Moe Lane's Blog, page 808
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.
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!
