Moe Lane's Blog, page 466
November 12, 2022
11/13/2022 NaNoWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 1817/29883.
I was going to just get some wordcount in – I watched television today, without shame – but then I hit a rhythm.
“Gah,” Lucas told me. Right now he had a face like a fish: open, kind of flapping, and no sound coming out. It had taken me five minutes to explain the situation, and I could almost see the gears lock up in his brain as he tried to follow along.
“So, yeah, it was just upper class fun and games. But, hey, nothing really bad happened, right?” I thought about it. “Except to the xylophone. But that just means there’s one less xylophone in the world, so it all evens out.”
“Gah.”
“And you’re going to get paid! Twice, even. Sofie’s gonna match whatever the highest amount you get for the other statues, plus a little extra for your troubles.” I leaned forward. “Just between you and me, amigo: go ahead and make sure that extra ain’t little. Just to drive the lesson home, right? Oh, and the Smithees will be happy if you can do this little thing for them, too. Their Aunt Dolores — you’d like her, I think — would just love to make some friendly deals with the Adventurer’s Guild. I guess just to keep things friendly. So, that’ll work out for you.”
“Gah.”
I sighed as I stood up. Clearly the guy needed some time to work through all of this. “Look, we never did have that breakfast, so why don’t you go get cleaned up, and we can go eat?” As I passed Lucas, still sitting in his chair, he suddenly started fumbling, like he was trying to say something, anything, that could somehow make all of this make any sense.
I grabbed his shoulder. “Forget it, Luke. It’s Cinderella.”
My mini-review of Amazon’s LET’S PLAY: MIDDLE-EARTH ROLEPLAYING.
Short version: I would have loved to have played in whatever homebrew MERP/Rolemaster campaign RINGS OF POWER was based off of.
Slightly longer version: as canonical Tolkien this show is an abomination before the Lord. However, if you tell yourself early and often that this show is somebody’s game, it becomes much, much easier to watch. I liked the Dwarves, and I liked the Harfoots! The Harfoots worked for me, surprisingly. I even eventually stopped wanting to punch Celebrimbor and Elrond in the face*. All in all, on its own terms it’s not… bad?
Yeah, I know. It feels blasphemous to even say.
Moe Lane
*It has nothing to do with their personalities or actions: it’s just that I’ve rarely met two characters with such punchable faces.
Book of the Week: The Silmarillion.
I’m picking The Silmarillion because I’ve been finishing up Rings of Power (of which more anon). So, on the oft chance that you haven’t yet read the collated worldbuilding notes of a man who could have been the greatest GM in the universe, here you go. Enjoy.
Tweet of the Day, Some People Are Gonna Lose Their [Expletive Deleted] In Twelve Hours edition.
They’ll be doing it live, too. I dunno if you want to watch it as it happens, or wait until tomorrow when they gather up all the particularly good meltdowns. Dealer’s choice, really.
This Saturday! Dave Chappelle and Black Star are here! pic.twitter.com/JbKwxvxtGK
— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) November 10, 2022
(Via Karen Townsend)
Moe Lane
PS: I know that this is close to The Line, but I’m a responsible bloghost. Far be it from me not to tell y’all about a particularly promising future trainwreck…
November 11, 2022
11/11/2022 NaNoWriMo, BANSHEE BEACH: 1010/28066
I took it a little easy today.
Joya was the kind of place that I usually have to figure out how to sneak, fake, or bluff my way into. You can tell even from the outside that it’s hoity-toity: the boardwalk splits in two and keeps going south, with a nice tall wall to let us mere commoners that this is where the rich folks frolic. The gates are manned, too, and with the polite kind of big, hulking guards. You weren‘t getting in there without an invitation.
Or unless you were guests of the Xanadu, because when we showed them our room keys the guards let us go right in. One of them even said, “Enjoy the beach, Shamus,” and sounded like he meant it.
Inside the fence it was all residential, the kind where you don’t bring the wife and kids unless they all get along all right with the mistress. Lucas cocked an eyebrow at me as we walked down the (ostentatiously low-key) bungalow-lined street towards the beach. “You look confused.”
“It’s like climbing stairs and thinking there’s one extra step,” I told him. “It’s never this easy.”
Lucas peered around. “You have to go to a lot of places like this? Why? There’s nothing here except beach houses. Really rich beach houses, sure, but all the fun places are on the other side of the fence.”
I gave a short, bitter laugh. “Places like this are where the really bad Cases come from, Lucas. You get sins everywhere, and they can slop over — but places like these got sin, secrets, and enough money to cover up both. I’ve never been here, but I’ll bet you a monroe that there’s at least three dead bodies buried inside the fences here. And that not a curtain twitched when they were buried, in the dead of night.”
That got a snort from the Adventurer. “Nice try, Shamus. If there that many murders here, you’d get ghosts. Everybody knows that.”
“…You have no romance in your soul, Lucas. You know that, right?”
“Tom, at this point in my career I’m just glad I still have the soul.”
RIP, Kevin Conroy.
Cancer sucks: “Kevin Conroy, best known for voicing Batman on Warner Bros.’ long-running TV show “Batman: The Animated Series,” has died after a short battle with cancer. He was 66.” He really was an iconic voice for that role.
My condolences to his family and loved ones.
Weekend Highlight: My Short Story Collection TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION (Buy it!)
I need to do posts like this more often. As in, every week. Advertising doesn’t happen on its own!
Anyway, TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION is a collection of short stories from my post-apocalyptic fantasy series the… Fermi Resolution*. It’s nine centuries’ worth of adventure, exploration, fighting, scheming, and general derring-do, and attractively priced, to boot! For Tom Vargas fans, there’s a prequel to FROZEN DREAMS in here; and if you haven’t read MORGAN BAROD yet, there’s an adventure from that book in this collection.
Check it out today!
*Which tries to answer the eternal question about alien civilizations: Where the Hell is everybody? My answer is, Alien cultures discover magic, and promptly blow themselves up. Imagine what would happen if eight billion people woke up and discovered that they could download spells via their smartphones. Go ahead. Imagine.
#commissionearned
I can haz vendor table sign?
…Sorry if that caused an involuntary flashback and/or a sudden existential terror. “Dying is easy. Comedy is hard.”
Behold! Signage for the vendor table. pic.twitter.com/FFDIDpj6Xm
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) November 11, 2022
Anyway, I bought the sign last weekend. It’s actually acrylic, not glass, so I won’t have to worry about it falling over and smashing into a million potential lawsuits; and I can set it to glow or cycle through a variety of colors. A bunch of the vendors around the folks selling this had clearly gotten their own signs, so maybe it’s more attractive to people selling stuff than people buying stuff. Still, I get to have nice things, too.
You can see more at KATS. I probably should have ordered the battery pack.
