Lawnmower Boy

Re: CthulhuTech? Well, I like pickled herrings, and I like chocolate cookie-dough ice cream, but I don't eat them at the same time. Mecha is, to me, the ultimate empowerment fantasy --coming fairly close to solipsism. Cthulhu, on the other hand, is the ultimate disempowerment nightmare. Fantasies and nightmares do not go together. If Cthulhu were ever to show up in real life, I would love to see him pasted by a giant mecha. But that is so not the point of the Mythos.

Re: PAH Fun: Top 20 Post-Apocalyptic Vehicles Forget dune buggies. I saw my favourite post-apocalyptic vehicle passing by the Sea Bus yesterday in the harbour. OCL Giron (I think) was headed for the Lion's Gate, loaded so high the bridge barely peaked over the container roofs. 500shipping containers of stuff would take a great deal of the sting out of the apocalypse. At least for me.

Re: CthulhuTech? Pretty boy: "Hey, you got chocolate cookie-dough ice cream on my pickled herring!" Cute girl: "Hey, you got pickled herring on my chocolate cookie-dough ice cream!" Voiceover: "Pickled herring and chocolate cookie-dough ice cream. Two great tastes that go... oh, the heck with it." Seriously. Cthluhu and mecha?

Re: Order of the Stick As smarter people than me are saying, if an oracle with buckets of cash and the favour of a goddess can't have a cleric on hand to do resurrections, who can? The question then being, what happens to Roy?

Re: Build that Character on 350 points Challenge Comic, you are one crazy guy. But as an exercise in creative building, this rocks.

Re: A Thread for Random Musings Wow, Cancer. I had no idea you taught me first year calculus. That was a long time ago.

Re: Bedouin tribesmen Just out of curiosity, where are these guys? (By the way, successful magazine rifles, as opposed to toys like the Sharps carbine, are a surprisingly late technology. Small numbers of modern rifles played a very large part in making the 1898 Northwest Frontier war such a hairy exercise. In fact, it has been argued that the entire strategic lie of the NWF was transformed by their appearance, and is still out of joint today.)

Re: Bedouin tribesmen Melee: scimitar, spear. Long range: jezail (long-barrelled smoothbore musket) or single-shot breechloading .45cal black powder percussion rifle of French or British design. A short bow is less likely, but possible.

Re: Super City Urich Olsen Jerusalem The Observer's (and the Super City Picayune Intelligencer's and WSCTV's) star city columnist knows where the bodies are buried; he has the connections; he knows what's going on. Admittedly that's devalued coin in a city where you can walk into a random bar, beat up the person sitting on the second stool on the left, and learn the name of the crime boss of the ultrazone two dimensions to the left, but it's still something. And he's cool. For example, the closing monologue on his weekly current affairs show is somehow also live action meta-commentary on any superbattle taking place anywhere near a TV. So it is a little strange that he hasn't noticed that his photographer is actually the Golden Spider; the P. I.'s weekend magazine editor is Ms. Super; that the P. I.'s publisher's son is the Thing-Wolf; that The Observer's "girl in the city" columnist's mysterious young ward is actually Alpha The Somewhat Little Known .....* I mean, every time there's an alien attack (and this is Super City, after all), it seems like the entire news room queues up in front of the bloom closet before disappearing one by one, and Urich doesn't figure it out. But let an obscure local defence attorney drop his cane at a party, and it's, like, "well, you're obviously Scaredevil!" *Based on a few glorious weeks in 1977 when there were that many superheroes running around the Daily Bugle on a daily basis. When, admittedly, Ben Urich hadn't even been invented, but still....

Re: What Idealistic superhero would you invent? Captain Canuck has had several incarnations over the years since Richard Comely launched him in 1978. He's never really taken, because, well, that's not how Canadians are patriotic. He doesn't address bilingualism, the ambivalent English/proud Scottish heritage, the constitutive anti-Americanism, or, above all, wilderness. (Don't get me wrong about the anti-Americanism. The point of Canada is that it decided not to be American. Our nation would not exist but for that conscious choice.) I think it is telling that Comely himself is (was?) a Mormon from southern Alberta, a community that is perhaps unfairly caricatured as people who look across the border for guidance on how Mormons should live their lives, and so try to be red-blooded Canadian patriots in exactly the same way that American Mormons are red-blooded Americans. Red Ensign sounds much more true to the spirit of the old-time Canadian funny book super-patriots, but Wolverine, for all his cheesiness, has pretty much got the lock on what it means to be an iconic Canadian superhero. From now on, that's going to be the template.

Re: Order of the Stick A bard sidekick? That's the lamest thing ever. Um... wrong thread?

Re: Name of Tiger Hero Tigerman, Tigerman/ Does whatever a Tiger can/ I'd make some crap up about a hero who eats mooks, but the geniuses behind Atlas Comics already got 90% of the way there.

Re: THE BOOK OF THE DESTROYER: What Do *You* Want To See? So the meatloaf and Jello salad recipes make the cut, then? I'm good. On a serious note, the more I think about the idea of the Destroyer as suffering from Narcissistic Personality Disorder, the more I like it. The mighty Destroyer, unable to conquer the world because, in the end, he is a typical NPD screwup? It fits the tone of "banality of evil" that I get from the current Destroyer.

Re: THE BOOK OF THE DESTROYER: What Do *You* Want To See? The more I think about it, the more I would like to see Destroyer 3000.

Re: Lame Superhero Rollcall In Champions continuity? My apologies for making fun of NPC heroes who are often designed to get in over their heads, but... You can't get much worse than Orchid. I sweat I've counted every point on that sheet; how can you spend 350 points and have so little to show for it? Harrier. Unlike the many mainstream comic book characters who can fly and nothing else ("Hi: I'm Black Condor/Falcon/Angel/Hawkman. Please shoot me before I get beaten up again.") she at least has some rD and a handgun. But still.... Tomahawk. Let's leave aside the vulnerability to non-Ojibway magic. How can you have a magic tomahawk for a weapon and not have a KA? Macahuitl is admittedly built on 75 more points, but is still pretty much the character that Tomahawk should have been. Victory. One point of rD for every 100 character points. Seems a little ...low. As for "real" comics, I've always thought that there sould be a special place for those purpose-created teams that go beyond individual lameness to a special land of cooperative lameticity. Remember the original New Mutants lineup? A girl who could turn into a wolf, a girl who could take over any one indivual mind; a girl who could manifest the villain's worst fears, presumably crippling him. And that's a pretty large female lineup because this book is going to be all about "empowering" female characters. Now, let's think about this for a moment. Your pre-established rogue's gallery includes all-powerful solo villains and giant killer robots. How do you think your empowered female protagonists will do?

Re: 20s or 30s? "Usually" is a bad worse, as I've only run one pulp campaign, but I started that one in 1927, with the thought that I was giving myself just enough time for a "find the lost continent/explore the lost continent/fight over the lost continent" plot before WWIi broke out.

Re: Time travel in the Marvel Universe Add Son of Satan to the list. Of course Damon Hellstrom can do it now that he's taken over his Daddy's old job,* but he also did it back in the day when he had his own comic book. Went to ancient Atlantis or some such. [Okay, Brain, now that I've written that fact down, am I allowed to forget it?] *Purely on merit, of course; he had the best qualifications of any of the hundreds of applications received. The hiring committee extends its best wishes to all applicants in their future endeavours.

Re: What Non-Fiction Book have you just finished? Rethinking Mycenaean Palaces, 2 rev., exp. 2nd Edition, eds. Michael L Galaty and William A. Parkinson [2007]. I'm not an archaeologist and have to fight a strong temptation to read the first paragraphs and zone out, but it is amazing how far we've come ..and how far we have left to go. (And by "we," I mean, "you archaeology boys." My job is to skim the abstracts.)

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares "Drove my chariot to the levy but the levy was dry/ And good old boys were drinking wine, ale and mead/ The day the wizard died..."

Re: PS238 Best Game of 2008! Congratulations! I looked for it at both game stores in walking distance, but no luck so far...* *So, yes, there are advantages to living in a densely populated urban neighbourhood.

Re: Urban Fantasy dead horses. At one point? I know guys at work who believe in a new big conspiracy every day before breakfast just to stay in practice. Oh... you meant the other kind of magical creature. Never mind.

Re: Alternate Universe: No Industry, No Guns This thread isn't dead. It's only sleeping. Or, possibly, palming for the fjords. Easter Island is deforested today. Since it has been a sheep ranch since the 1820s, long before modern interest awoke, this is hardly surprising. It would seem, on the basis of contested early accounts and pollen counts, that it was deforested long before 1820. Now, this apparently keys into a long-running debate in Chile over the native wine palm forests. Wherever there are anxious people debating things in newspapers, there is the possibility of distortion, but of course most of us are more interested in Jared Diamond's contention that Easter Island was deforested by its inhabitants and constitutes a laboratory of human folly. First, let me emphasise that this is a hypothesis. Only archaeology can tell us what the island was actually like in 1650, and its methods are sample-based. There is epistemic room for arguing that the island was still forested at the time of first European contact, a position that some scholars have taken. Granted that the deforestation model is correct, how did it happen? The anthropogenic explanation has been strongly contested, for the excellent reason that numerous oceanic islands off the east coast of Chile within the neo-tropical zone have been deforested, not by humans, but by introduced rats and ovocarpids. Beyond this there is the larger claim that deforestation led to impoverishment and isolation. Taking the isolation claim first, I should note that the "no more islands" thesis of Polynesian history emphasises that the Polynesian space was united by regular long range voyages. I find this compelling on linguistic grounds. Easter Island could hardly be said to be be isolated unless it was no longer the destination of such voyages. Taking impoverishment second, Diamond's use of the available archaeological and material history is questionable. Boats do not have to be made with wood. Taking a more speculative turn, the ovocarpids present on Selkirk Island in 1700 do not need to have been restricted to that island. While there was no genocidal war fought on Easter Island for the last scrap of shipbuilding timber, there may well have been sheep herds there even before the Tahitians intervened to commercialise operations in the 1820s. In the Atlantic case, a promised total revision of our understanding of the early Medieval era has been delayed in final editing. Goodbye to the Vikings promises, according to early reviews, reinterpret the supposed Viking era as one in which populations flowed north and west in reponse to the increasing strength and stability of the European littoral market economy beginning c. 900. Cod and herring fishing to meet the needs of inland consumers presents a paradoxical requirement for a long distance inshore fishery. It was resolved by fisherfolk going out to promising fishing grounds and establishing agricultural support colonies on adjacent shores. Archaeology confirms the development of an intensive, capitalised agriculture in the Viking era. Close to the sea, island farms could draw on vast fertiliser and manure resources. And they also exhibited the ecological sensitivity that any long-term farming operation requires. This is as true of Iceland as it is of islands off Murmansk. On the other hand, agriculture on Greenland was initiated in 970AD, but was abandoned some time after 1400. Resumed in 1740, it has continued to the present day, so that agriculture remains Greenland's main export industry in 2008. Both ancient Vikings and modern farmers rely heavily on animal husbandry, especially sheep. However, modern farmers also raise arable fodder crops, and vast quantities of flax and other "mueslix" grass grain seeds have been found in Viking poo. The mystery of the temporary abandonment has tantalised people ever since. Leaving aside pure b.s. such as the "Little Ice Age" hypothesis, much straining effort has been made to make it a great deal more mysterious than it actually was. The key example is Diamond's hyperbolically exaggerated reconstruction of the last days of a house in the Western Settlement, a reconstruction that even the excavators find overstated, I seem to recall hearing. (Take that for what it is worth.) There are a number of other claims, too, about textiles found buried in permafrost ("proving" the Little Ice Age), and shrinking average size in burial grounds. These are all in question. As with Easter Island, archaeology is expensive in Greenland, and thus rarely undertaken. And such evidence there is, is cherrypicked to support Well...[begin original research here] As with the Chilean wine palm story, there is a present day, or rather 1815--1926 context here. After Norway gained its independence from Denmark, it entered into a tortuous series of diplomatic efforts to regain control over its former Atlantic possessions, an effort that ended with a 1926 (I think; I'd have to -gasp- look this up to be sure of the year) World Court ruling against the last Norwegian claim, to East Greenland. The story of Greenland's Nordic history is thus written to the needs of the appellants, and resolved by historiographic synthesis from the bench. For Norway's case, it was important to emphasise that the newly united crown abandoned the settlers. Norwegian researchers dug up cases in which Icelanders complained that the royal monopoly trading ship was not sent, and turned this into an argument that Iceland was neglected, therefore Greenland even more so. In fact, the royal monopoly could not compete with Hanse ships. Royal neglect, yes; isolation, no. But Denmark had to claim the entire island in order top head off a "scramble for Greenland." For that, paradoxically enough, the Danes had to insist on non-continuity. If its claim were medieval, it could not claim unsettled parts of Greenland. It had instead to stake its claim on evangelical grounds. Denmark had a "civilising" mission as the first to bring a surviving Christianity to the island. This meant that Christian influences could not have survived the intervening centuries. And after a two century delay and in the face of a lack of evidence, how could one rule out the possiblity that the Inuits encountered in 1740 were not folk Catholics unless one argued that there had been no cultural intermixing at all. [end original research, begin book recommendation] The alternative hypothesis (recently laid out in Karin Seaver, Frozen Echoes)has always been one of gradual abandonment, as settlers moved out of this peripheral area just as the oceanic cod fishery on the Newfoundland banks emerged. The Greenland Norse did not die out. Having lost their local, captive textiles market to goods shipped over directly, they moved down into the Grand Banks fishery. Some settled in Newfoundland and Labrador, but most travelled back to metropolitan ports. Those who remained, assimilated.

Re: Genre-crossover nightmares Hey, Tkdguy, I'm supposed to pass on a message from Quentin T. "Thanks for ruining the surprise."

Re: Villainous Organizations of Else Earth. While I'm not sure that's the point of the thread, an entire HYDRA-clone made up of cougars is a ...frightening thought. "Look out! They have blasters ....and their biological clocks are at 5 minutes to midnight!" On the bright side, if you don't have the rD to survive the encounter, you may be able to substitute your tax return....

Re: Order of the Stick That was Chief grulguk. Shaman vurkle is just disappointed that he never gets to sacrifice anything nice.