Moe Lane's Blog, page 786
January 9, 2021
The second to last go-through on TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION.
After I finish checking the stories one more time, it’ll be time to collate them and get them into a KDF-compatible format. From there we go on to the print proof, and I’ll check it all again. And after that I’ll pull the trigger, order the books that need to be signed, and away we go. We’re still on track for this being done by the end of the month, or close to it.
In the meantime, the pre-order store for TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION remains open.
The SVALBARD Mythos-lite RPG Scenario Kickstarter.
SVALBARD looks like it’s fun, and it’s also clean. Printing is done via DriveThruRPG, and they do their print jobs in the US/UK, so no worries there. And, yeah: I hate having to check.
Book of the Week: BETWEEN HOME AND RUIN.
Karl’s second book in the Fall of the Censor Series. I’m reading BETWEEN HOME AND RUIN now, and it’s good! Check it out.
01/09/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
Getting along!
Patreon!I hear that on Earth they have lots of trouble with air traffic control. All those shuttles, all those Great Power borders, and all those places on the way that don’t take lightly to constant sonic booms. It sounded horribly complicated to me, back when I was just a local girl from Jefferson — but after six months here on 118-G-002, it feels like it’d be barely worse than driving a spaceport shuttle bus around.
Look, you all know the situation — humanity’s alone, all the Great Galactics who were supposed to mentor us were murdered four hundred years ago, nobody knows why, blah blah blah. Sure, that’s all really scary, too. But it’s the second-order stuff that’s alarming. Like flying an alien cargo shuttle, using the remains of an alien planetary transport system. It’s a lot harder to ignore how scary the universe is when you’re staring a corpse in the face.
You see, the good people (aliens are people, I figure) of 118-G-002 had one hell of a good network. In the safe zones where the system’s working right, it’s a dream to fly, with predictive telemetry so good you barely have to move the flight stick; and it can handle just about any problem the planet throws at you. Unfortunately, where the system is down or damaged it defaults to assuming you’re committing traffic violations just by breathing too hard.
January 8, 2021
Up on Patreon: My complete UNFILTERED Spooky Space Opera RPG setting (paywall).
I am trying to encourage the Patreon, after all. I expect that at some point I will make UNFILTERED generally available, though. To give you an idea of what it’s like:
They’re all gone.
When we finally activated the automated welcome beacon in the Oort Cloud, humanity rejoiced. Finally, we were going to meet the rest of the Galaxy! But… they’re all gone.
There’s a network of beacons covering us, and other ‘developing’ species. The non-sapient (it says) AI running that beacon knows what happened, either. The rest of Galactic civilization simply
disappeared
, four hundred years ago.
We’ll get more access to the databases as we check off the old criteria for species advancement, the network says. It’s slow going, without a mentor species. But we know that humanity can go out there.
It’s just… should we?
Enjoy! Unless you haven’t signed up, yet. Then sign up! And then enjoy!
Patreon!01/08/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
Starting to come together.
Patreon!A ‘nap,’ he says. Hah. More like a nightmare you can’t remember afterward.
A corporate team found a working deepsleeper about seven years ago on a fun little Yellow-class hellhole called 172-F-004; I’d reproduce the name the inhabitants used, but I don’t have a watermelon and a power saw handy. We’re pretty sure it wasn’t designed to be a sleep replacer, but that’s what it seems to do to our heads. One hour is worth ten ordinary hours’ worth of sleep, with no brain cancer! It’s a great gadget, as long as you don’t mind all the yelling and twitching by whoever uses it. But then, that’s why they invented soundproofing. And it works. I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed when the meeting started.
It was a small meeting, even for an operation in the Tomb Worlds. There was me, Greg wearing his ‘project head’ hat instead of the ‘merchant adventurer’ one, and Makena, representing the corporation. I felt most worried for Maki: if the Council jackwagons came down on anybody for anything, it’d be somebody from the corp. Oh, and there was Nur from the supply depot, but he wasn’t there to do anything except give us numbers when we needed them.
“All right. The good news is, anything iffy we can get into the shuttle in one go,” Greg said. “The bad news is, we can’t fly the stuff to wherever and get the shuttle back without the Council ship tracking the trip. We need an excuse for the return trip.”
RIP, Tommy Lasorda.
He was one hell of a baseball man.
BREAKING: Tommy Lasorda, Dodgers Hall of Famer, dead at 93https://t.co/n79TBemlrm pic.twitter.com/bu3eLwtsJH
— 1010 WINS (@1010WINS) January 8, 2021
It’s @KarlKGallagher’s birthday. Buy his books.
That’s always the right answer for ‘What do you get an author?’ A sale, o my droogies. You get them a sale.
Anyway: if you haven’t gotten Karl Gallagher’s Storm Between the Stars yet first get that, then get its sequel Between Home and Ruin. Both SF, both space opera, I’m in the middle of the second one now. Buy his books! They’re good and it’s his birthday.
Roku raises Quibi from its Essential Saltes.
It really is the best way to describe what happened. Even Roku admits it:
Hey, look, now we can all not-watch Quibi on our Rokus! pic.twitter.com/CnCQigkXEH
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) January 8, 2021
More here. The financial details were not disclosed, but I think we can agree that Roku did not buy Quibi’s product for 1.75 billion, so anybody who took a bath on funding that project is probably still in the tub. But, hey! There were a couple of shows on there that didn’t seem too bad, and since I have a Roku I’ll get to see them after all for free.
This feels all very metaphorical. To paraphrase Terry Pratchett: I’m not sure what it’s a metaphor of, though. Just a metaphor in general, really.
