Michael Hopcroft

A couple of old anime OPS from my memory of the 1990s. (And it makes me feel old that the groundbreaking Gundam Wing is almost thirty years old).
 
First a series few would remember by now -- Sorceror Hunters, about a luckless, lecherous lycanthrope loved by two very possessive and very dangerous sisters and on a quest to rid the world of wicked socerors.
 
 
 
Speaking of Gundam, I was one of the few admirers Turn A had at the time before its long-delayed licensing tyo the States, I guess it canbe best described as "Gundam by Studio Ghibli", mainly due to the character designs. But it's quite a story, in which warriors from a Lunar colony invaded an Earth that had regbressed to 1910s kevek technology -- with Earth's main hope being a long-lost mobile robot suit called Gundam. It runs out that the daughter of a tycoon on Earth bears an astonishing resemblance to the Moon's revered monarch, to the point that when they meet they decide to swap places back and forth for the rest of the series. 
 
 
And speaking of Wing, the OP was quite impressive -- and initially unseen by US audiences. But the show brought the sort of grey morality to a "Cartoon" that had not been seen by North Americans in forever. Are the Gundam Pilots heroes, terrorists, murderers, or saviors? Perhaps they were all of the above. Oh, and this was one of the most notable early series to be "shipped" among the male cast, even though each had a female love interest, in a triumph of "subtext" that would forever alter fandom not just for anime but for just about everything else.
 
 
Now I feel incredibly old.

""One of the benefits of being Section Chief is that I know who gets promoted. You have no kills on your record, and promotion to 00 requires..."
"Two"
(A moment's pause) "How did he die."
"Your contact? Not well."
"Made you feel it, did he? Well, I wouldn't worry. The second is..." (Sound of a muffled gunshot)
"Yes, much."

Now.
 
Ironically, Amazon is making quite a stir with their investment in self-publishing, and as a self-published author I appreciate the efforts. Things are being done on Youtube that have never been done before -- there are innumerable videos of covers, spoofs, and the like of classic music, for example. Scott Bradlee has already become a legitimate celebrity with the brilliant Postmodern Jukebox . So have artists like Puddle's Pity Party ("The Sad Clown with the Golden Voice"). 
 
None of these people are getting rich, at least not yet, but they show they still belong, whether by their virtuosity or their willingness to go in new directions. Now we just need to find a way to make these viable without megacorp support.
 
(I am reminded of the story of an NFL player who decided after his retirement to go to someplace like Atlanta and become an actor. His reasoning was that you can become a star in New York or LA, if you can bet the enormous odds, but an actor can live and work at his craft anywhere. Of course, it helps to have a side job and support -- Portland is a solid theater town, but some of the best actors ever to work here have found themselves living out of their cars because they can't afford Portland's notorious rents).

It is certainly a beautiful film, with lots of visual intensity in every frame. But that did not help me much in terms of understanding what I was seeing. Especially the ending, which left me with a sort of Schrödinger's Knight sensation.

Funny, I remember in the old Colloseum days the Lions were always the safe bet.
 
The NFL practically owes its existence to organized gambling which they dared not acknowledge while it was a.) illegal, and b.) controlled by organized crime. They attempted to half-heartedly keep the players away from it because in those days it was impossible for any athlete to play with two broken kneecaps.
 
There is no bottle. The Genie was always there. Only now he dresses like a respectable businessman and not like a gangster.

Q: We haven't seen any Orcas in ages. Where could they all have gone?
 
A: Nuts to your white mice!

The OSS 117 series was resumed this century but as satires of Western cluelessness about other parts of the world.

My first anime I remember much of was Voltron (Defender of the Universe). Then I saw Akira in 1988 (I ran into an oild con friend there) and referred to it as a crossover of 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
 
The big moment was when I rented the first episodes of Urusei Yatsura. That's what got me to the club at one last and it would be decades before I looked back.

The NBA ASG came up on First Take this morning.  Yeah, I realize...obnoxious.  I try to avoid it.  Here?  JJ Redick dissed it.  Russo dissed it.  SAS dissed it.  But the interesting point?  They also dissed ALL of the ASGs.  "Interleague play has ruined the MLB ASG."  Can't argue much with that;  part of the motivation for it was to see matchups you'd never see otherwise.  NHL and NFL don't resemble their real games.
 
Logan's link pointed out that the NBA ASG ratings were sharply down...but also that they've been bad for at least the last 2 years.  Which, of course, means this year's ratings should be even more alarming.  
 
We're not gonna see the games go away, tho, unless the pushback gets SO strong that it detracts from a league's overall image.  That seems unlikely.  Being in the ASG is a point in contracts and negotiations too much, I think, so the players want the credit...even if they don't want to participate.  (HUGE problem in the MLB ASG, so much so that it became, I believe, a condition in the standard player contract.)  And of course, the total farce this weekend.
 
Well...one of my favorite weeks in sports is almost here.  Conference championship week.  Not for the big conferences, for all those leagues that are 1-bid leagues.  For those schools, making the tournament's usually a HUGE deal, so those games have great meaning.
 
 

This. The thing was they were masters of mind games. After all, why shoot a dictator when you can drive him mad and provoke a leadership crisis in his country? An assassination would have been like killing Putin in a very obvious way that points to you, and exponentially increases the chances of getting caught and facing a firing squad or worse.
 
The movies turned the concept into action thrillers with stuntwork and fight scenes replacing the true focus of the series on deception and ingenious planning and execution. It would be like Lupin III, which would be difficult to capture in a live-action film unless you truly understood the character and the world he lives in.

This. The thing was they were masters of mind games. After all, why shoot a dictator when you can drive him mad and provoke a leadership crisis in his country? An assassination would have been like killing Putin in a very obvious way that points to you, and exponentially increases the chances of getting caught and facing a firing squad or worse.
 
The movies turned the concept into action thrillers with stuntwork and fight scenes replacing the true focus of the series on deception and ingenious planning and execution. It would be like Lupin III, which would be difficult to capture in a live-action film unless you truly understood the character and the world he lives in.

Manga has lost one of its giants with the death of Space Opera legend Leiji Matsumoto. His best-known creations are the legendary space pirate/rebel Captain Harlock, the pioneering Space Battleship Yamato (one of the first anime series to be released in the US, under the title Star Blazers) and the proto-transhumanist fantasy Galaxy Express 999.  He also created the music video series Interstellar 5555  for Techno masters Daft Punk.
 
He was known for his distinctive art style with languid lines contrasting with detailed and realistic technology, his controversial relationship with war (to this day his film The Cockpit is banned in much of the world), and his powerful mix of space and seeming-anachronisms like space cruisers modeled on WWII battleships (which always held a fascination for him) and spacefaring railway trains. His legacy, as I mentioned, is complex, yet there is astonishing beauty in much of his work.

Manga has lost one of its giants with the death of Space Opera legend Leiji Matsumoto. His best-known creations are the legendary space pirate/rebel Captain Harlock, the pioneering Space Battleship Yamato (one of the first anime series to be released in the US, under the title Star Blazers) and the proto-transhumanist fantasy Galaxy Express 999.  He also created the music video series Interstellar 5555  for Techno masters Daft Punk.
 
He was known for his distinctive art style with languid lines contrasting with detailed and realistic technology, his controversial relationship with war (to this day his film The Cockpit is banned in much of the world), and his powerful mix of space and seeming-anachronisms like space cruisers modeled on WWII battleships (which always held a fascination for him) and spacefaring railway trains. His legacy, as I mentioned, is complex, yet there is astonishing beauty in much of his work.

Manga has lost one of its giants with the death of Space Opera legend Leiji Matsumoto. His best-known creations are the legendary space pirate/rebel Captain Harlock, the pioneering Space Battleship Yamato (one of the first anime series to be released in the US, under the title Star Blazers) and the proto-transhumanist fantasy Galaxy Express 999.  He also created the music video series Interstellar 5555  for Techno masters Daft Punk.
 
He was known for his distinctive art style with languid lines contrasting with detailed and realistic technology, his controversial relationship with war (to this day his film The Cockpit is banned in much of the world), and his powerful mix of space and seeming-anachronisms like space cruisers modeled on WWII battleships (which always held a fascination for him) and spacefaring railway trains. His legacy, as I mentioned, is complex, yet there is astonishing beauty in much of his work.

Manga has lost one of its giants with the death of Space Opera legend Leiji Matsumoto. His best-known creations are the legendary space pirate/rebel Captain Harlock, the pioneering Space Battleship Yamato (one of the first anime series to be released in the US, under the title Star Blazers) and the proto-transhumanist fantasy Galaxy Express 999.  He also created the music video series Interstellar 5555  for Techno masters Daft Punk.
 
He was known for his distinctive art style with languid lines contrasting with detailed and realistic technology, his controversial relationship with war (to this day his film The Cockpit is banned in much of the world), and his powerful mix of space and seeming-anachronisms like space cruisers modeled on WWII battleships (which always held a fascination for him) and spacefaring railway trains. His legacy, as I mentioned, is complex, yet there is astonishing beauty in much of his work.

M3GAN has to have been the creepiest and most disturbing horror movie I've seen in years. The idea is a sort of variant on Frankenstein, in which a robotics engineer builds a robot designed to look and act human, and intended to protect her "primary user", in this case the engineer's new ward who was brought to her after her parents died. But, while the little girl adores the robot and sees her as a person, and the engineer's boss wants to start a M3GAN production line, M3GAN starts to transcend her boundaries, and gradually starts building a frightening demeanor, until finally she has no problem with killing even dogs and children if it serves her purpose.
 
Like the original Frankenstein, it poses questions. Is M#GAN a person, albeit an evil one? If she isn't, then who is culpable for her crimes?

Has Strange New Worlds been renewed?

Clark Kent is a beloved teacher of English and Journalism, with a dose of Ethics thrown in on the side. Because being faster than a speeding bullet more powerful than a locomotive is not what makes a Man Super...
 
Lex Luthor (under a false name) teaches Philosophy down the hall, but he draws mostly from Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. All he knows about Mr. Kent is that he despises him. Most students hate his classes and some hate him\, and the few that do admire him  are the worst bullies on campus..
 
 

In a way, Truck-kun is the ultimate plot device "character". But there is one key question -- does it hit people accidentally, or deliberately?
 
If it hits people on accident, then it is merely the plot device that launches the campaign (or at least one character's entry into it).
 
If it has a human driver who deliberately hits people, then it's a standard Vehicle with an extraordinary powerset. And since the abandoned "body" remains in the original world, he would appear on his side of the wall no different from any other serial-murdering psychotic who may or may not actually believe he is stocking another world or worlds with newly minted heroes and heroines (and the occasional obnoxious feline sidekick).
 
Now what really gets interesting is what happens if Truck-kun does not have or need a driver. The truck itself is, from the point of view of characters in the original world, running around killing random people for no good reason. It is possessed to kill. Never mind that it grants a second chance the victim might never get any other way -- the people it kills remain dead as far as their original world is concerned -- especially their family, fri9ends, and loved ones.
 
Although a psychotic driverless car has been used as a plot device in films and stories from good to bad (Stephen King used them to good effect in two different stories I am aware of, most notably Christine), any adventure about Truck-kun would be based on stopping it before it kills again -- and again.
 
(Truck-kun doesn't even have to be a truck. KARR, the evil counterpart of the iconic KITT, is not something you want to play chicken with, even though in its initial appearance in Knight Rider it does meet its end in a literal game of chicken.)

Toasters. Because you know darn well some guy who's seen a lot of Red Dwarf will be hostile towards toasters.

I didn't hear his reasoning, but at the Gencon where D&D 3.0 and the whole OGL phenomenon began, Villains & Vigilantes developer Jeff Dee was strongly opposed to it. I don't recall his reasoning, but my guess was that involved the efforts by WOTC at the time to turn as many companies/publishers as possible into promotion sources for D&D.
 
It may have turned out that way, but only to a limited extent. They certainly did not expect M&M to build its own engine on the core of D20, and when they launched 4e they never in a million years expected their magazine contractor would turn around and release Pathfinder (aka D&D 3.75) and build it into a juggernaut.
 
I'm surprised this didn't happen in 2009.

I'm pretty sure the jewel is what he meant, but let me also point out the obvious secondary answer, which is Blake Edward's 1964 farce -- perhaps one of the most perfect of film comedies, at least of the 1960's. 

That looks like something that bears absolutely no resemblance to a gorilla. They could only draw it on National Gorilla Suit Day.
And he viewed obviously packing heat as the sign of a rank amateur.

In the introduction to Situations, I believe Edwards cites the "Demon in a Bottle" storyline where Tony Stark battles the worst enemy he ever faces -- his own alcohol addiction. Stan Lee had already broken the back of the Comics Code Authority by examining drug abuse and its consequences in comics. I need to read those stories, because the panels of them I've seen are heroism.
 
A person's demons -- the things that live in their minds and souls and eat away at them little by little -- make really good Situations. But not all Situations are negative; if you and your spouse are on the same team, and both player-characters, then you draw some strength from the relationship. But it also causes problems in your lives...

Well, we all know people should be playing less D&D and more Fantasy Hero. But the interesting things being done with the open content parts of 5e are starting to get interesting -- even if it's a bit unclear whether the timing is off. I'm looking oddly at you, Doctors & Daleks... (Yes, this is a real game).
 
Perhaps Hasbro has decided the tabletop RPG itself is in its death throes, under competition from consoles and a resurgent interest in board games. This despite the new linkage between D&D and Magic the Gathering has produced some very interesting results. I found the Ravnica setting richly imaginative, if not exactly someplace I would want to live or even visit), and the only reason I haven't purchased the new Eberron book is lack of money.
 
But Doctor Who? Really? This makes about as much sense as the episodes with Santa Claus and superheroes.