I wasn't speaking to the time travel aspect of the story. I was speaking to the fact that the villain was a more or less normal person working a pretty dull job as a miner, until something happened to him. A blue collar villain, if you will. That was the part that was interesting to me.

That the villain was just a dude with a job and a family who worked on a mining ship, and went supervillain b/c his planet blew up. I don't know if moral issues qualify as "intellectually interesting" but I liked that bit of dialogue when he explained why he did what he did.

IIRC ever since Champions 4th edition you could buy your invisibility to specific sense groups, and vision was further subdivided into normal, IR/UV, and radar/radio. So *clearly* this counts as Invisibility, since it costs points.

I used to run a pretty active mailing list of about 30 people in my home town (pre-Facebook), and we used it for many of the same things people use Facebook for now. So been there, done that. They're all on FB now, and for many things it's actually easier. It's not FB as a concept that is flawed, just this particular execution, exacerbated by some well-understood phenomena like network effects and first across the finish line.

I have a bit of a following on Facebook (mostly political ranty-type stuff, nothing that amazing IMO). Still, more than a few people have told me that my FB posts are their daily news feed, for whatever that's worth. And I kind of despise Facebook for many of the reasons already described in previous posts. Yet I think "social networking" (ugh) has its place and its utility. I like Google+ better. I have wished vocally, on FB, that we would all just migrate together. Last month I decided to just jump myself, and maybe enough people would follow that at least my little zone of friends would still be intact. After about a month of crickets chirping (in a very superior UI, but still), I lamely wandered back to FB. I just want to talk to folks, and am not particularly ideological or religious about it. I imagine this is what it must feel like to be an IT-savvy Windows user.

But email is not one-to-many in the way that FB is. It is point to point, not broadcast. Understand I say this as someone who pines for Usenet daily, has no great love of Facebook, and wishes for something better. I'm also struck by the irony that I'm having this discussion with some faceless person on a web forum (no offense intended, it just runs a bit against the grain of your point).

DAILY MAIL ALERT!

I never really understood how webOS, as neglected and stillborn as it was, had a native X11 client (server, whatever, bite me) written for it by some community fan. But Android with its gazillion users never has, at least not that I ever found. Maybe some good technical reason for that which is over my head, but it seems odd.

If 6.4% of the mass of Mt. Everest landed on your head, it would feel massive.

Probably nothing. Did you bother to look it up, or are you just channeling Glenn Beck, asking "questions?"

I think Redbox is making a killing, which would undermine your point. Just because someone doesn't have $400 in one chunk, that doesn't mean they might not have $4 every week or so.

I don't do any of those things either. I view FB as a technically poor replacement for usenet, but it is nonetheless where the people are. So I use it as a way to talk to people, and hear what they have to say. Much like the Slashdot comments.

As opposed to hanging out posting comments to Slashdot. What do you think that is? I sure as heck don't come here for the summaries.

I can see a few cracks below my usual viewing threshold, but I'd like to just ask: what is "meme manipulation?"

I'm running JBSourcery 5.1 right now as my preferred ROM, but I tend to flit around between them (yay nandroid backups). Of *course* I'm unlocked, rooting, and ROM'ing. I was just speaking to the stock updates provided by Verizon.