Tag: minecraft

Do Impossible Burgers and the like count? Because those are good.

Went into the office again, ate some chicken strips, did some work.

Read: The Wrong Dead Guy (Richard Kadrey): Further adventures of the hapless thief who got recruited by the Men in Black and cannot stay out of trouble. There are plenty of dead guys in these hijinks.

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 2-3 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Frieren continues retracing the path of the quest to destroy the demon king, picks up another short-lived protege of one of her old party members, and reveals some of why she is utterly terrifying.

Played: Minecraft. To smooth out this lava lake, I’m going to have to scoop it all up and put it all back down, which is going to require a lot of buckets. Time to start branch mining at Y=+16, I guess!

Written: 217 of Big Bad Con adventure notes, since I had some thoughts. I should try to get it tested or something.

This time I slept in on purpose, which obviously makes it much better, and woke up in plenty of time to run errands and then spend 9234562349 hours playing Minecraft. I finished moving stuff indoors, then mined an Imperial buttload of netherrack and smelted it all into nether bricks to make the bottom and edge of my moat. My mining tunnel got to a deposit of basalt (meh, I can make it at home) and blackstone (vital for any proper black castle) but then a stupid piglin leapt in the way of my pick and got mad and I ended up back home. I’ll have to go back and mine more blackstone later.

My castle isn’t even complete and I’m already planning a Nether garden for my portal. Not sure how far I can move it from its current position before it generates a new portal in the Nether and messes up the rail line, though.

Written: 201.

DInosaurs, milk, olives, pineapples, black bears, hazelnut cake, nail polish, …

I accidentally turned off my alarm, so I ended up sleeping in until after noon without even meaning to. No dinosaurs for me! However, I did make it to errands and back home in time for Saturday Minecraft. Marith showed me her village and fishpond and evil shrine and ginormous cavern, which were all very nice, definitely better than my black castle of blackness. I also got a bunch of stuff moved from the temporary work camp into the black castle of blackness, and barrels with signs so possibly I can find things.

Ayse did not play Minecraft with us because she was busy finishing up and posting her Minecraft SMP fanfic to AO3. I don’t know anything about the source, but it is a good story in its own right and gives me Amber vibes.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 17-18: Apparently that wasn’t the final boss of the season, but he was super-annoying anyway.

Written: 242

Parrots are good with language, corvids are good with tool use, they should team up and take over the world.

I did not take over the world. I did some work, I played some Minecraft, I deliquesced into sludge.

That’s probably enough blackstone to finish my castle, or at least the top floor if not the entire roof and battlements.

Read: Chainsaw Man vol 2 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): The main character is easily manipulated by getting to second base, which is plausible for a lonely and poorly-socialized teenage boy, but meh. Also, new characters and the old ultra-violence.

Read: My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom vol 9 (Satoru Yamaguchi, Nami Hidaka): Katarina graduates from school and joins the workforce, but what do you mean there’s more romance targets for Maria and more doom flags?!

Read: Mysterious Disappearances vol 1 (Nujima): A former child prodigy author who feels washed up, mysterious teenagers, cursed books, urban legends, transformations, assorted mysteries. Kind of raunchy, but the mysterious stuff is actually interesting.

Read: Blood Blade vol 2 (Oma Sei): Further adventures of Dracula-reincarnated-as-a-young-girl and the people she keeps defeating and befriending by being totally OP, this time with an equally OP adversary.

Written: 152.

Everybody likes otters, pretty much.

Went into the office, met my boss in person since he’s in town, ate a brisket sandwich, did a work.

Played too much Minecraft, didn’t even get that much sand.

Read: Glitch vol 3 (Shima Shinya): The plot thickens! Which is to say, the kids have gotten some explanation which may even turn out to be true, and now they know there’s time pressure.

Read: Witch Hat Atelier vol 12 (Kamome Shirahama): That’s a particularly distressing city-wide catastrophe! Also, this is going to have awful consequences for witch-mundane relations.

Written: 281. I’m not sure I like any of these words, though.

Thanks, everybody who fought for democracy, and if you’d like to rise up and drag someone down to hell, I have suggestions…

Didn’t sleep in quite as much today, because I had to be on call from 13-19, but still a lot. Would have worked better if I hadn’t lost my sleep mask, but oh well. Spent a lot of the day playing Minecraft.

Written: 283.

Where’s my Babel fish?

Despite the lack of intra-aural translation services, I walked to grocery shopping for the first time in a million years. I was not slower than before (54 minutes from my door to the sandwich shop), but I could tell I had moved my legs. I need to do this more often, although I should have started before we got into the warm part of the year.

In the afternoon, we played Minecraft together. Dave gave me bookstore credit for a load of sand, so I finally got my diamond pick enchanted, and was able to get some more diamonds to make and enchant another one. Now I can do the thing where you mine ore with Silk Touch and then bring it home to harvest with Fortune III. I also got my castle torn down and rebuilt with better materials and made more progress. Now I need to get a bunch of wood to make more storage, see if I can make a basalt machine, mine a bunch of blackstone, grow produce to trade for emeralds, explore the many caves near my castle, make a new travel bed, plant bamboo for scaffolding, etc, etc.

No anime, Marith is still not feeling up to going places or doing things.

Written: 169. Had to go back and fix several sentences because I’m reading a book written in present tense and that makes me write in present tense. I guess there’s nothing stopping me from writing a story in present tense, but this one has too much written in past tense already.

Boo carbs.

Today I ran two (2) errands, with some amount of success. I was still very tired and very bad at Minecraft, though. Dave hooked my portal up to the Nether Railway Network, through no virtue of my own, and I mined a bunch of blackstone and basalt off one of the train tunnels. Maybe they will be better for a dark tower than the black concrete that got exploded anyway.

Read: The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction (ed Mike Ashley): A collection of stories that take “literature of ideas” seriously. “Wang’s Carpets” (Greg Egan) is here, along with many other stories about the far future, extreme conditions, transhumans, technology with unintended consequences, or some combination, written between 1909 and 2006.

Written: 131.

Astronomy brings us so many weird knowledges!

I stayed up too late reading because I am dumb, so instead of getting errands done, I mostly twitched uselessly all morning. I did feed a cat, though.

In the afternoon, I had to do work, which was poorly-timed enough that I missed seeing Jus’s show. Boo, customers!

Also I played Minecraft so badly that a creeper destroyed a bunch of my storage and most of the items despawned before I could recover them. Obviously it’s time to wall off my base and fill it with torches.

Written: 141. Too much Minecraft.

Did I remember to text my mother? I did not.

I did tell Rachel Happy Mother’s Day when I went over to game, at least.

Played: Librarians Errant. Jeremy made us do a bunch of world building about historical Masked Lords of Waterdeep and their families/heirs/successors. We might have been slightly ridiculous. Then the team made it back to the University with the second magic item and we leveled up. Now Thaïs can send a howling monster of shadow to annoy her enemy. Also I have to choose between fly (generally handy for a ranged combatant, similar to the leaping and skydiving magic she already has) and thunder step (escape and attack as a single spell, similar to the thunderous magic she already has but most similar to the one she never uses). Or of course another spell, but those seem like the two best that fit her affinity.

Played: Minecraft. I finally built a nether portal and experienced the horror that is the Nether. I had a shiny hat so the piglins were whatever, but hoglins and ghasts crushed me like the insect I am. I did mine some polished blackstone bricks from a bastion remnant, and lots of quartz and netherwrack and a surprising amount of gold before I gave up for the day.

Written: 239. My head is almost 1/30th as magic as Kit’s!

Instead of going shopping and eating pastrami and such, I went to Ayse and Ken’s and we watched Eurovision! It sucks that the Netherlands got kicked out and Israel didn’t, and also that so much popular vote was wasted on Israel. (Just on principle; the bus was terrible so I didn’t see their song.) It was the year of goth fae and witches, but it is okay that Switzerland won with their nonbinary meow-meow. I think that both Ireland and Finland should have placed much higher, however. Why did people not ask me before casting their votes?

Also we engaged in friendship activities and got squished by Jus and ate Thai food, and then I went shopping at the other grocery store and did not go into the bookstore because I was there just last week!

Marith missed out because she fears the germs.

At home, I played some Minecraft.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 12: More College backstory and doom and doomed backstory.

Written: 129. I’d say being social all day used up my brain cells, but no one thinks I had any to begin with.

Donkeys rarely wear socks. However, I had to wear socks today because they go with my shoes for going into the office. Ate a pretty okay salad, did a work, tried to wrangle livestock in Minecraft. This did not result in any explosions, but I lost one of the two leashes I got from boating llamas and then all my chickens got away because it doesn’t work to put the ungulates in with them. Also made some obsidian so I can make a nether portal if I feel motivated someday.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 7-8 (Kore Yamazaki): Jealousy! Kidnapping! Bad monster! And that’s how Chise got her arm, which I had forgotten the details of.

Written: 162

Does maniacal cackling count? It better!

Today I did one (1) errand, and also played some Minecraft. I got enough diamonds to make a pickaxe, and I already have a Lavanator, so I can make a nether portal whenever I like. Also I have a chicken run, so I can get eggs and feathers.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 3 (Kore Yamazaki): Yay, Ruth! Boo, Cartaphilus!

Written: 183.

My plush baby tapir probably needs a better name than “Baby Tapey”, don’t they?

I did the usual shopping things, got unjustifiably mad at Marith for destroying one of the campfires I set up under beehives when I find them, then got Jus’s house blown up because approximately one million creepers attacked while I was stopping by on my way to give Dave dripstone points for a lava factory. Apparently I should just hide in my own valley and never leave.

Played: Minecraft, very very badly.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess and the King of Beasts 12-13: Poor cat princess! She needs to grow up to overthrow the patriarchy! I am very disappointed that the hyena-soldier is a boy, too.

Played: Kick a ball very ineptly down the street so kids can get energy out.

Written: 124. Can’t blame capitalism this time.

I keep thinking I could try edibles, just for the experience, but have never managed to actually do such a thing. It would probably make my face fall off or something.

What I did do today was go to the very last Spring Fling for Nonny and draw lines on many elementary-school children. Some of the people who were supposed to show up to help Ayse check off kids as they completed laps didn’t show, so I had to help. It was fine, the kids were hardly even traumatized by my appearance, but standing in the same facing for a couple of hours during the middle of the day got me a sunburn on the tops of my calves.

Played: Minecraft. We had another session during which I was super-lame but got to listen to people being super-cool on voice chat, so that was fine. I found a bunch of beehives and managed to both smoke them and not irritate them, so I ended up with a bunch of honeycomb and honey bottles, which I will later use for something clever. Candles, probably. I also found the big pool of surface lava I had seen earlier, which was further inland than I thought. I think it’s actually close to Jus’s homestead.

Written: 164. This isn’t going in the way it should if I want it to sync up with everything else, but I think I know how to fix it.

Plants are good! They make oxygen and food and paper!

Played: Minecraft. After not playing since last Saturday, I am way behind everybody else, but whatever. I still like trundling around mining things and crafting things and seeing things. I found ice, but have no Silk Touch equipment to collect it, and found powder snow to experience the fun of hypothermia. Still not sure where that surface lava is.

Watched: Nothing. Marith wasn’t up for going places, so we all stayed home and played Minecraft more.

Written: 195.

 

Played: Minecraft on our shiny new server! We all logged in at the same time to start off the tree-punching, but by the end of the session, I had barely made a tiny house of plain planks, and other people had enslaved entire villages and mined diamonds. I am really very bad at video games, even ones I enjoy. (So like everything else, really.) We have a lot of cherry blossoms at spawn, though.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 9-11: Anubis and a lot of other beasts still don’t like Sariphi, but so far the king is keeping her safe. Maybe Anubis will eventually come around.

Written: 296.

Nightvale is one (1) years old today! That makes him a grown-up cat, not a kitten! He might still be kind of bb, though.

As usual after going into the office two days in a row, I am pretty blah, but I did a work and snuggled one or more cats.

Played: Ayse wants to play Minecraft together, so we spent some time tootling around the proposed seed in creative mode until everybody decided they like it. Someday, when we are not all busy with Easter, we will reboot it in survival mode and punch trees together.

Read: Edges (Linda Nagata): Start of a follow-on series to Deception Well and Vast and all those. One of the explorers returns home in a stolen ship, recruiting for an expedition back to the origins of humanity, where the people Deception Well left behind made Dyson spheres and then unmade them and now nobody knows what’s there. “The Inverted Frontier” is the title of the series.

Read: “The Speed of Time” (Jay Lake): Well, what do you expect, when members of your species listen to the voices from space?

Written: 226 words.

Look, it’s 2024! Insert meme here.

I had to get up at 7 to be on call, which I was late for, and then I had a thing that needed attention right away so there was no going back to sleep. Eventually I got to stop being on call, which I was also late for. Not an auspicious start to the year!

In between, I at least got to play a little Minecraft with Ayse and Nonny. I haven’t played in a long time, it turns out.

Watched: Umbrella Academy 3.9-10: Pretty sure listening to Five is always more sensible than listening to any of the others, and this was no exception. Now the season is over and everything is ???WTF??? yet again, but next season allegedly will wrap it all up. I doubt it will resolve the discrepancies in scale, but all visual SF has to suffer from those, because all people with enough money to make a theatrical movie or Netflix show are complete morons.

Read: Strange Machines (ed Marissa Van Uden): I actually read this a while back but forgot to note it, so here it is. Subtitled An Anthology of Dark User Manuals, it is what it says on the tin. Stories include “A Brief Guide to Surviving a Human-Forced Reset”, “How to Install Organic Prostheses”, “Implementation of Eusocial Technologies in the Office”, and “How to Talk to Your Luvvbot-3000 about WWIV”. None of them are very long, so it’s more like the instructional blurbs from the backs of the boxes than actual manuals, but a lot of them are quite dark.

Written: 212 words. This actually is auspicious!

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.

On call in the afternoon, but hardly any customers came to annoy me, so I was able to be very bad at Minecraft. I’m sorry, bees! I didn’t mean to kill you all through my incompetence! But I did eventually succeed in harvesting some honeycomb to make beehives, for when I figure out how to get bees to my farm. (It’s too far to lead them with flowers, so I think I’ll have to enchant a Silk Touch axe to steal the whole nest.) Also I found a hole in the ocean, which is pretty impressive but didn’t have anything special at the bottom.

Read: Nimona (Noelle Stevenson): I still want to throw all my material belongings into the sea, but I haven’t yet which means I was able to dig up my copy of the Nimona GN from like eight years ago. It’s different in many ways from the movie, but still the same story, which is pretty good adaptation. Or maybe Nimona is just that strong of a character.

Watched: Estab Life 5-6. For an episode that was all about underwear, that wasn’t actually that much fanservice. It’s also impressive how four people on a five-person team can all have both Cha and Wis as dump stats.

Written: 209/1377/9386.

Fortunately we did not have beans ‘n’ franks for office lunch. We did have sandwiches, but there wasn’t even cake to celebrate the end of our time in this office. Next week, no office; the week after that, new office. I guess I should figure out what trains to use to get there and back home.

Emptying the sea isn’t rewarding, so I switched to trying to get bees, but managed to mess up both smoking the bees and harvesting honeycomb from the hive.  Bah!

Read: The Mandroid Murders (Robin CM Duncan): It’s the future. A private eye who is a horndog and a fashion plate gets stuck with a teenaged mob heiress. Together, they fight crime, although really those guys had it coming.

Written: 274 for the day, 1050/1000 for the week, 9059 overall.

Not sure why World Population Day is less than nine months after International Kissing Day.

Early morning meeting for the CEO to tell us how we all have to suffer because the board set higher goals than Sales could reach. No layoffs this time, though, and probably my team’s hiring will not be affected.

In Minecraft, I built a hole to the bottom of the sea with the power of SAND, but it’s very slow and uses a lot of shovels, and even though the fjord out front of my great hall is allegedly a submerged ravine, I’m not finding much in the way of mineral wealth. Also I forgot to find and watch the Minecraft Musical.

Played: Lancer. I contributed nothing and also mistook a tree stump for a giant robot, so apparently I might as well have not bothered to show up. I should probably be writing on Tuesday nights anyway.

Written: FAIL, because I was wasting time gaming.

After sleeping in forever like a stupid lump, I went over to play Minecraft. I ran into the wilderness, then burrowed into the depths of the Earth in search of dripstone, then died horribly in burning lava. After that Nonny switched to Geometry Dash for his Youtube channel, so Ayse and I made our own world. We have bamboo and a verdant cave and a house that’s more or less zombie-proof and a desert village right next door and a paddock to lure animals into. After that, we ate delicious pork chile verde that Jus and Ken made and then I came home to write.

Written: 578 words, for a total of 2035 this week and 5416 overall. Only three weeks out of ten and I’m already halfway to my goal!

Sorry, all father points are revoked upon becoming a Trump voter. I don’t make the rules.

Since there isn’t Sunday gaming for the next however long, and this would be an off week anyway, I swapped with somebody to take their oncall shift today. I think they’re a father or something. But the customers did not attack, so mostly I was useless all day.

We did some Minecraft in the afternoon. I mostly harvested cobwebs and vegetables from the abandoned village, and flailed about in caves looking for dripstone. I replanted the vegetables, but I have no idea if the cobwebs regenerate.

Read: Shadows of a Dying Sun (Alan Bahr): An OSRish game with several tables of dying-earth genre stuff, lots of resource tracks to manage, and an inexorable progression toward death instead of hit points per se. Also there’s an event where someone predicts that the world will end tomorrow and there’s a 10% chance they’ll be right.

Written: 144 tonight, 1734 for the second week, 3381 for both weeks so far.

We had no Marith, but we played Minecraft anyway. The 9-Channel Lavamatic and Obsidian Condenser are done except that I need five more dripstone stalactites and when I went looking for some I ended up stuck in a cave full of lava and apparently with lots of water above me so I can’t dig out. Also Nonny built a cobblestone generator that (usually) puts the cobblestone right into a chest. After that, we ate grilled imitation meats and went to a park and searched for the lost art of conversation and Ayse tried to talk me into getting cats. I have to admit, cats are good.

Written: FAIL. That leaves me at 1647/1000 for the week, though, so I guess I set my weekly goal appropriately for my level of lameness.