Lawnmower Boy

All three hundred of me hate Aquaman! It's a genuine social movement!

I'm going to agree with Lord Liaden that the Alien Wars setting has more potential for both RPG and fan fiction purposes, and that the Galactic Federation period only really seems interesting as the backdrop for a Galactic Champions campaign. When I dabbled in CU fan fiction, I wrote a time travel caper drawing together Bronze Age (Kung Fu stylings of 1975!), 2012 (because that was then), 2600, and 3012. I'm guessing at the "2600" date. I thought that I had avoided the era of Empress Marissa, but it's been a long time since I wrote the material, and I suspect that my recollections are wrong. The Civil War-Marissa-Stephen period is the centre of gravity of the whole Terran Empire storyline, and knowing me I might have tried to rehabilitate Stephen, as I think clones get a bum rap in science fiction. Anyway, Sovereign (the GC villain) is trying to use time travel devices to screw around with history and prevent the rise of the Galactic Federation, and for some reason the 2600ish era was where he was trying to do it, and modern super heroes get mixed in because of course they do. But! Self indulgence aside, the point I'm trying to get across is that after setting my time machines in motion and working out my story, I found myself gravitating not to the periods I had chosen for episodes of the fan fiction, but to the dark days of the Alien Wars. It is just a whole lot cooler than the Terran Empire, which, while it has a lot to recommend it, doesn't transcend the sum of its parts.

Hey hey hey. Explosives aren't dangerous sitting around. They're only dangerous when they explode! I'm sure the owners didn't plan on all that fertiliser exploding, so no worries!

I feel like this is a rerun of my last post here, but I just binge watched The Tick. Yes, I'm one of those guys who got talked into signing up for a full month of free Amazon Prime and haven't been bothered to cancel the subscription since. Unlike Cloak and Dagger Season 2, this wasn't unexpectedly good. I knew it had a good rating from the critics, but I was surprised at the way that it was good. One review talks about "likeable characters," and it is exactly that. Uhm, spoilerish.

Sorry, dude. Bandwagon's full.

Finally watched Cloak and Dagger, Season 2, which I'd been putting off, as the first season struck me as mediocre at best. It was more or less so in preparation for watching Runaways,season 3, but I have to say that I was very impressed. Season 2 took what Season 1 handed it and made it good television.

It's not as hard as it seems Just be fast, efficient and courteous as you see the customer through the process. Before long, they'll be as professional as you are, and have no problem with intimate sharing with your interface. . . . Okay, I'm reaching with the last bit. I also find the comparison a bit disingenuous. We're dealing with adults, here. (The kids are below counter level). And we have our plexiglas shields.

This seems like classic pretrial stuff. The DA's office says that the pistol was "substantially" capable of being fired. Obviously, if the pin was in wrong, it wasn't able to fire, but otherwise, it was fine. Hence, "substantially." The defence says that the "substantially" is doing a lot of work, tainting the jury pool with the idea that the pistol was capable of being fired. So is the prosecutor exploiting the baffling power of legalese to weight the scales of justice, or is the defence using this as a rationale to plant the idea the gun was disable when it maybe wasn't? Sounds like this is going to be one of those fun juries.

Clearly, everything flourishes under the benevolent rule of strong men. Even viri flock to their leadership!

I never find posting in this thread all that satisfying, but it looks like we're not going to get to p. 666 any time soon if I don't pitch in.

Pincer? I hardly knew her! So. Had a discussion with some handy young people (Niece1 and Nephew4), who are the ones who would have to do the invading. They clarified their position on going to America in any capacity right now. It is: "Nope nope nope they have guns there." So you're going to have to take care of this on your own. All your problems: Coronavirus, guns, Aquaman, all of them. (What? I'm not the one that brought up Hermit's nemeses!) On the other hand, I wouldn't be a Canadian if I didn't have some smug and condescending advice for my American cousins! Have you thought about going back on your meds?

I dunno, boss. 71,670 cases today and deaths getting back on trend. . . This seems like as good a time as any for reminding you that you still haven't made a call on who gets your comics collection. If, you know, well

Yes, but I can't help thinking that that's a mistake.

You're Number I! You're Number 1! ...um, America? If something happens to you, can we have your comic collection?

Checks out.

Heh heh. He said "high."

I admit that Torontonians are strangely humourless about the ancient Canadian tradition of talking trash about Toronto

Thank you! Here in Vancouver, we had rain, cloud, maybe a snowflake or two(!), social distancing, and, in general, no fun whatsoever. A fine time was had by all.

You're on fire, Hermit!

Nub nub!

Holy crap, MIchael. Look after yourself!

Yeah, well, the most obvious explanation is that it is an observational artefact, but I do so want it to be true . . .

To be fair, the drow sure do know how to make pancake syrup. And, more importantly, the introduction of the duergar and derro makes it clear that the drow aren't just an evil race that happens to be dark-skinned. It's more like all dark-skinned races are evil. See? Much better.

So as part of my "postblogging technology" hobby, I do little appendices where I try to do a deep dive into current problems in technology in the period I'm looking at. Since I'm doing the spring of 1950 right now, a very pressing issue is Edward Teller running around telling everyone that he knows how to make a hydrogen bomb, when, in fact, he doesn't. So this raises an interesting question about all the mistaken ideas there might have been about hydrogen bombs and related subjects (including how stars work!) specifically in the spring of 1950. To make a long story short, I'm no Edward Whittaker, and anyway much of this stuff didn't get published anyway, but I did learn some things. Did you know that einsteinium was first discovered in the fallout from Ivy Mike? Did you know that this success led to a series of nuclear tests in the 1950s that aimed at making new transuranic elements, including using bombs make of mixed plutonium, neptunium, americium and thorium? (The higher transuranic elements make disappointing booms in fission bombs --or, at least they did in the 1960s.) Did you know that they detected einsteinium in a star in 2008, for which astrophysics apparently has no explanation whatsoever. Although aliens might be dumping nuclear waste, the star in question is a long way from anywhere you might want a nuclear reactor; a hidden reservoir of slowly decaying "island of stability" elements is both gonzo and suggestive that there might be a lot more of these elements than theory currently predicts. Anyway, I ask if you knew any of that, because I sure as heck didn't!