assault's random ideas

My current obsession is "what should be done about Cubbie Station"?

Basically, it needs to be brought under government control, and its water allocations redirected to rehabilitating the Murray-Darling river system. The Murray-Darling is roughly equivalent to the Mississippi system. And it's horribly close to running dry, with the environmental and social effects that you would expect.

The question, of course, is how much is it reasonable to pay to achieve ...

A few months ago I got hold of a copy of Superhero 2044, the first published superhero rpg. I'd been looking for it for a while. (I'm not really set up to use eBay etc, so it was a bit harder than it had to be.)

I'd looked through it way back in the 80s, but hadn't seen a copy for over a quarter of a century.

Anyway, I finally got to really sit down and study it. I'd been tantalised by what I'd seen of it in my earlier glances at it, but I hadn't done a proper detailed ...

I was recently reading Volume 7 in DC Comics' Superman Chronicles series, which is reprinting all the early Superman stories. This volume is up to late 1941.

One of the stories struck me as particularly interesting. This was The Case of the Crime Crusade. (A lot of the early story titles were added later. This one isn't marked as such, though.)

Anyway, the blurb in the first panel goes:
"Confronted by an obsolete and dangerous street railway situation, the ...

Today I encountered an interesting device at work: a "Dora the Explorer" clock/radio for children.

This was all fine, if tacky, except...

It spoke without batteries or power! The things it said were weird and creepy!

It was clearly possessed by a demon, and was intended to steal children's souls.

At least that's what I think.

(The clock and radio bits themselves were quite normal - it just had this weird voice thing.) ...

One of the problems I have designing characters is that I'm not a very "visual" person. I have a hard time imagining what they look like.

This is most obvious with superheroes/supervillains, where it is very easy to "design" a costume that looks really ugly. You need to see it on paper in order to see if it works.

Unsurprisingly, I can't draw to save my life either. Computerised tools help, but aren't portable enough.

At the moment, ...