BigJackBrass

Re: Pulp Music A few freebies for your phonograph from the early part of the century: http://www.foldedspace.org/weblog/2006/06/in_the_good_old_summertime.html

Re: City of Heroes - Online Hero Game I'm hoping to finally get back to CoH now that I actually have a PC. Haven't played the game for an age, since I moved out of my friends' house (apparently they needed my room for a nursery or something... some people have no sense of priorities...) but happily my old character is still waiting for me to return. Personally I loved the game (aside from a few fairly small issues), particularly because the interface allowed me to quip, banter and communicate easily during combats. The interaction between players was terrific fun. My friend Martin tells me that he has gone back to the game after a break and has been rewarded for his length of subscription with a new costume item: a giant Afro for his blaxploitation superhero!

Re: HERO in the courtroom!

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? A very fine choice, sir.

Re: Flash Gordon Series News You can't beat 'Buster' Crabbe as far as I'm concerned, although as an actor the guy was a really good swimmer. I don't know how much appeal Flash has to modern audiences, but then again I got into it about forty years late so I guess there must be something. Fingers crossed that they do a respectable job on this one.

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The Greatest Living Englishman by Martin Newell (featuring a wild guitar solo from Captain Sensible on one track).

Re: Musings on Random Musings Would that be any worse than a shallow critique of a deep event, I wonder?

Re: Musings on Random Musings If I recall that's largely the result of theories by Linus Pauling. His obituary said that he regularly took something like two hundred times the recommended dose of vitamin C and that he reckoned it stopped not only colds but cancer. He was in his mid-nineties when he finally died, I believe. And just to swing back to the orange drink element of this thread, when I first travelled to America I found a chain called Orange Julius, selling the weirdest orange drink I've ever encountered (although as I later discovered, in a country offering Grape Soda and Yoo-Hoo it probably wasn't all that weird after all). So really, just what was that thing?

Re: Musings on Random Musings I had a confusing thought about animals this afternoon. Bomb shelters were built to protect people from falling bombs, so what exactly are animal shelters doing? Did someone hear the expression "It's raining cats and dogs outside," and take it a bit too literally?

Re: Sam Rami to do a Pulp Film? I think that to be technically correct that should read: "You mean like casting Tom Cruise as Doc Savage and a couple of other dwarfs in the other parts."

Re: What Are You Listening To Right Now? The Bland Leading the Bland - Andy Partridge from his Fuzzy Warbles collections.

Re: Champions Or Mutants & Masterminds? A friend of mine bought a copy of Mutants and Masterminds 2nd Edition for me and he is now interested in running a supers game. Naturally, I'm the test subject so that he can decide which system to use. Although he owns Hero and has read through it he tells me that he has been finding the system quite difficult to grasp. Considering that this is a chap who used to enjoy Aftermath and Chivalry & Sorcery I think that it's less a matter of complexity than one of underlying concepts. In some respects M&M has taken a lot from Hero, and I have to say that it's a very good system, quite nicely presented. Character creation, which I've been working through this afternoon, is relatively straightforward but I can't say that it seems vastly quicker than with Hero. Combat may well be, but I've not given it a run through as yet. Both games look good and both could well serve your needs, but I will say that M&M is - understandably - much more limited than Hero. Although it is an effects-based system the range of options is smaller and I suspect that supplements will have to address this. If you want the most flexibility off the bat then Hero is my strong recommendation. Nonetheless, from what I've seen of it so far M&M is not a system to dismiss depending on what you need to do with it. A bit vague (sorry!) but it's clear that some people can "get" one system without being able to grasp the other. For my part, I feel that Hero gives much wider scope as well as greater control of detail. Not everyone needs that, of course.

Re: Sam Rami to do a Pulp Film? Oh, I agree. In the X-Men movies, though, there was clearly no thought given to this. After years of people calling Wolverine "runt" and "shorty" he was suddenly towering over all of them (must have answered one of those ads that used to be in the back of comicbooks or something) - and strangely I noticed that by Wolverine: The End (a comic series from a couple of years ago) he was even being drawn as a very tall individual. The differences between The Shadow and The Avenger wouldn't bother me too much on screen, but Doc Savage definitely needs to be tall and in almost superhuman physical shape, otherwise much of his characterisation would seem off. Which I guess means we won't see Simon Pegg playing him

Re: Top 10 List of the Lamest Superheroes of All Times "In the late 1950s and the early 1960s DC just kind of got weird." Absolutely my favourite line from the article. It's the point where the author seems to have finally realised just what he's been reading, understatement of the most perfect kind. As for the question of comical characters in comics, I'm all for more Plastic Man and Major Bummer in the world. The lamest characters tend to be the one-trick merchants (not just the heroes, either. Body Bag particularly annoyed me, for some reason) but I'd like to throw in a controversial vote for ROM. Not because the ROM comic was lame, but because it was such a desperate effort to make something decent from a really rather poor action figure.

Re: New Universal Didn't Plastic Man go up against a villain who could do that? Acid-Tongue, I think he was called.

Re: Character: Danger Mouse A couple of years ago the Cow Parade exhibit of sculptural cows around Manchester featured one inspired by DM: http://www.bbc.co.uk/manchester/arts/cow_parade/cow_of_the_day/cow_of_the_day.shtml

Re: Indiana Jones 4 officially confirmed You've just made me very happy. I may just put on my leather jacket and fedora right now to get in the mood.

Re: The Powers of a Super-Butler Although the "Bat Hankie" wasn't one of them.

Re: Sam Rami to do a Pulp Film? Then again, Hugh Jackman is exactly one foot taller than Wolverine is supposed to be, so it's not always something they lose sleep over in the movie biz.

Re: 7 heroes summoned through time: who are they? I'd include Richard Burton (the explorer, not the actor) on a shortlist at least. It's tempting to also suggest the likes of Shackleton and Mallory, but I think that they might be a bit narrow for this sort of project.

Re: Sam Rami to do a Pulp Film? Nah, if Raimi does the film then he'll probably be in it, played by Bruce Campbell.

Re: HERO System 1/4-page damage tracker sheet handout Now this is precisely the sort of handy gaming widget I like to see. Great job. To make it really excellent, however, it needs to come with one of those little pencils for the full mini-golf gaming experience.

Re: Sam Rami to do a Pulp Film?

Re: GMs: Funniest Character Sheet Mistakes You've Seen.

Re: Sam Rami to do a Pulp Film? And indeed that is also the title of the first Avenger novel, which is a real ripsnorting pulp read.