Moe Lane's Blog, page 612
January 11, 2022
The “This is incredibly, wonderfully stupid” MOONFALL trailer.
MOONFALL is absolutely INSANE.
…
01/11/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
Commiseration!
Patreon!Syah went on, “I liked her, right from the start. Chook was good to people. The first day I came in, she spent the whole morning getting to know me. None of that corporate crap about favorite bands or shared commonalities, either. She wanted to know the way I liked to work, what things drove me nuts when other people did them, how to know when to distract me and when to leave me alone, things like that. By the end of the day it was like I had been there for months.”
“Yeah.” For a moment I was tempted to call him out on the ‘corporate crap’ part — Syah had a little bit of a chip on his shoulder about the folks paying our salaries — but I decided to let it slide. “Chook was great at getting along with everybody. And she meant it, too; you can tell when somebody cares. Guess that’s why she went into net interfacing.” I swigged my own beer. “That, and how nosy she was.”
That got me a grimace from Syah. “That was a little weird, yeah. I didn’t think Chook meant anything by it, and I know you have to know everything to interface properly, but she lived the life, huh?”
The MATRIX: RESURRECTIONS Honest Trailer.
Honest Trailers was… exasperated about MATRIX: RESURRECTIONS, I think. I haven’t actually sat down to watch it yet. I haven’t been able to watch anything lately. And yes, that kind of sucks.
In the mail: Quantum of Nightmares (Laundry series).
Quantum of Nightmares is the latest installment of Charlie Stross’s ongoing spies-and-Cthulhu-and-computers Laundry series. As I’ve said before, I still enjoy the Laundry series, but I’m simply not scared of the current events stuff that scares Charlie. It gives me a certain amount of relaxed detachment from it all, and he’s a good enough author to avoid the insidious trap of writing-as-whining. So this should be fun!
#commissionearned
The Mimics, An Unnecessary Work, for Use With Fantasy RPGs Kickstarter.
Phil Reed’s Mimics, An Unnecessary Work, for Use With Fantasy RPGs Kickstarter perhaps suffers from a slight incredulity that anybody might actually back the Mimics, An Unnecessary Work, for Use With Fantasy RPGs Kickstarter. Given that it’s only been a half hour and the game is already 31% backed, said incredulity might be unwarranted. Not that I think Phil really means it. I mean, why create a Kickstarter that you don’t think will fund?
January 10, 2022
‘Foil.’
In my Top Five favorites of his, easy.
We are just SEVENTEEN(ish) patrons away from unlocking the next Patreon tier!
So, did anything… *happen*, today?
I mean, I was more or less productive, on my own. I just can’t find anything to write about. Maybe it’s because of the new year?
…Oh! I did get the DIFFERENT TROUBLE supplement for Greg Stolze’s Termination Shock space RPG. It’s all about aliens! And how hard it is to roleplay them. It’s pretty nifty. So, you know: there’s that.
Adventure Seed: Operation FLOWERPOT WEDDING
Operation FLOWERPOT WEDDING
As you know, Agents, the island of Madagascar has been under an interlocking series of glamours and enchantments for the last sixty years, thus neatly obscuring the fact that it was conquered in 1963 by invaders from another dimension (known as the Purple-Green Eclipse Legion). These enchantments are equally for the Legion’s and our own benefit, as it turns out that the Legion’s sophonts are incapable of surviving long-term in our universe’s unique physics without the use of ongoing and sophisticated thaumatology. This odd wrinkle in space-time has stymied the Legion’s original plan of planetary conquest; apparently, their own superiors don’t want them coming back home, either. So they’re stuck here, and they don’t like it very much, and we don’t like them very much, either. But better strained relations, than a repeat of the 1964 Event.
Yesterday, a high-ranking official in the Legion attempted to defect. More accurately, it went through an elaborate suicide ritual which ended with it dead in the US Embassy in Gaborone, still clutching a satchel full of untranslated papers. The official neglected to tell us why it was ‘defecting,’ and no American official in Botswana can actually read the Legion’s language, so the satchel needs to be secured and brought to Washington, DC post-haste. You may now guess as to who has been tapped to do the securing, and bringing.
The good news is, Botswana is a developed country with a flourishing infrastructure, a functional government, and robust economy: you should be able to fly in, collect the satchel, and leave. The bad news is, every other group out there aware of the Legion and the satchel (which is probably all of the groups aware of the Legion, by now) will be likewise able to fly in, and try to intercept you. To add to the complexity of this situation: some of these groups are our actual or at least nominal allies, so there are upper limits to what they can safely do to you, or you to them. Some of their agents will want to make deals with your team, trading additional security in exchange for getting a good look at the satchel. Some of them will even voluntarily honor those deals.
One last wrinkle: this could all very easily be a disinformation exercise. The Purple-Green Eclipse Legion is in permanent exile on this planet. They cannot go home, and they cannot conquer, so they must make the best of the situation. That does not mean that they are friendly, in even the slightest degree. It is perfectly possible that the satchel contains nothing but disinformation, or even gibberish.
Then again: it might not.
So, they almost did a TIME BANDITS sequel.
Feel free to click through to GeekTyrant’s description of it. Spoiler warning: the sequel would have been a pile of shit. …I was half-tempted to come with something a little less robustly Anglo-Saxon, there – but no. There are times when you have to call a pile of shit a pile of shit, and this is that time. Go watch TIME BANDITS again, instead – and offer praise to the LORD that this is not the worst timeline, after all.
#commissionearned
