Tag: gaming

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.

Played: Lancer. There was an attempt by too many people to explain the game to Kelsey, so we didn’t finish this combat. Or maybe it’s the fact that none of us except Brooks could roll for beans and Vivian’s audio went out again. Also people are unavailable next Tuesday so it will be two weeks until we can finish beating these guys up.

Read: Chapter 6 of Rodeo Clown: Blitzo should have suffered more.

Written: FAIL.

Had to get up two hours early for a meeting, but then managed to take a shower before starting normal work, which was surprisingly nice. Not nice enough to make me a productive participant in capitalism, though.

Probably today’s best thing was that we got to hear Kelsey’s voice (and see a picture of her doggo) for the first time in… half a year? two years? Since the Earth cooled from its primordial molten state? Anyway, she is not dead and can game, so that’s all good!

Played: Lancer, because gaming has moved to Tuesday! This time we had a fight that ended before we had to knock off for the evening, in which we triumphed, so good job us. I did not try to be clever at all, I just ran into a good position and worked on chopping the enemy to pieces, and it turned out great. I should probably switch out my one ranged weapon for a longer-ranged one, though, in case I come up against someone like that flier without enough support. Also we need to investigate this mysterious energy phenomenon, but the grad student is all over that, so probably my character should concentrate on getting the ship fixed to get us and our data out of here.

Read: Chapter 5 of “Rodeo Clown“, in which Blitzo finally can’t even.

Read: What If? 2 (Randall Munroe): It is very similar to the first volume, but I still read it instead of eating lunch.

Written: FAIL.

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.

Same customer, all day. They may finally be accepting that it’s their infrastructure and not our product, but only very slowly.

Played: Lancer. This is a very sand-tasting group, but we managed to get shot down so we can start the combat next week.

Read: “Vilcabamba” (Harry Turtledove): Titled for the last town of the Incas after the conquistadores destroyed their country, a story about the remnants of the US+Canada after aliens conquer Earth. It is not any more cheerful.

Read: “Choke” (Suyi Davies Okungbowa): I didn’t understand this story, but it definitely had a sense of creeping dread from creepy white people.

Written: FAIL

I finally got fans arranged so that I don’t die when I lie down in bed, but still have some nights of bad sleep to make up for. Grr. Argh.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. We finished the Mars adventure by destroying the terrorists’ stockpile of grey goo, and then annoying the TITAN that was the original source so that it noticed and destroyed them. Only some of us suffered deep psychological trauma from realizing that was an actual TITAN whirring away down there. I think next is more Lancer, then some gatecrashing, then we find out the shape of the solar system’s doom. Or maybe it’s just all Lancer all the time from here on out.

Written: FAIL.

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.

I guess it’s Halloween season now. Shops downtown have started to have skeletons in the windows.

Played: Back to Eclipse Phase 2, to finish the Mars adventure. Fortunately our mass of silverfish had a major freakout after too much exposure to TITAN bullshit and set off the self-destruct so we had to awkwardly excuse ourselves instead of staying there making long-term gaslighting rolls on each other forever. Now we can execute our brilliant plan to dry up the supply of this particular TITAN bullshit and keep Chi’s sister from committing further atrocities.

Written: FAIL.

Didn’t go to the office, no one said anything about it. It probably went on my permanent record, though.

Played: Lancer. We finished the raid on HA, so that’s probably enough Lancer for now. I was 100% useless for the entire three-session combat, so whatever. If we play again, I’ll ask Ken to design a damage-dealing mech for me. We don’t need three support weirdos per actual combatant.

Written: FAIL. I have to get up extra-early to go to the dentist tomorrow.

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.

I did not feel as clever in the training meeting today, and in fact I accomplished almost nothing, because I suck.

Played: Lancer. Part two of the assault on HA, still not finished. I did manage to get my mech destroyed, though, because I am terrible at all games.

Read: A Spaceship Repair Girl Supposedly Named Rachel (Richard Roberts): A teenaged girl escapes Earth into a solar system that is entirely habitable as long as you aren’t infected by Math. It’s a fun romp, and has some good images, but I’m always dubious about fantasy writers writing fantasies where fantasy writing is the greatest power, and I’m not sure the universe really hangs together. Probably not worse than a superhero universe, though, which is what Roberts is known for writing.

Read: “A Long Walk Home” (Jay Lake): Mysterious disappearances on a colony planet leave a survivor quite alone for many many years.

Written: FAIL.

Bah, work. Why not nap instead?

Played: Lancer. Brand couldn’t make it, but the rest of us started the battle Dave set up. As expected, Ken has the most effective mech, Vivian has the weirdest, Brooks spends the most time thinking about what to do, and I’m just kind of lame. We did avoid taking too many huge AoE attacks, though.

Read: “This Place Is Best Shunned” (David Erik Nelson): A cosmic horror encounter in the backwoods of WV, including revelations that severely damage the protagonist’s sanity. I feel like there are knowledge skills that would have protected her, though.

Written: FAIL.

Last day of the superspreader event! Only one session for us today, so we didn’t have to be there until mid-morning, but then we hung around for free lunch and team bonding (mostly admiring coworker UK-T’s vacation photos). Aside from the ever-present risk of viral doom, it was pretty nice. I had to log in again when I got home, but the customers were mostly quiescent.

Rapid Test: Negative.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Still trying to manipulate Chi’s sister into abandoning nanoterrorism as a viable tactic for liberating the oppressed peoples of Mars, still not getting very far because in addition to being crazy, she’s also psychic. GML, who knows nanotech stuff, nerded out with Nadine’s pet mad scientist and made some discoveries, but I’m not sure I understood them. I’m not smart enough to play this game.

Written: FAIL. But I expected that.

Played: Lancer. It turned out to be grey goo after all, but it was imitating normal matter and assimilating it. Also we had gotten sent three days into the past to avert the catastrophe, which was really confusing when we thought the time discrepancy was part of what was happening in the base. We put the grey goo ghost of the mad scientist into a jar (Dave swears he wasn’t listening to Jus’s game yesterday), which caused the base computer to freak out and send the big guns after us. This fight had lots of burn and lots of area denial, but by complete coincidence (Dave swears) there was a Full Service Robot Wash as one of the features of the battlefield and it didn’t get blown up until it had been used to negate burn a couple of times. The lava pit never did get used, but we were definitely worried about it. The battle ended with ASK punching the last enemy down to a few hit points, Kappa stomping toward it using each of her weapons as she got within range to get it down to a single hit point, and then Lena popping out of her completely destroyed mech to finish it off with her personal weapon. After that, we talked down the base and found the Horus connection, which in fact is all over ASK’s and Lena’s mechs. This was agreed to be the most climactic of all our battles, and Dave is getting tired of running Lancer, so we’ll switch to something else. Not sure what, people have to bring suggestions next fornight, or maybe to Rachel’s party next weekend.

Written: 255 words, for a final weekly total of 4447/3000. Next week looks pretty dismal, though.

Ayse has a cold, so Marith didn’t want to visit, and I was on call so I couldn’t make long bus trips. It was very sad. Especially for Ayse!

Played: Jus ran a thing! I was a crow spirit, Marith was a disgraced apprentice jeweler, we hunted ghosts! The little kid ghost was very sad, but we did the thing you do with sad ghosts. Jus is probably as good of a GM as I was in college.

Read: Legends & Lattes (Travis Baldree): An orcish adventurer retires to open the coffee shop of her dreams, which is harder than it should be because some people are jerks.

Written: 776 kitten words = 4192/3000. I don’t seem to be writing other things, do I?

Return of the training meeting. I wasn’t completely out to lunch, although apparently I sound terrible over the Internet. Also the Corporate Superspreader Event draws ever-nearer. Ugh.

Played: The tragic conclusion of Vivian’s 189X horror scenario. From best to worst outcome: Brand’s character survived with only mental scarring, Dave’s character lost a hand, Brooks’s character died, and my character was dragged screaming into the Black Forest. It was awesome! Vivian ad-libbed great spooky descriptions.

Read: The OP Lich Is A Returnee vol 5 (Stuart Grosse): 130% exposition by weight.

Written: FAIL. Still at 2506/3000 for the week.

I was backup on call for the new person (who isn’t the newest any more, but she’s the newest who can be on call) all day, but fortunately nothing happened. Also I did a lot of nothing, although I did manage to go grocery shopping and also play too much Squaredle (and also Squardle and Waffle and OG Wordle, but those are much quicker) instead of getting a real lunch. Then we went over to Monkeycat Towers and ate delicious Thai food.

Played: Zoomwarts, end of session 2! The expedition into the land of the dead was successful, because I didn’t make Voldemort terrible enough, but I supposes it’s okay for the PCs to win sometimes. I have no idea how to top that, though!

Played: Among Us. I was definitely the worst imposter ever and deserved to be spaced.

Read: FAIL.

Written: +363 = 3576/3000 for the week.

Played: Vivian’s Victorian Germany Backwoods Horror thing. Brand joined, as the blacksmith who was first to find out the true horror of the mysterious growths. It turns out the villagers are only fine with them when they don’t know what’s in them, so probably we do have to help them deal with the ancient, lurking, ever-evolving vampire witch. This is bound to go well.

Read: Unicorns Aren’t Horny vol 2 (Semi Ikuta): I was hoping for more about the bicorn, but no, just a bunch of human angst and finally they get together and The End.

Written: FAIL.

I got up and went shopping even earlier, since I didn’t even have the excuse of needing to wait for the bookstore to open. I guess that was like being awake at a reasonable time? Anyway, I’ll claim I slept okay even though I felt lethargic later in the day.

Played: Zoomwarts, at long last. You’d think a game with only two players plus a GM who has no life would be easy to schedule, and yet… Bella and Rosamund and the lizards have found most of the students and conned a hapless psychopomp into helping them escape, but now two of the four are unconscious and a partially-overlapping two are trapped in a cave full of slugs and bubbles with an evil octopus who hates them.

Played: Among Us. I am still terrible at this game, and also after playing like ten rounds I have never been an imposter, but I will keep playing because it makes people happy.

Played: Uno Flip. What name should we give to the most greenish of the colors on the dark side of the cards? Ayse maintains it’s teal, but it doesn’t seem blue enough to be teal to me.

Read: The Maid I Hired Recently is Mysterious vol 3 (Wakame Konbu): Still has no socially redeeming value, but the bystander who ships the two leads has finally suggested a name to give to their feelings.

Written: 505 kitten words, resolving the Existential Dreads and bringing me to 3414/3000 for the week so far.

Offloaded all my cases to coworker L who just came back from leave, did some stuff on the project with the exciting new deadline, and now it’s vacation time!

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. After derailing (SWIDT?) the plot to explode the 24:12 express to Olympus Mons, the intrepid Firewall agents meet up with the charismatic Barsoomian leader who is certain she can control TITAN nanotech well enough to make the Planetary Consortium knuckle under. Chi knows perfectly well that their sister is a narcissistic megalomaniac who definitely underestimates the rest of the solar system, and tries to talk her down from this without mentioning Firewall. Project Ozma is not shown, but is described, as something Nadine obviously has to go deal with before she can liberate Mars. Next week, we’ll find out whether this works at all.

Read: That Time I Got Drunk And Saved A Demon (Kimberly Lemming): What it says on the tin. Farmer girl rescues a demon, discovers that literally everything she thought about demons and gods is wrong, grows increasingly attached to demon, has wild sex with demon, marries demon. There’s a plot where other characters are also surprisingly quick to completely reverse their worldview and help the hot demon boys, but the spicy romance is definitely the point of the book.

Written: 331 words today, 2986/3000 this week.

I was pretty much useless today, but I did find some peach diet Snapple to alternate with the raspberry that I thought was the only flavor sold any more.

Played: Lancer, at long last! Allegedly this mission is to contain a potential grey goo outbreak, but I think something much more Horusy is going on. Also we got it all over us, so I’m sure that will come up later. We made it through two fights in one session, too.

Read: Yakuza Reincarnation vol 2 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): The honorable old-school yakuza reincarnated as a fantasy princess continues cleansing the kingdom of drug dealers, pimps, demons, and other sleazy criminals.

Written: 510 words, bringing me to a total of 3237/3000 for the week. I did make my goal, but it’s a bit lame compared to previous weeks.

No training meeting today, just customer cases. And lethargy.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Our octopus managed to get entangled with a terrorist plot that turns out to be masterminded by Chi’s sister and may or may not be related to our actual mission. In theory, we should probably ignore it or just tip off the authorities and move on, but none of us think very highly of the authorities and their ability to prevent atrocities, so we’re going to take care of the Purple Death Express ourselves. Somehow.

Read: Lazy Dragon Queen vol 2 (Ace Arriande): Even more ridiculous and full of cute girls and affection and cat abuse and tower defense and crafting.

Written: 89 measly words.

Why is there so much temperature? I didn’t order this! At least the customers were mostly quiet.

Played: Zoomwarts. The lizards and their mammalian sidekicks made it back into the land of the dead, to rescue everyone!

Eaten: Coq au vin and kale salad.

Watched: The Slayers 4-5: Attack of the fish-creature! Also joke which caused Jus to die of mortification, which fortunately will never be brought up again.

Written: 286 kitten words, for a total of 4119/3000 so far this week.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2, now with additional octopode action! Okay, really, octopode investigation, but since we lost Kelsey and her Titanian Science Cop, having Brand and his freelance forensics octopus is very useful. Chi being in an excessively-gendered morph is much less useful, although at least they’re somewhere their cold hard cash is useful.

Read: Micchi vs The New World vol 3 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): Further adventures of the isekai delinquents looking for their former leader and being massively OP all over the place.

Written: FAIL.

I used a suggestion from a pocket friend for the team meeting activity, and it wasn’t quite a disaster. Now I have five weeks to find something I can do better at.

Played: Both Eclipse Phase and Lancer. Oh no, are we crossing the streams? Anyway, the PCs on the Jovian station who were not whatever the hell Brooks’s second character were successfully exfiltrated due to multiple critical successes to avoid complications (I told you, Chi is too fabulous to die!) and went back to the scum swarm where GML made an isopod-cat hybrid. Its name is Smooth Randy and everyone who is not a heartless spider robot loves it. Then we got Ken’s progressive technopriest integrated with the rest of the Lost University weirdos and got mechs set up on Comp/Con. Now we can have a giant robot fight someday!

Written: 348 kitten words.

I don’t actually need to shop for groceries until Monday, but I ended up buying some less-perishable stuff because I had to go to the bank to get quarters anyway, and then the bookstore is right down the street, and I didn’t have to be on call until the afternoon…

A few weeks ago, Nonny wanted a “My books are calling and I must go read” shirt like mine, which was I was finally able to deliver. Now we’re Book Buddies.

Played: Zoomwarts, although not very energetically. Jus had a sleepover last night so of course very little actual sleep occurred, and Marith is always oppressed by work.

Eaten: Japanese food, but it wasn’t great. Or maybe I was just wrong about that being what I wanted. I’m not sure about this whole “eating” thing, TBH.

Read: The Gulp (Alan Baxter): Five linked stories about an extremely creepy town on the Australian coast and the horrible things that happen there: fungus, mutation, ancient dreams, inbreeding, eyeball eating, murder, the usual fun stuff.

Read: Babalon’s Hangover 2 (various): 100+ pages of horrible things, places, people, and happenings for the doomed, decaying world of Mörk Borg.

Written: FAIL.

Ugh, commuting is the worst. Being in a warm office with a bunch of other humans is also the worst. Free barbecue lunch, whatever. But I knew many several a few things when I imprudently sat across from former boss M in the training meeting.

Played: Ken is going to a con or something (they still have those?) so we worked more on Lancer characters and determined that our characters are actually ex-university cast into the future by spatial anomaly research, not ex-military, and have been recruited by the people who took over the university station after everyone ran off to become Horus.

Read: Enemy Action (Terry Mixon): Third in the series about a refugee from genetically-engineered commieland who becomes a space marine for the empire ruled by wild-type hereditary aristocrats (which is somehow better?). It’s fifteen thousand years in the future, so naturally all cultural references are to the mid-20th century, and makeup is a surprising revelation. It’s a good thing these books are free, because old white guys are dumb.

Written: Wait, I’m an old white guy!

Ken and Ayse and their household are full of plague and woe, so we didn’t go visit them.

Played: Zoomwarts, over zoom, but very badly. I had so many hopes for the Land of the Dead arc, but I am very dumb in addition to my numerous other failings.

Watched: The Owl House 15-16: Amity has feelings! Also what is going on with Luz’s mom? And is Luz nonbinary? I thought they were a girl, but I didn’t notice any pronouns this time, and that Grom outfit was not particularly binary.

Written: 635 kitten words.

I answered almost every question that came to me in the training meeting correctly, and the one I missed was one the expert running the meeting had missed the first time he encountered it, so it was hardly a great blow to my standing as somebody who has a clue what’s going on.

Played: Eclipse Phase 2. Fortunately the character who has to decide what to do with mine and Vivian’s current character is played by Brooks, who is the opposite of a hard-ass, so we’re just getting kicked off the station, not murderized. Events may still hose us, but so far it looks we’re okay, as is Dave’s character. That just leaves Brooks’s character to face the replicants. We were joined by Vivian’s friend Brand, who will make a character for the usual team when we finish this side arc, probably next week. They seem cool.

Read: FAIL.

Written: FAIL.

The only useful (…) thing I managed to do was go the bookstore after gaming to make up for not going yesterday. It’s not that I need more books, but at least now I know I could go grocery shopping after gaming if I completely failed on a Saturday.

Played: Lancer. We had the fight that was foretold last time, and showed that the opposition’s careful setup was useless against modern mechs. Unfortunately, that was pretty much it. At least we got to level up again, and can claim to have made the Lancers look good.

Read: Starship For Sale (MR Forbes): A young man dying of brain cancer and his best friend get sold a spaceship far beyond their tech level for complicated reasons that result in them being embroiled in a Star Wars-like universe of scams and blaster fire with only a single, vaguely trustworthy, native guide. Theoretically things will be explained, but I’m not sure it will end up making much sense.

Written: FAIL, although I listened to part of a zoom presentation on being a good editor. Possibly my problem is that I have to get better material to work on.