Moe Lane's Blog, page 166

Tweet/PSA of the Day, If You Assault Cops While Wearing A Banana Suit… edition.

…do not post pictures of yourself in the banana suit afterward. Or maybe do, because this was funny. I laughed. God help me, but I laughed.

2/2 @PhillyPolice say Thomas helped lead detectives to himself by posting selfie video & pics to social media from the car meetups. pic.twitter.com/fMykvJAh1i

— Steve Keeley (@KeeleyFox29) October 9, 2024

Via @iowahawkblog, who is likewise finding humor in this situation, somehow.

(PS: For the record, throwing firecrackers at a cop car or whatever it was is definitely assault, but I dunno if I’d agree it was aggravated assault. I thought it would be, like, a bat or something. Not that it matters, because I’m not going to be on that jury anyway.)

The unfortunately wrong-minded THE DAY OF THE JACKAL trailer.

I wish they had called DAY OF THE JACKAL something else.

It’s mostly because the show seems determined to do something that the book at least avoided (I can’t remember if I saw the film): to wit, make the Jackal a villain. In a very particular way, in the book he is not. The Jackal has no interest in his target, no agenda past his contract, and feels no need to offer a justification for his actions. He is… a force of nature, as implacable as his human frame will let him be, and the heroes don’t need to understand him. They simply need to kill him.

Is a tornado a villain? A mudslide? A swarm of angry bees? No, no, and no – but you can enjoy watching all of those being defeated. Humanizing the Jackal here feels like it’s just catering to what people think is the current taste for comprehensible, understandable villains. I’d rather they didn’t try to bother.

Moe Lane

PS: That being said: now I want to reread the book. And (re?)watch the movie. And… oh. Wow. That would work. That would absolutely work.

Nevermind, will tell you later.

#commissionearned

‘Bold Marauder.’

Bold Marauder, Mimi & Richard Farina

#commissionearned

Slight change of plans: I’m modifying clip art for DARK HISTORY *today*.

Some of it is not entirely awful. Note that I’m modifying clip art, not drawing it myself. I do not have that skill set. Believe me, if I could afford to have other people do it, I would.

Anyway, that was what I was doing tonight. It’s not really great, but it’s oddly soothing.

The new A COMPLETE UNKNOWN trailer.

Sorry not sorry. Bob Dylan and Joan Baez are part of the background music of my twenties (Johnny Cash came later). I can also believe Timothée Chalamet can do a convincing Dylan. All in all, I’m probably seeing A COMPLETE UNKNOWN in theaters. This is a thing that is happening.

Another DARK HISTORY page.

My schedule got thoroughly horked today, thanks to a doctor’s appointment that should have been over by 10 AM, but instead started then and stretched all the way to lunch. Good news came from it – my eyes are not oxidizing any faster than is normal for mortal humans – but I was hoping for more time to do things today. So I decided to finish laying out the text for DARK HISTORY instead. Tomorrow I start making charmingly authentic clip art for it. Hopefully I can have it ready by the middle of the month, because I should have done all of this in August.

(My other homebrew RPG stuff can be found here.)

Ach, well, hindsight and all that.

The DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE Honest Trailer.

Spoiler: No Deadpool cameo.

I don’t think this Honest Trailer was entirely fair, although I do see their points. But while it may have been aimed squarely at my demographic, DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE went on to hit $1.3 billion at the box office, which argues that my demographic is perhaps not all that small. Also, it was a relief to watch a superhero film that’s good at fanservice — again, the kind of fanservice that I want, to be sure. And again: $1.3 billion.

Tweet of the Day, Who ISN’T It Hard Out Here For, These Days? edition.

I gotta agree with the general commentary here. Ross Douthat should have been able to place his fantasy novel. I’ll also say this: Ross is also a hell of a lot better off just publishing the damned thing himself. It’ll never happen, but I doubt at this point I’d even take a multi-book contract, assuming anybody was insane enough to offer me one. Traditional publishing is not designed with the well-being of its authors in mind.

Seeing a NYT columnist turn to Substack to get his story out feels like a tipping point moment. And possibly the tipping point is for the trad publishers who rejected that book. https://t.co/KCTy8SAb5I

— Karl K. Gallagher (@KarlKGallagher) October 8, 2024

A rough draft page from the upcoming DARK HISTORY.

The image needs to be recentered, a bit. And some editing is required. But I’ve had a rotten day, so I needed to show that I did something creative today.

(My other homebrew RPG stuff can be found here.

Stay safe, Floridians.

I was feeling like I was having a bad day, until I remembered that I am not in the path of a hurricane, just after having another one pop up. Don’t take any foolish risk, folks. You can replace stuff easier than you can replace your lives.