I went to the Gollubs’ not for gaming, weird! It was a pretty sedate old-person party, but there were three cakes and a million cheeses and two dogs and several humans. I had nothing to talk about, because I never do anything and also I suck. Eventually I went home again.
Written: 131/1381/12470.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pretty much all I did today was go to Rachel’s birthday party (finally held because Jeremy stopped being full of covids). I ate too many party snacks and didn’t drink enough hydrations and saw a lot of people I haven’t seen in quite a while. They are still way cooler than me. I gave up on masking, so I should remember to test on Thursday or Friday.
Read: Cinnamon Bun vol 1 (Ravens Dagger): LitPRG about a teenaged girl named Broccoli Bunch who flings herself into a fantasy world and gets assigned the class Cinnamon Bun, which comes with important skills like Friendmaking and Cuteness and Jumping. She has many cheerful and only slightly alarming adventures and talks a whole lot. Alas, the other two volumes seem to only be available on Amazon.
Written: FAIL.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I had no brain at any point today.
Something I read on the Internet suggested that opening links in new tabs is usually not the right path, especially when thinking about accessibility, so I guess I’ll change how I do things.
Played: Lancer, at long last. I leveled up my invisibility, but sadly, we had to make Unity look good, so the whole session was diplomacy and investigation, and we only got to the pre-fight cliffhanger. Next fortnight for sure! Probably.
Watched: Star vs the Forces of Evil 6-7: Yep, still ridiculous. I want to see Star’s next instar.
Written: 520 kitten words.
I can get up on time when people expect me to be at the place to do the thing.
Played: Lancer. We defeated the Engineering Mutants and their pet abomination, by the simple expedient of barbecuing them all when they wouldn’t communicate, and some of the things that came through the malfunctioning Blinkgate. The other things we managed to delay in their incomprehensible purpose until we could unplug the console they were trying to use to reset the Blinkgate, and then get xenolinguists who have spent their entire careers waiting for this opportunity to talk to them. I’m sure there will be no consequences.
Watched: The Owl House 1-2. It was not what I was expecting, which I guess means I was expecting the wrong thing.
Read: Aposimz vol 3 (Tsutomu Nihei): Ugh, allies! Also, apparently there are no animals on this artificial world, only robots with edible parts. That’s very on-brand.
Words: 508 kitten words.
Double gaming weekend! There was some doubt, but Jeremy’s dad seems to be doing well so the Gollubs and their unending gaming food were available.
Played: Lancer. No combat this session, but we saved the world anyway. I think Kappa has to buy up her Charm trigger next level, since she did so much diplomacy this mission. Not that the mission is over yet, since Dave accepted our suggestion of mutants inhabiting the engineering spaces of the blink gate we need to repair. It was a pretty satisfying session.
Words: Only 294 words, but I finally implemented the fancier (kinda) calendar for kitten words, and made a link in Writing. Then I thought about revising and didn’t.