zslane

The best of them: Lee and McFarlane for example, did wonders for breathing new life into comic and character design.  Lee's art is brilliant, amazing stuff.  McFarlane took Spidey and made him popular again after that godawful clone story.

In a nutshell:
 
 

A book that is half "How To" and half "sample campaign" isn't a System Core Book, IMO. It is more of a genre supplement like Fantasy Hero. And to be perfectly honest, I don't think I ever hankered for a Psionics Hero genre book.
 
I think a better approach would be to ditch the how-to stuff and just focus on a psionics campaign setting book. The psionics architecture in the setting would (or should) serve as a good How-To example in and of itself.

I think it is a bit disingenuous for people to call the theatrical version of the movie "Joss-tice League", as if Whedon was the visionary mastermind behind what we got. The real culprits were WB execs who couldn't keep their meddling fingers out of the pie, even when Snyder was in charge. Whedon was merely the knife with which they butchered what Snyder had begun. Geoff Johns gleefully engineered Snyder's removal and convinced Whedon to take the reins for a nice, fat paycheck. Whedon was never going to have the time or resources to make what anyone would truly call "his Justice League". His greatest failure, in my view, was in agreeing to the job in the first place, and putting himself in a position to take all the blame for what ended up on screen.
 
The fact that the "Snyder Cut" is, by many accounts, merely different--but not necessarily better--is testament to the fact that the movie was flawed at its foundations, and that no amount of re-working was ever going to save it and make it great. It seems to me that any glowing praise for it is coming primarily from DC fanboys who are desperate for a win here. I would not be surprised if the Snyder Cut fades from memory and is forgotten in a few years as WB moves on to the next series of disconnected movies of inconsistent quality.

I think it is worth pointing out that in that particular case, the plaintiff was trying to argue that the "things the characters do in the game" (via game mechanics) are part of the copyrightable "expression" (of the characters), which the court dismissed in its judgment. This was ultimately a copyright infringement case, which the plaintiff lost (as they should have), and not a patent challenge for the game mechanics. The game mechanics only figured into the case tangentially, and ultimately, irrelevantly.

When it comes to game rules, copyrights only exist for a specific written text of rules. So if you completely re-write the rules to any game you are not in copyright violation. Copyrights do not protect ideas or game mechanics. When it comes to game mechanics, the only IP framework that can potentially cover them is a patent, and patents for game systems are extraordinarily rare. I seriously doubt that any of the material you are using was previously patented by anyone.
 
I am confident that you are safe from any legal challenge, at least in terms of how the judgment would go. If you think anyone is litigious enough to take it to court (even though they would lose), you would still have to consider the cost of legally defending your work.

In a nutshell:
 
 

In a nutshell:
 
 

In a nutshell:
 
 

In a nutshell:
 
 

In a nutshell:
 
 

I think it has been pretty well documented that the suicide of Zach's daughter had little-to-nothing to do with his departure from the project. That was merely the cover story given to the public.

I think it has been pretty well documented that the suicide of Zach's daughter had little-to-nothing to do with his departure from the project. That was merely the cover story given to the public.

I think it has been pretty well documented that the suicide of Zach's daughter had little-to-nothing to do with his departure from the project. That was merely the cover story given to the public.

I think it has been pretty well documented that the suicide of Zach's daughter had little-to-nothing to do with his departure from the project. That was merely the cover story given to the public.

Robin was part of a literary tradition of young boys taking on wild, dangerous adventures, such as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I think he works best in that context. But when you take Batman and make his stories dark, grim, and ultra-violent, then kid sidekicks no longer make any sense. You either remove the tween sidekicks from the stories, or you end up looking like an idiot for suggesting that it makes any kind of sense for Batman to bring kids into his lethal world of vigilantism. Pointing out that Batman is a poor mentor of young boys on the basis of stories--and the grimdark setting they inhabit--that aren't appropriate for young sidekicks to begin with is essentially a straw man argument.

Robin was part of a literary tradition of young boys taking on wild, dangerous adventures, such as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I think he works best in that context. But when you take Batman and make his stories dark, grim, and ultra-violent, then kid sidekicks no longer make any sense. You either remove the tween sidekicks from the stories, or you end up looking like an idiot for suggesting that it makes any kind of sense for Batman to bring kids into his lethal world of vigilantism. Pointing out that Batman is a poor mentor of young boys on the basis of stories--and the grimdark setting they inhabit--that aren't appropriate for young sidekicks to begin with is essentially a straw man argument.

I grew up during the 1970s loving Godzilla. But for me the Legendary Godzilla is the design my adult self sees as the "way he should have looked all along", conceding of course that it benefits greatly from exceptional CGI production. But Edwards' movie was the first time in 60 years that, to my eyes, Godzilla and the monsters he fought looked 100% real. I also really enjoyed the entire aesthetic of the 2014 movie along with its patient storytelling, and the decision to be sparing with showing the monsters.
 
We had decades of Godzilla movies that were non-stop monster slugfests. For me, that had become old hat and I wanted something different. By the end of the Showa era, I had outgrown Godzilla and the silly rubber suited action and low-budget stop-motion animation that came to define the look of the franchise. I had grown up and, without realizing it, wanted Godzilla filmmaking to grow up too. In my view it didn't do that until 2014. I kinda feel that for those who want to bathe in the cinematic tradition of previous eras, there are still Godzilla movies coming out of Japan that scratch that itch. I was hoping that the Legendary version would continue to be distinctive, modern, and American in the sense that it wouldn't feel quite so beholden to nostalgia for Japanese-derived tropes, traditions, and conventions.
 
But I am obviously in the minority here. One of the few who feels Gareth Edwards' film was the standard that should have set the tone and direction for the franchise going forward. In some ways it did, but I just feel that too much of the realism and nuanced storytelling was discarded in favor of "big dumb monster action" because, ostensibly, that's what audiences were demanding. Well, not this audience member.

I'm not going to get into a debate over the many fine Japanese filmmakers who contributed to Godzilla's distinctive style over the decades, or who did what. But "reviled" in relation to Edwards' Godzilla design is something I've never heard anywhere else. Michael Dougherty who directed KOTM said in interviews that his Godzilla is Gareth's Godzilla. He tweaked some visual elements to be more to his preference: enlarged the back spines to look more like stegosaurus plates, made the toes a little longer, the head and arms a little bigger.

Enjoy your nap of delusion.

The first was the best by far.

I feel like I need to present a different perspective on Gareth Edwards' direction of Godzilla. He was tasked with creating a new incarnation of this iconic creature which had, over the course of six decades, been reinterpreted many times, while still defining and remaining true to the essence of its character. His accomplishments on that front should not be dismissed. Every Legendary "Monsterverse" film featuring Godzilla has used Edwards' G. It looks and sounds like his G. It moves like his G. The way it's shot to show the scale of these creatures and the human perspective of them, is inspired by how Edwards did it.
 
The ranking of Gareth's work compared to other directors in the Legendary series is not universal. I know hard-core Godzilla fans who consider his 2014 film the best of them. I know moviegoers with no previous experience with the genre who consider it the best. Like I always say, "best" is subjective, but objectively there's a lot to admire in that movie.
 
Any time you're the first to do something, successors will take what you did farther. Anyone's personal reactions to a movie are valid, and reasonable criticism can certainly be made. But Gareth Edwards set a foundation for the directors who came after to build on, and it's a solid one. Give the man his due.

Godzilla went from being an unfathomable, destructive force in 1954 to a paragon of rubber-suit farce by the end of the Showa era. Any sense of "higher awareness" or intelligence he may have displayed was, in my view, purely a by-product of the declining level of realism and increased anthropomorphism heaped upon the character throughout the 1960s and 1970s. During the Heisei and Millennium eras there were occasions when Godzilla returned to his "force of nature" form, but it was never very consistent. I really thought that the 2014 Legendary Godzilla would set a new tone for the character that would be more like his original incarnation, but perhaps a bit more nuanced. I'm disappointed that Legendary Godzilla seems to be more or less following the same trajectory he did during the Showa era.

Robin was part of a literary tradition of young boys taking on wild, dangerous adventures, such as Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. I think he works best in that context. But when you take Batman and make his stories dark, grim, and ultra-violent, then kid sidekicks no longer make any sense. You either remove the tween sidekicks from the stories, or you end up looking like an idiot for suggesting that it makes any kind of sense for Batman to bring kids into his lethal world of vigilantism. Pointing out that Batman is a poor mentor of young boys on the basis of stories--and the grimdark setting they inhabit--that aren't appropriate for young sidekicks to begin with is essentially a straw man argument.

I agree that the people at the top of WB aren't fit for leadership (in the movie business), but not for the reasons Ray Fisher is going on about.