Moe Lane's Blog, page 478
October 19, 2022
Three days left on the WIDDERSHINS: SEA CHANGE Kickstarter!
Widdershins is a good webcomic. I like it. I kind of want to write the RPG for it, but Kate’s been bugged about that so many times (by people who weren’t me), I’m carefully not bringing it up. I happily backed the SEA CHANGE Kickstarter.
Just saying.
10/19/2022 Revisions, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND: 70500/80000.
Getting more pieces fitted in. Also: we broke 70,000 words. Go me!
Patreon!“You think this was related?” I asked Greg, once he was back from the bathroom. I discreetly didn’t comment on that. The man had a weak stomach when it came to watching clinical footage of atrocities, and that was that. I wish I did, sometimes.
Vomiting also always seemed to settle more than his guts, too, because he considered the question on the merits. “It’s tempting to say yes, but it’s not the Bureau’s style. They’re big believers in making sure all their targets are in one place. Besides, why would they want you dead?”
“Damned if I know, Greg. Why did they want 457-R-02 dead?”
“They told us. A mass outbreak of the space-happy.” Greg shrugged. “Mix that with a transient population capable of independent interstellar travel and the Bureau starts throwing rocks.”
“And then the EDO gets a little more evidence for the next time they push to ban private starships outright,” I said sourly. “Including XHum’s. Maybe Nur’s right, and the Bureau Désavoué does have Great Power backing.”
Tweet of the Day, Ook* edition.
Zookeepers: We've got one who can seehttps://t.co/pApZGQolIC
— Neil Stevens (@presjpolk) October 20, 2022
*Classical reference. And another one from Neil.
#commissionearned
I must now do the socially awkward thing where I remind people to buy my books!
It does feel socially awkward. But! Buying my books makes me money. I use the money to pay for publishing more books. That gives people more of my books to read. It then follows that people who like my books should tell other people to buy my books, so that they can feed their own my-books habit. Helping out with that is clearly more important than my own personal feelings.
So, yeah. Buy my books! Or tell somebody else to buy my books! That works, too.
10/19/22 Snippet, UNHOLY ANGLES.
Dang but this is easy to write. You can read the first drafts of the first two parts of UNHOLY ANGLES on Patreon: snippet below.
Patreon!“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” That old fraud! I mean, yes, he was technically correct: nature hates and fears walls, and straight lines, and the order we impose upon it. But Robert Frost didn’t know anything. He thought he knew the country and country life, but it was always only the parts we let him see. You think Frost was steeped in rural life, or Carl Sandberg, or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow?
…Oh, yes, absolutely we had a hand in Longfellow. James Fenimore Cooper, too. We’ve been clouding poets’ and writers’ visions of the countryside for a very long time. Why? So that they’d cloud your visions. Obviously! We can’t have people seeing what really goes on, out here. If you could, then you’d all try to do something about it, and it would be the wrong thing. I know this because it wouldn’t be the right thing, which is to keep your hands to yourselves, and let us keep on with what we’re doing. We do know best, and you will only make matters worse, and this is not a subject for debate.
You don’t want to know, anyway. None of you do. The people in the suburbs, they hate even thinking about the countryside, and when they have to, they make jokes about us. Except that they’re really making jokes about monsters, with the names changed. The people in the cities, they try not to think about farming in the first place. Food gets made in the store, don’t you know? Waves of meat, extruded out of a spigot in the back, wrapped up, then pushed out in styrofoam and plastic. Then people stick it in an oven for a half-hour, and call themselves ‘cooks’ because they can make a meatloaf.
Look, I picked ‘meatloaf’ because you have one on your plate, right in front of you. Concentrate on the now.
October 18, 2022
‘Werewolf.’
…How the heck have I never heard this before?
Hrm. I’m going to see BLACK ADAM anyway…
…but it’s a little surprising to see Sonny like BLACK ADAM. I’m used to him not liking stuff I like. I’m also surprised that they had to cut it down to keep the PG-13 rating. I was expecting something a little more inherently SHAZAM!-friendly.
I really enjoyed BLACK ADAM, aka MURDER SUPERMAN, but it could have used like 30 percent more murdering to really drive home the point that this is Superman Who Kills. Full review Friday!
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) October 19, 2022
#commissionearned
10/18/2022 Revisions, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND: 69900/80000
I would have gotten more in, but I wrote two thousand other words today.
Patreon!“So why wouldn’t you care about it?” I asked him. “Hypothetically, that is. If it was happening.”
“You mean, besides the fact that twenty-five people are now dead in a terrorist attack?” Oft’s tone was gentle, but I still winced.
“Okay, fair, Oft. But you wouldn’t have known that was going to happen beforehand.” I carefully didn’t look to see Nur’s reaction, because I already knew that he wouldn’t have conceded anything of the sort. I like the man, but he’s got a conspiracy theory for everything.
“I wish we had. That way, we could have stopped it.” Oft’s face went what I could already tell was uncharacteristically grim. “I know the Adjudication Council’s reputation precedes us, and not always favorably, but we are here for humanity’s sake. The people on that ship were innocent victims of a cruel attack, and we take that very seriously.”
“Yeah, fine, you made your point.” Nur sounded a little surly about it. “Dead bodies trumps hypothetical tariff evasion.”
“But of course. Besides, the Redacted’s operating budget doesn’t rely on Earth tariffs at all. The Great Powers would just waste the tax revenue anyway.”
Syah snorted. “Aren’t you a representative of the Great Powers?”
“Yes!” beamed Oft. “That’s why you can trust that I know what I’m talking about.”
10/18/2022 Snippet, UNHOLY ANGLES.
I had this thought for a three-part story over dinner, and I’ve already written the first part. A snippet is here, and the rest of it is on Patreon (behind the paywall, alas). Check it out!
Patreon!We should never have stopped using the cows.
I think it was cows. Maybe it was sheep? Couldn’t have been goats. No, goats are smart, you can tell they’re smart, I don’t think lots of people had goat herds in Europe. It was cows and sheep, and pigs behind the fences. Hey, you ever look at a pig? From the inside? There’s something in there, something we don’t like to think about about them and us. That’s why we love bacon and sausage and pork ribs, you know. The smell and the savor, they take us back. It’s always like a little taste of home.
Look, forget about the pigs, okay? The pigs aren’t important. We need to talk about the cows.
Okay, so back in the day, when everybody had chariots and spears and whatever, cows were wealth. They were money, before they had money. They were power, because if you had a lot of cows you were somebody special, you had the luck, you could tell people to do things and they’d do them. Why? I don’t know why. Humans are like that, okay? We’re this big bunch of monkeys and somebody has to be the one that decides where all the monkeys should go. So why not cows? Or, yeah, sheep — but we know it was really cows.
Tweet-thread of the Day, This Is Both Extremely Good… edition.
…and I was still kind of rooting for them.
I HEAR THE BLUES A-KILLIN' (or: Frasier Meets Columbo) part 1 of 4 pic.twitter.com/4C8zrB1CYB
— Joe Chouinard (@joechoui) October 18, 2022
Via @shaenongarrity.
