archer

Ammo shell casings for reloading. It's very difficult to make those on your own.

Raw lead for muzzle-loading bullets - most often found "in the wild" as tire weights on old cars.

Salt - you need it for health but also for flavoring and for tanning hides

Spices - because people crave flavor. Garlic, vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, cocoa, honey, bullion, baking supplies. Canning supplies (jars, lids, wax).

Brewing yeast, baking yeast

Candy

Pre-war liquor, tea, coffee, cigarettes

Medicine - antibiotics, aspirin, Tylenol, Motrin, multi-vitamin, soap, cough medicine, sunscreen, Chapstick, feminine hygiene products, diabetic supplies if the apocalypse just happened and there's still diabetic people around.

Dental floss - also works for cordage/thread.

Heirloom vegetable and grain seeds

Hand pump and/or siphon to move water or fuel out of inaccessible places.

Wool clothing if you're in a cold climate.

Matches, fire starters, flint, lighters, lighter fluid, lamps, wicks, candles

Decent camping stuff because there'll be more people on the road than available supplies. Pup tent, sleeping bag, space blanket, backpack, crank flashlight, waterproof windbreaker, tarp. The smaller and more lightweight, the better because people will quickly figure out they can't carry a crapload of gear while not eating well.

Lockpick gun - for getting into other people's stash quietly or getting into abandoned buildings quietly.

Bolt cutters - for when you get into a place a bit more obviously. A lot of the good salvage will be behind padlocks and/or chains.

Fishing line, weights, and hooks

Books on herb uses.
Books on how to survive.

Books on how to grow food.

Books on how to repair things.

Books on recognizing plants.

Paper maps (of other areas, you don't want other people foraging the good stuff within easy riding distance). Yellow pages of other towns.

Cheap knives and whetstones. Hand tools will be popular but most people won't be willing to trade an irreplaceable tool.

Portable preserved food, particularly meats.

Needle and thread. Heavier needles for mending tarps, sails, and such. Duct tape, silicone, scissors, pins, safety pins, super glue

Mousetraps and fly swatters, ant & roach killer

Chickens/eggs

Rechargeable batteries

Cloth and mesh bags

For any friends studying the citizenship exam:

1 minute ago, unclevlad said:

 

I thought that was Jameis Winston.

I've never seen the two of them in the same place....

1 hour ago, unclevlad said:

 

There's been numerous times when he's suggested he doesn't have 2 functioning brain cells, so...

I think he has two and they alternate working on Thursdays....

For those of you who give essay tests:

https://www.officedepot.com/cm/print-and-copy/shredding? -scroll down to get a coupon for 5 Free Pounds of in-store paper shredding at Office Depot stores. Expires 4/23.

3 hours ago, Duke Bushido said:

 

Barring the technicalities of how he finds out what is going in in time to do anything, or how gets to the plane far enough out over the ocean to have the time to do anything, there is the simpler issue of knowing what to do.  

 

For example:  I was sixty-two years and a few weeks old when I leaned that cockpit windows can be opened.   Is it something that Peter Parker would know?

 

I was thinking that, like the time he got to the Apollo capsule, that this time he'd be given a ride by the Air Force.

And that they'd tell him what he could do.

The whole "Spider-Man saves the day" falls apart if he's not working with people who have access to jets and radar. And it'd be silly to think that the Air Force would go through all that trouble to deliver him but not tell him of ways he could save the plane.  

I doubt Spider-Man knew how to safely open the Apollo parachute doors from the outside without brute forcing them open and potentially leaving jagged bits of metal which would have cut the parachute's cords. Obviously, he was told what to do.

The Dharma and Greg Initiative

The DHARMA (Department of Heuristics And Research on Material Applications) Initiative was a scientific research project which was at the heart of many mysteries of the island from the "Lost" TV series.

Dharma from "Dharma and Greg" was a carefree girl (born to hippie parents) who ended up spontaneously marrying an uptight lawyer/federal government employee.

Don't feel bad, on occasion I've been known to get confused and post content on the wrong website, never mind the wrong thread.

On 4/14/2022 at 7:15 PM, Christopher R Taylor said:

 

He's got around 40 STR so even with pushing there's nothing at all he could do about a jumbo jet crashing into a building.  He'd rescue a ton of people and clear rubble, etc as people said.

Well, Spider-Man wouldn't necessarily be lifting the airplane.

If he can get to the airplane, the cockpit windows are designed so that the pilots can escape through them in the event of a crash. (And in one comic, Spider-Man made it onto a landing Apollo capsule with the help of the Air Force so getting onto an airplane piloted by an inexperienced pilot who can't do evasive maneuvers isn't impossible.)

So Spider-Man could break in through a window, schlep himself in, knock out the terrorists, and either restore control to the pilot or steer it himself into a water landing rather than a skyscraper crash.

Or he could just alter the control surfaces from the outside so that he determines where the airplane goes. Webbing covering the jet intakes powers down the engines. Webbing also alters the angle of the flaps. He's certainly strong enough to overcome the hydraulics controlling the flaps.

On 1/8/2022 at 2:19 PM, Riposte said:

Hello everyone,

 

I need a good name for a kind of mafia created and controlled by supervillain. Tired of fighting heros in bad world's conquest plan, they decided to organised the mundane crime such as vice, drugs, weapons dealing, racket....

 

They have customs, tradition, rules.... but... i dont have a name.

 

Any suggestion?

Make it something to do with the origin of the group. 

Like if they're coming from a working class blue collar background, make it something like the Hardhat Union.

If they're traditional Italian mafia, name them after their don, like Stephano's Men.

Or make it originating from their part of the city like if they're primarily based in Fisherman's Wharf, call them the Wharfers.

Or based around the name or background for the founding supervillain.

6 hours ago, Logan.1179 said:

I just finished the Donna Troy episodes. 

 

Holy crap! I had heard for a long time that Donna had the worst continuity in comics, but I had no idea! I never really read the character, honestly, so I knew very little of this story. I never dreamed it would be that bad. Just amazing. 

I thought her getting married to a non-super would be the worst thing that could possibly happen to the character. 

But DC was certainly determined to prove me wrong. 

Repeatedly.

NATO member Romania has grounded its remaining fleet of 23 to 36 MiG-21 LanceR jets as of Friday given their "considerably high accident rate", and will speed up a planned purchase of second-hand F-16s from Norway, their defense ministry said.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/romania-suspends-military-mig-21-flights-speed-up-f-16-purchase-2022-04-15/

The MiG-21 is an older generation of fighter than the MiG-29 that Ukraine currently uses. And Ukraine has used the -21 in the past. So it's similar enough that their pilots could use them immediately if they had them. And the -21 was specifically designed to be friendly to low-skill pilots so it could be easily exported to third world countries.

Since Romania will no longer use them at all due to a crash in bad weather in March, it'd seem a no-brainer to work out some deal to transfer them to Ukraine.

1 minute ago, Bazza said:

Some of those is fan fiction.  

Not if you're credulous enough....

12 hours ago, Steve said:

Since Pittsburgh is known as Steel City, I think one of its major heroes should be a powered armor sort or have Steel in their name somehow.

Could go for something more generic of a working class hero's outfit or tools like Hardhat Union, Red Welder, Center Punch, Hammer Drill, Chop Saw, Dark Grinder, Lathe Lass, Band Saw, Plasma Arc, Pittsburg Hacksaw, Sledgehammer, etc.

5 hours ago, unclevlad said:

To continue that, I'm not sure how many people will really notice if there are no presidential debates. My feeling is...not that many.  And if that's close to true?  It's implausible to think it'll make any difference in the fall mid-terms.

 

 

In 2016, Trump got an excessive amount of free media coverage by all the cable news channels as they showed his rallies repeatedly in their entirety while not doing the same for his opponents.

In 2020, only Fox really covered his rallies and I don't know whether they showed them in their entirety. But Trump was able to communicate with his potential voters on social media.

I really don't know what a 2024 contest would look like if networks don't show Trump rallies, Trump has no access to social media, he doesn't show himself to the public in debates, and he doesn't have the opportunity to directly confront the sitting president who gets a lot of free media coverage himself because he's a sitting president.

I think people would eventually notice that they're not getting anything but campaign ads to tell them about the candidates they have to choose between...and be dissatisfied at the lack of seeing a direct confrontation between them.

I don't think Trump at that point will be able to successfully spin, even to his own voters, that he's better off not debating. And certainly won't be able to spin it to his advantage to swayable voters because he won't have access to them in order to sway them.

2 cents

15 hours ago, Logan.1179 said:

A shark could swim faster than me, but I could probably run faster than a shark.

 

So, in a triathlon, it would all come down to who is the better cyclist.

Swimming traditionally comes first so I doubt you could make it out of the water in a race with a shark.  

3 hours ago, Lord Liaden said:

[pedantry] Luke was not one of the traditional twelve Apostles, and it's very unlikely he ever personally met Jesus. [/pedantry]

 

Great joke, though.

Well, how many got book deals depends on how credulous you are.

[pedantry] Peter got a two books which made the bible and one book which didn't. Plus John's four books, Matthew, and Jude which all were written and permanently made it into the Bible. 

That's still four apostles who got official book deals. [/pedantry]

Plus...

Acts of Andrew exists now only in fragmentary form but was known to early church figures and appears to have been written before various Catholic rituals were made and formalized (definitely pre-2nd century origin).

The Gospel of Philip was known in the early days of the church but didn't make the final cut for being included in the Bible mostly because it was lost then finally rediscovered in the 20th century.

Gospel of Thomas

Gospel of Bartholomew

Gospel of Judas (Iscariot) which consists of conversations between Jesus and Judas

Plus the Gospel of Barnabas and the Epistle of Barnabas, even though he wasn't made an apostle until weeks after the Last Supper.

That gives a new meaning to "Is it I, Lord?"

I've been enjoying For All Mankind on Apple+.

It basically is an alternate history of the space race where the Russians took a huge chance to try to make it to the moon first and actually succeeded.

That lit a fire under the space race with both the Republicans and Democrats fighting over which party was more devoted to making sure that the US had the finest space program on the planet and off the planet.

It digs up a lot of real details of people who were astronauts (and those who were washed out of the program in the real world) and intertwines it with technical details of what NASA was really working on or had ready in the late 60's and early 70's to create a compelling tale of what NASA could have been and would have done if Nixon hadn't decided to trashcan NASA's budget.

Season 1 focused on the events surrounding the first US manned landing on the moon and the aftermath of being the second country there rather than the first. It covered the Nixon administration 68-72 and the Ted Kennedy administration 72-76. The main characters for all seasons are astronauts, mission control, NASA administrators, and families.

Season 2 alluded to events from the first Reagan administration 76-80 and took place mostly in the second Reagan administration 80-84 in the depths of the Cold War. And how the space stations, moon bases, and regular spaceflights affected world events.

Season 3 isn't out yet but a teaser seemed to show that a NERVA rocket has taken man to Mars in the mid-90's rather than just running shuttles to the moon.

I haven't really looked at anything yet in either season and said to myself that the writers hadn't done their research and got their facts wrong. That's unusual because I pick most shows to death.

I mean some things are unfixable within budget constraints like coming up with ways for everything in every shot looking like it's in lunar gravity. But if you ignore the occasional pot belly and/or bust line, the lack of technical fixes for low gravity isn't 

glaring.

1 hour ago, Cancer said:

 

No doubt he gets better grades than a number of my students.

Some are willing to do the lab work and others aren't.

Personally, I always hated lab work.

I much prefer working with a notebook and a pen than with equipment. (But that might be a leftover trauma from having to dissect a giant rat in 10th grade biology.)

1 hour ago, Lord Liaden said:

But it might have some influence on the Congressional mid-terms. The Democrats need to go on the attack more in general.

Well, the midterms are seven months away and that issue doesn't directly impact the midterm election itself.

I'd think they'd be better off trying to pass more legislation and pointing out the benefits of the legislation they've passed. And if they wanted to pull out an unrelated issue for the midterms, talk about how many Republicans are supporting Russia and not supporting Ukraine.

I mean, the presidential debate commission is kind of a real "inside baseball" kind of issue that means a lot to policy wonks and fans of the political process. But I don't think it'll have much effect on most people...until the debates either do or don't happen.

@unclevlad

Well, I wasn't thinking about interweaving a lot.

Say they're all happening on the same day. 

There's some Nick Fury or Amanda Waller figure appearing in all three movies doing the "what the hell is happening" routine, along with the "Get the Joint Chiefs on the phone" and "There's heroes on the scene? Who are they? Well, find the hell out!"

I don't really know the superprisons in the DC Universe but say there's

Belle Reve Correctional Center which is the ARGUS semi-black site

Arkham Asylum

Blackgate

Iron Heights

Slabside

Jump City

Stryker's Island

Pick three of those for the stories you want to tell. 

The three movies action all start on the same Breakout Day. Each prison is responded to by a different set of heroes who don't interact with the heroes in the other movies since they're busy at different prisons in different cities. Whether each movie in-world time lasts hours or days will vary.

In each movie, each hero becomes aware of the problem and makes their way to the nearest prison break.

In one movie, for example, Beast Boy lands next to a bystander or guard and asks them what's going on. The guy points off down the street saying that several people in costumes just ran down that way. In the distance you can see people in costumes, broken windows, flipped cars, downed power lines, etc. They appear to be arguing about how fast to flee versus how much destruction they're going to do along the way. People who are fans of the comics ought to be able to pick out who several of them are by the costumes.

As Beast Boy turns back to the guy, he's blindsided by Solomon Grundy and the fight's on. As he's struggling with Grundy, other costumed villains continue to stream by, with the occasional one taking a potshot at him and distracting Grundy.

Robin, Cyborg, Speedy, Raven, and Kid Flash appear individually as the fights go along.

Starfire shows up. No one recognizes her because she's newly arrived on Earth and one of the heroes engages her thinking she's a villain. Robin eventually figures out she's not on the list and she's recruited to their side.

That group of heroes never make it inside the prison. They end up chasing some villain or villains who Robin considers to be particularly dangerous then get repeatedly sidetracked by responding to police reports of various levels of desperation. They put down those villains as they pop up but some get reported as escaped again because the heroes can't guard them until the prison authorities who can contain them arrive.

They end up catching up with Robin's target at the end of the movie and foiling the scheme the guy had started before going to jail. But they don't end up catching him.

The movie ends up with the "team" having a mixed record because they weren't organized and were overwhelmed by events. Several of the heroes are frustrated. Robin vows to train them to work together if they'll stick with him.

Feel good end to the movie but they'll have to deal with the public and police fallout of their less than stellar record of keeping villains under wraps. And they'll have to watch out for Robin's target if he wants to return.

====

In the Justice League movie, in contrast, they manage to get to the prison before most of the inmates hit the streets. The fighting is a cat-and-mouse game of working their way through all the various sections of the prison finding villains who are hiding, teaming up, breaking through walls, trying to find their gear, etc.

Ends up most of the villains have been sent out as part of a delaying tactic by a mastermind villain who is trying to release the kraken (or Mongol, Mordru, or the uber-powerful villain of your choice).

The Justice League ends up with a better public reputation because they can immediately throw their captured escapees into a cell.

====

In the Freedom Fighters movie, the prison in near Washington DC. Some of the villains get into their heads that they want to go to the Pentagon and seize control of the US's nuclear weapons.

So they rampage through DC while only having a vague idea of where the Pentagon is.

The heroes have to wrangle villains, protect national monuments, protect a few politicians, etc.

And have a final showdown in the heart of the Pentagon where the villains find out that the nuclear weapons aren't controlled by the Pentagon.

The team gets good press though having had to deal with the not-so-bright end of the villain spectrum. The team picks up political support and somewhere along the way gains a clue as to who might have engineered the event.

====

I don't know, just spit-balling. The movies all start on the same day. But in different cities, prisons, heroes, villains, etc. They're more tied together by timing than with any character interaction.

On 4/8/2022 at 10:24 PM, Ternaugh said:

 

First season of Foundation, which isn't bad if you've never heard of Isaac Asimov and the Foundation series of books before. (Apple TV+)

 

Yeah, I was disappointed that Seldon and his encyclopedists didn't spend more time on Trantor, which was a more interesting setting than the spaceship or Terminus. You wouldn't need much in the way of set, just corridors and CGI huge crowds of people moving through them.

Seeing him gathering resources, recruiting personnel, rejecting spies applying to be personnel, and generally scheming to get what he wanted would have been a lot more entertaining than what the viewing audience actually got (Oh look she's swimming, again, and counting numbers, again).

minor spoilers:

And they never got around to explaining why the Galactic Empire was crumbling: education was stifled and rote memorization constituted training for many technical positions. So people who were maintaining the infrastructure of civilization didn't understand the machinery they were maintaining, people who built spaceships didn't understand the underlying theory of what they were doing, crewmen of spaceships were hit-and-miss on whether they could fix their own ships (and spare parts were increasingly a problem).

One of the great points of the books were that a general could have pulled the breakaway sections of the Empire back together.

1) But if he were incompetent, he couldn't do it.

2) If he were competent but disloyal, he'd be better off turning his ships against the center and taking over the remaining Empire than trying to reconquer the fringes.

3) If he were competent but loyal, the emperor would fear him and eventually either kill him or promote him out of the field so that he no longer commanded a fleet of ships.

And the thing that drove me up the wall about the TV version is that they make the point that an exceptional individual can change the course of history. That not only invalidates the entire concept of psychohistory but is exactly the opposite of the point which Asimov made in his books: history is formed by relentless sociological pressures and expressed through economics, warfare, and many other methods while the individual and his attempts to alter the fates of trillions upon trillions of people scattered around the galaxy were doomed to fail if they worked against the relentless tide of history.

If they want a successful comic book universe for the movies, there's just one secret: quit telling origin stories (over and over) and instead start in the middle of a universe about superheroes having adventures. 

I'd recommend the new head of DC projects to watch the TV cartoon series "The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes" from 2010-2012, particularly the first two episodes.

The world has 3 or 4 prisons for superpowered people. There's been a simultaneous escape engineered at all of them.

Heroes respond to all the sites, resulting in some teamups, some cases of mistaken identity, some villains immediately recaptured, and 75 superpowered villains being released back into the world.

Most villains are just seen as teased glimpses as they escape. Sometimes their powers are seen, sometimes not.

The first 2 episodes wrap with the heroes coming together to face one of the most powerful villains.

After, they realize that going it alone was okay while the threats were scattered. But some of the escapees have obviously joined together and there's just too many bad guys concentrated in a few areas for it to be safe to chase them solo. So the Avengers are born.

That's not a bad start when you don't have a $300 million theatrical budget plus five years of audience investment into the stories.

It teased fan favorite villains and left the viewer guessing as to which villains would be a major part of that part of the story. And it left unresolved who engineered the breakout, why, and how he found the prisons which were hidden. There was obvious sequels which the audience was invested in seeing.

Obviously you might not want to do exactly that. But if you did you could introduce a Justice League, the Teen Titans, and maybe another group like the Doom Patrol or the Freedom Fighters in a linked release of movies. 

And in the background of those movies, you could tease in TV reporting scenes that solo heroes (who are scheduled for upcoming movies) have responded to the emergency. Then when their movie comes up, do a flashback scene showing what they were doing on The Big Day.

Yeah, Marvel Comics had a big success with a multi-year slow rollout. But there's no reason you HAVE to do it like that if you make good movies which draw people into the situation. 

WWII movies rarely went into the socio-political underpinnings of the war in order to justify people fighting for one side over the other. They just showed people fighting the good fight and gave enough background for the characters to create some sympathy and to provide a viewpoint.

People know the origin stories for Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman already. But a Booster Gold origin story, for example, could be told in a couple of seconds by Skeets telling the crowd, "Booster's the hero from the future, come to save the day!" and a bit of chit-chat with other heroes who ask him if it's true.