Tag: on call pm

Slept in a bunch, because on-call doesn’t start until 13 o’clock, then watched the notifications while branch mining a bunch more of the bowels of the earth and finally making a full set of diamond armor and a diamond sword. Now if only I had the levels to enchant them…

Also caught up a little on journaling. I should probably just make draft posts instead of keeping notes in /tmp.

Read: “The Sound of Children Screaming” (Rachael K Jones): It’s like the Madoka Magica of child portal fiction.

Read: “How to Raise a Kraken in Your Bathtub” (P Djèlí Clark): That is such a supervillain plan. I hope the kraken is okay with it, though.

Read: “Better Living Through Algorithms” (Naomi Kritzer): “What if AI, but not evil?” It’s retreading ground that was visited decades ago (not that I can find the story because web searching is a thing of the past) but it’s even more relevant today, so that’s fine.

Read: “The Mausoleum’s Children” (Aliette de Bodard): A story about escaping the terrible place, and the people who didn’t escape.

Written: 129 according to the script. Does that feel like how much work I did, even though it was editing and not adding? I guess maybe?

Really, shouldn’t 259 days out of the year be World Oceans Day?

I managed to do some errands (but not all) and fail to get temporary checks printed out and still get home in time to play Minecraft be on call. The customers were quiet so I finished the exterior of my castle and the art installation/8-channel lavamatic in the basement, and made a proper setting for my Nether portal. Muahahahaha.

Ayse did not Minecraft with us, because she was busy publishing fanfic on AO3! (It was about a Minecraft actual play or whatever they’re called.) I am very proud of her!

Watched: Nothing, Marith doesn’t want to fall out of the habit of Saturday Night Anime but she also doesn’t want to die.

Written: 127. Still all terrible.

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.

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 a supervillain write this?

I managed to do most of the things I needed to do before being on call in the afternoon, and then I managed to fix the customers enough that I could go over to dye eggs and eat sushi with Ayse and Ken and fam. Marith insisted on driving me over, but could not stay because she was feeling poorly, which was very sad.

Written: 237 words. I was having too many infodumps, so I guessed that it was because I started the story too early and have jumped ahead to where I started it the first time. Will my greater knowledge of what’s going on make it better, or was it better when everything was mysterious?

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! There, how was that?

Had to be on call in the afternoon, and there were annoying customers, but I escaped to Monkeycat Towers for anime night anyway.

Watched: Princess Tutu 5-6: Uh oh, Fakir is getting suspicious! Although he was pretty sus to begin with.

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 8: Hah, called it!

Written: 177. Got to a point in planning where I diverge from the first graph, so that’s probably something.

Hurray for pangolins! I don’t know why I like them, but I do.

Apparently I also like being a useless lump, because that’s what I did today. I was on call in the afternoon and had to do some work, but only for a little while. Then in the evening we accomplished anime night again. Huzzah!

Watched: Sacrificial Princess & The King of Beasts 5-6: You can tell that new character is no good, he was mean to Amit!

Watched: Princess Tutu 1: Apparently we aren’t showing Jus Utena just yet, but Tutu seems weird enough for now.

Read: Crawljammer vol 4-6 (Tim Callahan, et al): More space adventure nonsense for DCC, random tables and adventures and random tables and classes and random tables.

Read: Dog of the Dead (Delia Marshall Turner): A no-nonsense middle-aged English teacher is bequeathed a mysterious giant egg by a student she sort of recognizes, and then everything goes downhill. Way downhill. Everything is eventually explained, but it is dream-like and elliptical getting there. I liked it, but it was pretty weird.

Written: 190. No, still not right.

Year of the Dragon, which is definitely auspicious and not a sign of doom.

I was too lazy to go grocery shopping before getting back to be on call all afternoon, and even if I hadn’t been, I wouldn’t have been able to go to the ice cream store. Instead I flopped around and then had to do some work and complain bitterly and throw out five bags of food from the fridge that was no longer trustworthy after the power outage. Eventually that ran out and Marith and I went over to Monkeycat Towers. We meant to go for anime, but instead we had really good Chinese food from Ken and Among Us with Nonny, which was all pretty great. I managed to win as the imposter! Then we switched to hide-and-seek mode, which I didn’t really understand because I’m old. Seeing people makes me happy.

Read: “Stubborn Stains” (Delia Marshall Turner): Turner wrote two books of an interesting fantasy/SF trilogy and then apparently disappeared, but now I learn that she has written the third book and this short story about a schoolteacher who gets involved with magic and a whole book about the schoolteacher! (The books are only available on Amazon, boo, but I’ll probably buy them anyway.)

Written: 125.

Penguins! They exist! Had you heard?

Today I accomplished all the things I planned to do, surprisingly. I did get up too early to get phlebotomized, then made it to the bookstore, a sandwich shop, and the grocery before arriving back home in plenty of time to be on call all afternoon. I was even able to almost entirely ignore customers and travel to Monkeycat Towers to watch more Madoka Magica. So yay me, I guess.

Watched: Puella Magi Madoka Magica 4-6: We finally got to the episode where Kyubey explains what’s really involved in becoming a magical girl. “Why does everybody react the same way when they find out? I don’t understand humans.”

Read: D&D5e Tome of Beasts 3 (Scott Gable, Richard Green, Kelly Pawlik, Sebastian Rombach, Mike Welham, et al): A pretty good monster book, although like all modern D&Ds it takes a Linnaean approach to monsters.

Written: 175.

Let’s watch all the Republicans whine when they get judged by the content of their character!

It’s a holiday, but I had to cover the afternoon, and ended up watching a lot of training video. Now I know a little bit more about kubernetes than I did before, or at least can put what I know into a little bit more context.

Read: The Skull Dragon’s Precious Daughter vol 2 (Ichi Yukishiro): More dragons, more magic, some dwarves, an elf, and an adorable baby.

Written: 209.

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!

Also another Bacon Day (it was meant to be Lentil Day, but right before the deadline…)

I did not want to get up and go grocery shopping this morning, but this afternoon I’m on-call, tomorrow is Retail Hell of NYE, the day after that is NYD and on-call, and then I’m back at work, so there was really not much choice.

Watched: Umbrella Academy 3.4-7: Well, that’s messed up.

Written: FAIL.

Most of the day I spent being a useless lump, yet available for customers if they needed help, but then the cats showed a great interest in the nook next to my computer desk, and when I looked, the electrical outlet there was smoking heavily. I unplugged everything from it and it stopped, but it obviously needs replaced. Maybe it’s time to think about a better apartment, but I’m not sure I’m up for doubling my rent.

Since my computer is also unplugged, I had to order pizza and watch TV.

Watched: Derry Girls 1.1-4: Everybody said this is very funny and it is! They are all sincerely ridiculous.

Read: O Maidens In Your Savage Season vol 7-8 (Mari Okada, Nao Emoto): Somehow, everything gets sorted out by the end, and yet sex remains pretty much a mystery. Also nobody dies, which they definitely would have in the US.

Written: FAIL, my computer is unplugged!

 

I don’t feel at all qualified to comment on what’s happening in Israel, but pretty sure an armistice would not be bad. Alas, when all you have is a nation-state, everything looks like a rival nation-state.

I was well enough to eat chicken tenders and buy groceries today, but not to do any braining, so it’s good that customers didn’t want anything from me. Instead of braining, I read a bunch about GLOG, which is a (more) minimalist, (more) DIY submovement within OSR, or something. The first rule of GLOG is obviously that there are no rules to GLOG, but if there were a rule, it would be that classes only have four levels worth of stuff, so there are no boring levels, and if you don’t die (which you probably will, because OSR) you will end up multiclassing. Other commonalities among  Many Rats On Sticks (Skerples), Runaway Princesses (Alcoops), Nuclear Ooze (Micah A), Moonhop (Type1Ninja), Vain the Sword (Phlox), and Ultraviolet Gloglands (Skerples) are slot-based inventory, copious random tables, and a magic system where you spend some of your precious few magic dice on a spell, the parameters of the spell are based on how many dice you rolled and the sum of them all, doubles and triples are bad, and only dice that roll low come back for reuse. Roll under your stat instead of vs target number is common but not required. What happens when you get to zero hit points usually involves a Death and Dismemberment Table.

This is irrelevant to my own game design struggles, since I want no hit points and do want superpowers and mostly nonlethal combat and the ability to play vampires, robots, goo monsters, tulpas, living black holes, or whatever other craziness can happen in Champions, which is an entirely different paradigm, but I’ll pretend looking at any game design is helpful.

Written: FAIL.

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.

There’s Marith right there! Also International Day of the Nacho, but nachos are something I seem to like more in theory than in practice,

I know I often write that I did nothing with a day, but this seems like even more nothing than usual. I didn’t even manage to read anything except webcomics, which I never manage to put on my reading list because they usually aren’t complete.

Customers apparently attacked before I was on call, but that wasn’t my problem.

I had to stop eating early because my brilliant plan to finally get the blood drawn that I’m supposed to by the end of the month might come to fruition tomorrow and I’m supposed to be fasting for that.

Written: Yep, more FAIL.

You may be aware of cephalopods, but are they aware of you? What if they are?

The Trader Joe’s unionization effort has not called for a boycott yet, so I went grocery shopping as normal. Also I was on call all afternoon, but there was only one customer.

Read: The Witches’ Marriage vol 1 (Studio Headline): Beautiful Melissa wants to cold-heartedly befriend (romance?) adorable young Tanya to increase her magical and then dump her to find someone else, but Tanya is just too cute. In fact, although Melissa wants to be terrible, and there is an age gap, the whole thing is pretty cute.

Read: There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 3 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): The horrible mess from the end of the previous volume gets resolved without anything terrible happening, but now our MC has another improbably hot girl trying to date her, and feelings are getting even more confused.

Read: Bruised (Tanya Boteju): Self-harm, roller derby, bisexual awakening, unhealthy coping mechanisms, found family, regular family.

Written: 246.

Arranged to have my lair cleaned, for which I will pay what the cleaners asked and tip a lot on top of that, so maybe I’m not a larger-than-average part of the problem?

Apparently it’s also National Fox Day. I need a better reference site.

On call all afternoon, but very close to nothing happened.

Read: Futari Escape vol 1 (Shouichi Taguchi): Two slackers, who might be girlfriends, go on vacations, flick in deadlines, philosophize about how idleness is great, and generally enjoy accomplishing nothing. It has more of a theme than a pure slice-of-life manga, but is in the same general space. For whatever reason, it didn’t grab me, though.

Read: I’m Not a Succubus! vol 1 (Horitomo): A human girl in a class of monster girls gets mistaken for a succubus and contrived fan service and raunchiness ensues. It seems a lot more sleazy than yesterday’s smut because it is so contrived instead of the characters wanting to have sex and getting naked accordingly. Or maybe I’m just too old for smut.

Written: 263.

 

But as with normal dates, I lurk here alone in my fetid pit of creepiness and despair.

What I do in my pit is mostly sleep, apparently. It’s a long weekend, so I can put off shopping until Monday and just deliquesce here. I was on call all afternoon, but absolutely nothing happened to force me to do anything.

Read: Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie vol 5 (Keigo Maki): Sports festival chapter, which of course Shikimori is good at so it’s more about the less obviously awesome side characters. I might have exhausted my interest, though.

Written: 311, which is coincidentally the number of flavors at Basking Shark Ice Cream. Maybe I should write more kitten words, but it would still be too easy and nobody would care.

American date style is stupid.

Cleaners came early in the morning, so I was up to go grocery shopping before being on call all afternoon. There were some customers, and a lot of uselessness. I tried to take a nap, but didn’t do a very good job.

Read: The Accidental Summoning (Kos Play): Teenage boy discovers the secret LitRPG world somehow hiding behind modern life, tries to summon a magic teacher and ends up with a cute teenaged girl, learns that his magic is the Forbidden Ultimate Power, etc. Except for being set in the US and a book, it would be a cheesy shōnen anime.

Written: 253/1247/10794. Not sure this is going anywhere useful, though.

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.

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.

Slept all morning, on call all afternoon. There was some customer activity but not much, and yet I did not accomplish anything. I think I mostly read webcomics and pushed my inbox to the top of a hill.

I did play more Minecraft, and finally, after tunneling all the way down to Y=-58, I found some diamonds! Now I can make a diamond pickaxe and then an enchanting table! I even almost made it back to the surface, but the cave I broke into that had a climbable slope also had monsters, so I died at about Y=+15.

Read: “Pretty Good Neighbor” (Jeffrey Ford): Terrible people get terrible ideas about terrible things.

Written: 143.

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 got up and almost went grocery shopping, but then went back to bed instead. Social Minecraft is today because Nonny and everybody are busy tomorrow, so I can shop then.

This week, I explored the desert some more. It turns out to have two rivers, which may explain why I couldn’t find the riverside cave I found earlier. It also has at least two wells, which are pretty but mostly useless since thirst is not a thing, a bunch of cactus, and some suspiciously rectangular skylines that are not desert temples. I bought some custom banners from Nonny’s banner shop,which now has a colored sheep breeding program as part of its supply chain. After we finished, I went to my own world and finally found two cows to lead back to my paddock. Once my wheat crop comes in, I can make them smooch adorably and spawn new cows, and finally I will have a steady supply of leather for books.

I was on call all afternoon, but the customers were quiescent.

Read: Renegades (Craig Alanson): Immediately upon returning from their last expedition, the PCs have to steal their ship back from duly-constituted authority and set out to save Earth by doing the impossible. Again.

Written: 152. If only two points were enough to draw a line…

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 meant to get up and shop a grocery, but instead laid in bed until noon. Surely this cannot be related to being sick and yet staying up every night to read web serials, right?

I wasn’t actually caught up on Katalepsis, there were a couple of chapters on Patreon, but now I am, and all the other web serials I’m following too. Should I start another one? (No, I should not.)

No customers attacked this afternoon, which was nice even though I am awake and theoretically capable of dealing with them.

Written: Still FAIL.

Oh no, I am not better at all, as I found out in the middle of the night. The events are too horrifying to relate, but I think it’s norovirus. I hear that’s going around, and the symptoms match. Anyway, I spent all day half-asleep, neither eating nor drinking, and not being much use for my on-call shift. New Boss R couldn’t find anyone to cover, but fortunately the customers were all observing the holiday too.

Read: Katalepsis ch 13.1-14 (Hungry): Yep, I still really like this.

Written: Ahahahaha FAIL.

Managed to get up and look in Marith’s car for my phone and go grocery shopping with my phone, somehow. Then I wobbled around all day until Marith came over for anime and Chinese food.

Watched: My Hero Academia 6.5-6: The fight continues, although it’s moved into a new phase now that the villains have way more damage output.

Read: Colorless vol 1 (KENT): Mysterious solar flare mutated everybody and blasted almost all color from the world, now the mutants are fighting over what color remains and how to use it to rule the world or not. The blurb calls it noir, but it’s really more like Batman.

Read: Namekawa-san Won’t Take a Licking vol 1 (Rie Ato): The title sounds like it could be yuri smut, but really it’s just nonconsensual sliminess. Boo.

Read: Vigor Mortis ch 175-181 (Thundamoo): Now I am caught up. Allegedly there are only twenty or so chapters remaining, which seems plausible. I think the endpoint is probably continental domination.

Read: The Agartha Loop ch 1-35 (RavensDagger): Magical girls with military backup, monsters, parallel universes, time travel, gay romance, and of course time loops. Chapter 35 is where it comes back around to the beginning, so I figured that was a good stopping place for tonight.

Written: FAIL and more FAIL.