Moe Lane's Blog, page 607
January 22, 2022
01/22/22 Snippet, DESERT.
Magic vs. science!

He looked at the two halflings. “I don’t suppose either of you two have any magic?”
Shiner snorted. “If we had, the elves would’ve cut our throats instead of putting collars around them. I know a little herblore and Blondie here…”
“Blondie can speak for herself,” she said with a glower. “I got math and lightning lore. My pa was a fulgurologist, and he taught me enough to be useful.”
“Fulgurologist? Not a fulgurmancer?” Joe asked her.
“Nah, he didn’t have magic, either. He didn’t need any, either.” Blondie sounded defiant and defensive at the same time; Joe figured she had made this statement before. “You don’t need magic to tame lightning. Just good gloves and a careful touch.”
Book of the Week: Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park.
I started reading Action Park: Fast Times, Wild Rides, and the Untold Story of America’s Most Dangerous Amusement Park yesterday. …My God. Oh, my God. You heard rumors about the place, growing up in New Jersey — but you didn’t know. Not really. None of us did.
And yet, nothing in this book so far is a surprise.
#commissionearned
Alpha reader revisions of the first two chapters of TINSEL RAIN done!
…Damn, I forget how long these take. And how weirdly tiring they are. But they gotta get done.
While you’re waiting for me to finish my next novel, why not read FROZEN DREAMS, my first one? It’ll be fun! It’ll also make it easier for me to be able to pay for more books.


Tweet of the Day, Simple Modern Gets Chill Points, Here edition.
One of the nice things about being retired is that I don’t have to milkshake duck anybody anymore. I am allowed instead to simply, heh, enjoy things. Case in point (Via @BrianFaughnan):
Recently one of our newest team members asked if he could decorate his cubical. When I said yes, I wasn't expecting this… pic.twitter.com/ovivyQbwDL
— Mike Beckham (@mikebeckhamsm) January 20, 2022
The CEO took one look at this and… decided to give everybody a cubicle budget. Honestly, I would have done the same thing, just for the heck of it.
January 21, 2022
‘I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That).’
I find the music video unacceptably curtailed. Every second in this song needs to be here.
I’d Do Anything For Love (But I Won’t Do That), Meat Loaf
#commissionearned
FILLLMMMS… INNNN…. SPAAAACE…
Assuming that this isn’t just PR nonsense, mind you: “Space Entertainment Enterprise has announced that they will be co-producing Cruise’s space film project, and they propose to build an arena production studio in space. It will be a place for filmmakers to shoot movies and shows like this in zero gravity.” Also mind you: if we can get price-per-pound to orbit down low enough, this becomes feasible. It’ll likely be only feasible as a publicity stunt for the rest of my life, but that’s all right. Future generations can have their own future.
01/21/22 Snippet, DESERT.
Scouting!

“Why the hell did we come along?” Shiner muttered under his breath.
“Revenge?” suggested Blondie. “That’s why I’m here.”
“And I told you that wouldn’t happen unless we got real unlucky,” Joe said as he surveyed the scene before them. “But I guess this counts.”
The three of them (the other halflings were right now supposed to be riding north and south to send word, just in case Joe didn’t come back) had dismounted when they were about a mile out from the Tracks, then crept up. Joe had known that halflings were supposed to be good at sneaking around, but seeing it in action was impressive. He supposed being half-size helped with that. Not that he’d say so. Halflings got annoyed when people went on about the ‘half-sized’ thing.
The ‘Why not just Delta Green it?’ WARHUNT trailer.
Horror-WWII movies start out with two major plot problems, in my opinion. Well, three if you count Mickey Rourke.
The first problem is, Why didn’t they just bomb the Bad Place until it was a hole in the ground? And the second is, No, really, why didn’t they just bomb the Bad Place until it was a hole in the ground? The Allies spent the last year of the war making rubble bounce across Europe: all somebody would have to do to get Site X added to the list would be convince one general officer there’s something bad going on there. Witch-magic is all very well, but if it could shrug off incendiary bombing raids then the history of modern Central Europe would look very different.
You can get around that: OVERLORD, for example, sets up its zombie premise by staging the action during D-Day and tying up the loose ends. But if there’s a bunch of witches somewhere ‘behind enemy lines’ that’s eating soldiers, the soldiers are going to notice. And then out come the flamethrowers. Hell, witches might not even be the worst thing they’ve seen in that war…
Moe Lane
#commissionearned
So, they found Sodom. Or what was left of it, after the blast.
Via @EsotericCD comes this interesting article:
We present evidence that in ~ 1650 BCE (~ 3600 years ago), a cosmic airburst destroyed Tall el-Hammam, a Middle-Bronze-Age city in the southern Jordan Valley northeast of the Dead Sea. The proposed airburst was larger than the 1908 explosion over Tunguska, Russia, where a ~ 50-m-wide bolide detonated with ~ 1000× more energy than the Hiroshima atomic bomb.
I get why the article writers don’t want to say that this was Sodom, and I approve of their precision. But I don’t have to share that precision. This was totally Sodom, which is going to be disappointing to a certain segment of online commenters. I was particularly amused by this part:
Early general observations at TeH indicated that the destruction layer is marked by anomalously high concentrations of salt. For example, where the carbon-rich, potentially fertile destruction layer is exposed on the surface of the lower tall, it is unsuitable for agriculture until the salts are leached using local spring water. Some areas of the lower tall have never been farmed, and the MB II surface exposed at ground level turns white with salt crystals following rainfall. For most excavated squares, the newly exposed MB II surface from each day’s archeological excavation produced an obvious white salt crust overnight as humidity leached salt to the surface. Also, we observed that the newly exposed mud/ash mortar between mudbricks hardened after exposure because of salt crystals and that many pottery sherds and some bones from the destruction layer were encrusted with large salt crystals.
Although the part afterward where they said, Oh, hey, one of the walls of Jericho got blown away was pretty interesting, too. I’m not a Bible literalist, to put it mildly, so I’m not really upset to hear of a potentially mundane reason for some of the stories from the Old Testament. I’m sure that the pure secularists aren’t too upset, either. But those particular folks who use the Sodom and Jericho stories as examples of the whole thing being made up? Well, they’re going to be upset.
Bless their hearts.