archer

Well, he screwed up and half the living beings of the universe disappeared for five years because he didn't cut off Thanos's arm. His dad, brother, and sister died. Asgard was destroyed with his assistance. Most of the Asgardians who survived the destruction of Asgard died on the rescue boat that he was captaining.
 
For all we know, a 5000 year old being goes through the stages of grief very slowly. In any case, even though he's 2000 years old, what he's gone through is still unprecedented in his lifetime.
 
I mean, look at an adult human who's gone through 40% of his lifespan: he participates in the annihilation of the Earth, has his family die, tries to rescue a few people from Earth but they mostly all die on the rescue boat he's captaining. So how many years would he be going to therapy to get over that?  
 
That's not how I would have written Thor but it's an understandable(though not entertaining) reaction on the "My-Life-Is-Crap-O-Meter". 

I admit I think that class would be so much better if the AP stood for Armor Piercing.

One of the reasons I harp on that 501 commercial is that when he’s asked if he went to art school he grins like an idiot and says, “Nope, just talent.”    Except when you can see from things like this that he has none and could have really used some instruction on things like anatomy and perspective.  
   And most of his “original” characters like Deadpool and Domino are thinly disguised ripoffs of characters like Wolverine and Longshot.
   I don’t begrudge somebody being a hack, even a well payed one. But cocky about it I can do without.

Be sure to point out to him how many river systems which Texas absolutely dominates.
 
Then tell him how that changed the course of the Civil War (which wasn't very civil in absolute terms).

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.

For any friends studying the citizenship exam:

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

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.

I do prefer paper over PDFs, because I don't like electronics at the (Face to face) gaming table.

This is long, but IMO worth it. Academic who studoes corrup;tion assesses the US, China and (for the updated edition) Russia. Biggest takeaway: There are multiple forms of corruption, causing harm in different ways. If you want to reduce corruption, first you need to know what forms of corruption actually take place.
 
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/is-the-u-s-really-less-corrupt-than-china-and-how-about-russia-update/
 
Insight from the update: The oligarchs who rule/own Russia never had much reason to care about sanctions, and still don't. China is in a very different situation. (Sanctions might be difficult, but they would be different difficulties.)
 
Dean Shomshak

"Doctor, I keep thinking I'm a harp."
"You're not big enough to be a harp."
"Are you calling me a lyre?"

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.

I agree with you about Trantor. It would have been a better model for the writers to start with Prelude to Foundation, and stick with that for the first season. Second season could be Forward the Foundation, Third could start the stories in Foundation. It would also allow the cast to remain relatively stable during a season, but allow changes for the inevitable jumps in time in the overall story, without resorting to convoluted plots involving cold sleep, AI duplicates, or serial cloning. And it would allow the viewer to see examples of how the systems were breaking down, which would inevitably lead to the fall of the empire.
 
I would have also liked to see a Terminus like that described in the books. The initial colonization was described as 100,000 scientist colonists to a watery world with lots of islands and a mild climate. What we got was a small colony on cold, rocky world that, 35 years after planetfall, still hasn't moved much of the colonists out of what appears to be temporary tent structures. There's certainly no real mention of anyone working on the Encyclopedia Galactica, which was the purported reason for establishing the Foundation in the first place.
 
It would definitely help if they had someone on the writing staff that actually appeared to enjoy the source material, which does not currently appear to be the case.

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.

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

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

We need to write these guys up!
 
 

Can't remember if I told this here before, so if this is a repeat, I apologize.
 
I was running a Champions campaign based in New York City when 9/11 happened.  My game world was very much real world history with supers added.  I thought long and hard about how I was going to handle 9/11.  I didn't want to be disrespectful of the first responders who gave their lives trying to save others, which I think would have been the case if the PC heroes just saved the day and stopped the planes from hitting the WTC.  I also thought it would be sucky of me to have the PCs' efforts all be for naught as they tried to prevent the disaster. 
 
So I decided they weren't there that day.  They were at Sanctuary (the pro-supers island in the south Pacific), with the NYC teleport portal being in the basement of the WTC North Tower.  And when the first plane hit the North Tower, it also shut down the portal, so the PC heroes couldn't just teleport back home and save the South Tower.
 
There was another (NPC) superhero team in NYC in my world: the Guardians.  I decided they were caught by surprise when the first plane hit the North Tower and were helping to evacuate the North Tower when the second airliner came in.  A few Guardians were outside and tried to stop the plane but were unable to do so.  In the end, all but one of the Guardians died either trying to stop the second plane, or were killed when the towers collapsed.  (In later game sessions, I had an adventure where the PC heroes helped that NPC hero get over his survivor's guilt, though to be honest I don't really recall the details of that.)
 
Meanwhile, on Sanctuary the heroes saw the news about the first plane hitting.  They couldn't teleport to NYC, but there was a teleport portal in LA, so they went there, and then started heading across the country to get back to New York to help out however they could.  Along with pretty much all the supers who were at Sanctuary at the time.  As they crossed the country, they were joined by other supers from cities across the country (both heroes and villains).  Old animosities were set aside for the greater good.  When they got to Manhattan, the supers did what they could to search for survivors, help the injured, and so on, alongside the police, firefighters, and other people.  
 
It may not have been the best possible way to handle it, but I think it was at least respectful of those who lost their lives and those who responded to the tragedy as best they could, without making the PCs be completely ineffective.

I tend to avoid them.  It's a holdover from gaming in college.  I just got tired of the fighting between players when they came up on opposite opinions about real world events.
 
Proxies dont work; the mutant thing is proof of that.  Every time we start discussing the mutant thing, someone pokes in with "it's a proxy for racism!"  Yes.  We all know that.  It's really, _really_ obvious.  Most proxies are pretty obvious. 
 
That is the problem with them.  When you use a proxy, people still get it, they get the reference, and you are taking that "what if they have opposite opinions" chance.  People want to be the good guy championing justice against the forces of evil, and don't tend to react well to finding out that half their friends think they _are_ the bas guy on one or another topic.
 
Real events?  Things that have happened?  When approached as history-  yep; WW 1 and 2 haooened in this universe; yep, the presidents you liked and the ones you hated were also the presidents.  Yep, Native Americans were displaced and died-  when presented as _history_, folks take it as they take it in the real world.
 
Current events?   Nope.  Avoid them.  Not like the plague, though: current events demonstrates that too many people arent trying to avoid that, and even discussing it brings up ill will in half the people you might trt to discuss it with.
 
 
 

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.