Moe Lane's Blog, page 73

Halfway to Halloween tomorrow…

…bed for me right now. I am feeling better, but I need sleep. Badly. Wish me luck! Buy my game!

04/25/2025 Snippet, THE ICE AWAITS.

This might actually work.

…

The Site

Back before the wars, UNSO would have made us sign NDAs before we could learn sensitive information. Now they’ll just send us to the colony worlds if we talk out of turn, and never mind what Salmaria Corp thinks about that. Or anything else, honestly.

Still… maybe this site is a secret worth keeping.

“We found it during the planetary scan,” UNSO Field Inspector Baskhi Chumley told the three of us. It was me, my crew chiefs Budi and Ilga, and her: I don’t know why the rest of the crew wasn’t in on this. Some nogo bullcrap, probably. “The site is on the moon’s equator, seven hundred and forty-three” — her pale, pinched face flickered for a moment — “miles southeast of her. Thankfully, it is embedded only twenty feet below the seabed surface, which is itself quite shallow in that area. We have already dug a sloping shaft that gives us access to the facility.”

Budi flicked a finger. “How flooded is it, ma’am?”

Chumley raised an eyebrow, then caught herself. “Yes, that is a natural assumption to make,” she murmured, probably to herself. “You are all hydraulic technicians, after all. To answer your question: considerably. We don’t know if there was a breach, or someone simply left the lifesystem open, but the entire facility is filled with Europan slushwater, mixed with seafloor debris. We will need to pump out the site and find any leaks before we can hope to reestablish life support there.”

I had the kind of afternoon…

…where I’m now waiting to see if I have food poisoning.

I think I need a nap.

‘Cumberland Gap.’

Cumberland Gap, David Rawlings

#commissionearned

…It was kind of a slow day today.

I fixed my display stand. I got a haircut. We went for kabobs for dinner and the dude who runs the place had us try out these appetizers that were sort of like deep-fried Chinese noodles with chives and something else in them, in the entirely justified hope that I’d order them on the regular from then on in because they were delicious.

So, not a bad day, but kind of not-exciting. Which is good, right?

The new Guy Ritchie FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH trailer.

Yeaaaaaah I figure Guy Ritchie always wanted to make an Indiana Jones movie. A shame he never did, huh?

04/24/2025 Snippet, The Ice Awaits.

I’ve decided to flip from expansive to tight on this one. Three thousand words, six sections, trim all the fat. Let’s see how it goes.

…

The Thawing
We’re barely on schedule. Everything about this job is harder than it should be, and it shouldn’t be hard at all. This place was made by the Amalgamation! Hell, it was made for us. Everything should work perfectly, on the first try. Instead we’re fighting freezes, leaks, stalled filters — if it wasn’t an alientech site, I’d be recommending that we just give up like the original designers did, and let the Covered Ocean have the whole damned thing back.

Chumley doesn’t understand how weird it is that we’re having problems, either. I’d expected her to do the usual nogo thing, and go around screaming about the delays. Instead, she’s been staying out of the way, letting us work in peace. She’s not yelling about the cost, either. Every time my team logs an overtime charge, Chumley checks off on it without even arguing.

…There’s something really weird going on here.

But we are on schedule. We mapped out the entire site, gotten the breach in the side closed, and slapped sealant on anything that looks like it might be leaky. The first slushpipe is moving the seawater out, and now we’re wading through the half-drained halls and looking for more leaks. There aren’t that many, actually. The Amalgamation did good construction work. Shame they’re all dead. We’ll start running the other two slushpipes tomorrow.

Patreon!

Self-Tweet of the Day, Keep Good Documentation edition.

I’m serious about this. Keep those sites up!

I just fixed my display banner stand, using an old website where the images were broken but the instructions were still readable. Once I had an obvious thing explained to me, the rest was simple.

Never shut down your old webpages, folks.

— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) April 24, 2025

‘Poker Face.’

Look, Weird Al has a good ear for this stuff. Even in the polkas. Especially in the polkas, really.

Poker Face, Lady Gaga

#commissionearned

Remember: Halfway to Halloween is this weekend!

I will be doing a panel at Halfway to Halloween! As usual. And it’s a good thing I put this post up, because I had completely forgotten that I was doing a panel. See you there!

April 26th, Marley Station Mall, Glen Burnie MD.