Moe Lane's Blog, page 758
April 15, 2021
E-Racing tonight!
I find the Penny Arcade racing stream remarkably soothing, honestly. Also, often funny. They say some very funny stuff on the Twitch stream, too.
04/15/21 Snippet, PROCESSING DUTY.
Gotta get cracking on various things.
Patreon!We found the hole.
Strike that: I found the hole. Jack had nothing to do with it. He should have been the one to find it, too. It was near his apartment, and the damn hole was almost causing a draft.
I growled about that a little, but Jack’s apartment was at the edge of the residential part of the Site. He didn’t have many neighbors, and half the apartments around him were just empty rooms. Ginnie nodded when she and I — and, oh, Jack — looked at the blueprints. “Yeah, they roughed these out in ‘58,” she said. “Remember the construction?”
“Before my time,” muttered Jack.
“I can sleep through anything, Ginnie,” I said. “They expecting more staff?”
“Yeah,” said Ginnie. “Or maybe The Big One. I hear they’re putting nuclear shelters everywhere now.”
“What, here?” I said. “This is a hell of a place to put a nuke shelter. I mean, all things considered.”
“Maybe they figure we’re used to the dangers of radiation.” Ginnie shrugged.
Working on something involving FROZEN DREAMS.
No, not a movie deal for FROZEN DREAMS or anything like that. I wish. Something else, which would be kinda cool. Not able to talk about it yet, though. Keep watching the skies…
Tweet of the Day, Excuse Me, I Thought This Was AMERICA edition.
I mean, yeah, dude’s gotta pay for the pole. That wasn’t his pole to smash through. But he could send in the cash for it… what? Well, obviously he can’t write a check, can he? Dude’s on the lam! Sheesh.
Daytona Beach Police are searching for the person who drove through a drawbridge crossing arm and jumped the bridge as it was rising into the air.
— WSVN 7 News (@wsvn) April 15, 2021
STORY: https://t.co/ywAkfRhCom pic.twitter.com/52hw0knTB0
Via @SonnyBunch.
April 14, 2021
Sorry, it was barely a productive day.
I may not last much longer tonight, honestly. Bed sounds pretty nice right now. And I definitely don’t get enough sleep.
04/14/21 Snippet, PROCESSING DUTY.
I finally figured out how to move forward on this one.
Patreon!“We sure nothing got smuggled in?” Jack asked as we broke for lunch, a nervous quaver in his voice. I wasn’t bothered by that, though. Somebody smuggling things in is one of our nightmares, because there’s no reason for anybody to do that unless they want to put a serious hurt on the US of A. I can think of six ways to do that — what? No, Agent Dunning, I’m not going to tell you any of them. Jesus!
Anyway, I had to consider the question seriously. “Maybe,” I allowed, “and maybe not. There might just be a hole in a wall, somewhere.”
“‘Just’ a hole? That’s bad.”
“Sure, but it’s better than smugglers. There’s always cracks opening up in the caves, and some of the critters out there can smell the Site. Back before you got here, we had a redcap sneak in, tried to take over the place.”
“Really? Why?”
“A question we asked, after I nailed it up on the wall,” I said after swigging my coffee. “From what I heard, it caught a good whiff of the Site, and didn’t know anything about us except there were a bunch of humans around. Guess it thought it could wet its hat in peace and quiet here, the dumbass.”
I have a Patreon , not a Substack, and it’s close to a new tier.
Frank Fleming‘s setting up a free Substack for his science fiction stuff, and that’s sensible of him: when you self-publish, you gotta do your own advertising. Yay. I’m not doing a Substack, though, because I already have a Patreon and it’s pretty close to the next tier (weekly serial fiction installments).
The link is below. Please note that I am not asking for people to up their pledges: I have a $1 buy-in, because I’d rather have ten people giving me a buck a month than one person giving me ten. Also note that I’ve revamped the goals and added some different writing samples. Send the link to your friends!
Patreon!Moe Lane
Blue Origin has successful New Shepard launch.
Meanwhile, in real engineering…
Blue Origin completed another test flight of its New Shepard vehicle April 14, putting the company on the verge of finally flying people.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard vehicle lifted off from the company’s West Texas test site, known as Launch Site One by the company, at 12:51 p.m. Eastern. The capsule, separating from its booster after the powered phase of flight, reached a peak altitude of about 106 kilometers before parachuting to a soft landing 10 and a half minutes after liftoff, three minutes after the booster made a powered landing.
Video here. New Shepard’s close enough to a rocketship to make me smile: as they say, it goes up on a pillar of fire and comes down on a pillar of fire, just like God and Bob Heinlein intended. If only they didn’t have to pop off the top every time… oh, well, it’s early days yet.
