Moe Lane's Blog, page 103

In the Mail: SATURDAY NIGHT.

I meant to see SATURDAY NIGHT in theaters, but it just wasn’t happening. Ach, well. …Huh. I was thinking of seeing a movie this week, too, but three days of school closings scuppered that plan, but good.

Again: oh, well. It’s not like these are actual problems.

#commissionearned

The Boss Lady, Part 2. (Unfiltered)

This one probably isn’t as interesting, although it’s been useful.

The Boss Lady (2102-2113)
President Martinez was not an idealist, and never presented herself as one. She was instead a born technocrat who despised the lack of feedback and accountability that had been increasing features of the Lewis regime. Martinez saw nothing particularly wrong with the idea of being effectively a ruling queen, as long as she was being given correct information and the ability to quickly fix mistakes. Neither was she adverse to the transportation process, as long as it was exiling the right people. And as long as it was only exiling people discriminately. The PLC and Coexisters had been running too wild, for too long.

Domestically, Martinez had three goals. The first was arranging matters so that the Extended States gained the same representation in Congress as the Original States. Privately, Martinez felt that the goal was meaningless — Congress did not significantly regain any power during her time in office — but it was becoming a matter of some importance to the hispanic half of the USNA. Second, Martinez permitted (and indeed quietly encouraged) opposition parties to flourish, solely because the Dynamic Party had ironically become a bloated, inefficient mess over the last few decades of single-party rule. Lewis might have wanted potential rivals to be dumb, fat, and happy, but then Lewis wanted to be carried out of the Oval Office, feet-first.

And that was Martinez’s third goal: to be able to serve two full terms, and then safely leave. She was familiar with history. Dictators almost never got to retire, and even monarchs had difficulty abdicating. Presidents left office all the time.

Foreign policy was much easier. The creation of Grande Brasil in 2102 had finally ended the Consolidation Wars, not that anyone realized it at the time (or that the endless worldwide conflicts that had killed a quarter of a billion people over a quarter-century would someday be lumped together). That made it possible for deal-making. West Europe was amenable to trading land in South America in exchange for Greenland (and a blind eye to the takeover of Iceland). She also signed the first trade agreements with the South East Defensive Association, which later led to cordial relations between the two Great Powers, and their long standing alliance on the new Adjudication Council (formed in 2109). The Martinez administration also formalized relations with the other Great Powers, while extricating the USNA from the last of the international obligations and understandings left over from its predecessor. For better or worse — Americans were evenly divided on which — the era of American world hegemony was over.

President Martinez did not run for reelection in 2112, instead peacefully handing power over to President Troy Gardner. She spent the rest of her life in comfortable retirement, occasionally performing diplomatic missions on the behalf of the USNA government. She wrote no memoirs, kept no diaries, made sure that any stories about her were kept as innocuous as possible — and gave as few interviews as she could. 

Maria Martinez died at home in her Veracruz estate on Jun 12, 2145, at the age of eighty-seven. At her request, her state funeral was held in her home city, which had grown to be the working capital of the USNA.  By then the country could fairly be called something like an actual functioning democracy, albeit one with a remarkably powerful executive, and an ongoing need for Reform. The older outrages of the Lewis regime were gone, but not quite forgotten, and certainly never really apologized for. They happened, and that was the end of the matter.

And throughout all this time, freer country or not, the flow of involuntary colonists never quite stopped flowing.

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Pssst! Hey, buddy: looking for cassette-era filk archives?

Here ya go. Got tipped the wink on this one by a fellow-enthusiast who saw me bemoaning the lack of a real archive for filk music. There’s just, like, tons of stuff out there on cassette that might as well be in another dimension for all we can interact with it. And you can’t blipping buy it, either. Even Firebird Art’s just gone, man, like tears in rain.

Damn, now I’m sad.

Yet more snow tonight.

Hopefully only a little, but the words ‘black ice’ are now showing up in advisories. The weather around here is hovering just around freezing during the day, and colding up at night, and the kids are already at a two hour delay for tomorrow. Fortunately, we’re still good on staples, because going out seems dumb right now.

Oh, and Backerkit thinks I’m likely to fund my upcoming Fermi Resolution Workbook project, now. That’s cool.

HELLDIVERS 2 to get god-awful movie adaptation.

…In your heart, you know I’m right: “The hit video game Helldivers 2 is getting the feature film treatment! Sony Pictures announced the project during their CES 2025 press conference.” It’s going to be very exciting, really. My eldest loves Helldivers 2, and hasn’t really experienced yet the special pain that comes when a movie studio takes one of your favorite video games, and drops it feet-first into a wood chipper. The life lesson will be good for his development, really.

Moe Lane

PS: Trust me, I could have been considerably more… visceral …in that imagery.

#commissionearned

DungeonDraft proof of concept.

Yeah, I was able to buy it after all. All I had to do was go on a video call with other creators, kvetch a little about how I wasn’t able to, and then the magic spell took effect and suddenly I could buy it. Note that I’m not actually embarrassed by that: everybody on the call was intimately aware of the phenomenon.

Anyway, first map. I can tell right now that Dungeon Draft will work fine, once I figure out what assets to acquire. I don’t need fancy, I just need floor plans.

The Boss Lady, Part One (Unfiltered).

More USNA stuff. This is oddly engrossing for me.

Mary G. Martin
(Maria Garcia Martinez)
(2058-2145)
Senator for Cardenas, 2085-2101
Vice President, USNA 2101-2102
President, USNA 2102-2113

Maria Garcia Martinez was the eldest child of a prominent Veracruz family. She was raised in a political atmosphere where all the doors were opened for her, no matter who was actually the mayor or governor at the time. She was a serious child, and even more serious adult, dividing her time between her studies and the family business (machine politics). She won her first election to the municipal council before she had even graduated from university, and somehow managed to juggle both before graduating with a political science degree in 2080.

In 2085 she was given the position of first Senator for the new Extended State of Cárdenas (essentially, the city of Veracruz, plus some of the surrounding suburbs) by the state legislature. They were looking for someone trustworthy who would keep an eye on things and not cause trouble; despite her youth (an absurdly young twenty-seven), Maria fit the bill.

To be fair, Maria performed both her assigned tasks flawlessly in her sixteen years in the Senate. She did anglicize her name almost immediately, but that was a common choice of hispanic politicians at the time. “Mary Martin” never tried to look or sound anglo, but she quickly became known as a horse trader and deal-maker when it came to what little business the USNA Senate was allowed to do. Mary made friends easily, but never the wrong friends. She was also just as adept at owing favors to people as she was having favors owed, too. Many people in Washington had a vested interest in seeing her ascend at a reasonable rate.

That was probably what got Senator Martin the Vice Presidential nod in 2100. The Lewis regime liked to swap out a new Vice Presidential nominee every four years, on the principle that allowing some discreet nest-feathering on a strict time schedule would keep more factions sweet, and it was finally the hispanics’ turn to get someone at the feeding trough. Besides, the Old Man was dying. Better to put a Vice President from the weakest power base in place there. Once Lewis finally died, Mary could serve as a caretaker President until a real replacement could be picked. And if she tried to make her own play, well, that would be unfortunate for her and her faction.

The Anti-Coup
The events of the evening of April 3rd, 2102, remain stubbornly mysterious. What is known is that General Lillian Early (Commandant, People’s Liberty Corps) had a meeting with Sam Sweetwater (Director, Department of Coexistence) had a late-night meeting with each other in a Bethesda government office, and it ended in a shootout that neither survived. Neither did most of their respective inner staffers and security details; two survivors (one from each side) were eventually tracked down, months later, and each independently insisted the meeting had been initiated by the other faction. Both survivors were also adamant that the whole thing had been a setup from the start, and that their own side had simply defended themselves when the other side started shooting. 

Regardless, this meant that when President Lewis died the next morning of a sudden stroke, the two factions considered most likely to make a play for the Oval Office were, to quote one gleeful Jefferson political writer, “two flopping chickens looking for their heads.” It turned out that neither the PLC nor the Department even knew that their respective leaders were missing, let alone that they were cooling corpses in an office that had been shut down for ‘fumigating’ that week. It would take a week for anybody to finally track the missing officials down, and even then it was because the stink was finally making it out to the street.

Not that it mattered. President Martin (who took the oath of office as ‘Maria Garcia Martinez’) had wasted no time in ordering the Army and Federal Security Bureau to place both entire organizations under immediate lockdown and detention. No excuses, no negotiations, no delays: the PLC and Coexisters could either surrender, or die.

Most chose ‘surrender.’ The ones who did not were disorganized, and ill-prepared for an actual shooting match. The two organizations had apparently spent far more time on abusing prisoners and transportees than on maintaining their weapons and readiness, because the resisters invariably put an embarrassingly bad defense. More than one firefight abruptly ended when the defenders had their smart weapons fail; and even when they shot back, they rarely hit anything that they aimed at. Cleaning out the last holdouts happened a bare week after the start of the campaign, and that was because of sheer physical distance.

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Boom?

Kinda maybe BOOM. This is pushing my self-defined limits for my site, I know, but the concrete policy changes are just too potentially far-reaching for me to ignore. I also get that none of these people are inherently trustworthy. There’s no guarantee that any of this will happen. Then again, given the current circumstances, there’s no guarantee it won’t happen, either.

Woah.

Zuck going full anti-censorship, following Elon and X's lead

Based Zuck arc and vibe shift complete pic.twitter.com/bsC7LrYL0n

— Beff – e/acc (@BasedBeffJezos) January 7, 2025

Via @eigenrobot.

‘City of New Orleans.’

City of New Orleans, Arlo Guthrie

#commissionearned

‘Why I Despise Reed Richards and You Should Too.’

Yeah, Doctor Doom would absolutely have a podcast. Sorry, a DOOMcast. This is pitch-perfect.