Moe Lane

Unspeakable Hard Drive

Description: currently, a 500 gig hard drive (Windows compatible) encased in an external hard drive shell.  The hard drive itself is defective, thanks to a burnt-out motor, but can still be restored by a competent technician with the right tools.  The outer shell has been painstakingly engraved with a variety of unknown symbols; staring too long at the inscriptions seems to neutralize the viewer’s current emotional state, in a manner that does not seem either entirely safe, or even ultimately desirable.

The Unspeakable Hard Drive (UHD) reputedly first belonged to a famous and beloved author; the various legends associated with the UHD attribute ownership to a variety of writers, both living and dead (obviously, the UHD has only been around for a decade or so).  The drive reputedly holds unique ‘forbidden knowledge.’ Again, legends vary as to what’s in the damned thing*:

http://moelane.com/tag/the-house/

It is difficult to ask a neighborhood if something is out there, and eating their pets. Although I was mildly surprised to find myself on remarkably good terms with my neighbors: I am not at my best when it comes to purely social occasions, but word had apparently gone out that I was wealthy. I was also living in the house, which automatically made me some sort of eccentric recluse in everyone else’s eyes.  I might have been annoyed at that, but at least it meant that any attempts at social interaction on my part would be viewed in the most favorable light. And this is, admittedly, a refreshing change.

So there I was, then, sitting in someone’s actual kitchen, and drinking a cup of mildly inoffensive coffee while I ‘chatted’ with Betty. That is not her real name, either.  One must be polite.

Betty was old enough to be divorced, and her kitchen suggested the presence of teenagers, rather than children.  She was also a happy gossip, up until the moment that I mentioned that I was considering getting a bird of some sort.  Then Betty shook her head, in a way that I found a touch intriguing. “Animals don’t stick around here,” she said.

Background: Elon Musk’s building a spaceport out there in Texas for his Mars rocket — and God DAMN but that’s just an observation that’s chock-full of crystallized awesome — and the retirement community next door is possibly not entirely enthralled with having regular bouts of Rocket Summer. So Musk’s offering three times the appraised value of their houses to buy them out. No fuss, no muss, he’ll even throw in VIP passes to see the rockets go up.

They’ll never understand this weekend, a hundred years from now. The politics of the day will have been long since dissected and analyzed, with the merciless precision of hindsight and later revelation; the great disputes of our generation will have been shrunk down to their proper size and context. But they’ll look at this guy, and be just as confused as I am.

I got nothing, my descendants. I got nothing.

Via @JoePCunningham. Nah, my descendants: the other one. I know, I know, it’s gonna be difficult to sort this all out, a century from now.

Paddy West, Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith

I know a different version, but this is pretty good.

There’s no time for questions! No time! Just sign up today! Get that fiction and that gaming stuff and those exclamation points!

Scuttle

This martial art is most suitable for those game worlds where every group has their own fighting style.  Pirates in particular would be almost forced to develop something that could counter the inscrutable ways of the ninja; after all, the alternative would be to die in a hail of throwing stars.  That’s hardly profitable!

The primary weapons of Scuttle are a cutlass in the dominant hand, and a knife in the other.  Nets are also used, typically against ninja: the style encourages both dodges and trickery. Also note that a pirate with a hook hand who had been trained in Scuttle can and will use both Aggressive Parry and Hook fairly safely.  These particular techniques are even taught to pirates who still have two hands, on the principle that it saves time later.

http://moelane.com/tag/the-house/

It took me a few days to realize the absence of one particular type of noise from outside: birdsong.  I have no objection to birdsong, understand. Obviously, it is merely the monotonous repetition of certain sounds, with no beauty or relevance to humanity save what we impose on it.  But I am not offended that such a thing might exist, and the noises are rarely annoying enough to hinder me from sleeping, or enjoying actual art, or doing anything else, really.  So I felt neither apprehension nor relief in the realization that no birds sang anywhere near the house.

But I did find it interesting.  And, once I paid more attention, I noticed that there were no squirrels near my house, either. No birds, no ‘woodland creatures,’ not even small lizards or frogs.  Which meant that the area should have been literally crawling with bugs, of course; but there was nary a spiderweb or a wasps’ nest to be seen. Even my neighbors did not have ‘bug zappers’ or other grisly amusements on their own properties.

And there was not a single family with a pet who lived within two blocks of the house.  Well, as far as I could tell. I was not about to start looking through windows.

This news is not too surprising: the way that CD Projekt Red handled updates and DLC for Witcher: Wild Hunt was very popular. If you missed it, what CDPR did was release for free a variety of little extras on a regular basis, including some quests, and then put out two large multi-hour adventure DLC for cash. It worked very well; I for one didn’t feel like the company was holding back necessary content for more money, and the regular additions generally reassured me that CDPR was actively supporting the game. If they do the same thing with Cyberpunk 2077, that will be righteously cool.

Little do they know that I have nothing else scheduled for this morning and have just queued up Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol on my computer. This involves me skipping ahead past the second and third films, but I keep getting told that’s the smart play, here. The point is that I can keep this up for quite a while.

I mean, I got a whole slew of movies that I want to watch, fellows.