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Old Man

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Posts posted by Old Man

  1. On 3/25/2024 at 8:59 AM, unclevlad said:

     

    Aragorn was 90 at the start of Fellowship.  He'd been helping Gandalf, scouting, and serving in Rohan and Gondor for decades.  Gandalf was a millenia-old Maia.  They'd developed fully, in terms of capabilities.  Gandalf...yeah, restraints removed almost literally, as the wizards were barred from countering power with power, lest they simply replaced the old bad guys with new bad guys...themselves.  Saruman's the perfect case of *that.*  And, heck...note that Gandalf almost never shows powers, in  the game sense.  To a point, the fight with the Balrog.  He lifts Faramir's body and stretcher off the pyre, as Denethor's madness reaches its culmination...ok, so he's got some super-strength, but that doesn't require much. 

     

    Gandalf also turns pinecones into fireballs against the Wargs, and at one point drives off a Nazgul with a frap ray.

     

    Aragorn might have bought off his hesitant-to-take-the-throne psych lim.  Legolas in the books is arguably more badass than Gandalf so there's not much room for improvement, though I suppose he and Gimli bought off their hatred for each other's races.  Or at least replaced the psych lim with DNPCs of each other.

     

     

    Quote

     

    Frodo and Sam...what abilities?  Their PRE rose.  Their EGO probably rose.  One could argue they lost disads.  What abilities did they ever show?  I'd also argue that in game terms, Merry and Pippin gained more...mostly definable as skills, like CSLs and Leadership.

     

    Frodo arguably lost points, picking up physical complications from being stabbed with a Morgul-blade and having a finger nibbled off.

     

    But not as many points as Boromir.

  2. We stood outside a house, trying to figure out where the wasps were coming from.  As we talked, a wasp landed on the wall in front of us, and crawled up under a sheet of plastic that had been nailed to the wall to keep the rain out.  I squished it through the plastic using a weird metal implement I held in my hand, like a door handle.  When I did that it moved the plastic closer to the wall and I saw a couple more wasps under the plastic further up, so I squished those too.  That revealed a dark spot under the plastic, which was the wasp nest.  It was the size of a basketball.  I could see the blurry blobs of hundreds of wasps under the plastic starting to move around, so I frantically started running my implement back and forth over the plastic to squish them all, and the nest.

  3. 2 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

     

    That would be the 1990 version, and it's included on the 4K and standard Blu-ray discs. While I like that version, the original 1986 release seemed to be a tighter and scarier version. Without the sentry guns, for example, they are forced into a firefight with very little ammo against the hordes of aliens. 

     

    Agreed.  Of the deleted scenes, only the one about Ripley's daughter improved on the theatrical release, IMO.

     

    But sentry guns.

     

    I saw this film five times in the theater the year it came out.  It's still exceptional for its lack of plot holes.

  4. 2 hours ago, Ternaugh said:

    Aliens (1986 Theatrical Cut): Ripley's lifeboat is found, 57 years after the events in Alien. After finding that the planet's been colonized for 20 years, and that communications was suddenly cut off, she becomes an advisor to a crew of marines sent to investigate. This is the recently-released 4K version, and the picture's much more detailed and brighter than I remember on VHS or DVD. HDR color grading is very good, but the picture looks a bit scrubbed to eliminate film grain*. Sound mix is detailed, but mixed somewhat low for most of the scenes.  The package features both the 1986 Theatrical Cut and the 1990 Special Edition on UHD and standard Blu-ray, with an additional Blu-ray of extras. It's a good watch. (4K UHD Blu-ray)

     

     

     

    *The three recent releases (Aliens, True Lies, and The Abyss) were supervised and approved by James Cameron, and the conversion reportedly involved processing to make them look like they were shot on modern digital cameras.

     

    Okay, does this theatrical cut have the scene about Ripley's daughter?  The sentry guns?  Hudson's dropship speech?  Newt's parents finding the derelict spacecraft?

     

    Excellent taste in films, by the way.

  5. 1 hour ago, wcw43921 said:

    Saw this on Facebook and thought I'd pass it along.  Rea Irvin, the artist behind the look of The New Yorker magazine, created his own superhero character--Superwoman

     

    spacer.png

     

    This was her only appearance, as National Comics, having already trademarked the name, came down on them faster than they ever came down on anyone else.  This strip was her only appearance in print.  Frankly, I don't think National had to worry about the competition, given the spoof nature of the plot and the quietly bizarre figure of the little man with the top hat and book. 

     

    I admit, I rather like the look of the character--she puts me very much in mind of Katherine Hepburn, assuming she could ever be persuaded to play a superheroine.  Perhaps Cate Blanchette could step into the role, bringing some of her Hepburn impersonation to the part.  It owuld have been interesting to see where Mr. Irvin would have gone with this.

     

    This comic is super annoying because the answer could be

    Spoiler

    'bee' or 'ant'.

     

  6. 2 hours ago, unclevlad said:

    ARGH.

     

    Supreme Court does NOT suspend Texas' law to allow purported immigrants to be arrested.  Despite the fact that this has been held to be a federal power for YEARS.

     

    And they did it by just kicking it back to let the appellate courts rule.  The gutless approach.

     

    Note that 'purported immigrants' covers anyone in all of Texas that LEOs think might have immigrated illegally.  It's a "papers please" law except that they might ignore your papers anyway.

     

    Federal power to determine immigration law is usually held to derive from the Congressional power to determine citizenship, as enumerated in the Constitution.  Instead this SCOTUS, which last week was wringing its hands about the possibility of a patchwork of state laws for federal elections, allowed Texas to implement its own immigration law.

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