SSgt Baloo

Re: A Thread for Random Videos

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore I had fried rabbit in tech school in Biloxi Mississippi. It wasn't very impressive, but it wasn't awful either. It was sort of like chicken, and not so different from other things you may have eaten as to be disgusting. Their attempt at chitterlings (chit'lins?) was more typical of military fare at the time: greasy and awful, putting me off tripe for years.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Keep in mind that muscle is denser than fat so at least some of your weight gain may be due to increased muscle mass. That's a good thing, because pound-for-pound, muscles consume more calories just resting than fat cells. This will help keep the fat off unless you relapse at a buffet. There are scales which can measure the percentage of bodyfat via an extremely weak (insensible to most) current sent through the soles of your feet. I've seen them at Target and Wal-Mart. Surely one of your local stores has one. If not, there's always the internet. Links to a page full of similar products: http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=body+fat+scales&tag=mh0b-20&index=aps&hvadid=162853537&ref=pd_sl_65awgqfv45_b

Re: World War Two Campaign That's not how the Geneva convention works. Unless "superpowers" had been discovered and outlawed in a prior conflict. Then all bets are off. Unless your superheroes are unstoppable juggernauts, however, there are plenty of ways to make battle sufficiently dangerous to them that the hit against morale should one of the supers be lost might be considered a greater risk than the benefit of a possibly-shorter war. They might be ordered to stay clear oif the battlefield unless called upon for tasks that suit their specific suite of powers. They would probably be then withdrawn from the front until need arises. Adventures could then center around how to help out behind friendly lines. Finding sleeper agents, looking for a specific soldier who is needed for whatever reason (as in Saving Private Ryan), getting out in the local economy on leave (and perhaps discovering secret plans left behind by the Nazis as a surprise for "our boys"). Unlike most superheroics, military action consists in large part of figuring out what the other guy expects you to do, then figuring out something else to do that will catch him off-balance and unable to respond effectively. You don't confront your enemy at his strongest point and slug it out. If supers were involved in combat without official sanction (and official orders) they would be considered loose cannons, liable to tip a battle the wrong way without intending to. TPTB would be frantically calling in supers they did have under orders to go get those "lunatics" out of there before they do more damage. If supers are used militarily at all, they would probably be used for commando-style raids rather than just tossed into the war-zone to duke it out with enemy tanks of opportunity.

Re: Creepy Pics. Either picture could have been taken at Wal-Mart.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Today was a Mom-day, and we watched King of the Cowboys with Roy Rogers. It's one where Roy and sidekick Smiley Burnett go undercover to find the team of saboteurs that's blowing up defense plants in Texas.

Re: The cranky thread If I do not respond to some of this grief, it is only because I am deeply affected by it and am unable to respond immediately. I apologize for these absences. You still are being upheld in prayer despite my apparent silence. My gripe is that my cable company says I haven't payed them since May, and that I owe them the equivalent of one month's payment. I've been paying them through their telephone service but apparently if you fail to write down the confirmation number they'll take advantage of it. From now on I'm paying at their brick-and-mortar location so I can have a physical receipt.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Most of it, anyway.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore

Re: Foods for those that just don't care anymore Let me guess. It tastes like lobster?

Re: "Neat" Pictures I did not know the Hoober-Bloob Highway was located in Norway.

Re: Creepy Pics.

Re: "Neat" Pictures *Huh?* Wha... What were you guys saying? I was looking at her tie.

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? The Dark Knight Rises Not the best superhero movie this summer. More like street-level superheroes. The only indication there was something different about Bain apart from the mask and accent) was when he took a swing at Batman and hit a concrete pillar (Wall? Not sure.) and knocked a chunk about it. I think the people making the DC movies still don't grok the superhero genre and try to make them add "realism" so people don't mistake them for kiddie movies, the exception being the Green Lantern Movie in which there were loads of supers but also some very stupid shenanigans that showed these guys still had a loose grasp of the source material.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Dracula 500 "When Dracula escapes, it's up to the good-old Nascar boys to put him back in the grave." I envision it as some horribly bad attempt to cash in on the late '70s popularity of CB radios, truckers, and scoffing at the national 55 MPH (then) speed limit, which led to such cinematic classics as the Smokey and the Bandit or Cannonball Run movies, and many, many imitators.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Um... guilty?

Re: What Have You Watched Recently? Maybe she was. Remember, a lot of martian women are green with four arms. That may have lowered the bar somewhat.

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete Right now, I can't!

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete I vaguely remember a book like that. If would be fun to allow new players to have a chioice between running a 300-point superhero or a team of 150-point heroic-level characters that, together were a match for a superhero. I still think it's a good concept, but I lost the book years ago.

Re: [New Product] Champions Complete I'm at the low end of the economic spectrum and yet I have always understood the need to have genre-specific material included. We want to make things easy for new people to get into gaming. I don't consider "rules included!" a waste of space, but a courtesy to others who aren't as familiar with the subject as we are. They need that, as I did when I was first starting out as a player, then a GM.

Re: A Thread for Random Videos Something to contrast with the previous video: The above message fills me with mirth.

Re: World War Two Campaign While this may be true, I can't imagine any group of Players that would be happy for their superheroes doing nothing more than playing detective in colorful costumes. They frequently needed doses of evil wizards, escaped lunatics, mad scientists and their "invincible" army of robots, apes, mind-controlled civilians, dinosaurs, or whatever (I find beaucoup utility in Mad Science!) & etc., to meet their expectations of what a superhero story is. The problem is, most folks aren't as intimately familiar with that era of comics as some of us RPG geeks. They've seen and heard stories set in that era, but if you cringe at the amount of anachronism in "historical" films (Titanic and Pearl Harbor are the two that stand out in my mind), you're not one of them. They want (with some exceptions) a WWII-flavored campaign, but can become upset when you unexpectedly introduce concepts and behaviors that were considered "normal" back then. They had loads of -isms, and were proud of it. If you intend to introduce "realism", you had better discuss specifics (racism, sexism, anti-semitism, Jim Crow, etc.) or somebody could get his nose out of joint.

Re: World War Two Campaign ...But what if you want your campaign to deviate from history? And who says WWII has to be played out according to historical records when in the campaign, they are rewriting them by their very existence?

Re: "Neat" Pictures Ah, yes. I remember now. Before Direct-to-Video releases there were made-for-TV movies, which even when good, were still kinda cheap-looking.