Moe Lane's Blog, page 849
September 7, 2020
Quote of the Day, So Much Anticipation! So Much Dread! edition.
I find this… fraught.
Arriving on Friday, November 20, Amblin Television and Warner Bros. Animation are bringing back the cartoon siblings for 13 episodes. Additionally, Pinky and the Brain will also be a part of the new Animaniacs series.
Mostly because I have no hopes or clues about how this gets resolved. The new Animaniacs could be fantastic! Or awful! We have no way of knowing ahead of time. It’s like playing a game of Russian Roulette where you don’t know how many bullets are in the gun*.
Guess we’ll find out November 20th! On Hulu!
Moe Lane
*Surely I am not the first person to make that rather alarming analogy.
School starts tomorrow!
…Which doesn’t have the same ring to it when it effectively means I start the new unpaid job tomorrow! Then again, we enjoy the nigh-obscene luxury of having parents home to minimize the situation; I was a stay-at-home already and my wife is still telecommuting. Based on the emails and messages coming out from the schools, there are a lot of kids in this county who will not have anybody to help them this semester with, well, pretty much everything.
I don’t think this is entirely fair to them, but I don’t really know what I can do about it, either.
It’s Labor Day! Check out the FROZEN DREAMS Goodreads Giveaway project!
30% of the way there! If we hit 100% ($10/$30 physical tiers only) at the preorder store, I will give away 5 physical copies on Goodreads! How exciting!
09/07/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.
Snark!
Patreon!It is a cliche to suggest I had a flash of inspiration from this — and yet, it is true; I did. We had all the elements necessary for a successful business enterprise. There was a need for alcohol that was truly cheap, yet not smelling like it was recycled, and I had both the right skill set and a clean credit score. Best of all, I had unfettered access to an endless stream of young people desperate to find a steady job which could employ their inherent talents. True, they were mostly from the humanities and social sciences, which meant the talents being used at first would largely involve heavy lifting; but surely some of them could be trained up for more useful work. Besides, it wasn’t like anybody else would be hiring them for their majors, either.
My first impulse was to brew beer, since I had already tried my hand at the practice (a common enough, although typically brief, diversion for budding chemical engineers). It soon became clear that the market for that was virtually saturated. And, besides: brewing beer in bulk was complicated. Too complicated for my mostly-untested credit score.
September 6, 2020
09/06/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.
Yeah, I was going to take it easy, but this post inspired me. In that font, ‘Miskatonic’ looks a lot like ‘Whiskey Tonic.’ …And, well, it’s just so obvious from there on out.
Patreon!It is true that I have set on fire the premises and contents of my own distillery, and yet I hope to shew by this statement that I am not an arsonist. At first I shall be called a criminal — no better than the petty-thieves that languish in their cells at our state penitentiaries. Later some of my readers will weigh each statement, correlate it with the known facts, and ask themselves how I could have acted otherwise than as I did after facing the evidence of that horror — that thing in my hip-flask.
Like many a person who threw himself blindly into the fractal singularity of university, I awoke one morning to discover myself ejected from that relentless embrace with nothing but a piece of inscribed paper and a variety of ill-formed opinions to show for it. All around me stood other, similarly-vomited individuals, all blinking in their loaned gowns and motherboards. Like new-hatched turtles we shambled here and there under the pitiless June sun, blindly searching out for some half-understood sea or at least shade; while far above us banks and other predators idly circled, waiting for the first signs of weakness or fatigue. But not right away, for they were patient, and knew how to wait.
I was more fortunate than my fellows, or so I thought at the time. My provincial and blinkered parents had been ridiculously insistent that the majority of my classes be in such things as engineering and chemistry, to the point where I had a degree in those eldritch subjects; they had likewise been tedious on the subject of loans. I was forced – forced! – to spend my summers and weekends working to make up the slack, which I bitterly resented up to the moment where I realized that the crushing burden of student debt was, in my case, entirely absent from my shoulders.
Book of the Week: Going Ballistic.
Dagnabbit, I knew I forgot something last night. Anyway, I have literally just picked up Dorothy Grant’s Going Ballistic on a whim, based on the cover, bio, and the reviews. I mention this merely to drive home the observation that covers, bios and particularly reviews have an impact on sales.
:Looks directly at camera:
Patreon Microfiction: ‘Several Options To Choose From.’
I think that video games really have things to teach the fantasy genre, as “Several Options To Choose From” demonstrates. People shouldn’t allow themselves to get too hung up about the standard quest reward paradigm; it can lead to curious blind spots. Although I suppose one might find such an attitude oddly disarming…
Patreon!
