Ironik
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Posts
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Joined
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I had done the things I wanted to do on the characters I wanted to do them on, but I'm happy for people who wanted more. Even leftover snowmobs aren't that big a deal, really.
Besides, Candy Canes sell for a pretty penny in July, let me tell you.
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This is how I play the majority of my characters, so it's not that big a deal to me. Even the ones who buy/craft things, I wait until they are 33 or 37 to do so, depending on how viable they are. Most of them I don't even bother doing that. Relying on drops and not buying anything is just par for the course for how I play.
My current hardcore character is Only Child, who is permanently level 2. He's a Willpower Scrapper and it's becoming more and more of a slog. I did manage to hook up with a charming and good-natured group of players last weekend to run many of the winter event missions. They reacted with good humor whenever I answered level-up ding "Grats!" with "Yay! 2 again!" Anything past about level 14 and your teammates have to carry you quite a bit. Someone mentioned that a Blaster would've been a better choice since they can still attack when stunned and I agree. I spend a great deal of time woozified because I chew through Mauves rapidly. I rely heavily on Vet powers and Temp powers, but since I can only hold a single recipe and 4 salvage at a time, it's rather difficult to craft anything. I focus on whatever temp power has dropped and sell everything not related to it. So far I've managed to make one temp power.
Another downside is that many of the unlockable goodies rely on your Security Level, not your Combat Level. Learned that the hard way when I wasn't able to get either the Raptor Pack or the Zero Gee Pack from the bank missions given out in Kings Row. *That* was a bummer. Same deal for making a Supergroup. I'll have to ask someone else to make it then invite me. -
Quote:/em winceOriginally Posted by QuiJon
Is it wrong that the time frame of the movie even from the trailer already is bugging me.
First off, WotWs happened in the 50s if i am not mistaken maybe 40s??? But anyway the trailer mentions in the final years of the 19th century??? Which means 15 years later is like WW1 time frame and the weapons etc are much far beyond that. Also its always bugged me the design concept that puts a big bad alien war machine on 3 fragile legs. Just a pet peeve there i guess.
Ow, dude. Geek fail. -
Oh yeah, if you can find them the Bureau 13 books by Nick Pollotta are fun reads. It's an X-Files type of thing, where the FBI has Bureau 13 to deal with monsters and supernatural critters.
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Quote:Do you mean "modern" as in "takes place today" or just something recognizably as our world, even if a bit in the future?Originally Posted by ObiWan
Sight thread jack, and if some have been presented then i appoloigize. I just skimmed the thread. I love modern urban fantasy but an i little bit over it. What i want to read is modern urban sci fi. The best example i can give is the movie "Push". Not quite superhero level and no cyberpunk dystopia. I read a series called Psi-Man by Peter David which was ok but i was hoping you guys had some suggestions.
Daemon (1st book) and Freedom (sequel) by Daniel Suarez start out as our society and become changed pretty quickly. Freedom may be a little cyberpunkish for you, but it's still early days in the change, so you might like it. I loved those books, because they were smart, well-plotted, had cool ideas and were just kinetic.
Jennifer Government by Max Barry takes place further in the future when everyone has taken on jobs which become their identities and their surnames. If you work for Honda, your name is Joe Honda. If you work for Apple, you're Joe Apple. So Jennifer Government has the crappiest job of all. It's dystopian if you're not crazy about corporations ruling the world.
I just saw that one of my all-time favorite books is back in print: The Apocalypse Door by James D. Macdonald. This is about a modern day Templar Knight (but he's cool) who teams up with a killer nun (who is *extremely* cool) in order to save the world. This book is a blast. Now, I'm the genre-typing guy, able to pigeonhole any film or book into its proper genre with a glance. That was the basis for my Ph.d. dissertation, in fact. The Apocalypse Door is the only work I've stumbled across that I can not decide if it's Fantasy or Science Fiction. That's how brilliantly Macdonald walks that line, giving equal evidence for both arguments. Either way, it's a crackerjack read. -
This is a new twist on the now-classic theme:
"I have the god-damned justice." -
I have no idea what happened. I saw Supergirl in her skivvies.
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Quote:I'll throw in a cousin just for funsies.Originally Posted by RogueDemonhunter
If you can find two more they can do a modern remake of 7 Brides for 7 Brothers.
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Quote:Although to be fair, no one involved in Trek (including Roddenberry) was ever concerned with continuity, so "canon" is kind of a loosey-goosey word for that franchise.Originally Posted by Arcanaville
If you pick and choose what parts of canon to accept, you're writing canon, not critiquing in.Quote:
Originally Posted by Durakken
As far as the why Romulans left, that is likely a lie or been warped over time as the teaching of Surak had beened and so many other things are so I would never take that at face value...
In this instance, though, since Abrams' movie is considered a reboot, none of the other series or movies matters. So if Spock said only a few thousand Vulcans survived, then that's likely the case since he doesn't make a lot of mistakes. -
Quote:I think there was a mention in either a TV episode or one of the books that the all-Vulcan ship was destroyed because they were over-reliant on logic. I forget the details, but after that incident no other ship was crewed entirely by Vulcans.Originally Posted by sleestack
There was one Starfleet ship (USS Intrepid) that was crewed entirely by Vulcans. It was mentioned in the Original Series episode "The Immunity Syndrome" (a.k.a the Giant Space Amoeba episode), and in the episode "Court Martial". According to Memory Alpha, "The Immunity Syndrome" occurred in 2268 which is 10 years after Vulcan is destroyed in the new movie, and "Court Martial" was in 2267. I don't know if the USS Intrepid was around at the time of Vulcan's destruction, but it likely was since it was a Constitution-class like the USS Enterprise.
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Quote:Just another example of why JJ Abrams sucks.Originally Posted by Forbin_Project
And yes I said millions of Vulcans. Vulcans had been been exploring space and spreading across the galaxy for 1,500 years. It's ludicrous to assume that all but 10,000 died.
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Looks cool.
I only have a semi-Tron toon that's not terribly creative. I made her a couple weeks ago to play AE arcs only, hence her name: Avatari (Avatar + Atari).
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More grim-and-gritty stories in the future, black ink sales increase dramatically. Everyone dies, everyone comes back. Alonso fired within 15 months, John Lasseter replaces him temporarily, everyone gets Hawaiian shirt-themed costumes for their family-friendly wacky adventures.
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Quote:/shrug What can I say? That's what the movie says.Originally Posted by Durakken
Star Trek: Vulcans are anything but home bodies, from what is known. They are an insular civilization which is why Spock gets all that grief. And we're not talking 100-200 years... We're talking, if I remember right, something like 5000 years of exploration and expansionism. It could be they just don't call anyone that calls home another planet as a Vulcan for some reason, but there is just no way there would only be "10,000" Vulcans. Especially since we know there are ships that are all Vulcan in Starfleet and ships are generally 500-1000 people... that's saying there are less than 10 vulcan starfleet ships... Highly unlikely given Vulcans having their own fleet for well over 1000 years.
I'm guessing you've never been to Mexico City or Hong Kong. You can cram a hell of a lot of people into a fairly small space. Whenever I visit my family in Brooklyn I'm struck by NYC's uneven population distribution. Queens has the second-highest population of the five boroughs yet parts of it look like any suburb in Ohio. Heck, some parts of the Bronx are still completely empty. You could easily stuff another 5 or even 7 million people within the boundaries of NYC without much trouble at all.Quote:DC: I said that the DCU Earth is up 4x bigger due to the fact there are roughly four major cities in one area and there is a ton more countries. Despite that DC also maintains that their population is 6 or 7 billion people on Earth which means that there is a lot more empty space just from that, but also there is a ton more because there are several more mega cities. The average major city has only around 3 million people, New York has like 10 millionish, and the biggest city has something like 17 or 18 million. Regardless, the major disasters and such of the DCU Earth has well over 15 million people dying and moving about the country in mass waves that I'm pretty sure no system could sustain for very long.
Besides, if the Earth were four times larger, the gravity would be at least four times greater, probably more like 6 times greater. That's just ridiculous, since that world is shown to be the same as ours with all the same stuff in it. Building on a planet with 4-6 times our gravity would look different, as would human beings. Much easier to simply assume they have a couple more cities which are the equivalent of Shanghai or Mumbai. A world 4 times the size of ours is far more difficult to hand-wave away than three or four cities with 12 million+ people in them. -
Quote:Snow Crash does suffer from bloat. There's a lot of info porn in it. That's why I prefer his novel The Diamond Age. Not so much of the over-explaining and a very cool concept with a great denouement based on the set-up. Very much a morality tale about unintended consequences. Mousey Tongue!Originally Posted by Defenestrator
I just finished "Snow Crash," and I'm kind of mixed on it.
Things I liked -- the setting and the characters.
Things I didn't care for -- so many pages dedicated to explaining language and ideas as a Sumerian meta-virus for society. Seriously, it seemed a quarter of the book was dedicated to Stephenson belching this stuff out. It's interesting, and figured into the plot of the book, but if you need 20 pages to explain your plot, you might have issues.
Would I recommend it to others? Probably, yeah.
I've heard good things about "Cryptonomicon," though. -
Quote:I think Jeff's disdain for quitters goes beyond just wanting to keep the drama queens around, I think he genuinely despises them. I'm guessing that's what was at the heart of his post-season pronouncement, "From now on, if you quit, we'll decide what to do with you." I know some people ding the show because "they aren't really 'surviving!'" Which is silly. There aren't chutes *or* ladders in Chutes and Ladders either, just pictures. The experience of Survivor looks plenty hard and the whole point is the social interaction. And seeing crazy people like Naonka try to justify their twisted behavior. (That woman is nuts. After seeing her crazy attitudes, I wouldn't let her teach my kids, either.)Originally Posted by Noble Savage
Definitely a great season. The show keeps surprising me, and as long as that's the case, I'll keep on watchin'. And I suppose they try to discourage quitting just to keep the drama high--if everyone just walked out, there wouldn't be much of a competition. Can't wait for Redemption Island.
Back on topic: 2010 had a ton of great action flicks, too. I enjoyed Knight and Day, The Other Guys and Salt as well as Predators, but the hands-down best action flick for me this year was Red. It managed to be cool *and* fun, with lots of humor thrown in. The fact that it's based on a comic makes it even better (and double on-topic for this forum!). Unfortunately, there were some genuinely terrible action flicks, too, such as Killers and Book of Eli and the single biggest disappointment of the year, The Expendables. Such a waste of assembled goodness, that one. Oh well, I'll be buying Red when it comes out on disc.
Best guilty pleasure: Hot Tub Time Machine. Much like the awesome Easy A it was a throwback (in more ways than one) to those great goofy teenage flicks of the '80s. We need more zany sci-fi caper flicks, I say. -
Quote:Wait a second... didn't you claim not too long ago that the DC Earth must be 4 times the size of our planet because of the stated size of Metropolis? Sounds like a bit of confusion on your part, really.Originally Posted by Durakken
Does it both anyone else that it appears that a number of writers don't seem to understand population sizes, how populations grow, and how much space is needed for any particular amount of a population...
Doesn't matter if anyone thinks that's realistic or not, that's what that (incredibly terrible) movie says, so it must be true. You can theorize all day about *why* only 4,000 Vulcans are off-planet... it's been stated in other versions of Star Trek that Vulcans don't have the same drive to explore the way humans do and that ambassadors and such visit other cultures primarily out of duty rather than any innate desire to experience them. Spock's hybrid upbringing has long marked him as an aberration among Vulcans, so he's not a typical example. Apparently the vast majority of Vulcans are homebodies. Nothing wrong with that. Until your planet explodes.Quote:In Star Trek (XI) the Vulcan home world is destroyed and it's stated something like the number of Vulcans killed was 4,000,000,000 and there are only something like 4,000 Vulcans left in the galaxy...
Ok, the 4 bil number could be understandable because once you get space capabilities it could be thought that a pop stabilizes at a given number, but then saying there are only 4,000 Vulcans left...That is so unrealistic and unlikely it's really not ignorable. -
Scaryhot!
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Foo did an awesome pose there. Looks like she posted it on AceBook, the CoH version of Facebook, and might regret it in a couple years.
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Quote:I have the agreeance.Originally Posted by Hero Prime
Your doodles are better than the best drawings I've ever done. Keep 'em coming!
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Color me intrigued.
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Akira, most likely, as that's a shot from the film, but tons of anime/manga from that era had that same nuclear bomb imagery.
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Quote:Yes. Unfortunately it was canceled with the Disney purchase of Marvel, but 2 seasons were made. I don't care for cartoons the way I used to, mostly being 30 years past the target audience, but Spectacular Spider-man was absolutely terrific. It also had the first Spidey theme song to rival the original.Originally Posted by warden_de_dios
Is that whole series as awesome as this clip is?
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From the same awesome artist who brought you the science fiction travel posters I posted about a while back comes the superhero version.
Sample:
