Pattern Ghost

Note also that none of the previous people barred from office due to Section 3 were charged with, or stood trial for, insurrection.

Technically, this says they want to hand Russia over to Russia. 🤔
 
As someone who served during the Cold War, I find all this cozying up to Russia by one of our political parties disgusting.

I'm going to talk about my writing in this thread, but anyone should feel free to throw in their own anecdotes.

I managed to flip a switch in my head recently, and I'm writing again. I'm writing a lot. On my main project, I've written over 40k words this month, with a few thousand more that I've ditched or set aside for possible future use. This makes me very happy.
 
Quite a while back, I posted a link to the one novel I've completed. anyone who remembers that would be unsurprised to learn that my current project is about teens with super powers. The protagonist, Frank,  is a character who was the antagonist in a bunch of stories I used to tell my kids at bedtime (but aged up a little, and with the G rated filter removed). Her worst enemy is the protagonist from most of those stories, Emily. I'd tried to write stories with Emily in the past, but she's just too good. She's based on my second Champions character, altered to be what my kids wanted in a superhero (e.g. she always won). That image of her is too stuck in my head for me to tone her down, much, so she wasn't really workable as a protagonist. As an antagonist, or even supporting character, though, she's fine. So her nemesis Frank became the protagonist, and Emily is the thorn in her side.
 
Since I'm essentially writing fanfic (even if it is for a world that's only in my head), it's probably inevitable that Frank and Emily would get thrown together, and get, if not an enemies-to-lovers arc, at least an enemies-to-girlfriends arc. It turns out that that's a lot of fun to write. Of course, that requires a redemption arc for Frank, which is fine, because I'm a fan of redemption arcs.
 
If Emily had been the protagonist, these would have been flat out superhero stories. With Frank as protagonist, though, they're not so much that, at least not at first. She isn't looking to save anyone. They're more slice-of-life or adventure stories.
 
The story I'm currently working on has Emily and Frank thrown into a parallel universe where the event that led to superpowers in their universe never happened (essentially our world). I wanted a fight scene while they're stuck there, partially because I just wanted a fight scene, and partially to advance Frank's redemption arc. 
 
So I started this scene. Getting them to it was no problem; Emily is drawn toward places and times where someone will need protection. Truck crashes through a window, Emily deals with that while Frank teleports around being a bad-ass and dealing with the armed men charging in. It sucked.
 
Sure, Emily's been doing this crap since she was thirteen, but Frank hasn't been in any fight more serious that a high school tussle or a sparring match in her life. She's very competent at [martial art tbd], but that doesn't mean that she'd have any idea how to handle herself in fire fight. Plus, she could just teleport away and leave Emily to deal with things. Facing a bunch of nazis with rifles and handguns, Emily's biggest worry would be not killing them (and keeping innocents safe, of course). I scrapped those 700 words and started again.
 
Now Emily gets taken down by a sniper rifle* as the start to the combat, and Frank needs to deal with the sniper on her own, or a bunch of people are going to die. She chooses to fight, and it's a really hard fight for her. It was so much more satisfying to write than if she'd just been kicking ass and taking names.
 
* I'm open to suggestions as to an appropriate real world weapon to use for this. Emily is a flying brick, with an emphasis on the brick. Small arms fire is basically a minor nuisance to her, and even normal assault rifles can't usually do more than cause a bit of pain or minor bruising. Military grade is fine, as long as it's something that could be lugged by one person up fourteen flights of stairs.
 
 
 
 

Let's see, with the wife, I've been watching The Gilmore Girls. Just started season 7. We watched it for about four seasons when it was originally on, but work schedules and life made us lose track. Wouldn't make it past the PC police today, and the characters are so flawed as to be downright unlikable at times (but rounded humans, who also have their good sides). It's one of those love it or hate it shows. 
 
Been watching some K-dramas and Anime also.
 
Uncanny Counter: Recently finished Season 3, which may be the final one. The show chronicles the adventures of a team of humans, empowered by higher powers to hunt down evil souls escaped from the underworld. These souls possess and empower their human hosts. The method of exorcism involves beating the possessed human to a pulp, then extracting the possessing spirit. Mostly lighthearted adventure that doesn't veer as much into darker subplots as a lot of Korean shows, though it has its moments. (Thinking of all the cute K-drama romcoms with scary a** serial killer subplots.)
 
Sweet Home: An apocalypse where people are suddenly monsterizing. Just finished Season 2, which was much different from Season 1. Season 1 was OK, but took a hit from its brevity, as it mostly ignored the psychological angle of the monsterizations. Season 2 was a confusing mess, adding a ton of new characters without much time put into giving them any distinctiveness, odd time jumps, a lot of lack of spotty plotting. Season 3 is coming, and Season 2 did end up with a reasonable launch point for it after much zig-zagging. Hopefully, Season 3 will return to the somewhat serviceable storytelling of Season 1. Overall, thin fare. 
 
Alchemy of Souls: Brings over the actor from Uncanny Counter who played the gruff but lovable middle aged guy, reprising  his stock character. (I can't recall the name, but I like the actor. Must watch with subtitles, b/c the American dub actor does not at all capture his vibe.) It's a world of kung-fu wizards, turned upside down by the forbidden sorcery of the Alchemy of Souls (body snatching by soul swapping, and other dastardly soul manipulations). Season one was decent, with a great female lead and great supporting cast. Season 2 diverges quite a bit from Season 1, and is pretty lacking in internal consistency, but was serviceable. It's a romance with some decent humor and some fairly dark subplots. (Still not as dark as those serial killers in the Park Bo Young romcoms -- and I recommend anything with her in it, though the quality varies a little. She's great as a romcom lead.)
 
Good Night World: Anime based on a manga that was apparently much better executed. Virtual reality game shenanigans, with plot points that are all over the place and zero internal consistency and poorly realized tech elements. (As in, the writers no bupkiss about tech and online gaming.) The worst thing about it is that it was short. It tried to cram 52 issues of a manga into 12 episodes of anime. The best thing about it is that it was short, so your suffering will also be short if you watch it.
 
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Just started watching this classic, which I haven't seen before. I'm about 8 episodes in and liking it. Watching the dub, because the dialog flows better than the subtitles. Voice acting quality seems good. Netflix has re-voiced this edition, apparently.
 
Barbie: We laughed all the way through this one. Another win for Margot Robbie's production company, IMO. You'll probably like it if you're not a member of

 
 
 
 

Watch the four Rebuild movies on Amazon to get the complete experience. The creator went back into depression over the course of the first three and recovered during the planning and making of the fourth. The animation is spectacular, and it actually tells you what the plan was at the end while giving closure to the characters.

Finished Neon Genesis Evangelion. Apparently all I have to do to get the whole story is watch another movie and maybe play a video game and read a manga. After further research, it seems the studio ran into budgeting problems, so the project suffered from that. Essentially, there's a pretty interesting bit of world building done here, but not quite enough of it made it to the screen in the original series, leaving anyone interested in the events of the plot hanging at the end. The story was very much driven by the psychological journey of the main character, so with the lack of funding, the focus seems to have been shifted to focus there, leaving many questions unanswered. I guess I'll watch The End of Evangelion, which is purported to offer a better realized ending, and see if it offers any satisfaction. 

Definitely watch End of Evangelion for closure.  It does get a little disturbing and weird though.

Finished Neon Genesis Evangelion. Apparently all I have to do to get the whole story is watch another movie and maybe play a video game and read a manga. After further research, it seems the studio ran into budgeting problems, so the project suffered from that. Essentially, there's a pretty interesting bit of world building done here, but not quite enough of it made it to the screen in the original series, leaving anyone interested in the events of the plot hanging at the end. The story was very much driven by the psychological journey of the main character, so with the lack of funding, the focus seems to have been shifted to focus there, leaving many questions unanswered. I guess I'll watch The End of Evangelion, which is purported to offer a better realized ending, and see if it offers any satisfaction. 

Well, I did specify Cyborg Guardian. IIRC, that one didn't do much emotion, so seemed like a fit. 😀

Let's see, for Keanu: Ghost Rider (he's expressed interest, and he's into motorcycles), The Shroud (stoic guy with martial arts and darkness powers), or maybe Guardian (James Hudson, cyborg version) from Alpha Flight.

Yeah I never used that rule, because there's no level of ugly in my mind that makes something terrifying.  It just is disgusting.  Presence is terrifying.  Buying a stat down makes it worse, by definition in my book, so you ought not gain a benefit for buying it down.

For me, Fifth Edition core rules hit the sweet spot of rules completeness and clarity, while still being an interesting and readily digestible read. 5E Revised went a little farther along that first axis than I liked, but remained manageable. Sixth Edition makes me feel like I'm studying to pass the bar. Even over a decade later, I still haven't read through the whole thing.

AEMH was one of the best animated series ever, and it had amazingly fine depictions of nearly every character.  I'd never liked the Wasp before and she was great in that show.  Even Kang was less crappy than he usually is.

I thought Carol's depiction as Ms. Marvel in the animated Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes was one of the most rounded incarnations of the character, doing her justice without going overboard while still making her interesting and relatable.
 
That series got so much right about the Marvel Universe. I'm still bummed it got cancelled for an inferior replacement.

I'm mostly familiar with her from some appearances in the X-books from the late 80s, early 90s, where she's shown to be a competent team player. Granted, the character has been around for a very long time, and like many characters has a garbage back story, but I'm sure there are several incarnations better than what they put on screen.

Or some guy whose name rhymes with Maron Bordo.

Trump's brain is like a glass of carbonated water. Bubbles of gas randomly rise to the surface.

I would have gone with a fart in the bath tub, but a glass of carbonated water works too, I guess.

Harmon got it totally, utterly wrong if he thought Marvels needed less Ms. Marvel.  I shall elaborate within this spoiler tag:
 
 
IMO of course.

There's more than one way to skin a cat.

You know, reading this thread, it struck me why they need to ditch Kang: The Kang in Loki is, by definition, the most competent of the Kangs. And he's been dealt with already. Loki's Kang already won the Kang multiversal war. The threat of another war is moot with Loki being elevated to a cosmic being, and the TVA monitoring the timelines for Kang variants.
 
I just saw a video (read: take this with a huge grain of salt) saying that there was only one Marvel movie slated for 2024 release. I think they're taking the opportunity to catch their breath and try to get their mojo back. IMO, they should be looking to replicate the earlier success of building up a longer storyline with a big event conclusion. They aren't going to do it with a bunch of second stringer characters. Iron Man wasn't as well known to the general public as Hulk, Spider-Man, and Captain America, but he was a lot more familiar than anything that came around in the second/third wave of heroes.
 
Ms. Marvel was popular with comics readers, and although I never read her book I thought it was one of the better Disney+ shows. Most people panned it as another M-She-U project, but the story was well done. The same happened with Hawkeye, which I thought was great. Two of the strongest shows in the line up were dismissed because the general audience weren't familiar with the characters involved, and didn't want to give them a chance after other projects soured their taste. A local radio idiot the other day said the title for The Marvels was boring, because it was the same as the name of the company, and unoriginal. Another critic complained that Ms Marvel and Captain Marvel's uniforms were too similar, showing an apparent lack of knowledge of the concept of legacy characters in comics. Many, many idiots have complained that they didn't need to make a female Hulk who's better at controlling her change than Bruce, where we see her as a classic character, and know that she'd gained control over her powers and decided to live as She Hulk full time in the comics at one point. There's a lot of stuff comics readers understand, and many characters we recognize, that the general public doesn't.
 
IMO, they should focus on putting Avengers and Avengers legacy characters (like all those Young Avengers they've introduced) on the small screen on Disney Plus shows, and keep them disconnected (even if they share continuity) from the movie universe. Then they move forward with a Fantastic Four or X-Men franchise that builds up to something. Or both. They can run one cosmic/multi-dimensional adventure track with Fantastic Four, and run a largely Earthbound track for X-men. There's also crossover potential for events once the X-men introduces their own cosmic and multidimensional threats. There's enough material in both franchises to keep each its own phase. Any way they approach it, they need to find new, fresh spaces to play in, but with highly recognizable characters. (I probably wouldn't start with Fantastic Four due to their prior history on screen possibly tainting the franchise given the public's lowered expectations of quality from the studio.)

Hermit have hit 25,000! The half way mark! PUNY NANOWRIMO! YOU SEEK TO CHALLENGE HERMIT?
Rarh! Hermit care nothing for Plot! Hermit no need grammar! Hermit no kare spellin!
No, Hermit make WORD THINGS! HE MAKE WORD THINGS GO!
 
*storms off to desert mesa amid the wreckage and debris of the English language*
 
 

Not the place for rumors....and definitely not the place for known-false rumors.

She was not in the car and was not [edit]directly[/edit] targeted in any way. It was an unmarked Secret Service vehicle which three people were observed attempting to break into...in an area that has seen a 100% rise in car thefts over the past year.

Biased comment here, but there also Metahumans Rising. 

Kolchak: The Night Stalker had some pulpy elements.
 
The Serpent and the Rainbow, while not pulp, I could see being used for inspiration.