The I in Evil

[ossuarian]

I finished the story previously known as 'Untitled Superhero Story'.  It was going slowly for a couple weeks after my last update, but really fast after I got this netbook.

I named it "The I in Evil" for many reasons that made sense to me at the time.

Comments

Thanks!

[ossuarian]

Much of the motivation for writing this came from a passage in Steven King's On Writing, where he says people love to write about work. The other part came from reading lots of comics and starting to wonder about the support staff.

There's a little bit of your life in it, too. The inspiration for one part came from your own encounters with someone who had borderline personality disorder.

[ilcylic]

Ok, so, is Firehawk doing some weird Bruce Wayne type "I don't want to actually kill my enemies because I'm the good guy" thing with Green Skull, or is he just obsessed with doing it with fire?

Because, really, the correct answer here is to show up at Green Skull's next shindig and shoot him repeatedly with a rifle. Kevlar vests are rated for pistol ammo. There are trauma plates made of RHA that'll stop .308, but it's the same stuff they put on tanks, and it's really heavy. Also, rifles with more KE than .308 are really common, especially if you're stupid rich. In short, since Green Skull isn't running around in a mecha, shooting him with a rifle will be enough to severely cramp his style.

[ilcylic]

Right. it's early, I forgot to finish my thought. Also, these trauma plates are about 6" x 8" , meant to cover critical areas, like your heart. Wearing enough of them to cover your entire body would make you weigh as much as a tank. Thus the line about running around in a mecha.

[ossuarian]

The answer to both the questions you ask is "yes". Firehawk tries not to kill, and he's obsessed with fire. Beyond that, there are also rules to his encounters with Green Skull. Green Skull knows where Vincent Cole lives, but does not bomb his house. Both Firehawk and Green Skull know the others' secret identities, but neither goes to the press with the other's.

I suppose something I have to keep in mind is that any police sniper would then be more dangerous to Green Skull than Firehawk is. I suppose Firehawk has more money than any individual officer and many departments would have, and he's trained longer and doesn't have to worry as much about judgements on his conduct.

[ilcylic]

A police sniper shooting a supervillain pretty much doesn't have to worry about judgements on his conduct either. Hell, practically speaking, police doorkickers who shoot innocent people and dogs don't have to worry about judgements on their conduct, as long as they say "Well, we thought there might have been some drugs around."

It comes down to what the police have on hand. Most police departments run 7.62x51mm NATO, which is what those trauma plates are explicitly rated for, but some of them run .300 WinMag, and some of them have .50 BMGs, either of which will cut through a trauma plate like it's not there.

For story purposes, though, it's nicely easy to have the robots be well armored enough to deal with any shoulder fired rifle. Most police units are short in the RPG department.

I do really like the story, BTW. I'm just a detail oriented person, even about utterly fictional universes. :D

[luvcraft]

Hooray! I like it lots, and look forward to the rewrite. I wouldn't worry about the names of the supers; at this point Marvel and DC have mashed up every possible combination of two or more monosyllabic nouns. Since your characters bare no resemblance to theirs, and since their characters are very minor, I'd think you'd be in the clear.

[ossuarian]

You have a good point. There's even multiple Clayfaces in DC. I'll have to think about Firehawk. I came up with the name pretty much on the spot where Green Skull first mentions him. The fire stuff became a big part of the story, but it deserves thought since that was an eeny-meenie-miney-moe decision.

[zoldang]

Good story. Today I avoided my bosses and the discussions of work that has to be done tomorrow, just so I could finish reading this (I can stay late and finish

[ossuarian]

I first heard the Goat Joke on Ain't It Cool News. One of their people asks as his signature question, "What's your favorite dirty joke?" Tobey MacGuire's is the goat joke. I Googled it and found a few versions that I referenced

[zoldang]

There was a paper in 2005 by Li Zhuang, Feng Zhou, and Doug Tygar.

Abstract:

"We examine the problem of keyboard acoustic emanations. We present a novel attack taking as input a 10-minute sound recording of a user typing English text using a keyboard, and then recovering up to 96% of typed characters. There is no need for a labeled training recording. Moreover the recognizer bootstrapped this way can even recognize random text such as passwords: In our experiments, 90% of 5-character random passwords using only letters can be generated in fewer than 20 attempts by an adversary; 80% of 10-character passwords can be generated in fewer than 75 attempts. Our attack uses the statistical constraints of the underlying content, English language, to reconstruct text from sound recordings without any labeled training data. The attack uses a combination of standard machine learning and speech recognition techniques, including cepstrum features, Hidden Markov Models, linear classification, and feedback-based incremental learning."