Moe Lane's Blog, page 596
February 12, 2022
Book of the Week: Death on the Nile.
Although I’m trying to remember if I’ve read Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile. I should have: when I was in my teens and twenties, I devoured all the Hercule Poirot stories I could find. Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Queen, Garrett, Westlake… I was what is in retrospect a somewhat enthusiastic fan of whodunits. ‘Course, I read a lot.
02/12/22 Snippet, THE THING IN THE AIRLOCK.
A character!
Patreon!“Yeah, I was the last person to see the corporal,” Gillian Waite told me. “Except for the murderer, I guess. Who was not me.”
Tobias hadn’t expected to get any real leads from the power plant skeleton crews, but Waite’s name had popped up. She just wasn’t one of the people on those crews; she had been the one who first reported Oates as being missing. She had come in for another interview with ill grace, but was still answering questions.
“I didn’t ask if you were,” Tobias pointed out. “Why assume?”
“Why not assume? I’m always getting asked about stuff I didn’t do. What’s one more?” She shrugged one shoulder. “I guess I got one of those faces.”
February 11, 2022
‘Friday I’m In Love.’
#commissionearned
TL9 Watch: the ArcFlash Labs’ GR-1 Anvil Portable Gauss Rifle.
Note: the GR-1 Anvil is underpowered. It is far too heavy. The magnetic field it generates is dangerous to anybody with a pacemaker, or sensitive electronics. But it’s a real gauss rifle.
Tweet of the Day, “JSA! JSA! JSA!” edition.
What time is it, folks? It’s JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA TIME.
Yes, yes, #BlackAdam, but more importantly THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA!
— Dan Casey (@DanCasey) February 11, 2022
The new DC Heroes teaser gave me a powerful urge to reread some JSA comics. Watch the full video on @nerdist: https://t.co/6HqMrgMzko pic.twitter.com/1ZCrBTuDss
Remember: I was a DC kid, not Marvel. Their heroes are gonna always have safe haven in my heart.
02/11/2022 Snippet, THE THING IN THE AIRLOCK.
Backstory!
Patreon!“Yeah. The first part, it was easy to figure out. Those were her notes on the embezzlers. Those people, she used their names and IDNs. Made it really easy to look them up. But everybody’s names in the second half were color-coded. Mr. Green, Ms. Red, stuff like that. No other ways to identify them.”
“Why on Earth would she do that?” Tobias scratched his chin. At some point the base would run out of depilatory, and that would be an annoying day. “Maybe some of the names in the first part match up with the ones in the second?”
“I thought of that, Commander. But there were only five names in the first half, and they’re all listed as being dead.” Domaine hesitated. “Their department was in Piper Dome.”
“Ah.” Piper Dome (formerly the main administrative hub of Heinlein Station) somehow had its doors sealed and its life support system turned down to one-fourth pressure on the first day of the apocalypse. Tobias was well aware by now that panicky anoxia was not the worst way to die on the moon, but it had not been an auspicious omen to mark the start of his tenure as Acting Commandant.
Where I was, this evening.
Chilling on a walk around a lake, during the golden hour. There were geese, herons, and rabbits. It was an entire thing, and I rather badly needed it.
Soothing. pic.twitter.com/CAfPoAqyWB
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) February 12, 2022
In the Mail: THE ONE RING Kickstarter rewards.
THE ONE RING is very nice. Very, very nice.
In the mail. pic.twitter.com/ztFWUvi6KW
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) February 11, 2022
Maps are cloth, by the way. And that’s the special version of the core rules. Hrm, if only WashingCon had gotten back to me: I could run a game of this there…
February 10, 2022
So, I finally sat down and read that Vanity Fair LotR article.
I do not say that this show is going to be good. I will say that Amazon is probably going to spend a billion bucks on THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, which is an insane amount of money that probably should not be in Jeff Bezos’ hands anyway. Plus, at that level of funding? If the show fails it will do so spectacularly. That can provide some entertainment, all on its own.
Moe Lane
PS: In case you are wondering: yes, the show will compress together the coming of Annatar, the betrayal of the Elves, the corruption and fall of Numenor, and presumably the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. They are justifying it by – oh, just read what they said:
In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”
…I do not entirely like this angle, but I don’t really have a better one. “Not doing it at all” remains a viable alternative take, of course.
