Moe Lane's Blog, page 891
August 2, 2020
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.
Patreon!08/02/2020 Snippet, MORGAN BAROD AND THE ELDRITCH TOME.
Moving along!
Patreon!At least the library wasn’t downtown. New Brunswick itself had been fairly savaged by the Demon Cow incident, to the point where entire blocks had been vaporized. Morgan was headed to one of the satellite campuses; supposedly, the damage hadn’t been too bad, out there. Then again, thought Morgan, that kind of statement begs the question: says who? He had never realized just how ubiquitous orienteering micro-drones had been until the first time he tried navigating cross-country without them. The results had been distressingly embarrassing, although Morgan did know enough to recognize just what a compass did.
Getting across the Raritan was fun. The Causeway avoided the university, or possibly the other way around, and the Route 18 bridge had been blown up back when people still thought cars would be a viable military resource. In the end, Morgan took the Route 18 route anyway, going from chunk of tumbled roadway bridge to chunk to ford the river.
He found it surprisingly easy going; the path looked a lot more formidable from up high than it did on the ground. There were even spots where somebody had come in with a crowbar to make a path through the wreckage. Smuggler’s path? thought Morgan. But what’s there to smuggle? He dismissed the thought and kept going.
Scrambling up on the other side, the highway didn’t look too bad, aside from the usual overgrown woods to the side and abandoned cars. Half-burnt, in this case, it looked like a small fire had swept through here a few years back. Or perhaps even longer; there was what appeared to be some kind of military checkpoint. Judging from the various scorches and craters in the ground, the soldiers were watching out for troublemakers — and found some. No scattered bones, though, thought Morgan. Guess the soldiers won that one.
August 1, 2020
(RPG) Book of the Week: Absinthe in Carcosa.
A slight stretch of the category, but Absinthe in Carcosa did just win an ENnie. It’s for The Yellow King RPG, and it’s gorgeous. I have it in PDF already, and I should have picked it up in print a while back.
Chapter 6, Part 2 of the Bold Marauder up on Patreon for free!
New sign-up, so new entry of the Bold Marauder for everybody to enjoy. As usual, free for everybody until we get to $200/month in Patreon. Sign up today!
Patreon!08/01/2020 Snippet, MORGAN BAROD AND THE ELDRITCH TOME.
Multitasking! This is a short story that can also be put into the new book. Huzzah!
Patreon!Morgan Barod ghosted through the ruins of the university. At least, he hoped he was ghosting, but he’d settle for just being pretty quiet. ‘Pretty quiet’ would, hopefully, be enough for the mission at hand.
He hadn’t been in the business long, but Morgan thought that Rutgers was pretty firmly in the ‘dangerously lovely’ abandoned ruin category. There were plenty of half-destroyed buildings that looked promisingly unlooted, and the overgrown clumps of trees were coming along nicely into becoming actual forests. There were birds chirping, various woodland critters doing their thing, and it really was a lovely morning to break into a shuttered library and retrieve an arcane tome. He didn’t trust any of it for a second.
At least he wasn’t stealing anything. When Morgan had shown up again, back from the salt-towns and carrying an official writ from the University, the officials behind the Line had been happy to countersign his salvage orders. They even gave him what intel they had on the site, which unfortunately wasn’t much. There were no really big monsters, probably.
And there weren’t any bandits operating out of the ruins of New Brunswick, either. “It’s too close to the Line,” Major West herself had told him. “We patrol that far out, pretty regular. Anybody or anything that messes with the patrol learns real fast how bad an idea it is.”
Tweet of the Day, Time For SCIENCE! edition.
(Via @EsotericCD) Basically: start the video below, CLOSE YOUR EYES IMMEDIATELY, and listen a few times. Then tell us what you hear. I tried it myself, but my brain’s been contaminated by expectations at this point. You’ll understand after you watch the video. But CLOSE YOUR EYES the first few times! SCIENCE! demands it.
This just broke my concept of reality pic.twitter.com/hUPBvpBKX6
— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) July 31, 2020
July 31, 2020
ENnie Awards tonight!
Didn’t know many of the games, but Absinthe in Carcosa (The Yellow King RPG) and The Labyrinth (Delta Green) both definitely deserved their awards. Good times on the Gen Con panels generally, although I forgot to point out to Ken Hite that Emperor Norton would make for a particularly pathos-horrific Tattered King*. Maybe if it comes up again organically in tomorrow’s panel…
*He’s doing a San Francisco supplement for TYKRPG! This made me simultaneously cheer, and groan. Cheer because it’s gonna be cool, and groan because there goes my Hastur Mythos steampunk concept right down the tubes… ach, well. His is gonna be awesome.
