I have some of those! Victory!
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.9-10: The one where they have to save the day with only an airport as resources and the one where Sterling talks them into stealing a technobabble from a chess tournament.
Read (manga): Leviathan vol 1 (Shiro Kuroi): Scavengers investigate a derelict spaceship while reading the journal of one of the schoolkids who descended right into savagery when the ship was damaged.
Written (catgirl): 234 of worldbuilding notes.
Went to the office, ate a Mediterranean-salmon burrito thing, did some work.
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.8: Conning the Mako.
Read (manga): Go With the Clouds North-by-Northwest vol 1 (Aki Irie): A Japanese teenager in Iceland, using his secret psychometry powers to do detective work while his grandpa picks up on the ladies. Lots of Icelandic scenery, people who make the MC’s life difficult, family trouble. By the same mangaka as Ran and the Gray World.
Read (novel): The City That Would Eat the World (John Bierce): In a world where everything runs on the very specific blessings of myriad gods, a god appeared who slowed aging for members of the city watch as long as they were on the walls. A few centuries later, everyone is officially part of the guard and the entire city is walls (except the interstices where the underclass labor and age, but that’s not important) and doing its best to cover the whole world. A disillusioned citizen and an outsider whose home was destroyed by the city’s extractive industries and general capitalist shittiness get stuck taking a god to the West Pole through this bizarre world full of corrupt societies, and doing their best to not suck along the way. There’s a lot of exposition because it’s a very different world, and the main characters are unfortunately straight, but people resisting capitalism is always good.
Written (catgirl): 122.
D’oh, I completely forgot!
Randomly took the day off work, since I was owed a day from working on President Day. Meant to get up and listen in on Friday morning training anyway, but completely failed and ended up sleeping in until I felt bad about not feeding the cats. Then I was moving so I fed myself with Pakistani-Indian Fusion Cuisine, spicy chicken qorma and less-spicy samosas and butter garlic sesame-seed naan. It might have been sufficiently celebratory.
I could possibly have done something useful, but mostly I cleaned up browser tabs, quite a few of which were short stories I had been meaning to read. Watched some TV with Marith, who is sick as well as having no computer. Probably I didn’t catch her cold. I hope my computer didn’t catch anything either.
Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.7: The one with shady funeral home family, where Parker has an honest-to-something feeling.
Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 19 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): A bunch of one-chapter stories. Kuro tried to star in one, Rikka played a horrible prank, assorted yōkai caused trouble.
Read (short): “Victory Citrus is Sweet” (Thoraiya Dyer): A spacer who is actually kind of a jerk gets himself and his apprentice in trouble by cutting corners to show somebody up.
Read (short): “Welcome to the Medical Clinic at the Interplanetary Relay Station | Hours Since the Last Patient Death: 0” (Caroline M Yoachim): A future in which the current American medical system is still in place. Story in the form of a choose-your-own-adventure.
Read (short): “When the Yogurt Took Over: A Short Story” (John Scalzi): Definitely a different spin on the “enough computers together form a mind” trope.
Read (short): “Transcript of Interaction Between Astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free A.I. Crash Advisor” (Grady Hendrix): Did you want your AI to be useful? Sorry, your timeline stems from the Trump-Musk presidency, you only get a chatbot.
Read (short): “Wikihistory” (Desmond Warzel): Everybody who gets access to time travel does it, then some long-suffering admin has to revert their changes.
Read (short): “In the Forests of Memory” (E Lily Yu): A sad story about an old lady in a cemetery of holographic grave markers, living off the offerings.
Read (short): “Presence” (Ken Liu): A sad story about an emigrant visiting his dying mother in the old country via telepresence.
Read (short): “The Thief of Memory” (Sunyi Dean): What is identity but memory? Also not a happy story, although you can’t blame a desparate teenager for making a rookie mistake.
Read (short): “The Dark House” (AC Wise): A haunted house, a haunted photographer, haunted photographs.
Written (game design): 136.
Does maniacal cackling count?
Went to the office, had the room to myself, ate a Mediterranean chicken burrito, did a little work. Probably didn’t hydrate enough.
Watched (live-action): Leverage 4.6: Elliot saves a small girl from a carnival.
Read (novel): Stars, Hide Your Fires (Jessica Best): A small-time crook from a crapsack world infiltrates an upper-crust ball to pick pockets, but although she meets a cute girl, the upper crust has problems of its own. Very Star Wars setting: blasters and spaceships, but social structures including security procedures are stuck in Three Musketeers era at best.
Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 17 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): A different yuki-onna mystery, with extra historical sword school shenanigans.
Written (game design): 104.
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.