The_Dude73

I was in the Pentagon.

I was on the phone with my wife, talking about how a second plane hit the other tower when all hell broke loose.

Crazy day. I wasn't anywhere near the impact site fortunately. A friend of mine who I had been talking to was a SEAL corpsman (what the Navy calls medics), and I stayed with him till well into the next morning, doing what he told me as we were helping the wounded. He was actually decorated for his actions that day.

God is referenced in the JLU quite frequently. As was alluded to with posts regarding the Spectre. Not to mention angelic characters like Zauriel, who was the center of that JLA arc where they had to battle a host of renegade Angels.

Looks much better than I thought it would.

Only two I have are Magic and MA.

With Magic I was full of oohs and ahs, MA left me feeling a little underwhelmed. The costume additions didn't do much for me. If it weren't for Ninja run, I'd have been very disappointed.

I made a vampire blueside and he was a dark/Regen scrapper. Plenty of ways people can go with it IMO.

Tried this out last night on a couple of my scrappers. I'm not overly thrilled with the way it looks, but functionally I love it.

I'm going to respec my jump travel powers out on a couple of them, particularly my /SR scrappers. Ninja Run+quickness+swift+sprint is my new favorite way to get around town.

I've posted this before, but MA did not kill off the official content.

People seem to have forgotten this lately, but before AE, there were numerous complaints on here how nobody played the arcs because everyone was doing radio missions.

And the reaction was always the same, radio missions allow groups to stay in the same zone. I'd been on many PUG that was working well and would suddenly fall apart at the realization we'd have to cross two zones to get the next mish.

So this travel issue has bugged people for a while, and people were getting around it with groups before AE was released.

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Was looking over the Euro Boards and reading how happy they are to meet up with the Americans. Woohooo Drinks on Me!!!!

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Why wouldn't they be happy to mix it with Americans?

It makes them look mature, intelligent, and cultured.

And skinny.

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You must have gone to different parts of Britain than I did....

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Lol It's hard to tell sometimes... especially now with the Witch Costumes running rampent all over the place.... and that outfit shows alot of skin!!!

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Yeah, that magic pack was much more "Halloween costume sexy witch" rahter than "wicked witch."

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I think that's the only kind of witch you ever find these days. Look at stuff like Charmed, or anime.

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There's a reason for that. Classic, scary, ugly, warted witches with big noses and pointy chins and who look like they're 500 years old are... Well, ugly and not very cool. Certainly not something I'd like to play as, or play against.

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Actually, I'd like to play a character like that. I've wanted to try to make an in game character like the Baba Yaga for a while now, but I can't seem to get an outfit I like just right.

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Lol It's hard to tell sometimes... especially now with the Witch Costumes running rampent all over the place.... and that outfit shows alot of skin!!!

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Yeah, that magic pack was much more "Halloween costume sexy witch" rahter than "wicked witch."

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Honestly, modest costumes aren't realistic for certain types of fighting, for either male or female. Superheroes lean heavily towards hand to hand fighting, and when your enemy is close enough to lay hands on you they can easily avoid most protective clothing. In addition, things like body armor make really great handholds, making it really easy for your opponent to throw you around. It doesn't matter how strong you are, if you give your enemy a good enough grip to get your feet off the ground, you're going pretty much wherever they want to put you.

If a character has more than a quarter inch of hair, you have no business talking about how "practical" or "impractical" their outfit is -- if you have hair you aren't prepared to fight. Necks are weaker than arms, and hair tends to be stronger than neck muscles, so hair is nothing more than an invitation to getting your face slammed into the nearest hard object. Almost all heroes and villains have hair that is way too long to fight in, after which point it's just silly to worry that their shirt looks too easy to pull off in a fight.

Really, once a character has hair they're already so hopelessly impractical and vain that nothing else is even close in importance. (Which is why the Frank Miller incarnation of Catwoman shaved her head.)

Capes are straight out.

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You sound like you fight like a girl.

Take care.

[/ QUOTE ]I fight like I want to live, if that's what you mean.

On my last Iraq tour my platoon did a lot of snatch missions, helped quiet a few prison riots, and escorted tens of thousands of detainees from one place to another. I was always outnumbered, and usually armed only with pepper spray or a taser (which has 1 shot). So if trouble started the goal was to end the fight as rapidly as possible, and to do it without injuring ourselves (since we might end up fighting tomorrow and every other day for the rest of the year, even little injuries could end up costing). Losing one fight means you die.

Pulling hair like in a high school catfight won't do much of anything. However, grabbing a handful of scalp lets you control a guy's head, usually causes him to grab weakly at your hand so you can get control of at least one of his hands, lets you expose their neck for a brachial stun or a choke, and gives you great leverage for taking a guy to the ground. On top of that most guys don't defend their hair because they don't expect it to be used against them.

There's a lot of dirty things I might do in a fight -- grabbing hair is not the only dirty trick -- but my goal was always to get my enemy under control in 5 to 10 seconds so his 5 buddies wouldn't have time to figure out what was happening.

So yeah, I don't fight like a man, but I'm alive, my buddies are alive, and whenever there was violence I was able to end it so swiftly that it didn't have the chance to escalate.

Anyway my point was that it's really no more realistic to show someone that fights every day prancing around in a bikini than it is to show them with long hair. Either one is pure fantasy. People throwing punches rather than grappling is mostly fantasy too. Any kick aimed above the knee is fantasy. (To be fair, people do throw punches and kicks in fights, but that takes a long time to cause enough damage that you can't fight back.) But fantasy is fun and reality sucks.

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That's all well and good, but I train in a variety of martials arts, mostly MMA related. Thai boxing, I'm a purple belt in BJJ, Combat Submission Wrestling, as well as a background in Judo and Greco-Roman. The guy that runs my school is a retired SEAL Team Six guy and we also do Filipino Kali/Escrima etc. as part of his overall Tactical Defense System, which is full of "against the rules" material. Certainly going beyond what I learned in MACP.

Pulling hair or grabbing the head on someone untrained may work just fine, but anyone who trains regularly would likely have an answer for that. I deal with people clinching up or trying to establish head control all the time.

I agree with your overall point that this is cartoonish violence and not realistic, I just find the statement that having hair makes you vulnerable to be a bit over the top.