Previously, in Trip's Life...
30 April 2010 - Friday
Work: I did some things. I did some other things. I
didn't do yet another bunch of things. Then I skived out on the office-warming
party.
Silly Computer Games: 102120.
Cats:
I petted Aspen! She was up on top of the food tree to get dinner, which
put her at a convenient height for pettins, so I imposed them upon her!
But she did not run away, even though I hadn't seized her! She sat there
by the food dish and let me pet and pet her for several minutes before
deciding she'd had enough and scarpering! I think she may even have
almost purred!
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29 April 2010 - Thursday
Work: Check.
My, biology really is full of things:
The mouse
that never drinks.
Textual Entertainments: Yay, got my new copy of
Sir Thursday!
Visual Entertainments: Tuesday Night Anime is not
enough! Now we have Thursday Night Slayers! We're starting
over from the beginning, so it will be a while until we get to the
fourth season, but we hope to not be disappointed! Or exploded!
Gaming: I suppose I should just accept that games I
run are like the first part of Slayers where they wander
around blowing things up, not any of the later parts where they uncover
secrets of the world.
Cats:
Oh no! These cats have never been fed ever! Not in their entire
lives! How can I let this tragedy persist?!
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28 April 2010 - Wednesday
Work: Brain still tiny. But at least the break room
is stocked with horrifyingly unhealthy snacks.
Textual Entertainments: Drowned
Wednesday. It's hard to go wrong with pirate rats!
But now I have to find something else to read until either the
bookstore gets in my new copy of Sir Thursday or the space
penguins return my old copy.
Cats:
Sometimes Aspen acts almost like she doesn't completely hate me, but
she always comes to her senses pretty quickly.
Make a comment!
27 April 2010 - Tuesday
Work: Tiny brain!
Visual Entertainments:
Look, it's a Marith!
Dave's new anime display is mighty, but I don't understand why the
picture in 4:3 mode doesn't reach the top and bottom of the screen (it's
obvious why it doesn't reach the sides). Maybe the rows wouldn't work out
nicely and the picture quality would suffer? But it's already NTSC... I
dunno, man, I just work with high-tech widgetry, I don't understand it.
The new anime display was apparently also surprisingly affordable,
but I don't need one. Really. Not even a bit.
- Higurashi When They Cry 6: We initially thought the
second arc is backstory to the first arc, but maybe it's AU.
- Natsume's Book of Friends 10: Aww!
- Soul Eater 15-16: Go Dr Stein!
- Kimi ni Todoke 4-5: Additional aww!
Food: The
Pizza My Heart barbecue chicken
pizza is pretty good, but not as good as the Watsonville Apple.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
26 April 2010 - Monday
Work: The break room with the fridge and the break
room with the utensils are still at opposite ends of the office. Also,
my new cube is even smaller. Otherwise, things are much the same.
Textual Entertainments: Grim Tuesday.
The Will continues to be momentually unhelpful.
Cats:
I oppressed Aspen with bellyrubbins! Ha hah!
Make a comment!
25 April 2010 - Sunday
Work: Again, nothing that can't wait until Monday.
My, the Internet really is full of things: Primate behavior, in various
combinations.
(NSFW. Possibly NSFHome. Definitely NSFProp8Supporters.)
Gaming: Blah, terrible. Not only do I suck as a GM,
I'm boring. Or maybe that's the same thing.
Visual Entertainments: Finished Agent Aika:
R-16. It was consistently what it was all the way through, which
I guess is something. After the link above, though, naked anime girls
seem somewhat lacking.
Cats:
Paws, fuzzy, 12.
Make a comment!
24 April 2010 - Saturday
Work: Not too much customer doom, and it can be put
off until Monday when I have a real computer.
Gaming: Preparate, preparate, la la la.
Textual Entertainments: Now that the final volume is
out, I must reread Garth Nix's "Keys to the Kingdom" series. Today:
Mister Monday. Oh the doom, with additional doom. (But not
too much, since the target audience is still fairly young.)
Food: First Trader Joe's discontinued the lemon dill
sauce, now they discontinue the marsala sauce! They are trying to get me
to eat my chicken strips naked, I can tell!
Cats:
I hear poor Jinian was quite sick today, but Marith zoomed her to the
vet and her ears were restored to the proper state of splendor! Hurray
for Marith!
Make a comment!
23 April 2010 - Friday
Work: Bah, from home I have only this cheesy little
Windows laptop to connect to the work network, and even that's down for
half the day. Good thing I don't need to do much except keep my
tentacles crossed that customers don't open any cases.
Cats:
Paws: still twelve!
Make a comment!
22 April 2010 - Thursday
Work: Last day in the old office, whee. I had to take
one of the customer VPN laptops home, to preserve it from the tender
attentions of the movers. Two laptops plus my backpack is a lot to carry,
which may have made this a poor choice of day for a bookstore accident. Oh
well!
Random Encounters: Rachel and CZR in the Palo Alto
Borders! I didn't recognize CZR at first, but really he still looks like
CZR, only with a narrower beard.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
21 April 2010 - Wednesday
Work: Check.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
20 April 2010 - Tuesday
Work: Check.
Visual Entertainments:
- Natsume's Book of Friends 8-9: Finally we learn about
the guy with the lizard in the opening credits!
- Kimi ni Todoke 3: Oh no! Sawako is being accused of
Heinous Crimes!
- Soul Eater 14: Poor Tsubaki. She really is
extra-tolerant.
- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni 4-5: Definitely the winner in
term of DOOOM!
Still no Marith. Hmph. Maybe we should explode her company.
Food: For no particularly good reason, I ordered pizza
from Pizza My Heart instead of FPD.
They are still Pizza My Wallet, ($18ish for a medium instead of $14ish at
FPD), but the Watsonville
Apple is both tasty and peculiar. Even Dave liked it!
Cats:
Yay furry kittysnuggles!
Make a comment!
19 April 2010 - Monday
Work: Today I am sleepy and unproductive. I mean,
more so than usual.
My, the Internet really is full of things:
Fancy
dice!
Cats:
Now I know why Aspen likes the laser
pointer.
Make a comment!
18 April 2010 - Sunday
Work: Tried to fix something for a cow orker, but I
think Outlook ate my mail. Bah!
Food: All hail Ken, Nom-Bringer and Pasta-maker!
Gaming: My Thrace character is still lame, but not
so lame as to get everyone killed. Quite.
Textual Entertainments: The Midnight
Mayor is the sequel to Kate Griffin's A Madness of
Angels, and if you liked the one, you'll like the other. It's
Mage-ariffic!
Sequential Entertainments: The end of Kenichi Sonoda's
Gunsmith Cats: Burst is interesting. Did Misty get a happy
ending? It's highly debatable! Minnie May did, but I'd say that Rally,
despite being the ostensible heroine, didn't.
Cats:
Jinian and Aime are still good kitties!
Make a comment!
17 April 2010 - Saturday
Gaming: Game design is hard, let's die in a pit.
(Yes, I know, but I already went shopping, twice, and it didn't help.)
Visual Entertainments: Aika R16 is
gratuitously excessive, or maybe excessively gratuitous. I think this is
the one Tamago warned me about. Sheesh.
Visual Entertainments, cont'd: Muahahahahahaha!
That is all.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
16 April 2010 - Friday
Work: Yay Friday!
Visual Entertainments: Finally finished
Noein, only eleventeen jillion months after starting! Certainly
Haruka is very cute, but quantum newagery still makes me scowl.
Cats:
Twelve classical paws!
Make a comment!
15 April 2010 - Thursday
Work: I ended up sitting with one of the engineers
all afternoon to debug a mysterious problem a customer was encountering.
It was pretty interesting, and I was only moderately stupid..
Textual Entertainments: Changes, the
latest book of Jim Butcher's "Dresden Files" series, is so amazingly full of
doom, with extra doom piled on top and a side of bonus doom. You can
tell by the way the title breaks with the previously established
pattern!
I'm not sure I approve of Harry's running off the rails in the first
part of the book turning out to be exactly the right thing to do, but
perhaps it's just part of the genre.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
14 April 2010 - Wednesday
Work: Fairly quiet week so far. I presume the
customers are saving up their issues for the end of next week, when
we will be all discombobulated by moving to a new office (which is on
the other side of the parking lot, so not a significant change in terms
of commute).
My, the Internet really is full of things:
How to get
unstuck.
Cats:
Aspen really is very certain that kitty treats are a plot against her.
Maybe I should get some with catnip, although that might just make the
boy cats push her out of the way to get to them.
Make a comment!
13 April 2010 - Tuesday
Work: Still sleepy. Not very productive.
Visual Entertainments:
- Natsume's Book of Friends 7: Awwww!
- Kimi ni Todoke 1-2: This show is even more full
of awww!
- Soul Eater 12-13: Some witches get cool totems. Some
witches... not so much.
- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni 3: I think shrieking and
gibbering and getting your back to a wall is a perfectly understandable
reaction to those circumstances.
No Marith. I don't know if her company will ever become competent
enough to not spazz out every single week.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
12 April 2010 - Monday
Work: Argh. So sleepy.
Cats:
I oppressed Aspen with snuggles! I need to do that more, so she will
become more used to not getting eaten.
Make a comment!
11 April 2010 - Sunday
Weather: Check. Fortunately the most exciting bits
didn't happen until I and my gaming books were safely indoors.
Gaming: No one takes swans seriously, even when
they're extra-large possessed/undead swans. Oh well, there are still
shadow demons lurking out there, plotting to steal back their manaworm.
Work: A customer called while I was at gaming, but I'm
not on-call this weekend, so I made the person who is call him back.
Hah.
Cats:
Suddenly, Super-Affection Beast Marma-Marma!
Make a comment!
10 April 2010 - Saturday
Eyestalks: Defective, so they want to me to see a
specialist. Bah.
Gaming: Bah, I can't find any monsters that seem
right to reskin as either possessed swans or giant ghostly-white
catfish. I guess I'll have to make some up.
Textual Educations: Why Evolution Is
True (Jerry Coyne) isn't a bad example of its genre, but I have a
couple of quibbles with it. One is the title, which really should be
"How We Know Evolution Is True"; the other is how, while properly
decrying the lameness of most current evolutionary psychology, he
perpetuates the common wisdom of "men are intrinsically promiscuous,
women are intrinsically monogamous". On the other tentacle, only two
quibbles in a whole book isn't much.
My favorite of the genre is still Neil Shubin's Your Inner
Fish, though.
Textual Entertainments: The God Engines
(John Scalzi) is very short for a book, but full of doom. I'm not sure
whether it would have benefitted from more exploration of the setting.
Cats:
Miau! Miau! Miau!
eyestalks and catfish by Rachel (Mon Apr 12 18:30:05 2010)
Defective eyestalks? What's wrong with them?
The catfish was cool. :)
Re: eyestalks and catfish by Trip (Tue Apr 13 09:35:59 2010)
The catfish was supposed to be much more fearsome, but I neglected to give it a better ranged or multi-target attack. I'm glad it was entertaining anyway.
Apparently there is a tiny amount of fluid accumulating behind one of my retinas. It doesn't sound like it's doing any direct harm, but changing the shape of the retina even slightly distorts the image received. Bah, I say.
Make a comment!
9 April 2010 - Friday
Work: Yay Friday! Boo problems that happen late in
the day!
Food: Om nom nom!
Cats:
Four orange paws, four brown paws, and four light orange paws!
Make a comment!
8 April 2010 - Thursday
Work: Bah, looks like I should have kept the older
cores and deleted the newer ones to free up disk space. Oh well, at
least the customer is up and running now.
Gaming: I really should come up with something to
run on Sunday, even though Earl won't be there. What kind of opponent
would most make the remaining PCs miss Naled? Hm....
Textual Entertainments: Now I can have read
Betrayals, which is actually much less doomed, although
still pretty doomed.
Visual Entertainments: Slowly working my way through
the penultimate disc of Noein.
Silly Computer Games: 70 actions per day isn't
enough!
Cats:
Twelve paws of fuzzy furriness!
Make a comment!
7 April 2010 - Wednesday
Work: Finally I phone-screened someone who knows
something about computers! Yay!
Textual Entertainments: I tried reading
Betrayals (Lili St Crow) but I didn't remember enough of
the previous book, Strange Angels, so I had to go back and
reread it. Wow, that's a lot of justification for angst.
Cats:
I hope Marith doesn't explode and die from snorfling Ghirardelli,
because he is very fluffy and deserves extra snorfles!
Make a comment!
6 April 2010 - Tuesday
Work: Look, it's tech support!
Visual Entertainments:
- Natsume's Book of Friends 5-6: Awww!
- Spice and Wolf season 2 OVA: Not really a lot happened,
but Holo is very cute.
- Soul Eater 11: Go Tsubaki!
- Higurashi no Naku Koro ni 1-2: So far it seems to be
following the manga. I wasn't sure it would, since apparently the work
is a multi-medium extravaganza with different parts published variously
as manga, light novels, and computer games. Perhaps the anime will
summarize them all and we won't have to play untranslated import games
to find out what happens in the end! (If we do, I blame Dave.)
Sadly, Marith couldn't make it, even after I refrained from ordering
mushrooms on the pizza.
Next week, Kimi ni Todoke!
Silly Computer Games: My Echo Bazaar character's
Nightmares score is getting alarmingly high. There's a cheery gentleman in
a stovepipe hat...
Cats:
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
5 April 2010 - Monday
Work: Was getting up this morning slightly less
horrible than previous Mondays? Maybe.
Visual Entertainments: Started the 4th disc of
Noein.
Cats:
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
4 April 2010 - Sunday
Food: Neither Marith nor I care about Easter, and I'm
pretty sure Dave doesn't, but we do care about ham and leeks and new
potatoes and friends. Friends who provide ham and leeks and new potatoes
(like Ken and Ayse) are the best sort!
We hear Julia had Adventures With Rice Gruel before we arrived.
Gaming: Yay Thrace! Books were copied, plans were laid,
hands were stolen, new familiars were interrogated for theological
correctness, loyalty was debated, libraries were infiltrated, heptagons
were drawn on maps. Apparently the PCs' town is built on top of a buried
god, on top of the Hellmouth, or both.
My character sucks because she has no goals. Wanting things is
hard.
Silly Computer Games: Ayse and Ken are trying to
lure me back into World of Warcraft when the next expansion comes out
later this year. Ken says he won't make fun of me for playing a foxgirl,
but I am suspicious. Deeply suspicious!
Cats:
Jinian and Aime are almost as cute as my cats!
Make a comment!
3 April 2010 - Saturday
Work: The guy responsible for Customer M knew my
name, so he phoned me to work on Customer M's problem. I'm really not
sure who's on call this weekend, but I didn't think it was me. Oh well.
Cow Orker G (who knows everything) figured out what the problem was
and I wrote a script to clean it up (which was probably faster than
doing it by hand, I think) and eventually Customer M was happy
again.
Textual Entertainments: Kitty's House of
Horrors is the seventh (I think) in the series that started with
Kitty and the Midnight Hour. Still entertaining! Plus,
bonus points for people who go around applying violence sometimes
actually going to prison, even if they're on the protagonists's side.
Silly Computer Games: Echo Bazaar. It's all Marith's fault.
But now I want to play an RPG set in Fallen London. (Horribly uncreative, I
know. What did you expect from a brain-eating space bug?)
Cats:
So extremely furry!
Make a comment!
2 April 2010 - Friday
Work: Check.
Visual Entertainments: Marith tried to lure people
to see
The Secret of Kells at
the Aquarius, but only Cat and Earl and I
responded. All those other people missed out!
It was pretty cool to see animation stylized in a completely
different way than usual, and the colors! The colors! (The cat and the
faerie needed more screen time, though.)
Food: After the movie, we went across the street to
Jing Jing and made them
serve us things like
dan dan
mein.
Cats:
Poor neglected kitties! I was gone ALL DAY, and I didn't even bring them
any tuna when I got back!
Make a comment!
1 April 2010 - Thursday
Work: Check. The guy who was out on paternity leave
is back, so once again problems can be solved correctly, instead of by
me.
Visual Entertainments: Finished the third disc of
Noein. Look, more doom!
Cats:
Miau! Also, Miau!
Make a comment!
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