Moe Lane's Blog, page 124
January 7, 2025
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.
Patreon!
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.
— Beff – e/acc (@BasedBeffJezos) January 7, 2025
Zuck going full anti-censorship, following Elon and X's lead
Based Zuck arc and vibe shift completepic.twitter.com/bsC7LrYL0n
Via @eigenrobot.
January 6, 2025
‘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.
The ‘Look, we wanted murder crabs, okay?’ SURVIVE trailer.
Coming Soon has the synopsis for SURVIVE, and it’s a doozy: ““In the film, Julia and her loving husband celebrate their son’s birthday on their boat in the middle of the ocean,” reads the official synopsis. “When a violent storm nearly capsizes them, the family awakes in a desert land. Earth has undergone a tragic polarity reversal, draining water from the oceans. The family must race to safety before the water returns all while battling hungry creatures from the abyss that hunt for fresh flesh.””
Yeah, I should be kinder. You don’t go to horror movies for the science. You go to horror movies for the swarming murder-crabs. Even if all of them should be exploding from the lack of pressure. And even then: as I said to my wife, watching sea monsters decompress like that would be impressively gory, but then what are you going to watch for the next hour and fifty nine minutes?
The Expanse RPG opens up late pledges.
I already backed THE EXPANSE ROLEPLAYING GAME: TRANSPORT UNION EDITION Backerkit. If you missed it, now is your chance to get in on that. Good, gritty Solar System science fiction. Check it out!
Tweet of the Day, Guess Who Likes Monnnnn-neeey? edition.
Chris Evans, that’s who. Via GeekTyrant comes this first look at the live-action What If? I am a little sad that Scarlett Johansson’s not on the list, but I guess there’s still bad blood there between her and the Mouse. Such is life.
#AvengersDoomsday late March pic.twitter.com/kFu0EeQf8H
— Chad Ryan (@TheGeekyCast) January 4, 2025
