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Seto Kaiba

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About Seto Kaiba

  • Birthday August 22

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    http://www.Macross2.net/m3/m3.html
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    MacrossMike

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    Male
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    Lagrange Terrace (a stable community)
  • Interests
    Anime (duh), Antique Firearms, Cryptography, Mechanical Design

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Tried two more new ones today. I was hoping for something unconventional, and Isekai Office Worker: the Other World's Books Depend on the Bean Counter seems to be set to fit that bill. Its basic premise seems to be very similar to titles like The Saint's Magic Power is Omnipotent, with a general j-fantasy alternate world that's under threat from periodic outbreaks evil miasma™️ that only the chosen isekai'd Lady Saint™️ can clean up with her magical powers. Where it differs is that it's about a random office worker who is accidentally isekai'd along with the future Lady Saint while trying to save her from being isekai'd. He's so used to Japan's toxic work ethic that, despite being told the kingdom will give him a generous stipend to live on as an apology for being isekai'd by mistake, he demands a job. So the kingdom sets him to work in its government accounting office, where he is immediately stunned by its relaxed work ethic... then finds its lax practices have been allowing all kinds of questionable accounting that he tries to crack down on just as the miasma sends the kingdom into a state of emergency. It's... unusual. I'm curious to see where it goes. The Case Book of Arne is, most unusually, apparently an adaptation of a freeware horror mystery video game made in RPG Maker and released back in 2017. Apparently it garnered enough of a following to be adapted into a manga in 2018, and now an anime. On paper, it's a supernatural detective story about a vampire who works as a Sherlock Holmes-style private detective solving crimes with supernatural origins that the conventional authorities just can't. I'm going to withhold judgement on this series until I've seen at least another episode or two, because the first episode is so badly composed that calling it a mystery or a detective story feels like Blatant Lies or at least false advertising.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Two more new ones today... You Can't Be In a Rom-Com with Your Childhood Friends! is about a first year high school student named Yonosuke who is obsessed with rom-coms where the protagonist falls in love with their childhood friend. That old and overused story trope. Of course, he is also realistic/cynical enough to understand that romance comedies are fiction and doesn't believe he could ever encounter such a circumstance in real life. Because he is IN a rom-com, he's also entertainingly wrong. Both of his female childhood friends have the hots for him and he either has suffered so much rom-com brainrot or is so uninterested that he hasn't noticed. By 1:05 into the first episode, it's pretty clear what we're in for is another one of those ecchi excuse plot harem comedies where the driving force of the plot and the only things that keep the story from ending at chapter one are the protagonist's Buddha-esque aversion to desire, his chronic inability to read even the most blatant signals imaginable, and a total failure to comprehend how abnormal his situation is despite abundant evidence. By 4:10, this series has lost me. This excuse plot is painfully thin even by the already-low standards of the genre. I'm not even going to bother finishing the episode. and deleting it from my watch history. SKIP. Wash It All Away is a slice-of-life series about an amnesiac girl named Wakana Kinme who runs a private laundry service in a quaint seaside town as she navigates daily life. This seems to be one of those titles that either has some clear creator provincialism or government sponsorship behind it, given that the first couple shots of the series are devoted to faithfully recreating real locations. Enough so that we can practically identify what street her fictional business is on. We see her pass through several Tawarahoncho landmarks like Atami station and pass through Atami Heiwa-dori shopping street on her way back to her small business, suggesting she's probably in Sakimicho, Atami, Shizuoka. It's cute, but so far there doesn't seem to be a lot to this one besides the incidental events of the slow daily life of a girl who just really likes doing laundry.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Y'know, ever since I first read Dune I always felt the setting's prohibition on AI felt a little silly and arbitrary. I'm starting to see what the Butlerians were on about. AI really is an affront to Humanity in general. I want to say that's the worst thing I've seen from Star Trek recently, but that'd be a lie. I've seen Starfleet Academy's teasers. So that's a close second. Just EUGH.🤮
  4. Seto Kaiba
    In the actually-worth-watching category, we've got the apparently VERY long-awaited anime adaptation of Hanazakari no Kimitachi e... more than twenty-one years after the original manga ended circulation, and almost 30 years after it started serialization in Hana to Yume back in 1996. Gave the first two episodes a whirl. It's definitely a high-quality adaptation with a lot of very experienced voice actors behind it. It does have a weird vibe to it, though... I think because the story was written back in the 90's it feels slightly odd and out of place even with modern animation behind it. Not bad, just... different. Still fun, still well-executed. I'm looking forward to more.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    A few more of this season's new simulcasts have dropped. The Daily Life of a Part-Time Torturer is... well, on paper it's allegedly a comedy. I say allegedly because it's not actually funny. Not even slightly. The series is set in an alternate Japan where torture and murder are not only legal, but a form of private enterprise. The protagonist Cero is a 20-something former job-hopper with more than fifty different part-time jobs under his belt who has settled comfortably into his new chosen vocation of torturer at a torture firm named Spirytus Company and is living his daily life wringing confessions out of a variety of ne'er do wells, criminals, and the like through force with his coworkers, whip-enthusiast Siu, horror author Mikke, and a man named Hugh who is simply Too Pretty to work with others. It's billed as a comedy, but nothing about it is funny unless you count the absurdity of the setting treating torture like it belongs to the same basic class of manual labor as hospitality, restaurant food prep, or construction. (To the extent that a torture hardware supply store has a loyalty card like a Japanese supermarket.) Nothing about it is funny, though, and the characters aren't engaging enough for it to pass for a slice-of-life story either. It doesn't even manage to feel inappropriate. The subject matter's transgressive as all get-out but it's so bland that it doesn't feel like it. It's just dull. I don't think I could recommend it, even as a form of torture. Kunon the Sorcerer Can See is a fantasy slice-of-life series about the son of a marquis who is born with a heredity disability called the Hero's Scar because he is a descendant of The Hero who was terribly maimed defeating The Demon Lord. In his case, he was born blind. He's terribly depressed about this because it means that he really can't do anything and requires constant care from others. Then, a faux pas on the part of his magic tutor gives him an idea... he decides to study magic in the hopes of being able to create new eyes for himself. It has an interesting premise and got off to a promising start, but it quickly becomes apparent that the story doesn't really know what to do with its own premise and it's padded like a menstruating fire hydrant. The protagonist's more of a one-trick magical pony than Harry Potter (the only spell he knows creates a ball of water) and yet he is treated as some kind of godlike magical prodigy. Somehow this very basic magic all but eliminates several aspects of his disability, and by the end of the second episode he's not only able to discern colors, he's able to read and is attending the now obligatory-in-j-fantasy School for the Nobility. Past about the halfway point in the first episode the series feels really lazy and uninspired... veering straight into "boring" territory by the first episode's end.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Remember, fold boosters are mainly for short-ranged fold navigation and the early models were exclusively short-ranged and single-use. That 4th Gen Valkyrie using a fold booster to insert itself behind enemy lines to rescue hostages or strike command ships or bases is not crossing the galaxy. It's coming from a ship or base that's at most 20 light years away. An impossibly vast distance for sublight flight, but practically just across the street in fold navigation terms. The sort of trip that fold-capable ships can make almost instantly. That Valkyrie isn't a one-man-army. There's a carrier, a taskforce, or potentially even a whole fleet hanging around just outside the area of operations waiting for a signal or an agreed time to move in and capitalize on the confusion of a now leaderless enemy or suppress the hostage-takers now that they no longer have hostages to hide behind. "Escape" may be as simple as linking up with a carrier that just popped out of fold space a few dozen kilometers away, or SSTOing back to orbital space where a pack of heavily armed warships just arrived. (For a really good example, consider Operation Stargazer, where Max used a fold booster to jump directly from orbit to a planet's surface instead of across interstellar distances, making a surprise entry to launch a reaction weapon with the intention of escaping back to his ship in orbit.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    The ones in Macross Plus, Macross 7, and Macross Dynamite 7 are broadly indicated to be the initial generation single-use type. By the time of Macross Frontier, the technology had improved to the point that modern (c.2059) fold boosters could perform multiple fold jumps and do so over longer distances. 4th Gen VFs had the concept of inserting a VF behind enemy lines using stealth and/or fold capability in order to strike enemy command centers, carry out hostage rescues, etc., as a part of a larger operation. Escaping via space fold is not mentioned. As with the 5th Gen YF-24 Evolution, use of a fold booster in direct combat is described as a way to maximize the element of surprise, and the VF's extraction from the combat area afterwards isn't mentioned. Presumably in such an operation, they would use stealth and their high flight performance to escape the enemy and then link up with friendly forces. Escape via space fold might be possible in later generations where reusable fold boosters exist, though leaving the booster behind would be quite risky. (There is some material to suggest mounting multiple fold boosters is possible. Macross Frontier shows this being done with the VF-171 and Master File shows the same with a VF-19.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno... the animation, and pretty much every textual description, suggests it's essentially a ballistic reentry. Macross Chronicle is, AFAIK, the only source to suggest that there was any semblance of control from the ship side beyond the unscheduled "lithobraking" maneuver at the terminal end of the descent, and it only mentions the ship slowing down not a turn. Depending on whether we're seeing the light and dust from impact or simply from the ship's passage overhead in that scene, that radically opens the field as to where he could've been. Shin could be in Novi and this would work. Sunrise on July 17th 1999 in Novi was ~06:10 and the Macross may well have been overhead around sunrise given the -13hr time zone adjustment (19:00 JST would've been 6:00 local time). Also possible. Though given that his home seems to have been unaffected by the passage of the ASS-1 overhead, and the ship is said to have cut a swath across Asia and Europe, caused volcanic eruptions in Canada, the western US would seem like the best candidate to be unaffected given a roughly ballistic flightpath. The severity of the impact would've likely caused at least some destruction in Japan, given that it was about 1,000km away and this was 13 times as energetic as Tsar Bomba, which blew out windows 780km away. Something to mathematically model later.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    The Jack-of-all-Trades Who Was Kicked Out of The Hero's Party ~ A Swordsman Who Worked as an Enchanter Due to Party Circumstances Rises to Become a Master of All Trades F*** me that's a title. I can see why the localization team wanted to abbreviate it to Jack of All Trades, Party of None. This is one for the "Another Bloody" file. As in, "it's another bloody isekai adjacent j-fantasy series about an adventurer who is kicked from the Hero's party of total arseholes for being Not Good Enough and discovers he's actually amazing". Like, this is almost exactly the same series as The Banished Court Magician Aims to Become The Strongest just with a slightly different art style. This ground is so thoroughly well-trodden at this point it's legally an eight-line interstate highway. Definitely seems like it's going to be a skip-worthy snoozefest with nothing to show for itself.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    True! Yes, though the described course suggests that it continued going in more or less a straight line from Burma northwest for almost one complete orbit before hitting the island. Possibly, but given that the one thing Shin really says about it is the "one sun in the east, the other in the west" I feel like we're meant to interpret that as Shin lived somewhere east of where the ship came down. Guam is to the south and Okinawa is to the west. That and I just cannot shake the feeling that Shin being from California would be Kawamori's way of working his love of SoCal into Macross Zero. It's on prominent display in Plus, 7, and Frontier, so it'd be weird if he didn't get at least a nod to it in Zero. Zero particularly being his only chance to use ACTUAL SoCal instead of spacefuture replica SoCal.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    New season is go! Winter 2026's first few titles are dropping on streaming now. I have no use for My Hero Academia or its spinoff, so I chose to start my Winter 2026 with MF Ghost Season 3. Picks up right where the previous season left off, mid-race with an injured Kanata slowly losing ground due to an arm injury preventing him from shifting into 2nd gear. Not a hugely remarkable first episode, but clearly building to a big comeback. Honestly, the one thing that really stood out... My second pick for the season is Tamon's B-Side, a romcom about a typical-ish teenage girl who loves her favorite idol singer and works a part time job as a housekeeper. When a coworker falls ill, she takes over their shifts and finds she is now the housekeeper to her favorite idol singer and is stunned by the gap between his perfect stage-managed public image and the deeply insecure, chronically depressed mess he actually is.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    The one good look we get at Shin's childhood home at the start of Macross Zero's first episode shows a house on top of a high hillside overlooking a large city directly on the coast. Given that he says he saw the ship fall to the west and we know from his bio that he's second-gen Japanese-American, we can assume that that's a western coastline. To me, that makes California seem like the most likely suspect. Honalulu faces out onto the ocean, but it faces south and east not west the way it would have to for the scene to be possible there. Not many Americans living in the Bonin islands, but Chichijima has another problem. If he saw the ship fall from there, the second sun he saw would be in the south not the west. IIRC, at the start of "Global Report", General Global attributes the failure to the booby trap compromising control of those devices.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle's History Sheet about the fall of the ASS-1 mentions, in passing, that the ship decelerated far more than should be possible after entering that atmosphere, which it presents as thought to have been an intentional braking maneuver. The ship was going over 10km/s when it entered the atmosphere and by the time it crashed it had slowed to only about 1km/s. Of course, something so massive hitting at "only" 1 kilometer per second still made a hell of a dent. Macross Chronicle asserts that the impact force was equivalent to a 670 megaton explosion, creating a crater 3km in diameter, with ejecta from the impact reaching altitudes over 10km and devastating an area of 100 square kilometers with the shockwave. It also notes that the impact reduced the size of the island somewhat to 16.9 square kilometers. (One of the more unusual points Macross Chronicle introduces is that the island was inhabited. A 16-man US military communications and satellite monitoring output on the island understandably did not survive the impact.) Yeah, a 670 megaton impact is likely to shake the Earth a bit different to a usual bay area earthquake. A bit, yeah... perhaps somewhat justified in the sense that the Earth Unification Government basically threw the entire global tech industry and planetary GDP at the problem for ten years, heedless of the economic consequences, and even then ended up taking a bunch of shortcuts by reverse-engineering the materials and applying that know-how to existing theoretical and practical tech instead of trying to perfectly reproduce the alien technology. (It may also have helped somewhat that what fell out of the sky was the Protoculture's lowest-bidder, ruggedized, keep-it-simple-stupid military hardware and not a more refined or advanced ship they might've used themselves. Figuring out how Gravity and Inertia Control works was basically the key to a lot of the rest too, so once they had that understanding the rest probably fell into place a lot faster.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Not specifically, no. South Ataria is a fictional island in the Ogasawara islands (the Bonin islands to westerners) south of Japan. The coordinates we're given put it about 90km south and slightly to the west of Iwo Jima and 54km to the west of South Iwo Jima. About 1,300km almost due south of Tokyo. It's not sourced on the Wiki because the Wiki got it from Egan's old site, but remarks similar to that are in a couple older artbooks. The course described there suggests the Alien Starship 1 was traveling northwest at a high rate of speed and must have completed almost an entire orbit before crashing given that it ends up east of where it entered the atmosphere. (Considering the course, it's likely New Zealand, New South Wales, Queensland, the Solomons, and New Guinea didn't have a great time either.) Macross Chronicle also supports the idea that the ship was moving generally northwest on reentry and crashed into South Ataria that way. Shin is a second-generation Japanese-American, so presumably he was living somewhere in the US when the ASS-1 came down. Practically all of the US cities and towns with large Japanese-American populations are in Hawaii or on the west coast, so in all likelihood Shin hails from either Hawaii, California, or Washington. (There's an outside chance he's from New Jersey, Michigan, New York, or Ohio, all of which are home to small but significant Japanese-American communities, but given Shin's not f***ing melting in the South Pacific weather on Mayan it seems unlikely he's a New Englander or a Midwesterner. I'll forego the almost obligatory joke about Ohio.) Kawamori seems to really like San Francisco, given how much time was taken recreating parts of it in Macross Frontier, so I'm guessing Shin's family are probably from the bay area.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    An uninspired attempt to coin a derisive nickname for isekai anime. It doesn't make sense if you think about it even a little, because TRON's "Grid" is just the software inside of a computer not an alternate reality and doesn't fit the definition of isekai even a little. Incidentally, I did a little more checking after supper. Of Crunchyroll's current Top 10 most-streamed titles on their service, the 5th and 9th places are isekai titles (Campfire Cooking in Another World and Tales of Wedding Rings). The top four spots on the top 10 are all shounen, being held by My Hero Academia, Gachiakuta, One Piece, and Tougen Anki. Top-selling manga is also predominantly shounen too... with My Hero Academia, One Piece, Jujutsu Kaisen, and Dan Da Dan topping charts in the west. Netflix's viewership metrics have shounen anime absolutely dominating their service's anime offerings too. The top-ranked anime title for I think three years running now on Netflix is Naruto. One Piece, Seven Deadly Sins, and Demon Slayer are all on that list too. Not a single isekai title broke the top 10 on Netflix. I'm not able to find any data for Hulu, but given the pattern established thus far... well... their website has a list of 22 strongly recommended anime titles based on their platform's streaming performance data. 0 are isekai. The titles that DID make the cut include Bleach, My Hero Academia, Naruto, Dragon Ball Z Kai, Jujutsu Kaisen, Ishura, Mob Psycho 100, Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, and Demon Slayer. That's 9 of 22.
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