Moe Lane's Blog, page 819
December 13, 2020
THE BAD BATCH trailer.
STAR WARS: THE BAD BATCH is going to resonate more with my wife than me, given as she’s taken the time to get through THE CLONE WARS. I suspect, however, that their Order 66 programming is going to be intact. At least at first.
12/13/20 Snippet: Timmy and the Christmas Elf.
Complications!
Patreon!“Look, I just want to know what you did, okay?” The girl looked a little scared – but a little happy, too, like she had just found out something that was really pretty cool. “You looked at me back there, and I could hear something, but nobody else heard it and I always knew I was different and you have to tell me what it is!”
Timmy shrugged. “Okay,” he said. “You’re a witch.”
The girl flushed. “Don’t lie to me – and don’t laugh!” because Timmy was laughing. “It’s not funny!” she almost shouted.
He shook his head. “Yeah, it is. I knew you weren’t gonna believe me if I told you the truth, and you didn’t!” His teachers had said that would happen. People didn’t really believe in magic anymore, especially the ones who could really do it. They think they’re lucky or smart or skilled, one of his teachers had told the class. Nobody wants to hear they’re just cheating. “I’m gonna go now.” Probably the elf wasn’t in one of the rooms anyway.
“You can’t go!” she said, behind him. Timmy turned back to tell her yes, he could — and then he shoved her, hard, as he saw a flicker of white down the hall. The pain hit just as a blurry figure hit the door to the outside; the alarm went off, but that was just one more thing by now.
Patreon Microfiction: ‘Eating Well By Doing Good.’
There’s already one story in the world of ‘Eating Well By Doing Good,’ and there could be others. I’m just not sure who I’d sell them to. They don’t exactly fit in the usual categories.
Patreon!Tweet of the Day, BEHOLD! This Is A Textbook Revenge Scenario edition.
This is, like, a Mission Impossible revenge situation.
Move over monoliths—it’s Peoria’s mystery Soviet Cookie Monster mural https://t.co/dalBRRCQ55
— Robin D. Laws (@RobinDLaws) December 13, 2020
The more I look at it, the better it gets. Speculation after the fold.
It seems clear that the property owner’s the one that’s been targeted for the revenge. To sum up: Mister X (we know it was a dude, or at least the front man was) pretended to be the actual property owner and found a local artist to do the mural on the building. He then paid the artist in full – this is where you can kind of relax a little, because the artist getting screwed out of his fee would have been pretty unfair – and got his mural of Cookie Monster blasting the world with Commie Rainbow Cookie Beams.
No, really.
The property owner went ballistic – which is fair – and then painted over the mural. Which is also fair, but unfortunate, because now everybody’s pissed at him for covering up the drive-by artwork and they’ve turned that corner into a shrine to the original. The property owner also managed to get in a feud with the artist, which is right on the cusp between fair and not-fair*, but he’s backed off on that. He’s going to put up a new mural, which will piss off still more people, and it’s amazing how little sympathy I have for this guy, considering that somebody stole his identity to slap up an insulting mural on his wall.
This is how you know it’s high-grade revenge, brothers and sisters. The property owner hasn’t done anything really wrong here, but the tacit assumption is that he must be some kind of burning, rotating jackwagon on wheels to be worth this kind of response. You don’t do this because the guy won’t fix your radiator right away. No. This kind of payback has to be earned.
Moe Lane
*Dude was being paid, dude probably should have asked why payment was in cash (I assume it was in cash). If he wasn’t, then the artist is actually in on the whole thing and that’ll shift the fair/unfair needle.
December 12, 2020
Book of the Week: Rogue Squadron: Star Wars Legends (X-Wing)
I’m pumped for the ROGUE SQUADRON movie because Patty Jenkins is directing it and she made it clear that she’s a huge nerd who wants to make an X-Wing fighter jock flick*. Other people are pumped because it’s going to be based off of the Rogue Squadron video game and books, which latter I never got into but other people obviously did. So I figured I’d give Michael Stackpole’s Rogue Squadron: Star Wars Legends (X-Wing) a whirl. I mean, why not?
Moe Lane
*If the idea of that in general doesn’t give you a thrill, then… I am sorry to hear that.
12/12/20 Snippet, GHOST OF THE DEVIL-HORSE.
Action!
Patreon!Getting to the real exploration took longer than I hoped, but shorter than I feared.
The Council site was a bust, alas. When the Dominion conquered Denver, back in the day, they had pretty thoroughly degraded the local civic symbols, and that absolutely included the centuries-old building where generations of Denverians had held court. What spirits were left after that scourging had hidden themselves so ‘deep’ in the metaphysical bedrock that I’m not sure any could hear us, even if they wanted to. And none of them seemed to want to.
But we did release a tormented spirit that some nameless Dominion bastard mage had bound to the walls, in chains of infinite pain, which was nice. Or it would have been, except that after several centuries of agony the spirit was homicidally crazy. Judging on how often they do it, this is apparently the Dominion’s idea of ‘humor.’
Right now the spirit was trying to strangle me with its bare hands, which were only not bursting into flames because I was using my own spellcasting abilities to counter the spirit’s. I don’t recommend this, mind you. Direct spell-to-spell negation works, but it also makes it impossible for you to use any magic of your own. On the other hand: it’s not the easiest thing to strangle a serpent-man, even when he’s in his borrowed human form.
Videogame of the Week: Spider-Man: Miles Morales (PS4).
My oldest son and I were both unaware that they released Spider-Man: Miles Morales for the PS4. I’m relieved, honestly, because I wasn’t gonna buy a PS5 so soon after getting this one…
‘An Alternate History of the Roman Empire.’
This is a very interesting set of articles about an alternate history Roman Empire by Tim Venning. Tim avoided making major changes to the timeline, preferring instead to have a high degree of historical inertia which nonetheless resulted in greater and greater changes over time, with an eye towards whether an Imperial collapse might be delayed or staved off. I look forward to reading the entire thing when it comes out.
