Moe Lane's Blog, page 845
September 15, 2020
The THE MANDALORIAN Season 2 trailer.
This is the Way. Yes, everybody else is saying that, too. You know why? Because THIS IS THE WAY.
Drops October 30th.
September 14, 2020
Life on Venus? Ehhh….
My skepticism is because of the highlighted sentence below.
Traces of a rare molecule known as phosphine have been found in the hellish, heavily acidic atmosphere of Venus, astronomers announced Monday — providing a tantalizing clue about the possibility of life. Phosphine molecules found on Earth are primarily a result of human industry or the actions of microbes that thrive in oxygen-free environments.
…if there’s a place in the solar system where planetary conditions are going to resemble the more dangerous insides of a Terran industrial facility, it’d be Venus. Damnable solar wind: why couldn’t Venus have been swapped out with Mars? We’d probably have colonies there by now if it had been.
09/14/2020 Update, DUTIES Project.
13,800/32,000. Hrm. This needs to go faster. A lot faster. The 500/word per word strategy just ain’t gonna cut it for this project. The problem is, if I up it to 1,500/words per day I’m likely to end up with crap, which is worse than not getting this project situated by the end of the month. I must think about this further.
Snippet from ‘The Fight In The Grove’ after the fold.
Patreon!And now you know why I am running pell-mell through a forest, with a dryad primly clutching my back. We of Man were not born to be priests of Earth-Father and the Sky Lady, but we take our duty seriously. A grove corrupted by bittersap is one bad thing; a grove that has lost its Tender to that corruption is a most different bad thing indeed.
“How did it start?” I asked. I could manage that much in the way of speech, as they were all short words. Dryads are strong for their weight, but they do have weight.
“Not by our hands, Jack,” she said easily enough, for was I not doing all the work? “We were tending the grove when a beast maddened by curdled bittersap came roaring through the trees. It looked like one of the cave-beasts” — which could mean anything from a bat to a bear, to a dryad — “and the Tender was careful when he slew it, I swear.”
I nodded. Bittersap curdles when mixed with flesh, although not all at once. “Did the beast still have a store of bittersap on its fur or horns?” Although that should not be enough to damn a Tender, or even a dryad.
09/14/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.
Academic sneering!
Patreon!Going out to the Pierce farm in daylight was interesting — traveling there at night, you do not realize just how wild the countryside can get; or rather, you assume that the wildness is all in your head. But the dark, narrow glens and deep woods are, if anything, darker and deeper in the first light of day. I do not really understand why people live out here, away from the pleasures of town. It is a fifteen minute drive by car, but in spirit it feels more like a century.
From my point of view, I met Gershon Pierce far too early in the morning; from his, I arrived half-way through his working day. This did not help me in our conversation, as I was half-asleep and he was completely irascible. “Look at that wheat!” he said. “Just look at it!” There was an odd undertone in his voice that I only realized later was apprehension. At the time I just heard the anger. I mention this mostly because I tend to get obstinate at people getting angry at me.
“It’s… wheat,” I said after a moment. “It looks fine.” And it did! I mean, at least from a distance. When I got closer it had a smell I did not quite recognize, but aside from that it looked like a fine example of grain. Or at least, I assumed; I was not an agronomy major. I would not have minded hiring a few for my increasing labor pool, but that was one of the valuable degrees.
Pierce gave me a look that made me bristle a little more inside; it was the sort I normally give to humanities graduates. “It’s not fine,” he said. “The smell’s wrong, and the taste’s wrong. I don’t know what you put into your spent grain, but whatever it is, it’s bad stuff. It made this part of the wheat grow all wrong. Fast, but wrong.”
Tweet of the Day, How To Critically Fail Your Engineering (Security Systems) Roll edition.
Via @Chaosium_Inc. Wait for it…
Someone designed this, pitched it, got it funded, produced it, sold it, and then an apartment complex actually installed it and liked it enough to keep it.
— Stallionslaughter (@SlaughterPony) September 11, 2020
Amazing. pic.twitter.com/wfZZxc3nGK
September 13, 2020
TENET is doing well, apparently.
Well… TENET is doing well for the situation. My part of the country continues to have no movie theaters operating, and I can’t drive down to NoVa to see a film. At least, not while the school year is going on, since I’m locked into place here over that, too.
If I seem… irritable, from time to time, it’s because this entire situation exasperates me. Not least because apparently I’m supposed to be on the ragged edge of madness, which is not happening, and won’t be happening any time soon. But it’s easier to be publicly on the edge of a dramatic, nervous breakdown than to be publicly getting tired of all of this [expletive deleted]…
09/13/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.
Using my utter ignorance of organic chemistry to my best advantage!
Patreon!…the formula, when followed, created a non-toxic solid catalyst that could be suspended in the spirits and accrete the pollutants. Fifteen minutes was typically all that was needed to ‘purify’ a five gallon carboy; and while the result was still effectively raw moonshine, it was easily good enough to please our extra-legal suppliers. Indeed, they proved to be our first real customers; apparently the illegal liquor of this region had an ugly reputation, among those who cared about such things. Guaranteed clean and local stock found ready buyers.
David was more than happy with the entire arrangement, as soon as he worked out a method where he could make his student loan balances shrink in a regular and discreet fashion; and eventually I decided to emulate his blissful ignorance. I was aware that conventional chemistry did not work like this, after all. In fact, I spent an entire weekend trying to figure out how any of this could be, and only stopped experimenting when I noticed a recurring spasm in my hands that had not been there before.
This was, I concluded, a hint of sorts. I told myself how there was no need to strain my mind trying to make sense of everything, especially since all David and I had to do was black box the whole thing. Liquor goes in, catalyst goes in, catalyst comes out, improved liquor remains: when put that way, it seemed all very mechanical and even explicable, in its way. As long as you didn’t let yourself think about how the process worked; or why, since it worked, nobody was doing it anywhere else.
