Michael Hopcroft

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "And the nominees for Best Performance as Subject of a Public Execution are....."

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Once you pull the styrofoam pin, Mr. NerfGrenade is not your friend." NT: Signs the newest appointee to the Supreme Court has lost her mind.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "No, Timmy! I don't care How cool it is, you can't have a NerfThermoNuclearDevice! Do you know how hard those are to clean up after?"

Re: Captain Jack One of the best of these "action man" companions may have been one of the very frist set of companions -- Ian Chesterton, the history teacher at Coal Hill School who, in 1963, followed one of his students "home" and discovered the TARDIS in Foreman's junkyard. His relationship with the Doctor was testy to say the least, not least because the Doctor himself was arrogant, abrasive, patronizing and had an alarming tendency to withold vital infromation if that was what it took to get his way. I remember a lot time ago there was an article in my local club's newsletter that was about the third serial, "Edge of Destruction", which took place entirely within the confines of the TARDIS with only the regular cast. The writer thought it was an exceptionally cheesy story, but when i watched it I was enthralled, mainly because it was a superb example of mutual suspcion and paranoia at work. The Doctor was convinced that Ian was trying to kill him, Ian was convinced the Doctor was trying to do the same to him, and all sorts of recriminations ensued.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Hey, who put Captain Salmonella in charge of the potato salad anyway?"

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Rig up the seats in every cinema on Earth so that the ringing of a cellphone will trigger a 75,000-volt electric shock, followed on the second ring by the detonation of a shaped explosive charge.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Have a McPoisonBlowfish! Most of the people who try it survive!" NT: Signs that the superhero assigned to protect your home town is out of his or her mind.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The Cardinals and the Padres on MLB Gameday Audio. St. Louis leads 1-0 right now, it's early in the game but nobody expects the Padres to have a prayer.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? "Seven Seas of Rhye" -- Queen, which is veyr disturbing because this is exactly the sort of song a supervillain would sing.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Check his bank balance, be thankful he can hire people to draw his strip for him so all he has to do is spend his money, and pray to God that everyone forgets about the movie. (I don't know if this is the right Jim Davis. I'm referring to the man who is in charge of Garfield.)

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Falls down, rubs his head, and says "Hey! That thing's too low to the ground! Move it!" NT: Signs you bought the wrong computer.

One thing anyone who watches a lot of anime gains is an apprecition for the infoluence of Shinto, the former Japanese state religion and one of the two main relgiions practiced in that country, on the stories that come over. The heroic demon-hunting miko has become a very popular character in games and videos alike, shrines are popular places to have things happen in, etc. The beliefs of Shinto are a powerful infleunce on people like Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away is a very Shinto film) and other manga artists and animation writers. What i am wondering is whether there are concepts from this very Japanese view of the world that translate well into other genres. Such as a fantasy setting where magical power comes from communicating with and appeasing the capricious spirits that inhabit everything alive and otherwise, sceince fiction settings where planets and comets and just about eevrything you could encounter have their own kami, and modern-day settings in which the Western view of how the world and the cosmos work is completely wrong, there are spirits everywhere, and they are unhappy about being leglected by the monothesists all these centuries.

Re: Okay, my friends. Give me your Ch'i Attacks of unusual nature. "Rodents of Unusual Size? I don't believe they exist." WHAM!

Re: Captain Jack I don't think I could tell you precisely how I've seen the new series without getting some of my friends into a lot of potential trouble. But apparently people have been recording the peisodes and related items (such as the concurrent "behiond-the-scenes" series Doctor Who Confidential), transferring them into video files, and putting them on the Internet usign BitTorrent and similar applications. Sometimes the files are distributed as read-to-burn DVD filesets, making them playable on DVD players once transferred to a disk the player can read. The BBS is not at all happy about this particular development, for the same reasons Japanese animation proiucers are upset at the fansubbers on the Internet. For the record, the CBC did show the new series (I don't know if they edited it for Canadian sensibilities), but South Dakota is probabl;y not close enough to the border to catch a Canadian station or have it carried by a cable outlet. The BBS has had an amazing lack of success at finding an American cable channel willing to carry the series at an acceptable price -- the Sci-Fi Channel and BBC America (which is NOT a subsidary of the BBC) both refused it outright. And the BBC is refusing to go direct-to-DVD in the US, and will not release the new series to the DVD market here until it is broadcast in the United States. Which means that American Doctor Who fans are back to doing what they did twenty years ago -- breaking the law to get their episodes.

Re: Okay, my friends. Give me your Ch'i Attacks of unusual nature. Nadia's ethnicity was never specified IIRC, but I suspect she was South Asian (inda/Sri lanka) or Pacific Islander (Guam/New Zealand/New Guniea) rather than African. She met her lion companion in the circus, not the wild. Claudia was an African-American. Bob, the guy from Tenjou Tenge, is probably of mixed descent given him name, with a Japanese father and an African-American mother. Socially, Japan is much more ethnocentric than America is (and that's saying a lot). Many there consider you a second-class citizen if your family came from Korea or China, even if you were born in Japan and lived there your entire life. And most Japanese can tell the difference by appearance. A person like Bob stands out in Japan, regardless of what he does.

Re: The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés It seems to me that there is no concievable science-fiction or fantasy device that has not been overused to the point of irrelevance. Maybe it is time to simply abandon fiction altogether and stop teaching creative writing at all, because all the concievable books worth reading have already been written. And then shut down Hollywood because all concievable movies and TV shows worth watching have already been made. Sounds absurd, but it does have a ring of truth to it. I mean, we're talking about this on an RPG board, and anything that appears in an RPG is by definition an overworked cliche.

Re: Mars Colony by 2025? Technolocical civilization won't last long enough for that to happen. By 2100, I am convinced that what we think of as civilization will have utterly destrtoyed itself and that what is left of mankind will be subsistence farmers eking out barely enough to survive with no level of social organization higher than the village. The pricnple problem with sending men to Mars, or the Moon for that matter, is that for most practical purposes there's nothing there. The Moon is simply a rock -- a rock that could offer some tantalizing clues about the oprgiins of this planet, but essentially just a rock. There's nothing there that can be put to practical use by humans at an expense that can be reasonably justified. The only reason we went to the Moon in 1969 was so that we could definitely prove to the Soviets that we had the capacity to rain nuclear death on them and there was nothing they could do about it. Once we achieved that aim and realized what was actually up there, our government rapidly lost interest. I think the only reason Bush cares about the Moon and Mars at all is to try and forestall the Chinese space program -- which is ltself largely a collosal bluff intended for domestic polcitical consumption. We could go to the Moon again if we really wanted to, but we don't. There's no compelling reason to go there again, juist as there was no true compelling reason to go there in the first place.

Re: High Noon Showdown Pardner One Western trope that I forgot to mention in this thread is that reputation is a two-edged sword. It can be your best friend, wshere just the mention of your name can intimidate your foes and get you out of trouble. The downside of reputation is the campaign will be full of two-bit punks and up-and-coming fighters who think things like "Hey, that's Wild Bill Hickock! If I can kill him, I'll be known for all time as 'The Man Who Killed Wild Bill Hickock!' I'll be a legend!" Thus the PC with that kind of reputation will frequently forced to fight against and kill foolish people with whom he has no particular quarrel, people who could potentially have been friends or allies otherwise.

Re: Okay, my friends. Give me your Ch'i Attacks of unusual nature. A series that might be an alternate source of ideas for the uber-martial-artists campaign in Tenjou Tenge, in which an entire school is devoted to the development of various martial arts disciplines, the school is a whilwind of rivalry and conflict, and the only force more powerful than the abilities of the characters is the effects of their hormones and the uncertainty in their hearts. You may have to count on a particular girl to save your life even though she has a huge crush on you that is driving you insane. (The series also features one of the best and most reasonable anime characters of African descent since Claudia in Macross.)

Re: Okay, my friends. Give me your Ch'i Attacks of unusual nature. Detaching your body parts and using them to attack your foe at range. Detaching your foe's body parts and attacking him with them. Instlilling your chi into an innocuous item such as a paper fan, so that in your hands it becomes stronger than steel and just as deadly.

I am told that my copy of Paul Dini's graphic novel Mutant, Texas has shipped. If i can ever get it in a post-worthy form 9darn Hero Designer!) i was thinking it would be nice to put up stats for Ida Red and some of the other important characters in this exciting "tall tale" from the man behind Batman: the Animated Series. The basic premise is thaqt a nuclear accident years ago has fundamentally altered just about everyone in a Texas community who stayed behind, uplifting much of the animal and plant population in the process. A orphaned baby named Ida Red is found and raised by an ursine wisewomanj, and grows up to be be a tall, pretty and lively cowgirl. Then she discoevers that she has superpowers -0- at about the time that someone is kidnapping mutantsa from town and selling them to the circus. It's up to Ida to save the town, and her deadliest foe may be the man sworn to protect it.... The first time I read it I realized I had to own a copy. And now I'm convinced that it would make a fabulously fun animated film as well.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "One weekend in Hell with Dad, the next in heaven with Mom. Gee, I have a confusing life, keen powers or no." NT: The one person in the world who would benefit most from being Ka-Girled (or Ka-Boyed) by Anne Onymous the Wotch.

And now for something rather strange. I've recently been watching some episodes of the anime series Galaxy Angel and i was wondering what sort of Star HERO fodder could be found there. Of course, I was thinking more in terms of character design problems than campaign fodder, because Galacy Angel doesn't really have a coherent setting. The basic premise is that the five-member all-girl Angel Brigade is seeking the Lost Technology -- and taking all kinds of odd jobs in the meantime. The central characters are: Milfuielle: A late-teenage girl and the newest recruit. She has no particular combat or science skills, but she has inconcievable luck. She is also incurably innocent, thinks the best of everyone despite all evidence to the contrary, and loves to cook and eat. Ranpha: A buxom blonde close-comabt specialist, Ranpha is incruably boy-crazy but once she latches onto a man has no idea what to do him. She is amazingly selfish and tends to tell outragoous lies that get everyone else in trouble. Forte: Ranpha's best friend who dresses like a cross between a stormtrooper and an SM queen, Forte's thing is guns. She loves guns. If you want Fotte to do something for you, just offer her a gun! She is a great shot and conceals a vulnerable personailty behind a brash exterior. Vanilla: Cool, calm and collected, Vanilla is fanatically devoted to her religion and treats every new setback 9and she endures many setabcks with this crew) as an extension of God's Will. She has some trouble dealing with people on an emotional level and socializes as little as possible. Mint: The daughter and heiress of the Blamanche Foundation, Mint is a cute but cunning girl who relies on her wits and charm (both of which are considerable) to achieve her aims. She adores costumes of all sorts, the more concealing the better, and will go to any lengths for the oppotunity to dress up as poultry, fresh fruit, or anything else that comes to mind. The team is assisted, sort of, by Modron, who was formely the self-aware guidance system of a ship-to-ship missile. Now he inhabits the body of a rather ugly plushie and, despite having an intellect the size of a planetoid, is perpetually (and some would say deservedly) abused by the girls. He is completely enchanted with Vanilla in particular, and she treats him worse than any of the others do in conseuqence.

Re: Captain Jack They've retconned out of spots like that before. There were at least three different occasions over the course of the run in which the Daleks have been completely expunged from time and space, for example. I doubt that series has ever appeared in North America. Anthony Stewart Head (thanks for the correction) made an inedlible impression here as Giles, reluctant mentor to Buffy Summers. (He also got one of the best songs in the notorious musical episode, "Standing"). I don't think so -- at least, I didn't see it on the actor's IMDB entry.