@Rubiksmoose Because the giant eagles know to put "yes" above "no" and not accept B as an input when getting to the confirmation page after long walls of text.
@trogdor ON the other hand, late teens to early 20's young men frequently do things of questionable wisdom "here, hold my beer ..." and off it goes ...
@Shalvenay @trogdor @KorvinStarmast If the weather's bad in the northeast in ways that changes my Saturday plans, would you-all be (a) around for and (b) interested in a session Saturday night?
@nitsua60 I have not yet told the Missus that sat nite was cnx'd, the mondy night group was cnx due to DM being sick, and Thursday nite group is not meeting ... so I will make the case that I can be on.
@NautArch What we had hoped to do was have a group that can stay together and do the ToA adventure ... I don't know how well "now and again" will or would fit into that, but nits can give you the final read on that.
@NautArch I'd love to see you in the group if we can make it work, though. The Back Room has us discussing that back and forth, if you want to throw the ideas you have up there we can all mind mash it to see what works.
Hmm, I am not sure what a mind mash is, but I think I may have created my first neologism ... but I better check the urban dictionary first ...
Well what do you know, no entry of mind mash at UD, so I guess I need to provide a provisional meaning. Similar to brainstorm, but with gravy is where I'll start.
Etymology includes influences from The Monster Mash, which was a dance of the monsters in a popular song.
Mind Mash: a neolgistic portmanteau of brainstorming and the Vulcan mind meld, with a cultural reference to the Monster Mash song/dance. Meaning: getting multiple people together to assess an idea, discuss it, and come to a resolution with the express purpose of something fun or light hearted being the result.
Gravy is extra
Depending upon the social setting, dancing may be involved.
Whoa, that was weird, YouTube offered up Dead Flowers by the Rolling Stones when I played the youtube Monster mash at the above link.
I guess I must have visited a bunch of Rolling Stones content from this IP address ... ?
IIRC, Bangers and Mash is sausage and mashed potatoes, so a British English first impression of this neologism is likely to be culinary. That's why the gravy is extra. Profit motive. :)
@GreySage We don't make mashed taters as much any more since we have reduced some kinds of our carb intakes. As we age, we don't burn the fuel as fast.
Arrgh, I know we have a question on scrolls and whether you have to concentrate on a spell cast from a scroll (I think you do) but I just got a call so .. later.
DMG pg. 141: "The spell uses its normal casting time, range, and duration, and the user of the item must concentrate if the spell requires concentration. Many items, such as potions, bypass the casting of a spell and confer the spell's effects, with their usual duration."
But I don't actually see a question on it. I thought there was one as well
See the rules on casting spells from magic items (DMG, 141). There you will find the answer you seek. #DnD https://twitter.com/wyndll/status/745038632340201472
Some magic items allow the user to cast a spell from the item. The spell is cast at the lowest possible spell level, doesn't expend any of the user 's spell slots, and requires no components, unless the item's description says otherwise. The spell uses its normal casting time, range , and duration, and the user of the item must concentrate if the spell requires concentration. Many items , such as potions, bypass the casting of a spell and confer the spell's effects, with their usual duration.
The movie was thematically flawed and indulged in some light character assassination, but that's the absolute best they probably could've done considering the source material.
I have some questions about certain decisions made in the MCU's Civil War storyline, but it was good as far as MCU stuff goes (which, yes, isn't saying much).
As far as in-universe stuff goes, I question Steve's decision to take on 6 supersoldiers, all of whom are as strong or stronger than Bucky (who he has had trouble defeating as well), with the team he brought.
And also bringing Bucky to a guy who has already shown that he can brainwash him.
My 2 biggest gripes about Civil War (movie) are that 1) 90% of the movie could have been wrapped up by Rogers and Stark talking together and coming to reasonable conclusions like adults, and 2) The entire "russian supersoldier" plot required no addressing. The heroes literally could have ignored the whole thing, thus removing one of the biggest conflicts in the movie, and nothing bad would have happened.
Related to 2: The 'bad guy' could have just told the Avengers "Hey, there are a bunch of old russian super soldiers over here, you may want to check that out" and it would have accomplished the same thing his whole plot with multiple murders did.
@GreySage If you're talking about his murders at the beginning of the movie, particularly of the Soviet guy, I think that was so he could get (video) confirmation that Bucky killed Tony's parents.
And the point of killing the other dudes was because he needed Bucky and Tony in the same room when he showed the video and he had no idea where Bucky was.
And killing the other dudes and framing Bucky was to get everyone to look for him because one guy who used to be a member of a third-world country's secret death squads doesn't really have the resources to pull off a worldwide manhunt.
Honestly, as far as characterization in Civil War goes, I liked Zemo the most. In the comics, he's basically just another Red Skull. Nazi with a weird thing going on with the face.
@Yuuki Based on my quick reading of wikipedia, you're right. Which of course raises the 3rd biggest problem, people getting mad at the Avengers over stuff that wasn't their fault. Everyone is mad that the Avengers trashed parts of Sokovia, while ignoring the fact that if they didn't the whole planet would have been destroyed.
@GreySage I'm not sure whether people are aware that Tony Stark made Ultron. But barring that, people blaming superheroes for saving them is a pretty common trope in the Marvel universe.
ok so there's no way that disintegrate is not supposed to work on a creature already at 0 hp, but darned if I can think of a rules-based way to justify that.
@Yuuki indeed, and the Sokovia Accords make a lot of sense, but getting mad at the Avengers for other things and using them as excuses to make the accords is stupid.
The whole thing --starting with the comic storyline-- was a clear case of having an end goal and then forcing a plot to get us there no matter how contrived or inconsistent.
@Rubiksmoose It's supposed to disintegrate if the target hits 0. It's a bit of a rules blindspot, but I'd say if the target is at 0 after the spell hits them, they get disintegrated
@GreySage That is definitely what I would say, but I think there are other abilities that trigger on dropping to 0 hp that would probably not be intended to work that way. I'm guessing on this right now since I haven't had time to look yet.
Yeah, there's the obvious problem of the Mandarin being revealed as an invention of a white guy and I still have mixed feelings about that regardless of whether it's supposedly "solved" by a DVD extra.
I thought it was moderately clever to have an irredeemably racist villain concept turn out to be someone exploiting our society's credulous eagerness to believe that such things are real.
It's not without its own problems, but definitely an interesting meta-textual approach.
At least the Iron Man saga has a consistent theme of "mistakes/actions in the past will come back to haunt you". I'm still not sure what the Thor saga is supposed to be about.
"I killed your people during my expansionist wars but raised you disconnected from your history and forced you to take on my own identity. Why aren't you grateful?" "..."
But yeah, the Thor arc is also about rejecting toxic masculinity, and about needing to take responsibility for cleaning up the exploitative privilege we've inherited.
I'm not entirely certain Asgard vs. the Frost Giants was an expansionist war. I think it's implied in Ragnarok that Odin stopped his empire-building a long, long time ago.
@BESW Supposedly, the Frost Giants attempted to conquer Midgard and that's why they fought. But Niflheim (I think that's the Frost Giants' realm?) is conspicuously one of the Nine Realms that Odin conquered.
@Yuuki See also: the "Cowboys and Indians" narrative.
I don't think Branagh had a lot of these themes at the forefront of his mind in the original Thor, but they're there and Taika Waititi drew them out into the text.
I guess Captain America's storyline is about rejecting big shadowy organizations and thinking for yourself or something? I dunno, the first one was a mess as far as themes go.
Steve Rogers' stories should, in my opinion, always touch variations on the theme of allyship: people whose circumstances let them ignore an injustice committed against others, but who take an active role in fighting injustice anyway. The stories aren't always about that, but they're better the more they use it as a touchstone.
Cap's arc in the films got thrown off course by Civil War, I think, because everybody's character needed to get bent in order to reach the producers' marks for what the movie had to have.
I think, at the end, his themes are about finding the balance between justice and mercy, in a world that often obfuscates the nature of both.
In that, Civil War does an okay job of sticking to point even if the things it's saying aren't coherent.
Side note on Civil War, I hate the "River of Truth" speech and while I appreciate that they didn't give the lines to Steve in the movies, I still hate that they felt it necessary to be included.
I don't care if it's an iconic moment for Cap in the comics, it's a dumb speech.
It's particularly interesting because he tries to resolve it by destroying the Frost Giants, essentially rejecting the culture of his birth in favor of the culture that he's adopted/was adopted into.
And then he falls into an abyss of spacetime and gets brainwashed by a giant alien raisin.
I think of that as "I'm going to find a dad who loves me for who I am!" and he finds the absolute worst role model possible who's more than happy to exploit Loki's insecurities.
Thanos looks like an abusive dad who would make his kids fight each other for his own amusement and warped sense of power... oh
I'm increasingly doubtful that Infinity War will give Thanos his original motivation for gathering the Stones. Which is a shame because that means we'll miss out all the best parts of the story.
So he gathers the Infinity Stones to gain power over all reality, and goes back to Death... who tells him that now he's so much more powerful than her, and Death can only love an equal.
And all of this is done without her talking to him at all: she uses intermediaries because he's first too weak, and later too strong, for her to speak to directly.
> Deadpool becomes infatuated with Death after he has a number of near-death experiences. During the Funeral for a Freak storyline, Death appears to reciprocate the feeling, and a jealous Thanos prevents Deadpool from dying and joining the entity by cursing him with immortality.
@Yuuki Yeah, Mistress Death is the same as Death. Mostly. Because comics, so continuity waaaat.
Death is an abstract entity, so any writer's version of Death in any continuity can get folded into being the same character when Marvel buys the property.
I generally don't like depictions of death/Death where the personification is appeased via killing tons of people (why would Death want more things to do?), but then again the Marvel universe is about the right kind of crapsack place where that would make sense.
@Yuuki if we take them up as the same Death, the story becomes she only really wanted to date Deadpool, and the stuff about declining Thanos as being too powerful or not powerful enough is because it's a really, really convenient way to just not deal with him.
@BESW I like to believe that Death's job isn't just collecting the souls of the Death, but also takes it upon... uhh... themselves(?) to maintain the flow of Life and Death.
@BESW thank you for this btw. part of Australian dialog about the native peoples -- and probably elsewhere -- is "why did they need an apology anyway, it's not like they were the ones affected" (even though they were busy being affected by direct action as recently as 40 years ago and are still dealing with its consequences, and now are dealing with the child welfare policies being a 2nd invisible stolen generation scheme)
that's going to help me understand what's going on and engage with that dialog constructively
@Ben also wow, that is a really powerful depiction of a suffering person right there and it is gripping me.
that artist got their body language spot on and then some
I had one joke with my friends about that - the Avengers would all be sitting around trying to come up with a plan on how to deal with (in this case Thanos), then all of a sudden [ding]... Camera pans over, and there's Deadpool at the microwave. He turns, about to take a bite of his hotpocket, and shares that "awkward moment" stare with the rest of the Avengers. He then bails - leaping out a window yelling "Catch me Spidey!" [thud] "Dammit Parker!"
@Ben exactly this. At one point in the fight with all the supers of the universe, Mephisto convinces Thanos to turn off several of the Soul Gems... just to prove to Death that he doesn't need them.
It's literally a "she'll like you if you fight with one hand behind your back" thing.
@Ben Well, that and privatized prisons are unreasonably restricting all entertainment, like extremely limited book lists, for various unethical reasons relating to profit and bigotry.
@Ash I've got a few friends in Correctional Security, and I've heard stories of functional weaponry created using plastic cutlery and plastic straws that are quite deadly.
So seeing this ingenuity used to create something like this is quite inspiring
The US comes down pretty hard on the "punishment" side of the punishment vs. rehabilitation debate over incarceration of criminals. This seems at least partly an extension of that line of thinking.
There's some really heartbreaking institutional oppression going on with the US prison systems.
@doppelgreener I'm sure there are better resources dealing more specifically with the Australian indigenous experience, which shares broad similarities with the Alaska Natives and First Tribes in America but is quite different in the particulars.
@Shalvenay honestly once you start getting into the details (like i've been) it gets downright dystopian. and that's when you start getting into the details.
also in other news entirely
#Macklemore @Macklemore showed up at his grandmothers house and surprised her, he filmed an amazing music video of their most #Wholesome day together https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OrLroFa0AI !!
