Previously, in Trip's Life...
31 March 2012 - Saturday
Today we brunched with Ja Baby, played Dave's Academy of Science game,
took Ja Baby to the park without her parents (and returned her home almost
entirely intact), and caused Ken to explode in a fit of
San-Diego-style-burrito making (carne asada, pico de gallo, guacamole,
salsa, no rice or beans or any of that wimpy San Francisco stuff).
The PCs in Dave's game successfully escaped the Mysterious Underground
Labyrinth of Mysterious Mystery with some insights and a seemly number of
ghosts, but now will discover the shape of their doom.
Marith and Dave and I did not eat Ja Baby or sell her to goblins or
anything, even though Ken left her with us at the park while he
went to buy San-Diego-style-burrito ingredients. Eventually it rained and
we had to take her back inside, though.
Ayse played about 256929341 hours of Dungeon
Raid on my iPad. Dave kept saying we were doing it wrong, and once he
got it on his phone he was able to keep playing pretty much forever, so I
guess we are.
None of this was anything like preparing D&D for tomorrow.
Ghirardelli is down to one gooshymedicine per day, but still gets the
horrible squirting twice a day. He is playing chase again, though, and
tussling with Marmalade!
Make a comment!
30 March 2012 - Friday
Yay! I'm not on call!
I picked up Eyes to See (Joseph Nassise) at the library
because it had a blurb by Seanan McGuire, but although it started off
interesting, it declined pretty steeply in quality. The (first-person)
sections from the main character's PoV were pretty good, but the female
lead was pretty clichéd and her (third-person) sections were not
even terribly well-written. And, as the book went along, the genre devolved
into Angel-esque action/adventure with demons just hanging
around.
I think it's supposed to tie in with Nassise's previous series, so
perhaps I'm not really the target reader, but on the other hand, he
doesn't have the excuse of it being his first book.
Ghirardelli still flees when he sees me coming with the Squirter of
Oppression, because I am horrible. :(
Make a comment!
29 March 2012 - Thursday
The Serpent Sea (Martha Wells) is the sequel to the
The Cloud Roads, in which more parts of the fantastic world
are visited. This one feels a little more like standard fantasy because
it has cities with the kinds of social structures we're used to
(although not the kind of physical structure we're used to), and
recognizable wizards. Also, this world seems to have no scaling laws.
- Katanagatari 6: Those ninjas are dropping like flies
(and not just the Insect Squad, either). I wasn't expecting next
episode's encounter until much later in the show, though.
- Penguindrum 7: Just how many "Project M"s are there,
anyway?
- Red Garden 13-14: Yay Rose! Boo Hervé!
- Madoka Magica
10 9: The amazingness of
Homura's power was a little lessened by having seen it in the flashback
episode that we watched out of order, but she is still pretty awesome.
Kyubei, on the other hand, is still a lying little space weasel. (Or
maybe a lying little extradimensional weasel.)
Ghirardelli is disdainful of the medicinal treat when I offer it to
him by hand, but if he's eating kibble and I put in the bowl, he'll nom
it down. Also, either I'm getting better at feeding him the antibiotic juice,
or he's getting more resigned to it, since he didn't try to hork it back
up either time today.
Make a comment!
28 March 2012 - Wednesday
Ghirardelli knows what the approach of the Evil Throat-Squirter Thing
means, but I can't let him escape. It really is for his own good
(probably). Poor kitty!
Now that we know the shape of Ghirardelli's doom, I can go to work
and beat Cow Orker A at foosball.
When I got home, my internet was mysteriously working. Support said
there had been an outage, which was news to me, but whatever.
I did not manage to use this internet to do anything productive.
Make a comment!
27 March 2012 - Tuesday
This has not been an epically bad day, but it wuz not so grate.
Ghirardelli was not in the heated room when I got up, and he did not
zoom to devour his gooshyfoods. I carried him from where he was being a
fuzzy lump to the kitchen, but he remained a fuzzy lump and turned his
nose up at the gooshyfood, so I decided to work from home and keep an
eye on him.
Unfortunately, working from home requires a network connection, and
mine went out sometime while I was sleeping. As far as I can tell from
the diagnostics available to me, everything is fine on my end, it's just
that the router has no PPPoE server to talk to. Aeriodisconnect was really
not very helpful. Changing email addresses would be a huge pain at this
point, but maybe I could ditch my DSL in favor of a more reliable
provider and just keep the shell account? Or maybe I should bite the
bullet, get my own domain, and change everything I'm signed up for on
the intertubes.
The USB cellular modem IT issued me sometime last year doesn't work.
It has never worked for me, and the interwub suggests that it has never
worked reliably for anyone. Bah!
Fortunately, someone nearby had an open wireless network (with a
fairly hippyish name, so hopefully it was meant to be open) and I used
a little of that to connect to work and do a small amount of
productivity. I would like to contact the person whose network it is and
thank them, but there doesn't seem to be a reasonable way to do that.
Ghirardelli stayed sitting on the bed, with no interest in water or
gooshyfood when I brought it to him, and didn't even tussle with Aspen
when she curled up by him, so I called
the vet and they said to
bring him in right away. He was not happy about being stuffed into the
small carrier and then lugged outside through the wind and rain with
giant loud moving things, but it's only like a mile so he was not really
too oppressed.
Once we pried Ghirardelli out of the carrier, he totally charmed the
vet-techs! He got smooches and everything! And he was very brave about
being irradiated and stung in the neck and everything, because he is a
cat of high quality. However, he is also a cat with bronchitis, so he
has medicine. I failed to pick up the more horrible kind, so I had to go
back to get it, but now he can be thoroughly oppressed with yucky goop
and only slightly mollified with chewy bits.
Also, he must receive many hugs.
No Lucifer, since Ken
is out of town, and no bonus live-action Sailor Moon because
Ayse is going to sleep! Like a sleeping thing!
sick fluffy cat! by marith (Thu Mar 29 08:50:00 2012)
Poor Ghiradelli and poor you! It sounds like your day yesterday was even less fun than mine.
Re: sick fluffy cat by Trip (Thu Mar 29 10:05:43 2012)
Ghirardelli had sickness and cold and the land of oppression and terrible medicine, but at least he was properly admired!
Make a comment!
26 March 2012 - Monday
Nobody likes Mondays, not even other Mondays.
I didn't find the stories in The Square Root of Man as
strong as the other William Tenn collections I've read. Also... well, it
was the past, they had different notions of gender roles and
relations.
So many cats of fliffiness!
Make a comment!
25 March 2012 - Sunday
When I started the second volume of Gate 7 (CLAMP), I had
no idea what was going on, so I went back and reread the first volume. It
only helped a little, because there are about eight thousand characters,
most of whom have at least two names, and many of whom are related so
those names are very similar. They're names of Japanese historical
personages, so presumably CLAMP's original readers were able to keep them
all straight, but I am confused. It's too bad, because the artwork is very
pretty.
The back cover blurb claims Hana is a girl, but the text makes it
clear that that's not clear. Apparently the art of writing back cover
blurbs has not advanced since the days of Wish.
With Fate Conspire (Marie Brennan) is apparently part of a
series, although it was not clear until the author's note at the end.
Structurally it works fine on its own; there are some things that are
not fully explained until near the end, but that's because at least two
of the viewpoint characters have had their memories tampered with. Maybe
I would have cared more about the characters if I had read the previous
books, but it's not like I gave them the Eight Deadly Words. Some parts
of the ending would have also have benefited from seeing how things got
to be the way they were, but other parts would probably have seemed kind
of DXM no matter what.
I still have both Dominion
and Dungeon
Raid on my iPad, so not much got done today.
While I was sitting on the couch reading, I got snuggles from
both Marmalade and Ghirardelli!
Dungeon Raid by Jeremy (Thu Mar 29 06:44:32 2012)
Augh dammit!
Re: Dungeon Raid by Trip (Thu Mar 29 07:05:27 2012)
Sorry about that!
Make a comment!
24 March 2012 - Saturday
Aspen and Ghirardelli slept on either side of my legs, trapping me
for hours!
Judging by the first omnibus, Young Miss Holmes (Kaoru
Shintani) is very silly. I'd say it probably causes heart attacks in
serious Holmes fans (if any are left living after the recent movies), but
at least for the cases I recognize, Sherlock Holmes does mostly solve them.
His 10-year-old niece just also solves them.
Also, random Dance in the Vampire Bund crossover.
Today was a day of feasting! In the morning, plentiful dim sum at
Fu Lam Mum, and we
were there when they opened so it was all fresh and hot.
In the evening,
Amarin Thai Cuisine
until it was coming out our ears. Even Dave ate huge amounts, which he
rarely does.
By the omens, this will be a year of plenty!
Ja Baby gave me a birthday card! It has stickers with tigers and
pandas, and her signature, and lots of orange coloring because Marmalade
is orange!
I'm sure it happens all the time in tournaments and other high-level
play, but this is the first time I've seen a Dominion score break
100. We bought out almost all the victory point cards, including the ones
from Prosperity,
and only split them three ways, so Ken ended up with 102 points.
Ayse played
Dungeon Raid
extensively, because it is addictive. It's probably not enough to make
her buy an iPad, though.
In Lucifer episode
14, the doom veers back in the direction of Kang not getting anywhere. It's
hard being Kang.
Make a comment!
23 March 2012 - Friday
I burned out on Dominion
for the moment, but I still can't accomplish anything because Dungeon
Raid is surprisingly addictive, given how nonbrainful it is.
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
22 March 2012 - Thursday
I don't remember how I got there, but I was thinking about the stories
of Vietnam veterans being spit on when they got of the plane back in the
US. I haven't researched it extensively, but my understanding is that
although many veterans have vivid memories of this happening, no one else
does, and there are no film or tape records of any such thing. This is
perfectly consistent with what we know about how memory works (that is, not
much different than the way imagination works); everyone's life is built on
that same shifting sand, and everyone's always has been.
In the near future, it's going to be possible to record everything you
see, say, or hear, and retrieve specific incidents from your lifelog. Not
too many Apple product cycles after that, it's going to be trivial to do
so, and probably enabled by default. What will having reliable memory
do to the human psyche, which has evolving having the past be completely
malleable?
"Mistakes were made, but not by me—"
"Actually, if you check the timestamp I just sent you, you'll see that
you did make that mistake, and then called Bob an idiot when he
suggested a better alternative."
"..."
- Katanagatari 5: I guess Shichika really is that
oblivious. Also, those eyes remind me way too much of Alien
Nine and Oh! Edo Rocket.
- Red Garden 12: Don't worry, dude, Hervé is
totally not up to anything, and you're totally not about to monster out.
- Penguindrum 5-6: Ah hah, that's what they're after! And
that's why Ringo is so warped. But where did it come from in the first
place?
- Madoka Magica
9 10: Oops. But that
explains so much!
I still cannot accomplish things, because there is
Dominion
on my iPad.
Okay, I can accomplish cat-fuzzling, but that's a pretty basic
requirement, only slightly more important than breathing.
Make a comment!
21 March 2012 - Wednesday
Apparently it's Me-Day. I should figure out how to log in to Facebook
and reply to all the well-wishers before I crumble into complete
decrepitude.
Not only did I log into Facebook, I even figured out how to clean out the all people I added to my friends list for
stupid games way back when. But it took up all the time I was going to
use to buy indie games for my iPad. I guess I'll have to spend money
some other day.
I always feel so bad when I have to dislodge Marmalade from his
purrbucketing spot so I can get something done!
Make a comment!
20 March 2012 - Tuesday
I'm almost certain this would be easier if the customer would upgrade
to the latest version. But I don't think they ever will.
No Lucifer for us,
because we have no Mariths, but there was conversation and pasta with
broccoli raab and ricotta salata(sp?).
Also, walking.
It looks like volume 19 is the end of CLAMP's xxxHolic. It's
not what you'd call climactic, but I think it does fit the way the
series has been winding down since [REDACTED] a few volumes back. It's
also not that happy of an ending for fans of [REDACTED], but it would be
wrong for it to be.
Twelve paws!
life, the universe, and tripchan by marith (Thu Mar 22 09:05:46 2012)
You are 42 now, right? Happy birthday! Neener!
Re: life, the universe, and tripchan by Trip (Thu Mar 22 11:10:38 2012)
It's 2012, so I guess I must be!
This is older than I have ever been before!
Make a comment!
19 March 2012 - Monday
Someday we're going to have to make customers actually open incidents
to receive support.
Tonight's Gravity Beast will be played by Marmalade O Cat.
Make a comment!
18 March 2012 - Sunday
One question from a customer, but he didn't wig out, possibly
because he's on vacation.
I tried to do some python coding to figure out the shortest way to
get from a 4-peak skill pyramid to a 5-peak, but it never really worked
right, even after I rewrote it from scratch. However, it seems to
confirm that, if you add each skill point to the pyramid as you get it,
it takes at least 24 skill points to push the peak to 5. If you can save
them up to spend in batches, then of course you can do it with only 15.
Ghirardelli has many admirable qualities, but I don't think he has much
of a future in pair programming.
Raven Calls is the 8936459234th in the "Walker Papers"
series by internationally acclaimed author C E Murphy (now with new
author photo!) and may wrap up the Irish part of the overall plot
— just in time for the Native American part to destroy Jo's
life! Again.
I cannot accomplish things. There is
Dominion
on my iPad.
Make a comment!
17 March 2012 - Saturday
No on-call trauma today!
Marith has found a list of the ways in which I fall
short as a GM!
I am also terrible as a player, but we did manage to play Dave's new
Academy of Science game. Our characters are exploring a mysterious
underground ruin, because there is no Go-Home Club, but seem to be doing
okay at uncovering its secrets. They will probably be shocked and
appalled to discover that the Academy has been disestablished or maybe
just destoryed while they were doing fieldwork.
FATE seems to work okay, although we need to break people of the
habit of reporting only their dice rolls and not their actual
results.
The best WordDot
output today: tie between "ambulant implement" and "swashbuckling
analysis".
It is St Patrick's Day, so we pretended to be Irish and ate a corned
beef as big as our head (okay, as big as Ja Baby's head) with cabbage
and potatoes and more potatoes and bangers ("we feast upon the sausages
of our oppressors!") until we became extremely round.
Aime is almost as cute as my small cute white cat!
Make a comment!
16 March 2012 - Friday
But I don't want to be on call!
The cats are unsympathetic to my plight, as it seems unlikely to
interfere with gooshyfood breakfast.
Make a comment!
15 March 2012 - Thursday
Ayse has discovered Peer-to-Peer
Lasagna. It's like the future!
The Rise of the Iron Moon is the third in Stephen Hunt's
steampunk series, and it's a cool setting and all, but something about the
writing leaves me cold. Maybe the Show/Tell balance is off.
The leftovers we bequeathed to Dave have added up to the point where
he made us beef stew with a butternut squash base. It was pretty
good!
- Katanagatari 4: That was a pretty good sword-collecting
fight (or so I hear). My prediction: <rot13>Fuvpuvxn'f Arr-fna vf
gur gjrysgu, be znlor guvegrragu, Cresrpgrq Qrivnag
Oynqr.</rot13>
- Red Garden 9-11: Lula's story sounds doomed enough that
might be the truth.
- Madoka Magica 8: It was pretty obvious that was going
to happen from at least the beginning of this episode, but it shows
that my suspicions are entirely well-founded. And, with only four
episodes left, <rot13>Znqbxn vf fgvyy abg n zntvpny
tvey</rot13>!
Aspen rolled over to expose her fluffy undercattage while playing
with a toy! Then Ghirardelli flopped down next to her and
rolled over too! So cute! Then there was tussling, which was also
cute!
Make a comment!
14 March 2012 - Wednesday
The new guy in Engineering is pretty good at foosball, but as long as
I side with Engineering Manager I, the safe money is on us.
Psyren (Toshiaki Iwashiro) looks like pretty standard
phone-based interdimensional travel and super-powered games shounen.
Maybe I'm holding out hope that the female lead will remain tsun and not
become dere.
In only three books, the protagonist of Demon Song (Cat
Adams) has escalated to saving the entire world with vastly powerful
magical artifacts that only the special few can use, and at the end she's
being dragged away for something even more desperate. I'm not sure how much
longer this series can continue without becoming excessively epic.
Now we shall sing the Giant-Fluffy-Cat-Brushing Song!
Make a comment!
13 March 2012 - Tuesday
Cow Orker M is back, but he's been tapped for a surprise special
project so I can't make him do all the work.
We did not get the full pre-Columbian effect since Ken ran out of
masa tortillas, but black beans cooked in duck fat make pretty good
burritos. I wonder if they had cheese? Llamas are mammals, right?
Is someone's plan starting to break down? Or is this exactly how it's
supposed to go? It's only episode 13 of Lucifer, so there's plenty
of time for exploding.
Geez, reporter guy, that was pretty harsh.
When I get home at 935612905 o'clock, I cannot adore the cats as much
as they deserve! (Arguably, I never adore them as much as they
deserve.)
Make a comment!
12 March 2012 - Monday
Cow Orker M is still on vacation, and Cow Orker A is at training.
Fortunately the customers are not too rowdy, and Promised Cow Orker G
has finally arrived.
Killing Rites is the fourth and most recent book in M L N
Hanover's "Black Sun's Daughter" series, in which the heroine becomes even
more morally conflicted but levels up anyway. It's not as dark as the
previous book, but it does end on a cliff-hanger.
I cannot find information about when the fifth book will come out. This
series better not get truncated because readers suck like Connolly's
"Twenty Palaces" did!
I meant to do all sorts of useful things tonight, but ended up not
doing much of anything except brushing Ghirardelli within an inch of his
life.
Make a comment!
11 March 2012 - Sunday
The manga adaptation of Soulless (by the original author,
Gail Carriger, and a mysterious entity know only as Rem) is labelled volume
1, but it seems to cover the entire book and maybe some bits from other
books. This means it leaves out a lot, and I'm not sure anyone who hadn't
read the book would know what was going on, but maybe exposition is not
required. There are fabulous vampires, Scottish werewolves, and people
getting hit with umbrellas, and the main character shows 847 times as much
cleavage as anyone else in the book.
Not being on call fails to save me yet again.
Amazingly, everyone remembered the DST transition and arrived at
brunch and gaming at the same time! Except Earl, but he's not even in
the state, so he didn't arrive at gaming at all. His character was
sorely missed, not for her sparkling personality and unique approach to
morality but because a fight where the enemy gets bonuses based on their
position is a pain without a controller. However, it takes a whole lot
of monsters of similar level to threaten a PC group, and there just
weren't that many of them.
Fights with gimmicks seem to go over well. Monsters with -33%
hitpoints and +50% damage are also adding to the fun, since individual
attacks can now make a significant difference to the fight on either
side.
I'd like to think that an NPC having a silver demon-binding nail
driven through their heart is kind of creepy, but when the NPC is a
female minotaur in a low-cut kimono, there is no way to describe it that
does not lower the tone of the game.
Hello, very opaque cats! It's just not the same standing on the
computer desk when I'm away, is it?
Make a comment!
10 March 2012 - Saturday
Somehow, not being on call doesn't keep me from getting called.
Volume 3 of Ouoku (Fumi Yoshinaga) concludes the story of
the first female shogun and the transformation of the shogun's harem into
the state we see in the first volume, with only a few people along the way
murdered by Buddhist priests.
There are at least three more volumes, which
Link+ will deliver to me in due
course.
I spent most of the day doinking with D&D stats, to little effect.
Anything that doesn't get used tomorrow will probably get changed by next
fortnight anyway.
Poor Aspen! I was home to oppress her almost all day!
Make a comment!
9 March 2012 - Friday
The first two books of the series were pretty good, but
Vicious Grace (M L N Hanover) is where the doom starts
raining down on the PCs and washing out the underpinnings of their world.
The climax is pretty dark and harrowing, although it will obviously
haunt some characters longer than others.
I don't know if it will be addressed explicitly, but it seems to me that
in this universe, <rot13>gur uhzna fbhy vf whfg n fcrpvrf bs
e-fgengrtl evqre</rot13>.
Due to lack of organization, we only managed to watch one episode of the
live-action Sailor Moon tonight (go Sailor Jupiter!), but we
did have abundant sushi from Hanamaru.
Today's WordDot
results: "iridescent homework", "resonant feather", and "brackish
violence".
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
8 March 2012 - Thursday
Volume 2 of Ouoku (Fumi Yoshinaga) is backstory, about the
early days of the conditions in volume 1, and the first female shogun
and her extremely annoying old lady.
I figured out the twist in Darker Angels (second of the
"Black Sun's Daughter" books, by M L N Hanover) pretty early on, but I
don't blame the characters for not getting it, since I had the advantage of
not being beaten up by possibly-not-evil extradimensional parasites.
House of Ashes is allegedly a novella that accompanies the
Mistborn
Adventure Game, but is more like a bunch of vignettes. None of the
people who wrote it (Shivam Bhatt, Logan Bonner, David Hill, Will
Hindmarch, Jeremy Keller, Filamena Young) is Brandon Sanderson, but it's
okay anyway, and possibly even like what PCs will do..
Gnomes ate the Red Garden disc. Maybe they'll cough it
up by next week.
Marith tried to adventurously order something new from
First Wok, but it turned out
to be full of bell peppers. I picked out some of the veggies but then I
encountered a stratum that was pure shredded pork, so we gave it to
Dave.
- Penguindrum 3-4: "Ringo" is Japanese for "apple". This
may be significant.
- Madoka Magica 6-7: I think the phrase they're looking
for is "rendered into a more durable form". And now we know what
Kyubei eats, but it's not very reassuring. <rot13>Zber guna
unysjnl guebhtu gur frevrf naq Znqbxn vf fgvyy abg n zntvpny
tvey!</rot13>
- Katanagatari 3: That was very sad, but also very
samurai-like, and I'm pretty sure that's what she was looking for
anyway. Also, is it more virtuous to serve a good lord, or one with a
crazy alien eye?
Cat Report: Miau! Miau! Miau!
Make a comment!
7 March 2012 - Wednesday
I triumphed at foosball again. Muahahahahaha.
Today, I read games on my iPad.
Lately (by which I mean this century) there have been several games that
try to do old-school swords-and-sorcery fantasy rather than the new-fangled
high fantasy of D&D. Barbarians
of Lemuria does not strike me as a particularly distinguished example
of the genre, but I suppose it might hit someone's nostalgia buttons.
Especially if he were nostalgic for a time when fantasy was not written by,
for, or about women.
Escape
from Tentacle City is a small RPG by Willow Palecek (the same person
who did Awesome
Adventures). Like Fiasco, it is not a game
that rewards trying to nurture and protect your character. At most 1/N of
the characters are going to survive, so you might as well go out
entertainingly. Bonus points for insisting that all characters not be rich
white people, but I'm not sure about the advice to enthusiastically embrace
stereotypes.
EABAlite is
an appetizer for EABA,
Greg Porter's generic system. It looks pretty generic (a little like D6), but
the interesting part, the powers system, is only barely alluded to
here.
I think I read EABA a long time ago, but found it
much more confusing than I find this. Possibly because the powers system
isn't involved here.
Look at the bounty of gooshyfood I have brought to you, my cats! You
will feast upon it for weeks! ("What's a week? Why is the gooshyfood in
these hard things where we can't get to it? Can we borrow your opposable
thumb? We'll give it back, honest!")
Make a comment!
6 March 2012 - Tuesday
according to the Big List of Books, I've
read the first volume of Ouoku (Fumi Yoshinaga) before, but I
didn't remember anything except the setup, which is that a plague with a
fatality rate of 75% or more among young men breaks out in Edo-era Japan,
which leads in due course to the country being run by women while men are
valued primarily for their reproductive capacity. This volume is a story of
intrigue in the (female) shogun's harem (of cute guys), but seems to be
pretty much over by the end. Maybe it will be one short story per
volume?
Today, Aquarium Expedition with
Ayse and Ja Baby!
On the way up, many Ja Baby tunes! On the way down, many repititions
of a few Ja Baby tunes! In between, fish! And more fish! And giant white
alligator! Also, starfish and sea urchins to pet, giraffe statues, tiny
eels that pop up from the ground, dancing amphibian,
small octopus,
African noises, projected elephants, Jungle Sphere with parrots and
butterflies and humidity, sharks and stingrays, a glass-roofed tunnel
beneath the flooded bottom of the Jungle Sphere with assorted large fish
swimming over it, disco jellyfish, upside-down photosymbiothetic
jellyfish, electric eels, and vegetarian spring rolls!
I took some pictures, but most of the exhibits had no-camera signs
(probably they really meant no flashes, but...) and the pictures I did
take didn't turn out very well, so you're probably better off going to
the website to see what these things look like.
All the excitement was over by the time I got in to work, so I felt
very clever. Also, I triumphed at foosball.
Unclean Spirits (M L N Hanover, who is secretly Daniel
Abraham) is pretty good urban fantasy. It has a coherent explanation for
horrible monsters, plans that don't actually succeed, and a heroine who
gets dropped into things without having a clue.
Lucifer episode 12
tightens the nooses
on many of the characters, but only one major character actually gets
done in. It's really not clear how that could have been set up, though.
Make a comment!
5 March 2012 - Monday
Today I noticed some graffiti on the bench at the bus stop:
"HΔ5TΣR". This is the very definition of a bad sign.
Make a comment!
4 March 2012 - Sunday
Bokurano vol 5 does in fact have even more doom. I'm not
sure what the motivation behind the doom is, but we have only a finite
number of volumes to find out.
Surprise bonus socialization! Mike's family is off doing something, so
he brought board games to Ken and Ayse's place and taught Ken how to crush
us at Settlers
of America[*] while Ja Baby failed utterly to nap. It's a strange
variant of Settlers, with a fixed map, semi-fixed production numbers, and
designated build sites. All the starting sites are east of the Mississippi,
but some of the hexes there have (randomly-drawn) number chits that get
moved to empty hexes out west when someone builds there, leaving the
eastern hexes productionless. In the production phase, everyone who gets no
resources gets one gold (except on 7s, naturally), which is half of any
resource and also necessary during the endgame. Settling requires only
building a settler unit and spending grain to move it to a city site, but
you still have to build railroads so that you can deliver tokens to other
people's cities and thus win. We let Ken suddenly leap into the rail phase
and deliver 6 of his 9 tokens in one turn, but clearly everyone should be
building trains and delivering tokens as they become available (you start
with one token and another one is released into the pool every time you
build a city, and all of them have to be delivered to win).
[*] Yes, I know it should actually be called "Invaders of America",
but it would be harder to look up if I referred to it that way.
Then Ken crushed us at Dominion again, this
time while holding Ja Baby on his lap.
Useful things I did: grocery shopping, laundry, replacing the toilet
seat.
Not so useful things I did: losing a Netflix envelope. Perhaps this
is a sign that I really do need to throw away everything.
The tummy of a cat who has been lounging on fresh laundry all evening
is exceptionally warm and fluffy.
Make a comment!
3 March 2012 - Saturday
I've finished rereading Bokurano (Mohiro Kitoh, also known
for Shadow Star) up through volume 4, so that I can read
volume 5. I often say that manga is full of doom, but compared to this,
most doom is a paltry inconvenience.
I guess technically I didn't social all day, but it was like
eleven hours, which is a lot of socialling. Activities included flinging Ja
Baby into the air, eating brunch, finishing up characters for Dave's
Academy of Science game, taking Ja Baby to the library, eating (proper
Midwest-style) chili, and playing Dominion.
I am somewhat enthused to play Academy of Science, which makes it sad
that we will only get to play for a couple of hours every fortnight.
I should move my cat pictures to my iPad, so Julia can admire them on
a grander scale!
Make a comment!
2 March 2012 - Friday
Polly and the Pirates vol 2 (Ted Naifeh, Robbi Rodriguez)
is not as swell as volume 1 because it is not as new. But it has
piratical action and derring-do.
Chthonian
Stars is somewhere between Eclipse Phase and
CthulhuTech, but
really not as well done as either. Traveller TL 8 is no
longer a plausible near future (even leaving out the attempt to make all
interplanetary travel take one week), the writing is not very good, and the
monsters and cultists are not evocative enough.
If done better, it could be a perfectly fine game of SF horror, but as
it is, I'd go with Eclipse Phase.
(What do you mean, "Not Cthulhoid enough"? Are you trying to claim the
Pandora Gates are NOT manifestations of Yog-Sothoth?)
A History of the World in 100 Objects is by Neil MacGregor,
director of the British Museum, so it has many excellent historical
objects, from hand axes and cuneiform tablets through suffragette-defaced
pennies and credit cards. One can argue about whether it's truly
representative of the whole world, but it certainly does a better job than
most.
It looks like the original radio programs, everything in the book, and a
bunch more, is on the BBC website.
Paw Count: Twelve!
Make a comment!
1 March 2012 - Thursday
I expect it would take many more nights of going to bed not late to
have any effect, and that doesn't seem likely to happen any time
soon.
I don't seem to be able to pull off my one good foosball move any more.
I'm not sure if I'm overthinking it, or if defenses are just getting
better.
- Red Garden 8: That seems to have been a smart move on
Lula's part, regardless of whether it was true. Perhaps the girls'
morale will even improve to the point where they realize that Claire
doesn't need to worry about poverty because Rachel could fund her
entire life out of her lipstick budget.
- Penguindrum 1-2: Huh. That's almost FLCL
levels of weirdness. But definitely Ikuhara. And clever use of silly
supernatural powers!
- Madoka Magica 5: So... what does Kyubei eat?
<rot13>Nyzbfg unysjnl guebhtu gur fubj, naq Znqbxn fgvyy vfa'g n
zntvpny tvey.</rot13>
- Katanagatari 2: Despite Togame's self-aggrandizement,
Shichika may still be the smart one. Or maybe it just seems that way
because of the high ratio of talking to fighting.
Today, the cats get Old Cat food, since Marmalade and Ghirardelli are
like ten, and even Aspen is probably about five. I am pretty sure it
won't make any detectable difference, but if it helps them continue to
grow older, I won't complain.
Make a comment!
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