Moe Lane

SM Stirling once noted that it’s something completely different than insanity when the voices in your head are telling you things that are true. Or at least useful. ‘To-Do List’ lives in that headspace.

I may start putting more stuff up here, too. Anyhoo, here’s the second part of the stuff on the Universal Dominion. Kind of weird to be finally getting back into all of this, really.

Some months are harder to get the work done than others. This was one of those months.

• Short story: Holdouts. Vampires! Obscure movie jokes! A story that resented being written! It has it all.
• RPG: Notes from the GUMSHOE Conversion: General Abilities. For the Fermi Resolution RPG worldbook. Feel free to kick the tires on this one.

There is a lot of rough language in “Terry.” But in the protagonist’s defense: you’d be swearing, too. Don’t read this around kids, and bear in mind that it’s considerably longer than 100 words. It’s also one of the best things I’ve written this year, so there you go.

I dunno, man. Sometimes you just need a change, you dig? Something to shake you up, get you out of your rut. Then you can look around, assess your life choices, decide what’s best for you, savvy?

Neither was what you’d call too cheerful. Or, perhaps, cheerful at all.

• As the Golden Emperor Lies Dying 5: RPG!
• Old Lou: Short story!

The full title is “Tales From The Columbian Alliance: Savage Flight From Sonora!” There are books in that setting. And I look forward for a chance to write some. At some point.

If you take nothing else from this website, take this: do not mess around with angels. You know Why every encounter of them starts with them saying “Fear not?” It’s because nobody survives the encounters where they don’t start off that way.

The good-ish news? My decision to have a single tier is going to save my readers quite a bit:

If the patron is not receiving any benefits, the pledge is not taxable in most places. For example, any pledge where the patron didn’t select one of your tiers, and any amount of money added on top of the tier cost is not in most places taxable. One notable exception is the EU, where we are currently required to apply tax (VAT) to all pledges regardless of whether the patron is receiving any benefits. We are working with EU tax authorities to secure reductions and exemptions for support-based pledges in the future. 

I have a single tier for $1, and it’s pretty explicitly a ‘first-look’ tier. I have a history of eventually giving this stuff away, so even if Patreon decides that my PDFs are taxable income they still can only ding my readers to the tune of the individual US state sales tax, which works out to three to seven cents a month. And if they try otherwise, I can contest that with an absolutely clear conscience, because I’ve had only the one tier since the day I signed up. This isn’t a situation that I’m now trying to evade, in other words; it’s merely one that legitimately doesn’t fully apply to me.

But I’ll keep an eye on it nonetheless.

What happens if the weakly godlike AIs decide to just simply work around us, instead of going down the genocide/involuntary uplift paths? You don’t see many post-Singularity stories along those lines, I think. I believe that’s a bit odd, really.