Trip's Life (Recent episodes)
20 May 2012 - Sunday
The PCs, after declining to have melted finger goo dripped into their
eyesockets, successfully defeated the architecture of the city, but it
was holding a grudge, so they skipped down without talking to the undead
giantess who wants them to destroy the current moon and put the old one
back and incidentally rule the world. The minotaur princess was
successfully handed over to the shadowhunters for ransoming, after being
divested of non-ransomable loot. Adam's old character was sent on a
mission on infiltrate a dwarven-supremecist cult of brewmasters, but his
pet owlbear, after eating something unnatural, became semi-sapient (but
still fond of beer). Then they started trying to guess the remaining
part of the teleport address for the place they've been trying to get to
for eleven levels now. After viewing fuzzy images of a few places, they
decided to go for the overgrown city, which turned out to have a giant
dragon made of brambles.
Sadly, Adam won't be here next session, so we have to wait a whole
month to find out how munchkinish the owlbear is as a PC. (It's actually
written up as a bugbear ranger with spiked chain, to simulate the double
attack with reach that the owlbear did when it was a monster.)
I spend most of the evening playing Magical Diary,
having given in to the lure of the walkthrough so I can find the Ellen
plotline. I did something wrong somewhere, though, since I never got Big
Steve to do the claw machine for me, and I had to log off before getting to
the actual plotline. I think I'm set for when the important event comes up,
though.
Twelve fuzzy paws! With extra bonus miauing!
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19 May 2012 - Saturday
Ayse brought Ja Baby over to admire my kitties (who she found very admirable)
and then we went to
Dana Street to meet up with
Ken and then to
BookBuyers before Ja Baby had
to be napped. It was a very fine way to spend a Saturday morning.
Fourteen bags of books completely accepted. Muahahahahahaha.
There was a vague plan to get together for more fun, or maybe
housework, after Ja Baby's nap, but it never materialized.
I played about a million more games of Dominion
while trying uninspiredly to prepare for tomorrow. I don't hate Thief as
much as I used to, but I still don't like it any better than Militia.
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18 May 2012 - Friday
No Sentai Sailor Moon this week, but popular sentiment is
generally in favor of Ayse sleeping.
Friends with Boys (Faith Erin Hicks) is about the
adventures of a home-schooled girl going to high school for the first
time. As the title implies, there is a lot about friendship, but there
is no romance. There is a ghost, but it's not clear why.
Shotgun Sorceress and Switchblade Goddess
(Lucy A Snyder) are the next two books in the series that started with
Spellbent. After going to a hell in the first book, the main
character now goes to Texas, which turns out to not be much better (mostly
because it's being invaded by monsters, to be fair), as well as Louisiana
and Switzerland (also containing monsters through no fault of their own).
More sex and violence and violent sex ensues.
Twelve paws!
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17 May 2012 - Thursday
- Penguindrum 13: More with weird pink-haired guy!
- Katanagatari 11: We finally have the commercial
release, which of course has different translations than the fansubs
we've been watching. The Deviant Blades are now called Klesha Bringers,
which suggests a more active role, and Togame's rival is now Princess
Denial. But we now have some exposition as to how the Klesha Bringers
were made, and what for. Also, traditional ending to the penultimate
episode!
- Kimi ni Todoke II 6: COMUNAKAYSHUN UR DOIN IT RONG
- Red Garden 19-20: We're well into the death spiral now,
and things look bad for the good guys, the bad guys, the other bad
guys... pretty much everyone.
Twelve fuzzy paws who want me to understand that their crunchyfood is
empty and Something Must Be Done!
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16 May 2012 - Wednesday
It seems like I spent most of today going "Durrrrrr", but actually I
did some work. Perhaps some of it won't come back to haunt me, even.
Durarara!! vol 2 (Ryohgo Narita, Suzuhito Yasuda, Akiyo
Satorigi) continues to follow the anime pretty closely. I am a huge loser
for thinking Anri is cute.
Brimstone Kiss (Carole Nelson Douglas) is the sequel to
Dancing with Werewolves, in which plot threads are extended
and multiplied but very few are actually brought to an end. Also: more
black and white zombies, undead Egyptian creepiness, and support groups for
victims of demonic smooches.
Spellbent (Lucy A Snyder) reminds me a little of Diane
Duane's "Young Wizards" series in the way wizards are vastly powerful,
answerable to higher powers, and yet hidden from most of the world. It's
not even slightly YA-okay, though, and the higher powers are not good,
just higher. And more powerful.
When the villain was criticizing the main character's life choices, I
thought he had some good points, but apparently the Man can't keep her
down even before she starts replacing parts of her body with magical
force.
Twelve paws!
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15 May 2012 - Tuesday
Customer X sent us a big box of miscellaneous swag in appreciation of
our not abandoning them in their hours of need.
After a long gap, Lucifer episode 16(ish)!
You'd think businessman guy would be better at lying after carrying on like
he did for so long, but I guess he didn't actually get away with that, did
he?
Also: The elevator! Gaaaah!
A Certain Scientific Railgun vol 4 definitely has one of
the more horrible biotech-based surprises I've seen.
Twelve extremely fluffy paws, some of them in need of blunting!
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14 May 2012 - Monday
Why does Monday always come after Sunday? Can't we go from Saturday
to Sunday and back to Saturday?
Twelve paws!
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13 May 2012 - Sunday
Marith liked the Avengers movie enough to come see it
again with me, and even Dave came along, which he almost never does. It
was pretty swell: superheroes always fought when they met, SHIELD had a
helicarrier, Hawkeye had ridiculous special arrows, and Loki was a huge
git.
I really liked the actor they had for Captain America. Wasn't there a
Captain America movie recently? Maybe I should have seen it.
Tony Stark is totally a Spark from Girl Genius. His brain
never slows down (which is probably why he drinks).
Dancing with Werewolves (Carole Nelson Douglas) is more
interesting than I expected. It hardly subverts the steamy urban fantasy
genre, but the heroine is messed up in less glamorous ways than usual,
even if she still does get the attention of all the cute guys. Perhaps
what I mean to say that is she does not seem like a guy with boobs. The
writing style is breezy and conversational and has random bits of wordplay
in — maybe it's the feminine equivalent of first-person smartass?
Marith pointed me to a walkthrough for Magical Diary,
which naturally has more spoilers than you can shake a wiggle wand at but
will definitely tell me how to get through any of the plotlines I want.
Choco-cat chase!
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12 May 2012 - Saturday
Ayse had to throw a baby shower for her friend, so there was not the
usual brunch, and then took a nap, so there was no Academy of Science,
but we hung out and played
Dominion and played
with Ja Baby and went shopping and played with Ja Baby some more and the
husband of the lady who had the baby shower came over to use the laundry
facilities because his exploded and stayed to play the
Ravenloft
board game and Ken made carne asada burritos and it was a pretty
good day.
BookBuyers took all of another
four bags of books. Eventually I'll run out of good books to get rid of,
I suppose, but for now I should obviously keep moving them out!
Apparently I did that
Magical Diary
plotline wrong, since it just petered out at the end of the school year,
so I started a new game to try one of the other plotlines. I'm not sure
it's going very well, though.
Dave is making horribly abusive D&D characters again. Maybe in the
next game I'll make everyone play monsters. The simplified writeups
would take the emphasis off feats and skills and powers and retraining
and items, and make more room for roleplaying, right?
Hello, Opacity-kun! You are so very difficult to see through!
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11 May 2012 - Friday
Everybody likes Friday, Friday goes "Baaaaah".
Joe Golem and the Drowning City (Mike Mignola, Christopher
Golden) is fairly short as novels go, even counting the (mostly small)
illustrations, but is extremely Mignola-tastic. It would completely fit as
a Hellboy side story or something.
Secrets of the Fire Sea is the fourth or so in Stephen
Hunt's steampunk series which may or may not be in a far future Earth. This
one contains mecha, evil electricity, more details about the strange
non-deistic psychohistorical religion, and a strong anti-transhumanist
message.
42.9k in Dungeon
Raid! And I have almost all the classes up to level 10, so I can give
them the right set of cooldowns.
Twelve adorable paws!
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10 May 2012 - Thursday
Marith spurned us for Avengers with her cow orkers, but
Dave and I had Thursday Night Anime anyway. It is sad that we never get
anyone else, but I guess all our friends are at the stage of life where
they never have any free time and if they did, they would use it to
sleep. Maybe in another fifteen years.
- Katanagatari 10: We pretty much had guessed about
Shichika's martial art, but it's nice that the creepy and annoying
spirit confirmed it.
- Penguindrum 12: I didn't expect that about their family
background at all.
- Kimi ni Todoke 4-5: Someone needs to either lock the
main couple in a closet for a week, or lock blond guy in a closet
forever.
- Red Garden 18: That's not very secretive!
Twelve paws!
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9 May 2012 - Wednesday
Ganymede (Cherie Priest) is straight-forward steampunk
adventure with sky pirates, submarines, and zombies.
New Dungeon
Raid high score of 36k! I'm almost to where Dave was with his first
game!
Ghirardelli continues to nom his medicine like a good kitty.
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8 May 2012 - Tuesday
Working from home means more sleep, but is still not very
productive.
Naturally, once the appointment was made, Ghirardelli began racing
around like his old self, but it did not save him. At least this time it
was not raining when I lugged him down to the vet.
The vet's conclusion was that it's probably his horrible tongue thing
(eosinophilic plaque, technically) giving him problems, so she has
prescribed a much higher dosage of prednisalone in hopes of reducing
it. Fortunately this is the medicine that comes in a form Ghirardelli
like Fortunately this is the medicine that comes in a form Ghirardelli
likes.
Marith has Mandatory Work Socialization, so we had no
Lucifer, but we did
have some
Danger 5, which was extraordinarily
silly.
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7 May 2012 - Monday
Bleah, Monday.
I'm not sure Ghirardelli is eating properly. Meep. I called the
advice line and they said to bring him in tomorrow, so I guess tomorrow
is a work-from-home day. I care a lot more about Ghirardelli's
health than I do about any corporation's analytics jobs.
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6 May 2012 - Sunday
PAD&D4: The fight against the Henyador princess and her
demonic/bureaucratic minions took a surprisingly long time. Still, if the
princess hadn't made her save against being incapacitated by the defenders'
ridiculous attacks, it would have been too short.
Adam has decided to switch characters because his attacks aren't
ridiculous enough. He is threatening to turn the owlbear pet of his
current character into a PC, which would definitely be more
ridiculous.
Ghirardelli is still kind of floppy, although he does wander around
the apartment and oppress Marmalade.
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5 May 2012 - Saturday
We took Ja Baby to the art festival and looked
at many things and fed her crepes, which seemed to meet with approval.
Later, there were pirogies.
BookBuyers took all four bags
of books in their entirety. I am teh w1nz0r.
Thursday Night Anime! (Other days may be substituted when Thursday
is out of stock.)
- Katanagatari 9: Togame's life would be so much easier
if she could just order him to love her.
- Kimi ni Todoke II 3: I can't say that these aren't
common human failings, but it still feels like the writers had to
gratuitously mess things up in order to have a second season.
- Penguindrum 10-11: We knew everything was connected,
but I still didn't expect that.
- Red Garden 17: Being doomed is very stressful.
Converting monster damage back to standard MM3 levels is easier than
increasing it, but still difficult to do while playing Magical Diary.
Curse you, Marith!
Ghirardelli is not being very active, but it is pretty warm.
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4 May 2012 - Friday
The Damned Busters (Matthew Hughes) is kind of a strange
book, about an Asperger's statistician who gets to fulfill his dream of
being a superhero by inadvertantly causing a labor dispute in Hell. It
reminds me of some stories from the 50s? 60s? where sane and rational
people get mixed up with demons with arbitrary powers that only cause
trouble. It is also an examination of the superhero genre, which to no
one's surprise would not work that well in real life.
Ah, that's how you get rid of the demerits. And that's the punishment
for heroism. Yike.
No, Ghirardelli, do not become Horking Cat!
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3 May 2012 - Thursday
This morning I slept and slept until it was time to wake up and no
cats disturbed my rest! (I don't know if they tried; I was asleep!)
Archon (Sabrina Benulis) is goth-tastic and overwrought,
but not actually good or anything. It's somewhere between Angel
Sanctuary and Anne Bishop's "Black Jewels" books.
Like Seanan McGuire's first series, Discount Armageddon is
urban fantasy, but based more on the Weekly World News mythology: rifts to
Hell, moth men nesting in the sewers, than sort of thing. Despite a fair
amount of violence, it is pretty light-hearted.
Marith has even more extra work, because her cow orkers do not fix
the bugs she finds, so we will have Thursday Night Anime on Saturday
this week.
This means I should have spent tonight preparing D&D, but instead I
played more Magical Diary. I
saw several of the endings with the obvious default romance plot, and then
started a new game to try to get some of the other plots. I hear getting
elected student council treasurer is good, but I can't find a way of
getting rid of the demerits you automatically pick up at the start of the
game.
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2 May 2012 - Wednesday
Ghirardelli was ahead of schedule again, but not by very much.
The Fourth Wall (Walter Jon Williams) is the sequel to
This Is Not A Game and Deep State, but this
time we get to see Dagmar and her life from the outside, so we can
better appreciate how crazy and scary she is. (Not that the viewpoint
character is a paragon of sanity and social normality, but you have to
expect that in Hollywood.)
I finished the school year in Magical Diary,
but there are plenty of paths I haven't followed.
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1 May 2012 - Tuesday
Ghirardelli decide that he wanted his gooshyfood an hour and a half
early today. I didn't give in, but I never got up the energy to unplug
from the brain expander and lock him out, so it was not a very restful
morning. If he keeps this up, the cats may not get to visit me while I'm
sleeping anymore.
The Princess Curse (Merrie Haskell) starts out as a
retelling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", but pulls in elements from
other fairy tales to make a complete and coherent story. Plus, it is set in
the fictional kingdom of Sylvania — you know, the place that
Transylvania is on the other side of.
Dave is back from Abroad! Marith has to work extra, so we couldn't
watch Lucifer, but we
ate Kabul food and
listened to tales of the Western Med. It sounds like Venice has become a
complete tourist trap, which is sad.
Instead of increasing monster damage, I could decrease PC hit points
(probably reducing the per-level gain rather than applying a flat
multiplier). It might be seen as nerfing, though.
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30 April 2012 - Monday
Dead Harvest (Chris F Holm) is definitely more on the noir
side of urban fantasy than the action-adventure side. The protagonist is a
damned soul who possesses bodies to go around collecting the souls of other
sinners to be delivered to eternal torment. That may not be
maximally antiheroic, but it's pretty far down there. He does try
to not suck completely, though.
I'll probably get the next one from the library too.
Today I did not stay up too late playing Dominion
or Dungeon
Raid!
I stayed up too late playing Magical Diary. I
blame Marith.
Twelve paws!
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29 April 2012 - Sunday
K-Machines (Damien Broderick) is the sequel to
Godplayers and wraps up most of the open threads, but not
in a way that I found very satisfying.
Because we could, Marith and I went to see the The Hunger
Games movie, which turned out to be pretty good. As far as I can
remember, it is faithful to the book, although of course very compressed
(the mentor had only about five minutes to go from useless drunk to
competent ally).
I don't remember it from the book, but the dish full of berries at the
end was a nice touch.
Will younger audiences understand what a pile of propaganda the
explanation for the games was? Probably not, alas.
Hurray! I accomplished nothing useful today!
Except for petting some cats, which I am told makes up for a lot of
my deficiencies.
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28 April 2012 - Saturday
Bunny Drop vol 5 (Yumi Unita) suddenly skips ten years,
to when Rin is in high school. It's still Bunny Drop,
though.
Volume 4 of Toradora (Yuyuko Takemiya, Zekkyo) is
apparently the swimsuits and breasts issue. I don't know why I didn't
think it was going to go this route.
This would be an Academy of Science weekend, except we still have no
Dave, so instead we played Talisman and
listened to Ja Baby not nap. Ayse was doing great because she rolled well,
until Ken used a spell to send her to the place where she had to use her
terrible stat instead of her awesome stat and she had to spend the rest of
the game trying to get back up to the inner regions before Ken crushed us
all from the center of the universe. I never got much of anywhere, because
I rolled crap. That is how Talisman works.
Ja Baby can use Marith's phone to play video games.
I really didn't need a large order of garlic fries at
Clarke's, but Marith took the rest
for breakfast tomorrow, so it worked out.
Twelve paws!
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27 April 2012 - Friday
Volume 1 of the Durarara!! manga (Ryohgo Narita, Suzuhito
Yasuda, and Akiyo Satorigi) follows the anime reasonably closely. The
details of Orihara's scene with his suicide groupies are different, but the
essential rat-bastardy is the same.
First Contacts is a collection of Murray Leinster's short
stories from the 30s to the 50s, including the famous "A Logic Named
Joe". It's sort of like Shakespeare: all Leinster did was string
together a bunch of well-known SF tropes.
Social attitudes in the first half of the 20th century were not so
progressive by modern standards. I can only hope that the future will
look back on the first half of the 21st century with equal horror.
Who needs sleep when there's Dungeon
Raid? Oh yah, I do.
Twelve paws!
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26 April 2012 - Thursday
I finally finished going back through volume two of the
Finder Library (#23-38 or so) with the end notes. I had
read at least part of "Dream Sequence" and "The Rescuers" before, but
not any of "Mystery Date" or "Five Crazy Women". Jaeger + speed dating =
GAAAH.
No anime because no Dave. Sad.
Marith wiggled string for Marmalade! She is a Hero of the Orange Cat
Revolution!
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25 April 2012 - Wednesday
Harbor (John Ajvide Lindqvist) is in the horror genre by
its plot, but it doesn't really give a feeling of horror. One of the
viewpoint characters is clearly a broken man, but the doom doesn't
impend well.
It would make a fine Call
of Cthulhu adventure, though.
Twelve paws!
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24 April 2012 - Tuesday
Oh, look, a new and exciting problem.
Somewhere Beneath Those Waves is an unthemed collection of
Sarah Monette's short stories (unlike The Bone Key and any
other collections she may have that I am inexplicably unaware of). A few of
them I have read before, but all of them were pretty good. I particularly
liked "The World Without Sleep", but I don't think it was the technically
best or anything.
We had no Daves and no Mariths, so there was no
Lucifer, but Ken's
LARP buddy Jacob came buy and we taught him to play
Dominion. He
seems okay, so I guess we'll let him be Ken's friend.
Julia thought it was the best thing ever that my cats have their own
"slide" (inclined scratcher) so I tried to get a few pictures of them
playing with it. I might need to try again when the light is better,
though.
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23 April 2012 - Monday
Nobody likes Monday, not even when customers didn't freak out until
the weekend was over.
Mondays when half the team is out are even more Montastic.
Twelve fuzzy paws!
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22 April 2012 - Sunday
Villainous dialogue is hard. Actually, talking to people in general
is hard. Maybe I shouldn't try to put role-playing into my gaming.
Anyway, after some pointless combat and then some plot-related
combat, the PCs managed to melt the ancient storage vault, banishing
the frost giant back to the other artifacts, and beat up Dave's
character so they were able to hold onto him. Next session, they can try
to deprogram him, and also remove the silver spikes that give him
extra superpowers.
Twelve paws!
Still no customers! I am teh w1nz0r!
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21 April 2012 - Saturday
This morning, Ja Baby came over to meet my cats! She has heard
stories of them and seen pictures of them, but was still a little
nervous about them. They were dubious about her too (except Aspen, who
was certain), but she got Marmalade to chase the toy she threw for him
and that made everyone happy.
Then I loaded up a couple of bags of books and went with Ja Baby and Ayse to
BookBuyers, which unprecedentedly
had almost no one in line to sell books at 10:00 on Saturday morning, and
Dana Street, which had many
people but also iced chai and jalapeno bagels and a random encounter
with one of my cow orkers. A good time was had by all, probably especially
by Ken who was at home asleep.
I stayed downtown to pick up the remaining books and take them to the
library, but Book Buyers only returned empty paper bags. FLAWLESS VICTORY!
Handling the Undead (John Ajvide Lindqvist) was probably
not the best book to read during lunch, but the walking dead are okay as
long as they aren't getting too close to my Thai iced tea.
HtU is a zombie book, but not a zombie apocalypse book
and not even an action book. The zombies are pretty pitiful, actually,
even though they are creepy and a lot of creepy stuff goes on around
them.
I don't even know what to prepare for tomorrow, never mind actually
doing it.
I am on call this weekend, but the customers have not attacked
yet.
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20 April 2012 - Friday
The Kingdoms of Dust (Amanda Downum) is third in the
"Necromancer Chronicles" about a spy and necromancer whose life pretty
much goes from bad to worse, although she does some good along the way.
When I first finished this volume, I felt that the resolution of the
climax hadn't been sufficiently set up, but I think it actually was. I
just didn't catch on.
Final dose of medicinal chews for Ghirardelli! He seems pretty
healthy, although he will often miau and miau at me for unclear reasons.
Maybe he wants me to turn down the sun, since he is weak against
thermions.
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