Previously, in Trip's Life...
31 October 2012 - Wednesday
HAPPY HAPPY ADAM-DAY!!
I tried to go to Monkeycatland to play Halloween games with Ayse and Ken
and Dave, but was not very successful because the bag full of games stayed
at the train station while I tried to fight through 589346923452135 crazed
sports fans to get to San Jose. I did eventually get to San Jose, and then
even to Monkeycatland (after embarrassingly going the wrong way on the
light rail), and we ate tasty stir-fry and played Dominion before I had
to scuttle home, but it was not the same. I hope we never want to play any
of those games again.
I had forgotten most of the second Tiffany Aching book, A Hat Full
of Sky, until I reread it, so it's a good thing I did!
So many paws!
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30 October 2012 - Tuesday
Work wants me to go to China in January to teach people stuff. I guess I
better figure out how to get a passport. It probably involves a deep pit
full of paperwork.
Simon West-Bulford apparently got his start writing for video games, and
that's about the level of SF that The Soul Consortium is.
Permeable Borders is a collection of Nina Kiriki Hoffman's
short stories, which are mostly modern fantasy of the type she is known
for. Some of them were interesting, but none of them amazed me.
Secondary worlds with magic are usually either fairly simple societies
with magic integrated to various degrees (examples far too numerous to
mention), or reflections of the present day with all mod-cons replaced by
very close magical equivalents (Operation Chaos, The
Case of the Toxic Spell Dump). Only rarely do we see a fantasy
setting with a society that is as complex and advanced as ours but not
ours.
Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead is a fine example of
the subgenre, and a murder mystery on a large scale (with bonus
zombies).
I tried to read the fourth "Tiffany Aching" book, but after I started
I decide that I didn't remember enough about the third one and would
have to reread it. This turned out to be a recursive process, but
eventually I got to the first one, The Wee Free Men, and
decided I did not need to reread all the previous Witches books (which I
probably don't even own).
Go Frying-Pan Lass!
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Passports by Carl (Wed Nov 7 23:35:26 2012)
If you want a US Passport by January you need to start on that NOW, and probably pay for expedited service (well worth it). See http://travel.state.gov/
You may also need a visa for China, but you'll likely need your passport first.
Many places can take passport photos; like US Post Offices, or Mailbox Etc.
If you're still a Canadian, then I have no idea. I think all countries just let Canadians wander freely about because they're so friendly and such. I may be wrong.
Re: Passports by Trip (Thu Nov 8 14:28:49 2012)
Apparently I am probably entitled to a US passport (complete with conductive case to slow down people trying to clone the RFID), but have to produce a bunch of documentation to prove it. Blah.
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29 October 2012 - Monday
Oh look, it's another Monday. At least Boss G is back from the
conference, although Cow Orker M is still out on medical leave.
This Monday contains cats!
Make a comment!
28 October 2012 - Sunday
Work tried to draft me, but I was not near a computer with VPN, so
neener!
Make-up Diaspora Effect after last week's microbe-induced failure!
This session was almost entirely one big action scene, or maybe two
parallel action scenes with intercutting.
In one track, Aylira (who had been stashed on the ship while Adam was
out last session), first tried to get the ship to take off by phoning in
fake bomb threats, and then tried to get it to crash into the Infernal
Device by grabbing the pilot and flying out through the bridge windows.
The rest of the PCs, after defeating Doctor Prime and its Net Nurses,
snuck through the salt-crystal forest to the control room and burst in
through the old drill shaft just as Mays was firing up/becoming the
suntap.
(Jeremy had to shuttle kids, so Norbert snuck away in the display of
unnatural biotics and locked himself in Mays's office full of interesting
notes and relics. This put a pass value of 4 and the aspect "Damn you,
Norbert" on the door, which foiled at least two people.)
There was a big fight in the control room, which Harnu Ers contributed
to by tearing apart control consoles with his bare waldos and gooping the
cyborg bug in the face, but was mostly won by Litra hacking things and
Siless shooting the bug's head off (which slowed it down a fair bit). Up in
the Plasma Storm of Death, Aylira got her suit shot full of holes but was
able to keep from dying by use of biotics and did eventually manage to talk
the secondary pilot into flying into the ground, although not into the
suntap machinery. She took cover from the hostile environment by joining
the fight inside, which helped a lot.
Eventually Mays tried to shut down the suntap operations so she could
concentrate on crushing the PCs even though it meant delaying the Great
Work by half a local year, but they trashed the place so thoroughly that
there was no hope and she had a nervous breakdown. (That seems to happen a
lot around this team.)
The Dark Mistress was trashed, but with the suntap not
running, the Anti-Cyclonic Storm of Inevitable Rectification
was able to pick up the survivors and geth black boxes and flee back to
Citadel where they could be debriefed by Top Sophonts.
Norbert finally got his hands on the rotating datastore, but the rest of
the team insisted on strict precautions to keep him from becoming a slave
of the Old Machines. It was tricky, but they did manage to see most of the
story of how the densorans (who I pictured as the flat-neck hammer-head guy
from Star Wars but were actually land-going
Opabina-type critters) met their doom. As r-strategists, they had
no problem handing over a bunch of offspring to the walking skyscrapers
from outer space in exchange for knowledge, but when their bright and
terrible cyborg children returned from the stars and overthrew them, it
seemed like less of a good bargain.
Next session, onward to the planet where all this went down, and
where Mays got her creepy alien kit for the suntap.
I got my panda up to level 9 before the cats demanded my
servitude.
Make a comment!
27 October 2012 - Saturday
Today I did a bunch of nothing in particular, but I did it in San
Jose. We tried to play
Small World Realms
but foundered on a lack of a lack of other things that needed doing and
played
Dominion instead.
Ken carved pumpkins to Ja Baby's order. Ayse roasted pumpkin seeds and
gestated. We ordered pizza that was fancy enough to suit Marith.
Dave's Mac-to-TV converter failed us, but Marith did have one of his
thumb drives to give back to him if she ever remembered, and the Blu-Ray
player has a USB port.
- Nodame Cantabile OAV: Foundered on the lack of OGG
audio support in the Blu-Ray player. We had subtitles, but watching
this series without audio seems kind of pointless.
- Mouretsu Pirates 8-9: This remains very silly, now with
additional space princesses and the underworld skill spoken of in
hushed whispers as "faking attendance".
- UN-GO 3: A mystery that takes more than one episode to
resolve! I wonder if Inga's trick will work on this character?
- Welcome to the NHK 17-18: I'd say she's good, but
it's not like they're able to put up much resistance.
My cats show no signs of dying! Good work, cats! Keep it up!
Make a comment!
26 October 2012 - Friday
I have such a poor work ethic that I left an hour early! I am such a
wild man that I used the extra time to do laundry.
At least I am not officially on-call this weekend.
Capes,
Cowls and Villains Foul explicitly sets out to recreate the
continuity-free glory of old-fashioned superhero comics. There is more
than a bit of "if you've been playing other superhero games you've only
been counting points", but in fact the powers system, while pretty
free-form, is at least as structured as the
new Marvel and more so than ICONS.
I have no moral high ground here, but it does bother me that
two of the female example characters have "Cleavage Stun" as a power
while none of the male characters have anything similar.
Mermaid
Adventures is a very small and simple game for young players who want
to be mermaids. It is not actually the Disney Little Mermaid,
but it could be.
Volume 5 of Mardock Scramble (Tow Ubukata, Yoshitoki Oima)
is the Explain Gambling volume. The $10M-poker-chips plot still makes no
sense.
Did you know my apartment is full of cats?
Mermaids by Carl (Wed Nov 7 23:41:46 2012)
Perhaps Mermaid Adventures could be combined with Magical Land of Yeld: Mermaid Hunters in which a brain, a tomboy, and a dog go through a mysterious door to bop mermaids on the head and put them in a net.
Re: Mermaids by Trip (Tue Nov 13 03:18:40 2012)
A game that is only available on paper?! What do they think this is, the 20th century?
Make a comment!
25 October 2012 - Thursday
Cow Orker M is out of the hospital, but still on various drugs and not
really up to braining. Fortunately the customers were not too unruly
today.
Into the
Cosmos is a book of more pregen PCs, more NPCs, more spaceships, and a
lot more adventure seeds for Cosmic Patrol. I
still want to be enthused about this game, but it's still too goofy and
incoherent. Maybe I wasn't exposed to serials at a young enough age or
something.
The cats would hear nothing of my putting my paws on the little
squares and staring at the glowy rectangle, so I sat on the couch and
watched the glowy cube (which they can at least sit on) while it showed
me the first couple of episodes of Kaze no Stigma. It
doesn't create its own genre, but so far it's not bad. The male lead is
both reasonably embittered by his tragic past and moving beyond it to
become cool in his own right.
Also I ate enough goat cheese to ...cheese a goat? A lot, anyway. It
was yummy.
Make a comment!
24 October 2012 - Wednesday
Having two people teach the same thing really doesn't work very well,
but may be unavoidable.
Twelve very fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
23 October 2012 - Tuesday
HAPPY HAPPY AYSE-DAY!!
Braining is hard. Let's photosynthesize.
The setting book and rulebook beta downloads for Tenra Bansho
Zero were mislabeled, so I ended up reading the rules first, but that's
okay. There were setting elements mentioned that I wanted to know more
about, but there was enough context that I didn't have to stop. It's
hyper-Asian action with samurai transformations, beautiful androids,
creepy Shinto Illuminati, and underaged mecha pilots; no need to get
bogged down in the details!
The system for determining whether you succeed at doing something is
pretty generic: roll d6s equal to your stat, ones that don't exceed your
skill count as successes. There are some interesting bits in the combat
system, though (some of which I like because I thought of them
independently but never did anything with because/therefore I suck).
The defender and attacker both roll, but in melee combat, whoever rolls
higher is considered to have attacked successfully and does damage. This is
how multiattacks work: leap into the middle of a horde of mooks and let
them all take swings at you, then dismantle them with the counterattacks.
(This doesn't usually work with ranged or special attacks, but you can get
feats that let you do it.)
There are no wound penalties. In fact, the more wounded you are, the
more plusses you get! Since you can distribute the damage you take between
wounds and stun as you please, you can pick how much of a bonus you want,
but wounds don't clear right after combat, and if you run into something
that makes you take damage only as wounds, you could be in a world of
hurt.
The important part of the system, though, is aiki/kiai/karma/fate.
(This is Buddhist karma, which comes in only flavor and leads inevitably
to suffering.) It works like this: Each character has some number of
Fates, attachments to worldly things (ie, psychlims). If you play up
your character's Fates in an entertaining way, the other players will
give you aiki tokens. Periodically, you can convert these tokens into
larger numbers of kiai, which can be spent to improve your character a
little permanently or a lot temporarily, letting you do awesome things
so you get more aiki tokens. However, each point of kiai you spend turns
into a point of karma at the end of the act, and if you start the next
act with more than 108 karma, you become an obsessive, insane NPC.
Between acts, you can reduce your karmic burden by resolving and
erasing, or rewriting and reducing, your Fates based on what's happened,
and you can play to those Fates in the next act to get more aiki tokens
and keep the cycle flowing.
Although normally I am highly sceptical of systems that let you throw
away experience points for short term gains so that you have to throw
away even more XP next session, I am okay with it in Tenra Bansho
Zero because there is no long term: an entire "campaign" is
supposed to play out in one 4-6hr session, after which the character's
stories are resolved. No one's stopping you from playing another
campaign with the same characters (in which case you might need to be
careful with your spending), but that doesn't seem to be what the system
primarily supports.
Next, the setting book! (Did we mention the guys that host bugs and
worms in their living flesh?)
Bleach vol 48 (Tite Kubo) actually resolves the Aizen arc!
Elements might pop up again later, but for the time being it seems to be
definitively over.
What would not be anticlimactic after that?
Angel Para Bellum (Nozomu Tamaki, Kent Minami) seems pretty
similar to Dance in the Vampire Bund but with
(hermaphroditic?) angels and (surprisingly honorable, or maybe just
goal-directed) demons instead of vampires and other vampires. Also, less
loli, but possibly more shota.
Purrbucket'd!
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22 October 2012 - Monday
Hey! It's raining! Who ordered that?
It cleared up as soon as I was done walking to work, naturally.
Boss G is at the big conference. Cow Orker M meant to be at the big
conference but is instead still hospitalized (though he is able to send email
and complain about medical procedures). MOAR COW ORKERS PLZ.
The insoluble thing from Friday turned out to be an IP address
conflict on the customer's end. Bah.
I beat Cow Orker A in four straight games of foosball, but probably
only because he's still recovering from being sick.
I only like Go Get
a Roomie! because I am a horrible person, but I think people who are
not horrible could like it too, as long as they aren't reading it at work.
The main character reminds me a little of Lotus Cloud from The Bridge
of Birds.
It is the time of year during which cats become snuggly at night!
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21 October 2012 - Sunday
No Diaspora Effect today because Earl is sick. We vaguely tried to
get together for other gaming but that fell through because kids.
Saga (Brian K Vaughan, Fiona Staples) is apparently the
hot new thing in the comic world, but it's actually not bad. The first
volume has a horrible creepy spider-woman that is what drow should look
like. However, I am deeply dubious about their excuse for Total Galactic
Warfare.
The Chronicles of Loth
(J.E. Flint, EFlint) is pretty generic amateur EFP webcomic. Meh.
We successfully watched the other half of last week's anime. I have
no idea what to do with the schedule.
- Nodame Cantabile 22-23: Aww! If Chiaki isn't careful,
he might start actually being fond of her!
- Welcome to the NHK 16: Hah! I guessed right about the
catgirl!
Twelve paws!
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20 October 2012 - Saturday
Cow Orker A called me for advice, because he's on call, but
fortunately I did not have to do anything substantial.
Holy crap! Cow orker M is in the hospital with heart problems! That's
not okay!
(It's not unexpected given his physical condition, but it's still not
okay!)
Monsterhearts is
based on the Apocalypse World
mechanics, but uses them for teenage monster drama (in the vein of
Buffy but more sordid and angst-soaked). The stats are
slightly different, and instead of history with someone you have strings on
them, and naturally the default moves and character playbooks are
different, but overall it's very similar to AW. I did not find it as
interesting, though, possibly because it's not new to me, possibly because
the creator is not as awesome as Baker, possibly because I don't care for
the genre as much. Or, possibly, just because I haven't experienced
it.
Today is Ayse and Ken and Ja Baby and Dave's House Shower/Baby
Warming party! (Only Ayse is currently involved in the baby
portion.) With 245623901490 cheese! And tamales! And people, one of whom
I had even not met before! And board games!
For a party, it was pretty good, but my proper place is still at the
bottom of a pit full of bugs and worms, out of everyone's way.
Cats are nice.
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19 October 2012 - Friday
Spent pretty much all day working with the customer on the thing. We
made more progress than had been made before, but only discovered new
problems.
I'm not on call this weekend!
In a Fix (Linda Grimes) is silly paranormal romance about a
woman with unexplained shapeshifting powers who makes her living as a body
double for people who are too busy to do things like be proposed to by
their boyfriends, her improbably hot shape-shifting distant relatives,
Viking-wannabe MRAs with a horrible plan, and silliness. The main character
is pretty much the spunky girl-next-door stereotype from all old movies
ever, constantly causing trouble because when the people who what the hell
they're doing tell her to stay where it's safe and let them do their job,
she won't stand for being bossed around by men. This is slightly less
stupid because she does actually have a superpower, but still kind of
annoying.
Paws: still twelve!
Make a comment!
18 October 2012 - Thursday
Because someone had a circumstance, I got abruptly rescheduled from Nov
18th to today for the CPR/AED training. This made my cow orkers sad when
multiple P1s arrived during the hour between a morning meeting and the
start of training, but I am now a card-carrying CPRitator and First-Aider!
Your hit points are safe with me!
Clean (Alex Hughes) may be theoretically SF, since it is in
the future and has flying cars to go with its psionics, but it feels very
much like urban fantasy of the detective subvariety, and, well, psionics.
Despite the flying cars, there are no robot butlers because in the past,
society became more automated than the available computer security
supported, and only the Psionic Conspiracy saved them.
The main character has substantial disads and totally earns the points for
them, which is always good.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
17 October 2012 - Wednesday
Everybody likes work, work goes splat.
The Shadowed Sun (N K Jemisin) is the sequel to The
Killing Moon, set some years later, with different characters being
protagonists and trying to fix the doomed situation from the end of the
previous book. For some reason I didn't notice it before, but the major
society is a very good example of oppressing people by putting them on
pedestals.
Why have I not read the third book in Jemisin's first series?
Twelve fuzzy paws!
Make a comment!
16 October 2012 - Tuesday
No training today, but we did eventually get the customer fixed.
Jiu Jiu (Touya Tobina) vol 1 is hardcore shoujo monster-hunting
emotion. Fights are implied by half a panel here or there; the manga is
actually about the main character's troubled relationship with her pet
werewolves, who are way more forgiving than she deserves, and also
frequently naked.
Another level of pandaness, but then I had to log off to feed and
oppress the cats.
Make a comment!
15 October 2012 - Monday
Yay, I didn't have to do all the training of New Cow Orker R by
myself today!
I made a panda and worked through the starting area to 4th level. It
was pretty cute, but WoW is still Wow so it's not like I can really play
with others.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
14 October 2012 - Sunday
We vaguely intended to finish the week's anime today, but Marith didn't
feel like it. I doubt we'll be able to watch anything next Saturday, since
it's the babywarminghouseshower party, never mind catch up. Maybe we should
switch to just watching one series at a time, since we never know if we'll
get a full six-episode timeslot in any given week.
I found the guy on the third level of the Torchlight dungeon who
sells the map to a bonus dungeon, which is full of undead and treasure.
Whee!
I think I need to change the action bar around, though. Having
attacks as low number keys is still ingrained from when I set up my WoW
action bars that way.
I finally finished Dragonaut, which took a long time
because either it's not great, or because watching anime alone is less
fun. Naturally, in the end it turned out to be the power of human love
that sent the transcendent mass-mind packing. (I suppose technically
that's a spoiler, but it was so very not unexpected that I think it
falls under the "the boat sinks" exemption.)
Oh no, I spotted what looks like dried blood under Aspen's fur. I
think I cut her by accident when trimming her fur. She doesn't seem to
be bothered by it, but I'm sure it didn't help her opinion of bipeds.
:(
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13 October 2012 - Saturday
Finally, Earthdawn!
Fortunately, one Dispel Magic broke everyone free of the terror effect,
which was good, because it took all of us and some NPCs to absorb the
bloatform's attacks. It turned out that Mike's character did pretty much
everything in the fight, by tempting the horror with an artifact so that it
promised it would kill him last and then regularly rolling way up on both
attack and damage. Ayse's and Ken's characters did some damage too, but
Dave never managed to roll up enough to do anything. (My character is
normally totally useless, because I picked a species other than human and a
standard character class, and this session was no different.)
Ken was right that it was a near thing, but it was so difficult to
hit the bloatform that we probably would have all died before managing
to do the last few points of damage had not reinforcements arrived and
prevented it from attacking while we each got one free attack on it.
It turned out that the bloatform was actually a cheap knockoff made
from a cultist of the Mad Passion of revenge and ickiness, so it did tie
back to the cult we uncovered earlier.
5000 Legend Points is a lot, but not enough to get Isidari to 6th
circle.
Ja Baby said it was nice that I was the one to knock on her door and
tell her naptime was over. Awwww!
Jinian can tell the difference between painkillers and antibiotics
and only spit up the one that doesn't make her feel better.
We tried to have anime, but were partially thwarted by dinner being both
out (Korean barbecue!) and after Ja Baby went to bed. There is no work
tomorrow, so I would have been up for staying an extra hour, but Marith was
blearghy.
- UN-GO 1-2: Weird! So far it is episodic, but hopefully
there will be some overall plot or theme revealed. The "ask one
question" schtick is good.
- Mouretsu Pirates 7: Something is clearly up! Or maybe
the main character is just paranoid from sleep deprivation.
Hello splendid boy cats! Hello beautiful but deeply suspicious girl
cat!
Make a comment!
12 October 2012 - Friday
Today I had five hours of meetings in a row, and then another hour of
meeting after a break. I was not useful for all of it.
Finally it is my turn to be on call again. Cow Orker D is doing the
upgrade at Big Customer X on Saturday, though, because he was working on
it before it got rescheduled.
Kelly McCullough wrote a series that was sort of like Amber crossed with
computers and Greek myth that I liked (possibly more than it deserved),
so I was pleased to see that he has written another book.
Broken Blade is more conventional fantasy, vaguely
Asian-flavored, about a former ninja of divine justice and his magic
shadow, political intrigue, magic, seedy dives, and zombies.
It looks to be the first of a series (provided people buy it, naturally).
I think volume 10 is the end of Yubisaki Milk Tea
(Tomochika Miyano); at least, it's all that I could find scanlated, and
it's a reasonable ending point. It seemed a little abrupt, but that could
just be the translation.
Sadly, the ending fails to subvert.
I played a little Torchlight, and it was okay. As expected, it's
somewhere between WoW and Nethack, real-time, with approximately a hundred
zillion different items with slightly different pluses. I'm terrible at it,
but I set it to the easiest difficulty level and hardly died at all. I wish
there were a better mapping function (I think W and M in angband have
spoiled me), but being able to send your pet back to town to sell stuff for
you is pretty handy.
I oppressed Aspen's fur so much! But it is so soft and nice where it
is not matted!
Make a comment!
11 October 2012 - Thursday
Welcome to Hell, here's your Webex client.
I successfully purchased Torchlight, but did not finish downloading
it before I had to go to bed. While I waiting, I alternated between
playing sudoku very badly and getting Marmasnuggled.
Make a comment!
10 October 2012 - Wednesday
HAPPY HAPPY MARITH-DAY!!
Much of the afternoon was taken up with helping a customer make a
thing do the thing it was supposed to do, but we were successful in the
end.
I meant to accomplish some things tonight, but when I sat down at the
computer, Marmalade came to tell me the weather is getting cooler. At
great length.
Make a comment!
9 October 2012 - Tuesday
I had to teach New Cow Orker R about things. I hope he was able to
extract information from my inane babbling.
No anime on weeknights. Only kitties.
Make a comment!
8 October 2012 - Monday
Mondayingu Mondayingu la la la.
Apocalypse World
was Carl's game of choice for a while, but I didn't get around to
reading until now, because I'm not cool enough.
After reading it, I'm still not cool enough. It seems like it could
be a pretty awesome game, but even if I had people to experiment on, I
don't think I could successfully play it, never mind run it.
The main character of Libriomancer (Jim C Hines) has the
power to reach into books and pull things out, which is awesome but
sounds over the top. However, there are enough limits, both innate and
imposed, that it is not a completely silly power. Also, the limitations
are an important plot point, partly because the main character is the
sort of person who, upon encountering a new magical phemonenon, thinks,
"How does that work? If you put it together with that other thing, could
you— oh, right figure it out after escaping with my
life".
The Wrong Goodbye (Chris F Holm) is the sequel to
Dead Harvest, chronicling the further doom of a
damned-soul-collector and the demons, angels, colleagues, and worse things
that make everything more noir (ie, difficult and tragic). Despite his
unsavoury job, aura of doom, and body-hopping, the protagonist gets along
prettywell with sufficiently non-square characters.
Laundry! Laundry for orange cats! Laundry for cat-dads! LAUNDRY FOR
ALL!
Apocalypse World by Bryant (Wed Oct 17 16:50:42 2012)
Having now played an AW variant as of the other weekend, I think the weight of rules is mostly on the GM. I would like to give running it a try sometime.
Re: Apocalypse World by Trip (Wed Oct 17 19:24:40 2012)
What variant?
I agree that it seems like most of the work is on the GM.
Re: Apocalypse World by Bryant (Thu Oct 18 15:34:22 2012)
Monsterhearts. We had some fighting so it wasn't all teen drama angst.
Make a comment!
7 October 2012 - Sunday
The customers brutally attacked Cow Orker D today, but I was
blissfully unaware due to having my phone turned down. I think Boss G
got him through it.
Adam is off having Real Fun(tm), but we played Diaspora Effect anyway.
This session, those PCs who were not incapacitated by exposure to
unnatural biotics reached the villain base on the blasted planet of a dying
star. It turned out the star was dying because someone had dumped a mass
relay into it and energy was being sucked out of the core and streamed
across the galaxy to who-knows-where (which means it's probably the one
that Joke told them about that had the Old Machines on the other end.) The
unnatural machinery that the Dark Mistress had been hauling was
for a huge bizarre machine dug beneath the forest of salt crystals that had
eaten an ancient oravore base and then had a (now ruined) quarian bunker
and later a (still-inhabited) geth gazebo built on top of it.
Siless analyzed the bizarre machine and determined it was
meant to pull energy out of the stream from the core, and from Dr Mays's
personal notes that Litra and Norbert broke into, it seemed that her plan
was to reflect the energy back to the relay and lift it out of the star,
thus allowing the Old Machines to come through and frolic among the
ruins of races that did not cast off their mor(t)ality.
Everyone in the base was human, so Norbert had been elected to drive
the daihatsu with the crate containing everyone else to a good hiding
spot in the kilometers of lightly-trafficked tunnels, but that exposed
him to the security cameras and he was recognized and hauled off to
listen to villainous rants.
Everyone else set about sabotaging the project and rescuing all the
humans, even the ones with geth for hearts. The ones guarding the
vehicle pool didn't want to be rescued, but that didn't stop Litra from
assembling an unstoppable army of daihatsus to carry incapacitated
humans to the ship after Siless's sabotage would inevitably lead to the
destruction of the base.
Some of the humans were being held in jars awaiting the attentions of
the geth heart-replacement engineer, Surgeon Prime, and its
waldos netnurses, which devolved into a fight in a
radiation-sizzling vacuum. Because Harnu Ers believes geth lives are
worth as much as any other sophont's, he did save Surgeon Prime's
black box, which may make him popular with geth if he can stop Litra
from taking a fusion cutter to it.
Norbert tried to escape, but was crushed by Dr Mays and the giant biotic
multi-eyed bug thing that executes the will of the Old Machines on this
side of the relay and ended up tied to a chair with a good view of the
impending doom.
Next session, they have to rescue Norbert along with all the other
humans (and geth!) and ensure that the base is destroyed when Dr Mays's
suntap-amplifier goes screwy and causes her to explode. No problem.
Harnu Ers may be a terrible character because, even though it's FATE,
Assets and Bureaucracy are not as exciting or universally applicable as
Slugthrowers and Communications.
Dave has been infected with JaBabySpeak and now says "that one".
Twelve paws!
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6 October 2012 - Saturday
Slightly Used Cow Orker D is on call for the first time (for us) this
weekend, but so far the customers are quiet.
Barbara (Osamu Tezuka) is a hallucinatory story of an author and
the hobo who becomes his muse — possibly because her mother is
Mnemosyne — and the craziness that his life becomes. It is set in
the 70s, which even in Japan came right after the 60s.
Lilith Saintcrow claims that The Iron Wyrm Affair is not
steampunk, just urban fantasy set in alternate late-C19 London. I see her
point, but think the street punks with cyberlimbs may undercut it. However,
despite the occasional killer robot or giant mechanical spider, it's
definitely a fantasy setting, with bonus deductive geniuses. In fact, it
could be described as, "She's a terrifying necromancer with a troubled
past. He's a defrocked government Sherlock Holmes. They fight treason."
There was a lack of dinner-party-related doom, so we did not have to punt
to Sunday (which is good, because I have to get up on Monday this
time).
- Nodame Cantabile 21: That really looked bad for Mine
for a minute.
- Shrine of the Morning Mist 23-26: The end, which only
vaguely connected to the beginning and middle. I wouldn't say this
series is terrible, since it didn't drive us to abandon it halfway
through, but it definitely has severe problems in a lot of ways.
- Mouretsu Pirates 6: That gig may not have the dignity
of full-fledged piracy, but it has to beat getting shot at.
- Welcome to the NHK 14-15: Sato seems to be interacting
just fine with a lot of people for a hikikomori. Yamazaki, on the
other hand, seems like someone who would end up on top of a clock
tower if they had guns in Japan.
When I came home, there were still twelve pawses!
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5 October 2012 - Friday
Good: It's Friday. Bad: Cow Orker M is out camping. Good: I'm not on
call this weekend. Bad: The frogurt is also cursed.
Twelve paws!
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4 October 2012 - Thursday
Today I got New Cow Orker R set up with some VMs and a basic
installation of the the product so he can experiment with it. I think
that is the extent of my productivity.
Wow, it's a Liralen! And also a Bryant, who I hadn't seen in like 15
years. Bryant is very much like Bryant, only 15 years older and completely
grey. (Liralen is always Liralen.) Also encountered: Bryant's wife Susan,
Chrisber, Christyber, Teober, and some people I see more often like Ayse
and Ken and Carl. We ate a million plates of Chinese food (containing meat,
which confused the Chef Chu people
greatly), and Too Much Ice Cream, and there was conversation.
My reread of Yubisaki Milk Tea (Tomochika Miyano) has come
to the last volume published in the US, the 8/9 omnibus. Curse you,
Tokyopop! But it looks like there is one more chapter available as
scanlations, and that might be the conclusion. The end of volume 9 does
look like it's heading toward a climax.
Giant Thief (David Tallerman) is an example of the
secondary-world-without-magic subgenre? mode? trope? mixin? with a
complete scoundrel for a main character who is only symapthetic because
he's not violent and a stolen giant. Also, adventure (by which we mean
discomfort, hunger, fatigue, and terror).
Manhattan in Reverse and Other Stories (Peter F Hamilton)
is what it says on the tin. Most of the stories are set in the same
future history as his most recent few novels, but some are random. They
are all Hamilton.
Twelve paws!
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3 October 2012 - Wednesday
Cow Orker D (who just passed on the New Guy stick to New Cow Orker R)
got dragged into doing an upgrade after hours, and then found out that
someone at the customer site had compressed the gzip and gunzip executables.
No one will admit to having done it, naturally. At least he didn't have
to stay up until all hours shepherding the upgrade along.
Today, all trains were delayed two hours due to "police activity",
but that was enough to convert them all to locals so I was able to get
home at a reasonable hour (modulo getting stuck with an incident by Cow
Orker A right before it was time to go home).
So many adorable paws!
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2 October 2012 - Tuesday
Today we had additional Hadoop training. We broke a Hadoop cluster,
and then... we fixed it! Yay!
The Emperor's Knife (Mazarkis Williams) is reasonably
standard fantasy, although with a creepier method of taking over a
country than most. The end of the book is more conclusive than many
first books, but it is prominently labelled as the beginning of a
trilogy.
The Fractal Prince (Hannu Rajaniemi) is the sequel to
The Quantum Thief, and is very confusing. Individual parts of
it make sense, and are pretty interesting far-future adventure, with bonus
wild nanotech conceptualized as Arabian Nights fantasy, but there are a lot
of places where it's not clear if the previous N chapters actually
happened.
The book does have an end, unlike many second books, but there's
plenty of room for sequels.
On the way home, the train stopped dead for an hour (due to someone
doing something stupid on the tracks, no doubt), so I had extra reading
time but did not accomplish much when I got home.
Kitties are for petting!
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1 October 2012 - Monday
HAPPY HAPPY JA BABY DAY!!
Today I didn't go in to work because I had stuff to do, and it threw
my routine off completely. I ended up sleeping in too much, not eating
a proper breakfast, eating an overrich lunch too late, etc. Blah.
Apparently the faceless real-estate corporation has tried this
backdated rent raise with some other tentants it wished it had billed
more, and Apartment Manager Hope is also pretty dubious about it. I paid
the new value for this month, although subsequently I found out that
they have to give us at least 30 days' notice by law, so there's a
good case to be made that they can't raise the rent until November.
Apparently my ichor quality has decreased since I last visited a
physician. I am not more bloated than before, so it's probably
creeping organ failure rather than behavioral defects, but either way
it's not good. I have again been exhorted to apply the ichorometer more
rigorously, and also to exercise more (by striding briskly instead of
dwadling, at least).
Twelve paws!
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