Tag: lancer

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!