Because spleens sound ridiculous.

Honestly, it probably ought to have been gall-bladder, given how much bile was involved, but so it goes.

Ah. Like Agatha's book in panel 6. Got it.

I've got an old Mad Magazine compilation from the '60s around here someplace that includes a "truth in comic book sound effects" feature along those same lines. My favorite was a panel depicting a cowboy firing a double-barrelled shotgun in a saloon fight. The sound effect was "BARROOM".

--G.
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There was an old Ambush Bug one-shot that had a full-page, single-panel explosion as the climax of the ridiculousness that is Ambush Bug. The accompanying sound effect was extremely tiny, looking out of place in the middle of the massive image behind it. A footnote at the bottom of the page contained an apologetic explanation from the writer, explaining that he had been up very late at night trying to finish before the deadline and that he didn't want to wake the wife with the explosion.

Par for the course for Ambush Bug (who, in UF, should be that weird uncle of Ravager's that the Wilson Family "doesn't talk about" or something. Either that, or the Last Herald of Galactus, having driven the poor fellow insane before he ever made it to Earth.)

Ebony the Black Dragon

"Life is like an anole. Sometimes it's green. Sometimes it's brown. But it's always a small Caribbean lizard."

First Mandalor, the original homeworld of the Mandalorian species, is gone. Not lost; gone. That's what I'm tryin'a tell you, kid, it ain't there. It's been totally blown away. That's how much the Mandalorian Wars didn't work out for the Mandalorians.

Second and Third Mandalores still exist, and as of the early 25th century, their locations are known. Little of note survives on either one; the ruins were picked clean long ago, by later and lesser civilizations that have themselves fallen and been lost to time. They're a little like Ilos in the original Mass Effect, except with fewer working terminals.

Atlantis is a slightly different story, in that there are plenty of records showing where it ought to be, but if you go there, there's nothing there. Not "the ruins of a destroyed solar system" like at First Mandalor, but nothing at all. It's like there never was a star there, which, given that surviving records indicate it was a G-class main sequence star like the Sun, should definitely not be the case in the cosmologically piddling span of time that has elapsed. Whether that indicates that the ancient navigation records are wrong, the translations of same are in error, or Something Really Frickin' Strange Is Going On, no one's really sure. Mainstream academia's money is on B.

--G.
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... wow.

I guess it is to be expected that when they fuck up, like in most other things, the Mandalorians did not screw around.

>Atlantis is a slightly different story, in that there are plenty of
>records showing where it ought to be, but if you go there, there's
>nothing there. Not "the ruins of a destroyed solar system" like at
>First Mandalor, but nothing at all. It's like there never was a star
>there, which, given that surviving records indicate it was a G-class
>main sequence star like the Sun, should definitely not be the case in
>the cosmologically piddling span of time that has elapsed.

Man. Nadia must have been bummed. Anakyn too, I guess.

Have they pinned down the time it vanished, at least? It shouldn't be that difficult to find the edge of that stars light cone. Unless that's gone as well, which would indicate that, indeed, there is something really frickin' strange going on.

(I do not actually expect an answer to that one, mention of the Dyson Sphere got me to put my hard sci-fi hat on for a bit. :)

Regardless, thanks.

-Merc
Keep Rat

-Droken

Well, the connection is more than possible; Nadia Davion is explicitly Nadia from Secret of Blue Water. We even see her leave her homeworld back in the day over in Fulcrum of Fate III.

I could have sworn that Nadia was aware of her heritage and had discussed it extensively at one point... but I'm damned if I can find that particular piece now. It could be I'm wholly mistaken.

I do hope I'm not; I keep hoping someone tracks down Anakyn and holds him accountable for, you know, the genocide and the war crimes, and the only other candidate at the moment is Kahm Santova, who does not have what one could call "clean hands" herself.

-Merc
Keep Rat

I don't quite follow your logic there. If the star's light cone
can be found in the expected location, but is truncated at some
definite interval before present, that's strong evidence for Something
Weird. But if there just isn't a light cone at all, that's consistent
with any of the three options, and Ockham's razor prefers A or B
(i.e. "we're looking in the wrong place, there never was a star here").

I wonder how hard it would be to persuade one of the various Time
Lords on good terms with "present day" galactic civilization to take a
team back and poke around.

edit: less telegraphic.

Then they can pin down exactly when whatever happened to Atlantis happened to it by finding the point where the light cone stops. Again, important to archaeologists and historians.

Then, depending on how badass a telescope you can build in the 25th century, they might actually be able to set about observing the event itself.

(I can't take credit for coming up with this idea myself. I was flipping through the Mass Effect Codex at the time, and came across the entry for a planet in the Aralakh system that the Korgan blew up real, real good; forensic experts, puzzled as to what happened, chased the events light cone out to observe it as it was happening.)

-Merc
Keep Rat

The protagonist, Dr Richard Seaton, developed the technique to spy on a hostile species and then noted he could use the same method to watch the pyramids being built.

I suppose in his defense, he did teleport out at least the human worlds first.

Brian

Right, so people who endorse option C would want this to be done, but people who endorse options A or B might well consider it a waste of effort and/or something they simply don't have budget for (it'd involve hiring a survey vessel and crew, at the very least, and it could take months of flying back and forth in hyperspace). Easier to just stick more people on improving the translations, which helps with other Atlantean documents as well.

Or persuade James Burke to be interested.

Well, yes, that is very likely, but the former constitute "mainstream academia", so...

--G.
"your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy and your conclusions are highly questionable - you are a poor scientist, Dr. Song." "But the kids love me!"
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I don't think so. As far as I am aware, the Time War didn't happen in UF; Rachel Griffin prevented it in Project Phoenix 3.

>And does the "War Doctor" exist in the UF-verse?

Funnily enough, I was just thinking about this very question the other day, and I never really reached a conclusion. The absence of the Time War from the storyline makes it doubtful - at the very least, he'd have to exist in a markedly different context - but in terms of presentation he's actually one of my favorite Doctors, so it would be rather a shame to lose him altogether. (The fact that he's a retcon without a proper sequence number is also a bit awkward, but at the same time kind of liberating, because it does mean if I do bring him along at some point, I don't necessarily have to put him between Mozart and The Ears.)

--G.
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It took me a moment to mentally unpack that, as I only watched The Movie once when it came out and don't remember it all that well...

... does this laughing-like-a-tickled-hyena thing wear off eventually?

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

I cannot speak as to additions, as I am not EPU Staff, but up until the Peter Jackson movies, The Lord of the Rings was on the "not gunna do it" list. So the list does change.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Might I recommend the equivalent page at All The Tropes instead? It's more up-to-date and there's no advertiser-imposed censorship.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I'm... unconvinced of the authoritativeness of either of these sources, frankly. :)

--G.
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<chuckle> I do my best (along with a few others) on the ATT page. And we admit that we're almost certainly incomplete.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Hmm, didn't know about that site. Maybe so, but just going by what I see on that link the page design is awfully clunky. TVTropes at least mostly works, and mostly looks OK.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

That's a side effect of the importation of the PMWiki-format pages into MediaWiki, and a still-small userbase to clean things up. We've only been at this since November and have accumulated only a couple hundred users since then (as opposed to TVT's several thousand).

And if something was actually broken, it would be nice to let us know what it was. As far as we know, everything works, and we're adding new features almost every week. If something is borked, we'll fix it immediately.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

Never mind, it seems to have been a one-off Firefox glitch at my end. Some of the links and "note" things weren't responding to clicks after my last FF update. Seems to be OK now.

As for the site style, it took me a little while to get used to TVTropes with its click-to-open buttons everywhere, I'll get used to this as it evolves. It's looking quite good, actually, the more I explore it.

--
Unable to save the day: File is read-only.

Oh, okay. You had me worried for a moment there.

>As for the site style, it took me a little while to get used to
>TVTropes with its click-to-open buttons everywhere, I'll get used to
>this as it evolves. It's looking quite good, actually, the more I
>explore it.

Glad to hear it. And now we should probably let this thread go back to what it's supposed to be about.

-- Bob
-------------------
My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I wouldn't presume to speak for G or his editorial policies, but I think it's a safe bet there won't be any MLP:FiM-derived content, especially after Mercutio and I went on a tangent about clopping.

Well, for obvious reasons, that last item wasn't on the board in, say, 1992.

Also, the reasons there aren't all quite the same. In the case of Dragonball and the various works of Rumiko Takahashi, I'm not going to do anything with those because I have zero desire to experience enough of the source material to have a basis to go on - they're the fanfic source equivalents of Things I Won't Work With. The other is more about not wanting a C&D from Mutant Enemy. (Similarly, I don't want any trouble with the McCaffrey estate.)

In the first case, I've more recently worked with quite a number of things from sources I'm none too fond of, and in fact, in some cases I find myself specifically drawn to work with them because I'm disenchanted with their sources. That's not going to happen with anything that I outright detest at first whiff, so we're still safe from Dragonball and Ranma (and Naruto, unless one of my colleagues pulls a fast one), but it does mean I'm generally less likely to rule things out quite that unilaterally.

Maybe I'm just running into less across-the-board rubbish these days. It's more often nowadays that I find something where the plotting gives me a series of sharp pains, but I like (in some cases love, which makes for an awkward day at the TV) the cast and/or the worldbuilding. I can and sometimes do work with that.

Mind you, there are whole genres that it's a pretty safe bet won't be heard from because I simply don't enjoy them. It is highly unlikely, for example, that you will ever see anyone from The Walking Dead wander into the camp, alive or dead. (The closest I got to getting on board with the zombie apocalypse fad was the Left 4 Dead mini, and that was mainly about getting the Survivors out of the dippy zombie apocalypse setting. :)

Anyway, that's more or less why I took down the rules in the first place - they were too specific.

--G.
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As a overall fan of Ranma, I can both fully understand why people take a dislike to the series and feel vaguely compelled to argue in its favor. I very much enjoyed the 1st season of the original tv series, and the OAV's released after the tv serials ended.

I think the major problem is everything in between, which I freely admit I willfully skipped. Otherwise I probably would have ended up detesting the series as well.

Ranma very quickly began to suffer the same fate to which Bleach has more recently succumbed: Character Bloat. I hadn't seriously watched any anime for several years when Adult Swim started airing Bleach. The first season blew me away. Now, nth hundreds of episodes later, I don't have a clue who these billions of on-screen dudes/dudettes/thing-ettes are. I therefore am no longer counted in that particular Nielsen rating.

>Maybe I'm just running into less across-the-board rubbish these days.
>It's more often nowadays that I find something where the plotting
>gives me a series of sharp pains, but I like (in some cases love,
>which makes for an awkward day at the TV) the cast and/or the
>worldbuilding. I can and sometimes do work with that.

My wife called my jaded a couple weeks back when it became apparent that Grimm was going to end the season on yet another tired and over-used story trope.

"Lets see. we've already given the girlfriend amnesia. We've given the lead amnesia that led to a major power-up for the lead we never bothered to fully explain. Hey, we took away the big baddy's powers last season, lets take the lead's powers away. Damn we're original!"

The world building in Grimm really has been some of the best I've seen on network television in some years. The lead and the reoccurring off-lead characters are interesting and have nicely developed back stories. The monster creation and interpretation of classic mythology has been fairly original. And then, the writers gave us that ending. Bah.

Brian

On the other hand, we have Outlanders, which started off as almost a Urusei Yatsura clone. But then Manabe allowed his characters to change, and to face challenges not brought on by their own stupidity. And the worldbuilding went in an entirely different direction. So I'm not surprised Kahm managed to make it into UF.

I stopped watching Bleach a long time ago. I should have stopped at the point they first went to the Soul Society, but I thought it might actually get good again? Anyway, the only people I've ever seen handle thousands of characters appropriately (and hyperbolically) are EPU and Ken Akamatsu, though there are probably more out there. The secret seems to be actually resolving stories rather than constantly mining new characters for plot.

Grimm is actually pretty good. I started watching it at the same time as Once Upon a Time, because hey, dueling fairy tale shows. At first I thought Grimm was the goofier of the two, but a year later Grimm had really grown, and I stopped watching Once completely. The scenery and sets are great, the actors and characters have grown into each other, and the monsters of the week are almost regular people.

It's not the tropes or their repeated use, it's the grade of execution. Taking powers away is what Hexenbeasts do -- I saw that coming, but it wasn't really special this time. On the other hand, the thing with Renard was really unexpected, and makes a good cliffhanger. I was most disappointed with yet another wedding gone violently wrong. It seems like all the cool kids are doing that these days. (As much as I would have liked to see Akio bleeding out into the B6 punchbowl.)

I was wondering if Agents of SHIELD might make it in, but if the Mutant Enemy thing is still up, I guess that's a no.

Well, there's the outtake where Kosh's place is taken by the Dalek ambassador. That at least strongly implies that it ends with Akio being exterminated. :)

>I was wondering if Agents of SHIELD might make it in, but if the
>Mutant Enemy thing is still up, I guess that's a no.

Probably not, but not so much because of the Mutant Enemy connection as because, I dunno, I watched the pilot and it didn't do anything for me. I mean, don't get me wrong, huge Clark Gregg fan, but the premise of Agents of SHIELD makes about as much sense as a TV show set in the Harry Potter movie universe that's about the daily working lives of some muggle cops in Indiana.

--G.
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As a TV series, it's pretty decent, as an extension of the Marvel Cinematic Universe it does great, but there are some dim "monster of the week" and/or character spotlight episodes to slog through. My recommendation is find the main plot episodes, skip the rest.

As far as UF goes, it would seem redundant; the theme of the show is "how do normal people handle living in a world with superheroes?", which is ground that's already been covered.

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

I've wondered for awhile, especially since The Avengers, where Agent Coulson would really fit into the UF-verse if he were to appear. Perhaps farther down the chain of the IPO's command, such as a problem-solver for one of Gryphon's lieutenants. The one they send in when they want to handle things "by the book," but not afraid to tear up the book if they find the source of their problems "uncooperative."

--------------------------
CdrMike, Renegade Time Lord

1) Yes, for some values of;

2) Not at this time.

--G.
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I'll look forward to the pipeline, then.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."

Probably, but since that was - ye gods - 13 years ago, I'm dipped if I can remember what it might've been now. Based on Utena's remarks early in the next episode about their average speed on the trip back to Cleveland, I probably just intended to suggest that he had driven ridiculously fast.

That he's inclined to do so is implied much later on, come to that. In Vortigern's Lake 2 he drives the 200 miles from New Avalon to Prisoner's Base in 72 minutes, which works out to an average speed of 166.67 miles per hour.

--G.
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You know, I must've reread Symphony 1 at least five times now, and I never really registered those remarks from Utena.

Granting that this is Corwin we are talking about here, and that he has 25th-century vehicle and roadbed technology to help out, even so, that is an impressive feat of endurance. 1200 miles, round trip, in less than a day. (Not to mention consistently not getting caught behind the trucks on I-90.)

Why there would be a spaceport built in that tiny town is left as an exercise to the reader.

Maybe his original plan included three or four hours in Boston, to check out the Museum of Science?

Peter Eng
--
Insert humorous comment here.

He's enjoying a well-earned rest at the St. Spyridon Home for Surplus-to-Requirements Characters.

>also - Upthread, Merc asked this question about Nadia Davion:
>
>>I could have sworn that Nadia was aware of her heritage and had
>>discussed it extensively at one point... but I'm damned if I can find
>>that particular piece now. It could be I'm wholly mistaken.
>
>"Trust". It's in the chronology immediately before Twilight.

I have erased those memory sectors.

--G.
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--G.
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Excellent point, that. I got so caught up in badly promoting the series that I completely forgot.

To question!

A) Have you seen it?
2) Did you like it?
III) Is it the sort of thing that would fit into UF?
d. Should I have posted this in the 'characters you'd like to see in NF' thread instead?
五) Is this why I forgot, because it's such a lame sort of question? (duh.)

I have not!

>2) Did you like it?

Unknown!

>III) Is it the sort of thing that would fit into UF?

Again I am shrugging!

>d. Should I have posted this in the 'characters you'd like to see in
>NF' thread instead?

Most (or all?) of Nathan's (they're mostly Nathan's, anyway) "Recent Anime" posts have been in General. A few have piqued my curiosity enough that I've investigated, and in a couple of cases I've gone on to start playing with UF ideas for them and established Source Material threads about them (Girls und Panzer and Arpeggio of Blue Steel, for instance). Others I've either missed due to inattentiveness or not been in a "new inputs desired" mood just then, so they've impacted the surface instead of entering the thermal exhaust port - though in at least two cases (GuP and Strike Witches) I've come back to them later on. (Although to be fair, SW didn't fare very well when I did. It's not an exact science. :)

Truth to tell, though I hate to discourage any traffic around here since things are so generally slow lately, I find the "characters you want to see" threads mildly annoying much of the time, because generally either people are naming characters I've never heard of with no context, or characters from shows I've already considered and spiked for whatever reason; either way it's not very helpful. Short descriptions of shows I might or might not have seen, and rundowns of why they might be of interest, are a lot more potentially useful than "wouldn't it be ace if so-and-so showed up". And kind of less passive-aggressive. :)

--G.
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Checking my notes, I haven't reviewed Strike Witches. I mentioned it, once, and I enjoyed it myself, but it's such a hit-or-miss series that I probably wouldn't recommend it to someone I didn't know already had a high tolerance for its... Foible.

I do consider that a pity - the characters are pretty likable once you get your teeth into it - but I was sighing and/or willing to strangle the art director often enough that I can hardly blame anyone who wasn't able to deal to get that far.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

Yeah... you could call it a foible.

I prefer to be honest and call it a fetish.

That said, there are better shows to watch.

Sword Art Online is in its second season.

Log Horizon (see elsethread) is about to start its second season.

Arpeggio of Blue Steel... well, they cut a VERY interesting B plot from the manga to squeeze the anime into 12 episodes.

Has anyone (like, say, you or Gryphon, this being the AGA thread) checked out 'Love Live'? It's supposedly a K-On imitator, so might be worth watching.

And then there's the new Sailor Moon...

Captain Earth was good. And Aldnoah Zero... gorgeous and judging from the current status there are some characters needing rescuing.

Actually, the trousers thing wasn't my biggest problem with the show; my biggest problem with the show was that the first episode spent a good long time establishing that the protagonist had strong and honestly held convictions against taking part in a war, and the end of that episode was quite clearly setting her up to be laughed at by the universe for said convictions and compelled to abandon her principles and Get With The Program. That struck me as cruel and exploitative, and I didn't like it. Maybe that's just me.

--G.
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I think that maybe Korra was getting to you. Yoshika does find it in herself to join a military unit and do violence - we'd hardly have much of a show if she didn't - and her hopes about reconnecting with her father are not granted in the show itself, but the door there is not completely closed, just left unresolved, and her change of heart is presented with respect from both my reading of the narration and from the other characters. She doesn't become any fonder of violence and war, she decides that leaving the people in the unit that she's met and decided she likes to fight alone isn't something she can do.

Later on, we see her actually attempting to establish a meaningful contact and dialog with the Neuroi - against explicit orders, no less - and while it doesn't work, the fact is presented as something of a this-didn't-need-to-happen missed opportunity.

-----

"V, did you do something foolish?"

"Yes, and it was glorious."

That is entirely possible. I'm going to be nursing those battle scars for a while yet.

--G.
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