Moe Lane's Blog, page 890
August 3, 2020
08/03/2020 Snippet, OMBUDSMAN.
I’ve had this story in my head for a while, and today was the day I decided to start writing it. I have some hope that it will be, ah, controversial.
Patreon!People had to call Bad Jack ‘John Steelman’ now. That was because he was respectable now, too: he wore socks with his shoes and changed his clothes every day (with clean ones!) and had a dentist brought in to deal with his teeth. Bad Jack didn’t even fuss when the dentist had to go in with the drill and the numbing goop. Or at least, John Steelman didn’t fuss, either in public and in private. In the back of his head, Bad Jack was pissed and thinking about how a dentist didn’t need good knees to keep working, right?
But that was a loser thought, Bad Jack told himself. The kind of thoughts bandits had, and Bad Jack wasn’t no bandit no longer. He wasn’t even a bandit chief. No, he was a manufacturer now in the Hershey Consortium, and for that you need polish and restraint. At least where people could see.
And, hell, the teeth did feel a lot better. Better enough that he was gonna keep this dentist around for the next time he needed one. Bad Jack didn’t know how to make the dentist stay under the new rules, but he was sure there was a way. That was what rules were always for; making sure that the people on top got what they wanted, and now he was one of the ones on top.
Not at the very top, though. But close enough. Besides; maybe there was a way to get even higher than Bad Jack was now. You just had to wait and see it.
Isaias now a hurricane.
Hurricane Isaias will just miss us here – probably – but a tropical storm at least looks ready to smack through New Jersey and maybe NYC. Assuming that the track is accurate, which is always a crap shoot. If I’m not on tomorrow, assume that the power’s out where I am.
Also: get the hell out of the path of the hurricane, if you live in the Carolinas.
In the Mail: SS-GB.
I picked SS-GB up because – well, this is actually kind of entertaining. A couple of people on Twitter got exceptionally pissy just because I made the perfectly reasonable observation that Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America was such a godawful book and crappy alternate history that I couldn’t finish it, which gets funnier and funnier the more I think of it. I mean, why the hell do they care if somebody thinks a book is awful*? Anyway, I forget how I found out that the BBC actually made a miniseries based off of Len Deighton’s SS-GB (which was an infinitely better alternate history novel**); but I did find out, and I purchased it accordingly. And here it is! Hope it doesn’t suck.
…Well, it was entertaining to me.
Moe Lane
*Unless, of course, they share the same opinion, and kind of resent that somebody’s coming out and saying something that they’d like to. But that would be ascribing motives, and we mustn’t have that.
**I don’t actually know if Deighton is a better writer than Roth generally. I do know that even the suggestion that he is would probably be enough to make certain people gnash their teeth; which is, again, pretty damn funny when you think about it.
SHANG-LI AND THE LEGEND OF THE TEN RINGS resumes production.
In Sydney, Australia. Better late than never, hey? Supposedly this one is going to have the actual Mandarin, instead of the Mandarin from Iron Man 3 (I’m just going to flat-out admit that I liked Iron Man 3, okay*?).
It's not Asia and it's not Hollywood; it is Western Sydney, home to the newest addition of the @Marvel movie franchise. The 7NEWS chopper captured these scenes today as work resumed building the set for the upcoming production, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/pvDbMyRHlb
— 7NEWS Sydney (@7NewsSydney) August 2, 2020
Moe Lane
*Look, I’m not saying it was Arrival. But I wanted what it gave me, and I particularly enjoyed the decade-long pander that was the MCU. I’m not gonna get mad that a popcorn movie came in and did the job it was contracted to do.
08/03/2020 Snippet, MORGAN BAROD AND THE ELDRITCH TOME.
I kind of feel sorry for Morgan Barod, at this moment.
Patreon!The mage didn’t seem to be in too much trouble, yet, but he wasn’t exactly brushing off the critters, either. These particular critters looked like mutated squirrels, puffed up to the size of beagles and tricked out with claws and fangs. Pack hunters, too, thought Morgan. Wonder if they have an alpha? And indeed, they did; there was one that seemed to be directing the attack. It looked like it was about halfway through the process of becoming a grizzled, wily old nemesis of the forest, the kind that would unerringly prey on the weak and unprepared, its scars bearing mute witness to a lifetime of cunning and savagery.
So Morgan attacked it first. He figured that somebody ten years down the line would thank him for that — no, wait, they’ll never know I did ‘em the favor, he thought. Oh, well. It was still a good idea to kill the really nasty buggers before they completely grew up.
Half-grown or not, the pack-squirrel alpha was viciously fast, and Morgan was very quickly happy that he was wearing good boots. And a cup, because the little bastard also could leap. For one horrified moment Morgan was worried that the fangs could actually manage to rip through the chain mail, leather, and stainless steel covering his important bits: but it couldn’t, quite.
And it wouldn’t let go, either. Morgan tried to spin it off, and maybe smack it against the barrier in the middle of the highway, but the pack-squirrel was having nothing of that. And he couldn’t quite get a good stab in. Well, Morgan could get a good stab in, but what if he missed? Eventually he settled for trying to use the edge of his shield to pop the damned thing off, or at least smash it in the head enough times.
August 2, 2020
So, virtual Gen Con was interesting.
Tried it a bunch of different ways and formats. I gotta say, Zoom was better than Twitch which was way better than Discord; if we’re going to be doing conventions virtually for the time being, Zoom seems to handle it best. I also had the most fun at the Pelgrane Press panels. Heck, I even ran into an old online friend at one, which was pretty cool. I wonder how they’re going to do it for Dragon Con.
No, really. I’d like to know, because it’s gonna be in a month and there hasn’t been much in the way of info about their virtual program. It’d be ironic if this is the one that I can’t go to, because Dragon Con was absolutely the one con I was definitely going to go to this year…
Tweet of the Day, The Dragon Has Landed edition.
Sometimes, the 21st Century has its moments.
"To anybody who has touched Endeavour, you should take a moment to just cherish this day."
— NASA (@NASA) August 2, 2020
Touching words from @Astro_Doug as @AstroBehnken is safely brought out of the spacecraft. #LaunchAmerica pic.twitter.com/0yKUWbD9Ed
Patreon microfiction: ‘Just a Thing.’
I’m fond of cosmic horror. The Cthulhu Mythos is a great favorite of mine. But ‘Just a Thing’ represents my sneaking suspicion that horror writers just might have a tendency to overestimate just how long a sanity-destroying anagnorisis can go on before the person experiencing it starts to get… maybe a little bored, sorry? Our brains are really, really good at throwing filters up, is all I’m saying.
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