Did at least one or two works today.
Watched: The Owl House 2.20-21: Climactic battle! Reversals! Terrifying magic! Smooches! Victory! But although multiple plot threads are set up for a third season, it doesn’t exist. I guess Disney execs are scared of girls kissing.
Written: 462 kitten words.
Wait, what happened to November?!
Two nights of fireplace noises has shown that this is not a good sleep aid. I think I need just plain white noise.
Despite my brain being shriveled from excessive dreams, I did three works today.
Read: Beesong Chronicles Omnibus vol 1: Sting & Song, Webs & Words, Hives & Heroism (Benjamin Medrano): For chaos god reasons, some fraction of the giant bees in a LitRPG world turn into beepeople. One of them gets kicked out of her hive, falls in with adventurers fighting against the Demon Lord, and is weird and cute and selfless and murdery and ace and bee-like for three books. The story is complete, but it’s labelled “vol 1” because the author hopes to write more.
Read: Hammered (Lindsay Buroker): A spinoff from the “Death Before Dragons” series, following another half-human Seattle resident who gets mixed up with interdimensional skullduggery when she just wants to renovate houses and have a normal life. Tragic backstory, magic weapons, elf-dwarf romantic tension.
Read: “How I Stole the Princess’s White Knight and Turned Him To Villainy: Miracle 1” (AJ Sherwood): A knight goes to an unlicensed sorcerer to help protect the people from the horrible princess, extravagant flirting ensues. The sorcerer is cute and eccentric in the best tradition of wizards who are so powerful they don’t have to care about dignity.
Watched: The Owl House 2.18-19: Revolt, revolt! OK!
Written: 319 kitten words. Too much reading, not enough writing.
I finally remembered to download an app for noise for sleeping instead of running the fan all night. Crackling fireplace noise was pleasant, but I don’t know how much it actually helped.
Watched: The Owl House 2.15-17: Flashbacks and also concrete information about King’s past. I was right about Belos.
Written: 170 kitten words, bringing me to around 12000 words for the month. That’s not as bad as I thought, even though most of them were not NaNoWriMo.
I have today off because in the original plan I was going to need it to recover after coming back from Roseville and I never changed my vacation plan. I meant to get up at a normal hour so I would be ready for tomorrow, but failed miserably. I did manage to do one thing, and then another thing, and finally the water is back on so I could take a shower and do dishes and stuff. I should not dread tomorrow, but I do.
Read: Illuminations (T Kingfisher): A young girl lives in a family of magic artists, who follow a tradition of painting practical enchantments into weird pictures, but some of their ancestors were more ambitious and did not follow safe disposal procedures. It has the T Kingfisher kids’ book feel, but it’s just not one of her strongest.
Watched: The Owl House 2-13-14: Luz and Amity are very cute but also kind of terrifying. Willow is pretty awesome too.
Written: 322 kitten words.
Today, the one thing I did was go over to the Gollubs’ to game and eat my body weight in cheese.
Water was still out all day.
Played: Dark Matter. Our castaways befriended two more factions, the Engineers and the Farmers, restored four whole books to the Library, checked out three books and had one of them immediately vanish, and collected a gang of kobolds who worship Jaseen. Then they broke into the mysterious room covered in warnings and craziness, and almost got the snot beat out of them by a giant metal skeleton and its radioactive ooze. Sesamina is still not getting anywhere with the librarian, but we probably have one more session this year.
Watched: The Owl House 2.11-12: Oh yeah, Luz and Amity are the cutest thing ever, and the emperor has a terrible plan. Also, I have a suspicion about the emperor’s background. And what happened to human solidarity?
Written: 101 kitten words, which is technically not nothing, but only technically.
On call all day, but the customers only attacked individually. Still, I’ll take it as an excuse for not having gotten anything done.
Read: The Fall (Alan Baxter): Five more short stories that, together with The Gulp, form a mosaic novel of cosmic horror and fungal doom.
Watched: The Owl House 2.9-10: Oh, that’s what’s going on with Luz’s mom!
Written: I signed up for the Hawai’ian Pizza Positive Writing Challenge, so if I have any ideas for writing, I should save them for tomorrow!
It’s kind of like Monday, only I’m on call during the day because it’s Tuesday. V confusing!
Read: Wish Upon A Satellite (Sophie Labelle): Further queer adventures of Ciel, Stephie, et al, in a Montreal high school that has both cuties and assholes, not easily sorted. The cuties are pretty cute, though.
Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride: Wizard’s Blue vol 3: Reread, so that now I know where they were and why Giselle was finally telling her story.
Watched: The Owl House 7-8: Oh my gosh, they’re all so cute! Except maybe Hooty.
Written: 504 kitten words.
Gaming cancelled due to plague (not that plague) at the Gollubs’, so I slept in without having to reset my alarm repeatedly, which was more restful than some alternatives, and then did a huge amount of nothing, including eating fried food and reading the archives of Pterrible Dinosaur Drawings. Eventually I went over to hang out with Ayse and Jus and Nonny for a while,
Watched: The Owl House 2.5-6: Horrible children! A conflicted villain! A horrible monster! Kisses!
Read: FAIL
Written: FAIL
Bah, no hot water for most of the day.
Today’s meeting activity was more stretches, so we’re at 50% stretching and 50% computer games. I should come up with something better when it’s my turn next week.
Watched: The Owl House 2.3-4: Backstory for both King and Eda and Lilith! And something is up with Luz’s mom.
Read: FAIL.
Written: 469 kitten words.
Well, my cough is still not covid. I guess that’s something. I hope everyone in the office appreciates it tomorrow.
Watched: The Owl House 2.1-2: Turns out Eda and Lilith are actually experts at magic, who would have thought?
Read: In/Spectre vol 14 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): More of Kotoko vs Rikka in brain-to-brain combat.
Written: FAIL.
When I went to Target yesterday and decided to buy an Ocular Photon Excluder (With Cooling Gel Action Grip), that was a good decision. When I decided I had enough flat sheets at home that I didn’t need to buy any more, that was a poor decision. I was able to mitigate it, but it took up a lot of my evening.
Watched: The Owl House 19: End of season 1! With Pyrrhic victories to set up season 2!
Read: The Lesbiana’s Guide to Catholic School (Sonora Reyes): A very gay, very closeted Mexican-American girl from a poor family ends up going to Catholic private school with rich white people while still having to deal with her family and capitalism and also an epic crush.
Written: Too dumb to write anything.
I slept in, which was probably a mistake, but oh well. I did manage to get to The Table and get a Reuben, which I have been wanting since one of my pocket friends mentioned them yesterday. It could have done with a little less pastrami and more kraut and dressing, but it was still good. Then I went to Target, which only had some of the things I wanted. If you check in the store, they say “only online” for a bunch of stuff, but if you look on line, they try to get you to go for in-store pickup! Make up your mind whether you’re succumbing to the failure of brick-and-mortar stores already, capitalist scum!
Read: Creepy Cat vol 1-2 (Cotton Valent): Mostly one-page strips about an artist who moves to a creepy old mansion which is inhabited by a bizarre nonphysical cat-thing and ghosts and dreams and general weirdness. It’s very cute, and doesn’t not remind me of kitten words.
Watched: The Owl House 17-18: Oh, no, Luz is definitely she/her. Also, in a lot of doom!
Written: 406 kitten words, some of them about Creepy Cat.
Ken and Ayse and their household are full of plague and woe, so we didn’t go visit them.
Played: Zoomwarts, over zoom, but very badly. I had so many hopes for the Land of the Dead arc, but I am very dumb in addition to my numerous other failings.
Watched: The Owl House 15-16: Amity has feelings! Also what is going on with Luz’s mom? And is Luz nonbinary? I thought they were a girl, but I didn’t notice any pronouns this time, and that Grom outfit was not particularly binary.
Written: 635 kitten words.
Watched: The Owl House 13-14: Misfits save the day! King has a heart!
Read: I Kissed Shara Wheeler (Casey McQuiston): High-school lesbian romance with bonus mysterious scavenger hunt and most people turn out to be cool, except the ones who suck. A pretty good example of the genre.
Written: FAIL.
I was up before noon, that’s good, right? Well, not as bad as it could be.
My stupid mental and physical health and I went on two stupid walks today, which again is not as bad as it could be, I guess.
Watched: The Owl House 11-12: The writing business, and learning a second spell. Go Luz!
Read: I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 2 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): Rae may or may not be getting closer to the villainess’s heart, but she’s certainly causing a lot of commotion!
Read: “#Spring Love, #Pichal Pairi” (Usman T Malik): A young reporter in India falls in love with a mythological creature who is more supernatural than he expected. Also, pandemicm although not exactly the one we have.
Words: 424.
There were customers during my on-call, but not very demanding ones. We still ended up not going over to Monkeycats’ because they are busy packing in order to leave for Portland tomorrow. Therefore, I was completely useless.
Read: The Caretaker of Tenants From Another World vol 1 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): A young Japanese shut-in becomes caretaker of a boarding house for visitors from the world of magic. They are all babes, and it is full of fan service, but on the other hand: nurturing male character, found family, recognition that living through an apocalyptic demon war is Not Okay, mental health is a thing that needs to be addressed by trained professionals.
Read: Epochrypha (Skerples): d100 imaginary geological ages, a delightfully bizarre combination of paleontology, geology, and D&D.
Watched: The Owl House 9-10: Yay magic school! And now we know what Bat Queen’s deal is.
Words: 326.
Watched: The Owl House 7-8: That explains why Amity is the way she is, but there’s still no excuse for Eda (and she likes it that way).
Read: FAIL.
Words: FAIL.
Apparently the 8am meeting was being cancelled even as I was sleeping through it, so uh good job me?
The only gaming idea I have today is remembering my gnoll/minotaur demonology empire from so many years ago when I ran D&D4. If I had successfully gotten people used to standard D&D gnolls first before springing the Henyador on them, it would have been great, but I think a further-developed form of it would make a good weird setting.
Watched: The Owl House 5-6: Eda’a backstory! Well, some of it, she obviously has a lot.
Read: Dragonbreath: The Frozen Menace (Ursula Vernon): This time it’s Danny who needs saving, and it’s related to breathing fire, so it’s appropriate that this is the last book in the series.
Read: “Sword & Spore” (Dominica Phetteplace): Bonus points for use of fungus, but gods still suck.
Read: “Stag” (Karen Russell): Humans aren’t that great either, actually. (I thought this was going to be specfic, but it was mostly literary
Read: Micchi vs The New World vol 1-2 (Jammin’ Rabbit aka Tony Huo): Isekai, but instead of a nebbish it’s one of the toughest yankee girls in Japan. Otherwise it’s kind of standard: she’s totally OP, rescues a buxom dark elf who’s devoted to her, gets involved in the adventurers’ guild, etc. However, it has about 80% less heterosexuality, and a cliffhanger at the end of each volume.
Played: Nothing, we didn’t have a GM.
Words: 451 kitten words.
Since Lancer was cancelled due to some kind of unspeakable plague situation, I stayed in bed forever reading like a huge useless lump of dumbness. Then I had regrets.
I did take my stupid mental and physical health for a stupid walk while it was still light out, but I came back with (possibly uncursed) frogurt and ordered a pizza, so that’s probably not a win.
Read: The Witch and the Beast vol 7 (Kousuke Satake): Still in Vampiretown, still embroiled in vampire murder-politics, vampires are still unprepared for what Gideau and Ashaf are going to do to them.
Read: Charming As A Verb (Ben Phillipe): A Black immigrant boy in NYC hustles and schmoozes his way through life so he can graduate with top marks from his fancy private school and get into his first-choice university, but then he’s a massive dumbass. He is charming (when he’s not being a dumbass), but his girlfriend is way cooler than him.
Watched: The Owl House 3-4: Oh, I guess there is a magic school after all. And now I know where that bit from the fan comic comes from.
Words: 551 kitten words.
I can get up on time when people expect me to be at the place to do the thing.
Played: Lancer. We defeated the Engineering Mutants and their pet abomination, by the simple expedient of barbecuing them all when they wouldn’t communicate, and some of the things that came through the malfunctioning Blinkgate. The other things we managed to delay in their incomprehensible purpose until we could unplug the console they were trying to use to reset the Blinkgate, and then get xenolinguists who have spent their entire careers waiting for this opportunity to talk to them. I’m sure there will be no consequences.
Watched: The Owl House 1-2. It was not what I was expecting, which I guess means I was expecting the wrong thing.
Read: Aposimz vol 3 (Tsutomu Nihei): Ugh, allies! Also, apparently there are no animals on this artificial world, only robots with edible parts. That’s very on-brand.
Words: 508 kitten words.