I'm not really taking a break. I'm trying to cut back my CoH play. Seriously, I'm playing this game too much - and I'm concerned it's taking over my life. I don't want to get into some weird addiction situation.
So, I'm trying to break away from the game a bit, and play it a lot less - and focus on well, my wife...
...and other games.--
Christopher Angel, aka JPublic
The Works of Christopher Angel
"Camaraderie, adventure, and steel on steel. The stuff of legend! Right, Boo?"

I came up with this short little thing after reading the latest chapter of the Naruto manga (342); it plays off of the last scene of that chapter.
I posted a slightly earlier draft of this to the FFML; if you read that one there's no significant changes.
All comments are, of course, appreciated.

At the very least for the convenience of those who are writing stories and need to describe the members of the Legendary, please post pics of your toons here.
This is just for members of the Legendary. If people want a general picture thread, let me know -- in another thread -- and I'll set it up. Please keep discussion in this thread to a minimum, so it's easier for people to scroll through and find the pictures they need to see.
Thanks!
-- Bob
---------
Visit beautiful Boston, proud successor to Seattle as
"City Most Scared Of Its Own Shadow

Heya, I sent a private message but I never used it before and am now sure it got lost in the Ether. Was just wondering if I could use some allusions to the Banzai Institute and some background political machinations that are reletively benign. Basically, Banzai Inst. gets a big donation, and a somebody's boneheaded but harmless mistake is taken care of quietly by my guys, one of whom is a quasi-reserve Blue Blazer.
If you want to see the bit I'd be happy to mail it to you at whatever address you want. I just felt since this was your area of the sandbox I'd better ask permission first.---------------
-Jon
Being the Mariner hitting coach is like being the Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher at Hogwarts.
-Poster on USSMariner.com
---
Jon
"And that must have caused my dad's brain to break in half, replaced by a purely mechanical engine of revenge!"

Sometimes I really wish there was an emote in-game for your character to smack his forehead and drag his hand down his face.

-Logan
-----------------
"Wake up! Time for SCIENCE!"
-Adam Savage
-----------------

I first encountered these smallish spherical satellites when one knocked on my window.
I'm not joking. My normal 'apartment' on Hephaestus is totally underground, but I keep a 'sitting room' sort of affair for people who need to see _something_ other than screens and displays and four rock walls. I know I need it, on occasion.
So I'm racked out in a Brady Bunch orange La-Z-Boy, reading some absurdly trashy military-scifi novel, and refilling my 'relaxation' meter, when I hear the stereotypical tap-tap-tapping upon my chamber door. Not on the door, actually, but on one of the bayed windows that this room is blessed with. I cocked an eyebrow and dog-eared my page, setting the book aside and getting up. I could see a silvery spheroid outside the window, with some sort of manipulator extended to tap against the glass.
Bemused, I waved, and the spheroid bobbed in place once and tapped the glass again. I glanced over my shoulder at the terminal built in to one of the bookcases, and opened my mouth.
"Hermes, you there?"
"Yeah, boss, what's.. WOAH!, what's that?!"
Hermes was apparently as startled as I am, and judging from the visual cue (her avatar abruptly being clad in jungle fatigues and clutching a rifle), significantly more worried about our visitor. "I'm not sure what it is, but why didn't you catch it earlier?"
"Well, I hate to admit it, but I'm burning enough CPU on the new 'waved Osmium alloy that I disabled video monitoring, and that thing doesn't show up above the noise floor on anything else."
I hrmmed, and the sphere outside the window tapped again. I considered it, and it tapped out S O S in morse, the single red 'eye' on it flashing along with the taps. That changed the situation, and Hermes made a startled noise as I opened the window. (note - the dome's been repaired and pressurized by this point, thank you Kevin). The silvery orb floated into the window, retracting his manipulator, and rotated away from me, allowing me to see a rather nasty dent in the 'back' side.
"I think we've got a 'little lost robot', Hermes. I'm gonna head down to the machine shop, just in case, alert Mr. Sparky, this thing might need to be 'handled'."
"Righto."
I tapped the little globe, and he spun around to face me with his glowing red eye, which on closer examination had a family resemblance to an IR transceiver with an LED behind it. I smiled and tossed a thumb over my shoulder at the door. "C'mon, little guy, let's take you downstairs and get you fixed up."
The little machine bobbed once, which I assume was it's equivalent of a nod, and we headed down to the machine shop.
As near as I can figure out, this poor little drone got whacked by a tiny asteroid and squished his radio, and he's been wandering around for quite a while on his inboard 'backup AI', looking for help. To make a long story short, I was able to fix the damage to the poor guy's shell, but I wasn't able to repair the radio that got squished.
He's got a fairly impressive sensor array, primarily optical. Hermes ran some rough calculations, and says he's well into the 'read lisence plates from orbit' range. He's also got a pretty damn impressive data radio, judging from the wreckage, a reactionless drive with fairly low power but impressive efficiency, and an ID tag.

ID Tag Wrote:Property of the Illuminati, if found, return to geostationary orbit, or 42 W. 23rd St., Seattle, WA, USA, Earth."

I've recently acquired a set of molds for some ships that were not included in the WOTC Star Wars starship battles game, and started casting up a few.
And am sculpting a new one myself.
Anyone here play the game, or just collect the minis, interested?
www.star-ranger.com/forum...php?t=2041 for more details.--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

(too meta for the Gazeteer, but possibly worthy of discussion)
Got into a discussion last night about the possibility of a Fenspace/'Danelaw conflict sometime in the future, and the question arose about fandom's political leanings. I didn't really have a good answer at the time, so I went back and read a little, took stock of the various characters and tried to distill it all into a couple of positions. These aren't faction political parties or societies or even really hard statements of belief. This is all pretty soft, broad and vague. That said, I see four major positions in fandom's political climate as of SOS-Con:
1) Apathists: "The 'Danelaw doesn't care about what we're doing out here, and we're too busy cracking rocks, herding comets and building domes to really care about the 'Danelaw. Things are just fine the way they are, so why freak out?"
2) Nationalists: "Fenspace is a frontier and like all frontiers it's a bit wild and wooly. Sooner or later though, civilization catches up with the frontier. Mundane laws and government will establish themselves, and that's not a bad thing - we all grew up under them and we came out okay, right? Naturally, the 'Danelaw countries what we came from at first get dibs, since they're the nations we know and love best. And as the sphere of civilization expands, the frontier will also expand, to the outer system and then to other star systems. That's the way we spread civilization."
3) Globalists: "Earth is the biggest, most powerful economic engine in the solar system. If we're going to not just survive, but thrive, we need to latch onto that engine and become an important part of it. All of our big projects depend on money from Earth, and if the money stops they stop. It's not even a question of politics, it's a question of keeping the Earth's engine turning Fenspace's wheel."
4) Separatists: "The solar system has a gigantic resource base, and history has shown us what happens to cultures that have resources but no industry that come into contact with cultures with industry but no resources. We must become self-sufficient, through breeding quirk-free wavetech, building our own hardtech industry or preferably both. If we can keep it together for a little while, we'll be strong enough to stand up for ourselves. And why give up this great situation? Why give up our country just so we can live in someone else's? Seriously why get involved in the 'Danelaw's squabbles?"
Naturally this isn't the sum total of political thought in Fenspace, but it's a start - relatively broad positions that cover some of the more important issues faced in space colonization. There's some overlap, nationalists and globalists being tricky to tell apart from a distance, same with apathists and seperatists. And there's room for variance within each position: a globalist could be anything from a L. Neil Smith libertarian to a hardcore communist, but they agree that trade with Earth is key to survival.
The status quo as of SOS-Con favors the apathist stance. Aside from a few almost half-hearted forays into cislunar space the 'Danelaw powers have turned their backs on the solar system at large. Without an overriding concern to draw people to the more committed stances, nationalists globalists & seperatists are reduced to yelling at each other at Conventions or on the SMOF/BNF political boards. The aftermath of SOS-Con and the Zwilnik War will shift this around some, but unless the conflict starts drawing attention from the 'Danelaw space powers the balance of power will remain in the apathist's court for a while yet.---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

I promised some of the people who frequent this board and who I game with in City of Heroes some of the screenshots I've made while we were playing. Here are some of the better ones. Click on the small thumbnail pics to see the full-size screenshots.
This first one is of Stalnoy Volk and Camille Hoyle doing an interesting mission in the revamped Faultline Zone. The girl in blue is an NPC Heroine named Fusionette and the guy in the White Arachnos Armor there is an NPC who fights WITH you cooperatively in this mission and whom later you have to fight as an Arch-Villain (or Elite Boss depending on how many people you take with you.) Naturally Cammy, Fusionette and Stalnoy are a little apprehensive working with him...


The following series of screens were taken while battling the Kraken in Perez Park. I was running through the park on a lower level alt and was amazed to run across him, as he's a particularly rare spawn. I switched over to Vigdis and notified whoever was on the Legendary Channel, which happened to be Foxboy and Later Paradoxe who brought Wide receiver and Australis respectively. We also had help in the form of a controller named Paida (who used Illusion with Phantom Army), a radiation Defender named Atom Baron and another Tanker named Ace Rimmer. Yes... THAT Ace Rimmer. ^_^


I love the shot below because one of the Illusion pets gets off a shot that goes right in the beasts open mouth and explodes!!! Man, that's GOTTA HURT!

POW!!! Right to the Kisser! It's a long Hail Mary and he is OUTTA THERE!!

The next 3 shots were on a day when a few of us were doing high level missions in Peregrine Island. It was Syndesis, Lora'Lai, Minuet Mac Hine and Yukiyo. We had a blast. Took a few screenies at the end in SG uniform and in our civvies to celebrate. And I caught Yukiyo in one of her distracted moments. ^_^




I've been having a lot of fun playing a MA/SR Scrapper on Virtue named Cyberman 8. I made him as an homage to 8-Man, the old 60s anime. Anyway, his main schtick is superspeed. And I've been taking that route in the powers selection of this character. Just a few days ago I got him to level 14 and of course picked up the superspeed power. I use one of the prestige sprints with him and his it's really cool when he runs at top speed because he has the prestige glow and the Super Reflexes powers leave shadowy afterimages of him in his wake!
Anyway, I'm REALLY proud of these two shots because they really capture the sense of explosive speed! Just the angle on them created a really cool effect!


-Logan
-----------------
"Wake up! Time for SCIENCE!"
-Adam Savage
-----------------

So I was going through the City of Heroes forums looking for something. I was searching my own posts because I thought I remembered posting to the topic. My search brought up something else I had posted to which I thought I should share.
There is a Tanker named Ascendant on Virtue server. I believe his player is still around and even brings him out still on occasion even though he's long since reached 50 and exhausted all the content, just for roleplaying purposes and to help friends out. I've met the guy in-game once or twice.
He's apparently well known on the boards and in-game as a role-player and occasional writer.
One of the things he's most well-known for is a little comedy routine he'd pull either in Beta or early in the game's release. He'd park himself one of the Trams next to the pay phones and have a one-sided discussion - usually hilarious - that would make people stop and hang around to listen to.
The post in question is one where he posted two of the "scripts" of his phone calls. The first is Ascendant talking to his moronic publicity agent, Saul. The second is him talking to his mom. They are hilarious and I can only imagine how cool encountering them in-game would have been!
Here's the link.
Check out the links in his initial post to the other stuff. It's really quite good.
The part that just cracks me up is the following -

Quote:

---

Ascendant: Moving on. The Ascendant Cave Action Playset.
Ascendant: Yeah, I actually like this thing. It doesn't look anything like my apartment, but it's pretty cool, I guess.
Ascendant: What do you mean they changed the name so it could fit on the box?
Ascendant: Well, sure, I guess Ascendant Cave Action Playset is a little long, but couldn't they just use a smaller font?
Ascendant: Fine, so what do they call it now? The Action Cave? Ascendant's Lair? What?
Ascendant: The A-Hole?!?!?!
Ascendant: Why on Earth would they call it the A-Hole, Saul?
Ascendant: Yes, I understand the 'A' is short for Ascendant, you moron, but why not call it the A-Cave? or the A-Lair?
Ascendant: Uh huh... Yeah... I see...
Ascendant: Well, we're NOT calling my secret headquarters the A-Hole, Saul, and that's final.

---

Quote:

---

Recently, I asked him about his cave.
Digital: Hey Ascendant. How's the A-Hole?
Ascendant: Impregnable Digi, impregnable.

---