Moe Lane's Blog, page 481
October 13, 2022
You know, it *wasn’t* a busy day.
So where did the time go? Very strange. Very, very strange. I should probably take it as a hint and go to bed early.
10/13/22 revisions, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND: 66900/80000.
Figured out who the cultists were!
Patreon!God, the smell of it.
You get the smallest, most attenuated sniff of deathheart when you’re doing off-world training. You get it only once, too. Any attempt to get another whiff is an automatic washout from the training program, and good luck trying to get off-planet at all. Nobody wants to have your eventual drug-addled death on their conscience.
How did deathheart smell to me, when I got tested? It smelled wonderful, and like death, and I was terrified of it. So I guess it smelled like it was supposed to? This wasn’t the weak stuff, though, diluted a million times by robots with no brains to burst. This deathheart was the true quill, and the deadly aroma coming up to me slammed at my entire nervous system at once and tried to dig in.
God bless that training program, though, because my reflexes kicked in immediately. There aren’t many times where a spastic jump back actually helps anything, but encountering deathheart is at the top of the list. I screamed “FLEE!” at the top of my lungs — anything to get the air out of them — as I scrabbled for my face filter. I’ve got reflexes for that, too: pop the capsule, breathe in the filter, try not to bite down on it as it sends tendrils over your face and down your throat, and wait for it to stabilize.
‘Time Trap’ (DUST short film)
TIME TRAP is apparently one of DUST’s older movies. It’s funny, a bit macabre, and very, very Australian. Worth a watch.
I am curious as to what *kind* of WICKER MAN series Andy Serkis wants to develop.
Background: “Andy Serkis is set to develop a series adaptation of Robin Hardy’s 1973 horror movie classic The Wicker Man. Serkis will develop the series with producer Jonathan Cavendish and writer Howard Overman (Misfits and War of the Worlds).” I’m not objecting to an adaptation of THE WICKER MAN per se, mind. I think it could work, as long as the following assumptions are made:
The bad people are in fact pagan fertility god worshipers with a taste for human sacrifice. Straight up, no evasions, no updating for modern sensibilities*.What they are doing is bad.And, possibly most importantly: what they are doing will not work.Do all of that, and the show will avoid a bunch of pitfalls. Don’t, and it.. won’t. Your guess is as good as mine whether they’ll get away with it, though. Andy Serkis might; you never know.
Moe Lane
#commissionearned
*Or somebody’s opinion about what modern sensibilities ought to be. Actual modern sensibilities is often quite keen about seeing pagans acting badly and so forth, especially if they’re evil young witches with a regrettable lack of clothing.
October 12, 2022
A point of order on Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series.
To wit: Naomi Novik’s Scholomance series is not evocative of “Those Who Walk Away From Omelas.” It is a rejection (whether intended or not) of Le Guin’s malignant thesis that the only options when confronting evil is to either just live with it, or else flee from its power*. There’s always the choice to fight back.
Okay, I’ll get off this soapbox now.
#commissionearned
Moe Lane
PS: …Jesus Christ but the Seventies just utterly sucked, huh?
*I have less contempt for the people in TWWAFO who stayed. They at least made a moral decision and stuck to it, even if it was the hideously wrong one. But you can never trust a coward.
The SECRET WORLD TT RPG Kickstarter passes 100K. ALMOST AS IF THERE’S AN EXISTING INTEREST IN THE IP, @FUNCOM…
…Oh, I’m sorry. Did I shout that out? My bad. Anyway, the SECRET WORLD RPG Kickstarter is actually at $101K, which is hardly shabby for a $40K project. I look forward to the next stretch goal, although not nearly as much I look forward TO GETTING THE TOKYO DUNGEONS AND THE FUSANG PvP BOARD BACK, FUNCOM…
Sorry! Sorry!
10/12/2022 Revisions, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND: 66200/80000.
I know, I know: early! Had a thought about it early, and I got to it. I even found a place to insert one of the orphan passages that I write first, and try to make fit later. Go me!
Patreon!After all of that, finding Adam’s server was almost anticlimactic. He had plugged in an Amalgamation data cube to store his (presumed) ill-gotten pirate booty, and it looked… like an Amalgamation data cube. “Hey, Prospect!” I rasped. “This thing encrypted?”
“I do not know, Wind-Walker Tanaka. Please do not touch the data cube until I have scanned it.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s delicate.” The Amalgamation used a weird encryption method for its data storage units, at least when it came to us half-uplifted types. The Process says that it’s to keep us from knowledge we can’t be expected to safely use, and we’ve learned by now to take that warning seriously. There’s plenty of stories about what happened to people who didn’t
Now, I was assuming that Adam already had whatever puzzle-lock on it disabled, but why take chances? So I just stared at the cube’s shifting, and admittedly-pretty yellow and black design, until The Process spoke up again. “There was no Amalgamation encryption on the data. I am also not detecting any kind of poisonous or psychoactive substances on the surface You can safely retrieve it.”
I popped it out of its holder. “Awesome.” I still wore gloves while grabbing it, though, and carefully put it in a guaranteed-shielded sample bag. It’s not that I didn’t trust The Process, but I knew where this thing had been.
‘The Complete History of the Rick Roll.’
Via Geeks are Sexy. It’s a quirky little collective interview about one of the oddest internet sensations of our time: obviously, the Rick Roll. It’s a fun watch, honestly, and not least because nobody involved can quite understand what the hell happened.
Just my little joke.
