Salkafar

The Declaration of War upon Freedom: "I am the new God. All is one in Darkseid. This mighty body is my church. When I command your surrender, I speak with three billion voices. When I make a fist to crush your resistance, it is with three billion hands. When I stare into your eyes and shatter your dreams... and break your heart... it is with six billion eyes. Nothing like Darkseid has ever come among you; nothing will again. I will take you to a hell without exit or end. And there I will murder your souls! And make you crawl and beg! And die! Die! DIE FOR DARKSEID!" Because strong and seductive words are not only spoken by the good, but also by the evil.

I don't think 'Ghost in the shell' is quintessentially Japanese in any sense of the word. And I also don't see why it needs a live-action treatment. It's kind of ten minutes ago now, concept-wise.

I wonder what he eats. If he eats. He seems really out of it. ...I wonder if Mizuki's going to have to feed him...

Thing is, we are already performing things that are eeriely like upgrading. Of course there are no people now who have several of these devices - which are still very early-days yet - but an integrated system of several of them would come close to a body. It's the brain which will remain a problem. The connection between the brain and the rest of the body is so insanely complex. Nanotechnology will have to make great advances before anything can be realistically done in that area. You'd have to 'hook up' each nerve with a nanotransmitter, and build a 'virtual body' based on the signals. ...Come to think of it, some people might opt not to have a body at all at that point. They might prefer the ultra-realistic fantasy computer games we'll have by then. Why live in the drab and dreary real world when you can ride dragons, fight orcs and flirt with elves in the endless realms of the imagination?

"There's room at the bottom", but once you get below a certain size, quantum effects are going to take their toll and switches and circuits will become less reliable (and overheating will become a problem long before). Of course they are working on quantum computers that use qubits rather than bits. Once they get those to work we might be looking at a whole new vista of possibilities as regards speed... But since nothing is infinite, eventually things will hit a limit. Although it might take a very long time. Then again, from our own point of view, computers might be infinitely fast because they perform any task we give them the moment we do.

And we still don't really know the relationship between Archanfel, Imakarum (where the heck is he?) and Apollyon. Side not: it makes a difference whether his name is Apollon (Apollo) or Apollyon. If it's Apollo, that suggests another step in the logical progression Ouranos / Kronos / Zeus. But if it is Apollyon (Abaddon), the Hebrew angel of the abyss, it means the introduction of a foreign, hostile element - conflict. Deliberately ambiguous? Twist: Apollyon's mask comes off and the armor drops to the ground in pieces because there's nothing inside: Archanfel has been subconsciously animating it with his telekinesis all this time.

I think you profoundly underestimate the practical hurdles.

I haven't lived until today. Seriously. I want to see the conversation that led to this. "Hey, you wanna play a game?" "Sure, whatever..."

Why, she is unashamedly racist. She claims all white people are the same. But she is not entirely wrong. To quote Chris Rock: "There's a white janitor with a limp in this theatre, and he wouldn't swap places with me... and I'm rich!"

That was quick!

...Wow. She has a hope, doesn't she?

And Captain America is so focused on the minute details that he would let the entire picture be destroyed. Including details.

Hmmm... that was intrigueing. A lot happened in a short chapter. Could have been spread out over two, instead of virtually nothing happening in the one and a lot in the other. Did he teleport out? Did Apollyon, who applied Yentsui's power? And what is Valcuria thinking of all this?

almost looks comical because of Apollyon's innately deadpan expression.

According to Babelfish, it means "It is to protest against oppression" Actually it says "It is to protest and against oppression". Basically, Anonymous continues its silent war against the idea that law and order can be entrusted to fascists.

There's only two episodes, really... well, unless you count 'New dominion tank police' which was nice, but a little too stiff by comparison. And the Pumas really didn't get much chance to shine...

I saw ads for the toys in comics magazines. I dunno, early 1990s? Then it was VHS tapes of the anime, during the manga fad here around the same time... that's what started everything for me. Not just Guyver, but everything... It's the Puma Twins what did it.

Well, he is not the same species, is he? It must feel like being superman in a world full of chimpanzees. All the same, the chimpanzees are his responsibility, even if his masters bailed on him.

Never have. My dad quit for me and my sister and he was so disappointed when she started. She quit since, though. The fact that I have never smoked always makes me feel I am several points ahead already of about a quarter of the world. I might start smoking when I am old, however.

Could be. They've been living together for so long, they must have found a way to live in harmony. I mean, otherwise the werewolf would have turned on Pan before, or the archaeopteryx snatched the fairy outta the air... So maybe they celebrate their savior and patron... If the people knew the truth, they might worship Archanfel as a god. Or a messiah. He saved us from the wrath of our creators, after all...

Actually I have been listening to all of their albums pretty much non-stop these last few weeks.

I can't breathe!

No, the problem is that the ideal is completely null and void in this case. The ideal of Captain America is the ideal that everybody should be free - free to think and speak any way they want, free to act so long as that action does not infringe on the freedom of others; and free from fear that someone or something will take those freedoms away. In the face of the purposeful, complete annihilation of everything that has ever existed or ever will exist... what should his response be? The smartest men in his world have done whatever they can to stave off the end. What should his response be? He has the strength of his convictions and his good right arm, and that's it. What is he going to do to stop this ultimate infringement of freedom - the freedom to exist? He has made no attempt to even discover what exactly is the cause for the destruction. The new Illuminati - as described in 'Time runs out' - have sent out a team of Earth's most powerful heroes - including Thor, Hyperion, Starbrand and Nightmask - across the Multiverse to find out who Rabum Alal is. Why wasn't he with them? (Well, actually, Cap recently lost his power when the Nail negated the super-soldier serum in his body and now he actually looks like a World War II veteran). Bottom line: this was not Cap's finest hour. At all.

That was actually one of the dumbest things he ever did. Let me set the scene: the 'Illuminati' - a group of powerful men in the Marvel Universe (originally Iron Man, Black Bolt, Professor X, Reed Richards, Doctor Strange and the Submariner), working in secret to fight terrible threats, trying to pre-empt the destruction of the world basically - discovered that the multiverse is slowly dying. An unknown event caused the destruction of an entire universe and now it has become a chain reaction. The destruction works like this: two universes collide at one point, and unless they are seperated again within eight hours, they are both destroyed. The cruncher is that the point where the universes crash into each other is always the same: it's always Earth. That is why the other powerful races of the universe have not realized what's happening yet: the window of opportunity is only eight hours long. And the only way to seperate the universes is to destroy the collision point - Earth. One of the Earths has to be destroyed for both universes to be saved. This is apparently an impossible choice for many people, even though it is of course not a choice at all. For a time the Illuminati lucked out - they actually managed to push the universes apart once using the Infinity Gauntlet; in another case, the other Earth was destroyed by that universe's Galactus (that actually seems like exactly the sort of thing the big G is supposed to do anyway) ; in yet another, the other Earth had already been stripped of all life by Mapmakers (evil, transdimensional super-robots). But it was inevitable that they would get faced with the inevitable necessity of destroying an inhabited world to save two universes. In that case it was Namor, the sub-mariner, who did the deed. Currently it's Thanos and his death squad who have taken it upon themselves to destroy alternate Earths to save their native universe (and incidentally the other universe as well). In any case, let it be clear: there is a choice... the choice is between destroying one Earth, or destroying, through inaction, two universes including the Earth you refused to destroy. Captain America refused to face this choice, instead insanely insisting something would come up that would spare them from making it. This page is from a related story: I mentioned the Illuminati, including, at the time, Captain America, had used the Infinity Gauntlet - the most powerful object in the universe - to push the other universe away, saving them both without destroying either Earth. In the process, however, the Infinity Gems shattered, and are believed lost (although I doubt it... they will probably re-form over time) except for the Time Gem, which fled into the time stream. Now it started to reappear, dragging people with it and ditching them again, until finally only Captain America was left in the distant future, faced with Immortus (the guy with the hat), Kang the Conqueror and Nathaniel Richards, aka Kid Immortus, aka Iron Lad. These three are actually the same person at three points in his own timeline, and they/he were there to stop Captain America from travelling back in time to interfere with the Illuminati. Iron Lad/Kang/Immortus believe that the multiverse has a chance of survival if they take Cap out of the equation and let the Illuminati do whatever it takes to stop the destruction of Earth. And that is his response. He doesn't care about the destruction of the multiverse, or even of the universe. He doesn't even seem to understand the situation, instead inanely insisting on a form of heroics which, in these terrible circumstances, can change nothing and help nobody. He has no idea what to do. Apparently he does not acknowledge the fact that if he stops the Illuminati from destroying another Earth, the result will be the death of everybody in the world, as well as everybody on that other Earth, as well as everybody in their universe. Now, I personally do not think this fits the character of Captain America, but it does suit the increasingly insulting characterization inflicted on him by many modern writers. So while this seems to be a heroic portrayal of him, it is in fact the exact opposite: it depicts him as a blinkered idiot, a suicidally, genocidally blinded lunatic who can't see beyond the immediate to realize the scale of the threat. Simultaneously proving the Illuminati completely justified in what they did before: Erase his memory of the events he took part in. If they hadn't, this would have happened a lot sooner and the Marvel Universe would possibly have been destroyed because a World War II veteran was too small-minded to realize he was toying with the fate of the world. Kind of ironic, isn't it? That this thread is about the exact opposite of what it seems? 'Cap was right' – He wasn't right during Civil War, and he is infinitely less right now. The two preceding pages. It's not fair, I grant you, but that doesn't change that that page was the wrong choice for the subject. I want Cap to be cool again, rather than Grampa Simpson.

It's getting a little ridiculous now.