Mutant for Hire

Re: Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved Well, fertility, contraception and midwife spells are important. There is some overlap with combat spells. Healing magic, anti-disease magic is also a good one. Injuries and disease are a fact for everyone, not just warriors. A lot of magic that you would expect a village warlock/witch to know would be divination magic. For example, the fertility of the soil. If a cow/sheep/whatever is lost, how to find it. What the weather will be for the next few weeks. Is spring here or is there going to be a turn of bad weather? Spells to determine if someone is honest or lying, oath spells that cause bad things to happen to someone who goes back on an agreement.

Re: Real-Life Hyperspace Theory? Causality. Relativity. Faster than Light travel. Pick two out of three. Problem is, tossing out relativity is going to be hard without contradicting over a century's worth of experiments that show special relativity works. Frankly this looks more like junk science than anything else.

Re: DC Universe Overview Well, now we have Superman vs. Darkseid to add to the list of other debates: Thor versus Superman Captain America versus Batman Spiderman versus Firelord

Re: Costume fixation (Get your mind out of the gutter) Actually, I should correct my previous post. I prefer plausible skintight costumes in plausible circumstances. For example, flyers have excellent reasons for wearing skintight costumes. They don't want something the wind will catch and try to rip off them, not to mention slowing them down. Aquatic heroes are another case where something skintight makes a lot of sense. Catburglars are another category. However even in those cases I tend to dislike the bright gaudy colors. The original Fantastic Four garb is one of the few superhero costumes that don't make me twitch. Something in dark utilitarian colors.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Mrs. Oddhat knows the dance of the seven hundred veils, which takes a full month to perform properly and will suck out the souls of all those who watch it. She has performed this dance twice. Rumors have it that the universe will end with the performance of the third dance. No one knows what she has done with the souls.

Re: Costume fixation (Get your mind out of the gutter) I tend to favor the more military uniform look. Utility belts, clothes that looked like they wouldn't rip when you looked at them. Things along the lines that you might actually expect paranormals in the real world to wear going into action. Which is not to say I didn't love the swimsuit to fetishwear look for the women, but on the whole I tended to find that a little implausible for action. Of course it's perfect for lounging around the base tho....

Re: Post your Thor tributes. In David Brin's classic story, the Holocaust was designed to summon/create the Norse Gods and give the Nazis victory. And so naturally Loki ends up helping the Americans out.

Re: Champions "What Ifs" What if Champions had been bought out by WOTC? ...by White Wolf?

Re: Complicate the Person Above Cancer tastes like chicken. He doesn't look like one though. Not much.

Re: Good Concepts, Bad Characters Cypher's big problem was that he was introduced to the Marvel Universe about three or four years too early. If he came out after the Internet had hit the popular consciousness, he could have easily have become the Marvel Universe's Oracle. And yes, he could have done the Cassandra-Batgirl business with a fluent mastery of body language. He could have been an amazing magician. His ability to read magic texts was only tapped into once during the New Mutants go to Asgard storyline. Lastly, he could have been a brilliant scientist. His ability to parse raw data of any sort, well, he could probably read DNA as well as raw data from scientific experiments of all sorts. He could probably also 'read' the stock market and other financial data. The Inner Circle, not to mention a number of other people would be interested in that as well as his ability to read any encrypted data transmission straight. In some ways he was actually more of a younger version of Charles Xavier, more set up for the Information Age, and they never figured this out.

Re: Revamping the Horsemen I once decided to thematically rebuild the Horsemen for the modern age. What would the classic four of Death, Pestilence, Famine and War translate to? Or rather if I was going to create four supervillains to recreate the Horsemen how would I go about it and make them relevent in modern times, if not more dangerous? War: Relatively unchanged. War incidentally is the most subtle of the Horsemen weirdly enough. War's power in HERO terms is Mind Control over a massive scale, or perhaps a Mental Transform, culminative that turns everyone into a fighting maniac, this side of a beserker (or perhaps the far side of one). War doesn't do damage directly, he just makes everyone else go to war. I stole the effect from Good Omens, I admit. Pestilence: Again, borrowing a leaf from Good Omens, I expanded Pestilence into corruption of all sorts. Chemical pollution, radioactive contamination, biological nastiness of all sorts. Pestilence also handles various nasties and stuff that corrupt even non-living material. Wood rots and chemicals leech away at the strength of concrete and steel. Think of New Orleans damaged by the flooding, and dangerous to inhabit because of the pollution. Famine: Famine consumes the things that we need to stay alive. Famine also causes drought. As we have shifted from animal/people power to other sorts of power, there are other sorts of power that Famine consumes. Famine also drains away at our energy supplies. A famine of energy sources like fuel can be just as devistating as anything else. Death: Death might as well be renamed Entropy. Death causes the breakdown of all complex systems, living and non-living. Machines and electronics break down as well as people.

Re: Cities of the Future To be frank, advancements in biotech, nanotech, artificial intelligence and robotics means that humanity itself is probably going to be undergoing a major shift within the next century. Having the human species alter means that the habitations that they choose to live in will also alter. The implications of this are not something I try too hard to think about.

Re: Cities of the Future A lot of folks here are assuming unlimited population growth, which is not necessarily the case here. Populations have been declining in the most developed regions and while there is no intrinsic reason to assume that in other population regions which are still expanding in population that they will undergo a similar decline, it is entirely possible that we will stabilize and even reduce in time our population.

Re: Complicate the Person Above Death Tribble, author of "Zornwil - the Unauthorized Biography"

Re: Cities of the Future First off, the majority of problems with fission are more due to social acceptability than due to expense. Fission reactors have gotten a lot less expensive and a lot more reliable than in the eighties. The main issue is disposal of the waste material. That said, before that, there are a number of alternate technologies that will stretch out our hydrocarbon supply. Tar sands are one. There are new technologies being developed which will make tar sands not quite as cheap as pumping oil straight out of the ground, but still economical enough for a source of fossil fuels. There's also shale oil as another source that they're developing new extraction techniques for. Fusion, sadly, is about a century away. There are a huge number of technical obstacles to solve in the case of fusion.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? Rainbow Connection - Kermit the Frog

Re: Cities of the Future

Re: Cities of the Future

Re: Cities of the Future The first thing to realize is that my obsession with transportation grids and cities comes from the fact that cities from the dawn of time have revolved around transportation grids. Cities evolved in the first place because they grew up on the nexus of various trade routes and intersections of waterways, which were the favorite way to move goods cheaply for the longest time (still is). In the nineteenth century in the United States, you had a lot of small towns all over the midwest and northwest. Some of them had rail lines built through them, others didn't. Guess which ones grew into major cities and which ones either died off or are still marginal? In the twentieth century we had the automobile inventing the suburb and creating a massive shift in the relationship between where people lived and where they worked. Hence when you ask what a hypothetical future city is going to be like, the first question is, what sort of transportation system are you going to put in place? Because everything about your transportation systems is going to determine the size, shape and number of cities. Most cities will be a nexus of different transportation grids, from space elevators to vacuum maglev to regular maglev, as well as flying and possibly ground cars. And part of the reason I'm tossing in this anti-car stuff is to challenge the assumption that the future is going to be just like today, except that all of the cars will be flying. There are other ways to build cities. Cars are just one approach to building them, and not necessarily the best approach either. And the assumption that just because we can build better skyscrapers we will, or that it's a good idea is another major assumption that I'd like to challenge.

Re: Cities of the Future Public transportation gets crappier the further west you go because the cities on the east coast tend to be older than the ones on the west coast. Public transportation was quite successful before 1930, when urban planners decided to center around the automobile rather than keep improving the public transportation grid instead. As for the space and expense, I keep emphasizing that it's a bad idea for a city to support two transportation networks. Where does the space for the rail network come from? It comes from the space you take up with the road system, assuming you don't put your rail system underground where it takes up even less room. Rail systems have a higher initial cost but the operational cost is far lower than automobiles and their associated support infrastructure. You have to remember that there are a lot of costs associated with the automobile. Gasoline, the initial investment of the automobile, maintenance costs of the automobile, insurance costs of the automobile, all the taxes that go to pay for road maintenance, traffic and parking law enforcement and so on. The downside is that a rail system needs a certain usage rate in order to make it economical. That's the main advantage of the automobile and it's the reason that it's more economically sensible to use that system outside of cities, where population densities are too low for rail and the traffic usage isn't enough to justify the investment in a rail system. I should add that you have to make a serious commitment to a rail infrastructure. Most stops for people will be set so it's a ten minute walk between stations (and hence no one will be more than a five minute walk from a station) and trains run during the day every four minutes and at night every eight minutes. This tends to address a lot of the convenience issues that people have. Also, you don't charge for passenger usage of the local rail network. It's for the same reason that city streets are not toll streets charging for usage. Having a token/turnstile system actually increases your operating expenses as you have to set up a token system and a passenger routing system. If you just make the passenger trains unlimited use, the real estate and operating costs of the stations drop as well as improving the convenience factor for using the trains. Whether the trains are open or empty they run anyway so you might as well encourage people to use them. Incidentally, I do not believe that trying to shift people off an 8-5 schedule is a good idea. We're not naturally nocturnal creatures. Most people are inclined to work during daylight hours. At best you can get people to shift their weekends, but most folks prefer their weekends to coincide so they can spend recreational time with friends and relations. In the end, rush hour is a product of human biology and psychology as much as anything else, you have to engineer around that.

Re: Cities of the Future Bear in mind that there are a goodly number of towns and cities that have zoning laws against skyscrapers. The "sacrifice of freedom" is really nothing more than a shift in zoning laws stating what sort of buildings can be built in different areas. We've never had perfect freedom to build what we like where we like. It's always been at the mercy of municipal planning. As for the automobile, yes, it provides the greatest amount of personal freedom. The problem is that the automobile is a highly inefficient form of transportation, especially the way it is used by most people. It takes a couple of tons of steel to move a single individual around. Then there is the infrastructure overhead of minimum two lane roads, and usually it's two lanes plus bike and/or parking lanes, not to mention traffic signals and usually you've got more than two lane roads and you need real estate to park all those automobiles as well. Think about all the transportation capacity that spends most of its time sitting around unused. And it only supports a certain density of people moving at certain rates of speed and has a tendency to clog up during peak usage. Urban planners have been trying to solve the problem of gridlock for decades now and they're not making a huge amount of headway there. A fundamental problem is that automobiles are inefficient in certain ways and those inefficiencies, the waste of space and other logistical issues end up choking you in an urban environment with population/transportation densities. Inside of a city, it makes a lot more sense to ban almost all automobiles and to invest in a rail-centric approach. You see, that's the problem with Portland and with most public transportation systems designed and built after the 1930's. In the end, you have to design a city around your primary transport infrastructure and any other incompatible infrastructures tend to suffer in comparison. A well designed rail system and the city designed around the assumption that everyone will use the rail system can be a very convenient system of transportation. Now the main problem with rail is that it is wasted out in the countryside. Where you have low population densities, it makes a lot more sense to shift to an automobile-based approach, where the inefficiencies of the automobile don't matter and the efficiencies of the automobile do play. It's just that in the city the car is very wasteful of space and when you pack too many of them together you end up with ugly gridlock issues. Incidentally, there are other conveniences than being able to set out at once. Often you know your starting time but you don't know your destination time. In a well maintained rail system you can calculate travel times very precisely. You don't have to worry about road construction, car accidents and so on. And if you're travelling at rush hour you might well find that whatever time you lose waiting for the train to show up is more than compensated for by the time you don't spend clogged up in traffic. And time spent on a train can be spent more productively than trying to stay out of automobile accidents. I respect the automobile but every transportation system is a series of tradeoffs, and I don't think that the automobile is well suited as the dominant transportation system in urban environments. Note that I am not against all vehicles, for example emergency vehicles logically should be allowed on city streets and certain other municipal vehicles, but as a dominant transportation system for the bulk of people and freight there are more efficient systems.

Re: Cities of the Future Here's a couple of links for people who want to go into more detail: New Urbanism: http://www.newurbanism.org/ Car Free Cities: http://www.carfree.com/

Re: Cities of the Future The big problem with packing people in high densities into small areas is the fact that your transportation grid has to be able to handle those flows of people and goods. Tokyo employs people to literally pack the rush hour subway traints to the gills. Higher densities of people mean that you're placing more and more stress on your transportation grid. Again, there are reasons why there are urban engineers who work on this sort of thing focus on hub-and-spoke rail systems with a distinct upper limit to the total area supported by a single hub in order to keep the transportation grid from choking due to overload. And yes, while skyscrapers form an impressive skyline from the distance, there are studies that indicate that they are not necessarily healthy to live in. Remember that a high percentage of the population suffers from the lack of sunlight in winter, and a set of skyscrapers all around can produce that effect year around. The fact is that a massive metropolis can be psychologically oppressive to live in, and why most of the depictions of dystopias tend to focus on massive monolithic buildings for that reason. As for the elimination of skyscrapers producing urban sprawl, there are two answers. First off, most of these urban planners are in fact against large numbers of buildings under three stories, much less two. They prefer mostly four story buildings everywhere. So when you eliminate the skyscrapers but also eliminate the one and two story buildings, it has a tendnecy to even out, if not shrink. And if you go to a car-free city, the sprawl shrinks even further. As it turns out, automobile-transportation infrastructure is incredibly wasteful of real estate. When you factor in the two lane roads, the parking spaces, and other elements associated with automobile infrastructure, that turns out to be a significant percentage of the city real estate. By eliminating automobiles in favor of underground rail, you can compress the city real estate a great deal and shrink the size of the cities. There are a number of concepts of twentieth century cities that are now being reexamined. For example, single use zoning is something that was invented late in the nineteenth century (or very early twentieth). It made for conceptually neater zoning. Now there are some urban planners who are wondering if it isn't better to allow mixed use neighborhoods which make it possible for folks to actually live very close to where they work and reduce the traffic burdens. Obviously, some things like factories and heavy industry aren't good places to live near, but for white collar buildings, that's another story entirely.

Re: Cities of the Future There are technological/architectural movements that aim at trying to improve the livability of cities. The New Urbanist movement is an example of one such movement. They are approaching the issue from a number of angles. Some are approaching in terms of esthetics, others are approaching in terms of technology. Interestingly enough, there is some convergence here and there. One issue is that of skyscrapers. There's a number of folks who believe that skyscrapers should be mostly banned in cities, period. They blot out the sky, which doesn't do much good for mental health when you deprive people of sunlight. Not to mention living around supertall buildings can be psychologically uncomfortable as well. They tend to favor a four story limit for most buildings, with the occasional monument/platform such as the Space Needle. They hate the concrete canyons that a lot of cities have now. Incidentally, they also tend to figure that it's better to keep to a minimum the number of buildings below four stories. The net result is a certain amount of compactification which is less dense than overcrowded modern cities but isn't quite as spread thin as modern suburbs. Then there is the issue of cars and public transportation. Again there are folks converging on a common idea from opposing directions. From the esthetic side, a lot of people prefer the winding cobblestone streets of pre-industrial cities for esthetic reasons, and then there are those engineers who observe that a properly built intracity rail system (with freight as well as passenger lines) would do a lot to handle current problems of congestion in the transportation infrastructure. Of course these folks also are aware that you can overload a transportation grid as well. The more advanced urban designers are trying to work out the upper limit to what a rail network "hub" can handle without congestion like you have on the Tokyo subways. The idea is that you break up major cities into smaller hubs and then link the hubs together by high speed express rail. The result of these proposed renovations would be an interesting combination of pre-industrial and post-industrial cities. The scale of the buildings and the layout of the surface streets would be much more like that of pre-industrial cities. The transportation infrastructure, an underground rail network would be post-industrial, as well as a number of other infrastructures. There are a lot of interesting things out there. In southeast asia, they're starting to deal with the problem of power brownouts caused by air conditioning by going to municipal air conditioning plants. Instead of everyone having their own air conditioner, they have a cooling plant located in the city that pumps out very cold water in underground pipes to major buildings, which use heat exchangers to cool off the buildings. All the power drainage and waste heat generated is in a single spot the city infrastructure can be adapted to. Economies of scale make it economical for the businesses as well. On the subject of homes, incidentally, there is also an architectural movement that is a reaction to the excesses of modern home architecture. There are a number of architects who think that modern homes are oversized and in general badly designed. Rooms are too large and too many rooms are more or less dead space most of the time. The result is that people often feel like they're living in caverns. Also, though various rooms are often designed for various things, often the way that people use their space is totally at odds with the official design intention. The response is a shift towards smaller homes with a view towards how people actually live. Rooms tend to be multifunctional, with an eye towards allowing different people to do different things in the same room, bringing a family together even if they're doing different activities. Things are smaller but more decorative. Instead of huge blank walls with the occasional rectangular window there are smaller walls with more decorative windows and so on. Most of the above is a general outgrowth of ergonomics and breaking away from simple "bigger is better" ideas. Yes, you can build mile-high buildings, but is it what people really want? The idea is to build homes and buildings and even cities that are esthetically attractive and psychologically comfortable for people, eliminating a lot of infrastructure problems that current cities currently have.

Re: Complicate the Person Above How can 59 + 1 = 50? Because L. Marcus has such a warping effect on reality that mathematics itself alters in his vicinity.