Moe Lane's Blog, page 769
February 12, 2021
Not feeling so hot today.
Not COVID, and not exactly food poisoning. But my food choices yesterday were apparently suboptimal. I’m taking it easy and puttering around the house.
February 11, 2021
Yeah, this is a bye day.
I got the last race of the current sponsorship coming up soon, and I have been promised that the cars will fall like rain (it’s an oval race, apparently). I’m gonna get me some scotch and some Girl Scout Thin Mints and I’m gonna watch it and generally chill out. I think I can indulge myself with a quiet night.
Race will be here.
02/11/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
Having a little trouble getting anything done today. Some days the creative juices don’t really flow, I guess.
Patreon!“Right,” I said as I leaned forward. “Tomb World colonies are dying, we’re next on the list, you’re here to stop it. Why didn’t you say so? And why are you saying it to me? This is a conversation to have with the project head, or the corp manager, not the chief pilot. I mean, sure, I’m real important and everything. I’m in the leadership. But I’m not in charge.”
“The answers are all related,” said Rubicon. “Simply put: you are the highest-ranking individual with no prior links to the other sites. We looked at public information; you have been on-planet for the last two years. No vacations, no offplanet assignments. You might still be involved, but there is an upper useful limit to paranoia. Besides, we cannot investigate further unless we have some access to private records.”
“Ha! And you’ve discovered by now that Jefferson-based corps won’t back-door personal information files, I bet.” I took his silence as consent. “Especially when it’s somebody from the Great Powers trying to get in. There’s a lotta people back home with long memories about how their grandmas ended up in the colony, you know.”
“I do not set Earth’s involuntary transportation policy, Pilot Officer Tanaka,” Rubicon said, evenly enough that I wondered if he might even disagree with it, a little. “But I will admit that it is currently making my task more difficult. And my task is to stop the scouring of this planetary site.”
The ONE RING RPG Kickstarter.
So, my wife asked me about the ONE RING Kickstarter, Weren’t you grumbling about it a couple of days ago? And I was, Yeah, but it’s my birthday (it’s not actually my birthday yet, but it will be, next month), and I wants it. So… we went with the fancy version. And that’s my birthday (again, next month) present sorted, too. At this point my wife and I more or less just find out what the other person wants, and signs off on it. Neither of us are addicted to surprise.
I just backed THE ONE RING
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) February 11, 2021Roleplaying Game, Second Edition on @Kickstarter https://t.co/K5dxWjOkFm
February 10, 2021
Some folks dealing with a NICU visit could use some help.
I was angry today, at people who were being cruel and nasty because they could be. So I… am not going to do that. I’m going to do what I can for these folks, instead.
https://t.co/3dkhYMZh8J
— P2Start (@conorquerin) February 11, 2021
Maaaasive longshot, but a signal boost on this from @TychoBrahe or @cwgabriel would both help me a lot and mean the entire world to me. My VERY premature twins were born on Friday and we're stuck in a NICU 12 hours from my life, job, and son
In the Mail: THE GENTLEMEN.
THE GENTLEMEN is one of the last films I saw in theaters, and I was glad to get it in. Guy Ritchie keeps making movies that I like to watch, even when they’re… something else (KING ARTHUR comes to mind). Don’t expect it to be anything except what it already is, and everything will be fine.
02/10/21 Snippet, [Title TBD]
Rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb!
Patreon!Luckily, the farmer’s canopy where the bad smell was coming from effectively had only one exit; the sides were lined with plastic tables featuring the foodstuffs now beginning to appear in the PECZ with some frequency. Anybody wanted to get out, they’d have to go through Elizabeth and Janet. Or duck under the tables, Janet thought, but at least then we’d know who to chase.
Janet didn’t have many things left from the Before Times, but ‘cop voice’ was one of them. “Everybody stop!” she shouted. “Council emergency! Possible contrabrand! Nobody move!”
Everybody stopped. Nobody moved. That was good; but everybody in the tent was now looking at each other suspiciously, which could end up being bad. For a lot of people, being in the PECZ felt like winning a lottery where ninety nine out of every hundred entrants died. It made people… territorial.
02/10/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
Calmness amid horror!
Patreon!“The colony had been scoured. That is the best way to put it. Something had come down and ripped apart every bit of organic Terran life that existed in the colony, if it had to chew through metal, eternaplastic, or solid rock to do so. There had been one temporary survivor, who had lived through the initial attack by being ‘lucky’ enough to don a sealed environmental suit in time; several others had tried, and failed. Her air and water supply would have failed her about a week before we arrived.”
“Would have?” I didn’t really ask. “I guess she decided not to wait.” Rubicon’s shake of his head told me I had guessed right. “What did her Final Transmission say?” There’s always one.
“The usual: a first, panicked outburst; an attempt to take control of the situation via self-identification and a half-rational description of events; and then a semblance of a daily log. Followed by the usual descent into poetic madness and hallucinatory terror. There was mercifully little agonized screaming at the end, though. She had managed to rig her medical systems to dump all of its painkillers into her at once. It was very ingenious, really. We might try to duplicate the effect as a last-resort option.”
Netflix picks up REDWALL for animated series.
I am mostly surprised this hasn’t happened already.
Brian Jacques’ beloved “Redwall” books are being adapted into a feature film and TV series thanks to a new rights deal between Netflix and Penguin Random House Children. The fantasy novels have sold 30 million copies globally and have attracted an avid following with their tales of heroism, villainy and derring do all played out by mice, moles, hares and badgers. Think J.R.R. Tolkien with cuddlier protagonists.
Although… ‘cuddlier?’ Well, okay, everybody in Middle-Earth who was a viewpoint character was also a stone-cold badass*. But I digress. It felt like I was just a little too old to read Redwall when it came out; was I mistaken?
(H/T: GeekTyrant)
Moe Lane
*I would fight you over arguing Samwise Gamgee was an exception, except I can’t believe that any of my readers would be likely to disagree.
