Michael Hopcroft

Re: WuXia Heaven Thanks! The DVD is on its way. It's a deadly projectile! (Well, actually, it's a shoe, but the effect is the same.)

Re: High Noon Showdown Pardner

Re: WuXia Heaven Speaking of Wuxia (although the film genre rather than the literary one), I am looking for a replacement copy of one of my favorite films, a spoof called Eagle Shooting Heroes. It has the storyline of a great epic -- and the attitude of a Monty Python sketch. No realtionship goes untwisted, no genre convention unsatirized. From the use of ingested invertebrates as torture devices to a young man whose quest for divinity takes an unexpected turn and a devious master villain who has the worst fortune this side of the Coyote, I get a huge kick just thinking about this film.

Re: High Noon Showdown Pardner I always thought it would be cool for fantasy-world duellists of certain orders to have a code where the drawing of one's sword was a highly ritualized game of brinkmanship. Once your sword was completely out of its scabbard, you were committed to fight, but anytime before that you could back down with no loss of face. How much of your blade is visible could be seen as an intimidation tool. Of course, part of that would interact with the duellist's reputation -- if a guy is especially well-known he can make people flee just be reaching for his hilt. It would be hard to come up with that kind of effect for guns, but it would be cool.

Re: Kamen no ninja Akakage Legendary sieyuu Megumi Hayashibara wes a hug4e Goranger fan growing up. In megumi-Toons, the manga she wrote (but did not draw) about her life, she cited an incident in which she threw one of her mother's earrings in emulation of the Pink Ranger's earring m=bombs, lost it, and got chewed out by her mom. I don't recall if she ever played a ncharacter like the Pink Ranger, but she did get to play such heroic females as Lina Inverse, Faye Valentine and the female form of Ranma Saotome. And Lina Inverse did actually use a variation on the expldoing earring trick in an epsidoe of Slayers NEXT.

Re: An Intelligence Agency Cat Burglar It would be interesting, although probably not relevant to this campaign, if agency bruglars who were antsy for a challenge did the occasional side job. She might, for example, steal from a crime lord that the agency has been ordered not to touch for politicial reasons. This could lead to a lot of problems for everyone.

Re: Kamen no ninja Akakage There are all sorts of weird, wacky and wonderful things on that site. Like the Japanese version of Spider-Man from 1978 (I'm not kidding!).

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat 1) Cats. 2) Being there when the other two sexes really get on each other's nerves. 3) Their fur. I'm not convinced this is a hypothetcial question. NT: Signs your Nintendog has been reprogrammed by a supervillain and is out to get you.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "There are some patients for whom, I've had to use the special probe."

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "Because penguins are in right now. Could you get that for me? it's hard to pick up a phone with these fl;ippers on."

Re: DnD's Spiked Chain You should try figthing a half-Ogre with a spiked chain and a package of Feats designed to take full advantage of it. I wonder how -- and if you would want to -- you would simulate this effect ion HERO.

Re: Filthy Rich Burghers Can you have an agrarian civilization without cities and gtowns at all? In other words, one in which there is no level of social organization higher than the village, and nobody but "adventurers" ever goes anywhere for any reason? Maybe there is a social taboo against going places. You are born, you work the farm until you can't anymore, then you die. Some writers seem to consider this the ideal way of life.

Re: How to Ka-Girl your friends (and foes)

Re: Anime Champions?

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat You find correction marks on your term paper and there are ink stains on the paws of your dog. NT: Signs that your teacher wants to have "impro9proper relations" with you.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat

Re: Captain Jack

Re: Captain Jack Typical Time Lords are only mildly telepathic. the Matser is a speical caser becasue he has deliberately developed his hypnotic powers to the level he has. However, they do have distinctive limitations 9won't work on the same person twice) and the Master himself has miscalculated what he would do with them ("I am the Matser, and you will obey me." "Yeah? Well, I'm Perpugilliam brown, and I can shout as loud as you can!") There are rumors of some Master stories in Season 28 (the new one with David Tennant), and it has not been annoucned for sure that he will come back and who will play him (persistent rumors like Anthiony Michael head of Buffy fame to the role).

I've recently been reading up on the webcomic The Wotch, which is a bit odd but fun. Anyone, there is one particular trick pulled by Anne that I wanted to clairfy. Anne, who has magical powers of near-infinitie variety, also has a couple of male friends, one of whom can get very annoying. Under numerous circunmstances, some too silly to describe, she switches their gender while making other changes (like hair color and style). This is known as being Ka-Girled. She can reverse the process at will. Anne has some other neat transofrm-others tricks. One of her favorites is turning her older brother Ed into her little sister Lilly (he actually enjoys relaxing as a four-yhear-old and spends a lot of his time that way). She can also turn herself into a catgirl, split herself into a lot of duplicates 9each with a part of her personality) and has permanently transformed one of her teachers into a Chinese exchange student and doesn't even know it.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "MegaBurger! Home of the one-pound cheeseburger for when you've burned all your END in battle and could eat the whole cow." (I'm, just thinking that supers would burn a lot of energy, even in the course of normal life, and thuse would ahve enormous appetites and the digestive fortitude to cope with enormous meals.)

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat The Stone God. NT: Signs your city has the wrong superhero for the job.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "No, your insurance doesn't cover gill imp;antation. I suggest you move to higher ground." NT: Signs your hobbies have finally pushed your mother too far.

Re: Essence of Desriability Tenchi does have similar problems to Akane in that regard, in that the most powerful women in his life tend to underestimate his abilities. And in Tenchi's case, that rubs off on him -- he cannot use his most powerful abilities at will, and is so used to being smothered that only extremely powerful stimuli will enable him to use his powers at full force. In Americomics, didn't Spider-Man have Chick Magnet-style issues related to his dual identity (everyone thought Peter Parker was a dork, but wasn't that Spider-Man dude cool?)

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "If you stick your finger in a gun, it won't fire! I've seen it all the time! Here, my finger is stuck in the barrel of the gun. Now, watch me pull the trigger with the nother hand. See? Piece of --" NT: Signs that your online romance is really an AI.