Previously, in Trip's Life...
31 March 2013 - Sunday
Happy Dead Fiction On A Stick Day!
But it's an excuse to eat deviled eggs (fortunately eggs have a hard
outer casing so that Ja Baby can play several rounds of Hide The Eggs
without their edibility decreasing too much), caramelized shallots, ham,
asparagus, and caramelized shallots.
I like caramelized shallots. I also like deviled eggs, but I'm pretty
sure the shallots are healthier, even prepared that way.
Ken finally got to play a Small
World Realms scenario, but the reinforcement die betrayed him horribly
so he lost. It betrayed Dave as well, but Dave was not playing the
Will-o-Wisps, so it was less crucial and he managed to crush us like the
insects we are.
Although most of the stories in New Cthulhu (ed Paula
Guran) are entertaining and/or creepy, the strongest ones were mostly the
ones I had read before (with a couple of exceptions that were by authors I
generally liked though I hadn't read those specific stories before). But it
is good to see that the Mythos is still going strong in the hands of
writers who do not suck.
Maybe it was a trick question this time? At least, I couldn't find
any of the options that had no possibility of being true, so I had to
leave them all unchecked. Marmalade didn't find any either, although I
don't think he checks his work very carefully when there is a
possibility of pettins.
Make a comment!
30 March 2013 - Saturday
Today, I was useless! I tried to be a little bit useful, but the
questions on the assignment were all either trivial or impossible.
Surprisingly, I did not get any surprise on-call.
- Nodame Cantabile III 9: Go Nodame!
- Hanasaku Iroha 15-16: Surely nothing can go wrong with
this plan.
- Steins;Gate 1-2: We're pretty sure something
is really going on, but I suppose it could still all turn out to be the
main character's delusions.
- Cross Game 3: I wonder if I will do better at keeping
the characters distinct with the anime than I did with the manga? They
have such caricatured designs it should be easy, but...
Marith forced me to stay up too late by giving me the first volume of
Questionable
Content. The early art was terrible, but the characters were
pretty adorable.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
29 March 2013 - Friday
Yay Friday! Yay me not on call!
The first plot arc of Bad Machinery
(John Allison) is in print. I bought it. I read it. I laughed and laughed.
Then I laughed some more.
Grenadier successfully concluded in 12 episodes,
although I'm not sure about that one villain's motivation for
surrendering.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
28 March 2013 - Thursday
I got next Tuesday off, so I can help take Ja Baby to a zoo!
Please
do not eat my town, jellyfish monster. (via Twitter, from somewhere or
other)
The Drowned World (J G Ballard) is allegedly a classic, but
I mostly found it to be extremely 60s. Racism: check; sexism: check;
vague psychobabble about ancestral memory: check. I guess it's supposed
to be a riff on Heart of Darkness, but it's been 25 years
since I read that, and I didn't pay much attention at the time, so I
only understand it at the level of the Literary Fluxx goal "Heart of
Darkness": if you have Jungle and Madness both on the table, you win.
The second half of this week's lecture also makes sense while it is
being explained. I looked at the assignment and think I can do it, but
history suggests this is not a substitute for actually doing it.
Marmalade and his tail helped me watch the lecture. I guess all
videos are better if they're orange!
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27 March 2013 - Wednesday
I managed to clear out a bunch of old tickets. Maybe I should work on
new tickets.
I managed to watch the first section of this week's lecture, and it
seemed clear while the instructor was explaining...
Impulse (Steven Gould) is Jumper: The Next
Generation. I'm surprised it took them twenty years to realize
what other powers they get as spin-offs of Teleport, but oh well. Cent
is pretty cute, in a crazed teenager sort of way, and there is plenty of
derring-do.
The Last Policeman (Ben H Winters) is technically SF, set
in a near future in which Earth is about to get plastered with a 6km
asteroid, but the actual story is modern crime, albeit in a setting of
social breakdown. Allegedly there are two sequels to follow, so there
may be more SFnal elements later, but I was not enthused enough that I
seem likely to keep reading.
In an unexpected fit of foresightedness, I bought cool beds for the
cats before it gets hot, because when it is hot, they will be
out of stock.
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26 March 2013 - Tuesday
So many customers. But also, training from Engineering that makes a
lot of things much clearer.
Apparently what I did wrong on the problem set was be a dumbass.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
25 March 2013 - Monday
Cow Orker D has returned! His vacation report: Sri Lanka is hot.
I'd like to say it's Outlook's fault that I failed at meeting today,
but really it's my own fault for not checking. (Also for using Outlook
to begin with).
O the embarrassment. All die.
The 1930s in the Soviet Union weren't all mysterious
disappearances and unending queues, just mostly. Nevertheless, people
continued living, and found ways around the broken official social
structures. I know this, because I have read Everyday
Stalinism (Sheila Fitzpatrick).
It's all about the blat.
I didn't suck so hard at the problem set that they have to retire the
word "suck" from overuse, but I did suck. I need to watch the tutorial
video to see why I suck, or at least how.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
24 March 2013 - Sunday
I managed to mostly escape work again! You'd think I wasn't on call or
something!
Earl wimped out on gaming due to being deathly ill or some feeble excuse
like that, but Dave had a copy of MHRPG
to share around in addition to my virtual copy, so we were able to make
characters and plan the shape of our doom. (Adam was also not present due
to work, but I had not entrusted him with any important materials.)
The campaign is still set in the world we Microscope'd up, with
dwarf lords and Atlantis and the S-Prize. The costumed lunatics we have
come up with are:
- Legion (Daniel Steele): building contractor and duplicator who has
formed a team to go for S-Prizes since honest labor isn't very
rewarding in the current economic climate.
- Muninn (Michael Steele): Daniel's brother, a former telepathic
supervillain who stared too long into the abyss of the human soul, and
villainy wasn't paying that well, so he's reformed.
- Jade (Janine something): Daniel's admin assistant, who turned out to
be a brick with minor sorcerous powers. She has green hair not because
she's cool, but because she's a spy for the Neanderthals of Atlantis.
- Paraselene (Master Smith Lunapara): a renegade dwarf princess with
Sumatran battle armor, who needs a backstory.
No idea if Earl and Adam will actually want to join us, but we hope
they will. Also, Rachel is threatening to invite one of her ex-cow-orkers
to join us.
I think I did the problem set on ∃ and ∀ correctly. I
did also finally prove that √2 is irrational, using prime factors
(if a number is a perfect square, it's the product of perfect squares,
but that means no other perfect square can be exactly twice the first
one, since 2 is not a perfect square). Someone solved it on the forums
the day of the lecture, but oh well. That person probably does not have
fuzzy cats to help!
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23 March 2013 - Saturday
Work tried to make me be useful, but I resisted by being useless!
We did not do anything super-exciting for my birthday, but Ayse made
risotto (so much stirring!) and Ken cooked many vegetables so I became
super-round and still had leftovers to take home.
- Nodame Cantabile III 8: Don't lose hope, Nodame!
- Cross Game 1-2: So far, pretty much the same as the
manga, but it's still in set-up.
- Hanasaku Iroha 14: See, Ohana, it could be worse.
- Ano Hana 10-11 (end): That was a pretty positive
ending, despite being full of tears.
I let Marith drive me to the train station, even though short trips
are the worst. Wum.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
22 March 2013 - Friday
It's like Monday and Friday combined!
Next week, the triumphant return of Cow Orker D. (But would escape be
even more triumphant?)
This week's lecture is on ∃ and ∀. I have never yet
remembered how those symbols work beyond the end of the lecture, but
479th time lucky?
The bonus assignment is to prove that √2 is irrational. I wonder
if I and my tiny brain can do this?
Earl stopped by to borrow D&D stuff for his new cool gamers (who could
not swallow Dogs in the
Vineyard). I foisted off MHRPG
on him, so he can be mentally prepared for Sunday, but he was nevertheless
properly appreciative of my splendid cats.
Make a comment!
21 March 2013 - Thursday
Time to make aging rolls!
Having the day off from work, I went to visit Monkeycat Towers, which
mostly involved painting watercolors with Ja Baby. I think her mom
appreciated having someone else occupy the frustrated, gimpy, toddler,
anyway.
I delivered Dave's copy of
MHRPG,
which he will doubtless use for evil.
Orbus (Neal Asher) is a direct sequel to Voyage of the
Sable Keech. It features many horrible bug monsters with boosted Int
that does not necessarily make them less appalling, but things seem to be
looking up by the end.
The cats are indoor-only, so their ability to bring me presents is
limited. I am probably okay with this.
Make a comment!
20 March 2013 - Wednesday
I wanted to take tomorrow and Friday off, but apparently the team
cannot survive without me for two consecutive days, so I only get one
day off. Oh well. At least paper copies of
Marvel Heroic Roleplaying have arrived before I left.
Silence (Michelle Sagara) is like the shoujo subspecies of urban
fantasy. There is physical danger and some amount of derring-do, but the
heroine's struggles are primarily emotional and interpersonal. That by
no means makes them less gruelling!
Probably not recommended for parents of toddlers.
The comics industry has not suddenly started producing huge
quantities of stuff I know I want to read. This is much cheaper than the
alternative, yet I cannot help feeling disappointed.
Twelve paws!
Happy happy Tripday observed! by marith (Sat Mar 23 14:24:16 2013)
Even if I was too lame to post it on Thursday, you are still my favorite Trip for yet another year, and all the years to come!
Comics Worth Reading by Carl (Tue Apr 2 00:00:21 2013)
The first volume of Matt Fraction's Hawkeye (My Life as a Weapon) is out, and good, despite my usual disdain these days for Marvel. Kieron Gillen's Young Loki in the Journey Into Mystery collections is also good, if you like people who are too clever for their own good. And Gillen and McKelvie have reunited to create a third volume of Phonogram, hiding it within the pages of Young Avengers to pretend to be a superhero title rather than a searing examination of magic and identity.
Also, Happy Birthday from the Future.
Re: Comics Worth Reading by Trip (Wed Apr 3 08:33:25 2013)
I already have Young Loki and it is pretty swell. I will look for Hawkeye, and Phonogram when the collection comes out.
Thanks!
Make a comment!
19 March 2013 - Tuesday
Wow, Super-Explodey Customer X did something and didn't explode! They
were even cheerful about it!
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
18 March 2013 - Monday
Not dead yet! Quite. Cow Orker D is still out until next week,
though.
The remodeling of the kitchen/foosball arena/break area has been
mostly completed, and the space is now quite nice!
The Voyage of the Sable Keech (Neal Asher) takes place on
one planet, and is full of zombies, but it's still space opera. Includes
giant invertebrate monsters.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
17 March 2013 - Sunday
More SECX, but not too much.
I have flipped through Star
Wars: Edge of the Empire Beginner Game, although I can't say I have
actually read it. Their strange dice do seem like they produce
potentially-interesting outcomes, but of course they are full of it when
they say regular dice can't do that. I am also slightly offended by their
charging $5 for the wacky dice app, but a set of dice, even when available
separately, will be $15 and only barely enough for one person, so it's not
that it's not a bargain.
I think it would be interesting to try it out, but where am I going
to find four more adults who have nothing better to do for a few hours?
Other anime has hot springs episodes, Grenadier has a
brothel episode.
Bleah, must get up and go to work tomorrow. Well, the cats will
comfort me.
Make a comment!
16 March 2013 - Saturday
Super-Exploding Customer X did in fact explode, but we managed to
slowly get them stapled back together. (Rather, we got the automatic
staplizer running.) I guess these days that counts as quiet.
City of Ruin (Mark Charan Newton) is the sequel to
Nights of Villjamur, and has much more in the way of cyclopean
works of the ancients (with inevitable doom). I did not discuss the
self-deceptive nature of human evil with Ayse and Marith until later, but
one of the villains from CoR completely qualifies.
Poor Ja Baby has a quite broken leg! Her cast is spiffy and red, but
not conduicive to walking so she has to get carried around a lot and
becomes unhappy if she is carried wrongly and her leg gets bumped.
Ta Baby still has the warmest brain ever, even though he spit up all
over my shirt.
I still suck at Netrunner.
Yay pirogis with mushroom-sour cream sauce!
- Nodame Cantabile III 7: Nodame has LEVELED UP!
- Hanasaku Iroha 12-13: There was a heartwarming family
reunion, but I don't think Ohana actually got what she set out for.
- Ano Hana 9: Should they be a lot more freaked out than
they are?
- Mouretsu Pirates 25-26: The end! It was a little
rushed, but suitably triumphant and sensical.
Next week (or whenever): Cross Game!
See, cats? I came back!
Make a comment!
15 March 2013 - Friday
It's Friday, but on-call weekends are never quiet any more.
:(
Read
and Understand Dungeon World (Eon Fontes-May, Sean M Dunstan) is a
long
essay (60 pages, though not high-density) about how to use the awesome
concepts in Dungeon
World in actual play. It is thus redundant with the rules if you are
a gaming genius (rather than a gaming Wile E Coyote), but I think it
helped me a little.
Midnight Blue-Light Special is the second in Seanan
McGuire's "InCryptids" series, and the looming doom from the first book is
already crashing down. Apparently the main character got all her
points from the disad of her family background.
Istas is still the best.
Twelve adorable paws!
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14 March 2013 - Thursday
Boss G3 is not technical and not even very clear, so I'm not exactly
sure what he wants in this report mandated by his boss. I guess I'll put
some information together and see if it satisfies him.
The plot twist in the second episode of Tin Man is not new
to the genre, but it's definitely a twist.
Opaque and yet adorable!
Make a comment!
13 March 2013 - Wednesday
I wonder if we'll get too sick of supporting Big Customer X before
they get too sick of using our system outside its designed role?
Hilldiggers (Neal Asher) is pretty straight-forward space
opera in which most of the trouble is caused by the default condition of
most intelligences, human-derived or otherwise, being rat-bastardy.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Worm.
I both finished watching the Monday lecture and watched all of the
Wednesday lecture (equivalence). I think I can do the assignment for 4, but
have not actually done so, or looked at the problem set. (As previously
established, I am too dumb to get anywhere with the problem sets
anyway.)
Twelve opaque paws! (Although really the opaque tails are more
problematic.)
Make a comment!
12 March 2013 - Tuesday
After recovering morale, I tried to watch the first lecture for this
week, but work interrupted. It wasn't very much work, but it effectively
filled up the remainder of the minutes before bedtime.
Library books: net +0.
Paws: 12.
Make a comment!
11 March 2013 - Monday
The customers are back. So many customers.
The Impossible Cube (Steven Harper) has not just mad
scientists, but Cossack mad scientists. This goes about as well as
you might expect. Also, even sympathetic characters are not immune to
progressive SAN loss.
I finally got around to getting the out-of-print volume 3 of
Atomic Robo (Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Ronda Pattison,
Jeff Powell) from Amazon. It has HP Lovecraft and Carl Sagan, and a monster
from beyond time that is actually from beyond time. Also, lightning
guns.
I guess those weren't trick questions after all. :(
Twelve paws of fliffiness!
Make a comment!
10 March 2013 - Sunday
No Palo Alto gaming, because Dave and I are not in Palo Alto! We are
still in Roseville!
Ayse and I did homework, although we had to chase off about three
people per minute for the entire period. It was pretty easy, so surely
the problem set will not be difficult.
On the way back, I rode with Ayse and Ta Baby, cruelly abandoning
Dave and Ken to Ja Baby's demands. We discussed many and diverse topics,
including brainology, human perfidy, and oceans.
Twelve paws did just fine in my absence. They didn't even come close
to running out of food or water.
The problem set seemed very easy. I must be making some horrible
mistake.
Someone somewhere once said the miniseries Tin Man was
interesting, so I put it somewhere near the end of my Netflix queue and
then Netflix randomly sent the first disc to me as an apology for taking
more than a single day to send me the disc that was actually at the front
of my queue.
It is okay, but not great, fanfic in the "a sufficiently blurry
tale of what actually happened could look like what was reported in the
original material" vein. I think make the main character a princess
was a mistake, but tropes meh blargh.
Make a comment!
9 March 2013 - Saturday
Ja Baby was so full of "When we will get to KateJoshHouse? I want to
be at KateJoshHouse right now!" that her dad became quite
stressed, but Dave was chill. (Ayse cleverly took the other car with Ta
Baby, who slept and slept so she had time to think without being
interrupted by other humans, which does not happen very much in her
daily life.)
At one gaming store, I picked up Star
Wars: Edge of the Empire Beginner Game, and when we finally made it to
the other (despite the best efforts of the navicomp), Cthulhu
Fluxx. Because this has always been the tentacles of Fluxx.
Ken ran pick-up Dungeon
World, which I'm not sure was in accord with the developer's vision,
but phosphorescent cultists were defeated and the town was saved, and Al
bought his own copy.
Gaming with kids is like playing with kids more than it is like
gaming. But maybe only people without kids think that.
For dinner, we went to the restaurant where Ja Baby can get both all
the shrimp she can eat, and strawberry ice cream to fill in the cracks.
She was very pleased.
Important words when managers call on the weekend: "I am not near a
computer and cannot do anything to help you." (Not strictly true, but
the implied condition was that the computer have the VPN software to
connect to TD stuff, which none of the ones near me did.)
Cthulhu
Fluxx reduced our SAN by having rules that were unclear in some
respects, and an inadequate FAQ. However, the monsters did not win, and
neither did Dave.
Marith now lives far away from the kitties, so I cannot get her to
check whether they still have paws, but I am sure they are fine.
Make a comment!
8 March 2013 - Friday
Spent all day working on a problem that turned out to not be anything
like what we originally thought, and quite possibly the customer's fault
to begin with, and then another cascading series of problems that is the
fault of Sales for telling the customer that it would be just fine to
use our finely-crafted wrench to pound nails.
I finished watching The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye.
The final episodes weren't necessarily plot-wise connected to most of what
happened during the series, but they were definitely thematically
connected, so I am okay with that ending.
Twelve paws that will totally be okay while I am gone! Right?
Make a comment!
7 March 2013 - Thursday
Even more customers, with even hotter fires. Cow Orker Beast
is allegedly out today, but had to answer lots of email to coordinate
getting people involved in fixing his customer.
I left work, but the work did not leave me, so I still did not get to
watch the second lecture of the course I am taking in a show of
solidarity with Ayse. I did successfully print out the assignments to
date so we can do them in Roseville.
The bibliography for Red Plenty made Planning
Problems in the USSR (Michael Ellman) sound interesting, but it is
way too hard-core for me. I could possibly read it if I had
Wikipedia to hand, but I mostly read on the train and don't like using the
3G data link if it can be avoided. Anyway, this book is from the early 70s
so who knows how much of that stuff is in Wikipedia anyway?
Executive summary: the optimal planning faction in the USSR had some
good ideas but also some very wrong-headed ones. The USSR could probably
have gotten a working economy, but only if they changed their approach,
which didn't seem very likely in 1973 (and which we know subsequently
did not come to pass).
I am not smarter.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
6 March 2013 - Wednesday
Still way too many customers.
Instead of getting comics, I did laundry. Marmalade was down with
this.
The
Dungeon Alphabet: Expanded Third Printing (Michael Curtis) is pretty
much what it says on the tin: ideas for dungeon features presented in
alphabetical order, in the form of tables for random generation. The table
entries are pretty old school: rotating rooms to confuse players mapping on
graph paper, inexplicably powerful magic, bizarrely complicated traps.
(Unsurprisingly, the back of the file has an ad for Dungeon
Crawl Classics.) However, I might be able to cannibalize it for Dungeon
World ideas.
Make a comment!
5 March 2013 - Tuesday
Too many customers, not enough brains. Especially in Korea, it sounds
like.
Battle Angel Alita: Last Order (Yukito Kishiro) seems to be
approaching the end as of volume 17. Alita just got a new
quest, but although it is momentous, it is probably not lengthy.
Star Wars: Scoundrels (Timothy Zahn) is a heist story set
between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes
Back, when Han has already managed to lose all the reward money
he loaded into his ship after the Death Star Incident. It could just as
well be called Solo's Eleven. Zahn is a perfectly good
writer, but he never describes characters, which bugs me, and the Star
Wars universe is kind of flavorless (inevitable in a corporate
franchise), so overall the book is unexceptional.
Also, I can think of several ways to deal with the alien superpower
that causes problems, which no one in the book even considered.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
4 March 2013 - Monday
Cow Orker D is apparently being annoyed pretty severely in Seoul, but so
far it's still making him stronger. (Which reminds me of the best
going-away speech ever, from my boss at one Google gig: "You tried to
destroy me, but you only made me more powerful.")
From an unspecified SF writer being interviewed in a dream about where
he gets story ideas: When an author puts something in the story so that
normal life can go on despite the SFnal elements, think about what the
world would be like if it wasn't there. (It seemed much more profound when
I was asleep, but I think it's still valid.)
Of course, a blatantly secondary-world setting doesn't get you the
fat fat lewts from teenagers who dream of being swept away and
murdered adored by vampires.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
3 March 2013 - Sunday
I met Ja Baby and Ken at Dana
Street and we went to a bookstore and a farmer's market and
then to a gaming store. They had a
reasonable selection of indie or at least small press games, but although I
thought about buying some of them, paper just takes up so much space! I
guess I'll see if RPGNow or IPR has them, and then
complain about local gaming stores going out of business.
I was lucky enough to win Dominion once, but in
the second game Dave got his hand down to four Golds and enough Adventurers
to always draw them all, and steamrollered us beneath his Colonies.
I do not think you would like this salsa, cats!
Make a comment!
2 March 2013 - Saturday
No brunch today, because there is a party at Ja Baby's preschool. All
the people there seem very nice, and the little kids hardly melted down
at all.
- Hanasaku Iroha 11: Ohana is fighting completely the
wrong battle. It would be nice if she failed because of it, but the
genre requires that she be rewarded for being willing to fight at all.
- Anohana 8: Menma seems to be getting strong. I think in
the last episode she'll eat them all.
- Mouretsu Pirates 24: So much for the enemy not knowing
what they're planning...
- Nodame Cantabile III 6: Wow, he gave up a chance to be
conducted by his old master for her!
Marith went splat so we stopped there and I made it home at an only
slightly unreasonable hour.
I finished rereading Black Lagoon (Rei Hiroe) through the
end of the second killer maid story arc, which I think is all there is so
far. (The mangaka has apparently been hinting about picking the series back
up again, though.) That's a pretty high body count, although most of them
probably deserved it. On the other hand, Shenhua, Sawyer, and Lotto
definitely deserve to be exploded, but I'm rooting for them because I
find them amusing.
Twelve paws that really should go to the vet for a checkup soon!
Make a comment!
1 March 2013 - Friday
Cow Orker D gets to fly to Seoul with two days' notice to cover for
another department's incompetence! Wheee!
At least he got the company to agree to send him back via his
ancestral homeland, so he can see his ancestors.
The Doomsday Vault (Steven Harper) is straightforward
steampunk adventure with zombies, air pirates, and musically-inclined
masterminds.
Twelve paws!
Make a comment!
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