It occured to me that there are seveal series who's fen might band together as a bounty hunting and/or mercenary guild.
Cowboy Bebop, City Hunter, The A-Team, Bubblegum Crisis (the Knightsabers are mercs after all), Slayers (Lina often collects bounties), ect.
I figure that they are propbably rivals with Hidden Asteroid due to overlap of jobs (both groups provide muscle, bodyguards, collect bounties, ect.)__________________
I bet that if you cooked an elephant, you'd have a lot of leftovers.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

AMAZING video of dude playing songs on his hands.
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Trooper*********
Touched By His Noodly Appendage
www.venganza.org

Now we'll have to come up with another excuse to say why man-made global warming doesn't exist.

...from the Virtue Wiki.
The Magical Girl category on the wiki has attracted a couple people who want to do away with it, including one who doesn't know what a magical girl is so thinks it just means a teenaged female with a Magic origin, and another who seems to think that having it will inevitably lead to a million categories like "left-handed Norwegian redheads with mixed tech and magic powers". (Discussion here, for anyone interested.)
Anyway, in the course of the discussion, this comment was made, which I found absolutely hilarious:

Quote:

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I think "Magical Girl" is a valid category because it refers to a specific archetype which is a combination of more and more specific traits than female, teenager, and magic - the same way that "vampire" is more than combination of magic, undead, and oversexed.

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'Okay, what the hell?' The idea is to have fun by coming up with a reasonably detailed and plausible plan for the space race of an alternate world where the events of the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries resulted in a relatively small number of continent-spanning major nations rather than the endless sprawl of small ones seen in the real world. The only reason it's even that different a world is that funding a competitive space program is nontrivial.
Judging who gets there first - or best - is kind of up in the air until I know how much interest there is; at the moment I'm expecting to rely on a good-faith consensus amoung the entrants.
Things I'd say'd be needed for a full entry off the top of my head: An overall game plan, a mission plan, and thumbnail dossiers on all hardware required for both.
I've got a plan entry in hand and I'll try and work up at least one dossier before class today so people can see what I'm thinking of.
Ja, -n

===============================================
"I'm terribly sorry, but I have to kill you quite horribly now."

Peg and I went out and saw the new Harry Potter movie last night. Forthwith my rambling thoughts on it.
First off, be aware it's long -- at least 2 1/2 hours, maybe closer to 2 3/4. It won't seem like it for most viewers, mind you, but just so you don't go into shock when you look at your watch after it's over, be warned.
Overall, good job of adaptation. Things were, inevitably, left out, as OoTP is where Rowling's books start getting really big, but to my surprise a lot more major points made it in than happened with Goblet of Fire. Hmm. Kreacher's betrayal is gone. Marietta Edgecomb is gone, with unexpected repercussions, plot- and character-wise. The painting of Mrs. Black is hinted at rather than shown, and we never get to hear her go off on a tirade. And most disturbingly, almost all Ginny plot/sublot is gone. (More on this below.) Um. I'm sure there were more but I can't recall them now.
Pleasant surprises: The Thestrals -- one, for looking really well-done, and two, because the trailers with the shots of Harry on a broom flying through London led me to believe they might have scrapped the thestrals entirely. Luna Lovegood -- Evanna Lynch is a lot lower-key than I expected Luna to be, and a lot less, um, spacey, but surprisingly good. Sirius going through the veil is profoundly creepy -- and more heartbreaking because of how it's done.
Disappointments: Because of the sheer amount of material the move had to cover, Tonks, Shacklebolt and others in the Order had very little screen time. I especially wanted to see more of Tonks, because Natalia Tena seemed to be doing a particularly good job with her. She just didn't get to do much. The Ministry battle -- is unexpectedly gutted. All the heroism and tragedy of the DA's participation has been completely removed. They break into the prophecy room, they run into Death Eaters, they get cornered in the veil room, the Order comes and does the real fighting. Worst of all, the Prophecy is edited and Neville's part in it thrown away -- this is just unbelievable, given how central the prophecy is to the overall plot arc.
Unexpected: Umbridge. I'd been conditioned to expect a harsh-voiced hag; I wasn't expecting her infamous "hem hem" to turn out to be a high-pitched titter. Still want to murder her in her sleep, though. Harry's brief relationship with Cho seems more... grown-up? mature? ... than it does in the book.
No cast changes in the kids this film. Looks like they've finally standardized their Patil twins, so I think they've finally locked down the student cast (tho' they've had most of it permanently defined since the first one).
One major concern, related to that: Bonnie Wright, who plays Ginny. She was hired for the first movie at something like 9 or 10, and all she had to do in it was hide behind Julie Waters and peer at Daniel Radcliffe. I don't remember much of her performance at all in Chamber of Secrets, and over the subsequent movies, I've noticed that she gets almost no lines. In this film, the only things I remember her actually saying are spell incantations! I am beginning to wonder if they signed her for a long-term contract, and then discovered that she couldn't act... because by god, they are writing the movies such that she is little more than a piece of moving furniture. She's got the most powerful zap in the DA, yes, but there's no real interaction between her and Harry. Luna Lovegood gets more screen time with Harry by orders of magnitude -- in fact, I think they were trying to set up a Harry-Luna relationship in this film! Harry and Luna have two good-length scenes together where it seems clear that they're trying to show a kind of kinship between the two, and Harry's clearly responding to something about her. I'd really like to know what other people think on this one when they see it.
Anyway... capsule review: Nicely done, far fewer inexplicable deletions than the last film, worth first run prices and the nearly 3 hours in the theatre that it'll take.

-- Bob
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The Internet Is For Norns.

From the Ain't It Cool News review of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes this casting note:

Quote:

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(...) I think the producers were inspired finding this non-actress. Its almost like they literally held open Rowlings book and shook it until Luna Lovegood, in the flesh, fell out and asked to be called Evanna Lynch.

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Enjoy!

By Kate Nepveau on her LJ:
See it Like Saruman: Reconciling Fantasy and Progress.
Judith Berman, John Crowley, Ken Houghton (L), James Morrow, Michael Swanwick.
History is written by the winners. That explains why Tolkien never mentions that the destruction of Fangorn Forest and other efforts towards industrialization by Saruman significantly raised the standard of living for the wild men of Dunland, in fact creating (for the first time in Middle Earth) a comfortable middle class. While there is a natural opposition between the romantic and pastoral ideal embodied in traditional fantasy and the Enlightenment ideal of progress (especially in its modern industrial and technological modes), we don't believe they are completely incompatible. What works of fantasy have attempted to accommodate both? What interesting new direction might the heroic fantasy novel be taken if the true positive effects of modernization were acknowledged? Readercon hopes to put the audio recording of this panel online at some point after the convention.
kate-nepveu.livejournal.c...tml#cutid1
The Case for Archetypal Evil in Fantasy.
Ellen Asher, S. C. Butler, Jeanne Cavelos, James Morrow (L), Joshua Palmatier.
The pervasive trend in modern fantasy is to give the bad guys moral complexity and psychological depth-good reasons to be bad. This approach stands in stark contrast to the legions of past Dark Lords who were utterly evil because, well, they were utterly evil. Tolkien, however, wrote pages of philosophy on the nature of Melkor / Morgoth (published in Morgoth's Ring), suggesting that our rejection of the old model was a reaction only to badly done Dark Lords. Is there an argument for making things at least somewhat black and white (how much psychological depth does a human sociopath have, anyway)?
kate-nepveu.livejournal.c...ml?#cutid1
They're not exactly whole transcripts but they're interesting condensed reads.

The hollow plastic crunching sound that one of the neighborhood kids' big wheel makes rolling across asphalt..

...is the same sound my neurotic retard cat, Rev (erend, olution, olver, olt, your engine) makes when he's horking.Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979Wire Geek - Burning the weak and trampling the dead since 1979