Books read: 2019

Books:

• Gideon the Ninth; Tamsyn Muir.
• 15/10.
• Magic for Liars; Sarah Gailey.
• 14/10.
• The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet; Becky Chambers.
• 12/10.
• A Closed and Common Orbit; Becky Chambers.
• 13/10
• Record of a Spaceborn Few; Becky Chambers.
• 11/10
• To Be Taught, If Fortunate; Becky Chambers.
• 13/10
• Sisters of the Vast Black; Lina Rather.
• 11/10
• The Affair of the Mysterious Letter; Alexis Hall.
• 10/10
• The Fisher of Bones; Sarah Gailey.
• 11/10
• The Labyrinth Index; Charles Stross.
• 10/10
• Strange Practice; Vivian Shaw.
• 11/10

Anthologies:

• Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror.

Short Stories/Online:

• The House that Made the Sixteen Loops of Time; Tamsyn Muir.
• Source.  Alternate.
• Chew; Tamsyn Muir.
• Source.  Alternate.
• The Magician's Apprentice; Tamsyn Muir.
• Source.  Alternate.
• Union; Tamsyn Muir.
• Source.  Alternate.
• Bread and Milk and Salt; Sarah Gailey.
• Source.  Alternate.
• Away with the Wolves; Sarah Gailey.
• Source.  Alternate.
• Anonymous Croupier; Sarah Gailey.
• Source.  Alternate.
• Paradox for Lost Causes; Jordan Kurella.
• Source.  Alternate.

Comics/Graphic Novels:

• Komi Can't Communicate; Tomohito Oda.
• 10/10
• The Way of the Househusband, V1; Kousuke Oono.
• 13/10
• Clover; CLAMP.
• 10/10
• I Married My Best Friend to Shut My Parents Up; Naoko Kodama.
• 11/10
• Snow, Glass, Apples; Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran.
• 11/10
• When I Arrived at the Castle; Emily Carroll.
• 12/10
• Appeal!; Ru Xu.
• 13/10
• Game On; Various/Catstealers.
• 12/10

Non-Fiction:

• You Look Like A Thing and I Love You; Janelle Shane.
• 10/10
• Female Tars; Suzanne J. Stark.
• 10/10
• Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain; Betty Edwards.
• 10/10

Tuesday: New Year's Eve

Lunch at Mighty Fine.

Then a lot of cooking and prep work and decorating.  LOTS of all of those.

Including blowing up 59 balloons.

 It's a lot of balloons.

But through the magic of coordinating colors of swaggable decorating cloth, they were able to be suspended to provide a festive NYE feel, with somewhat of a "old-style ship" feel.

I also decoratively stacked the wine glasses.

 It was loud due to kids, but all-in-all a nice end to a reasonably good year.

And there's a new splashscreen as well.

Monday: Escape!

Healthy lasagna with spinach and lemon ricotta.

Lemon ricotta is really good here, and probably in similar use-cases.

This sounds like a superhero.

Then escape room, where we solved all the puzzles with only one small hint in the bonus "extra-hard" bit.  Not bad, but we probably could have sorted it out if we had thought clearer about it.

I don't even know who this guy is.

Heatmor?  Whatever.

Then planning and shopping and cleaning for NYE.  One side benefit: getting bbq:

Yummy delicious bbq.  The brisket cooled a lot between the store and home, but that isn't really that big of a problem.

• I saw this chair yesterday, and kind of really want one, but with a back.  I 100% prefer to sit in my office chair crosslegged, and this would make that much easier and more comfortable.

Sunday: Hotpot and Puzzles

Central Market lunch.  Plus some initial planning for NYE, as well as for hotpot.

 Then some work-adjacent work.  I hate deciding that refactoring would solve a lot of problems.  Even though it probably will, and will make unit tests easier to write.

And delicious hotpot.  At home.

Yum yum yum!

And this dang puzzle:

It's a Bob Ross.

It's made me think about computer vision guided puzzle solvers.  It looks like the first two google results use some sort of edge/shape solver.  My thought was to feed in an image of "pieces" (which would then be segmented) and "goal", with the idea of using cross correlation to identify where each piece should fall on the completed image.  Maybe I'll see about implementing something when I get home.

• Julie's hotpot pic is better.
• Itasha cars.

Saturday: travel

Waking up early, checking a bag, finding out there are no quick food places past security at IND, flying to O'Hare, dashing across terminals there, getting to the second plane just as they're boarding my group, discovering that they've upgraded me for that flight, having a bad flight lunch, landing, getting my luggage despite everyone crowding around the conveyor, arriving.

Forgetting to take useful pictures.

Raids and gym take overs.

A new bear.

Friday: Last day here

Which means packing, futzing with luggage, and then worrying about my connection time tomorrow.  Forty-five minutes sounds good, until you realize one flight might be late, and that you'll have to go from one end of a terminal to another, and then worry about boarding times.  Ugh.  I guess we'll see, and it looks like there are at least two other later flights tomorrow.  ._.

And lots of people like cooked carrots.

• I saw this advertised, and wondered what the story was going to be like.  I guess I now know, because the producers didn't think, um, let's check: "that other people spoke languages."

Thursday: Visiting.

There's a big rocking chair on the way home.

• Spoon study.
• Live action Gokushufuko.

Wednesday: Christmas

Shitscram Eve

It is so loud.

Monday: Wrapping presents.

I also did work today, so I'll have a number of things to declare finished when I get back to the office.

A Galar outfit for winter.

• Good.
• A pizza place I'll likely not go back to.
• Another one.

Sunday: DOnking butts.

Yet again, I leave home, and my main computer shits itself and stops working.  Ugh.  And the power cycle bot is clearly not cycling power correctly.  Ugh..

Maybe I should talk to Pika Claus.

Or, more likely, I'll just buy a new box and replace the one that's not working well.  It probably should have more disk space anyway.

• Or maybe this is the problem?  It'd be nice if it's that easy.
• WTF.

Saturday: Today was cookie day.

So many cookies.

It's seasonal.

Friday: I have already lost track of what day it is.

Finally caught Moltres.

• Spent part of today relearning telescope optics.  For reasons.
• This episode was first shown 23 years ago.

Thursday: Travel.

Travel pretzel.

Travel buddy.

Good.

Wednesday: Pre-travel anxiety.

Scheduling a live demo of the stuff I've been working on for the last day of work probably wasn't the best strategy either.  At least I have all my clothes packed, and just need to dump electronics into my backpack to be ready.

New splash screen!

New Buddy fun!

Hello, giant buddy!

• Some fanfic is bad.
• That's a fair assessment.
• The internet.

Tuesday: pre-travel cleaning

I need to do laundry, but that's kind of a permanent state.

The boat in the game has a map on it.

• Symbolic math with neural nets.
• This has always been a mistake.
• The Last Man.
• Ancient chewing gum science.

Monday: Almost done with work for the year.

And, being super smrt, I decided to upgrade my main computer this evening.  It's still going. :(

Alkibiades is a bad influence.

I kind of caused a volcano eruption.

• Part of the reason to upgrade is to see about installing a private cloud server.
• Alkibiades.

Sunday: Team Board Games day

Which is probably good, because it meant I didn't hide in my apartment all day playing video games.

I also completed the Halloween event for this year, as well as the new one that just came out today while I got pancakes for lunch.

I always find it more fun to play annoying-but-not-really-destructive cards instead of winning for these deck building games.

1/3 of my deck was "Masquerade" cards, which makes everyone trade cards away.

Saturday: A useless day spent playing video games.

Pretty much all day.

Climbed a big Poseidon.

Climbed a smaller Poseidon at night.

Had a wolf corpse sit up like it was still alive.

Ran into someone 40 levels higher than me.

Friday: Solved almost all my outstanding problems.

Which is good for a relaxing weekend.

All those dots are angry people.  I made lots of angry people.

I wonder if there are secret underwater places that are full of cool things that don't show up on the map.

I mean, there's just causal statues everywhere.

• Or we could all just not be assholes.

Thursday: Sleepy

Staying up late to play video games this week finally caught up.  I've been sleepy all day.

Singularity came back!  Yay!

• This is like a block away from where I used to live.
• Ha ha.
• Magical girls.

Wednesday: I hate pair programming, but it's super useful, and it's a good way to spread knowledge and get things done.

Which is why I was happy it came back.  It's also good because there's someone else there to make you write proper unit tests instead of just asserting that things work correctly.

I'm still trying to cram in as much Assassin's Creed as I can before the holidays.  Which, given that I just completed the first half of the game yesterday, and then discovered that the extra DLC I got in my bundle contains like another at-least half of the game again, means I'm probably going to fuck around a bunch instead of advancing the story.  Today's problem was that I accidentally stumbled across a quadruple homicide that I accidentally committed by walking too close to people who got angry and then stabbed.  This game has characters who are both a) way too touchy about that kind of thing; and b) just don't give up when they can.  I guess that is in the title of the game.

Then I did one of the DLC quest lines, which involved saving a village.  After we all rode our horses out, the computer people walked back.

I met Thyia.

We discussed the finer points of mythology.

After saving the village, she was concerned about my finances, and the risks I took to help keep them safe.

I suggested that we take care not to create extra messes that would need to be cleaned up.

Followed by a short discussion of adequate nutrition.

So yeah.  Turns out there is a lot of romance in the DLC that I didn't know about.

Then I decided to fight a fire giant.

"I'm sure that boat will work."

 Spoiler: it did not.

So I swam.

To the lair of the Fire Dude.

Who promptly murdered me four times, because I am very very flammable.

• Mug cookie.
• I think this is another example of how outsourcing fundamental work is a terrible thing.
• A comparison of the game map to reality.