Cunning Man

It's them meddlin' kids and their dog*

 

 

 

 

*I'll be playing the part of the dog

You know it's only a matter of time before the Justice League Dark square off against Vincent Van Ghoul.

I don't know, I only read the first issue.

I foresee a retooled Tim Hunter, attendant of an extradimensional magic academy reachable through a train station, who champions the cause of corporate control over intellectual property against the evil machinations of a supernatural British nanny.

The haircut looks ridiculous to me. If you google images of Henry Cavill, most of his real-life haircuts look more like Superman than the faux horror movie bouffant in that still.

 

A year later, I don't really know what I meant by "faux horror movie". Now I know how the rest of you feel.

Faux in contrast with "real-life"; and "horror movie" as in "real horror show", but not in a good way as it's used in A Clockwork Orange, but rather what common sense would suggest it means?

And bouffant meaning big?

:mong:

He was in the 1990 Captain America.

In a performance that, according to the Washington Post, "cements his status as comics' high shaman".

I'm sure replacing "Okay, boy. Show me." with "I'm not finished, yet." is really helping sell people on the animation.

I'm thinking those movies should be combined, with a floating holographic Darren McGavin head in the Fortress of Solitude.

Darren McGavin's not in that.

Whatever they became, some Rambo movies were meant to have more of a message than Man of Steel is likely to carry, Morrison quotes, and all. All I can say about Ahnie is Raw Deal had Darren McGavin, but I might be forgetting something.

It seems sort of lowbrow.

Without agreeing or disagreeing with that, it looks like what I want from a Superman movie.

But yeah.

Contains supersecret drool-inducing nuggets of fanboy wisdom:

I don't want to nitpick but couldn't there have been a Thought Box or something with John telling us why he'd crossed his fingers when he made that promise to Cheryl? Were we supposed to expect to be told, or even suppose that there was a reason for it? Too many dead-end trains of narrative like that and Milligan can't rightly hold us responsible for just assuming he's a lazy or apathetic writer these days. Keep in mind I'm not reading the new arc, so I don't know how well the lastest dose of "it sucks to be a Constantine" will help the series recover from the above-mentioned gaffe. I think I'll read the trade, when a new writer is delivering regular monthly goodness, but for now, I must rely on seeing the book through threads like this. Doing so is disorientating, so I'll keep my rant impulse in check. On that note, it occurs to me that if someone who never saw (what I must now consider to be) John in his prime were to let this issue be their first exposure to the character, they would probably wonder just what the big deal about the infamous magician really is. And if sayed hypothetical reader then went off into the past to explore some vintage John stories like Swamp Thing or Books of Magic, they would necessarily have to draw a contrast between the older, better tales, and these new, here 'uns. All of this leads me to a point about the true nature of a comic title's appeal, but since I promised I wouldn't rant, I can't write what it is.

Heinlein sounds like the perfect man for that sort of project, provided he's there for PR.

Um, the Soviets were the Evil Empire. What part of "STAR WARS" defense program don't you understand...?

This is really looking good. If only I could forget that Snyder's justification for changing Watchmen's ending was it was perfectly believable that Superman would remove all of Earth's nuclear weapons and force the nations to behave. It's as if he learned nothing from Superman 4...

It's true, visionaries lay out the future and leave the details to the engineers. It's only when the engineers start transporting chunks of space around that the visionaries wake up screaming.

I mean insofar as an awful lot of the original series episodes dealt with technologies going horribly out of control and often having to be talked to death by William Shatner. Technical fixes for problems are never offered, and not even the Enterprise's drives are up to doing their job without stressing out James Doohanr. A sort of general distrust of technological apparatus is endemic to OS Star Trek, and as Roddenberry's was the main hand on the tiller (whatever Harlan Ellison likes to claim), that was most likely down to him.

There are a lot of technical fixes for problems. Spock's parasite in "Operation: Annihilate" is removed by a blast of light. Though it blinds him, he recovers. Radiation: our harmless friend. Energy beams from the ship incite behaviors that destroy the spore influence on the planet of the lotus eaters. Khan is beaten by Kirk in personal combat thanks to an inanimate carbon rod. What the transporter puts asunder it apologetically joins again in "The Enemy Within". I think that episode was propaganda from the transporter industry actually. The ship's phasers destroy Apollo's shrine, saving humanity from Utopia, but the happiness of that ending's debatable. Spock's shuttle trip kills the giant space amoeba that was going to infest the galaxy.

There are a lot of haywire computers and evil robots threatening human and alien development, but it's by no means one-sided.

Technically phasers fire nadions, which makes them particle beam weapons and not energy weapons per se. If I'm right, that means their rays travel shy of lightspeed.

I didn't say ST warp drive was based on the Alcubierre Drive. It's a similar idea which lacks those problems you mentioned.

Why do you call Gene Roddenberry a Luddite? Do you mean that insofar as the warp drive idea he was using is older than ST?

Seeing them get anything they want to appear on the main viewscreen for years I imagined the sensors must generate some kind of disembodied third-person consciousness that could float around, even out of time, in or out of warp fields. If I were going to try to write that into a story today I'd base it on quantum entanglement and hope whatever I came up with didn't get laughably dated too quickly by physicists. I don't have any ST tech manuals and I don't think that phenomenon was ever satisfactorily explained on the show. When somebody realized (the biggest reason) why the transporters wouldn't work the writers just added Heisenberg Compensators. I heard a fan asked Mike Okuda how they worked and he replied, "Very well, thank you!"

As for the warp question, it seems they use a variation on the Alcubierre Drive, which does like so:

I really don't know how they reconcile the weapons with that, but the first thing that comes to mind is a pencil in a glass of water, the image distorted by light refraction but the pencil actually straight.

Do they ever explain what their sensors are? If you turned cameras backward at warp you wouldn't see anything, because light couldn't catch up with you. I think they got past that problem by inventing "subspace sensors" but most viewers probably never realized why those were necessary. The Picard Maneuver seems to be an example of the above type of paradox, but it would only work on ships with normal sensors.

The Federation would be impossible to manage if warp drive created time dilation; all the clocks would run at different speeds.

Isn't that the point of that "Stardate" stuff on the telly, though? I thought they used that for log entries because time dilation would be enough of a factor that their local time would have diverted from time at their point of origin to at least some extent.

I don't know how they determine the Stardate. I guess I assumed it was something all the spacefaring species adopted out of the convenience of not having to use any one planet's schedule.

That's actually something I really like about the set up in the original series, even if it's obviously been fudged to the extent that it only causes a slight inconvenience when it comes to book keeping, rather than years or decades of relative time being lost on long haul trips.

Having a Stardate wouldn't keep them from coming home hundreds-or-whatever years after the people who gave them their mission had died of old age, if the engines had warped the crew as well as the space around them. They would just have the same discrepancy on a different format. To avoid that the writers would have to take relativity out of the crew's travel experience or just ignore it, and the latter option would have severely annoyed Spock (though he wouldn't admit it).

 

Prador Moon

The Shadow of the Scorpion

Gridlinked

The Line of Polity

Brass Man

Polity Agent

Line War

The Technician

The Skinner

The Voyage of the Sable Keech

Orbus

Hilldiggers

 

 

Gridlinked (2001)

The Line of Polity (2003)

Brass Man (2005)

Polity Agent (2006)

Line War (2008)

PrtSc

The Federation would be impossible to manage if warp drive created time dilation; all the clocks would run at different speeds. I think the shell only affects space in front and behind the ship to oomf it along, so that iron would be traveling at impulse after beaming. I take your meaning though: you could teleport internal organs out of chest cavities if you had that power. When Ebert was tired of seeing the bridge consoles explode in battle he asked why they don't just beam power into the instruments, instead of using these potentially spark-emitting conduits everywhere. Trek really has grown stale. It's a bit of a shame we'll never have a Borg Xtro. Anyway, Asher's books seem to be my kind of reading so I'll add them to my stack, but since it's already threatening to fall over and kill me it may be a while before I can read them.

ST:FC had a terrible third act.

It isn't like the first two were all that good, either.

:icon_wink:

Sadly true, but why have the queen be no more than a leather bottle opener when she could have been something elemental like V-GER, as Avaunt suggested. That's when it all fell apart for me.

So, those comics appeared on the astral plane once destroyed here, and the Powers there now turn them every way in pained confusion, trying to glean some sense and appeal from them. Between Their imminent howl of disgust and the twisted, slutty spectres freed by the conflagration, I fear we are in for some dire psychic turbulence.

Like porn sites melting computer monitors, and shit.