Moe Lane's Blog, page 703

08/05/21 Snippet, (The Rebooted) RESCUE.

I figured out what was wrong! I mean, with the entire story structure. It should go a lot more smoothly now.

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They say you don’t forget your first ship, and they’re right. The Paulie Girl wasn’t the biggest ship, or the newest; you could see from her hull and her deck that she was used to hard work and harder weather. Despite all that the crew could do — and didn’t we work her over, on the regular! — she was stubborn, and sometimes sulky. But her lines were clean, and she wore the rust lightly. She was a tough bitch, our Paulie. She’d take whatever you threw at her, and then spit it right back in your eye.

God, I loved her the moment I clapped eyes on her.

…

God, but this boat is a piece of shit, Ted thought.

‘Games Without Frontiers.’

Games Without Frontiers, Peter Gabriel

Huh: “The lyric repeated at the beginning and end is “jeux sans frontieres,” which is French for “games without frontiers.” It is frequently misheard as “she’s so popular.””

The ‘Does-not-need-my-help.’ AVATAR: LEGENDS ROLEPLAYING GAME Kickstarter.

Seriously. They picked a goal of $50,000: it’s now at $2.161* million. And note that the Avatar Legends RPG Kickstarter dropped yesterday.

I’m just going to wait until the last 48 hours, then see what goodies are available then. It seems the most efficient use of my resources.

Moe Lane

*It went to 2.165M while I was writing this. And 2.166M when I went to go check again. This is one of the monster Kickstarters.

08/04/21 Snippet, RESCUE.

I’m still trying to figure out elements of this story, honestly. Like the middle of it.

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Being locked up with the rest of the crew wasn’t great, but at least they weren’t aiming guns at him. Just some stares. Ted couldn’t decide if it was because he was the only American on the crew, or just the newest one. Then again, either would do.

When he told the story about the capture later — more accurately, when he told a story about the capture later — Ted would always make it sound like there was a plan, right from the start. Some of these guys, it wasn’t their first rodeo, he’d say. They knew what was gonna go down, if the pirates didn’t get what they wanted. We knew we had to be ready for anything. Then he’d say, Me? I was a snot-nosed kid back then, so I just shut up and did what they told me to. And it worked, didn’t it? We got through it okay, and the bad guys didn’t. After a while, he almost started believing all those lies himself, except for the last one. He didn’t get through it okay. Not. At. All.

To start with, there was no plan. And that was fine, from Ted’s point of view. Heroics wasn’t even close to being on his agenda. The freighter paid him to held sail the ship, and the ship wasn’t sailing. They wanted anything more right now, they could renegotiate his contract.

‘Chipmunks on 16 Speed’ (Take a couple hours to listen to this).

So this is what ate my afternoon: Alvin and the Chipmunks, slowed down to 16 rpm. It’s ridiculously good, in a post-punk sort of way. Straight-up good, honestly: “Good Girls Don’t” was particularly Wait, this was in a kid’s show? In fact, I’m listening to again now.

Headline of the Day, It’s True, We Are edition.

It’s so nice that somebody’s done the research on this: Study: Giraffes are socially complex, misunderstood. It’s a burden, being this sensitive. Alone. Alone, in the herd…

Via Instapundit. Also: …HEY!

Oh, God. The DELTA GREEN: THE CONSPIRACY Kickstarter is going to be painful.

The DELTA GREEN: THE CONSPIRACY Kickstarter is going to be the 25th anniversary edition of the original DELTA GREEN setting, and the question is: how many minutes before it gets funded? My only hope — MY ONLY HOPE — is that the stretch goals and higher tiers involve stuff I’ve already bought, because it’s gonna have all new art and layout and they’ll clean up some of the details and… look. There’s a reason why my copy of the first edition is probably worth at least five hundred bucks. And it’s well-used.

The night at the opera starts 08/09.

‘We Like To Party!’

They have kids in high school now.

We Like To Party!, Vengaboys

08/03/21 Snippet, RESCUE.

Here we go!

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Ted almost died when the pirates swarmed onto the ship.

It wasn’t his fault, he always muttered later, usually at the beer at the bottom of the bottle. He’d been told that hijacking wasn’t a problem anymore. Those bad old days were over and done with.

Everyone knew that, except maybe the pirates. When one of them pointed his rifle right at Ted’s head, he didn’t track it. It was just a joke, right? So Ted laughed. And the pirate laughed, too, just before he pulled the trigger — and nothing happened. The pirate laughed again, right before he slammed the rifle stock into Ted’s gut. That was apparently really funny, if not as much as seeing Ted throwing up his last meal.

I wonder at the Lovecraftian overtones of LEGEND OF WOOLEY SWAMP.

So I’m discussing 1950s horror comics with my wife – like you do – and I was telling her about one I read that involved confidence men who got hold of Confederate treasury currency plates and started forging Confederate money for the antiquities trade. They got caught, they killed the guy who caught them, his ghost (I think) killed them, etc. etc. And she goes Isn’t there a Charlie Daniels song about an old evil guy who got robbed of his jars of money and then his ghost killed the robbers, and you can still hear their screams and his laughter?

And I said, Well, there’s an HP Lovecraft story called “The Terrible Old Man” which is about an old evil guy with talking bottles who some people tried to rob, and then they disappeared because he pretty obviously killed them with magic.

Turns out we were both right. Here, read and listen for yourself.

Legend of Wooley Swamp, Charlie Daniels

It’s not a one-to-one correspondence, but I’m pretty sure Charlie at least read that story once. I say that without criticism, mind you. Inspiration is where you find it.