Moe Lane's Blog, page 599
February 7, 2022
Nominations for the Dragon Awards are open.
Click here to sign up and offer your choices. The deadline is July 2022, so you have time. Although that same deadline might have some bearing on when I release TINSEL RAIN. Assuming the Kickstarter goes well, that is.
February 6, 2022
Watched some Quatermass flicks today.
The first two movies – THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT and QUATERMASS 2. Both hold up very well after, God help us all, seventy years; good scripts and actors (mostly). I was particularly struck with how much of PISCES’s (from the Delta Green RPG) DNA feels like it’s from QUATERMASS 2: if you’re running a campaign using this setting, watch that movie. And it’s also nice to make sure that the new external CD/DVD drive is working properly. I’m going to try to chew through my backlog.
#commissionearned
This is weird. I can’t find THE DEVIL’S LIGHT trailer.
I mean, I saw the trailer in theaters yesterday. THE DEVIL’S LIGHT is this flick about a nun who wants to be an exorcist and she’s at this Catholic facility where they train priests to do field exorcisms and they’ve never had a woman before and no, wait, let’s go back to the ‘field exorcism’ thing. It’s like a hospital where they have patients crawling on the ceiling with grey-black eyes and nobody seems to be too alarmed about that.
It’s probably a bit more gory than I like (I will not lie: my major problem with VAN HELSING is that the script is not worthy of the basic concept), but you’d think that I could find a trailer for a movie that’s coming out in two weeks. I wonder what’s going on here.
#commissionearned
02/06/22 Snippet, THE THING IN THE AIRLOCK.
Fake identities!
Patreon!Tobias had made a bet with himself over what would happen first: Domaine actually finding something, or somebody finding another body. He was startled to discover it was the former. In his experience lately, betting on the worst thing happening was the smart move.
But there Domaine was, grinning on his monitor screen. “There are two ‘Corporal Shirley Oates’ in the records,” he said. “Same name, same parents, same history and service jacket — but one of the records is from thirty five years ago.”
“Okay. Is it a duplicate record?” Tobias asked evenly.
“No, it can’t be. They have different biometrics. Only the newer one matches the current Oates.” Domaine looked crestfallen. “I was expecting more of a reaction, Commander.”
Patreon Microfiction: ‘SS YARRR.’
Dragons can read spreadsheets, you know. They can calculate the best return-on-investment just as well as anybody else, modified of course for one’s own particular species-specific tendencies, and general mindset. And their ears perk up and their snouts start trailing smoke when they hear the magic phrase ‘government-sponsored resource acquisition.’
After that it’s just engineering.
Patreon!February 5, 2022
02/05/22 Snippet, THE THING IN THE AIRLOCK.
Bargains!
Patreon!Webster Domaine didn’t just look amused; he flat-out laughed in Tobias’s face. “You want me to investigate a murder? From my cell?”
“Yes. And yes. You’ll get all the information sent to you—.”
Say ‘via computer,’ Asenath hastily interjected. Trust me.
Tobias wasn’t sure why, but he went along with it. “—via computer, and you’ll work on the mystery from there. You come up with anything, or you want us to look at anything, you’ll let me know. Just me.”
Why just you, Commander? Asenath asked him.
I’ll tell you later, Tobias thought at her. Trust me.
Book of the Week: Mutineer’s Moon.
Mutineer’s Moon, by David Weber. Gee, I wonder why I picked a book about a guy who discovers the moon is actually this really big starship and the origin of the human species on Earth?
It’s a puzzler, let me tell you.
#commissionearned
My mini-review of MOONFALL.
Short version: do you like Atomic Horror-style B-movie flicks, but wish that they had had proper budgets? Then do I have a movie for you.
Slightly longer version: look, nobody’s ever gonna mistake MOONFALL for highfaluting cinema, or plausible science fiction, or – and this is important – a firm foundation for later sequels. It’d be one hell of a (ridiculous) miniseries, but the director’s got only two hours, so he’s sort of running through a lot of stuff while pointing and hand-waving it all away.
But do you care? Of course not. You want gravity waves and the moon blowing up national landmarks and people using gravity waves to get extra hang time when escaping the gravity waves at high speed. It does not make sense, but it’s fun to watch. And since Roland Emmerich is absolutely not doing a sequel to this movie anyway, there’s no point to it making sense. Go watch MOONFALL in theaters if you like B-movies and can have a beer first.
Moe Lane
PS: Extra points to all the absurd conspiracy theorizing. The Ancient Astronaut crowd doesn’t get any of the love, these days. It’s nice to see some of their weirder stuff show up on the screen for once.
