RDU Neil

American Mystery: How has Trump managed to ‘sell’ Putin & Russia to a ‘freedom loving’ Republican base?

I don't think the guy takes into account just how much more resilient live human tissue is than his meat and veggie targets for his tests, but it does give some idea of the amount of kinetic energy involved.
 

Randomly found this video and thought of this thread:
 
 

Regarding secret identities in the MCU, I think you have look at the heroes Marvel ended up using in their Phase One properties. Tony Stark is a billionaire with a head full of vital technological and defense secrets, his face recognized around the world. He could hardly have a bigger target on his back because he wears a metal suit. Steve Rogers was a soldier deliberately made into a high-profile symbol of America, and presumed dead for nearly seventy years. It wouldn't make sense for his true identity not to be a matter of public record. Thor is a prince and a god. He's used to being a public figure, and has no incentive to try to blend into society -- with his appearance and personality, that might not even be possible. The Hulk's alter ego has been widely recognized in the comics for decades. It's part of Bruce Banner's tragedy that he was often targeted by those who hunt the Hulk.
 
Black Widow and Hawkeye (in his Ultimates-inspired MCU form) are professional government operatives. They're well known in certain circles, and only assume other identities as needed for covert missions. T'challa is king of his country, and its champion as the Black Panther (a fact not known outside of MCU Wakanda before the events of the Civil War movie). Scarlet Witch and Vision have never hidden their real identities in the comics.
 
Spider-Man in the MCU retains a secret identity, as does Daredevil in its television analogue. It makes sense for them to do so; they live relatively ordinary civilian lives, and have loved ones they lack the resources to continuously protect if targeted by their enemies. OTOH Luke Cage had a past he tried to hide, but after adopting his new name never hid it or his face.
 
But even characters with secret identities in the MCU don't guard them as jealously as their comic-book counterparts used to do. To me that's a good thing. Many of those SID characters came across as paranoid, hiding who they are from family, friends, even fellow heroes they worked with for years. Being a superhero is stressful enough, without being unable to talk about those stresses with anyone else.

As a point of order, I suggest comic books and movies are each a medium.  Westerns and costumed superheroes are genres which, over the years, both of these, and many other, media (prose, TV) have presented.

Wikipedia credits (or discredits) him with killing 8 people.  However, whether the number is 4 or 8, it is worth remembering that many, many, many people have extremely hard lives and face abject poverty and still get through without killing anyone.
 
I have no doubt that Billy had a hard and sad life, but that is true of most murders.  That doesn't erase their crimes and make them decent people.  I wouldn't cast him into the deep pit, but I refuse to romanticize murders.  To do so is an insult to the truly decent people who muddle through hard lives without leaving widows and orphans in there wake.

I'm a white middle-class male, from the tail end of the baby-boom generation. But I grew up a first-language English speaker in Quebec, Canada, which has always been a majority French-speaking province. When I was young, English was the language of commerce, and of power. French speakers really were treated as second-class citizens in a number of ways. Where I grew up in Montreal, it wasn't even necessary to speak French to live your life comfortably -- you just assumed French Quebecers should learn English. But when I was a teenager, the French nationalist Parti Quebecois came to power. Suddenly the provincial government was "protecting and promoting" the French language and French Quebec culture by demanding the use of French in all public and commercial institutions; severely restricting English's use in signage and other advertising; limiting or reducing English-language educational institutions. French Quebecers became emboldened to publicly express their hostility and resentment toward the way English Canada had treated them (which feelings were not unjustified), and to return some of that to English-speaking Quebecers.
 
That experience gave me a bit of insight into what someone with my background almost never feels elsewhere in Canada or the United States: what it's like to be considered a minority. Not a visible minority, of course -- that's another level of misfortune -- but nonetheless one whose self-identity is being called out and challenged. The effect of the big things is easy to recognize and describe, but what always struck me is how the little things impact you. Constantly being told that you're different, you're lesser, that you don't really belong, having to fight for respect others take for granted... it's like the Chinese water torture, a constant drip-drip-drip that wears you down until you feel either like giving up or exploding.
 
As unpleasant as it was to go through, I think I'm better for it.

I may be mistaken, but what I took from the article is that white people in America generally dislike being designated "white" in the way that others are designated as "black" or "Hispanic," i.e. as part of an ethnic group that carries socio-cultural generalizations and assumptions. And the fact of that reaction highlights that white people have long considered themselves, consciously or unconsciously, to be the normative, baseline ethnic group; hence discussing them as just another ethnic category calls that normative status into question. They're made uncomfortable both by the challenge to that assumption, and by how it makes them face that the assumption exists in the first place.

I assume it's threatening to them to be put on equal footing with other kinds of "people with adjectives" instead of just being "people" by default.

What replaced the Western?  Science Fiction.
 
How did that work?  Scratch out "horse" and write "rocket pack"; cross out "Wagon" and write "spaceship", scratch out "six shooter" and write "Ray Gun", cross out "Indians" and write "Aliens".  The pretty girl and the saloon get to stick around.

I've been reading Iron Man since Tales of Suspense and I loved Iron Man 3. (Well really, since about Iron Man #75 or so... but still.) Granted I'm a huge fan of Shane Black's movies, so seeing that translated into Marvel (just like I love Waititi's movies) was a real treat. Mandarin is a dated, racist villain, and what they did with Trevor was genius, a real dig at fear mongering and profiling, etc. 
 
I've said before, the only thing I didn't like was the "blow up the armors" at the end, but it was clear that when Black was asked to write this, it was assumed RDJ was stepping down, and Iron Man was supposed to "end"... and so that ending doesn't make sense in the larger context. 

But why do it at all? Unless the new mythology says they can't talk underwater. Maybe they need some kind of telepathy... HEY! ?

4th edition Dark Champions and its attendant supplements were indisputably intended for street-level superheroes. It nonetheless included a large amount of useful information about real world law enforcement, organized crime, and firearms as those are major elements in such a game. As a result, it could easily be used for non-superheroic modern action games. 5th edition Dark Champions was produced with the active decision to expand the scope to include all manner of modern action stories. Both books are very well done, but I prefer the 4th edition version. I would prefer a strongly thematic Dark Champions with CU tie-ins and a completely separate Action Hero.

Hmmm... according to my wife, any role playing is Dork Roleplaying ?....?

That fits into a single year?

What if it's 13 Going on 30 with superheroes?

As to why it's okay to have a shirtless Jason Momoa being King of the Ocean yet kinda gross to present Margot Robbie as mentally ill rape bait:
 
https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/movies/bring-on-the-shirtless-men-why-its-acceptable-to-objectify-the-male-body-but-not-the-females
 
Don't worry, the article is much less confrontational than my opening sentence.
 
 

I don't perceive the tone of MCU movies as being monolithic. Sure, there's always a measure of humor in their films, more than in the generally bleak pre-WW DC films. But the predominant tone of Winter Soldier is very different from Ant-Man, and both are very different from Thor Ragnarok. I'm satisfied with the spectrum they present us with.

It certainly isn't something I'm particularly drawn to, either. But I'll take a relatively wholesome "kids love of superheroes" and the "what kind of superpower would you want?" conversations, over the brainless, "Yeah! Booyah!" male-gaze flexing idiocy and horrible, boring "action" of bright colors and lingering, intense stares that was Justice League. (I haven't seen BvS, as I couldn't stomach Man of Steel, and only made it five minutes into Suicide Squad before the abject objectification of Harley Quinn made me turn it off).
 
Ant-Man (first and second) were very much kids movies as well as being heist/caper films, and that is part of what really worked for me in those movies, because it owns the aspect of Scott Lang as a father, first and foremost, not just in his interactions with Cassie, but in the tone of the movie. Once the movie becomes "from the POV of the adolescent male" well... likely it will go downhill from there, but then, I never really cared for Captain Marvel much, except for the Ordway "Power of Shazam!" run.

From Putin’s standpoint he’s doing great. 

Good god, don't these people know better?
 
Tomorrow morning, a lab tech will walk into the lab and find the little piece of amber cracked open... FROM WITHIN! The so called "fossil" is nowhere to be seen.
 
Soon afterwards, all contact with the lab will be lost. The same will happen with the first emergency responders on the scene, as only a garbled radio call will be recorded... "...ahh... so many... kkkkkk...aaaa.... all over us... kkkkk..."
 
Local news will show shakey camera shots of Myanmar soldiers setting up a road block, then the camera image will jerk skyward to the roar above, tracking two PAC JF-17 Thunder aircraft rocketing toward the lab location. Seconds later, the ground shakes violently from a massive payload drop.
 
The next day, all contact with Myanmar is lost to the outside world.
 
 
Seriously people... it all starts like this!

There's more than one transformation shown in the trailer, so I'm guessing that he can turn back. Of course, he did appear to be at a carnival, so maybe he had to find a Zoltar machine.

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD returns for a 13 episode Six Season next year.  Apparently Inhumans was so bad not only was it cancelled but it book nine episodes of Agents of SHIELD with it.

AIUI he recorded way more than that.
 
Meanwhile,