Clonus

Re: Ctrl+V While somewhere in the world someone might be building steam engines, since it's only been 15 years, you could travel a long, long way before you ran into one of them.

Re: You Don't Have to be Crazy to be a Superhero, but it Helps! The Avengers fight Magneto. That how Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch ended up as a Avengers. Well, there is something awkward about mutantcy. It's this: Accidental origins first manifest their powers while recovering from kind of accident, usually as adults. Constructs are built with their powers and usually the knowledge of how to use them Experiments usually gain their powers in the context of an organization and are trained in how to use them before the public ever sees them. Aliens were raised by people with the same powers and once again arrive as mature adults. Mutants on the other hand tend to manifest their powers as adolescents in the grip of strong emotion. If you think about it, you can see why they might have a slightly higher than average chance of doing something that alienates their parents and school chums.

Re: Ctrl+V Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Bentham didn't believe in rights at all - "nonsense on stilts" - and Burke believed in the "divine right" of kings. In short, they disagreed and that meant they weren't True Scotsmen. For those keeping score at home the fallacies being offered are: 1. Assuming the Answer 2. Appeal to Authority 3. No True Scotsman 4. Ad Hominem 5. Ad Ignorantium Of course, that doesn't mean the proposition isn't true. To assume that based on the failure of the other party to offer a valid arguement is also a fallacy. Please describe precisely how you would have argued with Jefferson when he wrote that it is a self-evident truth that we are endowed with certain rights that precede any establishment of government; that government is instituted to secure those rights. Actually he said "we hold" that these things are a self-evident truth All that means is "We are going to take these propositions for granted and not question whether they are true". Calling something "self-evident" is only really true when the proposition is something circular like "If 1+1=2 then 2=1+1" or "This is a sentence". "It's obvious" is not and never will be a compelling argument. Jefferson wasn't arguing in favour of those propositions, however. He was using them as an axiom for his real argument, which is that revolution can be justified for anyone who accepts them. However for anyone who does not have a pseudo-religious faith in the founders of the American government, "Jefferson said it" isn't enough to establish that it is true.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... The Insidious Fu Manchu. Holy cow those guys get rescued by the girl all the time. I'm cataloguing all of Dr F.s deadly devices.

Re: What Fiction Book (other than Science Fiction or Fantasy) have you recently finis Fifteen Seconds. A plastic surgeon is pulled over for a minor traffic violation but then finds himself on the run after the policeman is shot. It's an incoherent action movie waiting to happen and makes about as much sense as this video. (Contains vulgarities) Disappointing particularly since the point where they start asking him all these 9/11esque questions about people he was never with and places he'd never been looked like a promising paranoid storyline inspired by the author's real life experience with paranoid cops. But then the whole thing derails into timewasting nonsense.

Re: Ctrl+V Deryni Rising. Of course the Deryni trilogy had a section at the back explaining the way in which "magic" powers were inherited, with words like "sex-linked genetic trait" so we're not exactly talking about flights of poetic fancy.

Re: Are Thanos and Darkseid the Same Person? Amusing factoid. Elongated Man was only created because the guy who created him didn't know D.C. already had the Plastic Man rights.

Re: Are Thanos and Darkseid the Same Person? Black Cat and Catwoman on the other hand...

Re: Are Thanos and Darkseid the Same Person? Ms Marvel and Mary Marvel aren't really versions of each other. They're just the chick versions of two characters named Captain Marvel who are nothing at all alike Although Mary Marvel's costume did sort of drift in the direction of Ms Marvel's when she made her heel turn...

Re: Ratios of Superpower Archetypes On the other hand, different nations produce different inspirations that will affect the ratios in practice. For example if I'm looking at China I'd look at their movies and that would suggest more, and more powerful martial artists. Do not fear the stereotype. The stereotype is your friend as long as you don't make a cage.

Re: Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities So then titillation is sexist and that's all there is to it?

Re: I have a dream. (and MAN was it wierd!) I dreamed I was a (single) pregnant young woman trying to deal with the issue of whether I should accept my gynecologist's impulsive proposal of marriage. I decided I should at least talk to him about it, but when I found him, he was a hotel maid and I was a man again. Belatedly I realize that I was now the gynecologist and the hotel maid was the pregnant young woman.

Re: looking for non-Causasian pulp roles If you don't want sidekicks, then perhaps villains I would like to draw your attention to Dragon Lady from the period comic strip "Terry and the Pirates", the half-caste pirate queen who, in the years leading up to American participation in World War II became a hero of sorts as a leader of Chinese resistance against the Japanese invaders. Then there's Twenty Faces, Edogawa Rampo's Lupin-like master of disguise who got an heroic makeover in a fairly recent cartoon.

Re: Popularity of Superhero Groups in a Shared Universe 1. The Avengers and the Fantastic Four have done a lot more actual world saving than the X-Men, and the saving they do gets a lot more publicity. 2. The X-Men are "racially" exclusive. Which do you think would be more popular with white people, a superhero team named the Rainbow Coalition, or the Black Powers Alliance? 3. The front man of the Fantastic Four is the world's greatest genius. Even the crumbs that fall off his table have been key to the technological advances of the last 20 years in his world. The front man of the Avengers is a flagsuit of unimpeachable integrity who used to punch out Hitler.

Re: Attractiveness - Comeliness Vs. Striking Appearance What you should do is consider Striking Appearance + relevant skills.

Re: A Thread For Random Links Great moments in newspaper retractions. http://kipwblog.blogspot.ca/2012/08/blog-post.html

Re: Superman Averts World War II? In my version, he intervenes on August 31st, the day before Germany invades Poland during the Gliewitz incident. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident. He tries to "arrest" Hitler and turns him over to the Court of International Justice in Brussels along with the SS troops who actually carried them out and the concentration camp prisoner they were planning to murder as stage dressing for the hoax. In the comic book book story the actual Superman intervenes in the invasion of Poland on what would have been a day or so after the 17th of September, and "arrests" both Hitler and Stalin.

Re: Superman Averts World War II? Frankly...I don't agree with Wylie. While Danner couldn't single-handedly win the war, it was well within his physical capability to ensure that any one of those futile frontal assaults would instead become a victory just by taking out a few machine guns. You may have noticed that it's not really my scenario. It's cribbed from an actual Superman story with minor modifications. That's why I made him an alien who doesn't quite understand the limitations of the International Court of Justice and the League of Nations that sponsored it until he learns the hard way. Not Russian society. Understand he doesn't do anything about nations declaring war. Had the Germans just gone ahead and said that Poland had something they wanted and they were gonna beat up Poland and take it, he would have stayed out of it. After all, he absolutely will not kill humans, and that leaves him ill-equipped to decide wars. But he flew out to Poland under the impression that private citizens were committing crimes that risked starting a war. He loses his temper when he discovers that it's a frame-up job and tries to bring the perpetrator to justice. But, discovering the hard way that just doesn't work, he doesn't keep on doing it. That being the case, the primary impact of his stunt is psychological. At first, nobody knows what his limits are, in any sense of the word. If they decide to call his "bluff", he's not going to charge out into the thick of battle and try to single-handedly win the war. But they don't know that. They don't know whether he can single-handedly win the war or just fly back in and pop Hitler's head like a grape. The title of this thread is not "Superman wins World War II". It's Superman averts World War II...with a question mark. If the superclone can't do that, he shrugs and goes back to simpler issues that he actually understands. What might end up happening is that he just ends up delaying the start of the war until 1942 when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. The Germans join in and attack Poland while sending creating robots, monsters and villains to menace the United States, hoping to defeat the superman, and consoling themselves in their failures that at least they are keeping him sticking close to home...unaware that he'd be staying home anyway.

Re: A Thread for Random Videos ​

Re: Ctrl+V We can hardly count Rhoda as near-main cast without counting Diane. As for the only way a population that skewed making sense, I can think of one way it makes sense. Suppose just for the sake of argument that lesbians had some kind of mysterious reason to seek one another out. If that were the case then once a single lesbian was introduced into the storyline from then on there would be an elevated chance that any new new female character introduced would turn out to be a lesbian. But why would lesbians be attracted to each other? I shall have to ponder this.

Re: Ctrl+V http://narwhalslefttooth.blogspot.ca/2011/03/tusk-smugglers-convicted.html

Re: World War Two Campaign GURPS Weird War II had the samebito, reptiloid undersea dwellers who served a "Dragon King" as possible Japanese allies.

Re: Superman Averts World War II? Actually its harder than you may think to do lethal amounts of damage to a human sized object that can fly faster than any airplane of the time and can't actually be killed with one hit. An intensive artillery barrage is bad enough that if one was coming at him, he'd probably beat a hasty retreat, but he's eminently equipped to do that. Also it's hard to surprise him what with his ability to detect and understand radio and see right through conventional camouflage.

Re: World War Two Campaign Pearl Harbor is a long, long way away from the mid-atlantic (where Atlantis usually located). It would probably be part of a completely different undersea nation's territory and if all the Atlantean attacks occurred in the Atlantic, it probably wouldn't make that much difference to their level of alertness at Pearl. Perhaps more significantly the kind of measures they'd take against the Atlanteans, wouldn't be all that useful against aerial attack. The Atlanteans would attack with with commando groups and kaiju, not flying machines.

Re: Ctrl+V