Moe Lane's Blog, page 787
January 8, 2021
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.
January 7, 2021
Tweet of the Day, DOOOOOOO ITTTTT, @SandyofCthulhu edition.
I’d buy it.
Now I want to write a horror scenario about someone using this old kit and coming to grief thanks to that damned (literally) crease.
— Sandy Petersen (@SandyofCthulhu) January 8, 2021
01/07/21 Snippet, GHOST OF THE DEVIL-HORSE.
I was feeling bad about only getting 200 words of this story done today, until I remembered that I also wrote about 1000 words of unrelated stuff beforehand. Today was actually productive, really. It didn’t feel like it, but what do I know?
Patreon!The first sign that something was going wrong was the high-pitched drone that suddenly reverberated inside my skull — and if ‘high-pitched drone’ sounds nonsensical, I’m sorry about that. I’m trying to describe what an unpleasant magical sensation feels like, and if you aren’t a mage it’s not going to make much sense. If you are a mage then you’d likely know exactly what I was talking about.
You’d also realize that hearing the drone meant a spell had just started to disastrously unravel, so you’d be hitting the dirt (literally, in this case). That’s what I was doing, yanking down Yuri along the way: I could see Barbara taking a dive, too, with barely enough time for her to yell “DUCK!” along the way and have it be useful.
Luckily, salvage archeology self-selects for people who know when to take cover at a moment’s notice. It turned out that almost all of the team at least got out of the metaphysical line of fire when the uncontrolled magical energy started manifesting as chain lightning (there are reasons why that happens, but you probably don’t care what they are).
In the Mail: Kindle Fire HD 8 Plus (and case).
The case is a kid’s case, but it’s not for my kids: it’s for me. My old Kindle has valiantly kept running, but it’s old enough that the battery requires constant charging. I can almost see the electricity… huh. There’s no good metaphor, there. If your Kindle is leaking electricity you really don’t want to be anywhere near it.
Merry Christmas to me! pic.twitter.com/QdqnLW8uV2
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) January 7, 2021
Anyway, this is what the Christmas money bought me. The screen is a little smaller on the Fire HD 8 Plus than my old Kindle but boy is it fast. I possibly should have upgraded last year. I might even use it for more than quick email checking in the morning…
A new year! A new chance to check out Moe Lane’s PATREON!
Sorry about the third-person there, but I’m trying to get my SEO all up in this thing. Anyway: I have a Patreon! Fiction! RPG material! More fiction! And it can all be yours!
Well. The access to it, at least. I still own everything.
Patreon!01/07/21 Snippet, GHOSTS ON AN ALIEN WIND.
This month’s story for Patreon. Not Fermi Resolution, but people may recognize the setting.
Patreon!The rain had started again as I maneuvered the cargo-hauler down to the landing pad. It’s always a crapshoot when it comes to salvaged alien equipment, but this time we had lucked out; the control configurations were within human norms. It wasn’t just the big stuff like ‘Can I reach all the buttons?” either: the colors made sense to human eyes, and the layout was intuitive to humanoids with binocular vision and thumbed hands. I didn’t even have to retrofit a cushion for my ass, which is pretty much standard operating procedure when it comes to adapting alien chairs for human use. The folks that made this hauler must have been a lot like us: it’s a real shame I’ll never meet one.
As I made my vertical landing I saw but did not immediately react to the way the landing pad was remarkably free of gear and pallets, or the way that people were rushing around, doing various things with an unmistakable air of urgency. Contragrav thrusters may be easier to maneuver than Earthtech turbofans, but you still don’t casually sling around a forty-ton flying brick. If there was a problem, I’d be told after I landed; and, if the problem was big enough, I’d have been told already not to land.
The other nice thing about contragrav is that the landings are whisper-quiet. You don’t feel the impact because there isn’t one; the energy field merges with planetary gravity and puts you both in instant equilibrium. Or something like that. The techies back in human space are trying to work out the details, so that we can make our own. It’ll be nice when they finally do, but they’ve been trying for the last eighty years, so I figure we’ll be salvaging Amalgamation tech for just a while longer.
