Michael Hopcroft

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat You accidentally log onto her Paypal account and find it is larger than the Gross Domestic Product of Venezuela. A check of the transactions shows that the balance includes the Gross Domestic Product of Venezuela.

Re: Anime Champions? Nio pussyfooting around for this guy, clawing his way to the top. Since I am already under sentence of death, I can get away with that. That and I don't live in Fremont, home of Casey, Andy, Mary (who likes to dress up as a cop and put several bullets through anyone who tells a pun in her presence) and the being I refer to as Satan-chan.

Re: Rocketmen Hero?

Re: Anime Champions? I don't know. Naga the Serpent must think all her enemies, most of her allies, and numerous random objects are extremely amusing. Her infamous laugh (which has been known to cause entire cities to be evacuated) is used at every opporutnity, reasonable or otherwise. And there is nothing more firghtening than a gang of ten Nagas bearing down on your, laughing and bouncing and looking like they could do you grevious bodily harm without exhibiting a care in the world. Except possibly the 200-foot-tall Naga golem, poweered and piloted by the real thing. I bet you didn't think it was possible for fired clay to bounce like that. And naga is not Lina Inverse's sidekick! She is Line Inevrse's greatest and msot supreme rival! At least that's what she things. To Lina, Naga is a pain in the rear that annoys her and that she cannot seem to shake (although eventually she does, as Naga never appears in the TV series except in brief shots.) Gourry isn't like that. Lina can (and frequently does) shake Gourry, particularly after he says something stupid. But deep down she likes the guy a lot. And even that is probably too light a term -- you generally don't place the entire universe on a silver platter and offer it in sacrifice just to save a guy if you only like him. But Lina Inverse is incredibly stubbornh and not always very honest with herself, so....

Re: What Champions Books Would You Like Published in the Future? You know I'd love to see Anime Champions, but it would have to be a very boradly-written book to cover everything from DBZ-level world-shattering battles to magical girls (not just Sailor Moon-style warriors botu also magical thieves like Kaitou Jeanne and transofrming idol singers like Fancy Lala), traditional sentai five-teams, modern-day mecha, Bubblegum Crisis-style power "rock-and-roll babes in power armor", and demon-fighting shrine maidens and ghost sweepers. The difficult thing will eb crossing it over to the mainstream Champions Universe, although Cantrip and a Japanese majokko joining forces would be quite amusing. Strike Force is otu of the question, but a book built around the same premise (follow a superteam that has had a profound impact on the CU from inception to the present) would be quite cool. The Martial World might be a neat little book, showcasing the CU's martial artists the way The Mystic World showcased its mages. It would be nice to have the little things of being a superhero discussed in a book, such as how a superteam handles the media and the cops, how a superhero does detective work, and the like.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat "tell me again how a 275-pound woman can ask her husband 'Does this dress make me look fat?' and expect any answer other than yes." NT: Signs the quarterback of your favorite football team really doesn't have his heart in i9t anymore.;

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat Windows ME.

Re: Clubs, Lethal Weapons? (Killing Damage Not Normal)

Re: Anime Champions? You know what amazes me? That anyone realizes that was a pun. Naugahyde, a form of artificial upholstery, has not been used commonly for nearly twenty years, and very few people know what it is anymore. So nobody has been searching for raw Naugha pelts for decades.

Re: Rocketmen Hero? Way cool! Now commission a real animated series and put Paul Dini in charge and a Classic Will Be Born! I wonder is WizKids really knows what they have on their hands. I don't normally play CMGs, but this one I think i want to try. And I definitely want to roleplay in this setting. Nick Sion is my kind of hero -- brave, resilient and cleevre than he looks. I also like the way the story started out, although I wish the episodes were longer because there's a LOT more they could do here....

Re: Nanotech!

Re: Good News For Time Travelers! That would be US Patent No. 1. James Ernst runs the company, which is still going. They are best known for the legendary "pre-mytsery" boardgame Kill Dr. Lucky, in which the players are trying to be the first to off a wealthy man while trying to prevent the other players from beating them to it. Some of their other titles include Deadwood (try to make money as a hack actor in a B-movie studio) and Unexploded Cow (no sane description of thios game is humanly possible). A somewhat higher-end branch of the company is responsible for Girl Genius: the Works and Brawl, cardgames that frequenlty feature Phil Foglio art (which is fitting as both Foglio and Ernst are in the Seattle area and Phil and Kaja Foglio are the creators of Girl Genius). ernst also won a lot of acclaim for Falling, a cardgame with the simple goal of "be the last player to hit the ground -- you may be just as dead as everyone else, but at least you won!" The weirdest ngame in the line would have to be Devil Bunny Needs a Ham. The title alone would make a great movie. it had a sequel, Devil Bunny Hates the Earth, about suicidal candy machines rebelling against the hideously evil Devil Bunny. I keep hoping he'll come out with a new Devil Bunny game, because the character is just so wickedly cool.

Re: Anime Champions? At the risk of giving ym enemies more ammuntion..... Back when I was watching raw anime with commericals on it in the mid-'90s with one of my friends, there were commercials for the cookies that we call Koala Yummies. The Japanese refer to them as Koala no Maachin ("Koalas on the March"). They are manufactures by Lote, a leading Japense confectioner. And I knew none of this when I heard those guys at the end of the commerical name the product. I thought they were saying "I love the Koala Machine." You don't give me an opening like that. "I love the Koala Machine! Push this button, get a koala! Push this button, get another koala! I love the Koala Machine!" Cross-langauge puns. I will never live them down. (One of the other in-jokes I had with one of my friends was that there was a time when I had difficulty remembering how to pronounce the name of the city of Orlando, imporant because I was a basketball fan. Whenever I found myself fumbling over a word or a phrase, my friend and I would look at each other and say, with one voice, "Or-LAN-do!")

Re: Anime Champions? Purin is pudding, although the Japnese version looks more like a flan than what an American would refer to as pudding. The title of the fantasy comedy Dekatato Princess ("Suddenly Princess") is a double pun, because the charatcers for "pudding" are used. The heroine just happens to be totally addicted to pudding, to the point that she will wither and die if deprived of it for long periods. That is not as bad as some of the anime puns I've come up with. "Look out! it's Naga! Hide!"

Re: Anime Champions? I'm sorry, but I'm a purist when it comes to my magical girl shows. The main reason I haven't seen any Tokyo Mew mew is that it is not available here in its original form. American Sailor Moon, Cardcaprots, and whatever they are going to do to Ojamaho Doremi tend to get my goat faster than any other topic you can mention, even though I have no objection to dubs that do not do substantial aletrations in setting, location, theme or content. Idol/actress is a popular cover for magical girls, actually. In the new live-action Pretty Guaridan Sailor Moon, Minako-chan actually is a superstar idol (a status she only aspires to in the anime) in addition to being the mysterious superheroine Sailor V. Apparently something really bad happens to her near the end of the series, but I haven't seen that far. Watching a live-action Sailor Moon with a blonde wig on the heroine form only and Power Rangers-level visual effects can be very odd. But in a sense it reutrns the franchise to its roots, as Naoko Takeuchi was actually attempting to combine the sensisbilties of the magical girl series previous with those of sentai. So PGSM is a throwback, somewhat updated to 2004, to what she originally had in mind.

Re: Good News For Time Travelers!

Re: Good News For Time Travelers! Aewricans. It's take hundreds of years to develop time travel. By the time that happens, will anyone still care about John Kennedy? Or any American President of the 20th century? The universe does not revolve around the United States, you know. What makes us think time travel won't be developed by the descendants of, say, the Iranian fundamentalists? The Chinese technocrats? Kenya? By the time time travel is developed, the USA may well be gone, forgotten and unmissed.

Re: NGD Scenes from a Hat The Magic 9-Ball -- OF DOOM! NT: Signs your buddy is plotting against you because you got to go to GenCon and he didn't.

Re: Anybody want an android? That says a lot more about you than about the technology. Whether Sexaroids would actually work or be desirable would depend entirely on what the user is trying to get out of the sex act. Remember, people have sex for innumerable reasons many of which have nothing to do with physical gratification, and a lot of those reasons would not be satisfied at all by a Sexaroid. Now it becomes a different story if the lines between person and machine become completely blurred or even obliterated, as many writers and artists have postulated. A full-conversion cyborg, for example, is unquestionaly a person and would be capable of a person's full emotional range regardless of its physical appearance. Indeed, authors like Masamune Shirow (in the Ghost in the Shell series) postulate worlds in which almost everyone is cybernetic to one degree or another, obliterating the lines of gender and orientation and calling into question the very concept of personal identity.

Re: Captain Jack The accent is probably part of his cover story in 1941 -- he was posing as an American volunteer pilot for the RAF. Since apparently he went to the Blitz often it was a cover he needed to keep up. Since Captain Jack's home time is at least three thousand years in the future it is highly doubtful that by the time he was born the United States of America would still exist in any form we would recognize -- or, for that matter, that anyone would still be speaking a remotely comprehensible version of English, accented or otherwise. Barring utter catastrophe there would still be scholars who can read English, but no spoken language can survive that long in everyday use. (For example, even if someone today had full classical training, he would speak latin with such an atrocious and incomprehensible accent that a Roman wouldn't understand more than one or two words out of thirty.) Remember, a lot of what the audience perceives on Doctor Who is the result of the viewpoint characters being affected by things like the TARDIS's translator field. The Docotr has been aboard the TARIDIS so long that this field, which he referred to once as "a Time Lord gift", is still with him even when he is separated from the TARDIS for long periods. He comprehends the speech of innumerbale aliens -- since we see the Universe through his eyes and hear it through his ears, therefore so do we. Captain Jack almost certainly has easy access to something similar, possibly implanted into his body -- and he also has the same sort of "slightly psychic paper" that the Doctor uses.

Although I haven't quite figured out how to, I'm thinking very seriously of doing a write-up of Captain Jack, the slightly unethical, occasionally outrageous, and generally very bizarre for the series ex-Time Agent from the recently-completed season of Doctor Who. Captain Jack encounters the Doctor while he is in the process of running a scam during the Blitz. He's dragged an alien spacecraft from the future to London in 1941, to a spot where it is sure to be blown up by the Germans unless someone picks it up, and mistakes Rose for the Time Agent who is going to buy it from him. He also thinks Rose is extremely sexually attractive. And so, for that matter, si the Doctor! As it turns out, Jack's scam has an unintended consequence that almost leads to utter catastrophe. But evicently he is forgiven sufficiently that he is admitted to the TARDIS, facing the Slitheen in 2005 and a really nasty enemy in the far future. It turns out that one of the reasons he is so eager to rip off his former comrades is that there is a two-year chunk missing from his life and he suspects the Time Corps (or whatever his former agency is called -- it's never named) was responsible. This suggests that Humanity does eventually discover reliable time travel in the Doctor Who universe once the principal force hindering them has been removed. One other ntoe about Captain jack is that he is utterly incredulous when told about the Doctor's Sonic Screwdriver. He literally cannot believe that anyone with any sense would invent such a device!

Re: Good News For Time Travelers! If they're dressed in period, speak English well, and don't do anything outrageous, a tourist from the future would look just like a tourist from Chicago. How do you know that guy standing next to you taking a picture of the Space Needle didn't really come from the year 5714 -- or the year 700 B.C.E., for that matter?

Re: HEROs of Heaven Heaven and Earth, which si goign through its third edition (and system), postulates its own take on the "Heaven and Hell go to war for the Earth" theme. Its basic take is that it is a lot more complicated than simple good against evil -0- Man is at the center of soemthing beyond its control, a war in which neither side really has its best inetrests at heart. It's the sort of game you would play if you're the sort of person who reads the story of Elijah and Ahab in 1 Kings, ponder which side you would be on if it were happening now, and realize you'd have a hard time deciding.... Which I suspect is what you would be looking for in a game like that. You would be looking for choices, where in the name of a higher good you may find youself forced to do terrible things, where what you even think of as good and evil is called into question under the crucible of a shades-of-grey reality.

Although the series itself does not have combat (and indeed combat would be incredibly out-of-place in it, in the way that a truly heterosexual female character would be out-of-place in Project A-ko), I was wondering about the Wind Manipulation powers that are the centerpiece of a wonderfullyh lyrical anime series called Windy Tales. There seems to be aburgeoning "magic reality" genre in anime, in which ordinary people and places have fantastic qualities, and Windy Tales is one of the very best of these series. At the local club it is the biggest hit among the membership since Azumanga Daioh, the rapturous recpetion only heightened by the glacial pace at which the fansubbers release episodes. Windy Tales is the sotry of Noa, a girl in junior high school who one day, while standing on the school roof, sees a cat flying by. She is so excited that she falls off the roof -- and comes to a soft landing. On one hand, everyone is worried about her because the accident has been mistaken for a suicide attempt. But on the other hand, her survival gains her entry into another world. One of her teachers is a Wind Manipulator, a man who can make the wind do his bidding, and he has been teaching his skills to the local feline population. Trying to explain why this series is so appealing is like trying to put words to the feelings engendered by a Beethoven quartet, or describing comprehensibly what goes through one's mind when viewing a Van Gogh painting. But along the way we meet a flying squirrel who doesn't know how to fly, a storytelling teacher with his own unique and melancholy gift, elementary school boys whose own wind powers are linked to their innocence, and a rural village that secretly controls Japan's weather.

Re: Zatch Bell Reminds me of a series called Ninku about this boy who looks like a badly-designed ventrilousit's dummy but is really an ultra-powerful martial artist leading a rebellions against a Napoleonic-stylized empire. he wanders around the world with a penguin in tow (seems to be an ordinary, if expectionally temperature-tolerant, penguin). Evidently a lot of people in Japan really liked it. But then again I have yet to find an adequate explanation for how Naruto begame a mega-hit either.