Random MetaBanter – Random Banter no. 236 (now with Flowers!)

[factotum]

There used to be a time when Latin was the lingua franca of the world

There was a time when it was French...that's what "lingua franca" actually means!

[Rater202]

So today I learned that aluminum foil will sometimes fuse to meatballs, mozzarella cheese, and pasta sauce in the fridge after a full day and that it is possible for pasta to not be as good a few days later.

[Peelee]

Pasta is never as good a few days later.

[Rater202]

Pasta is never as good a few days later.

This has not been my experience.

Granted, my experience is mostly with baked pastas.

But we've got a huge dish of pasta now that just... Does not taste as good now as it did Christmas night.

[Peelee]

Humans are really bad at estimating volume.

[Keltest]

Humans are really bad at estimating volume.

While true, the idea of having leftovers is very much an aspect of american culture and not just something we do accidentally.

[Peelee]

While true, the idea of having leftovers is very much an aspect of american culture and not just something we do accidentally.

I more meant like cylinders. Squaring is a powerful tool.

Apparently, if you use a standard size Frisbee as a bowl, it can hold roughly five beers.

[Fyraltari]

While true, the idea of having leftovers is very much an aspect of american culture and not just something we do accidentally.

Hey, waste not, want not.

[Rater202]

That feel when you forget to drink anything with caffeine in it for three days and then you finally bottom out and it feels like someone jammed a pickaxe in your brain.

[Peelee]

Hey, waste not, want not.

It'd be nice if that became an aspect of American culture.

That feel when you forget to drink anything with caffeine in it for three days and then you finally bottom out and it feels like someone jammed a pickaxe in your brain.

I cannot say that I am familiar with that feeling.

[Rater202]

I beleive that I have previously claimed to be a caffeine addict.

I can't say 100% certain if that is a medically accurate descriptor... But if I go three days without consuming caffeine I get a terrible headache and become progressively more irritable and nothing can help until I get caffeine in my system.

I've been trying to figure out what the bare minimum amount of caffeine to avoid this is but that's a hard thing to approach experimentally.

[LaZodiac]

I beleive that I have previously claimed to be a caffeine addict.

I can't say 100% certain if that is a medically accurate descriptor... But if I go three days without consuming caffeine I get a terrible headache and become progressively more irritable and nothing can help until I get caffeine in my system.

I've been trying to figure out what the bare minimum amount of caffeine to avoid this is but that's a hard thing to approach experimentally.

A can of diet pepsi a day is probably enough for this sort of thing.

[Keltest]

Caffeine is legitimately addictive, so yes, i think it does qualify.

[Rater202]

Okay so I wasn't actually looking for advice or clarificatio.

Was just clarifying my own statement.

[Beeftank]

I had a friend who used to drink a 2 liter bottle of orange soda a day. He had to wean off it because when he tried to quit cold Turkey he got the shakes.

[Mystic Muse]

I am going to be trying to switch from Soda to unsweet tea. The 30 ounce Yeti tumbler I got for Christmas should help with this.

[Rater202]

I had a friend who used to drink a 2 liter bottle of orange soda a day. He had to wean off it because when he tried to quit cold Turkey he got the shakes.

...That's weird. Most orange sodas don't have caffeine.

---

side note: This is one of the reasons why I want Super Soldier Serum.

...Or the horse talisman.

...Or be half-ghost.

Just... Anything that could even remotely help with general health and/or pain tolerance.

[Keltest]

...That's weird. Most orange sodas don't have caffeine.

If it was Sunkist, that has slightly less than Mountain Dew. Its a decent amount of caffeine for a soda.

Its also possible he was just crashing from not having an inhuman amount of sugar poured into his body every day.

[Beeftank]

It’s possible it was the second one.

[Rater202]

So I just realized that I have enough unused/underused original character concepts based on Marvel Comics that I could do an entire anti-hero team.

I've got the teen runaway-turned spider-themed mosnter girl.

The genetically engineered child assassin who doesn't know how to people.

The radioactive werewolf from hell.

The shapeshifting space-Gangster who acts like she's the protagonist of a classic gangster movie and uses a symbiote to make an organic "gat."

The high school athlete who was rendered paraplegic when he was run down by a drunk drier who, a decade later, volunteered for an experimental procedure that might have restored his ability to walk but uh oh, turns out it was a front for gamma experiments and now he's a normal torso on top of a pair of hulk legs.

If I could come up with a hook for them...

[HalfTangible]

So I just realized that I have enough unused/underused original character concepts based on Marvel Comics that I could do an entire anti-hero team.

I've got the teen runaway-turned spider-themed mosnter girl.

The genetically engineered child assassin who doesn't know how to people.

The radioactive werewolf from hell.

The shapeshifting space-Gangster who acts like she's the protagonist of a classic gangster movie and uses a symbiote to make an organic "gat."

The high school athlete who was rendered paraplegic when he was run down by a drunk drier who, a decade later, volunteered for an experimental procedure that might have restored his ability to walk but uh oh, turns out it was a front for gamma experiments and now he's a normal torso on top of a pair of hulk legs.

If I could come up with a hook for them...

Concepts are easy. Actual stories are very very hard.

[Rater202]

Concepts are easy. Actual stories are very very hard.

...I have noticed that very few of the ideas that we brainstorm in a fanfic ideas thread over on another board get written.

Kinda salty that the "Shaggy Rogers is the grandson of Steve Rogers" never got to the actual plot.

[Lord Raziere]

Concepts are easy. Actual stories are very very hard.

Yeah.

for some reason that short story naruto fanfic about a roleplay I just did? ten pages or more to write. its plot is basically "A Christmas carol but everything goes horribly wrong halfway through and suddenly its a sci-fi time travel story" I wish I could consistently write ten pages a day or even a week.

cool character concepts are one thing, but for plots you got start thinking of a mindset of "how can this go wrong? what happens when bad situations like this occur and what will these characters do about it?" because plots require problems, which require things to go wrong no matter how logical it would be them to not go wrong. if your not living in the universe where things go wrong and the protagonist is needed to solve the problem- it can't be anyone else-, you don't have a story.

so for superhero plots, one has got to start thinking of how things in a superhero universe can go wrong, which is why "mad science experiment goes wrong" is a common trope in superhero stories or "strange thing happens to make crazy villain". or people using powers to rob banks because they're powerful enough the police can't stop them (because if the police could solve it, superheroes wouldn't be needed). an anti-hero team like Rater's.....well he seems to like X-men a lot and this team would seem probably work in the same vein, being a bunch of outcasts....so probably I'd come up with organizations that just want to hunt them down for having any superpowers at all for whatever reason in addition to just random disasters that make them come together to help people.

though it would also be good to think about team dynamics: what they agree upon, what they don't agree upon, and conflicts they would have without a uniting outside enemy (after all, unlike roleplaying, Rater would have the freedom to have his characters disagree with each other more strenuously and even temporarily leave over this or that to heighten tension to better tell a story) and of course themes of teamwork is built into any team-based story so that something he can count upon, emphasized by giving the strongest (or at least the most confident) member of the team the loner role- they'd be the most confident in their abilities to handle things themselves and thus be more surprised when they need the rest of the team to overcome something. after all it doesn't make much sense for a weaker member to do so! the space-gangster and child assassin would probably agree on whether to kill someone in combat, the high school student would probably be closer to normal morality and thus not be okay with killing people, things like that.

its lot of "okay thats cool in concept, but what will they do in situation X with Y People, to make sure they Z?" one has to think about relationships, situations, social webs figuratively connecting this and that and things happening in motion.

like that "Shaggy Rogers is the grandson of Steve Rogers" idea: what would Shaggy's relationship with Steve be? what would that mean for their lives? Does Shaggy give up solving mysteries to become Captain America Jr. because it turns out he is just as just strong and such? do they just team up now and again? how the Mystery Machine gang deal with living in the Marvel universe and have a talking dog that is probably hated for a being a mutant dog, because marvel? Does this mean Scooby Doo is actually a super-powered mutant, and does this mean they crossover with the X-men as well? What villain will kidnap Shaggy to use as a hostage to try and lure Captain America into a trap, who wants his only grandson to live? how smart is Velma in marvel terms and does she become Mystery Machine Iron Woman?

These are questions that would need answering, and the story is how you answer them.

[Rater202]

like that "Shaggy Rogers is the grandson of Steve Rogers" idea: what would Shaggy's relationship with Steve be? what would that mean for their lives? Does Shaggy give up solving mysteries to become Captain America Jr. because it turns out he is just as just strong and such? do they just team up now and again? how the Mystery Machine gang deal with living in the Marvel universe and have a talking dog that is probably hated for a being a mutant dog, because marvel? Does this mean Scooby Doo is actually a super-powered mutant, and does this mean they crossover with the X-men as well? What villain will kidnap Shaggy to use as a hostage to try and lure Captain America into a trap, who wants his only grandson to live? how smart is Velma in marvel terms and does she become Mystery Machine Iron Woman?

These are questions that would need answering, and the story is how you answer them.

So this wasn't my idea, this was something I helped brainstorm.

The basic concept that this other person posted was that Shaggy went with the others on the "travel te country looking for things to do and mysteries to solve" plot becuase everyone back home expects great things of him becuase of his history and he just wanted to get away from that.

They posed that it would start out like a typical Scooby-Doo type plots, albeit the most serious toned ones, but that over time it would be more and more comic book stuff invovled in the mysteries.

Like they' be investigating a ghost citing at an abandoned factory in New York City and just happen to run into Spider-Man.

The initial "teaser" they posted was something along the lines of Shaggy, over time, learning to not be afraid so much.

When it came to brainstorming, and after I got an explanation for why they were doing this with Marvel and not DC, I made two suggestions.

1: Stories about what "Grandpa Steve" got up to during the war are why he believes in monsters.

"Like, do you have any idea how many vampires were working for the Axis powers man!"

2: Trace amounts of the Super Soldier Serum in Saggy's system might explain why he can eat like that without it affecting his health, because "you can just eat whatever you want and as long s you're hitting at least your minimum caloric intake yo won't 't have any problems" is one of the effects of the serum.

The first was responded to favorably but the second was rejected.

and then we sort of got sidetracked by a discussion of the ideal mystery inc(including a link to a video on the topic that was like an hour long.) and the idea died there.

---

If you want one of my ideas, in the same thread I postulated, based on the Fox Kids promo where Hank Hill convinces the Siler Surfer to switch to propane, a world where the Marvel Universe is just going on in the background of King of the Hill.

In my initial stream of thought draft, I detailed that 1: Dale Gribble had managed to figure out some of the things regarding superhumans that are known to the readers but aren't public knowledge in-universe... But also had some conspiracy theories that were way off.

He is notably 100% pro mutant becuase moments of being a jackass aside, Dale is both anti-government and generally well-meaning both of which preclude swallowing government propaganda regarding the necessity of denying rights to people just becuase they were born differant.

2: Dale himself is unknowingly a latent mutant whose powers were awakened by his habit of taste testing pesticides and injecting toxic amounts of chromium into his body on a regular basis. This is to handwave the intermittent feats of superhuman physical ability he demonstrates on and off throughout the show despite typically being presented as a weakling. (Like the time he shrugged several times the LD50 of fire-ant venom.)

3: Bobby is probably also a mutant, with insect communication powers: This is becuase of the incident where he was able to communicate with, and was briefly brainwashed by the pheromones of, a fire ant queen, from the same episode above.

4: There are no other superhumans native to Arlen.

Other people made suggestions that Cotton Hill probably claims he saved Captain America's life among his other exaggerated war stories and that perhaps the silver Surfer's home planet used propane as their primary fuel so that's why it was such an easy sell, but then people got fixated on doing it with the MCU instead of the timeline of the comics and talking about how Thaterton Fuels was probably a subsidiary of one of Starks's rival companies and honestly the obsession with the MCU and since I couldn't come up with a plot the idea died there.

[Qwertystop]

I don't think you need an excuse for Shaggy believing in monsters. In most of the movies he runs into actual magic demons or aliens or undead or whatever, and in most of what's left of the franchise he runs into mundane humans who are nevertheless apparently willing to seriously injure or kill him, his friends, his dog, and anyone else who wanders by in especially unpleasant and visceral ways for the sake of their real estate scam.

He's got plenty of experience with all sorts of monsters. He's met more monsters then I've met housepets, and I don't need an excuse to believe in hamsters. Believing they exist, and getting very worried when that sort of thing comes up again, is entirely reasonable given past experience.

[Peelee]

I don't think you need an excuse for Shaggy believing in monsters. In most of the movies he runs into actual magic demons or aliens

He ran into those aliens from the Globetrotter homeworld, for example!

[BisectedBrioche]

Pasta is never as good a few days later.

Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it!

[Fyraltari]

Those who forget the pasta are doomed to reheat it!

I'll add this to my extended signature if that's okay with you.

[Rater202]

I don't think you need an excuse for Shaggy believing in monsters. In most of the movies he runs into actual magic demons or aliens or undead or whatever, and in most of what's left of the franchise he runs into mundane humans who are nevertheless apparently willing to seriously injure or kill him, his friends, his dog, and anyone else who wanders by in especially unpleasant and visceral ways for the sake of their real estate scam.

He's got plenty of experience with all sorts of monsters. He's met more monsters then I've met housepets, and I don't need an excuse to believe in hamsters. Believing they exist, and getting very worried when that sort of thing comes up again, is entirely reasonable given past experience.

Yeah, but the way the orignal idea guy presented it, the story starts before any of that happens.

So more why he always assumes that the monster is real even though it was a hax the last three times four mysteries in.

[Fyraltari]

Yeah, but the way the orignal idea guy presented it, the story starts before any of that happens.

So more why he always assumes that the monster is real even though it was a hax the last three times four mysteries in.

Because he's afraid.
Claustrophobic people know that the elevator isn't going to collapse on them. But they're still afraid.