Moe Lane's Blog, page 156

Should I play SPACE MARINE before SPACE MARINE 2?

SPACE MARINE is apparently ten bucks on Amazon (the anniversary edition is fifteen bucks on Steam). Is it worth it to play that first for the story, or should I just shout THE EMPEROR PROTECTS and get SPACE MARINE 2 when I’m tired of farting around with FALLOUT 4 until the new STARFIELD expansion comes out? …Which is in ten days, so I probably would have to move on all of that.

#commissionearned

Art pieces that use AI in the process have a ‘look.’ One not unlike the Mark of Cain.

It doesn’t matter how much you do yourself. You could draw the whole thing by hand – but once you start using Stable Diffusion or whatever, the program overwhelms the actual art. You invariably end up with generic popslop, and I frankly don’t know why you bothered to do any original work at all.

God, art historians are going to end up hating this decade.

Moe Lane

PS: My books’ cover art is AI-free. I won’t use an artist who uses it.

#commissionearned

‘Swing the Cat.’

Swing the Cat, Meg Davis

#commissionearned

I had like zero concentration skills today.

On the bright side, I got some chores done. I also mailed out some comp copies of TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION 2, which is nice because usually I take forever to do that. Anyway, I should take my brain’s hint and get some sleep. But tomorrow I really need to get on with that short story…

So, Social Fixer does a LOT to fix Facebook.

Starting by defaulting back to ‘most recent posts from the people you follow.’ The algorithm was showing incredible amounts of crap, and apparently thinks that I am a damned Communist in the bargain (or at least enjoys the idea of orcas eating rich people*), and that was starting to seriously piss me off. Social Fixer isn’t perfect – I will have to go to my group pages (including my own) to post things – but I can live with the next configuration.

Guess I’m not too old yet, after all.

Moe Lane

*I do not. I like orcas, you see. I would thus find it regrettable to have to exterminate an entire pre-sapient species because they have developed a taste for human meat.

The surprisingly unsettling MR. CROCKET trailer.

I’m not going to lie: I got a bit alarmed at MR. CROCKET. The guy’s creepy, and there’s no denying it. My eldest already knew about the film and was planning to catch it next month, so maybe we’ll do that and ‘SALEM’S LOT for a Halloween movie night.

Oh, hey, I have Internet again.

Eight hours into a two hour neighborhood outage. This was like a two-truck problem, too. Here’s hoping it doesn’t conk out again while I’m posting this…

Violin performances… INNNNN SPAAAAAAAAAACE!

Saw this on Facebook originally, only I can’t find it now because Facebook has these very strange ideas about why people use Facebook. But this is cool. Mildly put together, but still extremely cool. And they did it just to say that they could*.

*And to sell Starlink subscriptions, obviously. To which I say: God Bless America, and All that the traffic will bear.

‘The Old Dun Cow.’

The Old Dun Cow, Seamus Kennedy

#commissionearned

09/18/2024 Snippet, THE LAST DAYS OF UNHOLY TOLEDO.

So I didn’t get as much done, but I got it started, and that was the hard part today.

Patreon!

The rooms were oddly proportioned, and worryingly angled. Shapes were wrong, and so were the shadows. The only light in each chamber were from great braziers, set outside the rooms themselves; their baleful fires flickered through tall, yet dirty stained glass windows, bathing each room in fantastical colors. It should have been darker; and yet the shadows themselves seemed to radiate an anti-light that revealed, yet brought no comfort.

This first chamber was all in blue, and the Monsignor made odd, mocking symbols with his fingers as they entered. “This is the Hall of Deserved Languor,” he told the other two, “and we must pass through it quickly.”

“Who would stop us?” Maddox started to mumble, then snapped his head as if fighting off a sudden weariness. “There are no defenders.”

“Look to your feet, fool!” Maddox bristled, but Nat looked – and then he swore, for some of the shadows were moving. The Monsignor muttered and threw up a mage-light, revealing the shadows to be crawling men and women. Of a sort: they were gaunt, with eyes always blinking, and hands and feet that were halfway to claws. Slow they looked and slow they moved, but there was a blind hunger in their faces that was no less cruel for being torpid.