Lawnmower Boy

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries The thing about all the high profile mysteries like the Voynich Manuscripts is that they tend to detract from the real ones. The "Minoans" and their mysterious, undeciphered Linear A script are very exciting, but if the Minoans actually were an advanced, powerful civilisation, there are virtually guaranteed to be Linear A-Akkadian bilingual texts in the diplomatic archives of nearby powers. Many Bronze Age archives have been found in the last few years. If the premise is correct, the key to Linear A is lying underground somewhere. It happens that the biggest power on the Anatolian coast was Arzawa, and its capital is very likely to have been Sardis. Sardis today is a greenfield site covered with picturesque ruins, easy to excavate and self-evidently worth it. Yet only a tiny fraction of of it has been dug. There's not the time, money and energy.

Re: [PAH] 50 years After What happened? People are resilient, so big changes require either a largescale effect or else fantastic changes in the nature of things. i) Grim and gritty, big smash: cavemen. ii) Fantastic, big smash: mutant metis priests riding telepathic moose fight zombies! iii) Grim and gritty, small smash: everyone picks up and rebuilds best they can. There's a lot of horse-rustling, because there weren't many of them around before, and they're really valuable now. The richest family in the region used to run a hayride with Clydesdales, and now have the postal monopoly. iv) Fantastic, small smash: half-elven werewolves are jacked into the cybernet!

Re: Who Is... Your Favorite Villain?

Re: Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils Maybe not an archaeological conference, but the Learneds, for sure. Every day at 5PM, right after the last paper is given to a few earnest grad students, there's Dr. Smith the physicist talking about overthrowing a galactic empire in his space-battleship and being back in time to slip his grant proposal into NSERC under the wire. Dr. Grant explains how dealing with a herd of brontosauri rampaging across campus before they can do any real damage (the educationi building gone? Oh, that's just ...terrible) can really change minds on the tenure review committee. For real credit, wait until the football team has been smushed, 'cuz even a team of walk-ons wouldn't let themselves get beat 50-14 by Ottawa for Pete's sake. And then, since the rule is that everyone at the table buys a round and tells a story, you have to hear about freakin' ocelots.

Re: Who Is... Your Favorite Villain? Apparently I have to give up on the "Darkseid is behind Intergang/ARGENT" reveal. Poo. Oh, well, it's not as though the real thing was anywhere near as cool as I remember it as a 10 year old. But I'm still going to hold my breath until I turn blue.

Re: Post-Apocalyptic Hero You Americans are just so cute when you're having an election. Is there any chance you can schedule them so you're always having one? Oh. Never mind then. Uhm, uh, Post-Apocalyptic Hero. Is that like when the grocery store runs out of Pellegrino? (We're a little sheltered here in Kitsilano.)

Re: Pulp sci-fi Nah, the rancor (darn, you've seen right through me) is directed at a guy named Corelli Barnett. The Hollywood vision of the world is just about being human. What a pity that I spewed all my anger over what looks like a a fine game setting. That said, if we all just surrendered to bad history, we would still believe that Columbus proved that the world was round.

Re: Pulp sci-fi I refuse to not flip out. Flipping out is my right. It's in the constitution, right under the part where the government has to run a railway on Vancouver Island. (That's right, we Canadians have a good constitution. And if there isn't an Internet constitution that says that you're allowed to flip out without reading something, then there's a lot of very confused people out there. What got me about the scenario presented in this fine resource is that it puts the Brits in a tagalong sidekick mode. Britain ended up on the verge of being a sidekick, but while I don't know if you Americans have noticed, the Brits usually walk a fine line. They pretend to be sidekicks, but mainly to rook you. When they're really incapable of playing an independent part, they sit in their rooms feeding coins into the heater and pretending to be above such things. Great Britain's national income (the measure of choice in 1939) was about 40% larger than Germany's. Modern GNP estimates pull the numbers down to parity. (Or so it says in Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction. The long and the short of it (I lie, I'm incapable of being brief) is that the British armed forces were huge, as was their defence budget and the R&D portion of it was equally big. British aircraft production pushed past German in the second quarter of 1939, and this was a great deal worse than it looked for the Luftwaffe as it was approaching a developmental and scientific bottleneck in which ULTRA and radar are only the tip of the iceberg. Of course all the spending in the world doesn't matter if there aren't boots on turf where it matters. I suspect that the imminent next flight of BEF reinforcements might have been enough to turn the tide in the critical fighting of 20--2 May, but that's as may be. At that point, the UK was hooped. It had to accelerate army production to the same scale as air and naval building, cutting off exports at a time when American imports were as vital to their economy as ever. Worse, American manufacturers were suddenly on the hook for a 2 billion dollar French spending spree. It would have been as idiotic for the Americans to let Britain goas it would have been for Britain to let many of the best American defence contractors suddenly declare bankruptcy. So Britain pretty much spent its immediate credit assuming the French buys, and the Administration played along, making an additional offer of American surplus field guns, mortars and rifles to really involve Americans in an expected imminent German invasion of Britain. This wasn't what the British needed. Guns and rifles are glamorous but not that hard to replace. What was lost in France was stuff like shells, cable and trucks. "Lend-Lease" won the war, but later. In the meantime the folk "fact" that is stuck in people's heads is that an advanced industrial economy with the largest public research and development effort on Earth somehow couldn't produce high technology. This is a bad lesson to teach, IMHO. Not quite up there with, say S. M. Stirling pounding us with the notion that eugenics works, but bad enough.

Re: Old Enemies Crown Prince Angelus Quintus of Not-Spain. Or, he used to be a Crown Prince. Then he was a King. And then his vassal Not-Cortez landed on a far coast and ...let's say he has some resources to pursue an old vendetta.

Re: Who Is... Your Favorite Villain? Sticking to Champions ('cuz John Mill and Thomas Macaulay are not going to head many other "enemies" lists) i) Tesseract (also Gyre, so maybe a split vote) has a very cool powerset with enormous plot potential. ii) Foxbat is a popular choice for goofball, but El Sauriano might just be even more ludicrous. iii) Telios is my idea of a master villain. I'm not quite sure how he got to have a 30 body, but what really gets me is his genetic loyalty treatment. I've always envisioned him as being an evil Hari Seldon masquerading as a "mere" genetic mastermind. And behind that is whoever set him up... iv) Takofanes. He has ruled the world before, and he's had a long time to cook up a plan. I cannot shake the feeling that he's behind some of the other mysterious things going on around the Heroverse --unlikely, unexpected things, like Mechanon, for example. v) Arvad the Betrayer and his boys. He's not quite as grand as Darkseid (I'm hoping that a better Hero-Darkseid will turn up behind ARGENT), but close enough.

Re: After DEMON wins... Not high enough, not dark enough. There's a plothook in Arcane Adversaries that works here. It is a Matrix world. The few surviving humans live in a very thinly veiled illusory world that they cling to haplessly until the very moment they are harvested, while outside the tiny little pockets of life, non-Euclidean structures loom over a black, blasted cinder, except for the Congo and Amazon basins, where Elder Worms and Thanes prepare to move on. I wouldn't put in a Resistance at all, except that the heroes have to talk to someone and get out. Leader? the only one it could be. Takofanes. The Crowns are his toys. So are Teleios and Mechanon. Other than that, he knows better than to trust human flesh in his desperate fight. He is more than willing to send the characters back in time to prevent this outcome, but he doesn't even bother denying that he is using this opportunity to engineer his past ascension. As far as he's concerned, it is Takofanes or the Lords of Edom. Your choice.

Re: Pulp sci-fi Help me out here: there were Americans in World War 2? Oh, wait, sorry, missed a footnote in my history books here. December 7th, 1941? Well, better late than never to join in, I say. Seriously, I accept that the gaming industry is going to be a little fixated on 300 million American consumers, but is anyone out there in the community even aware that the United Kingdom had a GNP as large as Germany's in 1939 and a lot more Nobel Prize winners than the States? What, exactly, were the French and British doing about space? Waiting for the Americans to give them second-hand spaceships so they could join in? Jolly good show, what!

Re: Artificial Islands Nan Madol already has a place in the Hero Universe. It is the place where the Basilisk Orb was stored until the Edomite showed up to use it in 1968. My first thought when I saw this was that it was going to be a bit about the "seadromes" that were supposed to be strewn across the Atlantic in the 30s so that passenger planes could island hop to Europe.

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries

Re: Planets from Past Futures Incredible site. "Mad scientists of the twenty-first century, get cracking!"

Re: Questions for the Canadian HEROBoard members Bearing in mind that this all comes from CBC Radio playing in background (our southern buddies should imagine what would happen if PBS and ABC got married and nine months later..., only with a radio service, too) The big Winnipeg street gangs for many years past have been Native, usually called [something] Warriors [something]. The excitement of recent years has been Somali immigrants. They're into meth, the old ultraviolence, and living life by the code of gangsta rap. (So just like suburban white boys, that way.) They'd like to have Glocks, but are a great deal more likely to try to stick pointy things at your players. A trend here in Vancouver in recent years has been big machetes and curio swords. Don't know if it has spread to Winnipeg. There's a reason that hardware stores sell machetes in Vancouver, and it doesn't really apply in the Peg. Hope that helps.

Re: Questions for the Canadian HEROBoard members Winnipeg? Well, when a 'Pegger gets on the Internet, maybe there'll be a better response. But... hot in summer, cold as heck in winter. Mosquitoes. An underground mall beneath the main intersection in town (Portage and Main), much appreciated because of the wind. Francophone, Ukrainian, Yiddish and Native culture intersecting, with a new generation of colourful ethnic street gangs added to the mix. A CFL team but no other pro franchises above junior, although they're desperate keen to have their old NHL team, the Jets, back. Allegedly, a vibrant cultural scene. Keanu Reeves played Hamlet in a local production one summer back in 1996, and a local tycoon bought the unwieldy TV/newspaper conglomerate built up during the convergence craze, so that the Asper family was supposed to become Canada's designated opinion-havers. Unfortunately, they forgot that they lived in Winnipeg.

Re: Archaeologist Tired Of Unearthing Unspeakable Ancient Evils The point isn't that he is unlucky, or strong or dextrous or has OCD. The point is, he's a whiner. The other archaeologists never complain about this. Look, take a deep breath, step back, and accept. It is part of the job. Why do you think you had to take that Methods and Techniques seminar on bullwhip fighting in grad school? Geez.

Re: Alien Stereotypes The immensely long-lived race that finds human FTL (and maybe even its taste for living around stars, 'lit' or otherwise) tasteless. The incomprehensible gas-giant dwelling race that just might actually know what is going on --if you could talk to it. Also incomprehensible, the sonar-using batlike people. This one is sure to be a hit with philosophy majors. Giant, powerful reptilians that may or may not want to eat us. Intelligent, mind-controlling plants. Blobs that assimilate our protoplasm to grow.

Re: History's Most Overlooked Mysteries When this came out, I nearly posted that the original feature ought to have been called "World's Most Overrated Mysteries..." But that would be biting the hand that feeds. What I ought to have said then, and want to say first of all now is.... Thank You, Susano for posting that and considerately keeping this forum alive. Thankythankyou. That said, I'll take on the Tarim Mummies. Way back in the day when the whole Indo-European thingie wasn't on life support (recently linguists have talked in terms of the "Indo-European Fallacy" that languages occur in large families or related tongues), one of the first things people noticed about the presumptive Indo-European families is how remarkably close Greek and Iranian are. Throw in a few presumptively similar languages along the road between Iran and Greece (Armenian and Phrygian), and there was a strong presumption that we could talk about a Greco-Iranian civilisation from, say, 1000BC to 500BC. This, to put it mildly, did not sit well with the somewhat less than enlightened theorists of the 19th century, and they were very glad indeed to notice that they could group all "European" IE languages separately from all "Oriental" IElanguges by the way they pronounced a word ("centum" is Europe) ( "satem" is Asia) Then, in the 1950s, researchers recovered a "lost" Indo-European language that had been spoken in two of the major Tarim Basin oases from a vast archive of documents accidentally preserved from the versos of Buddhist devoltional exercises, precisely dating them to the Mid-Tang. There was already plenty of evidence that the Tarim had been occupied by Indo-European speakers in the 600s/700s AD, with archives in both Iranian and Indian Indo-European languages. But these were Oriental as Oriental could be. Tocharian was a centum language, hence European. The discovery of Caucasian mummies dating to the millenium before from the area around Urumchi was therefore a great relief to the theorists, who even seized upon shroud-weaving styles to proclaim the Tocharians "Celts." See, Urumchi isn't, exactly, in the Tarim Basin. It is the Dzungharian Basin, parallel and to the north of the Tarim. Dzhungaria is colder than the Tarim, but also wetter, making it possible for Stone Age peoples to live there and travel through it from the Middle East to China, as we already knew had been done. There's no real reason to think that the mummies spoke Tocharian, but there is no reason to think they didn't either, and the breed of archaeologist that does think that he can figure out what language dead bodies spoke by talking to their pots was already convinced that Mummies=Tocharians. So there's the first point. The Tocharians carried wheat, barley, sheep, chariots from the Middle East to China. Second point: it has also been argued that the Tocharians also brought bronze, writing and Middle Eastern religion to China. Certain linguists have been claiming to see signs that Early Chinese was an Indo-European language since the 1950s, and the theory is given pretty serious attention in the Cambridge History of Early China. The Tocharians can be seen as China's culture bearers, and China's ancient civilisation as "derivative." This is a petty and stupid argument, but hey, if the Internet has proven anything, it is that people have a taste for such. Third point: on the map it looks like the easiest route from west to east via Dzhungaria runs across the Kalmyck Steppe to the Volga and thence to the Middle East via the Caspian or across the Volga to Ukraine. Thus proof that the Centum languages really did keep clear of the Middle East and that the vigour of our Aryan ancestors was not polluted by inferior Semitic stock... Ur, what I mean to say in purely dispassionate, scientific terms is that this proves the "Kurgan hypothesis" about Indo-European origins, which is a purely scientific dispute that laypeople should not pay any attention too, and.. sorry if there are any typoes here, but my right arm tends to fly into the air of its own accord whenever I start writing about the Kurgan hypothesis. (The foregoing is brought to you by the Committee of People Who Unfairly Parody the Views of Hard Working Historical Linguists, Thereby at least Skirting Godwin's Law.)

Re: Another human civilization may live inside Earth's hollows So we all agree on the importance of the scantily-clad ladies. There's other stuff to like about the Hollow Earth such as.... Uhm, dinosaurs?

Re: Help: Folk Heroes. There were some folk hero-mages in the Middle Ages. Avram Davidson used one, Vergil (as Vergilius Magus) in a book I never quite got around to actually reading. I saw some of the same stories told about Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus with powers such as levitation and teleportation occurring prominently. Mind reading, clairvoyance and healing would be a dime-a-dozen in figures such as Saint Theresa of Avila or Saint John of the Cross. Actually, given Saint John's emphasis on the way that direct knowledge of God is linked to real "scientific" knowledge [now that is how to use scare quotes!] he could even be a gadgeteer. Or you could use Galileo in that role, or, cliched as it is, Leonardo da Vinci. According to Umberto Eco, anyway, William of Ockham was actually Sherlock Holmes. Ned Kelly had an armour suit, so powered armour isn't that much of a stretch.

Re: If *you* were the Spectre... The Toronto Maple Leafs. I'd make sure that they never won another Cup... Oh. Guess that's taken care of. Seriously, Joker is just another in a long list of run of the mill psychopaths. He might have killed more people than Ted Bundy, but this is comics, after all. Big powers call for big people: Kobra (I have not forgotten what you did to your brother you b**d); Lex Luthor, whoever is currently big, normal and bad. Darkseid, Typhon, that kind of guy if you can swing it. I mean, over at the DCU there is omnipotent and then there is omnipotent. Joker would be a long way down the "to do" list.

Re: How much of "typical fantasy setting" actually intersects with "medieval europe"? Oops, having trolled, I have nothing really sexy to add. The question of what medieval Europe was "really" like is, I'm sorry to say, a lot more boring than the fantasy. If you want to know more about the invention of the concept of feudalism, I recommend Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals (1994, I think), but it is not an easy read. I don't have a finger on anything fresh and new on the history of medieval religion, but Delumeau, History of Christianity got me through comprehensives. On "divine right of kings," see the revelatory discussion of the actual origins of this debate in the period between 1570 and 1640 included in Hajo Holborn's Jesuit Political Thought. Unfortunately, the line of thinking here is not exactly direct, so I am going to blather on in an attemptd summary. Catholic and Protestant thinkers were both forced to explain why Protestants should accept Catholic kings and not vice versa, or vice versa. Both confessions wanted to rule out tyrannicide, since there were too many freelance assassins of their respective faith running around. Catholics wanted to assert the authority of the Pope without being caught saying that the Pope had the power to depose kings, while Protestants wanted to say that there was no need for a "supreme arbiter" of disputed matters (that is, the Pope), and that you could therefore assert the rights of a James I or Henri IV by an appeal to a transcendent source of royal power. So in a classic case of "that's not what I'm saying," both sides ended up asserting that there was no such thing as a divine right of kings, or absolute monarchy, while adding that their enemies said that there was, and there, kind of, but only different, actually was. You can see why Hobbes was such a breath of fresh air.

Re: How much of "typical fantasy setting" actually intersects with "medieval europe"? Considering that the actual medieval Europe didn't have feudalism, the Catholic Church, or the divine right of kings (at least in the form that they are assumed here), I'd say quite a lot. "Medieval Europe" is a seventeenth/eighteenth century fantasy, and the default fantasy setting is a 20th century reinterpretation.