Moe Lane's Blog, page 501
September 28, 2022
The ‘They missed a trick’ HOT TAKE: THE DEPP/HEARD TRIAL trailer.
I didn’t watch the trial itself, so I have no urge to see HOT TAKE: THE DEPP/HEARD TRIAL. But the problem with this movie isn’t that it’s exploitative. It’s that it’s not exploitative enough. What they should have done in this movie is gotten Johnny Depp and Amber Heard to play themselves.
…Yes, I’m making light of the entire tawdry affair. Then again, so is this movie.
09/28/2022 Snippet, BUZZ ON THE STREETS.
Crime Scene!
Patreon!It was unsurprisingly easier to trace the path of a wildly careening coach full of groaning mooks through the streets than it had been to track one single Adventurer on his way to breakfast. Most people hadn’t seen the coach themselves, but that was what gossip was for. A couple of times, I didn’t have to ask before somebody volunteered what they had heard from somebody else who had heard from a guy who’d been there. Mostly it boiled down to, “headed towards the southern docks.
After that, it was simply a matter of using my keen detective senses to find the remains of the coach, jammed into an alleyway. I was helped in that by the crowd surrounding the wreckage. Most of ‘em were trying to dismantle it, either for salvage or just to get the damned thing out of the way, but there were also people just there for the street theater. There usually are.
“Good morning, Shamus,” one of them said as I sidled up. She was an older lady, primly sitting on an barrel while she peeled an orange. “This your fault?”
“Nope,” I said automatically, and then snorted as I realized that it really wasn’t. “I came in late, Senora. What happened in Act One?”
“Oh, it was quite a scene,” she replied. “The coach came barreling through here about an hour ago, with maddened horses up front, fisticuffs on top, and some poor man hanging on for dear life on a rope behind. It must have bounced off of every cabbage cart in the street before the horses tried to go through that alleyway.” She sighed. “They almost managed to get the coach to fit. Orange slice?”
In the e-Mail: Casting the Runes [GUMSHOE]
The full title is Casting the Runes: Occult Investigation in the World of M. R. James; and the title really does say it all. “Casting the Runes is a roleplaying game based on the works of M.R. James, the father of the modern British ghost story, and uses the GUMSHOE system for investigative RPGs. The unique character of James’s stories, and his own personality, inspire the game.” It’s Edwardian-Era intangible horror, in other words. I picked it up because ghost stories sound like they’d work well in GUMSHOE’s system, and because they’re throwing in the PDF along with the print book for free. I’m down with that.
Tweet of the Day, Now Is A Good Time To Be Careful In [Tampa]* edition.
Nathan sums it up well.
That is not what you want to see. Turn around and put some distance between you and that. https://t.co/Erukpd09kg
— Chad Powers (@NathanWurtzel) September 28, 2022
*My bad. But the point remains.
September 27, 2022
09/27/2022 Snippet, UNNAMED STORY.
I was up late reading THE GOLDEN ENCLAVES. Worth it, but two paragraphs is all that I managed to write before running out of steam. Enjoy!
#commissionearned
Patreon!Both Beverly and I realized very quickly that [Lecturer] was not engaged in a typical summer survey of the Berkshire mountains. Oh, superficially it looked like she was going through the countryside, tracing the geographic and chronological evolution of selected ghost stories. The three of us would traipse from farm to hamlet to old-age home, interviewing either the tale-tellers themselves, or their surviving descendants. [Lecturer] would ask her questions, we’d take notes about the answers, and generally there’d be a ten minute recording session at the end of each interview. Her methods were idiosyncratic, but we had assumed that beforehand.
There were two things that leapt out at me about what we were doing, though. The first was the peculiar focus of her research. [Lecturer] wanted stories about ghost farmers or walking scarecrows, and (naturally) murder ballads. That in itself wasn’t really unusual, since most folklore projects look strange and over-specific from the outside. What was odd about it was that [Lecturer] was much more interested in the origins of some materials than she was in their motifs. She’d meticulously note the location of selected works, down to the GPS coordinates, and she would also record them in full. Everything else, she left to us to take notes over.Only, she never looked at our notes. That was the second odd thing. We were obviously in the data-collection stage of the process, but Beverly noticed after the second day that [Lecturer] hadn’t given us any specialized instructions on how to organize any of the information we were gathering.
Tweet of the Day, It’s Damned Close edition.
The classical definition of ‘chutzpah’ being, A man who kills his parents, and then asks for clemency at sentencing on the grounds that he is an orphan.
I will await the opinions of Talmudic scholars, but is this not the literal textbook definition of chutzpah? https://t.co/foURLaNW7K
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) September 27, 2022
…I mean, it’s real close, isn’t it? Not perfect, but what is?
The THE SANDMAN Honest Trailer.
One of those where Honest Trailers had to gently nitpick because THE SANDMAN* was… you know, good. I am mildly interested about why they didn’t really mention Death at all. This show’s particular version of Death absolutely knocked it out of the park…
*Expensive? Yes. Worth it?
…Also yes.
#commissionearned
Huh. Ticket Scalpers/Scammers targeting Fright Reads.
Said miscreants are charging twenty bucks for five buck tickets that aren’t even sold out (scalping), or haven’t actually been purchased (scamming). Remember, folks: as the article says, buy your tickets via EventBrite. Or just show up at Fright Reads on Saturday.
The WORLD OF TOMORROW short film.
WORLD OF TOMMOROW is very much not really what I normally watch, but I watched it. It was good! Strange and melancholy, but good.
