Lawnmower Boy

That seems cruel. Though it would be for their own good.

Not that anyone here needs a distraction or anything right now, but I have a Champions Universe setting-related quesdtion to put out to the assembled great minds of Herodom assembled. I've got to the point where my teen superheroes are chasing someone or something through the storage area under an old superhero team's trophy hall. (Champions Universe, right now is 2013, the team in question was active in Philadelphia from the late '50s to the late '70s. No-one ever comes down here these days but a part-time caretaker) One level up, you've got the spectacular stuff that everyone sees and maybe even uses, or at least studies. You've got your art deco space ship, your replica Stonehenge, the dead tree that's way more creepy than a dead tree should be. But what's down here? In a museum, the storage area is filled with duplicates, but also the stuff that hasn't been categorised, or is just too weird for public viewing, or that the staff can't really make heads or tails of. Any ideas? Doctor Destroyer's baby pictures? A complete download of Mechanon's operating system on 8" floppies? Something else?

My offering is the Belly Bottom Boys, a seniors street gang. They're the usual lot of the scooter, wheelchair, shopping buggy, cane and skipoles-enabled, semi-demented, questionably hyigienical old people that you can encounter at your average supermarket built underneath a massive high rise full of seniors housing. I had them terrorising Babylon from their base in the Rookeries, but they don't have to be tied to that setting. I also, unfortunately, didn't write them up. But you have your gadgeteer bag lady, your walker-armed martial artist, your scooter-driving-transformer-pilot, your . . . Well, after Cloaca, I decide not to go down that route, but, if you do, I have one phrase for you: "colostomy bag." If you don't, an energy projector with a projectile vomiting effect is probably more palatable. There's just something creepy and qliphotic about weaponising the decrepitude of old age.

Well, clearly you want to design your character to ruin the GM's life. Some examples: GM: "This is going to be a gritly, low-fantasy campaign. Magic and monsters will be rare, no combat magic. . " etc, etc. He's got an "Infectious Diseases" table, and he means to use it. Player: "My character is a dinosaur herder from the flying cloud cities of Zandar!" GM: "This is serious high fantasy stuff. Your characters will be members of an adventuring party drawn from the most noble warriors of the Five Races, and you're on a on a quest to [whatever] the [you know, the thing] from/to/at the Dark Master of All Things, who rules south beyond the Wall of Forlon." Player: "My character is an omnicidal Orcish assassin/thief/cannibal/sex pervert. Here's his enemies list. See how all the other PC's races are on it? Hilarious! How much do you get for selling thing at the auction house?" GM: "I've got bad news for you guys. Steve has gone to do the important thing on five minutes notice, and I'm going to be filling in for the next five weeks. I haven't got much done on the setting, tdhough I've got some ideas that I think are kind of cool. So let's say you're in some kind of Shire knockoff and your first level characters are going to fight, oh, say, giant spiders for copper pennies. . " Player: "My dark elf is named Zandar! He's from Clan Forlon, mightiest faction of Dark Master worshippers in The Shire, greatest dark elf city of the vast Underdeep that lies beneath the continent of Omni, from the Glittering Give Deserts to the Wall of Spiders [&tc for at least five minutes]" PC backgrounds are a lot more fun if you keep this one simple rule in mind.

Wait a minute! Bulletproof is 800 points in Galactic Champions. That's not low-powered at all! This product is dead to me! Dead, I say! . . . Or maybe it's using the mystic teachings it picked up in the forbidden monasteries of Tibet to pretend to be dead.

Well, first of all, I can't possibly comment on who might have been in town to tidy up an elderly relative's place, and I certainly can't comment on whether anyone in the neighbourhood might have been relying on a pretty substandard padlock on his garden shed that only took three sharp blows with a brick to break open. Because I don't know anything about that stuff. What I do know is what happens when you take an old Lawn Boy to a back yard strewn with twenty years of garbage when up on five lines of Bolivian Horse Cocaine (because maybe dealing with this kind of stuff is a bit depressing, is all I'm saying. We're all getting old, just some of us get there first), and it ain't pretty. So I think I join with all members of the Board in hoping that Burrito Boy wins the lottery, or maybe mugs a few people out in the back alley so that he can afford a shiny new lawnmower. We're all praying for you, BB, and don't forget to take the photo ID as well as the money and cards! People will pay good money for that stuff, although you want to be careful about what you tell them about how you got it. (Word to the wise.) Certainly you can get a good Lawn Pro at a couple places around BB's place, I'm just saying, and, hypothetically, that could happen if you're not so wired that it turns out that you've forgotten your credit cards at the motel. Which could also happen! Who among us haven't gotten a bit wrecked, one way or another, at one time in our lives, and done something that, hypothetically, we might regret later? Cancer. Cancer has. Cancer totally has. Just look at his shifty professor-eyes and tell me he hasn't! So, when we ask ourselves about stolen lawn mowers, and who is really on trial here, the answer is obvious. It's Cancer. Cancer's on trial here. I just can't believe all the stuff he's done. I just hope some day I'll find it in me to forgive him. Or in an envelope stuffed full of unmarked bills. That'd be a keen way to say, "I'm sorry," too.

You see, when corrupt potentates from a far-away land come to our country to dispense "justice," they stay at a hotel --and not an economy-type hotel, either, one of those overpriced tourist traps. They have no transportation, so they take limos everywhere; and, of course, they eat out. Like, all three square meals a day! And if it turns out that they forgot to bring toothpaste? They just buy some more! And not those tiny travel sizes, either. They're on an expense account! They'll even swing for that overpriced Toms of Maine stuff! Whereas when local potentates dispense their corrupt "justice," they go home every day to their McMansion in the suburbs, drive their own Discovery. . Heck, they probably brown bag it! (That getaway place in Aspen isn't going to pay for itself, you know.) So. Good for the economy, is what I'm saying.

When I think of LMDs, I think of the late 1980s "Deltite Affair," where sentient LMDs infiltrate and take over SHIELD before etc [shock, gasp!] etc. [i can't believe it] etc. While there were aspects of that run that I didn't like, it would be a good story for the season to take on, if it weren't already running with the Darkhold and, presumably, a Dr. Strange tie-in. Hey, what if the Darkhold thing takes them to Wundagore, the High Evolutionary, and the Lensherr family history? (In which case it is too bad that we're not going to get Peggy Carter, Season 3, to introduce the Whizzer, Miss America, and the Atom-Smasher.) Also, Daisy seems to be taking Practice Boyfriend's death pretty hard. It's almost as if she's a messed-up foster kid, or something.

While I can see why Daredevil 2 gets flack, and no-one should have to watch TV that they're not enjoying, there's something tragic about bailing on that season just before Elodie Yung's Elektra comes into her own as someone to mourn. Er, spoilers? Because Elektra dies in the end.

. . . A wizard did it?

Just finished Luke Cage. Very interesting arc in terms of villains.

"The common coupling of Swan's name with that of Thomas Edison in connection with the incandescent electric lamp has often led to the notion that Swan collaborated with Edison in this invention. That was not so. Their work was completely independent, and although each knew the other was working on the problem of devising a practical lamp, they had neither met nor communicated with each other. The conjunction of their names came about in 1883 when the two competing companies merged to exploit both Swan's and Edison's inventions" This is one of those weird Wikipedia conjunctions where the mandate to present the commonly accepted scholarly position leads to whiplash between paragraphs. Wikipedia continues: "In America, Edison had been working on copies of the original light bulb patented by Swan, trying to make them more efficient. Though Swan had beaten him to this goal, Edison obtained patents in America for a fairly direct copy of the Swan light,[25][26] and started an advertising campaign that claimed that he was the real inventor. Swan, who was less interested in making money from the invention, agreed that Edison could sell the lights in America while he retained the rights in the United Kingdom." How do we reconcile these two positions?Well, Edison did steal Swan's lightbulb. Not that this makes Swanany kind of hero. Swan had been experimenting with light bulbssince 1850. (Thomas Edison was three years old at the time.) However, he was experimenting with it because there was already a half-century or more of pioneering research in the area, and an entire industry of "safety lamps" for coal miners to fall back on. Swan's carbon filament-in-an-evacuated-glass-bulb was basically a fairly obvious solution to getting light out of something that kept the heat and sparks hermetically sealed away from the coal damp. From there you get to the point where you have an illumination method that's more practical than the gaslight competition. After that, the issue was market share. It was by this time abundantly clear that if you wanted to get into the American market, you needed an American collaborator, who would take out a patent on the invention. These American collaborators had an amazing ability to win patent law suits in American courts. There were American inventors who made money of patents on the teepee (you know, the Stone Age tent) and the padlock --which has been found in six thousand year old archaeological digs. (As well as being so common in medieval garbage dumps as to be pretty much junk even to archaeologists.) You might almost think .. . nah. So when Swan and Edison came to their agreement in 1883, it was just a bog-standard approach to doing business. If you wanted into the American market, you cut a deal with a local partner. The local partner might dig up an "inventor," or "invent" the process independently, Then they would come to an agreement under which the combined firm split up the lucrative American and English markets, with th rest of the world as the gravy on top. So it is in the case of the American market. Swan, either the inventor of the lightbulb, or, more likely, the winner of the ongoing British patent battle, cut Edison in. Edison got to make lots of dough on the American market, Swan also got to make lots of money. Given that they both had to fight off patent interlopers, they developed a common interpretation of the history of the lightbulb. While this interpretation was incorrect as history of technology, it was court-enforceable. (And given all the money that was tied up in it, understandably so. Who wants a true history of technology when it means pensioners eating pet food because their GE share value has collapsed?) This makes Thomas Edison seem like a less-than-savoury figure, and, in a sense, this is true. But he was following on in an American tradition that goes back at least as far as Robert Fulford, and probably got himself to sleep at night by telling himself that if he wasn't doing it, someone else would. Where I do fault Edison, and think of this as something worth getting excited about, is that his publicity did a great deal to propagate the idea of innovation as being driven by a heroic inventor in his "research lab." This, in turn, provides a veneer of intellectual legitimacy to the often dishonest and rent-seeking practices of patent law. Coming down to Elon Musk, we have the figure of an "inventor" who can only succeed if, basically, the Government builds him a Mars rocket and lets him rake off the profits. Which, absurd as it sounds, is how the transcontinental railways got built, so why not give it a whirl?

He said, "I'll just take out a patent on Joseph Swan's lightbulb! He'll never risk suing in an American court if I offer him a licensing deal!" Self-described heroic inventor are far more likely to be patent trolls than "innovators."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Co6zFxXw5-Q

The guy working across the street has a wife who works at Lord Kitchener Elementary School down the street. Apparently, his wife has told him that the school has been rebuilt without urinals in the boys' washrooms. He finds this upsetting. I know this because he has told the neighbourhood so. Very loudly. Admittedly, he was intending to communicate this to the children walking by on their way to school, but, as I say, he's very loud.

They're an endangered species! For shame!

I'd kill for that much action.

In the spirit of. . . A two-gunned character based on the original Sandman: wirepoon entangle in one gun, knockout and (grey, of course) knock-out gas in the other. Of course, it turns out that the real hero is his pretty secretary, who puts on a scandalous costume of her own to rescue him when he inevitably gets in over his head.

Go see if you can break someone's neck by twisting their head. We'll wait right here!

Here's a woman with a gift for marrying pulp . . . heroes. Ganna Walska (1887-1984) is described in her Wikipedia page as an "opera singer and garden enthusiast." The "garden enthusiast" is because she created the Lotusland botanical gardens at her mansion in Montecito, California. By all accounts (and that means that I skimmed the Wikipedia page), an interesting setting for a pulp adventure. But the "opera singer" is another matter entirely. She is the model of Susan Alexander, the amateur singer that Charles Kane tries to turn into a star in Citizen Kane, but the wealthy husband who promoted her was scion of the McCormick dynasty, Harry Fowler McCormick, an amateur avaitor who received one of the animal gland transplant operations offered by Serge Voronoff to cure his impotency. Of course, in the pulps, that kind of surgery ends up giving you animal vitality and . . . appetites. (You have to write that with the ellipsis in front.) For a hero, it could be more of a Professor Challenger kind of thing. Anyway, what with the impotence and all, that marriage was not long for the world. Her next (fourth) husband was, naturally enough, the inventor of a death ray, the Englishman Harry Grindell Matthews., who seems at the time to have been living in a fortified laboratory on the coast of Wales, busily inventing ways of detecting submarines and seeding aerial mines against bombers, while working on a "stratoplane" that he offered to the British Interplanetary Society. Now, I think that in real life, some or most of these inventions might have been imaginary. But you can see where pulp writers get their ideas. (Or where Matthews got his.) Walska's . . . appetites not being slaked by death rays and interplanetary space ships, she soon moved on to the famed "white lama," Theos Casimir Bernard, master of Tantric yoga. (If you know what I mean, and I think you do, etc, etc.) Bernard died in an attempt to reach the forbidden Key Monastery, in 1947, a year after Walska and Bernard were divorced. Her first and second husbands were pretty colourful, too, although not quite as obvious a source of material.

Well, sure. But what if you want to use time travel to combine your supers campaign with your high fantasy one? Like, the two parties meet when Captain Chronos sends the Des Moines Defenders back from 1996 to help the Flashing Bec du Corbins when it looks like they're hosed in a battle with Tamarr the Time Tatterdemalion. Comments about the sad tragedy suffered by Colonel Columbia leads the Flashing Becs use a Wish to travel forward in time to save the Colonel from the Nazi subsea base so that he can hook up with his best girl, leading the Defenders to not be judged strong enough to participate in the battle until 2016, at which point. . . Uhm, and then there's a parallel universe, and some time zombies show up, and dinosaurs and. . . I think I'm going to have to flow chart this some more. But what if?

Whereas, after some resistance, I've come around to thinking that placing the Turakian Age within the framework of the larger Champions Universe works. In fact, in the end, I don't think that Steve went far enough. (Something that's even more true of Atlantean Age.) Consider: Robert E. Howard, after having indifferent success with a generic "ancient past" fantasy universe with Kull, went full-pseudohistoric with Hyborian Age. Conan's Hyborian Age actually happened. Sure, it ended with a vaguely defined "catastrophe," but a comparison of the Hyborian Age map with the conjectural early-Holocene map early in H. G. Wells' Outline of HIstory tells you where Howard's mind is. His Picts are the real, historic Picts, and he borrows Wells' map because he considers it a significant issue, as Wells does., that the "pre-Indo-European" Picts be got onto an island without inventing boats. The peoples of the Hyborian Age are, generally, broad stroke caricatures of actual people, in locations not far off where they are historically, given the changed map. This comparison is a bit weak with respect to the Champions Universe, in that it is Valdorian Age that is supposed to have the everything-in-decline vibe that naturally ends with a catastrophe that wipes everything out. I've outlined my solution to this before (flipping the map upside down, localising it to Australasia and putting an "Aboriginal" skin on top), and I won't go there again. Turakian Age, as high fantasy, would work differently, and obviously you don't want to carry on the specific tradition of race-science history. That said, you've got a map to start with --and Ambrethel is a modified Eurasia-- the idea of local continuities to ground your regional treatments, an actual, real framing device, and a tradition of ending ages of high fantasy with some kind of sea change, as in Lord of the Rings. There really was an actually, historical catastrophe ("genetic bottleneck") in about 70,000 BC that nearly wiped out the human race. Now, I understand that ending everything in the last battle with Kal-Turak/Takofanes makes everything that came before seem futile. (And, incidentally, isn't it a bit strange that the age is named for its great, evil overlord? One of the conventions of the genre is that you don't say the name of your store-brand Sauron, because it attracts attention. That's why I like to use "King of Ivory," and Old Red Age/Aeon. And, yes, I'm stealing from Chris Rowley and actual geology, but it's theft in a good cause.) So you don't end things! Sure, Oh, sure, catastrophe, end of things, but. . . i) In the actual Champions Universe, we have several elven survivals. The Dark Elves go off and live in Faerie; other elves move to an island off the south north coast of Valdoria Australia (Tasmania, damn it!) and turn into Melniboneans. ii) "Lost cities" from the times before are a staple of pulp in generall, and there's already one in the Campions Universe --Arcadia-- with no reason not to add more. In my imagination, Venghest is leading her army in a hard march on the Doomspire and the last battle when the horizon to the north is lit by the cyan flare of mighty magic. Arriving on the evening of a lost battle, she never knows that the Empyrean host has fought and lost there that day, never again to interfere in the world, but when she launches her charge at the assembled host, she is able to cut through to the throne of the King of Ivory because of the sacrifices made that morning. But, hey, that aside, no reason not to have other lost cities. Shamballah, for example? iii) Back to the elven well again, but for a different inspiration. Elfquest is a good example of a genre of elven survivors of an ancient catastrophe, surrounded by primitive humans who hate & fear, etc....The Shire is another one, and, now that I think about it, so are a lot of other Young Adult "starting settings." The World is a tiny region surrounded by a mysterious wall/underground city/ valley surrounded by impassible mountains, and you are the first to go out and see what happened Outside in the Great Catastrophe so long ago. Turakian Age heroes could fight to create an enclave that will survive the coming catastrophe. Even better, from some points of view, it turns out to be a time-travel thing, so you can move easily across the ages. Also, furries. iv) In M. A. Foster's "Ler" books (Gameplayers of Zan, mainly), the space-elf "Ler" start out in an enclave, where they turn out to be. . . Anyway, they end up being carried away in a spaceship. Just because it's a fantasy campaign doesn't mean that the same thing can't end up happening in Turakian Age. There is the issue of fluctuating magic, and I understand that the idea bothers some people. It's like Vernor Vinge creating this huge, wonderful setting in Fire Upon the Deep and then just wiping it out. If that bothers you, though, just make it part of your metanarrative somehow. Perhaps revisit the idea, as Vinge did (but hopefullly with more spider-people and fewer obnoxious Tines).

Oh, come on! The one thing we know about Superman is that he doesn't like killing people. (Or squash.) Well, how do you know that you don't like killing people (or squash) until you've tried it? Hunh?