Moe Lane's Blog, page 863

09/23/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.

Time to start bringing it home!

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Things came to a head, as it were, thanks to my slightly irregular audit of the off-the-book books. There were no obvious embezzlements going on; but I had noticed that, about a month previously, Farmer Pierce had abruptly stopped supplying us with raw product.  He had apparently come around and began supplying us with more and more of his goo-enhanced crops, until it seemed like he was supplying us with his farm’s entire product. But we weren’t paying him for that anymore — and yet, there was no period where production faltered. What was going on?

The quick answer was, he had been bought out last month. A little bit of research even found me his new number; I am not sure why I wanted to contact Pierce. Perhaps I was afraid of what he said — it seems strange to write it out that way, as if to be afraid of something also means to be fascinated by it. Which is absurd.

And yet.

TINSEL RAIN. The next Tom Vargas novel will be titled TINSEL RAIN.

I had the thought in the shower — then had to refine the hell out of it. Still, I got that and the real opening to the book, which was cool. Note that TINSEL RAIN is the book that will be written in November; the next Kickstarter novel is something else entirely.

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Eddie Cazals was the kind of guy whose funeral you look forward to attending, right up to when it happens.

It was pretty well-attended, at least; the Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees had stepped in to handle everything, and that included having plenty of Eddie’s coworkers be able to show up. I don’t know how many of them felt bad about being there, but that’s between them and the inside of their heads. I know what my business is, and it ain’t that.

Speaking of business, there was a lot of professional courtesy on display at the services. The Sindicato Nacional de Trabajadoras del Hogar had sent over a ton of flowers and a decent number of mourners. It was good to see: the ATSE and the Syndicate had been butting heads a lot lately over the respective turfs in Cin City, and nobody likes to see mages fight. Especially the Castle, which probably explained why they had sent along the Crown Princess to look sad — and to keep things quiet by being there. You know. Just in case.

‘The Boys of Summer.’

The Boys of Summer, Don Henley

Prepping for the remote game session Friday.

It’s the $250 Kickstarter tier session for FROZEN DREAMS: obviously, $250 buys a certain amount of actual prep work, but I’ve done this adventure before and I know how it’s going to go, generally. The trick is keeping seven people entertained at once, but that’s why we run con games, right? Sweat more now, bleed less later, and all that.

I am debating whether to put in more than one gaming session tier for the next Kickstarter, though. I don’t know whether anybody would sign up for it; but then, I didn’t expect anybody to sign up for the last one, either. Gotta think about it some more.

So that was what I was doing today.

The ‘Unsure of the Worldbuilding’ LOVE AND MONSTERS trailer.

It’s not an awful conceit, but…

…if a bunch of plucky protagonists can make it from Point A to Point B with nothing but their wits and a little kinetic energy, then the goram USAF could have pushed the damn monsters back with a whole lot of kinetic energy, in the form of a bunch of A-10 Warthogs and their Happy Mandatory Fun Time GAU-Avenger rotary cannons. I mean: how could depleted uranium rounds do any worse than arrows, in this situation?

Oh, well, they’ll probably explain it away at some point.

09/22/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.

Poor socializing!

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I am not sure, but I think David began to actively research the goo only after I had made it clear how much I did not care about its origins or composition. But he must have been obsessed with it from the beginning, based on the notes that I found in his apartment… but I get ahead of myself. The point was, the poor man was filled with a terrible need to understand the goo.

I understood this, in a way: but I was able to ignore the peculiarities of the stuff by concentrating on chemical analyses and biological samplings, which all obligingly threw back results showing no exoteric dangers from the goo. Thus we see the benefits of a major in chemical engineering.

Unfortunately for David, his major was in medieval metaphysics. The mental toolbox which he had acquired while pursuing a degree was probably better at explaining things like the goo — but only in rather stark and judgmental terms. All in all: I think I got more worth for my tuition money.

Ironically, if David had not been on the outs with the library for reasons still obscure to me, he might have enlisted their help. I do wonder why he did not; pride, perhaps? Or an awareness that the forces represented by the Special Reading Room did not approve of understanding certain things? Either way, that route was closed to him; so David apparently began seeking out some of the very people who he (and I!) would normally instinctively avoid. They would not be so fussy about who was told what, surely.

The ‘Every Streaming Service’ Honest Trailer.

Not gonna lie: I was wondering whether Honest Trailers was scraping the bottom of the barrel with this one. But if they did, the barrel had been incompetently emptied earlier, because ‘Every Streaming Service’ is funny. Sometimes brutally so.

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…The Snyder Cut and all the DC stuff might get me to try out HBO Max. I’ll admit it, I’m not proud.

The Freaky FREAKY trailer.

I don’t normally do slasher flicks, but Sonny is right: FREAKY looks entertaining. I might be tempted to go see it. Assuming I get to go see anything this year.

09/21/2020 Snippet, THE THING IN MY HIP FLASK.

Grinding on through!

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“Please, David,” I said. “I’m not a fool. I’ve had toxicology reports done. There’s nothing in there you wouldn’t expect from a normal brewing process. No heavy metals, no alkaloids. Why, the goo is even mildly antibacterial. Not enough to be worth pursuing, but still. BSB is perfectly safe.” I sipped my now non-alcoholic drink. “In moderation.”

“And what about the people who get hooked?” David looked extremely upset at this point, but not precisely worrisome. More like on an edge I hadn’t expected. “You ever notice how the demand isn’t tapering off? We’re not expanding our customer base.”

“Our customers include buyers in bulk for resale,” I said, squashing resolutely a twinge of alarm (I had noticed how the demand remained high). “They’re the ones finding new customers, not us, and they’re welcome to. I wouldn’t care to sell directly to some of those people.”

An understatement, that. This entire part of New England seemed to attract some extremely odd individuals, and I had recently made the acquaintance of far too many of them. The alarming thing was, many of them seemed to like me on sight. Not in any particularly tawdry way, although there was offers for that, too, sometimes with a remarkable directness. But they would welcome my presence, under circumstances where I would have expected toleration at best. This would have been more refreshing, if only most of my new acquaintances were not so subtly repellant in their forms and manner.

Microsoft Buys Bethesda.

Welp.

Microsoft’s Xbox team significantly expanded its list of game development studios on Monday, announcing the purchase of ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion in cash. The entertainment company owns several industry-leading game developers, including Bethesda Softworks, the maker of the post-apocalyptic Fallout games and the fantasy series The Elder Scrolls. It also owns Id Software, known for its Doom, Rage and Wolfenstein shooting game franchises.

…Well. At least it wasn’t EA. God knows what happens to the next Fallout and/or Elder Scrolls, though. No, wait, we were wondering that now. So: never mind, I guess?