Moe Lane's Blog, page 77
March 2, 2025
Please, God, let this week be normal.
That had to have been the single most unpleasant weekend I’ve seen on social media since before the pandemic, and I wasn’t even involved in it. How bad? This bad:
The Discourse in my timeline this weekend has sucked so much I've taken refuge in the 'For You' tab.
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) March 3, 2025
This was the sort of environment where I used to go around asking people, “What is your victory condition, here?” – because damned if I could figure it out. I noped out as much as I could, but there’s a limit to how much Baldur’s Gate 3 you can play.
Huddles, Part 1 (Fermi Resolution)
Working on this in case we make an upcoming stretch goal for The Fermi Resolution Worldbook.
Huddles
The Universal Dominion does not have towns, and it only has one city (Grand Moingoana, squatting on what was once the blameless city of Des Moines, Iowa). The basic political unit of the Dominion is the Tower, which are to Sephiroths as baronies are to duchies. Sephiroths are self-sufficient, with no external trade, very little internal trade, and only a limited need for industry. Their only real exports are tribute shipments to Grand Moingoana. Even their agricultural capacity was deliberately kept low, as a form of population control. All of this means that the usual conditions that produce towns are simply absent in the Universal Dominion.
What they had and have instead are huddles: collections of shacks and hovels with just enough associated farmland to keep the population mostly alive in any given year. A huddle was usually large enough to support spinners and blacksmiths, but metal in particular was extremely difficult to acquire. There were no roads, and no trade; huddles were dependent on whatever raw materials their magical overlords deigned to toss at them, or what they could themselves dig out of the ground. The Dominion avoided putting huddles on the site of an Old American town or city, but even the foundations of a long-vanished house can have useful metals in them.
Life in a huddle was typically miserable, stunted, and unrewarding. The population was expected to keep themselves alive, stay where they were, speak English in a way that Dominion mages could understand, and hand over any babies with magical potential. Aside from that, they were ignored.
Well, until the Dominion needed raw materials. The unpleasant truth is that huddles were largely human farms, deliberately placed out in the woods and surrounded by monsters. When the Dominion needed slaves for a particular purpose, they’d take what they needed from a huddle. If they took too many people? Well: there were other huddles. Every so often Dominion breeders would collect a few young people from other huddles, and transport them to one that had lost its population. The system was wildly inefficient and hideously cruel, but then: so was the Universal Dominion.
Patreon!
Patreon Microfiction: You’re Not The Boss Of Me.
I don’t know why humans are like this. We just are. Tell us we can’t do something, and we go and do it: “You’re not the boss of me” is as good an answer as any other, I guess.
Patreon!
March 1, 2025
‘No Rain.’
#commissionearned
Trying to decide what this month’s short story will be.
I have a half-dozen Part 2s, unfinished stories, and promising starts to choose from. Nothing is wowing me, though. I would like a certain amount of wow.
Moe Lane
PS: The two Marsh/Asenath stories don’t count, even though I need to get them finished ASAP. I swear to God, samplers are more trouble than they’re worth…
Book of the Week: The King of FLORCUBATAMP.
I didn’t even know Michael Z. Williamson was writing the on-order The King of FLORCUBATAMP, which will be based on one of the more interesting, and eventually tragic, characters in John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising zombie apocalypse series. The dude’s interesting because he’s actually turning out to be a pretty good king: honest, charismatic, makes good decisions, looking to improve the lives of his people, hard when he has to be but doesn’t enjoy cruelty.
He’s ultimately going to be tragic because his kingdom is smack dab in the middle of Florida, and the reconstituted USA is gonna have a problem with that. And Article IV, Section 4 of the US Constitution is inflexible on the subject.
#commissionearned
Sic Transit Gloria Skype.
End of an era: “After more than two decades as a pioneer in internet-based calling, Skype is officially being retired on May 5, 2025, as Microsoft shifts its focus entirely to Teams. Microsoft’s move gives existing Skype users just 10 weeks to decide their next steps.” Although largely a forgotten one. There was a time where Skype was absolutely vital for my online shenanigans; now I don’t even know how to log onto my account.
I have nothing else to say about that, really. I’m not even upset, or emotional about it. It just struck me in a certain way, that’s all.
February 28, 2025
I ran out of oomph two hours ago.
The gas tank is well and truly drained. I’m seriously considering having a drink, then going to bed just to make sure I don’t wake up for eight hours. I don’t, normally, but this has been an absolute month.
The February Patreon stuff is up!
I didn’t know if this was happening. Short month and I am flat-out exhausted. I want to go take a nap, and it’s a quarter after 7 PM.
Right! Onward.
Short Story: Judith Stormcrow and the Flim-Flam Man. This… probably should have been started on a month with more days, when I wasn’t doing a Backerkit.Roleplaying Games: The Cunning Land, Part 4: Witchery. It’s a little light and fluffy, but so is this entire game setting.Patreon!
Check out Sandy Petersen’s Patreon!
This would be Sandy Petersen of Call of Cthulhu and Doom fame. Also the Executive Producer of The Whisperer In Darkness movie, which I did not know before today. Anyway, check out his Patreon! He’s a cool dude.
#commissionearned
