The Ant Pile

Ant-Man Lives on!

2010-07-26T09:17:00.000-07:00

Yes, its true. Ant-Man lives on!

Here is a quick re-cap, Ant-Man is now done with the Thunderbolts. I was pretty sad about this and figured that he was done. But, like trying to stomp on a Ant, he still somehow manages to make it!

So firstly, He is now on the Secret Avengers. He has appeared in issues 1 and 2. And will most appear more in this series.

Secondly, some more movie news on The Ant-Man Film, "On February 9, 2010 Stan Lee, the co-creator of Ant-Man, met with Wright for lunch, and Lee proudly recapped on his Twitter feed with two intriguing tweets: (1) "To make up for my previous grievous error, here's a little item that may have escaped you. Marvel is prepping a movie starring-- Ant Man!" and (2) "I had lunch with the cool, young director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and, as you'd imagine, we had fun discussing the tiny hero."

And then this one, "On February 11, 2010, Edgar Wright told MTV News, "Because that character isn't one of their biggest properties, it’s not like a tentpole deadline. It’s more like me and Kevin Feige saying, 'Let's make a really good script.' We've always agreed on that — 'Lets make a good script that works, that’s all about a great genre film, and that isn’t necessarily relying on anything else."

The future looks good for our Eric O'Grady!

Ant-Man News! 3/7/10

2010-03-07T15:24:00.000-08:00

Ok, its been awhile, but our good old boy Eric has been doing things lately!

First off, the Thunderbolts! Eric O' Grady has been playing a role in this team for awhile now. Heres a recap of what he has been up to,

Thunderbolts
In their first mission, Ant-Man and the second Black Widow sneak aboard, Ant-Man hidden in Black Widow's cleavage and take control of Air Force One with the Goblin, Doc Samson, and the new President aboard. He secretly plants a gamma emitter on Doc Samson, causing the doctor to increase in strength and anger, which makes him attack the president.
However, O'Grady began to regret his actions in the Thunderbolts but can't do anything about it, since Osborn would have him killed. Paladin advised that he wait until Osborn inevitably loses his mind and is taken down. Ant-Man later secretly witnesses Paladin Ghost and Headsman turn against Mister X and Scourge when they are ordered to execute Natasha Romanov and Songbird, then erase their teammates memories. He later assists in the capture of Luke Cage by entering his nervous system. However, when his teammates make no effort to extract him, O'Grady helps Cage to escape, later leaving his body while he is eating.

The question now is, what will he do? What do you think?

This is a little bit of trivia for Ant-Man fans but,
Ant-Man (Eric O' Grady) has appeared in
The Irredeemable Ant-Man #1-12
Avengers: The Initiative #8-20
And now, Thunderbolts #128-present

Also, Ant-Man (O'Grady) appears in the Spider-Woman motion comics. In this series, he is voiced by Jeffrey Hedquist.

In Ant-Man Movie news, On February 11, 2010, Edgar Wright told MTV News, "Because that character isn't one of their biggest properties, it’s not like a tentpole deadline. It’s more like me and Kevin Feige saying, 'Let's make a really good script.' We've always agreed on that — 'Lets make a good script that works, that’s all about a great genre film, and that isn’t necessarily relying on anything else."

Good to see Ant-Man still in action! What does the future hold, what will Ant-Man do in Dark Reign and beyond? Will the Ant-Man movie ever get worked on?

All we can do is wait! Stay posted for more news!

So, a little quick catch up and some info on where hes been and currently is!

Ant-Man News

2009-11-07T07:47:00.000-08:00

For regular readers of Marvel comics or those reading the Thunderbolts, then this is old news.

But for those who might not know, Ant-Man (Eric O' Grady) has been making some recent appearances!

More specifically, he is featured as a member of the Thunderbolts Team in issue 128#.

Here's the cover,

And here is a page in which we see Ant-Man doing what he does best!

Ant-Man has also made an appearance in Thunderbolts issue 133#

And, he seems to have a fancy new costume to go along with the new events of Dark Reign. I wonder if he will keep it?

Sorry for my extended time away.

2009-09-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

So, i know i haven't posted in a while, and i also know that many of the updates recently on this blog are not Ant-Man Related.

This is for two reasons,

1) I have been very busy with my personal life

2) There really hasn't been any big Ant-Man news.

So, their may not be updates for awhile (Their might be a couple, but those will probably be a bit random about my personal life.)

But fear not, i have not given up, and i am constantly looking for Ant-Man updates!

Why i hate Stepmania

2009-07-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

Today im going to focus on Stepmania. And I don't intend to differentiate between Stepmania the software, DDR as such, songs, and everything else - all of it is Fair Game.

First, I hate all the delays. The only part of Stepmania I care about is the one playing the songs and checking my steps, everything else is just an extra that should try its best not to get in the way. Stepmania spectacularly fails at it - there are delay screens and delay animations everywhere, some possible to turn off, most not really. I do not need the "CLEARED" screen, I especially do not need the score spin, and then 5 second delay back to the song selection wheel. Just give me the damn score, and get me back to the selection wheel immediately when I press START! PC is not an arcade machine!

Second, slowness. I mean, the non-deliberate delays. Now Stepmania is fast enough with 50 songs like arcade machines, but real installations will have over 9000 songs - what means a few minutes to start the damn thing. What is it doing during the startup, checking for rickrolls?

A minor related annoyance is the menu system. Configuration options are divided into way too many submenus that don't mean anything. You think they do? Now quickly tell me where are the options to speed up the wheel, and turn off all the delays that can be turned off... Yeah, I fail to see the logic behind it too. And while it makes sense to make the dance mat the primary controller, it would be nice if it was possible to use keyboard sometimes too. For the sake of example, let's say I'm looking for a Zelda song I really like but I don't remember the title. Right now I have to sort by title, go to Z(elda), L(egend of Zelda), T(the Legend of Zelda) and probably ten other places! How difficult would it be to add an option of search by keyboard for those times when I'm looking for something in particular? Remember, there are over 9000 songs, it's not an arcade machine!

Oh, and there entire difficulty levels system - I have so many complaints about it! For one, what does it matter to me if a song is an 8-feeter on standard, or 8-feeter on expert? It's an 8-feeter either way, but there's no way to browse all 8-feeters together. (for every possible value of 8 of course)

And I wouldn't really mind if the feet ratings were replaced with something else - foot ratings are sort of reasonably accurate for official releases, but for fan-made ones they can be horribly wrong. I wonder if we could take this 5-difficulty diagram or something like that, measure what player is good at, and convert that to player-specific difficulty ratings... That would be cool, wouldn't it?

Now something about songs - I really hate songs that do stupid tricks with arrows display. The root of the problem is that arrows move along with the beat timer, not along with wall clock time. This causes so many problems like:

•Low bpm songs have extremely densely packed slowly moving arrows, and are hard to read
•High bpm songs have very quickly moving arrows that don't last on the screen very long and provide very little reaction time
•Songs that change bpm a lot, and you don't know when you have to hit the arrows
•Songs that freeze beat timer and unfreeze it by surprise - unless you know when the unfreeze happens you'll miss the arrows.

In all cases you basically need to learn the song's arrows instead of looking at them on screen. These tricks could be fun if used occasionally, but they're overused to the point of being extremely annoying.

But most of all let me dance instead of waiting and I'll be happy enough.

Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts are not so wicked cool

2009-05-22T17:27:00.000-07:00

I got a review copy of Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts by Steve Pugh. I had my hopes up, as I quite enjoy reading cookbook-style books on programming - they are digestible in small pieces, what works great with my Internet-induced attention deficit, and they are mines of useful tidbits of programming knowledge.

Unfortunately Wicked Cool Ruby Scripts didn't do it for me. The subtitle says "Useful scripts that solve difficult problems", but most of the scripts were targeting trivial toy problems instead, like playing rock, paper, scissors with a computer (why would anybody do that), or reimplementing grep... not terribly useful. I'd say maybe 20% of the scripts do something useful that isn't a one-liner.

Now that on its own wouldn't be enough to give the book a bad review - I might have written a few Library-of-Congress-fuls of Ruby scripts already, so basics are obviously boring to me, but there are more beginners around than people like me, so beginner books are very useful to them. But there's a second problem that bothers me a lot - it's not said anywhere but the book is clearly targeted at Windows system administrators. The scripts instead of following Unix conventions like input from STDIN and arguments, output to STDOUT, errors to STDERR and so on, ask for all the input interactively or load it from predefined files, dump errors on STDOUT, and save output to predefined files.

For example here's a script which prints all IP addresses between a starting and ending one. They way it's implemented in the book is:

class IP # Code here is perfectly fineendprint "Input Starting IP Address"start_ip = gets.stripprint "Input Ending IP Address: "end_ip = gets.stripi = IP.new(start_ip)ofile = File.open("ips.txt", "w")ofile.puts i.succ! until i == end_ipofile.close

But that's horrible! This script is only useful for anything when manually operated. The entire point of scripts is that they can be building blocks of bigger scripts!

The proper way would be:

class IP # ...endraise "Usage: #{$0} start_ip end_ip" unless ARGV.size == 2start_ip, end_ip = *ARGVi = IP.new(start_ip)puts i.succ! until i == end_ip

That is - input from command line arguments, output to stdandard out. Unlike script in the book, this can be used as a building block for something bigger.

I'd say the book was a great idea, but a wasted opportunity. I'd only recommend it for beginner Windows administrators, for everybody else it's either too basic, or teaches some seriously bad practice

Which crackpot cult to join.

2009-01-17T06:51:00.000-08:00

I was once young and naive and thought that smart people can think for themselves, and don't believe in crackpot ideas. Some pretended to, but just because that's how they made money. The Internet proved me very very wrong - it turns out that many otherwise smart people believe in the most outrageous things, and actively spread them and argue about them on the Internet.

It's not just that their ideas are weird or wrong. Eliezer Yudkowsky's Friendly AI stuff is almost certainly wrong, but at least it's original and it makes a really great blog read. Most crackpots on the Internet are not only wrong and stupid, but they're the same few kinds of crackpots everywhere. If I had a nickel for every peakoil aynrandist wake-up-sheeple comment thrown at me I'd buy them another Internet so they can leave ours.

I know the basics of crackpottery science. There are memes that infect people's brains, and the particularly outrageous ones like religions also serve as pretty good in-group vs out-group indicators, and maybe mildly wrong memes somehow protects against infection by even worse memes and so on and so on, but couldn't you people at least follow some better cult? Ayn Rand? Peak oil? 9/11? Haskell monads? What's wrong with you!

I know a blog post won't make anyone leave their current cult once they're sucked in, but here's a list of a few better cults, so maybe future generations are at least better crackpots than the current one.

Linus Pauling

Crackpottery spreads better with a good guru, and there are fewer 20th century figures more notable than Linus Pauling. The guy won not just one but two Nobel Prizes, and was one of the first researchers of quantum chemistry, biochemistry, and modern genetics. He was also one of the leading activist for world piece and nuclear disarmament. There's really not much more you can ask from a leader, and he sure beats someone who writes about economy without any clue about either writing or economy, am I right?

So what's the cult? Pauling believed that the key to good health is taking massive amounts of vitamins and other micronutrients, like many grams a day of vitamin C (most scientists believe 100mg is enough to prevent vitamin C deficiency). He lived 93 years, so maybe there's something to it. I mean, Ayn Rand somehow didn't build a great financial empire in spite of her "insight" into economy and human nature, so ten years above average should count for something.

So back to vitamins. Research is pretty consistent at showing they don't work, but they also don't seem to harm you, so why not try taking some?

Pros: Your guru will be far more awesome than anybody else's. It might just have some tiny effect on your health, even if you live just one month longer that's worth something, isn't it? Maybe learning about all the vitamins will make you stop eating so much junk food.

Cons: You might spend a few more bucks on supplements, but they're pretty cheap these days. If you really overdo vitamin C you can get diarrhea, but this will only happen at over 100x the usual amounts. If you overdo some other vitamins you can get into more serious problems, but Pauling didn't advocate taking too much of those, so just follow the guru and you'll be fine.

Richard Dawkins

Richard Dawkins is one of the most eloquent gurus you could possibly follow, and his ideology is pretty simple - there is no God. Ok, that's not all of it - everybody knows there is no God, even the Catholics, the religion is just a fancy social ceremony they follow.

Dawkins' real point is that religion is not only false but also evil. Everything any religious organization does is pure wrongness and suffering, so they should be fought, primarily by writing blog posts on how all religion is evil. For some bonus points you can also buy a flying spaghetti monster t-shirt. Never mind that most of the suffering attributed by Dawkins to religion is simply basic human tendency to hate out-groupers, and in absence of religion humans have a proven track record of killing and otherwise hurting each other based on language, skin color, political ideology, programming language, or even favorite chariot team and I'm totally not making this last one up.

Pros: You save one hour a week by not attending Mass (or equivalent of your choice). You will have more eloquent guru than anybody else. The cool people are atheists much more often than lame people, so if you're openly atheist people might think you're cool too, at least before they come to know you better.

Cons: You won't be able to win any public elections in United States. You will piss off all religious people, and if you're persistent enough even the mildly religious ones. Well, that might as well be considered a pro.

Aubrey de Grey

Not much impressed by popping vitamin pills and blogposting that there is no God? Fear not, there's a cult for you too. Aubrey de Grey intends to cure the entire aging and make people live forever - young and healthy. Well, he's not much of a biological researcher, he's a computer programmer with a funny beard, even funnier than Stallman's.

And you know what - the way biotechnology is progressing it might even work some day. World without aging sounds even better than world without religion doesn't it? So far it's a total failure even on mice, with the longest living mice being simply calorie-restricted but maybe someday.

Pros: You can brag about having the best goal of all crackpots - it's even better than revealing that Mossad was behind 9/11. If it somehow works everyone will know, and you not only get the bragging rights, but you get bragging rights for the next 5 billion years, until Sun dies! Isn't that cool?

Cons: You'll have really creepy guru. It's going to really suck if they find out how to keep people young forever a week after you die.

Raymond Kurzweil

Eternal youth is not enough? Raymond Kurzweil says we're all going to be happy human-AI hybrid living in post-scarcity economy of singularity or whatever. I'm getting buzzword overload from all that. Vaguely conceived "growth" will accelerate, until we grow at infinite number of percents a day, and then singularity happens and everyone lives happily ever after as an upload.

Well, the growth doesn't really seem to be accelerating much. Of Kurzweil's many predictions for 2009 he made in 1999 pretty much none turned out to be right. Just listen to some - "In communications, translate telephone technology is commonly used. This allow you to speak in English, while your Japanese friend hears you in Japanese, and vice-versa", or "The majority of texts is created using continuous speech recognition, or CSR (dictation software). CSRs are very accurate, far more than the human transcriptionists, who were used up until a few years ago", or "Heptic technologies are emerging. They allow people to touch and feel objects and other persons at a distance. These force-feedback devices are wildly used in games and in training simulation systems. Interactive games routinely include all encompassing all visual and auditory environments", or "Jesus returns to judge the world and to establish the Kingdom of God". Oh sorry, the last one is from a different crackpottery, but they're pretty much equally accurate.

Pros: You can play with electronic gadgets all day and still believe you're doing the world a favor. Technology is progressing, so some of this stuff might come true eventually, just don't give any dates in your predictions and stay vague enough so that when something similar happens you can claim you predicted it.

Cons: Your guru gives out too many dates and details in his predictions, so others will make fun of you every time they don't come true. If you want to be hardcore enough you will need to use speech recognition instead of a keyboard, and with the software we have now half of the phrases recognized will be fuck you stupid machine just go to Amazon and order me a damn keyboard.

Richard Stallman

I probably don't have to advertise rms. He believes all software should be free, and to look at a web page he sends email to a demon which runs wget and mails the page back to him. It is very efficient use of his time.

To follow RMS you will write Free Software using Emacs on Debian (at least it's not GNU/Hurd these days), preferably in Lisp, but he's OK with you using C if you really have to. You will not use any proprietary software, like Flash, or any computer games. You will correct everyone who uses phrases like "Open Source" or "Intellectual Property".

Pros: You might actually write some useful software and do something good for humanity. Emacs is not the worst possible editor, and writing some software improves your CV.

Cons: You will forever have to fight with drivers for your wireless card. Everybody will make fun of your guru's beard and hygiene.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is so good Arc is just Blub for him. He writes web startups in Lisp and sells them to Yahoo during dotcom boom. He also thinks the same trick is going to work even in financial recession - because every time is the best possible time to start a startup.

He's a bit like Ayn Rand in his belief that economic success is the best measure of person's value, but at least he can write, and actually made a successful company and helped a few others. He believes that if you try to make a startup you will spend all your time chasing successive rounds of investment and most likely fail or with any luck sell it to Google with investors getting 95% of the money, and at the same time that it's a totally awesome way of building a company, unlike let's say bootstrapping, which just cannot possibly work.

Pros: It might get you rich, and you can create something cool on the Internet. Your guru will have a pretty decent blog.

Cons: You might have to work 100 hours a week for years, mostly chasing investors not coding, and then investors take all your money, and Yahoo decides to rewrite your beautiful Lisp program in C++ for lulz.

Barack Obama

Barrack Obama is your new bicycle. He brought hope and change into the world of despair, and the new era of world peace, prosperity, and justice is starting on January 20th.

Oh wait, he agrees with Bush and McCain on pretty much everything - he supports occupation of Afghanistan, surge and pretty much indefinite stay in Iraq, unsupervised bailout of banks, car makers and everybody else, Israeli genocide in Gaza, criminalization of marijuana possession, telecom immunity, offshore drilling, embargo against Cuba, and pretty much everything Bush stands for except for stem cell research. But worry not - he flip flips a lot, so he may yet align himself with your favorite views.

Pros: At least he's not Bush, and it's hard to imagine anyone worse than Bush. Maybe he'll fix a few things and you'll blame everything else on Republican opposition, or whatever. And at least stem cell research will be legal.

Cons: You will be making excuses for him for the next 4 to 8 years, and even neocons will be laughing at you. Finally disgruntled, you'll volunteer for Republican candidate in 2016, also campaigning on platform of hope and change, just like every politician since ancient Greece.

Choose your own crackpot cult

World will be a better place if instead of reading the same tired conspiracy theories over and over again, I could learn about a new crackpot cult each day. Wake up sheeple, you can think for yourself! Or if not, at least get more original theories, for example the ones I just presented, but Internet is full of other interesting crackpot cults if none of them interests you.

If you know any other cool crackpot cults people could join please list them in comments section below, just please no more Ayn Rand, ok?

Medieval 2 Total War concentrated Vanilla minimod

2009-01-11T11:31:00.000-08:00

I really enjoy Rome Total War and Medieval 2 Total War games. Yet there's something about me that's never content with what I have, and always wanting to make things better. There's been some things about Medieval 2 Total War that really bothered me - like how small differences between factions were compared to Rome Total War, or how often the game turned into a siegefest.

I tried a few mods but were mostly disappointed with them. Lands to Conquer was only a bit better than vanilla - on the one hand I finally had a chance of playing with late units, on the other hand it didn't really fix most of vanilla gameplay issues. Stainless Steel simply made things a lot worse to me, by slowing everything down, and creating this huge boring map on which nothing ever happens. Maybe other people like it this way, I didn't.

So I decided to take things in my hands, and do some modding myself. First I identified things I wanted to see changed about vanilla:

Differences between factions are too small. Part of it is because there are too many sieges and units are pretty much the same in a siege. Part of it is because of overpowered generals' bodyguards - you can send them all to the front, and they crush every low-to-mid-tier unit. Even if they die you'll get man of the hour or adoption soon enough.

Settlement defenses are very weak, one unit of Peasants or Militia with a ram is enough to break into even medium-tier settlement. This makes artillery, spies, ladders, and siege engine pretty much useless.
There's too much micromanagement of agents, and also rebels.

Everything moves too slowly. It takes ages to bring reinforcements to the front lines. It also makes field battles meaningless - AI will keep making units as fast as you're defeating them in field battles, so you have to siege if you want to win a war.

Building things is constrained by time, not by money. Most of the time almost every settlement builds something.
The only way to build good economy is quick expansion. Small economies have no chance of competing, so you have to expand quickly. After you expand AI has no chance of competing so there's not that much fun in finishing the campaign.
The game lasts too short before becoming boring. I never even got to Mongols, and I don't think it's even possible to get to New World while still having fun.

Units are supposed to be rock-paper-scissors - cavalry beats archers beat infantry beat cavalry. In reality cavalry charge kills everyone, and you have very good cavalry (bodyguards) immediately, and missile infantry runs out of missiles before killing anyone.

Plus I had some complaints about diplomacy and stuff, but they weren't easy to fix, so I let them be for some time (diplomacy is one of the things that mods like LTC actually fix rather well, I need to borrow one of them). So I decided to do some pretty drastic changes. Now I know doubling and halving stuff is an overkill in many cases, but at least I'll know what effects will it have on gameplay. If I adjusted statistics by 20% I would need to spend months in playtesting before I could tell if it's actually any improvement or not. So the changes were:

Bodyguards nerfed to half their original size and 1 hitpoint per unit (like normal units) instead of 2 (like elephants).
Missile infantry (but not missile cavalry or siege engines) get twice the ammo.
Gates twice as strong, ram attack half as powerful, settlement towers fire rate doubled. Rams also have half the hitpoints, but it only matters if you attack them with artillery, not if you attack them with fire arrows.

Everyone moves twice as fast in campaign mode.
Rebels and pirates twice less common.
All buildings build in one turn.
All resources twice as valuable, this doubles mines, trade, and merchant trade income. Cost of mines doubled to compensate.
Tax rates have 1% per level impact on population growth, not 0.5%.

I only did some moderate playtesting, so I don't know all the consequences of this yet. Fortunately as the changes were rather large major consequences can be seen very easily.

First, more field battles. Because sieges are harder you cannot just siege, build one ram, and assault in the next turn. You will likely spend more time building siege equipment, or even waiting the defenders out, and as AI is twice as fast now, many sieges seem to end in AI reinforcement coming to the rescue and a big field battle - exactly the way I wanted. I think even after all these doublings rams are still a bit overpowered and settlements are still a bit too easy to take, so I'm not going to reduce these numbers.

There's less micromanagement. If you want to move your agents somewhere, it takes half the time. Rebels are less frequent (this seems to make them stronger, but I'm not completely positive about this effect), so one annoyance disappears, and when they come you don't have to spend so many turns just going there and then going back.

Even drastic nerfing bodyguards didn't make them too weak. They cannot do a frontal charge on a strong unit and hope to survive without casualties, but they're good enough at protecting the general, and they can still get tripple digit kill rate when charging Peasant Archers and other low-tier mobs.

Doubling ammo of missile troops worked quite well. First, they can do a lot more damage when defending a settlement, especially since it now takes a lot longer to break the gates, so there's plenty of times to pour arrows on the enemy. Unless you skip the gates and use ladders, or siege towers, or spies, or break gates from afar with artillery. Artillery is a lot more useful now, not only relative to rams, but also because unit speeds are much more reasonable. Second, increased ammo turned mid-to-high-tier archers really good skirmishers, as they won't run out of arrows before killing anyone. It doesn't help them that much in battles with full spectrum of units, as ammo is rarely a limiting factor in such cases. Stronger missile infantry balances missile cavalry, which now pays for increased mobility with less ammo; and it makes light cavalry more important - small detachment of light cavalry can protect your infantry-based force against enemy skirmishers, which would otherwise become a much bigger pain in the ass.

All this tweaking made factions feel a lot more different from each other than they did in vanilla, even though they still have the same roosters of units and buildings and starting positions. I'm happy with every tweak I made to battles, and while the exact number can be changed a bit higher or lower, they feel a lot better than vanilla's numbers.

With campaign it's been somewhat more mixed. I really like that buildings can be build very quickly if you have enough cash, and that taxes have serious consequences and are no longer an automatic "as high as possible without a rebellion". Increased movement speed is a great thing, but I think doubling it was too extreme, and it makes map feel really very small. By the way, isn't anybody bothered by how unrealistically slow everyone moves? Columbus crossed the Atlantic in just five weeks, not 20 years as it would take him in vanilla. So maybe I'll make 200% into 175% or something in the next release.

Doubling value of resources wasn't such a great idea. Yes, it changes the balance so resource-rich (like Timbuktu) settlements and those with good access to maritime trade are a lot more valuable now, and trade rights can score you many thousands of florins per turn. Unfortunately everyone is flooded with cash. More money isn't necessarily a bad thing, as bigger armies are fun, but I think it goes too far, and I'll reduce resource values from 200% to 150% of vanilla's.

The game progresses differently now. Instead of fast early expansion, which then slows because everyone attacks you and it takes ages to move reinforcements to the front lines, you have slow early expansion (as sieges are hard), followed by a happy total war with everybody fighting everybody else with big armies, and fast counterattacks. Unfortunately I failed at making it last much longer, so you probably won't see Mongols, much less Timurids or Aztecs.

AI seems to handle these changes quite well. It doesn't seem to lose too many generals. It sucks at economy, and spends all its money on Peasant armies, but that's more or less what it did in vanilla, so I'm not complaining much. AI has a big advantage, because autoresolve completely ignores settlement defenses as long as you have at least a single ram or ladder. This isn't as bad as it sounds, as AI really sucked at sieges back in vanilla, failing to take rebel settlements even with big numerical advantage, so now it's more even. But - autoresolving a siege is considered nasty cheating now! It really goes against everything the mod stands for. Try toggle_fow instead - unlike gamebreaking autoresolve toggle_fow makes the game more fun and saves you from a lot of boring micromanagement.

Here's a link to download Concentrated Vanilla mod at original settings (200% speed, 200% resources). Here's a link to Concentrated Vanilla mod with tweaks that haven't been playtested yet (175% speed, 150% resources and mines cost). Just unzip all files in your Medieval 2 Total War directory and double click on the bat file. The files are pretty big as it seems some files need to be copied even if I don't change them, like campaign start menu.

I'd love to hear your feedback about this minimod. I'd also like to include some good bugfix and diplomacy minimods, so your help with that would be appreciated too.

The ancient art of stabbing people

2008-12-15T19:43:00.000-08:00

Here's a blogified version of a talk I gave on BarCamp London 5. Most BarCamp talks tend to be about Internet, computing, startups and the usual topics that everybody's heard about over 9000 times. This one is going to be different because it talks about ancient human history.

London is the stabbing capital of the world. While rests of the world shoots at each other, 29% of our homicides are good old making holes in thy neighbour. But stabbing is older than humanity. Here's a photo of an orangutan getting his food by stabbing some fish.

Our closest relatives chimpanzees also hunt with spears. Here's a chimp sharpening a spear, so it makes good holes.

Chimps use spears to hunt for galagos like the one here, killing them while they sleep. Can you imagine anything more adorable than a monkey stabbing a cute little sleeping galago? What is clear from these examples is that stabbing is an instinctual behavior for hominid primates including humans, and that sense of fair play isn't.

Prehistoric humans obviously used stabbing tools for hunting. It's not really clear at which point we started to use them to stab fellow humans. There's plenty of ancient skeletons with wounds caused by weapons, but some of them might just be hunting accidents. When a group is hunting accidents are very common - lately Dick Cheney shot a 78-old guy in a face while hunting for quail, and when half of humanity hunted daily for whatever they could find it's certain many people died of stab wounds even without any foul play. Or if you didn't like someone you could make it look like a "hunting accident" and the rest of the tribe probably couldn't tell.

At some point people clearly started systematically killing each other. That's a good time to ask the question - why stabbing? When you look at most movies and computer games people almost exclusively slash, shoot, and bludgeon each other, while stabbing is very rare. Historically on the other hand stabbing was the best and most common way to hurt other people through almost entire human history.

The first thing to forget is shooting - unless you're firing at point-blank range there's almost no way an arrow or bullet is going to hit the intended target. Even with modern precisely manufactured and very powerful weapons, if they didn't have insanely high rate of fire you'd be better off with a knife than a gun. For virtually the entire history the way bows, crossbows, guns, slingshots, and all other projectile weapons were used was a large number of people shooting another large group of people. You had a small chance of hitting a particular guy at a distance, but some of you will probably hit some of them. Unfortunately for you the other guys will catch up with you quickly, so very few battles were won by just shooting with small weapons.

The main problem with bludgeoning is its low lethality. Human body can take a very high number of blows before you die. It's going to hurt like hell, and some bones might be broken, but you will only notice that after adrenaline rush of the battle cools down. If you're trying to bludgeon some guy to death, it's going to take so much time that he might very well die of boredom before he dies of wounds.

Stabbing on the other hand was very lethal - a deep stab would can destroy vital organs, cause massive bleeding, or if it doesn't work, kill by infection. Before the invention of antibiotics, what happened very recently on historical scale, even a very small stab wound could easily kill you a few days after the fight.

Slashing was somewhat popular, but there are many problems with it. First, it is a lot slower than stabbing. It also has a short range - long slashing weapons like huge jrpg swords would be way too slow to be practical. It also causes shallow wounds that are a lot less likely to kill than deep stabbing wounds, is much easier to parry, and its effectiveness is seriously reduced by even light armor. There are also technological issues - many materials like bronze are too weak for long slashing weapons, and you need a lot of metal to make a sword than just a spearhead that you attach to a wooden stick.

Most historical slashing weapons are really hybrid stabbing/slashing weapons, with stabbing being the primary mode of use.

It's time to leave prehistory and enter history. The best known spearmen in the world are Greek Hoplites, and among them obviously Spartans.

The "300" movie is very inaccurate in its depiction of ancient Greek warfare. Persians didn't really have war rhinoceros, and Spartans didn't fight barechested to show off their abs. Hoplites were really fighting in heavy armor, as the very idea was to make holes in the enemy before he makes holes in you - bare chest doesn't really help with that.

Here's a guy reenacting a Greek Hoplite. I totally love those reenactment guys and great photos they provide. You can see he's got a good stabbing tool, and the best body protection he can get, even if it hides some of the muscle.

Hoplites did not fight alone - weight of all the armor slows them down a lot, and spear is not the greatest weapon unless at the right range. Hoplites fought in a phalanx. Phalanx is a long line of hoplites, many people deep, and sometimes many kilometers long, with all spears pointing in direction of enemy. Big shields are used to protect you and the guy on the left. It is very deadly as long as the enemy is in front of you and the formation holds. It also has very low mobility - it can go forward fast enough, but changing direction without breaking formation takes ages.

It is very vulnerable from the back and flanks, so it must be long not to get outmaneuvered, and it must be deep not to be broken by a frontal assault. Another useful thing is that the guy standing behind you also points his spear in direction of the enemy.

Greek and in particular Spartan Phalanges dominated Greek warfare, but they were far from invincible. In battle of Lechaeum a bunch of lightly armored Peltasts throwing javelins, which is like no-contact stabbing, destroyed Spartan Hoplite unit by "throw a javelin and run" tactics. That's the only such case in history, as normally a Phalanx was accompanied by support troops like Peltasts and cavalry, so tricks like that didn't work and the fight returned to phalanx superiority.

A much more significant blow to Spartan reputation for masculinity was battle of Leuctra where significantly smaller Theban hoplite army led by openly gay-married Sacred Band of Thebes totally pwned Spartan asses and killed Spartan king.

At some point Greece and in fact most of the known world was conquered by Macedon. Macedon armies also used Phalanx formation, with a tiny difference of using very long spear called sarissa in place of traditional short Greek spear dory.

Sarissa was very heavy, was carried in two parts that were only assembled before the battle, and was almost completely useless as a weapon except when used as part of a Phalanx.

The difference as shown by the reenactors is very clear.

And here are they charging at each other. Both weapons make sense only in a Phalanx, and sarissa more so. It also takes two hands to use, so Macedonian reenactor has a much smaller shield attached to his arm, while Greek reenactor can hold a big shield in his left hand.

The real power of sarissa can be seen in Macedon Phalanx. Now instead of two spearheads between you and the enemy there are five, what significantly increases enemy's expected number of blood-letting holes.

Here's another picture of a Macedon Phalanx, this time from one of my favorite games Rome: Total War. The game shows warfare with reasonable levels of historical accuracy, so there's a lot of hot stabbing action.

This was one of the greatest triumphs of stabbers. Macedon Phalanx was a deadly force but very vulnerable. Alexander used his tactical genius to leverage its power and minimize its vulnerabilities, and so conquered most of the world in just twelve years starting from a very small kingdom.

Here's a picture of Alexander showing equipment of Macedon cavalry. They used 4 meter long spears which they used to stab people. Charging with couched lance known from late Medieval era was completely unknown to the ancient people.

The next big power after fall of Macedon was Rome. Roman army completely changed many times during Roman history. At first Romans used walls of spears just like Greeks. Here's a picture of Roman Triarii from Rome: Total War.

Roman Legions in their best known form fought using short sword gladius. It was primarily a stabbing weapon. Romans didn't introduce many technical innovations to the art of stabbing, they were really good at tactics, engineering, and especially politics.

Another important part of Legionary equipment were usually two pila. They were thrown before engaging in melee. The part behind the head is made of soft iron which bend on impact, making it difficult to get rid of a pilum. This way even if pilum hit a shield, how the enemy had a shart point sticking out of it, was made the shield a lot less useful or even dangerous to the user.

No history of stabbing would be complete without mentioning the most famous stabbing victim - Julius Caesar.

Caesar was killed by repeated stabbing with a Roman utility knife pugio.

Senators who killed Caesar intended to restore the Republic. The assassination was successful, but as far as restoring the Republic, it was an epic fail.

There were almost no innovations in stabbing technology for the next millennium after stabbing of Caesar. In late antiquity stabbing from horseback got quite popular. Here's a picture of heavily armed Parthian Cataphract cavalry.

Cataphracts look a lot like Medieval knights. Both them and their horses are heavily armored, and they use long spears to stab enemies. They didn't have stirrups, and still stabbed their enemies instead of charging at them.

This way of fighting didn't change until Late Middle Ages. In Battle of Hastings depicted by Bayeux Tapestry you can see cavalry having stirrups, but still using their spears as stabbing weapons, not for couched charge.

At some point in the Medieval era couched charge was developed. It was a result of better horse-riding technology including stirrups, nailed horseshoes, and solid tree saddle, as well as better armor of soldiers, which required more punch from the charge.

Cavalry was heavily armored, both riders and horses.

Here's a great photo of a knight reenactment.

Late Medieval infantry battles also had a lot of happy stabbing. Because soldiers were so heavily armored, slashing was almost useless. Armor like that needs to be pierced if you want to kill, slashing plate armor with a sword is not much better than bludgeoning it with a club.

And finally era of heavy cavalry was over. But it wasn't because of gunpowder yet. At first gunpowder was used more for siege artillery than for a field battle - guns were too slow and inaccurate for battle, but city walls are hard to miss and aren't really going anywhere.

What killed heavy cavalry was rise of pikemen and halberdiers, who were in many ways similar to ancient Greek Phalanx, and definitely not something you want to charge.

Masses of mercenary pikemen charging at each other were a bloody and quick way to resolve their differences.

One problem with pikes and other long polearms is that when fighting gets close enough, they are very hard to use, and something like sword is a lot more practical.

Pikemen armies saw gradual introduction of firearms. Arquebus is a very slow weapon, so unit equipped with them can easily be crushed by cavalry or infantry charge. A combination of arquebusiers, pikemen, and sometimes also swordsmen, and halberdiers can deliver hot lead over the distance, and make stab holes in anybody who comes too close.

This was however the end of stab-centric armies. As you don't need to shot and stab at the same time, "pike and shot" formation always leaves half of the troops unused. We could give everybody a gun and a pike, but that would be rather unwieldy and heavy. But hey - isn't a gun already a long stick that just needs something sharp on its end?

The idea isn't new, even 13th century Chinese cavalry used it. In this case it was more of a spear with attached gun than a gun with attached bayonet.

Muskets with bayonets replaced "pike and shot" armies. Even in Napoleonic Wars bayonet charges were important part of military strategy, as rate of fire was very low. Also a quick decisive charge is much more likely to rout enemy forces than slow fire.

As rate of fire increased tremendously, bayonets became less relevant. Now they're basically utility knifes, and even at very short ranges it makes a lot more sense to shoot than to stab. Stabbing after long history is no longer part of mainsteam military.

Tradition of stabbing continued for some time after mainstream militaries moved on. Polish heavy cavalry Hussars dominated 17th century Central Europe. They had those cool bad-ass wings, nobody's really sure what for.

Even in 19th century, Zulus were able to build an empire using mostly spears. It was probably the last stabbing-based empire in human history.

Now that stabbing is no longer of any military significance, it's mostly used for crime by people without access to guns, like the British. But you can stab even without a knife - there's a great collection of improvised stabbing tools from prisons - The Art of Shiv by Brett Yasko.

I tried to keep historically accurate but some simplifications were necessary for the sake of a good story. If you have any questions - use comments below the post.

Iraq War Scoreboard

2008-11-07T14:13:00.000-08:00

The Iraq War isn't over yet. Wars in the Middle East have nasty tendency of being long, bloody, and reigniting long after everybody thought they're done. However I would be really surprised if anyone moved between the losers and winners part of the scorecard. So let's go.

Losers

Saddam Hussein and Baath Party - before the war they had a safe grip on a failed country. If they could somehow get the world to add enough loopholes to the sanctions that would be plenty of money and power. Now they're all dead or broke and powerless.
American economy - war spending so far has been $550 billion, with new $12 billion being spent every month. That's not even close to the total cost, as the war is fought on borrowed money. According to study by Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz total cost of war in Iraq together with interest is around $3 trillion. That's $10,000 per person or over four Wall Street bailouts. This massive debt was undoubtedly one of the main triggers of financial system collapse and global recession, and is massively larger than subprime mortgages and other small failures. It wasn't the first war that bankrupted a country, and it won't be the last one.
George Bush and Republican Party - before failures in Iraq and economic collapse caused by this and other economic failures (massive deficits, irresponsible deregulation, procyclical monetary policy) nothing even suggested they were heading towards their greatest electoral failure ever. In spite of four years of Bush 2004 elections were a huge success and Democratic Party wasn't able to offer any attractive alternative to the voters. If it wasn't for failures in Iraq and resulting economic collapse Republican Party would most likely still be in power.
People of Iraq - political rights improved, as Iraqis can now vote (along tribal and religious lines) and have access to independent media, but that's small conciliation for death of 650,000 - 1,200,000 people, 4,700,000 people losing their homes, religious persecution of minorities, gays, women, people from the wrong tribe, and everybody with bad luck.
United States of America - the war crushed their economy, proved their military completely incapable of running a successful occupation (but very capable of destroying conventional army in a conventional war), and completely ruined their reputation and international standing. Americans don't understand the soft power, but EU managed to annex Central Europe this way, and Chinese are going to use it to build their global dominance.
Winners
All enemies of America were big winners of the war.

Iran - it's always nice to see your two biggest enemies - Saddam Hussein and USA - butchering each other. Religious Shiite government of Iraq is rather friendly towards Iran, and after USA got burned they lost a lot of power and influence in the Middle East. Other world powers like EU, China, India and Russia are much more friendly to Iran than USA was, so multipolar world is definitely in Iranian best interest. It's quite likely now that the new American administration will pursue normalization.
China - they never had any interest in Middle East, but weakening American economy is essential to them if they want to take over as the global superpower. According to IMF Chinese economy is about half as big as American economy. That's less than a decade at their current growth rate. Most modern empires started this way - economy and soft power first, military to back it up later.
Russia - was in truly dismal shape before the war. It was uplifted primarily by drastically higher prices of oil and other commodities, but it would never get the balls to invade a sovereign country allied with USA if American power wasn't as completely broken as it is now.
Islamists - secular Baathist government of Iraq was very hostile towards religion, now Islamists dictate how people live in Iraq. They're also been a resurgence of Islamism in other countries in the region, like Lebanon and Pakistan. Not much, but it reverses past trend of secularization, and from purely demographic perspective if secularists cannot convince religious people to join them, they're going to lose big.
Taliban - they almost collapsed after invasion of Afghanistan, but then somehow American focus got split, and crushing defeat turned into a lasting guerilla warfare in two countries. It's not a Taliban victory yet, but they might very well at least get into a power sharing agreement with current Afghani government, and get control over Sharia courts in exchange for leaving politics to others or something like that.
North Korea - they got a fucking nuke while Americans were busy. That's a country with economic power (PPP) similar to Luxembourg (city of less than half million people). Only part of it can be blamed on Iraqi War, but it certainly didn't help.
Mixed

Europe - Europeans participated in the war half-heartedly out of goodwill left from the Clinton era, sending some troops to the safest regions and trying to avoid casualties. Not only did they suffer military loses and financial costs, Americans proved they cannot even be relied as allies when they failed to protect Georgia against Russian aggression. On the other hand their loses were rather minor.
Israeli government - one the one hand they got rid of Saddam Hussein without paying the price. On the other hand the price was paid by their main ally USA which in future might be much less willing and able to intervene in Israeli interests. During this time Israel also lost a war against Hezbollah big way, resulting in major humiliation but no lasting damage and their PR in the region has never been good anyway.
Thinking about what various sides actually got out of the war is much more meaningful than babbling about military victories and propaganda political goals. The best example is the Second World War which was won by Stalin big way in spite of tens of millions deaths, and British Empire was a bankrupted loser in spite of not suffering too much in human or military terms. I also haven't listed Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda, because on global scale they're about as relevant as trolls from /b/.

Put your variables on diet

2008-10-20T13:15:00.001-07:00

There are all kinds of categorization schemes for programming languages, by paradigms or checklists of supported features. Categorizations criteria tend to be highly subjective (e.g. "builtin support for regular expressions"), useless (e.g. "significant indentation"), or both (e.g. "does it have a standard").

I want to propose a new categorization - objective, easy to evaluate, and at the same time exposing something very deep about programming languages.

I will divide languages into:

thin variable languages - where variables refer to data.
fat variable languages - where variables contain data. Variables can also contain references to data, but there's a distinction between direct and indirect access.

This division is very old. Assembly language is obviously a fat variable language, even though its variable system is very simple - registers and memory locations contain stuff directly, or contain references (memory addresses) to stuff. As languages need to be compiled to assembly plenty of high performance languages follow this road. Fortran and C variables are just assembly variables plus types. C++ didn't break up with it, it made container variables much fatter and much more complicated - RAII, copy constructors, assignment operators, and all the related mess. Java in spite of superficial similarity to C++ is definitely a thin variable language.

Thin variable languages are also very old. The original Lisp was the first language with thin variables, and all Lisp dialects, just like all ML and Haskell dialects, are thin variable languages. I don't think a single seriously functional language uses fat variables.

All object-oriented languages, most popular of them being Smalltalk, Ruby, Javascript, and (let's be charitable) Java - use thin variables too. There are some fat languages like C++ and Perl with objects bolted on top of them, but they are definitely not object-oriented, they just support some limited object functionality.

Scripting languages are interesting. Old languages like Unix shell have very fat variables, even though all variables are simple strings. Perl and PHP continue this tradition, but Python and Ruby are soundly in the thin variable camp.

Observations

Having categorized all popular languages let's do some observations.

All (pure and impure, strict and lazy) functional languages are thin variable.
All honestly object-oriented languages are thin variable.
Thin variable languages and garbage collected languages are very closely related categories. There are some reference counted languages in both camps (Perl, PHP on thick side, Python on thin side), but there seem to be no thin language with manual memory allocation or thick language with full GC.
All segfaulting languages (assembly, C, C++) use fat variables, but many fat variable languages are non-segfaulting (Fortran, bash, Perl, PHP).
Dynamic typing is on both sides (Perl/PHP vs Lisp/Ruby).
Explicit static typing is also on both sides (C/C++ vs Java).
Implicit static typing is only no the thin side (ML/Haskell) and is actually quite popular there.
Almost all thin languages have closures. A few languages like Python and Java have less than full closures, in form of named inner functions or anonymous inner classes. In both cases it's a syntactic not semantic limitation.
Almost no thick language has closures. A big exception is Perl, which has full closures.
Lexical and global scope exists on both sides, in almost every language.
Dynamic scope is unusual, but is supported on both thick (Perl), and thin (some Lisp dialects including the original Lisp, Emacs Lisp, and Common Lisp, but not Scheme) side.
Rich literal notation is supported (Perl vs Python/Ruby/Lisp/ML/etc.) and not supported (C/C++ vs Java) on both sides.
Macros exists only on the thin side (Lisps, Dylan, Nemerle). There doesn't seem to be any obvious reason for it.

I could go on. It actually surprises me how many semantic differences follow the thin vs fat divide, with Perl and Java being the biggest outliers (and also their derivatives like PHP and C#). These outliers are very interesting. Java's lack of power is definitely syntactic not semantic and there is plenty of JVM languages which are little more than fully compatible alternative syntaxes for Java with more expressive power. Nothing like that ever happened to popular fat variable languages like C/C++, which fail for semantic not syntactic reasons.

The biggest outlier on the fat side in Perl. While Perl was able to get almost 100% score on supported features checklist, it seems to be an evolutionary dead end. Every new thin variable language steals ideas from Perl, but Perl 6 effort was never able to transform the language, and Perl programmers have been leaving for Ruby and Python for years now.

If you're writing a new language today, and every programmer should do that, just forget about fat variables. They have one big advantage of allowing explicit memory management, what can still result in more memory efficient programs, but that's about it. Expressiveness of fat variable languages have been pushed to the limits by Perl, and it seems it cannot be pushed any further. Thin side is already far ahead, with Ruby, Scheme, Haskell and all the small research languages you've never heard of.

Rome total war strategy guide

2008-10-05T18:02:00.000-07:00

I'm not sure why but all strategy guides I've seen on the Internet suggest gameplay very different from how I've been playing. It's quite likely that on higher difficulty the strategy I'm proposing doesn't work any more, so you should listen to them instead of me.

In a way of full disclosure I play with fog of war turned off (~ toggle_fow), Follow AI movement turned off (in menu when you start), and battle camera movement restriction turned off (~ toggle_restrictcam). I don't think it affects difficulty at all, it mostly makes interface nicer.

You already know map of Europe, and turning off FOW doesn't reveal enemy units or buildings, so you still need some spies to learn that. Battle camera restrictions make giving orders to your units in battle much harder, especially when the battle gets bigger or you get some reinforcements. It's just user interface pain in the ass, so I got rid of it. I also played with low unit size not to fry my GPU, but it seemed to handle it quite nicely, so maybe I'll up it to medium next time.

Economy
I think the most confusing part of Rome: Total War interface is city income. Real city income is revenue minus garrison cost. Income displayed by the game is revenue minus total cost of your army divided proportionally to city population. This leads to bullshit numbers, as revenue is not growing proportionally to population. So totally ignore city income figures.

You want as much revenue and as little spending as possible. Two most important revenue sources are sea trade, and land trade. Build best ports you can, and paved roads (or even highways) as early as possible, and get trade right with everyone. Trade-enhancing buildings like traders, market etc. are also very useful. Trade revenues grow only slowly with city size, so you basically want to have as many cities as you can, even if they're quite small, as long you they can build paved roads or port (that's level 2).

The second biggest source of income is farming and mining. Because it doesn't depend on city size at all, it's better to build basic farming and mining everywhere you can before you build advanced farming/mining. For 4000 you can build two mines in two cities, producing 400/turn. If you built mines+mines upgrade in one city instead it would cost you 5500 and produce only 350/turn. It's quite similar with farms - it's cheaper to have a little everywhere than to concentrate them all in one place.

Your next major source of income are wonders. Hanging Gardens give you +20% to farming income, unfortunately it's on the edge of the map. Colossus of Rhodes is even better as gives you +40% to naval trade income and is often barely defended by very weak Greek Cities faction.

Taxes aren't worth that much. There's some tricky equation to make them grow much slower than population, so big cities produce maybe ten times less in taxes than you'd expect. And in any case tax income is going to be much lower than trade income, and as higher tax rates reduce growth and public order I normally set all tax rates to Low by default. In smaller settlements it's important for the sake of growth, in larger settlements for the sake of public order. If you don't want to grow the settlement any more and it has high public order you could set tax rates higher, but it's usually not worth the bother.

Public order
It's important to keep your public order high, otherwise citizens can rebel damaging population, buildings, and your soldiers, brigands will spawn more often, and the whole city may even rebel throwing your garrison away. If a big city with a lot of military buildings rebels they will have a very respectable army and will be a major pain in the ass to retake.

Public order is determined by many factors. First is distance to capital, with very distant settlements getting even as much as -80%. So move your capital close to center of your empire every now and then and try to conquer in one nice block, not random settlements all over the map. Starting positions of Carthage, Greek Cities and Parthia are pretty bad for this reason. It will also make your empire easier to defend, another reason to try having solid empire. There's even a Javascript app to determine best location for your capital.

Another is culture penalty. I'm not exactly sure how it's calculated, but it's based on buildings from foreign cultures. There are six cultures - Barbarian (Britons, Dacia, Gauls, Germans, Scythia, Spain), Carthaginian (Carthage, Numidia), Eastern (Armenia, Parthia, Pontus), Egyptian (Egypt), Greek (Greek Cities, Macedon, Seleucid, Thrace), and Roman (Brutii, Julii, Scipii, Senate), and conquering within your culture should give you no penalty.

Government buildings and religious buildings having the biggest effect, so the first thing you want to do to reduce it is destroying any religious building they might have and building your own. Then upgrade all buildings you can, especially government building, as upgrading removes culture penalty for them. If you cannot upgrade, you can sometimes destroy and rebuild, what's going to cost you some money but it will work. Unfortunately you cannot destroy many buildings, especially the important government buildings, so you might need to live with some culture penalty forever.

The next important factor is unrest. Unrest starts high when you conquer a city, and then goes down by 5% until reaching the base level, but only if public order is at least 75%. So if you can get a conquered city to 75% by temporary measures like large garrison and good governor then just by staying in the city for a few turns the unrest will disappear. On the other hand if you cannot even reach 75% you will have pretty much permanent problems with the city. Well, not really permanent as rioting kills of citizens, what solves your problem slowly, but if you think the city is going to be a problem, just enslave it, and by the time it grows back it will have no unrest. Basic unrest rates are 0% for most cities but can be 15% for many and even 30% for a few like Jerusalem.

The next factor is squalor, based on city size. Big cities simply have high squalor, and it makes people unhappy. That's why when you're conquering a new city, with high distance to capital, high culture penalty, high unrest, and high squalor, it will be totally ungovernable. Better to enslave or even exterminate its population to reduce squalor, then quickly raze their temples and build your own to reduce culture penalty, keep large garrison in it for a few turns to reduce unrest, and keep capital close to center of your empire to make distance to capital penalties manageable.

To increase public order you can build buildings, especially religious buildings which usually give you +10% increase per level. Some give you only +5% and some other bonus, so you need to decide if the extra bonus is worth losing 5-25% of public order (depending on city size, unfortunately you cannot change your mind easily later, you'd need to raze the temple completely and start from shrine). Depending on culture there are some other buildings like execution square, odeon, tavern etc.

Wonders are also helpful here. Statue of Zeus at Olympia gives you permanent bonus to all your settlements, capturing any wonder gives you a high bonus for a few turns but it wears off too quickly to be worth relying on.

Influence rating of the governor improves public unrest, but you won't have enough governors with high influence for all of your empire. I never did it, but maybe you could try a shitty governor and building an academy for him to get better stats. Governors can also get useful retinue from religious building.

A very important way of improving public order is garrison. The most important fact is that the bonus is based on ratio of total number of troops to total population. So 30 peasants are worth as much as 30 cataphracts. But everything including Town Guard is significantly more expensive per person than peasants - so seriously use only peasants as a garrison. Using serious combat troops for garrison in all your cities is going to cost you a lot of money, and you cannot even use them for crushing rebellions, as then you'd need another way of keeping your public order up.

Also - only use garrisons in small to medium settlements. In a small settlement, one stack of peasants can give you +80% garrison bonus (you can never go higher than that) and will cost you 100 denari/turn. In a large settlement, one stack of peasants will give you less than +5% and sitll cost you 100 denari/turn. Every other method costs the same no matter the settlement size. So it simply makes no sense to use garrison as a way of keeping large settlements happy, unless you positively have to. Much more effective ways are low taxes, religious buildings, governor influence, games, wonders etc. Oh and having absolutely no troops in a settlement gives it extra -15%, not to mention making it super easy to lose, so keep at least some peasants in all of them.

Tactics
Most strategy guides talk a lot about advanced unit types, but unless you play very slowly you will only get them in the end game, when you're so strong that it doesn't really matter that much.

A very important unit type are peasants, which you should use exclusively for garrisoning, but never for battles. Peasant garrisons are half the upkeep costs of the weakest battle units, so use them. If you have some spare peasants you can take them with your army so they can serve as an occupying force for the captured settlements, while your real forces go forward. Or maybe if someone needs to hold battering rams and you have pure-cavalry army, but that's already getting somewhat dubious.

One of the nicest things about Rome: Total War is richness of unit types and tactics you can develop with different combinations of unit types against different combinations of enemy unit types.

Many tactics can be formed around phalanges. First you take a wall of any units capable of forming a phalanx, which most factions can get almost immediately. Then you make either your opponent run into the wall of spears, or attack your opponent with this wall. If you set guard mode on your units will try to keep the wall of spears, if you set it to off they will break it to attack the enemy. Either can be useful depending on circumstances.

Even a phalanx formed with very cheap units can kill most of enemies. Non-phalanx infantry, and light cavalry will simply get massacred. With heavy cavalry, elephant, and chariots it's not that simple. Depending on your and their strength they might be killed by your phalanx (instant win) or break it (instant lose), but often they will simply get entangled in it without getting killed. Now it's time to attack, either with adjacent phalanx unit, or even better with your cavalry attacking from a side or a back. You will have some loses in your cheap phalanx, but you'll kill a much more expensive heavy cavalry unit this way, for a major win.

To fight with other phalanx you simply form a pushing match. If you have stronger phalanx, especially one with longer spears, you can outstab the enemy. If not, just attack the enemy phalanx with some cavalry while they cannot move.

The main problem with phalanges is that they are very vulnerable from flanks and back, so you want to keep some cavalry, or at least some non-phalanx infantry on both wings. Not only will it protect your phalanx, they can attack and destroy any enemy captured by it.

If enemy has some cavalry, you might want to take all your cavalry, charge into his, and try to destroy it before the infantry battle begins. Cavalry has very high charge bonuses so by properly maneuvering you can do disproportionate damage even without very strong units. If they rout, don't follow but go back to wings of your formation - you won't catch horses with horses, and your cavalry is too important to waste just yet. Even if the enemy reforms they won't have much morale left and you can rerout them later with a simple charge.

It's important to have cavalry superiority, even though the cavalry won't win the battle for you. If you charge at a phalanx, or even straightforward melee infantry, you're going to suffer heavy loses. Cavalry is strong because of high charge bonus, if they're entangled they suddenly become very vulnerable. There are some units you can safely charge at - missile units like archers/bowmen, peltasts/velites/skirmishers etc.; very light infantry like rebel peasants; other cavalry units, including generals (who are weak without their bonus charge); and later artillery units. Charging at anything else means high loses even with relatively heavy cavalry, and is outright suicidal for light cavalry. Even if some unit is weak, you can still suffer if there's a strong unit in its proximity. So obviously bowmen shouldn't be left without protection.

Another important thing you can do with cavalry is killing off routing infantry units. The difference between defeated army suffering 30% loses refilled in the first visit to nearby city, and 90% loses that are impossible to refill comes from your cavalry. Normally infantry cannot catch routing infantry, and cavalry cannot catch routing cavalry, so the only kind of massacre you will be able to do is cavalry massacring routing infantry. Even the cheapest light cavalry is very important just for this purpose.

If you have cavalry superiority you can get some missile units, or later some artillery. They are very weak against cavalry, and it's not too easy to protect them using just infantry after the chaos of the battle starts. Your tactics depends on range of your missile units, so usually it makes no sense at all to have multiple kinds of missile units in the same army. Either take all bowmen, or all peltasts, or all onagers, or some other consistent army.

Missile units cause free damage to your opponents. They can try to stand it out until you run out of ammo and suffer heavy casualties, or else they'll be forced to attack you on your terms. If the enemy has no cavalry and no missile units (or you just killed them with your cavalry), you can even send your missile units in skirmish mode way in front of your main units to pepper them with arrows and javelins. Normally however you want to keep them close to your units, either behind your main infantry line, or just in front and then making them fall back when the attack finally happens.

Missile troops alone are not going to win the battle. But with enough damage the enemy will be losing morale and will rout more easily. After some of the enemy starts routing the battle is pretty much won, and just use your cavalry to kill off what's left. Missile units are also quite useful at finishing off routing units.

There are a few more tactics you can try. Romans have strong infantry units that throw javelins before attacking. It's like an ok missile troop and a good melee troop in one unit. If you stand against enemy phalanx with Roman infantry try splitting your troops and attacking from flanks. It might work just fine.

Chariots are like heavy cavalry except you can have them very early in the right faction like Egypt and Seleucids. They have even lower defense than normal cavalry, so try charging through enemy unit to the other site, not on enemy unit. Also, never let enemy missile units fire at your chariots, or anybody to attack a standing chariot. It takes some practice to learn how to use chariots properly, but it's fully worth the effort.

If you have mixed heavy and light cavalry and want to charge a strong unit, charge with your heavy cavalry first, immediately followed by the light cavalry. This reduces your loses a lot. On the initial charge will still be capable of defending itself, so a heavy charge is needed. Just afterwards it will be completely disorganized so even light cavalry will be able to make a kill.

Sieges
You're not fighting for the sake of fighting, you're fighting to conquer, so many battles will be sieges. The good news is that in early game most settlements will at most wooden wall. Just make one battering ram, and here we go. Easy way to win a siege is having missile units and cavalry. Take battering ram and missile units to the gates, and fire at anybody standing next to the gate. Because unlike in a field battle they're not going to charge at you, if you're patient you can empty all your ammo on them and inflict severe loses, no need to hurry with the ram.

Once it's done take your cavalry and charge at everybody. Hopefully there aren't any strong phalanges in the vicinity of the gate now that you peppered them with arrows. Everything else will just rout when charged. It's important to kill them off now, otherwise they'll run towards the town square and reform there. As you go toward the town square just charge on every unit you find on the streets. AI tends not to offer any organized resistance on the streets, so it's going to be an easy kill. You may find some serious resistance in the town square, hopefully by this time you inflicted sufficient damage that it's just a matter of finishing everyone off.

In my experience for settlements without at least stone walls, AI defending army is a hell lot weaker than the same army would be on a field.

It's much much worse if they have stone walls and some missile units to man the walls. Because they're higher and protected by walls they're easily ten times as deadly as your missile units shooting at them. Add to that fire coming from towers, and reinforced games slowing down ramming a lot, and you can lose a quarter of your army before even coming inside.

You can obviously starve them, forcing them to attack you, but that's going to be very slow. Fortunately there's a much better way. First you need at least one hole in the walls. In can be gate opened by your spy, or a sap point, or hole made by your onagers if you already have them (onagers come late in the game, but so do stone walls). Then charge with all your cavalry, the more and heavier the better, and go towards the city center as soon as possible. By not wasting time on the gates and moving all your units at an instant you won't get fired upon that much. If you take the city center the enemy has 3 minutes to take it back or they lose and all die, so they'll have to go off their comfy wall posts and fight on the street, and they really suck at it.

If you make more holes you can choose one that will take you away from the walls as soon as possible, and that's the least defended. If you have some artillery you can even try to shoot at units protecting the hole to make it easier for your cavalry to charge over them. Unfortunately bowmen won't do, as enemy bowmen have better range while on the walls.

If this siege tactic won't work, well starving them is always an option.

I wouldn't depend on city defenses too much. Walls delay the enemy, but you still need enough field army to defeat him. Otherwise he can just starve you off.

Strategy
In Rome: Total War there's a very smooth transition between high level strategy and battle tactics, with both level affecting each other. Your strategic choices will have major impact on your battles, and your battles will have major strategic implications.

Unfortunately diplomacy is pretty much broken, and all AIs will attack you sooner rather than later, so you cannot go to the very high level and try forging one alliance against another alliance. Sadly it's like that in almost every strategy game I can think of. At least everybody against the player is better than everybody pussying out from every fight and letting you do whatever you want like in Colonization. So don't think too much about diplomacy.

You should have some idea on how you're going to play. In my last game with Egyptians I took all my armies, bought all the mercenaries I could, and expanded in three directions at once, west to Siwa and Cyrene, east to Petra, and Bostra, and north-west to Kydonia, and Sparta. Initial battles were tough, but this way I had a decent empire before anybody could even react. This plan was very ambitious, and it's quite likely that it might not have worked on higher difficulty levels, but it's a good idea to have some plan before starting to play.

It's important to move early, as you get some decent army to start with, often with units that you won't be able to make for a long time, while everybody's armies are still quite small and many settlements are barely defended, especially the rebel ones.

It's plenty of fun to start a war, but before you do think how you're going to end it. Can you take all enemy settlements quickly? Or at least all that are nearby, if the enemy is all over the place like Greek Cities, Carthage, and Parthia.

If you don't think of it, you might get into a long trench warfare that someone else will use to backstab you. In my last game I wasn't thinking enough about this and at one point I had wars with Parthia, Armenia, Seleucids, Pontus, Greek Cities, Macedon, Thrace, and all four Roman factions.

Your armies are investment. Don't keep them in secure cities. Actually don't keep them in cities at all - peasants should patrol cities, all your armies should be in the field fighting. Upkeep is very high compared to initial cost. Typically cost is about three turns worth of upkeep. So if you have a unit that's going to spend four or more turns doing nothing it's cheaper to disband it and make a new one when it's needed. You cannot make them as fast as you'd like to and you'd lose all experience, so maybe the threshold is higher than four, but armies should fight.

If you need some troops fast, and are far from your lands you might want to get some mercenaries, but normally cheaper and stronger units are available in your cities. Exception are units that you cannot produce but would like to, like Sarmatian Cavalry, and Createan Archers, depending on your faction.

Bribing is even more dubious practice. It costs more to bribe than to recruit an army (even mercenary army), defeat whoever you were thinking of bribing, and disband just afterwards. Bribing should be thought of as a really special case situation. Maybe if you want to bribe generals, because you cannot normally recruit them. But you can recruit a unit, take it into a fight, and you have a chance of getting "man of the hour" free general. I got plenty of generals this way.

Navy is expensive. You can do two things with Navy. In early game you want to transport armies from one coast to the other in a single turn (or otherwise as quickly as possible), so they are never vulnerable. There's no point fighting at this point, unless someone is trying to blockade you and you really have no choice.

The other thing is total domination of a sea. If you have plenty of money you can buy enough ships to take total control of a large body of water, like "whole Mediterranean sea east of Sicily". Just buy loads of ships, attack everywhere it in, then you can blockade everything, and safely transport all your troops.

There's little reason to go between the two extremely. Semi-strong navy that won't protect your transports is just throwing money away. If your navy isn't useful any more, just disband it.

When you're waging a war on a strategic level it's important to achieve local superiority of force. It doesn't matter who's got more units on the entire map. What matters is who's got more and better units in the place of battle. So go completely out of proportion, committing all your armies you can to the small part of the front where you want to achieve your objectives, like conquering enemy city, or destroying his not very strong armies. If AI has weakly protected settlement, take your big army and take it. If it has medium sized army in the field, crush it with army twice the size. If it took all its strongest units and heads towards your capital, raid his territory and force it to go back home.

You will be much more mobile if you have paved roads, a bit of navy, and no sense of fear. It's even more important to have all your battle troops on the front, not back home patrolling streets.

The biggest factor however is economy strong enough that you can easily raise new armies and replace your loses while the opponent cannot, even if they manage to win a few big battles, because that's how Rome became great!

Ant-Man movie News

2008-09-17T15:23:00.000-07:00

Found this intersting bit

Director Edgar Wright says "It's written and we're doing a second draft of it. It's going to be less overtly comedic than anything else I've ever done. It's more of a full-on action adventure sci-fi film but with a comedic element - in the same spirit of a lot of escapist fare like that. It's certainly not a superhero spoof or pastiche." Which version of the hero would it be? "It could be Scott Lang, it could be Hank Pym, it could be both - okay it is both, now there's an exclusive for you."

I can see now that eric O' grady will not be in the film.
why? Why? WHY?
I've grown so use to seeing eric in the initiave, and not seeing any apperances of scott in any comic book for a long time.

Do you guys think that eric O' grady will make a smart comeback at how there was a movie called ant-man and he was not in it!?
Comedy gold!

Black hat SEO on amazon

2008-09-09T20:40:00.000-07:00

( Yes i know, he is not wearing a black hat, but admit it, he is so adorable)

Amazon started as a bookstore, then after a brief period of being a patent troll it became an generic Internet shop, now it seems to be turning more and more into a shopping search engine, with thousands of sellers using it as an intermediary between themselves and the customers. I'd really enjoy the fight for shopping search engines between Amazon-style thick intermediaries and Google Products-style thin intermediaries. For now I must say Amazon is much more useful than Google Products, but maybe some day with some open standard shopping metadata the fight will be more even.

And just like every search engine Amazon starts to see the problem of black hat search engine optimization. Some time ago I was looking for earphones extension cord on Amazon, and the first results was one by Belkin with cost of £0.01. That's a pretty good price except there was a shipping cost of £4.50 per item, so they were basically abusing the search results screen.

Right now it seems Belkin isn't doing this anymore. I guess someone at Amazon noticed the abuse and wrist slapped them. Amazon as a thick intermediary has plenty of power over the sellers to control abusive behavior. It would be much more difficult for Google Products to enforce good behavior. Here's my prediction:

If thin intermediaries for shopping like Google Products ever become widespread, abusing behavior like hiding shipping costs, transaction costs, taxes and other fees will become as common as it is now in the airline industry.

Watch X-men evoultion for free!

2008-09-07T06:57:00.000-07:00

Are you ready for some X-Men?!

Starting today, you can watch full episodes of "X-Men: Evolution" streaming exclusively on Marvel.com! Beginning with the first episode, fans can now watch the classic animated series completely free of charge.

The Emmy Award-winning and fan-favorite series follows classic characters such as Cyclops, Storm and Rogue as they do their best to survive Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. In the first episode, the X-Men recruit two new members…But is one of them a spy for Mystique and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants?

Every Monday for the first five weeks two additional episodes will premiere on Marvel.com, and subsequently one new episode will premiere every week! Afterwards, each episode will be archived on the site and viewable at any time in the future! Enjoy them as many times as you'd like, and catch new details with each viewing!

Catch the first two episodes here,
http://www.marvel.com/animation/X-Men~colon~_Evolution

Marvel Hotline Debut

2008-09-02T21:01:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wanted to actully hear what the writer/artist has to say about his/her comic?

Well now with marvel hotline, you can!

Every Monday, Marvel Hotline will feature a top creator talking about his/her work on a comic soon to be in stores. Listen in on the exclusive phone conversation, and you can see what the said.

What i like about this new idea for marvle hotline, is that you can actully hear what the creator is talking about. you can feel the tone of voice, not imagine what he is saying.

12 Comic's That will come out 9/04/08

2008-08-30T05:59:00.000-07:00

Heres the list...

ETERNALS #4
INVINCIBLE IRON MAN #5
MARVEL APES #1
MS. MARVEL ANNUAL #1
PUNISHER WAR JOURNAL #23
SECRET INVASION: FRONT LINE #3
SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE #2
SUB-MARINER: THE DEPTHS #1
THE TWELVE ½ #1
VENOM: DARK ORIGIN #2
X-MEN ORIGINS: BEAST #1
X-MEN: MANIFEST DESTINY #1

The Front line comic looks very good, then again all of them do...
should i just buy all of the?

Get up to date on the current marvel universe for FREE

2008-08-26T15:20:00.000-07:00

Ok, i know i havent been posting anything accept for those little school days, But i will start posting more news again.

Missed out on Avengers Disassembled? Or how about Civil War? Well, now is your chance to catch up with your favorite super heroes in MARVEL: YOUR UNIVERSE, featuring a complete look at the major Marvel events of the last five years, as narrated by Watcher! Marvel Digital Comics Unlimited is proud to present Marvel: Your Universe available right here for FREE!

Is it all connected? What's next? These answers and more arrive in MARVEL: YOUR UNIVERSE! Plus, MARVEL: YOUR UNIVERSE contains preview material from the new Marvel Handbook hardcovers along with never-before-seen handbook material

This 32-page must-read comic is 100% free!

MASSIVE MARVEL NEWS

2008-08-18T13:17:00.000-07:00

FIRST UP, SPIDER-MAN COMICS COMING IN NOVEMBER!!

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #576
Written by JOE KELLY
Pencils and Cover by CHRIS BACHALO
Hammerhead's having a Brand New Day of his own and it's Spidey's turn to pay. This one hurts…a lot.
32 PGS./Rated A …$2.99

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #577
Written by ZEB WELLS
Pencils and cover by PAOLO RIVERA
Variant Cover by SAL BUSCEMA
You'll never guess this issue's special guess--oh wait, he's up on the cover. That's right, it's a good old fashioned Spider-Man/Punisher punch-up-a-palooza! What's Punisher want with a mysterious, power-enhancing serum? What does MOSES MAGNUM have to do with it? And why is Peter Parker DRIVING A CAB?! Spidey-Stalwart Zeb Wells and groundbreaking artist Paolo Rivera (MYTHOS series) bring Spidey the answers in this double-size spectacular! IN COLOR!
48 PGS./Rated A …$3.99

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #578
Written by MARK WAID
Pencils & Cover by MARCOS MARTIN
Mark Waid (FANTASTIC FOUR, KINGDOM COME) joins the Spider-team with fan favorite Marcos Martin to bring you part one of this two-part blockbuster! Random earthquakes don't happen in New York – trust us, we live here. So how did one trap Spidey and a subway car full of New Yorkers underground? But there's more to these passengers than meets the eye as a high powered mob trial's verdict is in their hands. And one of them has a crucial connection to Pete's old boss, J. Jonah Jameson!
32 PGS./Rated A …$2.99

SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY #2
56 PGS./Rated A …$3.99

SPIDER-MAN LOVES MARY JANE #4
Written by TERRY MOORE
Penciled by CRAIG ROUSSEAU
Cover by TERRY MOORE
She's lean! She's mean! She's green! She's…what? She's not green? Oh. Sorry. Getting her and Hulk mixed up. Check out the most awesomest series in the universe featuring said universe's favorite redhead, by STRANGERS IN PARADISE writer Terry Moore, and art by the fantastical CRAIG ROUSSEAU!
32 PGS./All Ages …$2.99

AMAZING SPIDER-GIRL #26
Written by TOM DEFALCO
Pencils & Cover by RON FRENZ
"The Replacement!"
Araña's back, Fury strikes, and the Green Goblin joins the search for the missing Peter Parker! But the big story is, will the real Mayday please stand up?!?
32 PGS./Rated A …$2.99

VENOM: DARK ORIGIN #4
Written by ZEB WELLS
Pencils & Cover by ANGEL MEDINA
Eddie Brock's dishonesty and his humiliation at the hands of Spider-Man have poisoned his soul. But it's the strange new costume that'll give him the strength to strike out! Now Eddie's about to discover just where this living alien symbiote comes from…why it possesses the powers it does…and what privileged secrets it can teach him about the man behind Spider-Man's mask! Discover the never-before-seen truth about Venom's past and the symbiote's home planet! By Zeb Wells (AMAZING SPIDER-MAN) and Angel Medina (SENSATIONAL SPIDER-MAN)!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$2.99

AND NOW FOR A LIST OF ALL THE TITLES COMING UP FROM MARVEL

MARVEL ILLUSTRATED: KIDNAPPED! #1
Written by ROY THOMAS (BASED ON THE NOVEL BY ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON)
Penciled by MARIO GULLY
Cover by GERALD PAREL
It's the first issue of that seafaring classic by Robert Louis Stevenson. Young David Balfour's parents are dead and he now wants to see the world. He learns that his father's brother, Ebenezer, may have killed his brother for the estate. It appears Ebenezer wants David out of the way, and will go to any length, perhaps even murder. His troubles are only beginning. Don't miss this fine adaptation by the same team who brought you Stevenson's TREASURE ISLAND in Ilustrated form.
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

MARVEL
ILLUSTRATED:
THE THREE
MUSKETEERS #6

MARVEL ILLUSTRATED: THE THREE MUSKETEERS #6
Written by ROY THOMAS (BASED ON THE NOVEL BY ALEXANDRE DUMAS)
Penciled by HUGO PETRUS
Cover by GERALD PAREL
It's the final clash of King Louis' forces and those of Cardinal Richelieu for whose influence will matter most in France.
It all goes well for the Musketeers until an agent of the
Cardinal appears and arrests d'Artagnan who is accused of conspiring with the enemies of France! This could become a death sentence unless his companions can find an out. How will it end? It's all here in the concluding chapter of the swashbuckling saga to end them all!
32 PGS./Rated A …$3.99

MARVEL
ILLUSTRATED:
THE ODYSSEY
#3

MARVEL ILLUSTRATED: THE ODYSSEY #3
Written by ROY THOMAS (BASED ON THE EPIC POEM BY HOMER)
Pencils & Cover by GREG TOCCHINI
On their way back home to Ithaca, Odysseus and his men stop for supplies at a mysterious isle. Little do they know it is the home to a race of monstrous Cyclopes, one of whom captures Odysseus' party and begins to feast upon them! Summoning all of his courage and wits, Odysseus embarks on a dangerous gambit to free himself and his men as the fate of his journey home takes an ominous turn!
32 PGS./Rated T+ …$3.99

MARVEL
ADVENTURES
FANTASTIC FOUR
#42

MARVEL ADVENTURES FANTASTIC FOUR #42
Written by PAUL TOBIN
Penciled by DAVID HAHN
Cover by CLAYTON HENRY
DOOMED ELECTION: The Fantastic Four travel to Latveria after Doctor Doom bows to international pressure and opens the office of Supreme President to a democratic election! Of course, Doom has a plan for some serious election fraud, but when his voting scheme backfires the Fantastic Four are caught between Latveria's progressive new leader and one VERY angry ex-tyrant!
32 PGS./All Ages …$2.99

MARVEL
ADVENTURES
SUPER HEROES
#5

MARVEL ADVENTURES SUPER HEROES #5
Written by PAUL TOBIN
Penciled by JACOPO CAMAGNI
Cover by ROGER CRUZ
A VERY STRANGE DAY: In his MA: Super Heroes debut, Doctor Strange encounters a cosmically powered creature known as a Zakimiya, which has been allowing its newborn babies to feed on the very fabric of reality. Dang! Luckily,
Doctor Strange has a plan---recruit a magically souped-up Spider-Man to web shut the holes in the fabric of reality, and then hope the two of them can bluff their way to victory against the all-powerful Zakimiya. Good luck with that!
32 PGS./All Ages …$2.99

MARVEL
ADVENTURES
SPIDER-MAN
#45

MARVEL ADVENTURES SPIDER-MAN #45
Written by TODD DEZAGO
Pencils & Cover by ZACH HOWARD
Teamed with new Bugle reporter, Billy Walters, Peter finds himself interviewing witnesses to a battle between the nefarious DOCTOR OCTOPUS and the amazing SPIDER-MAN, and discovers that every story has many sides...and not everyone is a Spider-fan!
32 PGS./All Ages …$2.99

MARVEL
ADVENTURES
THE AVENGERS
#30

MARVEL ADVENTURES THE AVENGERS #30
Written by PAUL TOBIN
Penciled by IG GUARA
Cover by GRAHAM NOLAN
THERE'S A TIGRA ON THE LOOSE!: The Griffin is on a rampage, and it's up to the Avengers to stop him! But why is Tigra secretly observing the fight from afar, and why has she been spying on the Avengers for days? And who, in turn, has been spying on HER? Plus, a new Avenger joins the ranks!
32 PGS./All Ages …$2.99

MARVEL
ADVENTURES
TWO-IN-ONE #17

MARVEL ADVENTURES TWO-IN-ONE #17
64 PGS./All Ages …$4.99

HULK
CHRONICLES:
WWH #5

HULK CHRONICLES: WWH #5
72 PGS./Rated T+ …$4.99

Q&A: Daniel Way

2008-08-12T18:05:00.000-07:00

It may be time to start calling Daniel Way "Mr. Marvel Universe."

While the WOLVERINE :ORIGINS scribe has often spun tales of hard edged characters on the fringe of Marvel's biggest properties, this September he leaps feet first into Skrull territory with the new DEADPOOL ongoing series kicking off with a Secret Invasion tie-in three-parter and art by Paco Medina, late of NEW WARRIORS. And if charting the madcap adventures of the Merc with a Mouth doesn't make for news enough, September 24 sees ORIGINS http://www.guitarworld.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=40905&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=855 take its first step towards mixing it up with the rest of the X-line in issue #28, the prelude to a five-part crossover with Mike Carey's X-MEN: LEGACY which officially starts in October's X-MEN: ORIGINAL SIN #1.

From the top of his new mountain-based home base in northern Georgia, Way revealed to Marvel.com exactly why DEADPOOL provides a off the cuff lynchpin to the entire Secret Invasion event and why the mystery-unveiling "Original Sin" crossover was fated to happen now.

Question #1: Your long-awaited DEADPOOL ongoing series comes September 3, and the first arc will be a Secret Invasion tie-in. Did that event status at all change how you were going to launch this book from your original plan for the character?

Answer #1: Well, not really. Deadpool is a very story-rich character. There aren't many situations where you can't plug him into it and make it a Deadpool story. The situation was that when Marvel approached me to do a new Deadpool book, part of the mandate was "Bring this guy back into the Marvel Universe. Make him relevant again." So [Executive Editor] Axel [Alonso] and I got our heads together and figured out how to do that, and the best way to do that, we figured, was to put him right in the middle of the big event of the moment, which is Secret Invasion. And that's perfect because Brian Bendis was actually casting around. He needed a certain thing accomplished—he needed a character to do it for the super story, but he didn't have room. Deadpool was a perfect fit to play this part. What happened as we went along is that this creative trajectory for the character drives him deeper and deeper into the middle of the Marvel Universe. It felt really cool.
It's an intensely creative environment, but you can't nail down things six months or a year in advance, and that's why we do these retreats to often—you get together and plan out six months, but then you come back in three months to tear up a bunch of track and lay new stuff. We were just at the X-Men summit in L.A.—which got hit by an earthquake by the way. Marc Guggenheim is talking one minute and all the sudden the building starts shaking. But when we started to get some steam going on some ideas, they just let it roll.

Question #2: It seems that one thing that has helped this new series is that in the arc of ORIGINS where he showed up, you didn't try to lay a bunch of plot hints as to what Deadpool's solo series would be about. He was very much a guest star in a Wolverine story, and you just got used to writing him as a character first.

answer #2: And just as importantly, readers got used to me writing Deadpool. It was kind of a soft build thing for me writing DEADPOOL. And that was one of the goals of that story was to let people know that I "got" the character. At least I hope I do. I know it feels right. And we've got a lot great feedback on that arc from people we'd never heard from before, sections of fandom that haven't really been paying attention to ORIGINS. So it brought something to ORIGINS, but it also brought those Wolverine reader eyes to Deadpool. We did a little bit of character stuff in there, like in the third issue where they're mostly talking and kind of batting it back and forth. That was the way to get some exposition out of the way. It didn't really lay a lot of groundwork, but it allowed for rediscovery: this is who Wade Wilson is. This is who Deadpool is. Everyone knows who Wolverine is. In the story, this is how they're the same and how they're different. And it shows where Deadpool's peaks and valleys are, and there are a lot. That's what makes him cool.

Question #3: Like you said, the first arc of the series ties heavily into the ultra-secret plot of SECRET INVASION, but as I understand it, the story builds upon the idea that the Skrulls can't replicate the powers of Deadpool, right?

Answer #3: Right. Deadpool is very unique in that he's not a mutant. He's more of a mutation. He had this very virulent form of cancer, and then he went through all these crazy experiments in the Weapon X project and then further had Dr. Killebrew's Workshop messing with him. The goal when he initially stepped into this was like a trade off. "We'll cure your cancer, but the trade is that you'll be our weapon." And he went for it. So they gave him these treatments and experiments in hopes of reversing the effects of the cancer that was eating him alive. So his healing factor is not like Wolverine's. His healing factor is intertwined with that cancer. The healthy cells are like a byproduct. It eats cancer,
and excretes healthy tissue—that's what makes him whole. And if you wanted to replicate it, there are so many steps that you actually have to do—give someone that type or strain of cancer and then subject them to this battery of tests. There's no simple way to get right there. It's such a Byzantine path that it can't be replicated. That's why Wade was thrown away from Weapon X. He was considered to be a complete failure.

Question #4: Are you going to be bringing in some background characters from Deadpool's past runs in this new monthly?

Answer #4: There will be characters from Deadpool's past popping up, but there's a different objective with this book than there is with ORIGINS. ORIGINS is a finite story, and it deals specifically with digging through his past, so you have to bring all that to the table so that everyone's aware of it as you sort it out. Otherwise, for newer readers and people that haven't reading these stories for 20 or 30 years, it's not going to have a lot of resonance.
With Deadpool, he's a character that lives in the moment. Digging up his past doesn't accomplish much story-wise. He's not a character carrying a lot of baggage. The answers aren't back there. He has some regrets, but it's not like Wolverine where he can't shake it. Deadpool lives in Deadpool world. So to answer your question, will I be rehashing his past? Not really. This is an action book with its eyes on the prize. Will we be bringing characters in from his past? Yes, definitely. There are several I want to use, but it's hard in that Deadpool is one of those characters who has a great cast of supporting characters, but most of them have only ever appeared in a Deadpool book. If you start populating your book with those characters, you start walling him off from the rest of the Marvel Universe. And in my opinion, that's what sank the ship the last time around. It was a great book with a lot of great character stuff, but in the broad
sense, it doesn't go with the rest of the Marvel Universe. Essentially, it was easy to ignore. That's not what we want to do. We take the Deadpool approach to marketing this one. Deadpool is not a character that will be ignored. This is not a book that will be ignored. And it also allows me to indulge in my more rowdy, rambunctious kind of story. It's more fun. It's got a bit of a mean spirit to it, but it comes across well. The stories are never slapstick, but they're never desolate and grim.

Question #5: Paco Medina seems like a great fit for the art in that respect because he can handle the fun and lighthearted elements as well as deliver the straight super hero action stuff…

Answer #5: What's funny is that we had someone else in mind for the book initially, and I was in New York in Axel's office coming up with a shortlist because we had to come up with an alternative. I looked down and saw a cover for NEW WARRIORS, and I was like, "This is perfect!" And Axel said, "Well yeah, that's Paco. You guys have worked together before. You did a VENOM arc together [in 2003's VENOM #6 through #10.]" I was like, "Oh yeah." [Laughs] And as we started talking, it went from "get a list together" to "get Paco!" And we found out very quickly that he was down for it, and he was excited about it. That means a lot. There are a lot of guys out there that are a hell of an artist and can draw anything you throw at them, but it's when you come at it with a character or title and they love it, then they bring that to the book. Paco loves this character, and he loves to push it. I've seen his pencils, and you can tell that Deadpool is always the first thing he draws. First and foremost, Deadpool's gotta look cool. And he always does.
We found this too when we were reaching out for people to do variant covers. The first few issues have variant covers, and so many people's hands shot in the air. There are a couple that I can't reveal yet, but I can tell you that a lot of them are people known for doing Deadpool. Then there are some that are not. [Laughs] They're just like secret Deadpool fanatics. And it was really cool. There was no having to ask. It was just having to tell people no because there were so many applicants.

Question #6: When ORIGINS first came out, it had to kind of stand on its own because it had so much to do with Logan's past. In the next arc, you're doing your first cross over with X-MEN: LEGACY, which seems like the perfect book to tie into ORIGINS because it also explores X-history. How did this story come about?

Answer #6: ORIGINS is about [Wolverine] looking back, and LEGACY is about Xavier looking forward, but it also applies in the inverse as well. [Logan] has to put his past together. They're very complimentary. For ORIGINS, one of the very first storylines I laid down was the Professor X storyline and as Mike [Carey] was putting together LEGACY, he got to the point where he [wanted] to do a Wolverine story. And I kid you not, it was that much of a happy coincidence. I went to John Barber and said, "I want to get into the Professor X stuff" and he said, "Well, Mike wants to get into the Wolverine stuff." It just came together.

Question #7: How did you and Carey work up this story? Have you been calling each other back and forth and plotting each others issues out together?

Answer #7: Originally, I got together with Mike and to be completely candid, I said, "I want you and I to get this as close to the finish line as we can before we turn it in so that we have a clear vision on this." And we did that. I outlined it first and sent it to Mike. He made changes and sent it back. Then we streamlined it together and were feeling pretty good about it. At that point, we sent it in to our respective editors, and they had some revisions and ideas. We shot them all down. [Laughs] No, we didn't shoot them all down. They had some really good ones. But the four of us started breaking it into pieces and figuring out how the story would be told.
The first part is me doing a prologue in [ORIGINS #28], and then we do a one-shot which is the two books combined where I write the first half and Mike has written the second half. Then part two takes place in LEGACY, three in ORIGINS, four in LEGACY and part five in ORIGINS. So we're both working from the same outline. I've read through Mike's first draft of the first part, and I'm working on the second part. I'm really happy with it. I've never really collaborated with another writer. Then when I learned we were going to do this, I was like, "Mike's a really good writer!" [Laughs] It was like, "Don't get caught looking stupid." So I tried to bring it all to the table with this, and he likes it. That's a good sign. I'm still not very confident in my writing, so it feels good when a guy like Mike gives me a compliment.

Question #8: Wolverine and Professor X have both been major players in the X-Men for decades, and everyone remembers that initial scene where the Professor recruits Logan onto the team. Will you be exploring or revealing any additional past they may have together that we don't know about?

Answer #8: They did not meet prior to GIANT-SIZE X-MEN #1. That was their first meeting face-to-face, but what we find out is that there was more than one reason why they met at that certain time. GIANT-SIZE X-MEN was where Professor X was recruiting for the new team because the old team had been trapped on the living island Krakoa, and they had to be extracted out. Ed Brubaker explored this a lot in X-MEN: DEADLY GENESIS which cast a light onto the shadows of Charles Xavier's past. Looking back now, he was extremely cocky. He thought he had it all under control, and he still doesn't. At the beginning of this story in a flashback episode, he learns that there are elements in this world like Wolverine and like Romulus who's been pulling Wolverine's strings, and there's no controlling them. It's a pretty interesting peak behind the curtain. We do show the behind the scenes of that first meeting and explore why Wolverine was out in the woods fighting the Hulk and Wendigo. And why in the world would Professor X bring a guy like Wolverine onto this team? He's not a team player. So both of them had agendas, and both of them did something that needs to be atoned for. That's what a lot of "Original Sin" is about.
But not only are their pasts densely intertwined, but events in the present bring them together. Wolverine shows up with Daken in tow. Daken is in [a] very similar [situation] to where Wolverine was a long time ago. He's got really bad wiring, and he needs someone to straighten him out before he becomes unstable. Wolverine got pulled back from the edge. Will Professor X be able to help Daken as well, or is he one of those things that can't be controlled? And there's the specter of Romulus over this whole thing. Has this been anticipated? You can't take any of that for granted.

Marvel U: Olympic Host City Hopefuls...

2008-08-10T02:12:00.000-07:00

With the Olympics opening in Beijing today, marvle polled its readers on which city in the marvel universe should be taken place at, heres the locations, and the pros and cons of them.

1st location: Blue area of the moon
A competition between the Kree and the Cotati is the very reason the Blue Area of the Moon was created. Only the Kree were sore losers and initiated a millennia-long conflict with the moderators, the Skrulls. Yeah, Skrulls. Ugh. Anyway, it's good enough for Utau the Watcher and the Inhumans to call home so it's good enough for us! Here's how it shapes up as a potential Olympic host city.

Pros:
1) Being able to breathe here may actually be less of a concern than in Beijing.
2)There aren't any swimming pools in the Blue Area, so we won't have to see Michael Phelps reappear from four years of complete obscurity to hear about how he's going to break every record ever known to mankind, again.
3) The Women's U.S. Olympics Gymnastics team is exposed to the Terrigen Mists and becomes the Men's U.S. Olympics Wrestling team.

Cons:
1) The Women's U.S. Olympics Gymnastics team is exposed to the Terrigen Mists and becomes the Men's U.S. Olympics Wrestling team.
2) Uatu the Watcher's always sticking his big forehead in other people's business.
3) Black Bolt's insistence to sing Inhuman national anthem leads to mass chaos and destruction.

2nd location: Broxton, Oklahoma
Broxton, Oklahoma. Probably not the first place you conjure when you think of the Marvel U—or the Olympics...or, well, anything, for that matter. But as the new home of Asgard City, the realm of the mighty Thor and the rest of his Norse buddies, Broxton is one patch of the Great Plains that just ain't so plain anymore.

Pros:
1) Inclement weather a non-issue with the God of Thunder standing by.
2) Security? Also a non-issue. If the presence of Norse gods doesn't discourage potential terrorists then we don't know what would.
3) It would be the biggest entertainment event the sleepy little town has ever seen—no longer will one have to drive to Oklahoma City for "an Xbox or an arcade!"

Cons:
1) Loki certain to be hanging around Olympic Village hawking Golden Apples as performance enhancers.
2) As a non-resident of Earth, Thor gets testy when denied entry into hammer throw event.
3) Hercules shows up for games honoring his people—massive brawl ensues.

3rd location: Atlantis
A sunken human city inhabited by the aquatic "homo mermanus" species, Atlantis is a beautiful, underwater paradise. Ruled by the human/Atlantean hybrid Prince Namor, Atlantis has vacillated between a friend of the terrestrial world and a foe. The heroes that have sprung from its illustrious waters include Namora, another Human/Atlantean hybrid, her daughter Namorita and of course Namor the Sub-Mariner. Though recently destroyed by the super villain Nitro, Atlantis had a long-standing bid for the Olympics before this tragedy occurred.

Pros:
1) Dehydration really isn't a concern.
2) All the natives wear bikinis and Speedos.
3) All the seafood you can eat!

Cons:
1) "Shark Week" takes on a whole new meaning.
2) It would be too easy for Hydro Man to bypass security.
3) On second thought, it's all salt water: dehydration = MAJOR CONCERN

4th location: Latveria
There may be no other place more welcoming for the world's best athletes than the Kingdom of Latveria. An immense population of robots mingles with the citizenry—all under the dictatorship rule of Marvel's master of evil Dr. Doom. Latveria's strict law enforcement, time travel capabilities and fine dining make it a good place for the world's athletic ambassadors to gather; either at the capital Doomstadt, the city of Doomsburg, Castle Doom or the Citadel of Doom. Sounds inviting, no?

Pros:
1) All events will start on time…Or else.
2) Streets will remain clean and orderly…Or else.
3) Dr. Doom…Surprisingly tasteful decorator.

Cons:
1) Latverian team wins every gold medal...Or else.
2) One word: Doombots.
3) No other countries invited.

5th location: The Savage Land

At the center of this summer's mega-event "Secret Invasion" the Savage Land is well known for its native inhabitants. Mainly, the dinosaurs. The Savage Land is currently the home of Ka-Zar and Shanna the She-Devil, but in the past has also hosted the headquarters of such nefarious villains as Magneto and Mr. Sinister.

Pros:
1) Ample accommodations provided by ruins of various citadels, temples and other former villainous headquarters.
2) Between Zabu, Devil Dinosaur and others, no shortage of Olympic mascot hopefuls.
3) Plenty of opportunities for sightseeing…

Cons:
1) If one can avoid the occasional hungry T-Rex and other predators.
2) Beach Volleyball on quicksand — not ideal.
3) Crudely-run barbarian government leaves spectators longing for Dr. Doom's efficient schedule making abilities.

A new hawkman blog

2008-08-05T10:58:00.000-07:00

Stop by beingcarterhall.blogspot.com and get up to date on hawk man news, and other things.

And heres a pic of hawkman

Just kidding, that pic looked very funny.

Does anyone read your blog?

2008-07-31T00:04:00.001-07:00

The answer is Yes.

I was wondering that question this evening. Does anyone read “my” blog? Well I would have to say that if I read other people’s blogs, they in turn must read mine? The problem is no one is leaving a comment to say they were there or “hey I read your blog”.

A simple comment can inspire people to write even more and knowing that will inspire you to write even more. So leave a comment and pass it on ~

Cheap oil at what cost?

2008-07-28T18:14:00.000-07:00

Drill Here, Drill Now... my ass!

Yes, I said it. Let the shit hit the fan and the chunks land where they may. Then compost it.

I just don't believe, for one moment, that we should rape what little land we have left for a very short term solution.
This is my blog, my soapbox, and I am standing on it. We need to seek ways to need oil less, not get oil cheaper. People just don't want to put the effort into changing. "How can I have my bananas, grapes and drive all by myself where ever I want to go?"

This sounds cynical. In fact, it sounds so cynical, it's a turn off and for that, I am sorry. I will try to make my point here without coming off as a pain in the ass.

I hate paying this much at the pump, too. I drive to work. But this is bigger than us and not all about me.
Instead of scrambling around, trying to find more cheap oil, don't we need to commit to find alternatives? Not just alternative fuels but alternative lifestyles?

My friend Jason and I just had this conversation last week... the general collective will only change when they are forced to change. Very few take it upon themselves to shift before necessity demands change.
Being angry, blaming others and hoping for a fresh batch of oil at the end of the rainbow isn't a solution. It's procrastination.

It's comparative to my inner dialog concerning buying a new, fuel efficient vehicle. Will I save money at the pump only to turn around and spend it on a new car payment, interest, and increased insurance rates? No... my solution is to drive as little as possible, grow more food, turn off more lights and spend less where ever possible. My sense of entitlement is something I try to pay close attention to, keep in check, and under control.

I have clean, running water in my house. That's a luxury for most of the world's population. Each day, I try to find something I do have instead of what I don't have... it makes it a bit easier. The future is scary but having hope (instead of anger) makes me brave.

Courage and information is empowering. Pass it on.

Hello synthetic-reality fourm users.

2008-07-26T18:32:00.000-07:00

Yes it is me new goblin.
i was that guy who complained about WoS community sucking and a lot of other complaining.
So leave a commment and keep reading my blog once a day.

War machine on-going series

2008-07-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

For James Rhodes, one war leads to another.

This December, Rhodey gets his very own ongoing series once again when WAR MACHINE debuts courtesy of writer Greg Pak and artist Leonardo Manco.

While 12 years have passed since the end of War Machine's last solo turn, Pak says Rhodey can thank Secret Invasion and its fallout for rocketing him back into a new solo title. Well, that and one other thing…

"Terrence Howard's awesome portrayal of Jim Rhodes in the ["Iron Man"] movie has certainly helped put a spotlight on the character," Pak points out, before rather ominously adding, "But more importantly, in the wake of Secret Invasion, the Marvel Universe needs Jim Rhodes—and War Machine—more than it ever has before."

If December seems too far away for your War Machine fix, Pak wants readers to know that Rhodey's solo adventure in the upcoming IRON MAN: DIRECTOR OF S.H.I.E.L.D. #33-35 will not only sate your appetite but lead directly into the all-new series.

"[Writer] Christos Gage's super sweet Secret Invasion tie-in starring War Machine will plunge the character into a brand new status quo," Pak promises. "We'll follow that by launching the new series with a shocking twist or two that should blow minds right and left. Literally.
"I can't say too much for fear of spoilers, but Rhodey may just end up playing the biggest role he ever has in the Marvel Universe. You'll know what I'm talking about when we finally reveal his big nemesis."

While that villain's name remains under wraps, Pak could reveal that part of War Machine's new mission statement brings him to some very real-world situations.

"Every day, somewhere on the planet, tyrants commit the most horrific atrocities imaginable, secure in the knowledge that the outside world won't raise a finger to stop them," Pak explains. "But now War Machine's on the job. And forget the finger—he's raising a couple of ginormous shoulder mounted rocket cannons!"

As for who all Rhodey will share the spotlight with, Pak wouldn't name names, though he would offer up a hint or two:

"Look for some faces that'll be familiar to long-time War Machine fans, as well as a big surprise or two from the Iron Man mythos."

The character of War Machine has always had a particular appeal for Pak, who thinks Rhodey brings something to the table that no other super hero can.

"I was hooked by Jim Rhodes the first time I ever saw him in the funny books," the writer confesses. "He wasn't ever just the other guy in the Iron Man armor; he brought a brand new perspective as a kid who grew up fighting bullies in South Philly and developed a whole new angle on the use of force through his military training.

"For better or for worse, War Machine will go places few other Marvel heroes dare," Pak adds. "And that makes for explosive, high stakes stories that we're champing at the bit to tell."

This series looks good, lets see now, deadpool, nickfury, war machine, hopefully alphaflight. yep 2008 has been a good year for me. i cant wait to start reading this.
Because its like having two iron man's!! plus i think the name war machine sounds cooler.

The most cute thing you have ever seen...

2008-07-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

Dude when i saw this, i fell in love with him, his name is dale jr. and hes a baby goat.
My god these things are so adorable, i'd buy one one, but im far to lazy.

Now tell me how cute you think he is on a 1 to 10 scale.
i gave him a 100.

I love money

2008-07-22T14:31:00.000-07:00

If you watch VH1 or TV at all, you proably heard of a very good show called i love money. Well im going to be reviewing every episode, and i think there has already been about 3 episodes already. so i guess ill be reviewing them, over the next couple of days.
Stay tuned for more!!

Northstar fanfiction,

2008-07-21T16:01:00.001-07:00

WARNING SOME SEXUAL REFERNCES AND SITUATIONS,
RATED T FOR TEEN
DONT SAY I DIDNT WARN YA

Faster and Faster

Everyone was surprised when Quicksilver and Northstar started dating, though they could see how it happened. Ever since the two men discovered that Jean-Paul was able to speed up his social interactions with Pietro to let him function at a speed that was more natural and comfortable for him, the two had become close. Even Pietro had been surprised. He hadn’t been aware of ever being attracted to a man before, but the relationship had evolved so organically out of that ease of communication that he never questioned it.

His father was furious. His sister was happy for him, but thought he’d lost his mind. Pietro didn’t care. He was happier than he could ever remember being. No one could deny the improvement of his disposition, so the X-Men were willing to overlook quite a few things.

Not the least of which were the “Quickies.”

It had started as a game between the two of them. How fast could they do it? Before long they were doing it in places they could easily be caught and leaving quickly before anyone had the chance. It was Jean-Paul who first mentioned that they were probably moving to fast for anyone in the mansion to actually see them. The rest had been Pietro’s idea. Most had guessed with the occasional blurs were, but sometimes denial isn’t a bad state to be in. Besides, none of them wanted to be the one to actually address the issue anyway.

When Logan was returning from a long mission and saw a blur zap across the room in front of him and felt the breeze of stirred air, all he could do was stand there with a low growl reverberating deep in his chest.

“Either someone has left the window open,” he sighed to himself “or I just watched eight-point-two nanoseconds of hardcore gay porn against my will.”

He closed his eyes. “I want beer.”

Bulls Eye

2008-07-19T18:55:00.000-07:00

Bulls eye in daredevil the movie, 2004.
colin farell plays bullseye in daredevil. know i like bulls eye almost more than i like ant-man.
and i was wondeirng if bullseye ever showed his face?
if so and one of you guys could post me up a link, id be really grateful :)
and what did you guys think of this movie btw?

Ant-Man news

2008-07-18T02:49:00.000-07:00

Watch this whole video, its good.
AND BOOYAH
YES
YES
WOOT WOOT
YES I HAVENT SEEN MY ANT-MAN ON SOMETHING LIKE THIS FOR AWHILE NOW,
ITS LIKE A HIGH FROM LIFE!!!
sorry for being so psyched and just plain stuipd, but i havent seen ant-man talked about ANYWHERE, like he was dead in everything ( accept for the initaive of course )
but anyways im happy so let us rejoice my friends!!

Whats the point of a blog?

2008-07-17T15:06:00.000-07:00

I don't know. Who knows why anyone writes? To tell a story, true or false. To entertain? To convey knowledge, information, or wisdom? Any or all of these reasons are good enough I'd imagine. One friend asked me if I was still blogging. Sure I said. "But Why?" she persisted. And I really couldn't give her a valid reason. I'm not especially wise so THAT can't be the reason. I'm not especially knowledgeable so I don't really have much to convey to others so THAT can't be the reason. I'm not especially funny, so entertainment is not part of the equation. Why then? I simply don't know. Why do people draw, paint or create poetry? I guess because we like to create. I think I'm creating a story when I write. It's like breathing to me. It's very uncomfortable to hold my breath for any length of time. I need to breath. Writing is breathing.But then, why the public blog? Why not write privately? I do. But it's still not enough for me to just write privately. I feel like this is a good place for a voice. I mostly write for my friends.
If you read this, then thank you!!

Taboo

2008-07-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

Taboo = A taboo is a strong social prohibition (or ban) against words, objects, actions, or discussions that are considered undesirable or offensive by a group, culture, society, or community. Breaking a taboo is usually considered objectionable or abhorrent. Some taboo activities or customs are prohibited by law and transgressions may lead to severe penalties. Other taboos result in embarrassment, shame and rudeness.
This is the offical term for the word "taboo"
Now if anyone watches this on national geographic, you know this show is in a way both cool and disgusting, that in mean i just saw the episode where it showed "the freak show" with a migit and a deformed young lady with small legs, and a tall guy about 7'3. now when this was showing, they kept refering to themselfs as freaks, and i just kept wondering why they didnt want to be called mutants, i mean there was about 8 of them, and everyone labeled them as outcasts and such.
so wouldnt it be cool if they were mutants? i even thought of dumb*** george bush saying they could destroy america, and need to produce robots that could hunt and kill them all.
and then people give them the nick name "Sentinels".
But be honest, wouldnt this be awsome?

Moon knight 20#

2008-07-15T16:30:00.000-07:00

Im very happy with this series, i have a pretty nice list of comics that i get, and this is by far my most favirote one. first of the art is so good, the story is good, and everything else is good.
and with the death of marc spector coming up, its only going to be better.
Plus this 20 issue is a double sized.
And here is the story info
The Story: “IN THE COMPANY OF WOLVES” Special extra-sized issue illustrated by Mike Deodato (AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, NEW AVENGERS) and guest-starring Werewolf By Night! In the aftermath of the Black Spectre debacle, Moon Knight is Public Enemy Number One, a fugitive from justice. But that’s not his only problem. Something awful is happening in the dank basement below Club Lu’Pine. Blood-smeared walls raked by claws tell half the story. To know the whole truth, Moon Knight will have to step into the arena and stare down a creature fueled by instinct and fury. To survive, he must become what he faces. Parental Advisory …$3.99

And take a look at this photo and tell me you dont think that this is just awsome, i mean im such a fanboy of this guy right now, its awsome

Commercials on two days TV's

2008-07-13T22:10:00.000-07:00

Yes i find myself watching TV alot lately, and while usally like everyone else in the planet, i hate them. until i started seeing some very funny ones. such as the sasquatch one, or that orbit gum thing one. for some reason i find myself on youtube watching these, i even subscribed to some random guy named sasquatch, who records the commercials and puts them on youtube.
I'd post a clip of the commercial, but i cannot get the embedded thingy to work on my post's
so im left only to write about it. But usally theres only the viagra and beer and other commercials on TV.

Heres one

And a close up of the man himself

Hellboy was F****** great!!!

2008-07-12T21:49:00.001-07:00

yes i did that lame cussing thing with star's word thingy, but thats just how awsome hellboy 2 was!! the film had a great story, good amount of action and story, with keeping the action reasonable. (***cough*** cough*** the transporter**)
i highly suggest to go see this film, its good.
5 out 5!!!!
i wont post any spoilers, as i wont be the one to steal your 5 bucks!!

About to go see hell boy!!

2008-07-11T16:15:00.000-07:00

yes, im about to ge see the highly awaited hell boy 2.
i was a massive fan of the first and can only imagine how good the second one was.
well im getting ready to leave right about now.
O and did i ever mention my addiction to nacho's and cheese?
for real this isnt even funny, i'm like a junkie hooked on this crap, its horrible!!
well im gonna have a good time at the movies.

And seeing from the looks of this poster, this movie looks very very good.
well ant-man's off

Im bored right now, and have almost nothing to post so...

2008-07-09T21:53:00.001-07:00

Well i know this is an all time low for the ant-pile, but you have to admit this is a pretty funny picture. ( Ah memories ;) )

The current versions of ant-man for film?

2008-07-08T23:44:00.000-07:00

Well according to the boards at http://edgarwright.co.uk/ the current versions
of ant-man in the movie will be Hank pym in the 60's as he discovers pym particules
and then the main story will go back on scott lang.

But what i am wondering about is what happened to eric o' grady? ( 3rd version of ant-man)
Although i really like both of these ant-man's i think eric o' grady would be more suited for the big screen, i think because he seems to have more of a better cooler looking suit, plus he has some very funny aspects to him, ( readers who read the the irredeemable ant-man series, know what im talking about )

Well either way im happy that we are getting an ant-man film.

Deadpool Merc with a mouth!!!!

2008-07-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

Well its almost time for deadpool to make his new ongoing series!!!
ant-man and deadpool are two of my most favriote guys, so i cant wait for this to come out
i cant wait to hear the jokes hes gonna make fighting skrulls!!!
man its gonna be great!!
it comes out in september

Alphaflight.net

2008-07-07T11:56:00.001-07:00

if anyone remebers the canadaian super team called apha flight, then your proably a fan of it ( im guessing) well i found a great little community for it, called alphaflight.net if you go to the links section theres a fourms link which have many people. and you can talk about alpha flight or its members or anything.
One main thing that caught my eye though was their fight for the flight campaign, it provides you with a chance to try and talk to marvel to get a new alphaflight or omega flight series.
theres not many fan sites like this, so be sure to check it out!!
Alphaflight.net
Omegaflight.net

Happy 4th of july every one!!!!

2008-07-05T15:25:00.001-07:00

hope every one has a good 4th of july
stay safe, and have fun every one
o and 2 moro i am really gonna go to the comic shop, yes im lazy :p

im so behind on secret invasion

2008-07-04T12:42:00.000-07:00

im so behind on secret invasion, so i will not be buying any cable or initiave comics, as i need to get more secret invasion comics, i dont even have one!
and because i heard that nick fury is in secret invasion, so i have to get it now!

i need to buy some comics!!

2008-07-03T18:56:00.000-07:00

well hopefully i hope to buy these
Cable #2-5
secret insaion #1
Avengers: The Initiative #14 i think 15 might be out so ill see if it is.
Well 2 moro is gonna be a fun day at the comic book shop!!
any other comics you think i should pick up?

Some information on Edgar Wright, director of the upcoming ant-man film

2008-07-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

Edgar Howard Wright Jnr. was born on the 18th April 1974 in Poole, in Dorset and grew up in Wells. He started making and forcing films upon his peers at the age of 14 and created such classics as 'Rolf Harris Saves The World' and 'Carbolic Soap'. 1993 saw the release of the film which would later serve as some inspiration for a slightly larger budget production - 'Dead Right' (and can be seen on 'Hot Fuzz' DVD extras). And in 1994 he wrote and directed a no-budget spoof western called 'A Fistful of Fingers' which sold itself as "The greatest western ever made... in Somerset".
Edgar then moved on to bigger and more televisually based things, directing a number of programmes for the Paramount comedy channel and the BBC including 'Asylum' (which starred, amongst others, Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson), 'Is It Bill Bailey?' and 'Alexei Sayle's Merry-Go-Round'.
In 1999 Edgar was asked to direct the sitcom 'Spaced'. Written by and starring Simon Pegg and Jessica Stevenson as Tim and Daisy respectively, it followed the lives of the two twentysomethings and their friends. The show ran for two series, and was made up of a total of 14 episodes. It was twice nominated and robbed of BAFTAs by less worthy sitcoms. (You can read more about 'Spaced' by clicking here or visiting the Links page).
Whilst shooting a Resident Evil sequence for an episode of 'Spaced' Simon and Edgar both realised that they shared a passion for the brand violence and gore that can only be offered to you by the zombie genre. It was this epiphany that eventually led to the creation of the rom-zom-com (or "romantic zombie comedy", to you) 'Shaun Of The Dead' which Edgar co-wrote with Simon and directed. (You can learn more about the film here).
In 2007 Edgar finished a second film with Simon and Nick called 'Hot Fuzz' - you may have heard of it, it topped the UK box office chart for several weeks. 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz' will make up two of the films in Wright and Pegg's so-called "Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy". The third has been announced with the working title of 'The World's End'.
Edgar has been nominated for countless awards and has won a Bram Stoker Award (2005) and a British Independent Film Award (2004) for 'Shaun Of The Dead'. 'Shaun Of The Dead' received awards for Best Film (NME Awards), Best British Film (Empire Awards), Best Horror Film (US Saturn Awards), Funniest Scene (Total Film) and Best Poster (Total Film). 'Hot Fuzz' received the award for Best Comedy at the National Movie Awards (2007).
The beardy young so-and-so has also tried his hand at acting, appearing in both series of BBC's 'Look Around You'. He also appeared in George Romero's 'Land Of The Dead' as 'Photo Booth Zombie' and in 'The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' as 'Deep Thought Technician'.
Edgar is lined up to work on 'Them', 'Ant-Man' and 'Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World' in the coming years.

Stan Lee talks marvel movies

2008-06-30T21:31:00.000-07:00

By now, you all know about the onslaught of films based on Marvel Super Heroes that is set to invade theaters throughout the next four years and beyond. But do you know what Stan the Man thinks of all this nonstop production going on lately?
Here’s what Stan Lee, 85, who created the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man and Nick Fury characters, and Joe Simon, 94, creator of Captain America, had to say about the origins of the next wave of comic book characters from their own minds to the big screen.

Thor Release date: Solo film to be released June 4, 2010 Screenwriter: Mark Protosevich (I Am Legend) Origin: Disabled medical student Donald Blake discovers a mighty hammer that transforms him into his alter ego, the Norse warrior Thor. Lee recalls meeting years ago with Fabio, the romance-novel cover boy, about playing the part. “Someone brought him up to my office to see if he could play Thor,” Lee says. “Visually, he would have been good, but in those days we weren’t even in a position to do a movie.” Lee says Thor “will have to be someone big and strong and kind of blondish. And there should be a nobility.”

The First Avenger: Captain America Release date: Solo film to be released May 6, 2011 Origin: Captain America made his debut in 1941 as lowly U.S. Army Pvt. Steve Rogers. “We had him peeling spuds,” creator Joe Simon recalls. “The government shot him up with a super-serum, which made him the first of what was to be an army of superheroes.” Simon and comic-book artist Jack Kirby, who died in 1994, created the character during World War II as an all-American adversary to Adolf Hitler. “We were a war-consumed nation, just like today,” he says. “Hitler was a comic foil for our character, and every comic sold out that first year.” Simon now suggests that Osama bin Laden might be an appropriate foe for Captain America to pursue. But Captain America more likely will take on his most famous adversary, the Red Skull — a Nazi (later turned Communist) introduced by Simon in Captain America Comics #1.

Nick Fury Release date: Not intended as a solo film, but character will appear in The Avengers universe in summer 2011 Origin: Lee introduced the character in 1963 in the war magazine Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos. “It did very well,” Lee says. “But after a couple of years, I got bored with it and wanted to kill it. Years later, I got a lot of fan mail asking, ‘What happened to Sgt. Fury?’ In those days, there was a popular show called The Man From U.N.C.L.E., so I brought Nick back as a colonel for S.H.I.E.L.D.: Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division.”

Ant-Man Release date: Solo film, but timing not yet available Director: Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz) Screenwriters: Wright and Joe Cornish Origin: Biochemist Hank Pym can alter his size as well as communicate with and control insects. Ant-Man creator Stan Lee recently had lunch with Wright to discuss the direction of the film. “There’s never been a hero like this in the movies,” Lee says. “I did one comic book called The Man in the Ant Hill about a guy who shrunk down and there were ants or bees chasing him. That sold so well that I thought making him into a superhero might be fun.”

Some info on ant-man and the avengers movie

2008-06-29T21:26:00.000-07:00

Comic fans know how the Avengers began: with the Hulk on a rampage, the greatest heroes of the day - alerted by ham radio operator Rick Jones! - assembled to stop him, discovering along the way that the evil Norse god Loki was behind it all. Iron Man, Thor, Ant-Man and the Wasp formed that initial core group, and a couple of issues later they were joined by the newly thawed out World War II legend, Captain America. That team stayed intact for a year or so, and they've since been seen as the true line-up of the Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
And they may all be coming together in the movie version of The Avengers - including Ant-Man. That's a character I didn't expect to see in the team-up film, mainly because his solo movie hasn't yet been scheduled on Marvel's list of release dates. I had assumed that the set-up would be solo film first, followed by the team-up extravaganza, but Jon Favreau says it ain't so. Talking to USA Today he says "the [characters] Marvel is talking about now are Captain America, Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man and Iron Man. I would love to see that."
Ant-Man's sort of a weird fit in a cinematic superhero team, but that's not my main concern - my main concern is that Marvel's full-speed ahead efforts to get The Avengers on screen may interfere with Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish's plans for the character. With Edgar going off to do Scott Pilgrim this fall (fuck yes), he wouldn't be able to get around to Ant-Man until some time in mid to late 2009 - and that's if he ramps up his current fairly laid back period between films. I want Edgar and Joe's take on Ant-Man more than any random screenwriters and director, so I hope that Marvel's rush to cinemas won't end up Favreauing Edgar.

Chat about Ant-man on edgar wright fourms

2008-06-29T10:16:00.000-07:00

come down to chat about the up-coming ant-man film on the edgar wright fourms
heres the link http://www.peggster.net/forums/
plus you can chat about other things, shaun of the dead or other movies done by edgar wright.

DIABLO 3 OFFICAL!!!

2008-06-28T14:49:00.000-07:00

diablo 3 has been announced at WWI!!
they have an offical site up now, diablo3.com
well i am completey HAPPY!!
im a big fan of blizzard and their diablo games, and im so happy to hear about a 3rd game.
took um long enough, to make though.

A Film Adaptation of Marvel Comics Ant-Man May Be Next For Edgar Wright

2008-06-28T00:03:00.000-07:00

The director of Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead says the film is in the queue.
While discussing the UK opening of the full double-feature version of Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantinos Grindhouse, Edgar Wright, who directed a trailer for the film and will be hosting the release, was asked if his next film was going to be the adaptation of Marvel Comics Ant-Man that he has reportedly been working on.

Wright said:"It could be that. I finished the script and I'm having a meeting about it next week, but it depends which comes first in the queue basically. I've been working on two at once, and I'm also about to start developing two more scripts, one of which is with Simon (Pegg). It could be Scott Pilgrim [Scott Prilgrims Precious Little Life] is next or it could be Ant Man, we shall see."Dr. Henry Hank Pym, a scientist in the Marvel Universe, discovered Pym particles, rare sub-atomic particles that allowed him to alter his size. Pym used his size-changing powers and his ability to communicate and control insects to fight crime as a solo adventurer and as a member of the Avengers.

Ant-Man was tentatively slated for a 2008 release, but may be pused back to 2009 or beyond.

Well hopefully we ant-man fans get a movie. but i hope wright dosent try to make it into a comedy film, hopefully he puts in some good action!
Well whats your opinion?

The best pics of ant-man ( i think)

2008-06-27T23:08:00.000-07:00

His first costume

Just awsome ;)

You suck.. lol

Well these are some really good pics i think!!
what do you guys think?