Tag: on call am

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!

Now I have to remember Aspen and Ghirardelli and Marmalade and Benny and Aimee and Jinian and so many other cats and doggos and assorted other animal friends.

Another pretty useless day, prepared for calls that never came and wakefulness that also never really came. I did manage to sign up for Confluence the Living Archive, a DCC demo, and Paperdemon Art RPG, leaving only Saturday morning for Games on Demand.

No actual gaming today, because Dave is still covered in germs and using Roll20 for an actual battlemap is a huge pain that Jeremy is not prepared for. Story games win again.

Written: 136.

Also National Teddy Bear Day and Wonderful Weirdoes Day.

Since I didn’t have to do anything except wait for phone calls all morning, that’s all I did. This activity combines well with sleeping. Eventually I got to hand it over to Coworker L and go grocery shopping, which was moderately successful. So, I kind of did two things today, counting morning and evening on-call as half a thing each.

I also thought about game design a whole lot, but in a despairing kind of way because so many of these ideas are not fitting together. Six rolls is definitely too many to resolve the most simple attack, though.

Watched: Helluva Boss 2.5-6: I guess it was nice to see Blitz’s sister, but the new writer is just bad. Even in this genre, the characters deserve more respect than that. Ep 6 was way better, and opens up plot, and also I actually like Fizzaroli and Ozzie. (Although Ozzie and Stolas should have been more useful.)

Read: “The Curing” (Kristina Ten): Magical realism plus middle-school clique fads equals a dismaying mess and permanent damage.

Read: “The Three O’Clock Dragon” (John Wiswell): More magical realism, train dragon vs corrupt mayor. I think this may be a reflection on current NYC politics, but not sure.

Read: “The Job at the End of the World” (Ray Nayler): Not fantasy, barely even SF despite being set in our climate-disaster future in which all the works of humanity are as nothing before the fire tornadoes.

Written: 193.

Weirdly, I was on call only in the morning. Customers attacked, but they could not defeat me before I escaped to do grocery shopping.

Read: Amelia the Level Zero Hero vol 1 (VA Lewis): MC got sucked into a hell dimension where she fought monsters literally 24/7 for years, so when she escapes to LitRPG World, she is already more powerful than anyone without having a class or level. Drama and cultists ensue.

Read: Ships of the Line (Terry Mixon, JN Chaney): This episode is all about ramping up the new technology obtained from an unsavory source which definitely does not have any trojan horses or other hidden bugs.

Written: 206 for the day, 492 for the weak week, 7890 total.

Today I had to be on call from some poorly-defined time around 7:00 to an equally poorly-defined time around 19:00, but the customers were fairly quiet, so it turned out okay. I slept next to my phone a bunch, and also tootled around in Minecraft finding villages full of villagers that only want to trade for vegetables. Actually I found one guy that wanted to trade for string, but there weren’t enough giant spiders. I eventually died and had to respawn back home, so I could get some string and row all the way out there again, I guess, but it’s a long ways for emeralds that I’m not sure what to do with.

Written: 210 words.

I was on call from 7 to 19 o’clock, because capitalism, but the customers were pretty quite so I was able to sleep in next to my phone, and also visit Ayse & fam for Eurovision 2023. Earl and Cat also put in an appearance and we ate bread and roe and borscht and pelmeni and watched ridiculous stage performances and had a good time. I didn’t like the songs as much this year; I remembered some of the spectacle, but little of the music. However, agreement was universal that Finland was robbed.

Because there were technical difficulties, it took a lot longer to get to the replay of the finals, so we spent some time watching the first semi and part of the second, and didn’t finish until well into the evening, but it’s not like I had a better use for the day.

Marith was not there because she is dead in anticipation of an upcoming trip with her abusive mother.

Written: FAIL.

I was on call all day, Marith’s car is pretty dodgy at the moment, and Nonny has some illness, so there was no gathering, and I didn’t do anything else useful today. I should have, what with having the whole day to sit in front of my computer, but I was too dumb.

Read: “Clutch Control” (Chosen_undead): Loona/Octavia from Helluva Boss, mostly during the last episode of season 1 while their fathers are having their own drama. No smut, just trying to be friends in their messed-up world. (Is smut even a thing in fanfic any more? I feel like it went out with Harry Potter, which probably just shows that I’m too dumb to read fanfic.)

Written: 638 kitten words.

Instead of being at a baby shower in Roseville, I am at home being on call for twelve hours straight. It’s probably for the best, since although I am still testing negative, I spent most of the past week with humans and their virus-spewing face-holes.

Read: “Grow” (Carrie Vaughn): “Wild Cards” short story, about what the teenage impulse to show off your powers gets you.

Read: “Equoid” (Charles Stross): Reread, still the most horrifying unicorns (although Kij Johnson may beat Stross for most horrifying unicorn story).

Read: “The Silken Swift” (Theodore Sturgeon): What’s horrifying here is not the unicorn, who is actually pretty okay, but the assignment of blame, which is, um, a product of its time.

Rapid Test: Negative.

Written: 848 kitten words, 1714/3000 for the week.

I was on call all day, which annoyingly prevented me from going grocery shopping, but the customers remained quiescent.

We did go over to dye eggs with Ayse and Ken and fam, and also eat delicious Thai food and exercise Nonny. No gaming or anime, though.

Words: I think I figured out how to upload and link the thing I’m not currently revising. Also, 303 kitten words.