Zeropoint

Leonardo Dar'lyeh, surely?

That's a great picture. It makes the plane look like it's fast while it's standing still. I'm no photographer or visual artist, but let's see if I can analyze this: I think it's the way the viewing angle and relatively short lens emphasize the nose, giving the plane a weight-forward appearance. Also, the chosen viewing angle gives the plane a fairly smooth silhouette, with strong diagonal lines running along the plane's belly and along the fuselage top and wing leading edge. The composition follows the "rule of thirds", with the bottom third of the image taken up by the ground, and the top third by the sky. The slanted edge of the ground echos the strong diagonals of the plane, adding to the sense of motion. The large clump of plants hides the rear landing gear, lessening the sense that the plane is connected to the ground. The human figure lies entirely within the silhouette of the airplane, leaving its lines intact. Props to the photographer, even if it is a jet.

Neat. It looks like an opal or like a piece of artisan colored glass.

I simply assumed that he still had all his muscle under that fat. As much emphasis as the current media puts on looking good, it's still entirely possible to be in great cardiovascular condition and have large amounts of well-developed muscle and still have fat on top of all that.

Of course it was. Thor acting out of his usual character was intended to convey how hard it hit him that half of all living beings in the entire universe had been destroyed and he was helpless against that fact. O.O.C. Is Serious Business.

Honestly, I liked the way it looked like Vader was letting his anger get in the way of proper technique. It might not be the Vader we built up in our heads in the decades before the prequels, but there's no denying that Anakin had anger issues.

I'm actually on board with this trend. In my earlier gaming days, I loved simulationism. Today, I realize that there is no bottom to the simulationist rabbit hole, and also that 1) most people are going to be using their intuition and judgement to determine whether a simulationist approach is "realistic" or not, so 2) the simulationist approaches tend to spit your seat-of-the-pants judgements back to you but with more work, so 3) why not just go straight to the seat of the pants and save some work and play time?

It's my understanding that a "proper" modeling of firearms would include the Real Weapon and Beam (can't find that in 6E, though) limitations, which would account for those differences. I don't know how to rule on corpses being destroyed, though. HERO has some blind spots, and that's one of them. There's also nothing in the rules (that I'm aware of) about "blowthrough"--by RAW, if a human gets hit by a main battle tank APDS round, they'll die but they'll also stop the dart. That . . . doesn't seem right to me.

You can lead a horse to water . . .

In downtown Portland, Oregon, there are a decent number of pump & tool stations for bicyclists. Not "every doorstep" but they're around.

You'd also expect that someone with 60 STR to be able to tear an adult male human in half like wet tissue paper. The logarithmic damage is explicitly designed to allow high lifting strength without damage getting out of hand. Of course, such gamist decisions kind of conflict with the simulationist flavor of HERO, but . . . the whole point of this business is a game that you can actually play at the table, right?

Makes sense to me. I can tear through aluminum foil by accident, with force that wouldn't deal a single pip of damage as measured against a human target. The foil is effectively 0 BODY and 0 DEF. Faced with a half-inch slab of aluminum (the same material), I couldn't damage it at all--it's DEF exceeds the maximum damage that I can deal with my bare hands.

But some dogs can do lab work.

If you squint really hard, you can make out a teeny tiny Ankh-Morpork.

This is easy for me to say, because I don't like sports in the first place, but I would like to see a future where people--even professional athletes--refuse to harm themselves for other people's profits and entertainment.