Trip's Life (Recent episodes)
24 January 2015 - Saturday
Slack slack slack splat.
We did not finish Parakiss but we got up to episode 7.
If Dave is too fried from travel, and we want to push, we could finish
next week.
San
Juan works better with four players than with two, even though I didn't
win.
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23 January 2015 - Friday
Yay! It's Friday!
Twelve paws!
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22 January 2015 - Thursday
Hurray, it's an Avalon! But not the sort of Avalon who will ever
forget ill-considered remarks.
The manga of Paradise Kiss (Yazawa Ai) mostly seems to
follow the same plot as the anime, but I am deeply suspicious of the
early Tokyopop translation.
The future of House Immortal (Devon Monk) is divided neatly
up by industry, which makes pretty much no sense for humans, but it has
stitched-together immortals powered by electricity from the 19th century
and also romance and mysterious mystery.
Memories by Avalon (Fri Jan 23 20:40:06 2015)
I remember considered ones too. =)
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21 January 2015 - Wednesday
I am still terrible at gaming, but apparently pretty good at eating
edamame. Anyway, the
13th Age
PCs successfully made it to the heart of the living dungeon without
either betraying or being betrayed by the dwarven mercenaries, and
killed the statue of the Spider Queen and her little dragon too. Now
they just have to get out through the hordes of undead and goblins
between them and sunlight, and then people can betray each
other over the loot. (Remember, according to the Dwarf King, all
underground treasure is rightfully dwarven!)
Not all the stories in
Fungi (ed Orrin Grey, Silvia Moreno-Garcia) are
Lovecraftian horror, but they are in fact all about fungi or fungus
monsters. Some of them are even good!
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20 January 2015 - Tuesday
Work. Date night with Avalon. Viewing of Avalon's baby cousin, who
will probably not transform into a ghoul later in life.
A Key, An Egg, An Unfortunate Remark (Harry Connolly) is
billed as pacifist urban fantasy, and so it is. Reasoned discussion and
moral suasion don't always work, but the numerous people who use violence
come off even worse.
A while back, Evil hat
kickstarted a bunch of novels in their Spirit of the Century
universe from various authors, and the one by world-reknowned author C E Murphy,
Stone's Throe is now available!
Imagine Batman as a black woman in Paris in 1938, running around with
Josephine Baker.
"Ancient Indian magic" doesn't seem like a good excuse for the
supernatural (for a variety of reasons), but Of A Feather (Ken
Goldman) is nevertheless full of creepy bird stuff. Swarm attack FTW!
The Sun
Below: City on the Edge is a third-party adventure for Numenera, which
feels somewhat pulpish, possibly because of how the PCs are supposed to
interact with the decadent lost city. Or maybe I just don't understand how
Numenera is supposed to work.
Twelve paws!
Probably not by Avalon (Thu Jan 22 18:10:01 2015)
I think she is pretty much human...unlike some of my other cousins. =)
Re: Probably not by Trip (Sun Jan 25 17:56:16 2015)
They look human until they start to transform in middle age!
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19 January 2015 - Monday
Even knocking off gaming early isn't like getting a lot of sleep.
For unclear reasons, probably related to my terminal lack of
organization with respect to files from the Internets, it took until now
to transfer Harry Connolly's new series onto my iPad and read them.
The Way Into Chaos, The Way Into Magic, and
The Way Into Darkness are not quite as awesome as the "Twenty
Palaces" books, but still pretty swell. The threat was unusual, the
world was interesting, and there were no romantic subplots shoehorned
in.
Make a comment!
18 January 2015 - Sunday
Super-lethargy powers... ACTIV— eh, maybe later.
But oh no, Bryn has to drop out of Fading
Suns to conserve creativity for her actual work! And Kyle might want to
spend those Sunday nights with her, so we might be down two people out of
five, which just doesn't work.
We played Castle
Ravenloft and despite being on the edge of getting wiped out for the
whole game, slew the dracolich.
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17 January 2015 - Saturday
No Parakiss even though Dave is gone, because it is time
for New Year's Eve (Observed) with exciting fondue! Om nom nom!
Pantomime and Shadowplay (Laura Lam) win
because the protagonist is not on the gender binary. However, the more
important the protagonist becomes to everything, the less I'm interested in
the story, or maybe in the setting.
Twelve paws that get no fondue!
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16 January 2015 - Friday
Hurray for Avalon! Boo for Avalon's horrible work environment!
The Darkest Part of the Forest
is faerie-tale-tastic, because it's by Holly Black. Princes in glass
coffins, hollow hills, cryptic bargains, artistic talent, the whole
seven yards.
Sky Pirates of the Rio Grande (Paul D Batteiger) is
straight-up smut. There is some sort of steampunk supervillain
background, but only as an excuse for a naked tigergirl riding a
dinosaur.
Twelve paws!
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15 January 2015 - Thursday
I read some fairly terrible self-published-on-Amazon books by P S
Power. I'd say it was so you don't have to, but you never had to to
begin with.
Twelve paws.
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14 January 2015 - Wednesday
Cough. Cough. Splat. I ended up sleeping for 89634586235 hours, after
which I felt significantly better, but not very energetic. Bleagh.
Fortunately, work didn't explode without me.
In the evening, I and my tiny brain trundled off to Monkeycat Towers for
13th Age. We
had to send Dave's character off to rouse the townsfolk, leaving only three
of us to fight the Flint Spiders and Flint Ettercaps and whatever you call
those things in the living dungeon of the story about the 10th Age Spider
Queen getting shanked by the Kobold Lord.
Also, pot roast with pot roasted vegetables!
The Get-Away God (Richard Kadrey) finishes the story of
cosmic disaster that started in Sandman Slim. The protagonist
and his remaining peeps come out of it pretty well, considering the amount
of doom involved.
Collectanea
Creaturae (Monsters & Magic
edition) has somewhat unusual takes on some monsters, like kobolds being
actual mine faeries instead of dragon wannabes, and actual information on
the animals, but otherwise is what you'd expect.
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13 January 2015 - Tuesday
Cough. Cough.
Yay, finally it's Avalon! But she is sad from horrible life stress.
8(
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12 January 2015 - Monday
I hate doing performance reviews. But it would be worse if I were a
manager, I'm sure!
No Avalon, only scheduling doom.
Girl on a Wire (Gwenda Bond) is probably not
modern fantasy, but many of the characters are convinced that it is. It
is definitely full of circustasticness, including running away from the
circus to join the circus.
A Call to Duty (David Weber, Timothy, Zahn) is in the
backstory of the "Honor Harrington" universe, when the Virtuous Monarchy
was just getting started and wasn't sure it was able to afford a space
navy. Also, villainous space pirates.
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11 January 2015 - Sunday
Dave is gone, but we played D&D5e
again anyway. Our bold academics grad students and staff
avoided getting arrested, encountered and (ahem) befriended some puppet
fighters, discovered that the missing person was looking for coins with
four sides, infiltrated a wretched hive of scum and villainy, fought a pit
match against a really nasty puppet (that they probably only won by
cheating) to get their missing person back, heard about the erase
person spell and the Remembered Temple, got mugged by a snowman, and
were betrayed and left for dead by the person they rescued. In two weeks,
we track her down and make her give our token faculty member back!
No Avalon, only plague.
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10 January 2015 - Saturday
Slothingu, slothingu, la la la!
I will tell you about the new anime I checked out on Crunchyroll so you
don't have to experience it yourself.
- The Testament of Sister New Devil: Shounen combat and
jiggling. There are only two female characters so far, but it will
probably be a harem show.
- Saekano -How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend-: Also harem,
one boy in the otherwise female Make A Romance Sim Game club.
- KanColle: This is in the same subgenre as Strike
Witches, but slightly less pants-averse and naval instead of
aerial.
- Cute High Earth Defense Club LOVE!: A pink wombat
appears to a group of students at an all-boys high school and drafts
them to fight evil with the power of love and cheesy pinkness. I want
to say something about gender, but I don't know what, and it would
probably be overanalyzing it.
No regular anime because Dave is gone, so we played some
Dominion and
watched some Paradise Kiss. People who have read the manga
were bemused by the directorial choices, which seem to mostly distance
the characters. I can't compare to the manga, but I agree that showing
the passion for fashion seems like it should be central.
The Siren Depths (Martha Wells) is the third "Raksura"
book, and the end of the story arc in that the Fell threat has been
explicated and resolved. There are a probably literally-infinite number
of stories remaining to be told in that world, though.
Numerous paws!
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9 January 2015 - Friday
Hurray! I'm not on call any more! Of course Avalon is busy tonight
and tomorrow night, but maybe someday...
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8 January 2015 - Thursday
Argh, stupid customers! Why do you call when I am trying to have date
night with Avalon?
Yes... by Avalon (Fri Jan 9 21:14:22 2015)
But oh well saving the world of customer solutions can be quite sexy...
Re: Yes... by Trip (Mon Jan 12 08:46:25 2015)
But it does not allow time for doing anything with that sexiness!
Make a comment!
7 January 2015 - Wednesday
After the Holiday Gaming Drought, we have 13th Age again!
As usual, I was terrible, but we did finish the murder mystery plotline,
level up, and get mugged by goblins on the way to Ken's adventure.
Apparently they wanted to sell our necromancer to the Orc Lord, something
up with which we will not put! Anwe got to look impressive because she got
three crits in four rounds of combat.
More long-awaited books that came out this week:
Unbound (Jim C Hines) is the conclusion of the "Magic Ex
Libris" trilogy, in which many things are resolved despite the main
character being (justifiably) seriously depressed after the events of the
previous book. Fortunately his girlfriend's other sweetie is a therapist,
and the guy he stole his car from is willing to kick him in the ass. Also,
doooooooom.
Firefight (Brandon Sanderson) is the sequel to
Steelheart, in which we find out more about where the
supervillains come from, and maybe about how they work. Based on the title
of the next book, this one is probably the middle book of a trilogy, where
plot twists are introduced and also there is smooching (which may be a plot
twist in itself). I can't say that Sanderson is a great writer, but I have
to approve of books where the theme is figuring things out.
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6 January 2015 - Tuesday
What, no Avalon?! Perfidy and outrage!
The new "PC Peter Grant" book, Foxglove Summer (Ben
Aaronovitch), is out! But I had to practice delayed gratification by
rereading the previous one, Broken Homes.
FS does continue the plot thread from the end of
BH, but very much as a B plot. The main plot is not related
to that or really to much in previous books, except Beverly and a little
Molly, so I don't think it's the strongest of the five so far. Hopefully
the plot threads from this book will continue onward to make Peter's
life even more doom-filled.
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5 January 2015 - Monday
Twelve paws, and sixteen breaths per minute!
The Code of the Space-Lanes has no RPGGeek link, and that's okay, because it
doesn't really have any merits. Simple simulationist systems are a dime
a dozen and don't do anything to illuminate a genre.
The Academy: Book One (Chad Leito) is firmly in the
"teenager discovers the secret stuff and goes to secret school" genre, but
it's not a well-done example. It does get points for being nominally not
magic, but the technology is a bit silly.
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4 January 2015 - Sunday
Earl pretended that we aren't too lame to game with long enough to start
running D&D5e
for the Palo Alto crowd. (Dave is back in between travelling, but sleepless
enough to not want to run the end of Immortal
Empire just now.) So far, our expeditionary team from the
Temple University of Athena has found snow, sheep, unwise
magic, snow, zombies, cowardly and superstitious halfling bandits, dogs,
and snow. Next week: a town! I predict more snow.
D&D5e is about like I expected from reading the PHB. We need to
figure out more about when advantage and disadvantage apply, but
otherwise it's pretty straightforward. I might like
13th Age
more.
Fantasy adventure still seems to be a big favorite as a genre.
Speaking of which, Wandering Monsters High School is pretty much TFOS,
only with D&D monsters instead of aliens. It is by the same person who is
doing The
Queen's Cavaliers, so the system is similar but even simpler.
Less-published games I have read recently include the partially-complete
beta of Pirate
World (Dungeon
World plus sea monsters and demon empires and goblins that eat
gunpowder) and an early playtest version of Breakfeast
Cult (like SCOOS but
with a coherent background and excuse for magic, using Fate
Accelerated). Both look like they will be pretty swell when
finished.
Make a comment!
3 January 2015 - Saturday
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica 10-12: Ayse was actually
surprised (pleasantly) by the ending, which made us all happy because
it doesn't happen very often.
- Chihayafuru 17-18: Re-establishing character after the
mid-season recap, plus endurance training for a card game.
We were going to watch the end of Korra book II, but
then customers attacked. Aaarrrgh!
Uresia: Grave of
Heaven is S John Ross's mostly-atheistic low-grimness anime-inspired
RPG setting. It's more coherent than Slayers, but on the other
hand, it has catgirls, full-contact cooking contests, pirates, dungeons,
snow golems, secret elven martial arts, an entire kingdom of villains trying to go straight, and magical mystery.
A shorter version of Uresia was published as a supplement
for BESM,
but this is the completely system-free version. Naturally, I thought about
13th Age, but
there isn't a natural fit for the Icons. Maybe Dungeon
World...? (Because Changeling
World isn't enough to flail incompetently enough at.)
Although explicitly based on the Vietnam War, Of Bone and
Thunder (Chris Evans) is straight-up fantasy. The dragons act like
dragons, not like helicopters, etc. It has the elements essential to at
least fiction about Vietnam, though: stand-up troops skulking through the
jungle with experimental gear trying to fight suicidally-determined
guerillas while on drugs. Also amoral spies and dwarves that just leveled
up from slaves to oppressed underclass. And dragons.
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2 January 2015 - Friday
Blargh, back to work. And I don't even get to stop being on call.
Project Maigo and Project 731 (Jeremy
Robinson) continue the dooooooom from Project Nemesis and
Island 731. Toward the end it gets kind of over the top (yes,
compared to hundred-meter-tall monsters stomping all over Boston) and the
naming gets lamer, but I suppose it's not really a change of genre.
Needs more catgirl.
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1 January 2015 - Thursday
Holy crap, it's the future! Again! Still no spaceships or catgirls,
but at least there are robot servants to help with my eight loads of
laundry.
Breathless and Trembling (V J Chambers)
started off amusing from the whole "what if the messiah and the antichrist
fell in love?" premise and the wacky town, but ran out of novelty. I do not
think there is any need to read the other N books.
Despite the premise, there is not any overt supernatural activity.
Neither side has any more support than religious fanatics do in the real
world.
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31 December 2014 - Wednesday
Customers attacked first thing in the morning (so I had to work from
home), then retreated during the day and returned in the late afternoon.
Curse them!
NYE celebration fell apart because Monkeycat Towers is a house of
plague, so I didn't miss any more than anyone else, but still, curse you
customers!
After we made the customers happy, I stayed up until midnight to wish
the cats a happy new year. They said meow.
The protagonist of Drowned (Nichola Reilly) is missing a
hand and has terrible scars, which do mess up her life and don't seem like
tokens to get the diversity stamp. However, her entire world is just large
enough to keep 400 people above the sea monster line at high tide, so a
missing hand pales in comparison. There will probably be sequels, but
they'll have to work hard to explain how the world got so soggy.
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30 December 2014 - Tuesday
Wait, I was at work yesterday! How come I have to be at work again
today!?
Not all the biology in
Island 731 (Jeremy Robinson) holds up, but the monsters are
pretty horrifying. Plus, of course, catgirl FTW.
This is not obviously related to Project Nemesis, but I
know one of the later books in that series is Project 731,
so suspicion seems called for.
Make a comment!
29 December 2014 - Monday
Back to work even more, and still on call. Bah. Humbug.
Project Nemesis (Jeremy Robinson) is a straight-up
kaiju story, complete with daring hero, badass heroine, evil
corporate scientists, military that does more harm than good, and monster
that defies physics. There is plenty of room for an inevitable sequel.
Johannes Cabal returns in the short piece A Long Spoon
(Jonathan L Howard), along with a spider-demon devil of
great charm and terrifying personal habits. Because I have no survival
instincts, I think she is awesome and Johannes should summon her again.
Make a comment!
28 December 2014 - Sunday
Even though I am on call and probably shouldn't be out of contact for
such extended periods on a weekend, I went to Monkeycat Towers and let Ken
crush me at San
Juan, but not at Star
Realms. Then I went back home for date night with Avalon.
At the start of
Memory's Wake (Selina Fenech), I hoped for girlsmooches,
but no. It failed me in all respects.
Make a comment!
27 December 2014 - Saturday
Hey, it's a weekend already! I like this one-day-work-week thing! I
don't like being on call, though.
Gathering Blue (Lois Lowry) and Dragonswood
(Janet Lee Carey) are two more books from the
YA-fantasy-with-protagonists-with-disabilities list. The former is yet
another with a bum leg, but I only read the first chapter or so before
deciding it wasn't grabbing me (which is pretty hard — once I start a
book I usually finish it compulsively).
The heroine of the latter is deaf in one ear, which only comes up
like once. However, it's interestingly set on a fictional island near
England, around the time of the King Richard/Prince John
kerfuffle, and seems appropriately medievel in its squalor (not counting
the fae and dragons, although even then...).
Why do I care? Maybe I just think they're getting too many points for
their disads.
Make a comment!
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