Moe Lane

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.

With or Without You, U2

I mean, if you don’t understand by now that you’re not supposed to touch with your bare hands the creature hitherto unknown to science that you just pulled up from below the ice, then maybe you deserve to have your entire research facility turned into a nightmarish landscape of jellies and death. There is no excuse! You’ve been warned for decades that Antarctica is impatiently waiting to eat you!

I’m sorry to be the killjoy here, but somebody’s gotta be.

Via @kennethhite.