Moe Lane's Blog, page 77

The Final THUNDERBOLTS* trailer.

I will be giving it that shot. Most of you will not, and I respect that. But the heck of it is: THUNDERBOLTS* knows. It is self-aware enough to know that it has been scraped and smooshed together from everything Marvel had left in the creative fridge, just to make one last flick. Will it work? Probably not. Is the flick going down swinging anyway?

In two weeks, one last shot at redemption See Marvel Studios’ #Thunderbolts* only in theaters May 2. Get tickets now: https://t.co/bFq0RNfp6K pic.twitter.com/AC0eQzRZa1

— Marvel Studios (@MarvelStudios) April 16, 2025

…Danged if it doesn’t look ready to do just that. So… all right, then. Light that candle.

04/16/2025 Snippet, CALL OF THE MOON-BEASTS.

Back to this!

…

Abbie had hit the roof when he called in the whole thing, although she saved most of her commentary for when she showed up. Along with multiple sets of lunar climbing gear, just in case anyone was wondering what role she expected for herself in all of this. “Don’t argue, sir,” she told him, just as soon as he opened his mouth. “I am the chief engineer, and this is a hole in my base. On the moon. I need to see how bad the leaks are.”

“Aren’t all leaks bad?” Lillian asked. From her tone, she sounded worried about the answer.

Abbie grinned, with only a faint touch of death’s-head about it. “Yes! But the pinwheels aren’t spinning” — she pointed at the hastily-placed items, set up right by the hole — “so the leaks aren’t very bad. You’re always going to get holes in the walls up here, Lillian. Trick’s to stay ahead of them.”

We have reached the final proofreading stage of the Fermi Resolution Worldbook!

I’ve already done a typo check on the Fermi Resolution Worldbook, and need to come up with the best path for going through the text to fix them. It’s easier to do it in the PDFs themselves, but smarter long-term to go through Affinity and fix ’em that way. Either way, we are very close to getting something that can go to the printers! Huz-zah.

Back, at least for a couple of days.

We got more stuff coming up this weekend. But tomorrow and Thursday should be normal. Well. Relatively.

The TOMBSTONE Honest Trailer.

Honest Trailers didn’t even try to roast TOMBSTONE. Then again… how? Where could you even start?

#commissionearned

Tweet of the Day, They Really Should edition.

There’s a whole genre of these.

Every ST: TOS episode should have an MI opening. https://t.co/hlft7xX4Nu

— Brian Faughnan (@BrianFaughnan) April 15, 2025

Light posting for the next two days.

Social activities: the family is on vacation, after all. …Not much to add to that, really. It’s really very nice out; you all should take advantage of the better weather, assuming you’re having some.

Got the PDF files back on the Fermi Resolution Worldbook!

…And I will be grappling with them for the rest of the week. We need to make sure that the print version is properly formatted, that the digital distribution version is optimized (which makes a big distance in PDF sizes), and that little things like proofreading and so forth are made up to date. All part of the process. The Fermi Resolution Worldbook looks good, but we’re not quite there yet.

‘Home We’ll Go.’

Home We’ll Go, Steve Aoki & Walk Off The Earth

#commissionearned

The Consolidation Wars, Part the Last. (Unfiltered)

I have no idea why I got a bug up my butt to write all of this out.

…

Empire Imposed
Brazil’s occupation of Argentina in 2075 is generally not considered part of the Consolidation Wars. It was instead a humanitarian intervention, at least at first. An Argentinian xeno-research facility examining what appeared to be Amalgamation artificial intelligence technology did… something. Whatever it was managed to utterly crash the country’s entire datagrid in an almost literal instant, coming perilously close to breaking out into the wider world. In the process it managed to kill ten percent of the population outright, and sending the remainder of Argentina into a preindustrial state. It was only through Herculean efforts that Brazil was able to keep the Argentinian population alive long enough to get the lights back on.

Argentinian gratitude lasted an entire year, until it was clear that while Brazil had been eager to arrive, they had no intention of leaving. The intervention had been expensive, and Argentina had many valuable mineral resources, and there was a need to make sure that the AI crash did not happen again… the Brazilian government announced in 2077 that the occupation would be indefinite. A dozen small insurgencies started the next day.

Six years later, the Brazilians were still dealing with a restive Argentina. Brazil had not been a repressive overlord, except in areas where there were active rebels. Even there the government took prisoners and distinguished between insurgents, and terrorists. If there had still been objective observers at the time, they would have predicted that at some point the fighting would have died down, particularly if some arrangement was reached that made Argentina at least partially sovereign again. All the two countries needed was a bit of calm.

Instead, they got the Guianan Atrocities.

West Europe’s invasion of Colombia, Venezuela, and Surinam — with the kind of mass civilian deaths now unfortunately associated with Eurasian and African conflicts — galvanized both the old United States of America and Brazil into rapidly expanding their territories. In the north, the USA engaged in diplomacy (for what would turn out to be distinctly unsavory reasons); in the South, Brazil simply decided to grab as much territory as it could before the West Europeans did.

Brazil succeeded, because it had enough of an orbital KEW presence to make West Europe thoughtful. For that matter, the USA had rather more of one, and an interest in not letting the Europeans take over another continent. In 2085 Brazil traded some extremely unpopulated territory in its far north to West Europe in exchange for the understanding that everything — and everyone — below a certain line of latitude was Brazil’s affair, and nobody else’s. The newly-minted USNA stood as guarantor to the deal, piously reanimating a Monroe Doctrine that had long since gone past ‘dead’ and was now ‘zombified.’

It took Brazil almost twenty years to first actually conquer the countries it had been given by the other Great Powers, and then pacify them. The mountainous nations of the western coast put up more of a fight than the easterners, but the threat of Brazil’s own KEW stocks kept insurgencies under some semblance of control. That left only conventional military forces, and Brasil was simply too strong there, too. The nation of Chile held out the longest, finally falling to Brazilian forces in 2096 after a brutal four year campaign. To this day it is estimated that outworld transportees of Chilean descent outnumber Chileans from actual Chile by five to one.

The formal recognition in 2102 of Grande Brasil as a Great Power was taken by later historians as the ‘official’ end of the Consolidation Wars. In reality, it was another decade before the rest of South America fully accepted their fates. It would take even longer for some of them to accept that whatever their future was, it would be spoken of in Portuguese…

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