Lawnmower Boy

Since this one is slipping down the lists, I thought I'd pop in and mention how much I like the title. 'Dearthwood" is cool. I will also plug Selby's Winter Road, which plays with the idea of a protagonist going into a dearthwood and trying to fix it, although perhaps not delivering completely.

Explosives are always the answer to removing eyesores.

We do! Questions like: --With all the advances in technology, why does belly button lint still happen? --Who likes the juice you squeeze out of cans of tuna as much as cats? --Does anyone else think that Oreo cookies are actually kinda cardboard-y? --Who writes this stuff?

The list of awesome people!

Just do what I do! Relentlessly harass Hermit while making fun of his favourite superhero. It's gonna work soon. I can feel it!

Amateur. Applying my deciphering technique, I read, "Send all your money to Lawnmower Boy, 213 Stevens Street, Vancouver, Canada. P.S. Aquaman sucks."

"Valonqar" does mean "younger brother."

Okay. Now, I dropped out of Game of Thrones before last season. because the Battle of the Bastards annoyed me and I only have so much time for pop culture. That being said, the whole dead/winter versus the living thing doesn't have to be dropped just because the plot is turning towards a resolution of "who sits on the Iron Throne." What makes Old Nan's story about the Night King so creepy is that he's a Lord Commander of the Night's Watch who is seduced over to the side of Death by a sexy, sexy zombie. Winter/Death has already had a huge win here. The Wall is gone, the Night Watch is all but disbanded, hunger and winter stalk the land, the objectively pro-End-of-Everything candidate already sits on the Iron Throne. The only thing lost is a living-dead revenant raised by the Children of the Forest in an ill-judged necromantic exercise in making bargains with eldritch forces. As it happens, said objectively pro-Death candidate is being up by two creepy necromancers, one of whom has raise a living dead revenant in an exercise in . . . . Do the math here, people! I'm not the writer, and I don't have the fan's fan's credit to argue that this is where the narrative is going. I have no idea if that's where it's going. But it does use existing plot elements to bring everything together to a satisfying moment when Jaime runs Cersei through, and the corpse's eyes snap open --blue.

MCU Captain America throws with Thor. I wouldn't be afraid of making him Speed 8.

So I went to see Endgame rather earlier in its run than is my usual wont, because people kept trying to spoil it on the Internet, which I need to mention just because I know it's all Aquaman's fault somehow. Speaking of spoilers, the whole thread is under a spoiler tag so I'm not going to bother. Sorry for those who clicked anyway. Now for Deep Thoughts With A Guest Host Because Jack Handy Isn't Available: --I love* the development of Nebula's role in a way that I haven't always loved the big movie heel turns. (Lookin' at you, Jennifer Lawrence. Shoulda pushed for a chance to play Tabitha Smith in the Nextwave movie that would blow this Avengers stuff out of the water, you listen to me, MCU.) --At least for the moment, I'm willing to buy that Captain Marvel has one heck of a move through and is very sturdy. Good for taking out spaceships, maybe not as good at mowing down mooks. --I assume that Captain America's Excellent Adventure is going to turn out to be long enough and elaborate enough to answer all the questions. All the questions. Also, it will be a great way to funnel a gazillion dollars into Chris Evans' pocket if he doesn't turn out to be the next Olivier. --Lay off Dad Body Thor, everybody. PTSD. Look it up. Also, it's so sweet that he's not over Jane Foster. I wouldn't be either, in the unlikely event that I fell for her while trying to get Darcy's phone number. --Thought the Grrl power thing was overdone. --Read some guy complaining about how Valkyrie got hold of Aragorn. Had to restrain myself from jumping down the Intertubes to strangle him into silence before the Russos took it back. --Morgan too old, Cassie too old? Not sure these things compute. Also, Clint is a bad, bad Dad who can't even remember his own daughter's name. I know that's spelled "Lila," but it's pronounced K-A-T-I-E. --Rocket needs to be in charge of everything. --Very disappointed that Hulk didn't get to punch it up with Thanos and show that he really is the strongest one there is, but I have to bear in mind that that's not the real Hulk. --I'm glad I went to see this in 3D so that I could contribute to what must be a big enough cameo budget to float Hollywood down to the Pacific on a tidal wave of cash. --Someone else has mentioned that Jarvis was the only TV MCU guy. Too bad, as I would have preferred the Agent Carter Howard Stark, but he was, indeed, most worthy. --Anyone who thinks that it's a million-to-one chance that a rat happened to walk on any particular flat surface in that warehouse has never actually dealt with a rat infestation. Yuck yuck yuck. The amazing thing is that it took five years. --Captain America being worthy was the biggest of the spoilers I encountered this weekend. Given how often it was floated, I was actually a bit sad that there wasn't someone a bit more out of left field who could have done the wielding. Perhaps someone with a bad habit of shouting her attacks out loud? "Terawatt X-ray laser --I mean, magic hammer smitey attack!" Especially if Captain America told her to go back to the kitchen and make dinner a moment before.** *Love love love love: "This is the guy? Seriously?" "Your choices were him or a walking tree."# **Yes, yes, a bit out of character, but he's under stress, you know? Seriously, Hollywood, call me. Nextwave is gold. #Loved. She even managed to get off one of her signature "Yeah, okay, lady [backs away slowly]" moments that I would quote verbatim if I could remember the actual line.

Funny thing. The closer Aquaman is to Namor, the better he does. Just saying. I'm not holding out much hope for this, but since we've got Monica Rambeau now, I want to see her in her best story. You know what I'm talking about. Your underwear is itchy, and people taste like popcorn shrimp. Broccoli men are out to get you. You want to fight mini-MODOKs. You do. Nextwave: Agents of HATE has to be a Marvel movie.

What Lord Liaden said. I'd be as popular as you if I just contributed as much to the community. Hmmph. I think I'll stalk off and make fun of Aquaman again.

In fairness, those guys did look pretty tasty.

Chris, please don't worry about the time you're taking. Most of these projects never get done.

Just to be clear here, I will accept none of your lollygagging excuses, and will be over shortly to force you to enjoy writing free updates for me. . . . Uhm, where did you say you lived, again, Hermit?

Moar tentacles moar better.

It's a bad day when people talk trash about creepy geriatric hell beasts. We're people, too! Well, not people as such, but . . . Also, the older I get, the more I hate late shifts, and the next two schedules are up, and guess what?

Maybe, maybe not. Say you're doing a Teen heroes "super school" thing. There are things that, to my mind, it just has to have: A mall, for example. Super parents, too. Those might not be part of the original concept, but they just seem like an irresistable retcon, so why not start with them? Underground passages, secret doors, secret identities. This is all a bit weird in the frequent superhero-private-school setting, and their absence is a problem in the Ravenswood setting for CU, but with the sheer number of supers and retired supers in the Boston-Washington area in the CU, it's hard to believe that there isn't a commuter option. So Midtown High in Brooklyn --or, not to toot my own horn, Tatammy High in Philadelphia-- has a teen super magnet programme. It's just secret, because secrets are cool, and because Diadem (now-retired Sentinel leader) would throw a fit if her secret identity were compromised. She's not built with a lot of rPD versus "sniper with a grudge"! Okay, we've got the basics: a secret superhero programme within a large American high school. Secret underground Danger Room, whatever else you want to put down there. Records Hall, locker room, broken time machine that only needs a refibulator to work again, sentient spaceship named Martha . . . It's a comic book. What else do we need? Class dynamics, of course. Rich kids, poor kids; uptown girl, downtown boy. Rivals. You may not be into this kind of thing, but you can run it with NPCs and let the players be observers. Some kind of teen super-sport. (J. K. Rowling says you have to have Quidditch. Even if you're not a jock, other people are.) Rivals. Star-crossed relationships. Rivals. See where I'm going with this? You don't have to have an eco-system of super-schools to interact with, but the CU has already got one, and as Fleur De Pew, or whatever her name is from Harry Potter demonstrates, it is absolutely the case that you need foreign schools so that you can do your terrible foreign accent at the table. Except maybe when you introduce Tiger Squad's junior varsity. Probably don't want to go there. So when the Indian teen superheroine is hanging out with her boyfriend in the mall near his house in Philadelphia, trying to keep it on the down low because her guardian is a Hindu nationalist built on a thousand points who would turn her crush into a newt in a second if he knew about it, clearly the word comes down that the Superhero Division's training compound in Kerala State is under attack. I mean, that's just the way you do things in a superhero campaign. Who is behind it? A published master villain is fine. Dr. Destroyer is active in India, for example, although for this setting one of his underbosses is a lot more appropriate. And when you wing into action to stop the attack and hopefully make sure that the girl makes bed check, you're immersed in the Indian superhero scene, which, as laid out in Champions Worldwide, is pretty extensive. This is where I think the published CU is a powerful tool, in that you have context for all of this. The drawback is that you're drawn right into the global context. Yes, you have a listing of superheroes in India, and a few Indian supervillains, but now you're worried about what we're calling the "ecology" of the setting. It looks like India is pretty underpopulated with villains compared with the rest of the world. On the other hand, it is hard to see how the Superhero Division fends off Dr. Destroyer's little offensive by itself. That guy's got resources! Presumably, the world mobilises to beat him, but this raises the thought I was getting at when I suggested that it's hard to team up against Dr. Destroyer in one corner of the world when there are so many menaces elsewhere. We see Massey's "Night Man" approach in the Vibora Bay setting. Black Mask X is more-or-less what he's talking about; the problem is that it is hard to see what she does when Dark Seraph and the Crowns of Krim take advantage of the crisis in India to wreak a little havoc. Having a hero in reserve in Vibora Bay who is a match for Dr. Destroyer . . . does not work. Having a lot more teams around the world, so that India is self-sufficient, does. On the other hand, now you need even more master villains --an approach that has been alluded to in Champions Worldwide, where China apparently has its own Dr. Destroyer just to keep the Tiger Squad busy. And now you have a situation where, on any given day, there's probably one or two climactic battles against world-threatening menaces going on somewhere in the world, and your average citizen is lined up at Starbucks getting their mocha frappa-macha-mocha-cappacino and checking their text alerts to see if the world is going to end before they can get into work because the Fair Advancers* can't defend Melbourne from an army of cloned Taipans. (Which they can't. Whoa boy is that guy scary.) ___ *Matilda Waltzers? Mad Mates?

This is true. The question is where that gets you when you're modelling the CU as a setting. Pamela's point is that the heroes are going to be overwhelmed by a human wave of villains. You can't have a global gang up on Dr. Destroyer in Djakarta when Dark Seraph chooses just that minute to level New York and Eurostar decides to use the opportunity to hold Zurich for ransom. From a story telling angle, Pamela's fix to that makes perfect sense, which is why, as I understand it, she's brainstorming the way that you apply it to the actually existing CU. Now, as a CU fan, I take the different approach of trying to save the published details. The problem that Pamela has identified is real, but her solution obviously doesn't work from my perspective. It also doesn't work if you're a fan of climactic battles. Perhaps we need to sit down and figure out just how much firepower the Forces of Good in the CU have to have to make this all even out. I'll admit that Isvatha V'han, in particular, makes this hard to do. Watch V'han take on Tyrannon and root for an injury? If so, maybe we're expecting Borealis to counter Dr. Destroyer. . .

"When Captain Average throws his mediocre shield/ Villains in the lower third of the point range must yield. . . " Think I need to work on the scansion.

Superman versus Firelord pwns Dr. Destroyer versus Takofanes.

It's okay, Hermit. We understand. -- "I'm back, and here's that gallon of methanol y'all wanted what for to embiggen the hootch!" --"Just stack it with that pile of guns over there, Bobby Joe." --"Which pile o'guns, again, Billy Sue?" --"The one next to the oxy scripts." -- "Did Ah here someone say Meth?" --"Settle down, Gramps. And turn on your Medicare-provided hearing aid, 'cuz you can't here a word over Fox and Friends talkin' about how Guvmint ain't worth spit. Anyways, Bobby Joe's got rubbin' alcohol, not meth." --"Ah likes that, too! Makes my tooth-holes go numb!" --"Well, Billy Bob's cooking up some meth this afternoon, and he'll be looking for a tester." --"You're a mighty fine grandson, Billy Sue. And nephew. And son. And half-brother." --"Coming from you, Gramps, that's kindly words. So what's on the agenda for you today, Bobby Joe?" --"Going to take the weekly load down to Nashville in my big, black Ford!" --"Can't go wrong with that. Ah got my marathon of Celebrity Dancing House Apprentice lined up, so Ah'll stay here and watch the 'holler in case Chelsea Clinton runs for President and sends the black helicopters." --"Good thinking, Billy Sue." --"And spam the Internet with pro-Aquaman posts!" [Rousing general cheer.] . . . Or do we? Dunh dunh dunh.

As a further illustration of just how completely our news media universe has collapsed, I found out this morning from a blog (so, you know, hurrah for Balloon Juice) that Nebraska is under water. While I expect no better of the Huffington Post, it didn't make Slate or Vox; or, more seriously, the CBC radio national news. It all makes me a little sick, since there's a developing trend in social media for people to claim that everyone's ignoring the situation in Nebraska because they're a bunch of "deplorables."Just what we needed this weekend.

This is a fair and good point, but, on the other hand, it's Jerry Pournelle, who has a pretty solid track record for being wrong about stuff. Heh. I'm hilarious. On second thought, I don't feel like being hilarious this morning, although I'll leave that up in honour of this: RCMP take over investigation of UCP 'irregular financial contribution' allegations

I should very much like to see this thing.