Moe Lane's Blog, page 775
January 30, 2021
There’s a storm a-coming.
Usually that’s a metaphor for something or other, but in this case it just means the East Coast is gonna get hammered with anywhere from six to eighteen inches of snow, depending. My area’s supposed to get six to eight inches. …Which means precisely zero, unless the power and/or Internet goes out. My kids aren’t really thrilled about the end of snow days, and I can’t say that I blame for that, either.
Ach, well, the beer store’s within walking distance.
Book of the Week: One Hungry Werewolf.
The full title is One Hungry Werewolf: And Other Monstrous Rhymes. Author’s my buddy Jimmie Bise, and you can pre-order it today. Which I have. Check it out!
Tweet of the Day, Esoterrorists Alert edition.
I know what happened, yeah. My guess was, they were testing the system, and they used an obviously fake alert just in case somebody screwed up and distributed it for real. Which is what happened, so everybody should just have a big laugh over this and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Oh man.
— Allie Gravitt (@alliegravitt) January 30, 2021https://t.co/LSuZtbwFoF
It is also pretty solid Esoterrorist fodder. This is the sort of thing you’d have distributed if there was some kind of rampaging miniature construct running around Texas until a shadowy government agency managed to take it out; anybody who’d try to reveal the truth later would just get pointed to this and told Can’t believe everything you read on the Internet, dude. The term for this in the Esoterrorists RPG is the ‘veil-out,’ and it’s an integral part of the game.
The SCP Tabletop RPG Kickstarter.
My eldest is totally into SCP, and we have yet to get him interested in TT RPGs, so… let’s give this a whirl.
January 29, 2021
‘One Thing.’
Been a long damn decade.
Time to listen to what I’m saying.
Seriously.
I'm not here to tell people how to get out of bed in the morning. The work still has to get done, though, and nobody's volunteering to do it for me.
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) January 30, 2021
Back to book proofing!
WANDAVISION at the halfway point.
No spoilers, but: it does not suck. And, yeah, it’s a horror show. There’s one particular scene which will establish that, once and for all.
I can also say that generally WANDAVISION is taking full advantage of the fact that it has over a decade of movies – and the actors/actresses associated with them – to draw from. Marvel’s not overdoing it, but to give one example: they used the past movies to establish in roughly thirty seconds what the SWORD organization is, what it does, and how you should react to it. Assuming that you watched the movies, which I did so I’m covered, at least.
All in all: it’s fun and I’m enjoying it and things are likely to get a little dark going forward. Possibly even… mad.
Moe Lane
PS: There is no Route 2 in New Jersey, by the way. But there is a Route 17 in North Jersey (which used to be Route 2, before World War 2), which is the only part of the state where you can enter it without going over a bridge first. You’ll figure out why I’m pointing this out when you see the episode.
Direct Sequel to CLOVERFIELD announced.
You either liked CLOVERFIELD a lot or you didn’t; I’m not particularly susceptible to motion sickness via shaky cam, which is I suspect why I’m in the first category. But apparently they’re going to make an actual sequel, not another movie in the ‘series’ (I haven’t seen either), which sounds cool. It also sounds like it’s not gonna be a ‘found footage’ flick, so more people may be able to watch it without getting queasy*.
Personally, I want to see the movie that was going on at the same time as CLOVERFIELD. It looked like a straightforward 1950s Atomic Horror kaiju flick, and I’m curious to see what that sort of thing looks like when it’s got 2020s SFX backing its play. I don’t really expect to get that, though.
Moe Lane
*It’s an Abrams production, though, so I hope you like lens flare.
01/29/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
This is staying a short story. It is.
Patreon!It took me three days to figure out why the hell Rubicon had come here, mostly because I wasted two of them trying to pump the crew of the [Redacted] 523 (no, really. That was the name on the manifests) for information. I got precisely nowhere, which I sort of expected, but not really. I mean, you get used to Council spacers being closemouthed, out here in the Tomb Worlds. Their masters only send out the really committed and trustworthy minions.
But these folks were… they were like black holes when it came to gossip. Not actually rude, unlike their ship captain: they wanted fresh food and new entertainment and cold beer, and were happy to trade with me or Nur for them. But none of them would talk about why they were here. We were lucky to even get shrugs.
“They’ve been mind-locked,” Nur told me confidently as we grabbed some cold drinks of our own. Not beer, though. Nur didn’t drink and I was on call for the duration.
I rolled my eyes. “First off, they’re not mind-locked. Second, they’re not mind-locked. Third… what’s mind-locked?”
“Damned if I know. Probably some weird alien tech that makes people keep their mouth shut.”Nur grinned. “But you know something like that has got to be out there.”
