Zeropoint

GM: "The area immediately behind the Skyranger is poorly lit by light spilling from the interior of your craft. You can see a warehouse directly ahead of you, about 25 yards behind the plane, with a gas station off to the left and a city street on the right. No living being, human or alien is in sight, and nothing is moving." Player 1: "Okay, I carefully move down the ramp to the parking lot." GM: "You are hit by five heavy plasma bursts. You are dead."

Nothing--I like having shoulders that work. It's just to look cool over the fireplace.

I'd love to have a sniper rifle in 25 x 137. Have. Not "shoot".

Well, that would by why you MAKE air and soil on-site from local materials. Air is just nitrogen and oxygen. Soil is just mineral grains with water, bacteria, and dead plant bits mixed in. Sure, you'd have to ship some starter cultures of plants and soil bacteria, but you could get the rest from astronomical bodies, and that would be the vast majority of the mass and volume.

Basically, what it comes down to is that most writers are humans writing for an audience of humans. A story wherein humans discover that they are both numerically and technologically outmatched by the aliens and then get realistically curbstomped just wouldn't appeal to most people. "War of the Worlds" probably wouldn't be a classic if it didn't have the Martians get sick and die in the end. Hmm, should I have put that in spoiler tags?

My first instinct is to buy Life Support: Doesn't Age and then spend the rest on INT, with the assumption that at that point I'll be able to figure out how to get any other power I might want. However, high intelligence is socially isolating, and I'm already socially isolated enough as it is (and it's not all due to being smart; I have other problems). Maybe the Life Support, a few points of INT, and the rest on PRE?

Eh, probably something the Doctor did.

We could have "A creature that thinks as well as a man . . . but not like a man."

Ooh, a lightsaber configuration even MORE dangerous than a hilt or a double-ended blade! Laser sword-chucks. Fighter would weep for joy.

Intriguing. I'm not entirely sure how I feel about giving better tools for oppression to the cops these days, but leaving that aside the Pogojet is pretty cool. I like cool firearms tech, and I like engineering that makes people safer. What I don't like is the way the user has to push on the lever of the microswitch directly to fire that thing. Put a proper trigger in front of it!

I know. I wasn't happy with the resolution of the Bundy ranch event (happy that no one got killed. Very not happy that they didn't all get arrested later). This is us reaping the consequences of that mistake. To me it looks like it's going to be very important for the Feds to resolve this decisively in favor of the rule of law. If not, we're on our way to a failed state.

Robbing a condom machine? With a bomb? I have to wonder things like, "how many condoms could he have bought with the money for the bomb materials?" and "doesn't his area have places that give out free condoms?"

The real irony of the "boy's" chrometrooper costume is that Captain Phasma is a woman.

Good. I hope they all get caught and get the harshest punishment available under French law. I also hope that the nations of the West, including the US, can find the moral courage to continue welcoming the Syrian refugees with open arms, instead of giving in to fear and hatred like Daesh wants us to.

I like my tauren female warrior. I originally went with the female tauren because I specifically wanted a holstein-patterned tauren and that coat wasn't available in male (not that you can see any of it now). Over time, the character design has grown on me and now I consider the tauren women to be quite attractive, and I enjoy seeing a depiction of an attractive woman who isn't a waif, and who dresses like her main fashion concerns are kicking ass and not getting hurt.

I wouldn't say that the female character designs "kill it for me". (The reason I'm not getting the game is that I don't like that genre of shooter, not because of anything to do with the character designs.) My initial reaction to the female characters was to appreciate their sex appeal, even--especially the one showing some thigh, Symmetra. It's just that after having someone point it out, I can take a step back and agree that yeah, the designs ARE a bit sexist, when they didn't have to be. I don't find any of the female character designs offensive individually, in much the same way that there's absolutely no problem with any individual game having a muscular 30-something white male with a crew cut for a protagonist. When you start seeing the same thing over and over and over again, though, then it looks lazy and unoriginal at best.

I missed a few posts while I was composing my last one. That's a big part of it--I would argue that the cliches they're following have been informed by sexist attitudes. Not gonna lie, part of the reason I like her design is seeing a different flavor of sexy. The only thing I don't find hot about her is my fear that a woman with a physique like that wouldn't be interested in a flabby nerd like me. Not really, but when all the women have the same pinup girl body, it starts to look a bit odd. Yeah, the fact that 4/5 of the original women are dressed in skin-tight, curve-hugging outfits that are designed more to show off their bodies than to look practical (and even Pharah's power armor leaves NO doubt about the sex of the person wearing it). This kind of costuming design makes it look like the designers think that a woman's first priority on the battlefield should be looking sexy for the men watching them.

Designed for the male gaze, as Tasha said. Now, none of the female character designs are a problem considered individually. Considered collectively and compared with the male characters, we see that once again, Blizzard has fallen into the rut of depicting male characters as something for the male players to fantasize about being, and the female characters as something for the male players to fantasize about having. Zarya is a great addition to the team--I like the fact that they've created a female character design that celebrates and shows off the character's strength--this woman is valuable because she's strong and powerful, not because she's nice to look at (although she is that, too, which is another good point in her design--"attractive" comes in many flavors). If the female character designs had been, say, Zarya (heavy weapons), Tracer (the speedster in the bomber jacket with the arc reactor glowy thing), and Pharah (blue power armor), then I don't think I would have seen a problem (although Pharah's armor has an improbably narrow waist). A selection like that could have been rounded out by including, for instance, someone like a veteran SWAT trooper or infantry soldier with some age lines and a touch of gray, wearing tactical gear that didn't show any skin below her neck and body armor that made it hard to tell she had boobs at all--a design that says "this person is dangerous because she's spent a long time in a dangerous profession." I'm not going to accuse anyone at Blizzard of being deliberately sexist, but sexism has been a pervasive part of our culture for so long that it's easy to "default" to being sexist even when we think we're being even-handed.

I'd play a game with a female Link working to save Prince Zelda . . . I wouldn't mind a female Link and a Princess Zelda either, but that would be for other than dramatic reasons. Regarding the whole "Ms. Character" phenomenon and why it's bad, it seems to me that it's because it treats "being female" as being in this weird space where it's simultaneously considered a noticeable difference but also only cosmetic. We get "Regular Batman" and then, for example, "Steampunk Batman", "Medieval Batman", "Future Batman", and . . . "Female Batman". I can see why women would be upset about having their gender applied as a gimmick. How would we men feel if, instead of having Ant-Man, we had "Mr. Wasp"? "He's just like the Wasp, except he's MALE . . . and can't fly." Would we Caucasians find it appropriate if a new comic character was explicitly positioned as "the white Luke Cage"? (Okay, I have to admit that those examples don't really hit home, because "male" and "white" are positions of relative privilege, so those of us in those categories don't really feel the pinch of prejudice like minorities do.) On another topic, does anyone else find the character designs for Blizzards new game "Overwatch" to be a little problematic?

The classic Matt Jeffries Klingon D-7 Battlecruiser, IMO, actually exhibits a trait of many proposed "real-world" ships: having a habitat section separated from the engineering section by a long and lightweight spar, to minimize crew exposure to radiation. Of course, such a rationalization assumes that the forward bulb IS "the habitat section" and no crew are routinely in the aft section, which is probably not the case in the Trek universe. In any case, I'm not too bothered by the widely different look of the various species' ships. Yes, they're all trying to solve the same engineering problems, but they are alien species, not merely different human cultures, and it's not surprising that they'd come up with different solutions to the same problems. Even then, most ships hold to the rules about warp nacelles coming in even numbers and having a clear path forward.

It wouldn't be the first time that what seems to be a radically different take on a character turns out to be good and valid. I'm thinking specifically of Robert Downey Jr.'s take on Sherlock Holmes.

I still think that Mark Hamil's joker was the best one. Heath Ledger was good, and that whole franchise was an interesting take on the Bat-verse, but the "Batman: the Animated Series" version is going to be hard to dethrone as THE Joker for me.

Ah, the old Klingon Promotion in action. Sometimes life imitates art imitating life.

It opens a gate to the Astral Plane, sucking in everything in a ten-foot radius, and both items are destroyed . . . or that's what I heard.

Well, next time I'm up around Powell's City of Books, I'm going to get myself a copy of "Dark Beyond the Stars".