Moe Lane's Blog, page 456
December 4, 2022
‘I Saw Three Ships.’
I Saw Three Ships, Barenaked Ladies
#commissionearned
12/04/2022 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE FAT MAN.
Danger!
Patreon!Timmy was pretty sure kids weren’t supposed to be in this part of town. Good kids, at least. It was probably okay for wicked kids like him. It was night, too. …Only, was it a school night? It’d been a while since he’d been in a regular one. The School he went to now sometimes had classes after dark, because there was a lot of stuff you could only learn how to do when the sun wasn’t in the sky. Shadowy alleys and dirty streets weren’t nearly as bad.
It all smelled awful, though. It was a mix of Dirt and unwashed bodies, and smells from all the stuff that came out of people — including blood. The blood was what he was sniffing for now, because the thing Timmy was chasing had leaked out a bunch of it as it ran. It didn’t smell like regular blood, either” too sharp, like it had been mixed with bleach. That was good, though. He could track it better that way.
Timmy thought he was gaining on the thing he was hunting. That was good, and bad. Good because it meant it was getting weaker, and bad because it was one of the things who could think. A dumb animal would just run until it fell over, but anything smart would figure out that it’d have a better chance if it turned around and went after Timmy, as hard as it could. At least, that’s what Timmy would do — and this thing was as smart as a teenager, right? So Timmy had to worry about that.
December goal: 45 book sales!
If I manage that, I should be able to say that I’ve made an average of $500/per year from Amazon sales of my books since I started up on this. What does that mean, in the larger scheme of things? …Honestly, not that much. I’ve had a really good year generally already. But the overarching goal here is to achieve a revenue stream that will let me publish at least one novel a year on my own; and to do that, I need to hustle. This is part of the hustle.
So. Buy my books! They make awesome Christmas gifts.
Moe Lane
PS: I also need to start up a store in 2023 that will let me sell people signed copies of my books. For that I’m gonna need to do some research, though. I don’t have the money to pay somebody to do it for me.
#commissionearned
Tweet-thread of the Day, I laughed, @Iowahawk edition.
Noice.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 4, 2022
Who said—“A vast and trunkless shred of car
Stands in the desert. Near it, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered grille lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command…
1/3https://t.co/x4gFl7qLih
My name is 1925ish Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost, Car of Kings;
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) December 4, 2022
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
3/3
*with apologies to Percy Bysshe Shelley
Patreon Microfiction: Patience in the Dark.
I figure the guys in ‘Patience in the Dark’ are actually not too bad when it comes to getting disease cures, if not fertility treatments. Blighting the existence of viruses and bacteria, before they can accomplish their personal goals (such as they are)? That’s actually kind of soothing to the Brotherhood. Plus, it helps keep the authorities off their collective backs.
Patreon!December 3, 2022
‘Little Drummer Boy.’
Little Drummer Boy, For King & Country
#commissionearned
The “I should ask my kid why this will suck” THE LAST OF US trailer.
I didn’t actually play the video game and he did, you see. So I’m unsure precisely how the premise of THE LAST OF US is going to be ridiculous. I assume it will be, because core assumptions that are okay to be implausible in video games rarely translate well into the big screen; but I just don’t know the precise details*.
*In real life those things look like they’d easily burn, bleed out, and/or not survive a dose of hard radiation. Nobody cares in a video game, because killing zombies is your job; but in a movie, the question arises, Did nobody have barbed wire, flamethrowers, and/or thermobaric weapons handy? I mean, shoot, we still remember how to make mustard gas, right? It doesn’t count as a war crime when you use them only on zombies.
#commissionearned
12/03/2022 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE FAT MAN.
Timmy!
Patreon!“Good afternoon, child.” The Fat Man’s voice was as bad as the hum. It was grave, but merry underneath it all. He sounded like just the sort of fellow who you could trust with your life and your soul, but not your selfishly-hoarded resources that would be better used to brighten the lives of a bunch of orphans. If they were the right kind of orphans, naturally; Timmy was technically an orphan himself, and he was pretty sure he wouldn’t qualify.
“Good afternoon, sir.” Timmy wanted to be rude. He really did. He’d been told not to by the Headmaster of the School, though. That had been weird, because lately the old guy had started saying why. “The ‘Fat Man,’ as you called him — please do not call him that to his face, young Mister Timothy — is an extremely powerful Entity. He is not our foe, but he is also absolutely not aligned with us in methods. He tolerates our existence, nothing more.”
“He’s dangerous, then?” Timmy frowned at the Headmaster. “The stories I heard didn’t say he’s mean.”
“Oh, he is safe enough to approach, as long as you don’t provoke him. I do admit that it’s safer for even a wicked child like you to treat with him than it would be for me. You simply don’t have the same bitter history with him that an adult in my position would. Rest assured, I wouldn’t let you go near him if I seriously thought it might end in disaster.” Timmy decided that he believed that, which felt weird. He also instinctively knew that it was smart to be careful around anybody who somebody as powerful as the Headmaster took seriously.
Book of the Week: Implacable (The Lost Fleet: Outlands Book 3).
…Damn you, Ace Books. Damn you for knowing I’ll preorder the Kindle version of Implacable at paperback prices. And damn you (much less forgivably) for not giving Jack Campbell more of it.
#commissionearned
Tweet of the Day, Why I’m Not Worried About AI Writing edition.
Basically: the problem it’ll have with replacing human writing can’t be fixed by tweaking the grammatical algorithms. This doesn’t even work as satire.
I want to see if AI can replace me, so I asked it to write the sort of thing I’d write on my Substack. pic.twitter.com/xSmYymhhgq
— Frank J. Fleming (@IMAO_) December 4, 2022
