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It feels like another case of Hollywood coming up with what they think is a clever way to do a "superhero" show without making it look or feel like a superhero show. They'll throw in a few X-Men references and call it an adaptation of the comic. Feh.

The Greek gods were depicted as having all the usual human failings. In fact, their incessant need to participate/interfere in human affairs made them more human than they would probably have cared to admit.

I agree completely. But I think the Nolan trilogy is generally graded as a whole, and two of the three films were quite good. I'd give the trilogy a solid B+ overall. Nevertheless, while The Dark Knight is a landmark film deserving of (most of) the acclaim it has received, I think we all agree that is no reason to paint the entire DCEU with the grimdark brush. I think its towering success profoundly distorted WB/DC's (creative) perspective, and the fact that Nolan's third installment was a disappointment didn't recalibrate that perspective one bit.

It is an epic failure from WB/DC's point of view, which will have a profound impact on the future of the brand. And, ultimately, that's the only point of view that matters since they, not us, are in control of the content we (get to) consume.

It should be doable. On July 18, 2014, Kevin Feige told IGN in an interview that the Namor film rights are not with Universal or Legendary Pictures, but he explained there are a number of (other) contracts and deals that need to be sorted out before Namor can be used in the MCU. That would theoretically make Namor considerably easier to fold into the MCU than even the Hulk was. I wonder if a big reason Marvel never moved on this was that they preferred to introduce him as a Fantastic Four antagonist first, but couldn't do that until getting the FF rights back from Fox. If true, then that is how the Fox deal helps Namor.

This presumes that the only way to use the X-Men is to yet again pursue the anti-mutant persecution narrative. I submit that it is not only not necessary to do that, but that it would be counter-productive to the goal of rebooting the franchise for a fresh start.

It is unclear to me why ancient civilizations are better models for far-future galactic empires, apart from the practical benefit that they require GMs to exercise less imagination.

I see no reason the Fantastic Four can't be folded into the MCU; they strike me as a perfect addition. Call them the MCU's "First Family". Same goes for the X-Men. Their adventures don't have to intersect with anyone else's, just like in most of their comics. But having them in the MCU opens interesting narrative possibilities that simply weren't possible before. In fact, I'd argue that there's no compelling reason not to fold them into the MCU. Just as there was no compelling reason not to have Daredevil, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist, and the Punisher inhabit the MCU.

Most definitely.

I worry about the loss of net neutrality too, but I will go on record right now and predict that the Disney acquisition of Fox's entertainment assets will have no discernible negative effects in the long term. I think people are wringing their hands for no reason (at this point).

What, exactly, is there to be anxious about here? What specifically is it that everyone fears Disney will do that will ruin cinema or television now that they've acquired Fox's entertainment assets?

The implications aren't just for PCs who might never venture further than two jumps from their home planet, but moreso for galactic governments whose power and influence reaches out and affects the PCs in countless ways. Consequently, the "age of sail" feel seeps into the very fabric of the game experience whether your players are adventuring beyond a single sector or not. If not, then the role and impact of the governing bodies who struggle to maintain authority over vast distances is being ignored, diluting the flavor of the Traveller universe.

I prefer SBBF - (Solomon Grundy) Don't Fight Girls:

Examples are good for inspiration. For sparking one's own design ideas in a direction you might not have previously thought of. However, I feel that if a game needs a ton of examples just to adequately explain the core rules, then something is terribly wrong with the game (or its presentation). Players should be able to read the rules, look at an example or two, and then go and build their own powers/characters/vehicles/whatever. I remember reading the 2nd edition rulebook (back in 1982) and then spending all my time in school making characters. I would occasionally look at Enemies #1 just to see the variety of character builds the publisher came up with, and they were instructional to a degree, but they weren't essential to learning or understanding the game. The basic rulebook took care of that all by itself, and it only had a smattering of examples. Contrast that with books filled with collections of pre-built stuff. Bestiaries, grimoires, and armories are great for saving time, especially in cases where a monster or spell is going to be the same each time it is encountered (i.e., there is only one type of bugbear, only one type of stone giant, only one fireball spell, only one version of the AK-47, etc.). They are also useful as working examples of the system in action, but that's only incidental. Their real value is in providing generic items that don't need special differentiation, something that I don't really feel applies to superpowers (i.e., a "database of superpowers" is actually less helpful than it sounds, IMO).

That's merely a digital device that hasn't been configured yet. A digital device that is broken tends not to function at all.

I love those pulpy Golden Age names!

A broken clock is still right twice a day.

JL struck me as more like a superhero video game come to life, than a well-told comic book superhero story adapted for live action.

Sure, and Star Trek has phasers with a stun setting (useful during shipboard combat) where projectiles or disintegration beams would be a no-no. And subspace communications are nearly instantaneous; ships don't have to be mail carriers, they can instead focus on being explorers, investigators, enforcers, or conquerors. It all comes down to the feel you want for your game. Traveller wants you to feel like Horatio Hornblower in space, more or less, and they've contrived common tech levels to insure the game feels that way (emphasizing the presence of pirates and smugglers in the game helps a lot too).

Back in the day, power examples came from the Enemies books, and later, the organization books. There is really no need to stuff more unreadable text into the margins of any book, or bloat the core rules with material that is more effectively delivered through products that have tremendous utility above and beyond their incidental value as example providers (like books full of villains, monsters, etc.).

Edge cases are, by definition, situations for which the rules/mechanics do not provide an explicit answer to the question, "How do we resolve this?" There is probably no better example of the Hero System's attempt to put edge-case management in the hands of players than Special Effects. It is a powerful abstraction meant to gloss over a million fine details that would needlessly complicate the game and slow down play if addressed with explicit mechanics. You can see how the current generation of players have drifted away from the use of this handy tool by the predominance of example power write-ups that attempt to encode everything to a very fine level of granularity (via Advantages and Limitations) rather than allow Special Effect to handle the "chrome" in a less detailed, formal manner. The Hero System demands quite a bit from its players, both in terms of maturity and a solid grasp of logic/math. It is also hellishly hard to GM well. The game is not for everyone. If a GM is routinely making bad rulings with the Hero System, then he or she probably shouldn't be GMing the Hero System (if they are routinely making bad rulings no matter the system, then they should probably let someone else GM all together). If a GM is only occasionally making a bad ruling, well, that's just part of GMing, and that gets better with experience. Mature players will just roll with it (no pun intended) and allow the game to proceed with a minimum of fuss. If you don't have mature players, then there's nothing the rules can really do to help with that; even with 6E's massive corpus of rules there is more than enough room for arguments over interpretation; only now there are about a thousand more things to argue over than before.

I wish I could explain it in detail. Unfortunately, I was privvy to neither the spreadsheets nor the formulas embedded in them over at Dreamworks. However, there are formulas that studios (and the banks that backstop their productions through things like completion bonds) use to predict the income a movie will generate over approximately a 5-year period, and it is almost entirely based on opening weekend box office returns. Not first-run box office performance, opening weekend performance. Historically it has predicted the amount of money a film can expect to make to within about a 3-5% margin of error, which is why I used the word uncanny before. The consistency of its predictive power is something that boggles my mind and almost makes me believe in magic.

Yes, very much so. I always felt that the real beauty of the Hero System was that it provided a logical framework within which to easily interpolate a solution whenever an "edge case" came up. You didn't need the rulebook to explicitly cover every possibility because its flexible and logical architecture gave you the tools to come up with your own rule (or mechanic) with the confidence of knowing it would be consistent and congruent with the rest of the game. But I guess too many players simply lacked the confidence to interpolate, and insisted on having as many of the edge cases as possible officially addressed. I feel this actually made the game less playable, not more, and dis-empowered players rather than empowered them, making them slaves to the rules text rather than to the rules architecture.

Except not nearly as pretty as 300.

I just think the whole "I met a disgraced priestess" bit is a little too convenient to the plot, and not substantiated by anything actually shown in any episode. It requires us to imagine too many pieces and stitch them together ourselves out of whole cloth to make that work (for me). The problem here is that the Colville character is (repeatedly) being used to serve plot needs, but he hasn't been sufficiently developed, IMO, to earn believability in many areas (like his knowledge). He has extraordinary levels of KS: Kryptonian History, KS: Kryptonian Culture, KS: Kryptonian Religion, which in my book require extraordinary levels of explanation/development not adequately provided so far. But I do agree that your analysis is not unreasonable given the relatively low standard of world-building and plot coherency we hold CW shows to.