Lawnmower Boy

Re: New foxbat for president trailer! As a foreigner, I can't vote. I am, however, required to make a sneering comment about guns, cowboys and racism, drag Nixon and Jim Crow into the conversation, and endorse someone even crazier (but lefter) than Foxbat. So, uhm, all you redneck cowboys should shoot your separate but equal water fountains at Kent State and vote for Pulsar. And now, we dance!

Re: Foxbat and... Well, obviously Takofanes. Everything goes better with Kal Turak. "For my first caper, will I throw the shadow of Turakian darkness over the world, leaving it a twilight horror made worse by the lights of a perverted science? Or rob the Quik-E-Freeze?...Umm, undead ice cream."

Re: Genetic Engineering? The two aren't necessarily that distinct. Classic factory work stops when the millstreams stop running (even after the steam engine, since early condensors relied heavily on stream water). In winter, when streams freeze and the roads are closed, everyone is spinning and weaving. In the summer, factories would close just in time for the grain harvest. Agricultural labourers classically suffered from seasonal underemployment that industrial work ameliorated.

Re: Where to send the scientific expedition

Re: Where to send the scientific expedition Nyrath, stop scaring the kids! (And thanks for the little dose of Bulglish, too.)

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... It was a remarkable piece of storytelling. And yet I couldn't touch Earth and feel no desire to read Kiln People or --that other one. Should I give Brin's other work a chance?

Re: If Earth was hit by a Meteor Move along, nothing to see here.

Re: dacoit? Narratio, you've got the facts on the ground, and I'm not going to argue. I'm still working out the parameters of a religio-political conflict I only tumbled onto last year. That said, China and the Qing dynasty definitely promoted Mahayana, so my suspicion was that one of the conflicts that made Burma such a difficult place to run was the fact that the Brits, having been snookered by their Sri Lankhan contacts, were so completely oblivious to the issue.

Re: Order of the Stick And people worried that Celia's naivete would get her into trouble! She's found the nicest resurrectionist in all of Greysky City. No nasty undead for him, nuh-unh.

Re: Alternate Teams (inspired by Thunderbolts) Hmm.... I can't come up with an acronym, but one name that fits Momentum's approach (obtrusive, obnoxious, overblown, but perhaps also accurate) came to me with a flash when I saw Lord Liaden's contribution: Masada.

Re: Genetic Engineering? I'm not an expert on the Luddites by any means, but I would suggest that you're trying on the wrong handle if you imagine them as living in a modern context of factory jobs. The modern social apparatus is very modern. There were factories around in the 1820s, but by far the majority of industrial work was being done in the home, and the issue with modern equipment was often that it was being issued by proprietors to individuals who had previously done their piecework on their own looms. The idea was impractical, to some extent, and this is one reason that the idea of the factory spread. But people had their own concerns about what would happen to them in factories, concerns that go to the religious politics of the era. I'm sure no-one wants to read eye-glazing blather about Nonconformists and Anglicans and blah blah blah blah, but if we want to understand the Luddites and their critics, we do have to investigate these things. Harold Perkins is the usual assigned reading on this subject, but I think the literature is also moving on as we begin to understand just how far "nineteenth century Liberalism" has snookered us.

Re: dacoit? I think the idea that Rohmer might have been entertaining is that dacoitry was sometimes a cover for Chinese imperial designs in Burma, hence dacoits were natural agents of Fu Manchu's agenda of restoring the "Manchu" Dynasty. The Brits, especially the self-appointed in-country experts who dominated pro-imperialism journalism, were quick to see conspiracy. People like the Burmese had no right to be offended, and therefore were not. It certainly didn't help that the Brits had been snookered by proponents of Theravadan Buddhism and took a very negative view of Burma's Mahayana faith.

Re: Alternate Teams (inspired by Thunderbolts) This list scratches an itch I've recently developed. I was trying to put a "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants versus Project GENOCIDE" scenario together for the Glorious Twelfth. What better way to mark a celebration of institutionalised bigotry then with comicdom's favourite metaphor for intolerance? Unfortunately, I had some trouble with the Brotherhood. The CU now has its own Magneto (Momentum, from VVV, works well in a role that Holocaust never quite fit), but I was sticking on the underwhelming sidekicks. Here's my answer. I'm not sure Lancer belongs in the group (she seems to be more about "mental man" then "mutant man"), but now that I think about it, Brainchild adds a certain dynamic. The Brotherhood ought to have someone constantly challenging the boss's authority and getting slapped down.... Though Momentum might want to get a snazzy helmet with built-in mental defence, first. The Movement For Genetic Equality Momentum (leader) Brainchild (wishes he was leader) Hummingbird (cutey required!) Black Diamond (and another!) Firedrake (wandered in from the Kirby version of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants that showed up in a Captain America annual and decided to stay) Binary Man

Re: Is a Jedi reasonable in a Marvel Avengers campaign? Search your feelings, Kirby. You know it to be true.

Re: OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual I'd love to discuss this further, but it willl have to be tabled until after 6th Edition is finished. Now, who thinks that Speed should be a figured characteristic?

Re: Young Titans 2008 - Infinite Secret Crisis on Just One Earth! Okay, I'll leave Refrigerator Girl and Ethnic Stereotype Man behind. But we've got to cut a deal on NAMBLA Boy.

Re: Genres HERO GAMES may want to avoid (intended to be humorous) You missed it by that much, Bubba.

Re: Genetic Engineering? And there's a difference between vaccination and inoculation. I suspect that there's a subtext to early smallpox inoculation, too; but I'm only going to fart in the elevator about that in the Colonial Gothic thread. For a more out-there example, how about futurology? You used to be able to get a lot of publicity (sometimes more than you could handle) by predicting the apocalypse, deaths of kings and Popes, or triumph of Protestantism/Catholicism/Islam. Now, everyone is doing it.

Re: Handling day and night on infinite plane? Without the mathemtical sophistication, Cancer's vibrating membrane is the way that Xenocrates and the Hebrew scholars did it, after rejecting the implications of Babylonian astronomy, c. 600BC. (Infinite God can mean an infinite universe, in which case the Earth is a sphere around which the Sun God circles. Unfortunately, that means that there is no land of the dead and the other planets are lesser gods. Better: the Earth is an infinite plane, just as God is infinite. ) The holes in the firmament through which the sun and stars shine are "the lamps of his mouth, the stars of his eyes" that gave Roger Zelazny one of his best titles.

Re: Generic 'Protocols' ideas? Juryrig (Vibora Bay) seems to fit the DocVision concept, although the creator settles for an 80 AP variable power pool, a jet pack, defences and some electronically augmented senses. It strikes me as a great deal less conceptually troubling if you just say that he can cobble all this stuff together at his local junkyard (or whatever) then to invent a new technology that your players are either going to run away with or be disappointed that they can't. But that's just me.

Re: test.

Re: Alternate Teams (inspired by Thunderbolts) That's a very dangerous and eclectic bunch, LL. I bet the Demonologist is behind it....

Re: test. I just realised I'm naked.

Re: Alternate Teams (inspired by Thunderbolts) There are machines in the heart of Arcadia that have stood, arcane even to Empyrean super-science, for 250,000 years. The purposes of some are perfectly well known. Just ask the crews of the Aero-triremes of Lemuria, or the explorers who have walked right past the walls of the Mother of Cities without even noticing it. Some, for all the energy they drink, are of purposes inscrutable, having never done anything but turn their enigmatic cams in the lifetime of any Arcadian yet living on Earth. When Augury came to Arcadia with the Northern Guard in 1996, every gyro wheel on one of those machines toppled. Eleven years later, it summoned Hunter Thav "home" to Arcadia Everliving. What it said to him, if it said anything, we will never know. But we know that Thav has assembled an unlikely force consisting of Tesseract, Taipan, the Strangler, Khanjar and Hazard. He has some hold over them (although Hazard is more of an enforcer than a victim of Thav's methods), and, dirty as their tactics have been, they have been a force for good. This "Assassin Squad's" intelligence could not have been assembled without help. A North Korean defector to VIPER says that two major sanctions are left: Teleios and Fiacho. But the Italian superhero Fortuna has told the Drifter that the Fiacho file is a legend. The other name on the list, the second most dangerous man on Earth, is actually a professor of historical linguistics at Humboldt-Universitaet Berlin. The Drifter's contacts (the Witness, mainly) says it is true, but not why. For a nigh-omniscient being, to be ignorant of something so profound is ...disturbing. In the maze that is the future, he has seen one path to the survival of the human race. He must give Thav one last contract. The "Assassin Squad's" last mission will be to take out the Drifter himself.

Re: What Fantasy/Sci-Fi book have you just finished? Please rate it... The ending is a little anticlimactic, but the Pliocene Exile is a cracking good read. Though I hear a rumour that Julian May actually died just after finishing it, and her other books were actually produced from notes by her son, Christopher