Moe Lane's Blog, page 834
October 5, 2020
Two weeks until the TALES FROM THE FERMI RESOLUTION, Vol 1 Kickstarter launches!
10/20/20. Sign up now for launch notifications!
Take a peek at this upcoming project on @Kickstarter! Then sign up for notifications to stay tuned. https://t.co/vfqM6myo7s
— Ogiel (Moe Lane) (@Ogiel23) October 6, 2020
There also is, naturally, a mailing list. You can sign up for that, too.
10/05/20 Snippet, PATCHWORK GOD.
Bad physics! Bad! No biscuit!
Patreon!I did a little time dilation of my own as I scrambled around, under, and a couple of times over various pieces of suddenly-mobile office furniture. Partially because I needed to think as fast as I was moving, but mostly because I wanted the Blasphemous Tome focused absolutely on me. Sort of like screaming in somebody’s ear to distract them, only with more casual abuse of the local laws of physics. Which is why it was only a little time dilation; the last thing we needed right now was to make it easier for the Tome to escape. This amount of distraction was enough.
This particular Tome was a talker, and once it figured out that I wasn’t human (ugh) or from the Loyalists (double ugh) it started trying to convince me to just let it run away. As, to quote the humans, if; but I let it drone on and on about fellow travelers and following our nature and non serviam while I sidestepped corkscrewing computer monitors — which gave me an idea; I grabbed two by their power cords and started spinning them around like nunchuks. The cords would pop off in a second or two, sure… but at the speed I was moving at, that effectively meant ‘some time from now.’
10/25/2020 Update, REVISIONARY 27200/32000
We’re getting pretty close to a culmination, here. Although the fourth story in the chapbook needs quite a bit of expansion.
Patreon!More from “Polly Want”:
It was wrong to judge alien ecosystems by one’s own, Blid knew. But [birds] were simply horrible creatures. There was one video showing a large aquatic [bird] called a [heron] that was hunting smaller ones called [ducks]. The [heron] would stalk and capture a [duck], one by one, then half-strangle it using the two nightmare needles it called a ‘beak.’ Once the [duck] was sufficiently stunned — and usually half-drowned in the process — the heron would then somehow manage to swallow the [duck] whole and alive. And then the [heron] would go onto the next one, its prey still struggling under the skin and scales — no, [feathers].
Blid thought maybe that was it. The [birds] were all so patient, so methodical, it seemed like they weren’t really alive in the conventional sense. Shake-shake-shake, chomp, shake-shake-shake, chomp — over and over again, like a machine.
“Only they’re not machines,” he told Trindy over another lunch. “Machines don’t have those eyes.” Blid hunched down a little over his meal after that, as if talking about a [bird’s] eye might attract its gaze. Which was silly, of course. They were all on Terra! Except for the one in the Consulate, a treacherous voice in his head told him.
HARD CLEFT (Unofficial Legends of The Secret World #5) available for pre-order.
Just in time for Halloween (October 29). No word whether Blodwedd will have to retroactively rewrite all the bits with the weapons, going forward. (This is a Secret World Legends joke. A bad one, so don’t worry if it’s not funny).
HARD CLEFT – Book 5 of the Unofficial Legends of The Secret World is available for preorder on Amazon now! https://t.co/VUen80IplO pic.twitter.com/45eKMgqSPp
— Blodwedd Mallory (@BlodweddMallory) October 5, 2020
The oddly endearing FREE GUY trailer.
Then again, I roll Paragon lightside Queen of the Girl Scouts*. There are games where I’ve wanted to do this sort of thing on general principles.
Via @geeksaresexy.
Moe Lane
*I still remember the first time I heard that in Mass Effect 3. It made me grin and say aloud, “Aww, Jack. I missed you, too.” And I had. Jack was my FemShep’s id, saying a lot of the stuff I’d have had my character say if it wasn’t for the, you know, entire Queen of the Girl Scouts thing.
October 4, 2020
10/04/20 Snippet, PATCHWORK GOD.
Buzzword bingo!
Patreon!“Excuse me,” I yelled as I vaulted over a desk or two, “but have you really focus-tested your storyscaping for sustainability?” This got the attention of a couple of mind-numbed minions — probably poor souls who didn’t run away fast enough — and as they turned to start chasing me down in the approved zombie fashion I shouted at them. “This operating paradigm you’re shackled to is undercutting the desired throughput! Internalize a new critical path checklist!”
…I sort of know what all of that meant, but I didn’t have to. The buzzwords are unimportant, except in how the Tome was using them as a framework for its actual goal: to wit, grabbing an office full of humans and escaping to its own pocket dimension. It’s like all the old spells for summoning demons; the actual words were unimportant. What mattered was intent.
The same is true for Jack and I, only we approach it from the opposite angle. I can actually hear the spells underneath the jargon, which meant I didn’t need to know Buzzword, any more than I would have needed to know Latin or Enochian or any of that crap to chat with some would-be Dr. Faustus before I decapitated him for Foul Sorcery. Instead, I just said what I wanted to say, and let the jargon attach itself. In this case, I was trash-talking the Tome, then confusing the Hell out of the minions instead of killing them.
I mention all of this because I know it can be confusing.
10/04/20 Update, REVISIONARY: 26700/32000.
I wonder where ‘Polly Want’ is going to end up. Maybe 7,000 words. It wasn’t in all that bad shape to begin with, tell truthful.
Patreon!It was difficult for Blid to express why the videos Kuiz had sent him scared him so. It wasn’t the blood, although most Terran animals seemed to have quite a lot of it. The blood, in fact, made the videos feel like things from a bad stabber movie. He almost couldn’t take them seriously, even though Blid knew perfectly well that the footage was real.
Besides, simply videos of animal attacks themselves weren’t terrifying. Nasty, sure — but Predators on his own homeworld ate prey all the time, after all. When it was deathworld creature against deathworld creature, Blid had no standard of comparison. He couldn’t even get a good feel for the sizes of the creatures involved. When a [wolf] caught a [rabbit], how big was either, really?
But that all went out the window when it was a [bird] video. Any [bird] video. Even the one showing an adult putting worms into its spawns’ blindly-snapping mouths… that one woke up Blid, his lung burning, and him unsure whether he needed to call for an ambulance or a sanvac shuttle. In the end, he just settled for vomiting in the toilet and going back to fitful sleep.
Tweet of the Day, …I’m Sorry, Beers. I’m So Terribly, Terribly Sorry edition.
I hope to God this is just what the confirmation of my beer delivery order looks like during the month of October. Because this is some [expletive deleted]ed-up [expletive deleted], man. I dunno if I want this in my head.
