Ex Machina (comics) Puns

I just saw the movie Ex Machina for the first time. What a perfect science fiction film. Everything I love about science fiction, the dichotomy of good and evil (or who you THINK is good and evil), the atmosphere, the acting (especially Ava!). There's a sense of something weird, for lack of a better term, that just builds and then the last act delivers. I already rewatched it once. What a great movie!

I listed these comics because of their common theme: introspection on life in strange settings. The Flintstones provided surprisingly deep insight on family life, love, capitalism, religion, and more, despite being based on a cheesy cartoon about cavemen. That's why I absolutely love this comic. There was real character development, drama, and plot. Ex Machina, Astro City, and Watchmen all tell stories about the personal lives and inner turmoil of superheroes, and did so with immense skill.

Basically, I want more comics about how strange, fantastical, or comedic settings affect the lives of their characters. If you have any further questions, please ask.

Title

My players have stumbled upon a pitched battle between a pillaging band of bad guys and a local village. The village is on fire and they want to protect the villagers and also prevent one of the shops from burning down so they can secure some potentially valuable items.

The problem is that they're pretty tapped on resources, having very few spell slots remaining and also being somewhat low on HP. The party also doesn't have a real healer so they don't have many options to recover HP, and they can't take a short rest because of the urgency of the ongoing battle.

I want my players to be able to head into this village because I'm happy that they're taking the plot hook despite the risk, however as it stands now it looks like it would be a pretty challenging battle that could risk TPK with their current resource level.

So, I think I have three options:

1. Add in previously unplanned NPC or two to help them, perhaps a cleric who could restore some HP to them or restore some spell slots
2. Reduce the difficulty of the battle by weakening some previously planned enemies
3. Do nothing - let their actions have consequences - while heroic, they may die for their heroism

My issue with option 1 is that it might seem to obvious that I'm saving them. But it's appealing to me as DM because I can keep the big setpiece battle that I have prepared.

Any advice?

For context, the final encounter is a fight against a nerfed Adult Silver Dragon. Basically its a mix between the stats of an adult and young silver dragons. The justification behind this is that this dragon is under the effect of an artifact called The Dread Emerald. This artifact is slowly absorbing the dragons sould and power, but he keeps it on himself because he believes it's safer with him than deep inside his lairs vault where he keeps other items deemed too dangerous to be left at the mercy of ill-intented individuals. On top of that, centuries of adventuring as a human and collecting these items from powerful villains has got him 2 things: the title of Lich-bane, and many permanent scars, and blind eyes. During his adventuring, the Dragon, called Gumushdon, decided he needed help on his life's mission, so he started a Adventuring Guild called Gladiis Argentum. Since then he has been mascara thing as a humanoid and uses his own lair as the HQ.

Now, as for possible Deus ex Machinas, I thought about the Dragons second in command betraying him, because I need to have an inside man working with the parties patron.

The party is a group of thieves, murderers and other criminal, whose mission is to infiltrate the HQ, steal the Emerald primarily, and maybe some other valuable rare items.

The party should be 4/5 8 level players, with some magic items. I'm considering giving them a free feat too ..

So, if they still end up overwhelmed, what think could I do to help them in case it all goes tits up?

Edit: spelling

As the title says what do you think is the biggest Deus ex machina in the franchise?

For me it’s the wormhole drive from the SGA finale. It came out of no where, saved the day but what made it even worse is that they didn’t even show it.

Deux ex Machina - God of Mechanical Contraptions

Creator: 그로녹 (Gronoc)

Raw: http://www.inven.co.kr/board/powerbbs.php?come_idx=2775&query=view&p=1&my=&category=&sort=PID&orderby=&where=&name=&subject=&content=&keyword=&sterm=&iskin=&mskin=&l=54853

BGM: http://bgmstore.net/view/alapu [broken link]

Related lore:

• Viktor: http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Viktor/Background

• Orianna: http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Orianna/Background

• Blitzcrank: http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/Blitzcrank/Background

• Blitzcrank's Dating Service: http://leagueoflegends.wikia.com/wiki/The_Journal_of_Justice:_Volume_1,_Issue_17

Older short comic from the artist I posted yesterday: http://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/29hia1/translated_comic_heart_of_a_human/

Pardon me for sounding like my grandfather with my question but I bought daemon ex machina a while ago and I hate that game with a burning passion. So thinking very much about buying this game but I haven’t seen much reviews. I just don’t want to buy another bad game. How does this game compare to daemon ex machina?

index

For something slightly different this time, I figured I’d veer off into a more general discussion of a common fictional trope – the deus ex machina. Literally meaning ‘god from the machine’, it was called this due to the use of contraptions in ancient Greek theater to make the entrance of actors playing gods seem more impressive.

Since the invocation of gods was often used at the end of the play to wrap up all the loose ends through their divine powers, these days when people call something a deus ex machina, they usually mean it seems contrived - that the writer, not knowing how to resolve the story, has introduced a force more powerful than the main characters to direct the plot in the way they want.

As you might have guessed from the title, the way I want to relate this to Fate/Stay Night is via the sudden reappearance of Archer at the end of the Unlimited Blade Works route. Having seemingly been killed by Gilgamesh the day before, he arrives to save the day by clearing a path for Rin out of the Grail mud, shooting Gilgamesh in the head to stop him from dragging Shirou into nothingness, and even earlier projecting Rho Aias from a distance to shield Shirou from Enuma Elish.

It’s easy to point to this as an example of Nasu’s bad writing – there is, after all, not really any reason to believe Archer could have survived being turned into a pincushion by Gil several times over, after already being stabbed by Shirou and losing most of his mana due to not having a Master for multiple days.

(as an aside, I think this makes more sense when you remember that Archer is Emiya Shirou. You know, this guy. If he was going to die he would simply turn his entire body into swords instead)

However, to interrogate it from the opposite direction, did the predicament that Rin and Shirou were in really call for Archer’s intervention? Shirou says himself that he probably could have killed Gilgamesh even with the collapse of the Reality Marble – and the Grail itself almost took care of that for him, which itself is rather convenient. I think a scenario like Gil being swallowed up without having enough time to deploy his chains would have been much less contrived than the revelation that Archer was still alive.

Euripides, considered a great playwright, employed deus ex machina in more than half of his surviving plays – I think it’s clear that there

Rewatched Dredd last week and have been listening to its already-awesome Paul Leonard-Morgan score since then. But I was intrigued to stumble onto the existence of Drokk: Music Inspired by Mega-City One - a whole album made by the duo who were originally hired to score the film(and have scored every Alex Garland movie since) before the filmmakers went in a different direction.

It's much more retro than what we got; a lot of it feels like the soundtrack to an imaginary '80s Dredd videogame or Terminator movie.

Whole article about it here. Definitely a must-listen for any Dredd fan!

Ex Machina is one of my favourite movies. First and foremost because it exists in a genre that I feel is rarely seen and that's probably a good thing. I feel like these creepy/unnerving modest budget science fiction thrillers are so exciting because they come around so occasionally it feels like an event. For me it started with the Fly, and since then I gravitated to movies like Alien, Species, Splice, Under the Skin and Life.

But Ex-Machina is my favourite in that genre. But what I find fascinating about it is that it's also one of Reddit's favourite movies, which made me think about why that was.

Upon my 2nd viewing it was very clear to me that the film had some very strong feminist themes. Every viewing since then has only solidified that it not only has feminist themes but is explicitly a feminist movie. Now a lot a lot has been said about the tropes of the 'average' redditor which may or may not be as true as described (white, lonely, ,atheist etc) but I think it is safe to say that the site broadly skews young and male. So we have a site full of boys who really enjoy a very feminist movie.

Now I've had more than a few reddit discussions with people who love the film but did not know or feel that the film was feminist in anyway, and just saw it as an A.I. thriller which asks questions about humanity. This reading is correct. It absolutely is an A.I. thriller and it asks questions about humanity though the lens of feminism.

SPOILERS AHEAD (If you haven't seen the movie go and watch it on Netflix right now. You won't regret it.)

On the surface you have a fairly simple dynamic between Nathan and Caleb. Nathan is manipulative, self absorbed genius with a god complex and Caleb is a well meaning, shy, loner with a moral compass. The Hero/Villain set up is clear. The catalyst of them coming into direct conflict is Ava, who Caleb falls for hard and Nathan diminishes as just another in a continuum of updates for A.I.

So where is this feminism?

I think you first have to realise that Nathan and Caleb (while well acted and portrayed) are not so much characters as they are representations of ideas and viewpoints. The film hyper-focuses all of their views on and ideas around the female gender, and not only what it is, but what it should be.

Nathan represents the direct, clear and 'ugly' face of misogyny. Every physical A.I. he has ever created are attractive females. Apart from studying them, he keeps them in various roles for his

The thing that stands out above all else in his work is the focus on storytelling. There may be people with horns and space battles, but these are just accents on great plotting and interesting characters, all wrapped up in surprising and unique and amazing worlds. Where else can I find stuff like that (even regardless of genre, doesn't have to be SciFi)?

edit: Thanks for all the recommendations everyone!

I have many runs of single issues of image comics. All are bagged and boarded.

Walking dead Tyrese 1 Special Machone 1 Special Governor 1 Special 90 97 100-132 (tons of 100 and 115 variants)

Invincible 21-112 (missing 31-33,111) 7 variants of #100, atom eve 1,2)

East of West $2

1 (2nd,3rd,4th printing) 2 (2nd printing) 3 (2nd printing) 6,7,15,16 1st print

SHUTTER 4,5 - $1.50

Saga 1st prints 2- $12 3- $12 17 - $2

Southern bastards 1-6 1st prints -$30

Ex Machina - $50 1-41 plus specials

Nowhere Men 1 -6 - $20

Black Science

1,2 - $4

Looking for $$ or trade for TPBs. Will split shipping cost and paypal fee

If it‘s a deus ex machina, you choose a problem they have that is immediately pressing, and it will be solved in an appropriate amount of time - basically, if their life was a tv show, it would take at most five minutes to watch, accounting for montages and time skips.

If it’s a diabolus ex machina, you choose a general category for their problem to affect - financial woes, or friction in a relationship, for example. Something will cause that problem to arise (taking at most five minutes of their show, again), and it will resolve relatively quickly (in other words, by the end of an episode), though it may have further repercussions.

In either case, the event that begins the deus ex machina or diabolus ex machina will be highly improbable, and it will have little or no foreshadowing beforehand.

So, obviously I know that Agent Smith is defeated as he attempts to spread to Neo, which in turn causes him to unexpectedly interface with none other than Deus Ex Machina who proceeds toanalyze and destroy his code.

However, I'm curious about the course of the fight itself. As far as I understand it, the ability to influence the Matrix ( dodge bullets, make power attacks, etc. ) is measured by concentration and maybe even depersonalization, which is boiled down to 'belief' - belief that nothing around you is real to such an extent that your brain 'breaks free' of the wired connection's artifical software constraints and starts breaching, or literally 'hacking' into the limits placed on humans by the machines.

Secondly, expanding upon the neurological theme here, I'm pretty sure that cognitive speed ( how fast you think/your neurons are firing ) also plays a role, as I believe during the Neo fight against Morpheus, it's stated that his neuron speed/brain activity is 'off the charts' as he starts to move so fast that his moves are practically a blur, ultimately surprising Morpheus.

The reason why machines, or Agent Smith for that matter ( although he has a few other enhancements ) are basically thought to be unbeatable until the arrival of The One is because, naturally, the machines are nearly, if not for some tiny displays of human emotion/uncertainty that they evolved with, completely flawless in both of those aspects. Their senses display the Matrix in its completely raw form ( They also probably have some kind of 'sysadmin' access superiority ) and their processing power is astronomical when it comes to rapidly altering Matrix code. So it's entirely effortless for them to perform supernatural feats.

Now, in the final fight, Neo is hooked up directly through his entire nervous system and brain to Deus Ex Machina, the A.I Supercomputer which rules Machine City, who is on his side during that fight. During that fight, though Neo has already shown capabilities far above a normal human before, he is incredibly more powerful than in the past. Punching Agent Smith into the ground with a force that breaks the pavement, effortless flight, hitting Agent Smith with his own slow-mo machine level punches, and most significantly - surviving peak Agent Smith's most potent attack that carried as much rage as he could muster - both being punched with a shockwave in the air, and being slammed down into a crater.

Despite all of that, while he is physically stumbling,

He's my favorite graphic novelist. I would really like to expand my horizons as far as comics go.