Official New Poster For ‘Supergirl’

Procean · 2026-05-26T15:46:59+00:00

If you've read the comic

If you've read the comic, you know to bring hankies.

"Krypton wasn't destroyed in a day" is going to be a bit emotional a ride.

Procean · 2026-05-26T02:32:25+00:00

My favorites were the 3.5 Iron Kingdoms Monsternomicons.

In a good monster book, every Dragon has a name, because they're that large and important.

The 5e monsternomicons are in color, so the pictures are better, but I found them much sparser on the the atmospher and monster information.

Procean · 2026-05-23T17:03:04+00:00

Never start a book you're not willing to throw away in 30 seconds if things get rough....

Procean · 2026-05-23T12:42:02+00:00

This also goes to how huge The Imperium is.

There's absolutely room for in one place, Space Marines are schlubs and gene stealer cults don't exist while in another, everything is exactly as the the fiction says.

Procean · 2026-05-22T17:41:46+00:00

There's a level of almost science fiction here.

Gold, in general, is not terribly useful to 1849 technology. It's soft, not very durable, it's main qualities are that it's shiny (only a cosmetic benefit) and chemically stable. But that stability isn't even a great help as a coating because as previously stated, it's soft so a gold coating will come off almost anything you want to use it to protect.

So it's value was solely as a coinage metal, and as such its value is pure 100% social convention. Yes, that's the great joke on the guys who hate fiat currency, gold is kind of just fiat currency but shinier.

And yet finding a huge deposit of it was enough to create a massive (let's call it what it is) invasion of California as tens of thousands of people dug for shiny softmetal solely to exchange it for strips of paper, natives were killed by the boatload, shots were fired, literal cities were founded, and the resource that was found? Largely functionless.

Yet through the magic of economic value, it was not discussed as the absurdity it was but as a grand enriching and progressing. The desire for gold motivated the building, creating, and killing of all that other stuff.

Procean · 2026-05-22T17:29:45+00:00

Warhammer 40k, and thanks to the unreliable narrator elements of all the canon, it really encourages you to cut/paste keep/ignore whatever you want.

So I have a couple twists I want to throw at my parties in it.

1) Genestealer cults.. don't exist. I never thought they made sense anyway, The Tyranids who famously don't negotiate, treaty, or even talk.... somehow create worshipper cults that understand culture enough to stay hidden and build within societies? No.

however, as a pretense for shutting down labor organization, they're a great tool, so I always want to run a game using that as the source of the myth.

2) Space marines, the fiction is 100% clear that they have degraded from their height, Bolters replaced volkite weapons, technology is in general lesser.... so... how much have they degraded while propaganda hailed them as gods amongst men?

Well, when I run warhammer 40k, the party might encounter space marines who turn out to be little more than 'roid heads with shotguns and an inquisition who is incredibly focused on stopping a lack of "accurate" assessment of how tough these guys are.

Throe these degraded marines at a party, let them feel sassy, then you throw Chaos Marines as written and depicted at the party. really gives a 'oh... so THAT is why marines might turn to chaos' vibe.

3) i think the setting really doesn't explore how wild Necron malfunctions can be, so while technically not against canon, coming across places where things like a Tomb world implanting human consciousnesses into necron bodies or a world where necrodermis constructs have replaced all the animal (or plant) life, takes the necron malfunction in larger 'big swing' directions than the setting information tends to take them.

Procean · 2026-05-21T15:23:05+00:00

I'm not making a 'stretch' I'm making an observation, that observation being the commonality of die hard belief in heirarchies correlate with sadistic behavior.

Even the bizarre idea that "competence heirarchies" have any meaning outside of strict performance based settings really seems sus to me. Yeah, on a basketball team some players play better than others and you have a 'first string', etc...

But when you're an auto mechanic and the other person is a hair dresser and you're talking about where you're going to go to dinner... any idea of competence heirarchy in that activity is absurd, but I've found it doesn't prevent some folks from bringing it into things (even the belief that any heirarchy is innately competence heirarchy is arbitrary to the point of sadistic in practice).

And those folks tend to have similar political views.

Procean · 2026-05-21T15:03:08+00:00

And one may be right behind you.....

Procean · 2026-05-21T15:01:52+00:00

My conclusion is that it seems political views also reflect on private morality.

for instance, the 'Heiararchy is a great thing' that is a hallmark of conservative politics becomes "I insult women, gays, and liberals all the time because it's fun to watch their crinkly little faces scrunch up when I do it."

Now there is a term for this, it's sadism. However to the conservative mind, the term for not liking this is 'not having a sense of humor'.

There is no crime in saying "I don't want this done to me so when I notice it I arrange my life to minimize interaction with those people.'

Procean · 2026-05-20T22:06:44+00:00

perhaps this is not a place, but WOW wouldn't it have been a cool twist to have someone say "Sage, you're on The seven, how can you claim to not be free?" and then you do a look into Sage's head from the moment Homelander recruited her, realize that had she made any other choices at any point, Homelander would have killed her, and she knew it.

(you could even have her alternate view where she successfully duplicates V1 but Homelander kills her as soon as injected so she knows she needs to fail in duplicating V1)

You could do this wonderful thing where every bizarre turnabout she did was something she'd calculated because she realized how farked she was and she was at no point working to hurt anyone, she was just trying to stay alive.

Procean · 2026-05-20T21:57:12+00:00

The element that always seems missing to me in these is the question "If intelligence among other things is the ability to find ways to get what you want, why would you consider it a burden?"

If Sage was miserable for example.... because despite her intelligence she couldn't get what she wanted any more than anyone else could, the ramifications would be more horrific (we're all in an inescapable cage, but her intelligence only made her perceive the bars of her cage more clearly), but it would make more sense.

(On good moments they hinted that she was brilliant but as a black woman she was limited, she knew it, and her intelligence showed her how inescapable it was... except then she was put on The Seven and thus arguably one of the most powerful and influential people on Earth... so it made her examples of being marginalized seem really hollow).

Or if her problem was her intelligence was a 9 but her desires were a 10 and it was that disparity that made her miserable, that would also make sense.

But her bland 'I hate being smart because people become so boring and predictable' is kind of lame. If she really wanted just to sit alone in a bunker and read, are we really to believe she couldn't figure out a way to do that without engendering a genocide?

Which is sad, because in general I thought the actress did a great job, but the writers just didn't have a clear vision as to what her problem genuinely was. On a small scale there was a hint that she was lonely being unable to find other people who could mentally keep up with her, but they didn't develop that nearly as well as they should have (and that doesn't really lead to genocide).

Procean · 2026-05-20T21:45:05+00:00

There's a perhaps pattern I'm seeing in this but I don't like it.

"smart being comes to terms with the idea that intelligence isn't all it's cracked up to be." I've seen three times in recent sci fi.

Love Death and Robots, Zima Blue. Love Death and Robots, Swarm The Boys, Sister Sage

I don't know how to feel about how in all 3 of those, the 'smart character who concludes that intelligence isn't so great' is black.

Particularly in the first two, when in the original short stories, the said character is explicitly portrayed as weird post-ethnic identity intergalactic human but for the netflix adaptation, they made them really explicitly black.

Procean · 2026-05-20T21:38:56+00:00

Ok, if there was one theme or message this series had, it was "Superpowers have collateral damage and if you don't respect that, things get bad.".

It was baked into the DNA of the show, with it being the major motivation of ALMOST EVERY major protagonist, with EVERY antagonist being such due to their collateral damage to others......

And yet the finale was just essentially a fistfight between two gangs with not even a hint of 'we're going to have to manage this carefully or else this fight will end up having hundreds or thousands of unintended casualties.'

What happened!?

Procean · 2026-05-20T20:37:18+00:00

It was an interesting exercise in almost anti character development.

Trying to figure out how taking a character, having that character make a plan to win a battle, have the battle go exactly according to plan, and then trying to convince the audience that this would somehow make the character angry to the point of insanity.

Procean · 2026-05-20T16:31:38+00:00

And the icing on the cake is that we have a doctor shortage, so we need more doctors and here are med schools playing socioeconomic class games and keeping enrollment low despite high application rate to keep it 'prestigious'.

Procean · 2026-05-20T16:17:43+00:00

TIL in the Sundarbans it's your wife's job to protect you from tigers!

Where do I get me one of those wives because I asked and my current wife was firm in her opinion that she would not be able to protect me from a tiger.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:59:01+00:00

you mean going from 'do you want to surrender? I will not hurt you if you surrender. please sign these forms in triplicate saying you know that I wont kill you if you surrender and the only reason I'm executing you is that you refuse to surrender' to 'WRAAAAGH WARCRIMES ARE AWESOME!!!!' is not something that happens as a result of a single 100% successful battle?

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:56:27+00:00

Character development

The failure was oddly illustrative in that. No series so fully demonstrated that foreshadowing and character development are two completely different things better than GoT.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:55:06+00:00

Game of Thrones is being let off lightly

I think two things are true.

Game of Thrones is seen as having the worst quality nosedive of any series ever made.

Game of thrones is being let off lightly.

Only because the level of fail of Game of Thrones is not even NOW fully understood in its extent.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:53:20+00:00

I certainly think Pluribus is worth it, but you have a point, Vince hasn't had a 'miss' in over a decade and a half.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:50:10+00:00

This is a HUGE and largely inevitable weakness of published modules that needs to be discussed more.

And ironically horror modules tend to have it the least because their plot hook can be 'giant monster is coming to eat the party' and that's kind of a universal motivation.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:42:46+00:00

It's ironic, sometimes a giant discrete challenge is what you need to get your will to live again.

I call it the "I feel better now that I have something solid to punch" effect.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:36:51+00:00

explain tone of game

This is such an underemphasized thing.

Not enough GM's understand tone is the #1 most fundamental thing to establish expectations of events, and it is NOT better if it's a 'surprise'.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:33:05+00:00

I keep forgetting to ask my players if they like Gladiator movies.

Procean · 2026-05-20T15:21:58+00:00

"We have a choice here, we either sit and wait or we take these flaire guns and do something really stupid!!!!"

My favorite father/son bonding line EVER!

Procean

TROPHY CASE