Moe Lane's Blog, page 799
December 10, 2020
12/10/20 Snippet, GHOST OF THE DEVIL HORSE.
Gadgets! Exposition!
Patreon!“The spectral reverberator, or specrev, is here to help us contact ghosts,” Hank went on. “The real deep ghosts, the ones so old they’re almost in stasis. This should help us focus them enough that they can function and communicate – and who knows? Maybe some of them will take advantage of the specrev to Go On.”
All right, quick debunking here: ghosts don’t actually fade away into nothing, because a ghost is actually a soul and those are invulnerable to everything. But the really old ghosts get that way because they found this equilibrium where they don’t feel pulled either Up or Down – or pulled to do anything else, really. Which all sounds really boring, but I guess some people prefer it to being judged. Or they’ve spent so long paring away the post-mortem unessentials that they’ve forgotten that there was anywhere else to go.
Barbara spoke up. “Why are we looking for the deeper ghosts?” she asked. “I thought the dig was going to focus on the Dominion Conquest period. The Council of Five and the Rattlesnake Legion sites: we already know their approximate locations, and whatever ghosts survive from then are still accessible by the usual methods.” Goat blood, if you’re not familiar with the techniques. Hey, it worked for the Antediluvian Greeks and Romans, right? “Or do you have another little surprise for us, Sage Johnson?”
Tweet of the Day, The NOBODY Trailer Goes To Places I’m Happy To Revisit.
It’s just enough different from JOHN WICK that I’ll go, Sure. Dude’s got to balance being a BAMF with his responsibilities as a husband and father. That’s relatable. Look, I go to movies to relax, okay? I’m not going to get upset that somebody made a movie that’s pretty close to a bunch of movies that I liked.
Obviously I’m going to be seeing BOB WICK in movie theaters. https://t.co/k36c4qYsMw
— Sonny Bunch (@SonnyBunch) December 10, 2020
12/10/20 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE CHRISTMAS ELF.
Flushing out the game!
Patreon!In the end, Timmy decided to make like a lion and roar.
It was a little roar, though. He couldn’t be really loud; and he couldn’t roar right at the elf, either. Timmy knew that if he did, the elf would freak out in front of everybody, and that would be bad. But if he roared a little, at somebody who couldn’t hear him anyway? Yeah, that might make the elf run.
The trick was, finding somebody to roar at, close enough to the elf to spook it but not close enough that the elf could see who was roaring. Timmy picked a girl, close enough to his own age. She was with both her parents, trying not to listen as they yelled at each other the way adults do when they don’t want people to see them yelling. Timmy sighed. Some people just didn’t have any Christmas spirit.
Up far too late installing CYBERPUNK 2077.
The installation was a pain in the ass, because I had tried to pre-install CYBERPUNK 2077 and it hung up. I just gave up, uninstalled, and then reinstalled, and then it worked fine. The game itself runs really smoothly and REALLY prettily on the PC; I have no complaints.
I did run through the beginning of the game, and I realized fairly quickly; if you’re running the Corpo track, you more or less default to being a total [expletive deleted] to everybody around you. I, like, maybe killed two people without even trying – but nobody said anything to me about it, and I don’t think it was because the game itself didn’t care. My usual gameplay strategy of being Queen of the Girl Scouts is gonna be REAL hard to achieve in this title.
Moe Lane
PS: You already know this, but: don’t play this game around kids.
December 9, 2020
12/09/20 Snippet, TIMMY AND THE CHRISTMAS ELF.
Elves!
Patreon!The elf was dressed like an… elf. Timmy thought that was funny, because the elf didn’t look happy to be dressed like one of Santa’s helpers. The hat and pointed shoes looked real dumb on it, the green tunic was ripped in a couple of places to make it fit, and the stockings were all baggy. Timmy knew why nobody else was seeing this — elves were good at making your eyes lie to you — but it was still weird to see the elf just stand there.
Young and Thin hadn’t gotten Timmy’s made-up mother on the walkie-talkie, obviously, and they were trying to figure out what to do next. So Timmy had helped them out by saying My mom would be waiting for me by Santa! She’ll be there! The adults were happy to grasp at that straw. Once he got there, all Timmy had to do was shout Mommy, mommy! There you are! before ducking into the crowd. Young and Thin tried to catch up, but Timmy was able to get out of his sight… and then, just like that, Timmy had a different colored coat on and no brightly-colored hat and he was wearing a pair of thick glasses. Young and Thin went right past him without figuring it out.
The other adults didn’t see Timmy’s sudden switcheroo, either. They never did. He’d seen that adults hardly ever saw anything. It was weird.
12/09/20 Snippet, GHOST OF THE DEVIL-HORSE.
Odd device that should probably work out fine!
Patreon!Hank had gathered us all together to show off — it’s hard to describe, actually. In outline it looked like a set of three tubes, fused together at one end, and… somehow indistinctly separate at the other end. And I mean ‘indistinctly:’ you couldn’t look at the other end directly. Your focus would just slide off, like the item was somehow so frictionless it affected your vision. Which is more or less what it was doing, I guess.
The experience didn’t bother me, and I could see that Barbara was also interested, not revulsed. But most of the humans avoided looking at the artifact for very long, and the two elves and one orc in the group both looked like they were ready to smash it on general principles. From Hank’s nod, he was expecting all of our reactions.
“Don’t worry!” he said as he covered the item again with the cloth. “It’s called a spectral reverberator, and it’s harmless. The folks at the UNV High Magic lab came up with it last year while researching the interaction between clinical necromancy and deep psychometry; there’s nothing forbidden, nothing corruptive about it.”
Well, that was reassuring.
In the mail: the proof copy for REVISIONARY!
Half a week early. Illustrations by Ben Fleuter, and they came out real nice.
You can go the REVISIONARY route in one of three ways: get the Kindle book now, pre-order a physical copy via Amazon, or order a signed copy at a slight discount via my Backerkit store. Either way: four stories, about 32 thousand words, four illustrations. Enjoy!
Daredevil Showing Up In The Next Spidey Movie?
Mayyyyybe:
#Daredevil star Charlie Cox has reportedly joined Spider-Man 3, now. https://t.co/gfNgczL33R pic.twitter.com/GMPToAzgrE
— ComicBook.com (@ComicBook) December 9, 2020
Via @zamoose. The Netflix MCU shows actually would work well in Sony’s Spider-verse thingy; they’re lower-powered, for one thing. Punisher or Kingpin make more sense as antagonists for Spider-Man than they would have for Iron Man or Captain America; you could believe that Spidey would have real trouble taking one of them down. As for continuity? …Who the hell cares about continuity? The comics sure don’t!
