Cool

masks and helmets that hides someone's face in such a way that they become the face themselves my beloved

these are all creatures to me

What was the point in animal planet airing those incredibly convincing fake documentaries about dragons and mermaids

i love in fantasy when its like “king galamir the mighty golden eagle and his most trusted advisor who would never betray him, gruelworm bloodeye the treacherous”

http://chng.it/2TrMRPgFjS

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Help stop the gassing of Immigrants!!

I enjoy The Boys but one major problem I have with it is that it’s so hard to compare strengths to other settings, like we never see Homelander challenged so we have no clue how’d he fair against others which I get is maybe sorta the point with it being like him as a medium fish on a small pond but it’s still annoying

Some Podcasts as Welcome to Night Vale Quotes

Because I can. These are just the ones I could find quotes for, or that I’m subscribed to, so I may post an updated version later.

The Magnus Archives: There’s no cause for concern. We’re way past that now. If you’re not feeling mild terror then you haven’t been paying attention

The Penumbra Podcast (Junoverse): It is the good and the bad. It is the sound of the world. A world that will kill you, but also a world that will allow you to live

Wolf 359: I come to you live from under my desk, where I dragged my microphone and am currently hiding in the fetal position.

Archive 81: *static* *rising tones* *abrupt end of episode*

Eos 10: The Night Vale Medical Board announced today that they can’t help you. Not if you’re gonna keep screaming like that! They also asked that you clean up a bit before you come in. They don’t want to get sick!

Death by Dying: Death is only the end if you assume the story is about you

Stellar Firma: We have nothing to fear except ourselves. We are unholy, awful people. Fear ourselves with silence. Look down, look down, and forget what you’ve done.

Brimstone Valley Mall: There’s a special place in Hell. It’s really hip. Very exclusive.

Ars PARADOXICA: Time is weird. So is space. I hope ours match again someday

The Amelia Project: if you see something, say nothing and drink (cocoa) to forget

Startripper!!: Space tip: bring a sweater

The Orbiting Human Circus (of the air): I’m a single issue voter. If the candidate is not a baby polar bear, I straight up cannot vote for them.

One of the biggest obstacles to moving forward with Tiny Frog Wizards is that I just couldn't get Paths of Power and Power Dice to pull their weight. They represented a soft violation of the game's basic mechanical conceit that casting spells and only casting spells has dice-rolling attached to it, and in playtesting they didn't prove to be terribly effective at encouraging specific flavours of foolishness – they were just a lot of mental overhead for not a lot of benefit.

The pages previewed above represent a first pass at reworking them into something a little more on point. Instead of big goofy statements about your tiny frog wizard's ethos of magic that hook into a metagame resource economy, you get a generic pool of material components, optionally supplemented with magic items that mess with the dice economy at the time of casting, and you don't need to do anything special if you decide you don't want to use them at all.

As always, comments, criticisms, and/or bizarre rants are welcome!

(Please disregard the fact the page numbering skips from 11 to 13 – page 12 is reserved for the other twelve example Functions I haven't come up with yet. In the meantime, if you want to give it a spin, just use a d4 rather than a d6 for the first digit of the Function roll.)

You could also tie in two other common tropes with the whole “Superman-esq is trying to contain all these guys” which is the whole no kill rule everyone follows and how villains constantly break out

Basically the Superman knock off purposely enforced the no kill and purposely tries to make containment not a priority so that way there’s always villains to keep the hero’s distracted so they can’t start enacting facist coups or whatever but it’s a ticking clock of hero’s getting fed up and just putting people down and villainy getting less popular until there aren’t enough villains to keep this system going and it all comes crashing down

sorry for random addition just an idea that popped into my head based around this

A few years ago, there was a thread on r/asksciencefiction where someone was fishing for a superhero story with an inverted Omni-Man dynamic, or a setting where Homelander's initial presentation is played straight- a setting where the Superman figure actually is the paragon of morality he's initially presented as, but no other superhero is- a situation where you've got one really competent true-blue hero standing head-and-shoulders in power above what's otherwise a complete nest of vipers.

Someone in the thread floated My Hero Academia; while I haven't read it, my understanding is that that's not really an accurate read of what's going on with Stain's neurosis about All-Might being the only "real hero," that the point of that arc is that Stain's got an insane and unreasonable standard and that taking an endorsement deal, while bad, isn't actually grounds for execution. My own contribution to the thread was Gail Simone's Welcome to Tranquility, where a major part of the backstory involved the faux Justice-League's Superman analogue having a little accident because he's the only one who thought they were morally obligated to go public with the secret life-extending macguffin that the rest of the team is using to enforce comic-book time on themselves and their loved ones; while only a couple members of the team are directly in on it, the rest are conveniently incurious. And Jupiter's Legacy gets tantalizingly close to this- The Utopian, a well-meaning stick-in-the-mud, ultimately gets blindsided and couped by his scheming brother who creates a superhero junta staffed by a Kingdom-Come-style glut of third-gen superheroes, who are framed as fundamentally self-interested because only came onto the scene after most of the situations you legitimately need a superhero to handle have been neutralized. (The rub, of course, is that the comic is also highly critical of the Utopian's intellectually incurious self-righteously 'apolitical' approach to superheroism- if for no other reason than that it left him in a position to get blindsided by a coup!) While Jupiter's Legacy gets the closest, all three of these are only loosely orbiting around the spirit of the original idea, and there's something really interesting there- particularly if the Superman figure isn't hopelessly naive in the same way as Utopian. Because first of all, if you're Metaman or Amazingman or whatever brand-name alias the writer goes with, and you really earnestly mean it, and you put together a team of all the other most powerful heroes on earth in order to pool your resources, and then with dawning horror you gradually begin to realize that everyone in the room besides yourself is a fascist or a con artist or abuser or any other variant of a kid with a magnifying glass eyeing that anthill called Earth- What the hell is your next move?

Do you just call the whole thing off? Can you trust that they'll actually go home if you call the whole thing off? I mean you've put the idea in their heads, are you sure that they aren't going to, like, start the Crime Syndicate in your absence? Do you stick around to try and enact containment, see if getting all of these people on a team makes them easier to keep on a leash? But that's functionally going to make you their enabler pretty quickly, right? Overlooking "should you kill them-" can you kill them? You're stronger than any individual one of them- are you stronger than all of them? The first time one of them really crosses a line in a way you can't ignore- will that be a one-on-one fight? Are they the kind of people capable of putting two-and-two together and pre-emptively ganging up on you if you push back too hard? Do you just start trying to get them killed, or keep them at each other's throats so they can't coordinate anything really nasty? Can you squeeze any positive moral utility out of them, or is that just a way to justify not doing the hard work of taking them down? There've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that Superman in specific would be a good person, and there've been works where the conceit is to question the default assumption that superheroes in general would be good people. Something to be done, I think, with questioning the default assumption that everyone Superman becomes professionally close to would be good, and to explore how he'd handle it if they weren't.