rounds before we had to call it a night. Because Lancer.
Written: FAIL.
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.
Happy Discount Candy Eve to all who celebrate!
Played: Lancer. Finally we finished escaping the Cave of Infinite Robots, but Droid’s mech got completely trashed. It was a little embarrassing, but there were a lot of enemies, so whatever. Sadly, we probably cannot steal the printers that made the infinite robots and will have to follow the leads we got to the next stage of the adventure.
Read: Victory’s Bright Dawn (Eric Thomson): Fourth book in the series, main character has gotten upgraded to a larger and less rules-oriented ship, but humans are still the problem.
Read: Katalepsis ch 6.1-9 (Hungry): More friends does mean more problems, yes, but MC is taking a few steps in the direction of her end goal.
Written: FAIL.
Played: Lancer. Finally a fight that isn’t just last-mech-standing! We made it all the way to back of the battlefield before the security system started launching robots at us, and had to keep them off Abrakyl while she rifled the suspicious database, and now we have to escape with her findings. It would probably be working better if I had retreated instead of charging into the stream.
Written: FAIL.
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.
Quarterly review at work. Apparently we have a new system, where when you do the things, you get the points, and if you have enough points at the end of the quarter, you don’t have to go into the crocodile pit. Also I managed to confess that kubernetes is not doing it for me, so somebody more compatible will be given all the cases.
Played: Lancer. I was able to contribute a lot more to the fight once I stop not contributing, and of course we won without being hardly at all destroyed. But all the printers are offline, so we can’t repair much before being sent off to find out who invaded the university and explain the error of their ways.
Written: FAIL.
So many meetings, starting actually before sunrise. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
Played: Lancer. Back at base and doing downtime activities after the last mission, the PCs are suddenly assaulted by random mechs! Or at least the university (“university” to Abrakyl and Shoutao, who mock their excessive use of IRBs) is assaulted and the PCs are the only ones with mechs handy. I tried to do the teamwork thing of staying by the defender mech that can protect me with its memes, but this seems to be a losing proposition without ranged attacks.
Read: Rodeo Clown chapter 11 (Marith): At long last, the climactic battle between evil and other, more shippable, evil!
Written: FAIL.
Back to work. At least Friday is closer than it may appear in mirror.
Played: Lancer. We finished the battle against the migrating radioactive robots, and then handwaved the many fights we were going to have to have against all the other people in the Triangle before we could persuade them that downloading illegal technology from the omninet is a bad idea even if you’re then going to take it to an unaligned world before experimenting with it. Level UP.
Written: FAIL.
Yay electricity! Otherwise not an exciting day.
Written: 229 words. Almost certain I’m not just counting the words from Sunday again.
Power went out at 2 this morning, and didn’t come back until after 15, so I spent a lot of the day wandering around trying to find a place to work from. All the coffee shops were full of WFHers, so I ended up in the Campbell Express Library, but it is teeny and had only a chair, no power. When I ran out of battery, I got lunch and then went to the nice big coffee shop in downtown Campbell, which by that time did have some room and some power outlets, and also coworker S from my previous job! It was very surprising and also nice to see her.
I was afraid the power was going to be out for ages, because the outage page never gave an ETA, but it was because they couldn’t be arsed to tell us, not because they didn’t know, and suddenly I got the notification that power was restored so I trundled home to sit with my electricity and my hydration and my computer.
For whatever reason, I did not sleep well without power (lack of fan noise?) but I was still somewhat productive.
Played: Lancer. Once again, downloading supertech off the space internet turns out to be a bad idea (except when Abrakyl does it, obviously), and we had to chase down the parts of somebody’s base, which had turned into a swarm of weird little robots and wandered off. They were extremely annoying little robots, so we’re looking forward to next week when Tinca will be there with her area-effect missiles.
Written: FAIL, only gaming.
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.
Company is open for business as usual, so we all had to be there at the usual time, and the customers were there too. Not in force, at least, and the early Tuesday meeting seems to have been dropped for now. We have two new coworkers who will be doing a specialized thing, but I don’t know whether they’re cool yet.
Read: Stray Cat Strut ch 1.27-77, 2.1-8 (RavensDagger): Our heroine not only survived but was reunited with her girlfriend and family, and then got a quest from a fellow participant in the alien points scheme.
Played: Lancer. Finished the fight fairly quickly, found out unregulated NHPs were involved (which made Abrakyl and Early happy), then found out some people are onto other people, which might be us or might be somebody else. But the people we defeated let us use their printer to fix up our mechs, so that’s all good.
Written: FAIL.
Don’t want to work. Want to sleep. But sleep pays so poorly.
Played: Lancer. As usual, we ended in the middle of a fight, but it’s pretty close to over. Then we get to start grilling the other team to see if their story matches. Dave mentioned a twist, but I bet that will be on the third data point we try to gather.
Written: FAIL. It’s not like I even went to bed early after gaming, I just suck.
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’s early-morning meeting was cancelled, but I didn’t realize until I was already awake, so I spent the extra hour being useless instead of really sleeping. (But do I ever really sleep? Signs point to no.)
Played: Lancer. Vivian wasn’t able to make it, so we let Ken play TWO mechs since it’s his game after all. That’s probably why we trounced the all-flying team despite none of us being able to fly for more than a couple of rounds. Tinca was appalled that everyone else went, “secret offworlder underground mech fight ring, okay, seems legit”.
Read: “Touching Divinity” (Benjamin Medrano): It has more than one scene, so I guess it’s technically not a vignette, but it’s very short and pretty much only one thing happens. It is gay, though.
Written: 226 kitten words.
Back to work! If only taking a vacation made me more instead of less energetic…
Played: Lancer. How does this game work again? And why do our enemies(?) have a fake beach set up in an underground bunker along with a wrestling announcer and a bird-themed mech squad?
Read: Talyn: Descent (Benjamin Medrano): Further adventures of a gay LitRPG succubus, featuring an incredibly nerve-wracking of leveling way up as well as the resolution of the mysterious problem. Third book not out until late next year, though.
Written: 383 kitten words, and I’m caught up through November 29, but just barely.
Apparently there was a super-extra-early departmental meeting at 7. I guess I was still on vacation until 8, when I did attend the normal early meeting. Then I got a bunch of cases to replace the ones I handed off when I went on vacation. Some of them are the same ones.
Played: Lancer. We leveled up and did downtime and that was pretty much the entire session. At least I got a spaceship out of it.
Written: FAIL. Not doing too great at this whole NaNoWriMo thing.
Everybody is usually pretty zombified by the third day of a con, and we had a bonus Fire Alarm Incident at 1am, so today was not a bright or energetic day. I got into a Slugblaster game in Games on Demand, which is something that I’ve wanted to play for a while since it looks like the new generation’s TFOS. There were only two players and the GM was kind of out of it, but we did get to stream us doing skateboard tricks in another dimension while a giant robot launched from a silo, and isn’t that what it’s all about?
The afternoon game was a playtest and apparently the previous run of it showed too many problems, so it got switched to a different in-development game, Gallant. This put off some of the players so again it was only two of us and a GM, but we buckled the swashes and retrieved the stolen documents from the vile Comte. This game’s mechanical gimmick is that you need to decide on three things you want to accomplish each turn, and then once you’ve rolled your pile of d8s, you have to assign them to the three goals, so you may get any combination of success, mixed success, and failure. When it comes out, I will probably buy it for Jeremy, because he is all about swashbuckling in fake France. No idea when that might be, though.
And that was it! I trundled back home and was very blargh.
Read: Gahi-chan! vol 1 (Tirotata): Tentacled yōkai that eat human art to take the shape of the characters therein could be interesting even if lewd, but here it’s just lewd.
Read: Hot Reset (Elliott Kay): Extremely male-fantasy space opera about a down-on-his-luck guy who uses the power of not being a complete dick to get a harem of hot, bi, poly girls and a sweet spaceship, and also blow up the bad guys and save the day.
Written: FAIL.
Oddly, getting up at 7 isn’t any better the second time. It probably doesn’t help that DDP is one of the things I forgot to bring.
This session’s players were less energetic, and I was not up to making up for that, so less fun was had today than yesterday. I did not manage to keep everyone engaged, and also did not learn anything from yesterday’s experience. Plus I forgot how random DW combat is, so the wooden boar running roughshod over the party yesterday was no indicator of future performance. It was still better than not gaming, but not by as much as anyone would like.
Since my evening game started at 18:00, I decided to skip the 14-18 slot in favor of napping. This left me time to get dinner, but I ended up not bothering. I also perused the dealer’s corner, but I mostly don’t want physical books any more. Sorry, publishers of indie games!
The evening slot was Leverage, with the twist that we were helping people who had been screwed over by a corrupt superhero. Because right was on our side, we made pretty much every roll for the whole game, even against the security guard who had a d10 gut telling him something was hinky and the d12 superhero. I was playing the tiny thief, so I got to sneak into the bank data center through the HVAC ducts that no one could possibly fit through, and then later into the museum to get an old costume for the grifter to impersonate the superhero in front of his coconspirators. It was obviously not as smooth as real Leverage caper, but we had to do it in one pass with no revisions, so I think it turned out pretty well all things considered.
Despite my nap, I didn’t mind ending before the scheduled time of midnight.
I set my alarm for 7 and that turned out to be a good move because I was so slow-moving that I would not have made my 9:00 game if I had slept much later.
As usual, I did a terrible job of GMing, with bonus failure in the context of a 4-hour slot, but people had fun anyway, probably because it was the first gaming slot of the con and everyone was still hyped up and full of sleep. They gave me backstory hooks that I could weave in, too. Everyone seemed happy with One Shot World over regular Dungeon World, so I think I’ll stick with it next year if nothing better comes along. I would still prefer something FitD, but it’s not like that would make up for my deficiencies.
After lunch, I played an in-development game called In Her Footsteps (PbtA, but there are only four moves so we just had a rating in each of them instead of separate stats) with a bunch of nice and very gay ladies. We started by making a magical world, which ended up being a river delta that was a crossroads to many worlds of varying levels of magic, then made witches to inhabit that world, and finally had to deal with refugees from one of those worlds bringing us a horrible hungry curse. We got everything sorted, though, and the overworked chairwitch got a hot date with the witch we revivified. (Not my character, I was a giant beaver of lurking comfortably in mist and darkness.)
Evening game was Hello, World, criminal shenanigans in a mysterious virtual universe FitD. It seems to have a lot of lore, most of which we skipped over, but we ended up being catspaws in a three-way conflict among criminal factions, luring one into a trap while they were doing crimes during a surveillance outage and then betraying them. However, while setting up clocks, the GM mentioned all the terrible things previous groups had done to the opposing bruiser, and our bruiser decided we should defeat her with smooches. The climactic showdown ended up being “let’s you and him step outside and fight” while the PCs tried to keep things under control and arrange the collapse of the partially-restored-from-backup building to trap the two bruisers together. It all worked out in the end!
Will buy Hello, World when I get back to my computer, and In Her Footsteps when it comes out (and not just because the GM so kindly shared her It’s-Its with us).
The meeting that used to be in the late morning on Monday is now before the day starts on Tuesday, and is more interesting (this time) but less useful. Pretty sure I don’t approve.
Played: Lancer. Boss fight! Arguably Vivian’s character won the fight by ignoring the opponent and disrupting its power source instead, which worked better than my character mugging the person who set in motion. At least we got to give her drugs.
Read: Chapter 9 of “Rodeo Clown“: Awww!
Written: FAIL.
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’m pretty sure I should have been smarter today.
Played: Lancer. We finished off the mysterious mechs from last time, who did not yield any more information, and then tried to help Kelsey recreate the mech that Comp/Con ate. Despite the number of people helping, she eventually succeeded, and we all stomped up to the boss fight together.
Read: Obie Is Man Enough (Schuyler Bailar): Slice of life about a Korean-American trans boy who just wants to live his 7th-grade life and swim competitively, but extreme asshats keep trying to stop him. He does triumph in the end, but man, people suck. (Author is also a trans guy, so presumably the transphobia is realistic or even toned down.)
Written: FAIL.