Moe Lane's Blog, page 138

The THE GORGE Apple TV+ trailer.

Look, I am a simple man, with simple tastes. Boy meets Girl while guarding a Hellmouth is right up my alley. I would have gone seen THE GORGE in theaters, honestly.

12/08/2024 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

Lunar lairs have to be smmmmaaaaal…

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It’s actually not very hard to secure a man in a spacesuit; control his air, and you control him. Supposedly the local environment was habitable, but Tobias didn’t trust those readings for a moment. Judging by the generally horrible features of his captors, there were probably all sorts of contaminants down here.

Subconsciously, Tobias had been expecting a long, torturous journey through endless passages and caverns, but that was ridiculous. All of this atmosphere had to brought in, heated, and kept from escaping, after all. There could be no luxuries like a vast complex. Not on the moon. Instead… just down the way was a door, which led to a three-story atrium. That had a collection of rooms scooped ouf of the rock, and that was the end of the matter. 

Whether or not it was the end of them would be a different story.

Patreon microfiction: ‘All the Reason I Need.’

100WS-All the Reason I NeedDownloadPatreon!

We ever get off this rock, “All the Reason I Need” will at some point become historical fiction. “Because I felt like it” and “You ain’t the boss of me” covers so many situations, doesn’t it? …As well it should.

12/07/2024 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON BEASTS.

Starting to finally figure this one out.

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“I’m sorry to say that Marcin was rather good at puzzles,” Lillian told him. Tobias had decided that reading her into the situation was safe enough; he trusted her, Asenath trusted her, and there wasn’t anything else for a lunar geologist to do right now. Besides, she knew Marcin from Dee Station.

“He enjoyed working out old collisions from the asteroid tracking data,” Lillian went on. “He always said it helped him quiet the part of the brain that kept him from painting. He was good at those, too. Not a master, mind you, but he could have made a go at it if being a lunar researcher hadn’t worked out.”

“Was he one of the, ah, interesting ones at Dee Station?” Tobias asked her as he studied what images existed of Grabinski’s work. He had been a neo-graffitist, so most of his work obviously was back at the abandoned British facility.

“Interesting-interesting, or interesting-barking mad?” Lillian shrugged. “The former, I’d say. He had his little ways, like the rest of us, but he would sit with people at meals and come to parties. I think he had a fellow, back on” — she waved up, all the while keeping her eyes resolutely anywhere but in the direction of Earth — “You Know Where. I know he took it hard when everything happened. Even when we still talked about it, he chose not to talk about it. I suppose he never saw the point.”

12/07/2024 Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODELS.

No translation!

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Tobias was not a small man, nor had he neglected his exercise training on the Moon. He still staggered when one of the attackers casually shoved him against the wall, then pulled out the cleaver that had been strapped to the side. The few lights set in the passageways that still worked made the cleaver-man’s face into a nightmare of shadow and scar, with a sneer that could have been carved into the very bone below. “Ein dicker Amerikaner,” he spit. “Gut. Das beste Fleisch muss eine Weile abgehangen werden.”

Beside him, Reitner gasped. “Warte! Bist du auch Schweizer?”

That stopped the cleaver-man cold. He looked Reitner up, down, then gestured at the two attackers who had grabbed Reitner. “Zeig mir dein Gesicht,” the cleaver-man barked. Tobias decided that this was definitely German, but not quite the version still spoken in some parts of the EU. It sounded more guttural, and with fewer Euro loan-words.

The man must have said something like Reveal yourself!, because Reithner promptly made her helmet fully transparent. She looked… well, like Hell, Tobias admitted. We all do. Too-pale skin with frozen sapphire eyes, and her hair was buzzed too short to tell the color. But the set and shape of her face oddly matched the attackers’. You could believe that they and she were related, and that thought filled Tobias with both horror, and pity.

TikTok, tik tok, tikkkkkk tokkkkk…

It is looking grim for the Chinese company:

A federal court in the United States has upheld the legality of a bi-partisan action that could cause social media app TikTok to become inaccessible nationwide beginning in January 2025. Attorneys representing TikTok are expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court of the United States, but they’re currently up against a January 19 deadline.

This is one of those complicated topics that have relevance to both my former and current lives. Focusing strictly on the latter: this will have a serious impact on BookTok, in the ‘high explosives steadily dropped on it’ sense of the word. I imagine that a lot of people who use that service are absolutely freaking out, right now.

Personally, I’ve been expecting something like this to happen for a couple of years now. Which is one major reason why I haven’t been moving into the TikTok space. The other reasons? …Ehh, those are more in the ‘my former life’ column. Suffice it to say that there’s a reason why the app wasn’t sold to a non-ChiCom entity.

Book of the Week: Sink the Rising Sun.

Sink the Rising Sun‘s coming out next week, and Jon Gabriel’s an old internet buddy of mine*. Plus, it’s a WWII submarine warfare book. What’s not to like?

*Who has not given me an ARC or anything, not that I would’ve taken one anyway. Sales are important. Especially when it’s a first book.

#commissionearned

‘A Christmas Carol.’

Just a bit of whiskey. Unaccountably, I have a meeting tomorrow. A not-fun SCA officer meeting.

A Christmas Carol, Tom Lehrer

#commissionearned

Well, *that* was an unexpectedly generous cocktail crawl.

I didn’t drink (well, except for the margarita, but that was just one drink anyway) much, but the restaurants doing this cocktail crawl thing weren’t shy about giving you a plate of food. Good stuff, too, not pigs-in-a-blanket or anything. Clearly they wanted us going, Hey. We should come back here and have a real dinner, and they will no doubt be pleased to hear that it absolutely worked.

Just not tonight: the thing ended at 8 PM, and I am morally certain that every restaurant in that little complex we were at is still packed to the gills, rafters, and/or the bursting point.

Moe Lane

PS: Part of me is now wondering whether I should have a little whiskey, since I’m home and don’t need to drive anywhere. Another part of me is wondering whether I should have a rather larger whiskey. It’s a puzzler.

Doing a food/drink walkabout thing tonight…

…which we will of course have to pace ourselves on, because I am not twenty-five anymore and neither is my wife. But that’s all right. When we were that young we couldn’t afford stuff like this. Remember your advantages, is what I say.

But expect a quiet night here.