Moe Lane

Ramble On, Led Zeppelin

AGAPE

The Anti-Good Alliance for Professional Evildoers (or AGAPE) is a carefully-calibrated bane of the superheroic community’s life.  Too much villainy, and they get shut down, hard. Too little, and people won’t take them very seriously. And that’s the problem, right there; it’s hard enough to take AGAPE too seriously, thanks (as usual) to bad branding.

The concept was sound, on paper.  Pink! Fluffy! Liberal use of heart and rose motifs!  Nobody else was doing it, which made the look unique; and the mix of Hallmark aesthetics with grand larceny would make people shocked and appalled!  Villainous groups like it when civilians are shocked and appalled. They’re more likely to run away, which means that you get fewer hostage situations, and professional super-crook groups hate hostage situations. A lot of superheroes think that the gloves get to come off just a little when they’re facing a criminal menacing a nice old lady or something, and society tends to agree with them.  It’s different when the heroes are facing crooks by themselves, somehow. Some kind of psychology thing.

[Spoiler alert]

There’s a theme. Can you figure out what it is? Mild spoilers after the fold.

Sources say [Loki] will follow Loki as the trickster and shapeshifter pops up throughout human history as unlikely influencer on historical events.

Marvel had no comment.  

Marvel is working on several series that will debut on Disney+. Other known series are The Vision and Scarlet Witch, being run by Captain Marvel writer Jac Schaeffer, while another will focus on a a team-up of Falcon and Winter Soldier, the heroes played by Anthony Mackie and Sebastian Stan, respectively. Malcolm Spellman (Empire) has been hired to write the latter effort.

Via GeekTyrant.

With handy links!

Arcadia (locked):
Crossroads of the Commonwealth (unlocked):
The Fermi Resolution (locked):
Shoppers for the Ghoul Lords (locked):
War of the Mountain King (unlocked):

I have at least one more to collate

…RPG campaign setting is now up on Patreon. Maybe if I get more subscribers, I’ll unlock it right away. MAYBE. Or some of the others. Live dangerously! Join up today!

Should have been up an hour ago, but I was helping somebody tank a dungeon for the first time. …Which makes perfect sense, if you play MMOs; and does not, if you don’t. Anyway, goose egg, alas. But this is a process, not an event.

It’s going to suck. Bolding mine.

As citizens of New London, Bernard Marx and Lenina Crowne have only ever known a rigid social order, a perfect pharmaceutical called Soma, and a culture of instant gratification and ubiquitous sex. Curious to explore life beyond the strictures of their society, the two New Worlders embark on a vacation to the Savage Lands, where they become embroiled in a harrowing and violent rebellion. Bernard and Lenina are rescued by John the Savage, who escapes with them back to New London. John’s arrival in the New World soon threatens to disrupt its utopian harmony, leaving Bernard and Lenina to grapple with the repercussions. The three become entwined in a fraught relationship that awakens them to the dangers of their own conditioning.”

Slightly, because normally this would have been green-lighted the moment Warner Bros started having difficulty hearing people because of all that MONEY.

Almost two months after opening its billion dollar hit Aquaman,Warner Bros. is starting to put the pieces together for a sequel. The studio has tapped David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick, who co-wrote the first movie, to begin penning a new installment, The Hollywood Reporter has confirmed.  James Wan, who helmed the first movie and worked with Johnson-McGoldrick on The Conjuring 2, is making a deal to return as producer, as is Peter Safran. It is unclear at this stage whether Wan would return as director.

Ea-nasir Gambit

This temporal trick is the Time Patrol’s equivalent of an emergency field dressing, in the sense that it’s kept in reserve for use during a genuinely life-threatening situation.  It’s not a desperation play; the Ea-nasir Gambit works perfectly well, which is why the Time Patrol uses it. It’s just that the Gambit is not a permanent fix. It’s barely a temporary one.

The math that explains how the Ea-nasir Gambit works is complex — to the point where parts of it have applied for, and gotten, official legal status as sapient entities — but the incredibly dumbed-down explanation involves temporal inertia.  To put it obscenely simply, the universe is expected to go from Point A to Point B, and it does. Everything in between can be changed, but not permanently, or more accurately, it doesn’t matter if things ‘change’ or not. When the Big Crunch happens in the end, it’s not going to make any difference if Earth was the center of a giant stellar empire, or whether it got saved from being vaporized in 2145 AD, or whether the Union won the Civil War, or whether somebody turned left instead of right on the corner and thus discovered a really nice restaurant that she totally didn’t know was there.  It all smooths out in the end.