General Inspiration Thread

Doyce T. said:

Even the Teen Titans don't like Teen Titans Go.

https://rabbitdadisw0rried.tumblr.com/post/163398410642/mangoshawty-johncribati

Oh my God. That was awesome.

This feels like the sort of entertainment that Halcyon City would have. It's brightly colored, technically amazing, and high-energy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oUMkoKEcyc

That's amazing.

Good friends. https://imgur.com/gallery/ns4uM

Bill G. said:

Good friends. https://imgur.com/gallery/ns4uM

That's awesome. All those little scenarios we hold in our heads about one another ... 

Maybe a map of Jason's private space at the Foundation/where most of the Quill Foundation Action Happens?

Hmm, but would the Conversation Pit replace H or F?  Given the size of the room in the picture, maybe both?

I think that'd be H?

I've left it all kind of vague, even in my head, just to allow the place to be a sort of chaotic assemblage of rooms remodeled and repurposed a dozen times over. But I'm also good with this, if we're going to use it as a club house.

I agree the conversation pit can fit into H. The dining room table / conference room works fine as is.

Byron and Rusty dossed down in the Master Bedroom. The adjoining Guest Bedroom was for precisely that. I posit an additional pair of rooms for Jason and Amir down a flight of stairs. For the record, Jason still sleeps in his old room. When he sleeps.

The outdoor terrace on the bottom of the drawing usually has the windows pulled closed. Most of the windows have shades, and vibrational tech to harden them against laser mics and the like. The quarters themselves are only 3-4 floors up above ground level (so about 10 levels above the lowest level in that building stack), and are towered over on at least two sides by the office building and one of the larger warehouses. The windows are just as likely to be used to look down on some interior garden spaces in the Quill Block than the outside world.

((For the record, having worked in two of them, hexagonal buildings suck.))

Original version of this appears to be here.

Ooh. It's part of Earth 27? That's such a great fan project.

I figured the map was dense and undefined enough that it gave us some useful stuff to work with, but really it's just a suggestion, hence my ? at the end of the introduction of it.  It's sometimes nice to have a map like this if only to suggest a new location for a scene than the conversation pit. :)

Or to provide some setting when Rossum's army of RookBots and Androidlycias burst through the windows ...

Alita: Battle Angel trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj8mN_7Apcw&feature=youtu.be

Non-verbal elements can be important to a performance. Iron Man: https://imgur.com/gallery/XVYGs

Bill G. said:

Non-verbal elements can be important to a performance. Iron Man: https://imgur.com/gallery/XVYGs

I've always loved those sorts of underplayed tells. Walter Koenig chose to have his Babylon 5 Psi-Cop Bester have a painfully clenched left fist throughout the series (never explained or even really pointed out on the show), giving him a slightly off, unhealthy / crippled appearance.

Okay, so this one's going to go down a rabbit hole a bit.

I have, in the past, shared a number of fics by author Unpretty, over on G+. This is some of that, but as it pertains to Masks - all the stuff I'm linking is from the POV of Tim Drake. Some of it is so very much in the style of our game (mostly the use of social media), I had to share.

Note: in Unpretty's DC universe, Tim Drake is a trans boy, and just... amazing and hilarious and maybe my favorite character she writes, which is saying something. I'm mostly mentioning this since my nephew's transitioning right now and it's on my mind (one of the reasons today is so crazy is surgery scheduling stuff).

(Also note: Much of Unpretty's stuff is NSFW, but all the stuff I'm linking is fine. If you go digging through her other fic, though, be prepared. Her Squirrel Girl/Kraven stuff is adorable.)

• Anti-social, Chapter 1 - Where Tim figures out Bruce Wayne is Batman. https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019937/chapters...
• Anti-social, Chapter 3, Signal Boost - Where Tim gets adopted because he went and asked to be adopted. https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019937/chapters...
• Anti-social, Chapter 4 - The one where Tim snapchats all the crazy crap that happens at Wayne Manor. https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019937/chapters...
• Anti-social, Chapter 5 - The one where Dick talks Tim through some Bat-drama https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019937/chapters...
• Anti-social, Chapter 6 - The one where Bruce is either drunk or concussed and Tim and Dick make him do an AMA while eating Greek takeout. https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019937/chapters...
• Anti-social, Chapter 7, BRUCE WAYNE BANNED FROM WALMART [Snapchat Compilation] - The one where Bruce Wayne gets banned from Walmart. All of them. https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019937/chapters...
• Anti-social, Chapter 8, Best of Bruce Wayne, Let's Play (plus a surprise announcement) - I mean... the title says everything. It makes me cry with laughter. Special appearances by Barbara Gordon and Ray Palmer (kind of). https://archiveofourown.org/works/8019937/chapters...

As an added bonus, Bruce's spreadsheet of reasons he is sad.

Perhaps we're wrong. Perhaps the vanished island isn't Iceland ... it's Frisland!

I was trying to remember where I'd grabbed the idea of Jason's "Grab hold of something and push against it until your hands literally tear free" and here it is.

Doyce T. said:

Reminds me of Jason and Link talking about each other...

I love this.

Honey Badger don't care. https://imgur.com/gallery/5ArlB

Bill G. said:

Honey Badger don't care. https://imgur.com/gallery/5ArlB

I love All-New Wolverine (particularly with Gabby). It just makes me smile.

Really on the nose, but Magpie just released beta versions of the playbooks from Secrets of AEGIS - the Brain, the Harbinger, and the Soldier.

Ooh. Those are fun.

Conceptually interesting but those are some complicated moves.

Yeah I'm hoping they get polished a bit between now and going out for primetime.

Ugh, I want "No, You Move" so badly for Concord. 

Mike said:

Ugh, I want "No, You Move" so badly for Concord. 

I think that's something Concord could totally pick up... once you and Sol are in better alignment. :)

Helen O'Loy, relevant to Pneuma's story. https://my.fit.edu/~rosiene/delrey.pdf

Bill G. said:

Helen O'Loy, relevant to Pneuma's story. https://my.fit.edu/~rosiene/delrey.pdf

Aw, man -- been years since I read that one. Fine stuff (and apropos). Thanks.

Bill G. said:

Alita: Battle Angel trailer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj8mN_7Apcw&feature=youtu.be

Just saw that trailer in the theater. Hell yes.

And just got back from _The Last Jedi._ OMG, such a Masks game in so many ways, esp. every time Kylo or Rey was on screen. Seriously advise seeing it, and worthwhile seeing it in the theater.

*** Dave H. said:

And just got back from _The Last Jedi._ OMG, such a Masks game in so many ways, esp. every time Kylo or Rey was on screen. Seriously advise seeing it, and worthwhile seeing it in the theater.

Agreed.  Won't spoil anything, but there are definitely relevant information to talk about in that movie as far as this game goes. 

My family is out of town this weekend, so I won't be able to see it until next Saturday. I do however already have tickets. :-)

Doyce T. said:

My family is out of town this weekend, so I won't be able to see it until next Saturday. I do however already have tickets. :-)

Harry's player insists that a bag of chips would have worked wonders in this story. 

https://sewickedthread.tumblr.com/post/16876051564...

Summary: After the death of his mother, Devin Maxwell joins Titan Force, an organization that collects supernatural artifacts using super powered agents. Devin quickly rises to become a brash, yet successful agent under the field name: Streetslam. He forms a pseudo family with his friends and fellow agents at Titan Force.
Devin’s allegiances are put to the test after an enigmatic billionaire offers him the chance to revive his mother, but only if he turns on his new family and steals a mysterious item from the Titan Force vault.
Featuring:
-A black main lead with superpowers.
-Anime style battles.
-Characters dealing with depression, poverty, abuse, and recovery.
-A diverse and robust cast, featuring strong black women, strong hispanic women, and a trio of super powered sisters.
-Anime tropes such as BIG ASS swords, long evolving story arcs, a military organization that has no problem hiring teenagers, and even a character with animal ears.

I think of this (well, the first chapter, not the rest) as: "A fic about Bruce Wayne that in my head could just as easily have been Leo about six months before he made Pneuma." https://archiveofourown.org/works/8524186/chapters/19539673

While it is difficult to catch lightning in a bottle twice, I've started reading (and quickly caught up on) the new run of Runaways, which is just darned excellent. While the original run's of existential dread and rejection and loss and paranoia is toned down, the current challenges of "getting the band back together" after time has passed, dealing with death and life and aging and time displacement and beheading and cats with glowing eyes, and just trying to find belonging is very neatly executed.

Also, a shout-out to my alma mater in issue #3, which was completely unexpected.

Doyce T. said:

I think of this (well, the first chapter, not the rest) as: "A fic about Bruce Wayne that in my head could just as easily have been Leo about six months before he made Pneuma." https://archiveofourown.org/works/8524186/chapters/19539673

Leo was that kind of focused powder keg at one point, but without anything like that level of self-control or skill. He was actually a little calmer as a bully, since his outlet for violence was always available. These days, he has to control himself more, so when it comes out, it's gonna come out hard. There's a reason I describe his robot friends not only as his power-up in battle, but also his restraint.

Facebook reminded me that I posted this way back in 2012: https://www.wired.com/2012/12/365-superheroes/

Apparently there is a different Japanese theme song for Jonny Quest, which appears to be titled Kagaku Shounen J.Q. (Science Boy JQ) (different, that is, from the classic Hoyt Curtain tune).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2mZfES6BlA

The picture to the right is from a Japanese "sonosheet" (a 45 rpm flimsy record and comic book) of the episode "The Robot Spy" (the classic giant spider robot ep). The sonosheet sound track had a different artist for the theme music than in the YouTube video above, and an instrumental end theme.

"JQ! JQ! JQ! JQ!"

https://imgur.com/gallery/CVTOC

Overwatch/X-Men art crossover.

Menagerie Tropes - I did it as Markdown, which turns out to be a total pain in the butt to convert to the wiki format, so I just put it on my blog because I'm super lazy.

Email me your Markdown, I've got a script.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WebOriginal/...

Total time taken: about 8 minutes, most of that filling in the header text and making sure the links work.

Some of these entries are probably not the trope that was originally picked, or could use some expansion. I can work on this tonight.

Oops. I probably broke some links.

I just thought we were going to put it on our own Wiki. It's really need to see it on TV tropes.

A conversion to our wiki would take about 3 minutes. I can do that soon if we'd prefer to have it there for shared editing.

+1 on all of that

http://wiki.menagerie.team/Tropes for the version of that page on our own wiki, as an experiment/demonstration. If people are serious about adding to the tropes list, please pick a place for them to live.

Methodology:

1. Visit the page on tvtropes.org in Chrome, inspect element at the top of the article, right-click > Copy outerHTML
2. Paste the resulting text into a file
3. Run pandoc (https://pandoc.org/) like this:  pandoc -s -t mediawiki file.html -o file.wiki
4. Paste the resulting mediawiki markup into a new page on wiki.menagerie.team

Seriously, if anyone is trying to move structured text between wiki, markdown, HTML, PDF, or many other formats, go get yourself pandoc.

https://digg.com/video/unhappy-teenager

Why Being An Unhappy Teenager Is Good For You In The Long Run