Tag: marith

Hurray for birbs!

I did manage to have a functional metabolism all night, although I still didn’t like getting up in the morning and doing some work.

Watched: Scott Pilgrim Takes Off 7-8: Yep, that’s a Scott Pilgrim plan, all right. I can’t help but think that Ramona could do better, but of course that will be a different timeline. Anyway, musical theater, massive battle, the end!

Read: Frogkisser! (Garth Nix): A young princess goes on a Quest to defeat the evil sorcerer who is trying to take over her kingdom, which involves a lot of transformation spells. The Quest gets pretty complicated and also smelly, but she has an assortment of friends and allies and it’s not like she can go home until she’s done.

Written: 252, although half of it was terrible and half was just notes. Actually maybe all of it was terrible.

Happy Merry to all who celebrate!

I celebrated by doing nothing useful all day and then going over to Ayse and Ken’s to eat food and see people and admire Jus’s presents and stuff. Poor Nonny is pretty sick, but I risked the germs for companionship. Even Marith did!

Despite most of the food being carbs, my arm widget didn’t freak out. It’s almost like eating a real meal made of real food is better than microwaving one unit of Capitalism Chow. (Also, ham.)

Written: FAIL.

Darn, I’ve run out of chocolate-covered chocolate.

Somehow I got up and did things today. Not sure how that happened, but here we are, with fresh produce and bao and flu antigens and the return of anime night and everything.

Watched: Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts 2.3-4: Looking for Kipo’s backstory, but getting Wolf’s along the way.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 1-4: Our first show for revived anime night! It’s pretty fluffy, with hardly any humans being devoured on screen, and so far the princess is only being compassionate, not getting into administration like rumor has it she will. It’s a full season, though, so we have plenty of time yet. Probably not enough for the cat princess to redeem herself, though.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 8 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): More of the same, including a flashback to Katarina’s earlier teen years when other girls were just as unable to deal with her. Apparently next volume they graduate and get jobs, but I can’t imagine it will change Katarina at all.

Written: FAIL.

Is two a herd? They certainly sound like it when they stampede in the middle of the night!

I did several works, but feel like I should have done more. Oh well.

Watched: Scott Pilgrim Takes Off 4-6: An entire subplot to tie in to the original story, sure. Get it, Wallace! But now Ramona has solved much of the mystery, so it’s time for another plot twist!

Read: Blackguard vol 1 (Ryo Hanada): Zombie apocalypse of the future, the arcology’s greatest defender fights alone with a sword and has a death wish, he gets partnered with a more orthodox bad ass, etc.

Read: The Shiunji Family Children vol 1 (Reiji Miyajima, Reiji Yukino): Forbidden teenage love that’s suddenly not forbidden. Despite the ML complaining that living with five stunning sisters isn’t like a harem romcom, it’s obvious where this is going.

Read: Paladin’s Faith (T Kingfisher): Another of the ex-paladins gets tangled up in the problems of a beautiful woman, in this case the mysterious best friend from the first book in the series. Intrigue, espionage, romance, and demonolatry ensue.  I liked it, but it didn’t seem like the espionage adventure and the demon adventure had any connection except one happened right after the other. It could have been two novellas just as easily.

Written: FAIL.

I keep resisting the urge to buy More Dice. Maybe I’m a bad gamer. I mean, for more reasons than previously mentioned.

Finally managed to start using the new bloodometers (the kind you stick on and leave in place for two weeks), so at least I could tell the doctor I was doing it. She probably would have been happier if I had done it months ago like I said, though.

Also finally dragged my computer desk into my bedroom so I could plug it back in. Fortunately it is not too far from the wifi router.

Watched: Scott Pilgrim Takes Off 1-3: After the end of the first episode (which was suitably surprising to Marith), it’s all the other characters all the time! I heard that this show is partially a response to people who esteemed Scott too highly (looking at you, SP) and now I believe it.

Written: Regular FAIL.

Nightvale counts, even though he is partly stars!

Getting two cats got me two weeks of Fact Or Share, but this time I had to use a fact, which is that deepsea anglerfish are not the size of a Nerf football, they are big enough to swallow you whole.

Watched: My Happy Marriage 10-12: We find out what’s up with the secret family and why whatsisface is being so creepy and how you should definitely not underestimate Miyo. Happy ending!

Read: System Collapse (Martha Wells): Oh man, poor Murderbot! I’m glad it has a terrifying friend to watch media with, and also that it is developing non-murdery skills for saving the day. Plus, “capitalism sucks” never grows old as a theme.

Written: FAIL.

My theory: Everything wrong with the US today is a result of insufficient Sesame Street.

Watched: My Happy Marriage 6-9: It was nice to see the random rich guys who thought they were so great pick a fight with an actual military monster hunter, but Cinderella still needs to communicate better!

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 2 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): It’s kind of adorable how Nomoto (the one who likes to cook) is just “Welp, guess I’m a lesbian, I should check the Internet to find out how that works” and now she has a pocket friend to discuss things with. Plus, new character with a completely different relationship to food than the main couple.

Written: 184, although it took me like two weeks to accumulate what should be half a night’s work. Neither kitties nor germs are conducive to writing. (Also I suck.)

I went back to my usual grocery store this week, which is next to my usual bookstore, which was full of things to buy, because I haven’t really converted to reading manga digitally, because I’m dumb. Also I ate chicken tenders to prepare my digestive system. I was on call in the afternoon to cover for coworker M who was trapped by the perfidy of automobiles, which boss B made a big deal of appreciating even though it was only for like 45 minutes.

In the evening, Ayse finally came over to meet my cats, and then we all* went to Brazil Meat Center (which is actually called Taurinus) for meat and more meat and grilled pineapple that tastes like peach pie and more meat and dessert because Marith hadn’t gotten a birthday celebration yet. Happy Lizard Day!

*Except Nonny who is sick and Dave who was keeping an eye on him and doesn’t like eating out much anyway.

Written: Still FAIL.

Ah, maybe that’s why I failed to obtain a black cat today, I’m in the US. Which is built around cars and the adoption people would not hand over the cats when I said I was going to carry them on the bus. I will have to make a better plan and try again.

Fortunately work was pretty quiet so my taking a few hours off to fail miserably wasn’t a problem.

Watched: Marith and I tried watching some Adventure Time, because apparently it is still a huge cultural phenomenon, but even with what Marith could remember of the curated episode list, it was still pretty uninteresting. Then we tried watching the pilot of the new cultural phenomenon, The Amazing Digital Circus, which was also not very interesting. It was just weird things happening to the main character that she can’t do anything about.

Written: FAIL.

Within a reasonable confidence interval.

Brain? Brain? What is “brain”? If I had anything like that, I would not have had the cleaners come at the same time I was having a meeting.

Marith and I wanted to watch the new season of Our Flag Means Death, but it’s on some streaming service somewhere, not the streaming services on my TV. Fuck capitalism.

Watched: One Piece 1.1-2: I’d say it must get better later, or else there wouldn’t be 1087 episodes, but the first two were not good enough to make us want to watch any more. Maybe it’s just the bias of seeing it first, but I liked the opening of the live-action series way more.

Written: FAIL. Maybe I need to go back to 100 words per day.

 

But don’t worry about that, being superstitious is bad luck.

I had no brain and accomplished no things today.

Watched: Murder Drones 1.4-6: Rewatching the two episodes before the latest only helped a little bit. It is still very confusing. They have a human to take care of now? But also robot dinosaurs! (The robot dinosaurs are also cursed.)

Written: FAIL.

Do they mean the small woodland mammal, or something else? I guess I’ll have to ask them over and over and over to clarify.

Watched: One Piece 1.8: Yeah, the thing with Garp should have been much more drawn out, although of course streaming shows can’t ever delay gratification more than a few episodes. It was a decent season finale, with lots of yelling and the boss’s body never recovered.

Read: “The Air In My House Tastes Like Sugar” (ZZ Claybourne): African witches, mother and daughter, travel the world and get varying receptions from white people and their haunts. The oven thing totally makes sense in context.

Written: FAIL.

I understood that reference!

No work today, only decompression and weekend stuff like grocery shopping. And birthday sushi with Jus! So much sushi. No, more sushi than that. Also cake. But I am glad everybody is done being sick and able to socialize and listen to my terrible con stories. There may have been hugs.

Read: “The Dragon Project” (Naomi Kritzer): Some people don’t deserve dragons.

Written: Writing down what I actually did over the extended weekend should be trivial, and yet it is using all my words (I don’t have very many).

I think the equinox is just before midnight, unless I’ve forgotten how time zones work, which is entirely possible.

Ate too much Chinese food, because what else are local Chinese restaurants for?

Watched: One Piece 5-7: Every pirate crew needs a cook with a backstory! Also we finally get Nami’s backstory, and it is full of doom and betrayal. Next episode: season finale battle!

Written: FAIL.

That was somebody’s fact in the fact-or-share portion of the meeting. Mine was that chickens, pheasants, and other birds in that family can eat deadly nightshade without harm, thus spreading its seeds. I got adopted by Boss B, because I was able to look up Helicoprion, but that did not save me from being on shift until 19:00.

Watched: One Piece 3-4: The ones with Kaya, Usopp, and Kuro. And Sham, who can be my minion anytime. Also Zoro’s backstory, so maybe next episode we’ll find out about Nami.

Read: MonsTABOO vol 4 (Yuya Takahashi, TALI): Instead of going on for one million volumes while never getting closer to a resolution, it ended! Many people died, who may or may not have deserved it, some people did not die, some people did both.

Written: FAIL.

SWIDT?

Fortunately work was light today, but I have to be available in case the Special Customer calls between 19 tonight and 13 tomorrow, and same tomorrow night. The expected number of calls is zero, though.

Watched: One Piece 1.1-2: Marith liked the first episode, so we continued on to the Evil Clown episode. The clown was definitely evil! Also more of Luffy’s backstory. Shanks was pretty great, it’s no surprise Luffy thinks of pirates as heroic. Not sure about this anti-Straw-Hat task force, though.

Written: 242, although I ended up deleting most of it after. It wasn’t going in the right direction.

But September means Big Bad Con is almost here!

Finally finished Good Omens 2, I was not impressed. It fulfilled Marith’s fanfic need to see more of the main characters doing stuff, but I didn’t like some of the stuff they did, or much of what the secondary characters did. Also, it was clear setup for subsequent seasons, which just seems foolhardy in this world of streaming services.

Written: 186.

 

For the first time in quite a while, I went over to Monkeycat Towers to play Minecraft. We didn’t do much, but it was fun anyway. Then we ate Frogmore Stew, which I guess is a regional variant of shrimp boil specific to one small island off the coast of South Carolina? It’s not actually stew, since the traditional method of serving is to pour it out onto a newspaper-covered picnic table and let the juice soak into the beach, leaving only Old-Bay-seasoned shrimp, sausage, potatoes, and corn to eat with fingers. It was definitely better than sitting at home in front of my computer all day.

Written: FAIL.

Today’s meeting fact: Hippos can’t swim. That’s not buoyant fat, it’s all muscle and bone to WRECK YOUR SHIT. Bonus fact, hippos are an invasive species in South America.

Watched: Good Omens 2.4-5: I’m pretty meh about the flashbacks, and in general just not liking this as much as the first season. Apparently Pratchett did add something. But maybe the last episode will bring it all together and I will understand the genius.

Read: Dandadan vol 3 (Yukinobu Tatsu): The annoying aliens are back, with reinforcements, not that it’s going to do them any good against the naked yokai powers of Earth.

Read: Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie vol 2 (Keigo Maki): Further slices in the life of a very femme-presenting but tough and cool high-school girl and her less butch and also cursed boyfriend.

Written: 325. That’s more like it, brain.

Everybody loves the void!

Traffic was horrible, probably because parents all drive their children to school in individual vehicles, so I didn’t make the transfer to the train, but the long bus got me there like twenty minutes later, which isn’t too bad. Customers were still somewhat numerous, but not like yesterday. I did a command line thing, it was okay.

I could not find the things I was looking for in my useless room of useless piles of useless comics.

Watched: Good Omens 2.3: Oh good, more ominousness!

Read: A Restless Truth (Freya Marske): It’s the same magical intrigue from A Marvellous Light, but the quest has extended to America, which can only be reached by water, so it’s time for the ocean liner murder mystery! With enthusiastic sapphic interludes.

Written: FAIL.

Mine was several days ago, but close enough!

After telling everybody in the office “Go home for the rest of the week. No reason.” the company told everybody “Get back in the office this week. No reason.” That does not make me confident that they have identified and mitigated any safety issues.

Watched: Good Omens 2.2: I am in awe of the beard. Also, angels r dum.

Written: 220/1212/14965.

“Cut down, not across.” (Like anyone remembers alt.sysadmin.recovery these days.)

Usually I don’t get much grief from vaccine side-effects, but the old-person vaccines I had to get yesterday are more obnoxious than most. Still better than either shingles or pneumonia, I’m pretty sure.

Even had I been minded to, I couldn’t have reasonably taken the day off sick since two people were out and one called in sick, but whatever. Fatigue and headache build character, right?

The high point of the day was definitely going with Marith to see Barbie. That was really quite something, even if I’m just Ken. (Actually, people said I have Allan energy, so :shrug emoji:.) Apparently some of the thing it was is Innana’s journey to the Underworld, so that’s awesome.

Written: FAIL.

I have nothing against Australian lemon-choco cakes, but probably wouldn’t have picked this for my header if Coworker T hadn’t used it for his fact in the meeting today. (My fact was about turtle butts.)

Watched: Murder Drones 4-5: Still pretty ???, but then YouTube rolled over to somebody explaining his theory of what happened, and it seemed pretty plausible. No idea whether it’s correct.

Written: 181 today, 994 for the week, 10541 overall.

We went to the park to see Jus’s Shakespeare camp production of Twelfth Night, Abridged Cowboy Version. Obviously she was brilliant, but also it was 897582 degrees outside so we all died and I didn’t come back to life until Marith came over for pizza and anime.

Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.9-12: This time, Mob must face… his own heart! The end (of season 3).

Read: Micchi vs The New World vol 4 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): We finally find out why the long-lost senpai of the main character has been doing all these terrible things, and everything is resolved. Also a lot of people get severely clobbered because seriously, don’t fuck with Micchi. The end.

Written: Only 176, but that’s more than my daily goal, and brings me to 1420 for the week, 6836 overall. More than 2/3 of the way to my 10-week goal!

No gaming, I blame capitalism. Instead, Marith came over and we watched more Mob Psycho 100. Also I played too much Minecraft, and got ganked by a wet zmobie when I stopped to mine clay on my way to the village where I might be able to turn my string into emeralds. I managed to refloor my hall of making, though, even the edges under the furniture.

Watched: Mob Psycho 100 3.6-8: End of the giant broccoli (and Dimple?), then aliens. That was actually super-nice of the Telepathy Club.

Read: My Cute Little Kitten vol 1 (Milk Morinaga): Roommates adopt an orphan kitten in a no-pets apartment, then one confesses to the other, but the kitten has excellent (terrible) timing for cat stuff. Life ensues, in slices.

Written: 167 today, 573 for the week, 573 overall.