Moe Lane's Blog, page 753
April 25, 2021
Patreon Microfiction: Establishing a Loophole.
‘Establishing A Loophole’ is here to remind you: don’t trust Evil. It’s not your friend. And you probably aren’t brighter than it.
Patreon!
April 24, 2021
Book of the Week: …you tell *me*.
I read some stuff this week, but nothing’s really standing out for me. I also was busy doing my own stuff, which also ate into my reading time. So feel free to sing out with your own book recommendations.
Another Snippet, PICKMAN’S MODEL.
Waiting to hear back from people.
Patreon!There was a flicker of confusion as Richard opened the door to see… Abigail, her hand raised to knock again. Correction: two flickers. The first was seeing a lovely young woman on his doorstep, instead of some salesman. Or worse, a missionary.
The second flicker was… odder. For a moment, Richard had focused on Abigail, seeing her with the keen eye of an artist. In that moment her features had taken on a queerly alien quality; there were no physical changes, and yet she looked subtly inhuman. Even bestial. The upraised hand looked just like a monstrous paw, ready to descend, and her eyes were of a hue not known in any of the regular haunts of Earth…
“Richard? Are you quite all right?”
Richard blinked. When his eyes cleared, the effect was gone: Abigail looked perfectly normal, and looking at him with concern. Or at least she seemed perfectly normal.
Shaking his head in mixed confusion and disappointment, Richard replied, “I suppose I am, now.”
Finished THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER.
Verdict: not bad, as soon as I internalized that the show deliberately ignored MCU canon, all the way to the last half of the last episode. It was like they had the MCU continuity on a rubber band, and stretched it out alllll the way over there in order to do some specific stuff from the comics. Watching them suddenly release that continuity, snapping everything back to the original shiny-happy timeline, was in its way highly entertaining. I suspect some people ended up being upset at how no ‘greater’ lessons were learned.
All in all, I liked THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER, but you can probably skip it if you don’t want to soak in the MCU.
Well, I should have back reliable Internet now.
Had to upgrade the modem because we had to get a new phone line because the old landline went away. That didn’t require horrific effort; just time. Also, I have basic cable again because it was cheaper that way. My first reaction?
Gggggoodd cable TV is so freaking *clunky* the search function sucks and I want to delete about 90% of these live-streams.
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) April 24, 2021
I find this relatively comforting.
Moe Lane
PS: Seriously, is there anyway to archive most of these channels? The menu would be a lot easier to navigate if I had only thirty channels showing up in it.
April 23, 2021
A new snippet from my ‘Pickman’s Model.’
I am gonna get paid for this story, dammit. I have… plans.
Patreon!He found her dubiously observing the cheese tray. “Has it gone off?” Richard asked Abigail. “It’s best to avoid that part of the buffet, after the first two hours.”
She considered a particular half-runny piece, took it with surprisingly swift fingers, and chewed it meditatively. Richard noted she had a respectably powerful jaw. She swallowed in one quick motion and shook her head. “Cheese is all spoiled milk, Richard. There was nothing to recommend this one bit of it.”
Richard noted a touch of — disappointment? — in her tone. “A shame. Better to be awful, than bland.”
“Really? I agree, mind you — but why do you say so?”
“I suspect, for the same reason you might give, Miss Pickman.” He gave her a small bow. “Blandness has no ambition. At least awful has standards.”
Internet’s spotty today.
Unsurprising, I guess: the local load has skyrocketed. Still slightly disconcerting when everything goes offline. Anyway, if I don’t post anything else tonight that’s why.
Promising malaria vaccine.
Very promising. “We can maybe hope to just wipe out the filthy thing” kind of promising. From the BBC: “A malaria vaccine has proved to be 77% effective in early trials and could be a major breakthrough against the disease, says the University of Oxford team behind it.”
I was trying to come up with a natural disaster to compare with malaria, until I realized: that is precisely backwards. Malaria is what you compare natural disasters to. It’s a steady killer of hundreds of thousands of human beings, every year. If I could wipe out the Anopheles mosquito with a snap of my fingers I would have done it twenty years ago, and never mind what it might do to my arm*. A 77% effective vaccine sounds absolutely grand.
Moe Lane
*In fact… I just tried, on general principles. No luck, unfortunately. No, seriously, I’d have given up my left arm to make that happen.
