Having seen Natalie Portman in other roles, its clearly Lucas' direction and writing that made her awful in the prequels. There are plenty of videos with the cast of Star Wars complaining about Lucas' writing (nobody talks that way). Ewan McGregor did a great job despite the restrictions but he's the only one that came across well.
Relax, gents. I've seen the entire series before. And seasons 3 and 4 were pretty good. Except for the finale, of course. But there is a lot of chaff to sift through to get to anything substantial, mainly in the first season. We'll see.
I've used Foxbat in nearly every Champions campaign I've run. (He has yet to make a named appearance in my current campaign, but a news article talked about one of his antics without naming him.)
He typically has a team in my worlds - The Foxbat Five (obviously greater than the Fantastic Four, at least numerically) and Foxbat Force being the most used names. I'm pretty sure Exo-Skeleton Man has been in all teams, though the rest of the roster has changed with each campaign.
IIRC, The Foxbat Five were Foxbat (naturally), Exoskeleton Man, Dot (I stole the pic from CLOWN but made him more like Spot, the Spider-Man foe), Harmonious Fist, and The Amazing Static Man. At some point, I think I replaced The Amazing Static Man with Garble.
Foxbat Force added the Foxbots (mainly comic relief), Professor Robert Steriaca, Blinky, and The King (claims to be the real Elvis Presley kidnapped by aliens).
Along the way he got a love interest (Batfox), kinda the Harley Quinn to Foxbat's Joker.
And of course, he had the Centipedemobile, the multi-pod vehicle, with each pod having its own special movement power, sensor, and weapon for when they separate. That was fun to write up, and I even got a set of multicolored ping-pong balls (with velcro to attach them to each other) to use on the battle map to represent his crazy vehicle.
He has appeared alone a few times, but only when facing off against a lone hero. Otherwise, he's with his team.
Many, many fond memories of Foxbat and his crazy crew...
Well, you don't put in for the night on an open-water run! Which can be very, very long, by the way. English fleets used to show up off the Levant in the early summer on a regular basis from the First Crusade on. (Actually, probably a century or so earlier.) As far as we can tell, the standard route was : assembly at Dartmouth or nearby (hanging around); a straight run to Santiago de Compostella (hanging around); turn left at Lisbon and straight through to Sicily (hanging around); Levant.
The hanging-around episodes in the midst of long voyages all involve waiting for the right wind, although when we have accounts of them they're all about politics. (People get bored, and bored people besiege cities and take sides in civil wars. It's just human nature.) By late medieval times, English voyagers were clearly ending up in Candia (honey citron), Kalamata (olives), and Monemvasia (Malmsey) so often that the names are synonymous with their signature exports. By this time, the standard voyage was from London, and the place of hanging-around was the Downs. We know the Downs above all from the trials of the Pilgrims there: you took ship in London, went downriver to the Downs, and then waited for a wind that would take you around Spithead, from which it was usually fresh all the way to Gibraltar. And so this very long voyage from England all the way to Greece was usually most trouble a day's voyage from London.
It's all about the wind, is, I think, a fair summary of this particular kind of voyage. It's almost meaningless to talk about how long "the voyage" is, unless you include the time spent hanging around waiting for the right wind. Because if you haven't got a fresh wind, and an expectation of it continuing, why are you even bothering? Just wait on land!
Now, on the other hand, the "standard" voyage to St Kilda was four days, and made under oars. This is a very small distance, and a very long time, and it is not as though you can't improvise sails on boats this small. (Picture that image of the lifeboat with the improvised sail made by hanging clothes off an oar.) The reason people did things this way is that by far the most laborious parts of the whole voyage were those spent doodling around land. The entire last day of the voyage to St Kilda was scheduled on the basis that you arrived off the island's anchorage at nightfall, waited until morning, and spent as much of the day as you needed negotiating your way to land --probably mostly determined by the tides.
In other words, it is not just the distance across open water that matters here. It's also the last hundred yards to land. This is pretty common for Atlantic voyaging. There has to be close attention to destinations and also waypoints. You sail, period, long distances, and row, period, short ones. (Although by "row" I think we need to allow improvised masts and sails, as noted.) I could pile on circumstance and location without end, here. Norwegians built deep-hulled ships because their waters are deep. Cinque Port captains go pirate easily, and this reflects corruption on land, because the only way to land at the Cinque Ports is to come up on the beach, and have some locals winch your characteristically short, fat-hulled boat up the steep dunes.
And yet for a coastwise galley-trip in the Mediterranean, suddenly the rules are reversed; sails are used even for short voyages, and voyages are broken by what appears to be easy and regular beachings. The reason things are so different is that Mediterranean beaches are quite different from Atlantic, and much more common. While, on the other hand, tides are quite gentle and neither aid nor obstruct beaching. You probably can't just set out into the blue in a Mediterranean context, but if you know the land and seascape, you can plan a point-to-point-to-point voyage from one beach to the next. This is why the typical Mediterranean cabotage vessel is long, narrow, and shallow-hulled. It's meant to be hauled up shallow beaches.
And then, from Bangkok to Canton, it's nothing but sails, ever, and even if you're going to war to restore the Bach Viet, your war elephants go from Da Nang to the Pearl by junk. Again, whereas if you're going to war against the Khmer or Surabaya, it is by war canoe. The long voyages rely on the monsoon winds, and your profit depends on your being the first ship of the season to catch them. Whereas the short voyages are going to landing stages on the flooded forest margin. It's that interface between land and sea that is decisive here. Different geographies demand different technologies, and different schedules.
This is why, I think, most writers, and especially writers from the good old age of sail, scour ancient texts for voyage lengths. Locals know their waters, and, if pressed and talkative, will explain why the boats look like they do, and why voyages take the time they do. But, even here, you have to beware the "smartest man in the room." I think I'm on solid ground here, writing mainly from the maritime history of the Crusades and histories of the European workboat, and the very dangerously shallow basis of some tentative work on South China Sea piracy in the golden age.
Agreed. Although in general the better business model would be to give away the rules for next to nothing and make money on splatbooks and modules. If you're Hasbro or GW, then you have a gradual power creep with each successive splatbook so people have to keep buying them to remain competitive. But I'd like to think we wouldn't have to go that far.
Lawnmower Boy reacted to Pariah in Funny Pics II: The Revenge
Lawnmower Boy got a reaction from L. Marcus in Order of the Stick
Lawnmower Boy got a reaction from Cancer in Travel Times & Distances
