Moe Lane's Blog, page 25

Lonnnnnng day today.

I’m running Field for an SCA event this weekend. That basically translates to “help set up the baronial and Minister of the List tents, as well as the list field fences themselves.” We had plenty of help, but I’m not thirty anymore. Shoot, I’m not even forty. I’m the guy with the gray beard and the three hundred foot heavy-duty outdoor tape measure* and the little red flags who tells you where to set up.

At least tomorrow is a no-heavy-lifting day.

Moe Lane

*It feels glorious to have one of those, in fact. There is nothing quite so grown-up as knowing that you are a person who needs to keep a three hundred foot heavy-duty outdoor tape measure in the trunk of your car. You can feel the universe taking you ever-so-slightly more seriously.

‘Jingle Jangle Jingle.’

Jingle Jangle Jingle, Kay Kyser

#commissionearned

Tweet of the Day, The Student Cheating Problem edition.

As a father, some of this was tough to watch. I’m just glad that I can trust my own kids not to do anything like this.

Professor crashes out over cheating students pic.twitter.com/svzbteCMUy

— AlmostFriday.TV (@AlmostFridayTV) June 19, 2025

Via @DaddyWarpig.

05/19/2025 Snippet, IN THE HALLS OF THE LILY KING.

Still trying to get into the rhythm.

…

It was easy to cause a distraction in Holy Quebec. All you had to do was be loud in any other language besides French. The trick lay in being loud in the right way. Waylon had seen the inside of this city’s holding cells a time or too, and while they weren’t awful he was far too sober to overlook their drawbacks. So doing anything illegal was, as New Californians would put it, Right Out.

Luckily, the Lost Tourist wheeze was an old reliable.

“Please, Notre-Dame, see-voo play?” he asked the closest gendarme, mangling the French with malice aforethought. “La mee-zoom dew papa? On rude bee-ad? Is this the right way?” He wished he’d an actual map to wave around, but calling the Cathedral-Basilica of Notre-Dame de Québec ‘the Pope’s house’ would probably be enough to roil the waters without boiling them.

And didn’t it, just? The gendarme gave him the sourest of looks, barking out “C’est une affaire de police. Je ne suis pas guide touristique. Allez-vous-en!” far too quickly for someone who didn’t speak Imperial French well to follow. Luckily, his muttered “Imbécile!” afterward was loud enough for Waylon to hear.

Tweet of the Day, Roll 3d10 For Crushing Damage edition.

This is fairly hardcore, especially since the DM in question undoubtedly heard this response at some point, and then began to smile evilly.

My favorite Gary Gygax thing happened while I was on a panel with him (obviously Gary was the big draw for the audience, so we let him do most of the talking). A querulous player asked how to interpret some arcane rule buried in the dungeon master's guide. Gary said curtly, "Ask… pic.twitter.com/6SIdP3134x

— Sandy Petersen (@SandyofCthulhu) June 19, 2025

Happy Juneteenth!

As is customary for this site, happy Juneteenth! It’s a clear, hot day: I may just grill those hamburgers instead of stove-cooking them, after all. And to Hell with all slavers.

‘I’ll Fly Away.’

I’ll Fly Away, Gillian Welch & Alison Krauss

#commissionearned

The Predictable But Maybe Okay Anyway OSIRIS trailer.

Yeah, it’s silly that aliens would come to Earth just to collect humans for their larders. Silly and stupid. On the other hand: lots of guns, and Linda Hamilton doing a weary Russian accent. On the gripping hand: my wife wants to know what they did with that poor Gorn’s eyes.

The Unnameable (Unfiltered)

I really need to get back to other things.

…

The Unnameable (Unfiltered)

Who killed the Amalgamation? What killed the Amalgamation? That is the unanswered question. It may very well be an unanswerable question, for all that it is the most important one facing humanity. There are those who strenuously argue that the question should not be answered at all. What good could possibly come from solving the mystery? If an entire galactic civilization could not prevail against its murderer, what hope does humanity have?

That is a minority opinion, however. Most people take the position that it’s better to know the danger, if only because it could give humanity an idea of how to minimize the risks. They don’t obsess over the topic, though. Obsessing over it never ends well.

What Is Known

The scale was universal. Humanity has yet to find an occupied Amalgamation world that was not targeted. Even the smallest orbital platform or mining outpost was sought out.The attacks were simultaneous. Not quite perfectly: the central worlds were all struck at the same time, to the extent that this even means anything over interstellar distances, with outlying systems mopped up in an inexorable tide of xenocide. But the murder of the Amalgamation took no more than six standard Terran days.The destruction was thorough. No sapient life besides humanity survives in the former worlds of the Amalgamation. At least one ship survived by hiding in interstellar space, but it was long cold by the time humanity found it. Under the circumstances, finding more derelict ships would be distinctly low-probability events.The malice was overwhelming. Whatever killed the Amalgamation hated it. It particularly hated the Amalgamation’s culture and arts, taking special care to wreck and spoil whatever it could find of beauty, strength, and worth. This destruction was not perfect, but to this day there are huge gaps in humanity’s understanding of the aesthetics of galactic society.The xenocide was ritualized. As for the various species of the Amalgamation: most died on the first day of the attacks. The others were brought to various places in the Tomb Worlds (invariably one of local religious or cultural importance), and had things done to them. Several centuries have turned the evidence of those things into battered, scattered bones, to the secret relief of xeno-archeologists. It was already too easy to think too hard about what must have happened there.The oversight was deliberate. Whatever murdered the Amalgamation knew of humanity’s existence. The location of Earth was well-marked in the records, and the Amalgamation’s monitoring of humanity was both constant and comprehensive. Earth should have met the same fate as the rest of the Galaxy.

And nobody knows why it did not.

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The SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE trailer.

Yes, let me address this now: SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE left me unimpressed. Jeremy Allen White is a good actor, but he doesn’t have Bruce’s musical stage presence – yes, yes, I know many of my readers don’t like Springsteen’s singing. The man can work a crowd, though. Concede that, at the very least.

Also: I like Nebraska a lot more, now that I’ve admitted it’s a folk album. But let’s not make it into the greatest work of Twentieth century music, okay? Even if it’s part of the biopic.

#commissionearned