Seto Kaiba

So, the newest episode of Starfeet Academy is "The Life of the Stars". Once again, we witness that this incarnation of Starfleet Academy seems to be run in the most incompetent manner possible. What is the point of a bridge simulation where the person serving as captain is not only not leading, but seemingly actively hindering and belittling the students? It can, at least, be said with confidence that the writers room firmly understands the character from Discovery. That is to say, she only opens her mouth to say the stupidest thing possible at any given moment. There's a very good reason that the one and only competent officer to serve on the Discovery in the 32nd century took an instant dislike to her, told her on no uncertain terms to STFU, and ultimately drove her off the ship entirely. Even Reno seems to find her quietly disgusting, comparing her presence to a toothache and describing her manner as "nightmarish". Is it just me, or is this show allergic to depicting competence in even the smallest degree? I actually admire that Darem has the brass ones to point out that not only do none of the cadets really give a damn about Tilly's class. I can sympathize. I feel myself tuning the episode out every time Mary Wiseman opens her mouth. Line of the episode: It's such a weird thing to say, given that she is literally a mind reader. Her entire species are mind readers. It's their entire goddamn hat. Not only that, she's such a powerful mind reader she can accidentally give people brain damage. This scene is so badly written it's giving the audience brain damage. Honestly, I'm with the Kasqians on this one... Oh. My. God. NICE JOB BREAKING IT, B'ELANNA! So one cheap fix handled montage-style we've killed and unkilled a main cast member for shiggles because it's literally faster than giving them actual character development. Honestly tho... this is the second episode where we've had an implicit character assassination for a 90's-era Trek character. First it was turning Ben Sisko into an absent father, now B'Elanna's sadism is giving people centuries of PTSD.

I doubt it... because I really do not believe that Paramount sincerely wants to acquire Warner Bros. It's more than they can reasonably afford to spend and they have to know that it's only going to invite unwanted scrutiny from regulators and antitrust enforcement. It seems unlikely that they would be able to find a party willing to finance the deal and the debt it would require taking on would almost certainly ruin them. If it does make it in front of the courts, it'll likely be Warner Bros shareholders suing Paramount to compel them to close the deal like what happened to the muskrat's unserious offer to buy Twitter.

Kind of suspect this will ultimately fall apart when the question of financing is finally raised for real. After all, Paramount Skydance is still dealing with the debt, cashflow, and valuation problems from the merger of Viacom and CBS into Paramount seven years ago. The merger with Skydance and National Amusements was a fiscal desperation move that only made their problems worse as the organization got even more bloated. I'm guessing Paramount intends to back out after making a show of trying and failing to get financing, content in having denied Warner Bros to Netflix. Basically what the muskrat tried to do with Twitter before he got sued and the courts forced him to close the deal.

Well, after blowing most of the show's budget on the ridiculously elaborate atrium set to the detriment of literally everything else they're naturally gonna shoot the money... Eh... that's such a common trope across Star Trek that it's hardly grounds to complain. Star Trek loves "A form you are comfortable with" for alien-created illusions, hallucinations, visions, and what have you. The Prophets in DS9 used it almost exclusively, only ever creating one original locale in the entire series. TBH, I've been expecting audiences to turn on AI characters for a while now thanks to the public's general overestimation of what modern AI technology is and the widespread (and entirely correct) view that that technology really only produces mindless derivative slop with no redeeming value. A bit unfair to characters like Data or the Doctor, IMO, who are self-aware artificial general intelligences rather than mindless virtual assistants like the computer voice interface... but still expected given the present climate. (In "The Ensigns of Command", Data seems to regard his own artistic experiments as AI slop due to believing he was not capable of originality... even advising Picard to see a different violinist's performance for essentially that reason.)

Around the 2/3 mark on the current season, not a lot of the shows I've tried have had much to show for themselves. I'm particularly frustrated by The Casebook of Arne because, despite its pretensions to being a detective story, it's so badly composed that calling it a detective story feels like a slight against actual detective stories. (Esp. since the answer to each mystery is usually whatever the most obvious supernatural monster is given the circumstances. It basically obeys none of Knox's Ten Commandments for mystery writing so every deduction and every conclusion feels like an arse pull AND baby's first mystery at alternating times. A lot of the suspected isekai and adjacent slop turned out to just be actual isekai and adjacent slop. Jack-of-all-Trades, Party of None is your usual overpowered protagonist affair. A Gentle Noble's Vacation Recommendation is almost the embodiment of tedium. Isekai Office Worker started out interesting but after a few episodes it's basically just the same joke on his lover's overprotectiveness over and over. The Villainess is Adored by the Prince of the Neighboring Kingdom is an otome series with none of the usual parody of subversion, so it's not funny or interesting it's just the adventures of a blatant Mary Sue. I've had a bit more fun with romcoms like Tamon's B-Side, which remains both a romcom and a frank examination of how phenomenally toxic and fake the idol industry is.

Well, in that case you may like Macross II: Lovers Again because it is really just more of that. In terms of themes, tone, and content it's easily the sequel closest to the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross: Do You Remember Love? movie. It's a very "safe" sequel that takes relatively few risks and doesn't do much to change up the established formula. It's very like a Gundam sequel in that regard. That lack of innovation is one of the main criticisms Macross fans level at the OVA. The setting hasn't really changed substantially despite 80 years of in-universe time passing. The mechanical designs are, in large part, 90's updated versions of the original designs instead of anything really new or radically different. Well, like I mentioned above it's a very "safe" sequel that's not really taking many risks with its story. It still has the same themes about idols and song as a form of communication, but mixed in with a plot heavily inspired by Roman Holiday and some new themes about nationalism, xenophobia, and journalistic integrity. The one area where it really diverges from the established formula is that its protagonist is a civilian journalist rather than a soldier, which lets the story go in some new directions. I think most fans would agree that it's merely "pretty good" where most other Macross titles are usually "great". Partly because 6 OVA episodes isn't really enough time to fully develop every character, so the love triangle can feel a bit one-sided. It is the title that hews most closely to the original form of the Macross formula, so if that's what you're after you'll probably enjoy it.

I guess now that Gainax is no more, Anno and Khara have arrived at the realization they have to actually do work. 😅 This May is Khara's 20th anniversary and their filmography's so thin it makes you wonder what they've been doing all that time. This new Evangelion series is only their second actual TV series project in that entire time. Their total non-Evangelion animation output in 20 years amounts to one movie (Mary and the Witch's Flower), 12 TV episodes (GQuuuuuuX), two 45 minute specials (The Dragon Dentist), a 20 minute video game promo (Gravity Rush), and about three-dozen shorts with ~6 minute average runtime.

Sitting down to watch this week's new episode... Ko'Zeine. Honestly, the episode title sounds like a sleep aid. (Not even being sarcastic there, and I work for a company where like 2/3 of the staff have made the joke that our company name ALSO sounds like a medication.) So apparently this one's premise is that the students go home to see family during what we're not going to call Spring Break but is definitely Spring Break? I guess we can't show the cadets going to Cancun (or Risa?) for Spring Break because it would be weird and out-of-place for them to be horny on main like they've been for the last six episodes right after that disastrous training exercise that got so many people killed. Of course, it also bears recognizing that Nahla Ake has been Chancellor of Starfleet Academy's Earth campus for a single semester and she's done such a rubbish job of it that there's now a death toll directly attributable to her irresponsible conduct. Honestly, the acknowledgement that the events of the previous episode were capital T "Traumatic" for the cadets and that they're still processing it even with the help of therapy is a rare thing for Star Trek and shows the writers are thinking. "You've got four pairs of boots in here! You don't even wear shoes!" - my candidate for line of the episode. "SUNSET MOON" is certainly a choice of caption. It makes no sense, even as a placename. "The Khionian Realm" isn't much more helpful. It's another planet subjected to the Piss Filter, because that's how you know you're outdoors... the sky looks like you're viewing it through a yard of cheap pilsner. The fan phrase "Dadmiral" has now graduated to an official part of the Star Trek lexicon after being used to refer to Admirals Paris and Mariner. Maybe the reason Darem's so worried is because all the decor on this moon seems to be shaped like a buttplug. The director's foot fetish is back. This time it's Reno's feet being jammed into the camera. Seriously. I am SO close to calling an exorcist to remove the vengeful spirit of Quentin Tarantino from the studio. Honestly, not a bad episode at all. This series seems to do character writing much better than it does anything to do with space adventure. Another licensed song over the credits this time... "We watch the stars" by Fink. Pretty much, yeah. Starfleet Academy's main problem is that the writing is horribly uneven. When the series wants to do character-focused drama, they actually do a pretty passable job at it. Some of the episodes (e.g. Kraag's focus episode) are almost worthy of the title of Star Trek and could be made quite good with only a few tweaks. But both times the series has tried to do Space Adventure in a vein similar to past Star Trek titles, the bottom has fallen out quality-wise and they've served up some Discovery-tier idiot plots. A secondary problem is that the show's writers want to do humor, but the kind of humor they want to do doesn't seem to be something they know how to integrate into the story organically. So the attempts at humor are very forced and unnatural and you can practically see the writer's wild-eyed desperation and unspoken plea of "Please laugh". Colbert's involvement is purely "humorous" in the sense that he seems to exist in the story purely to serve up "funny" non-sequiturs that aren't actually funny in-context or out. Many of the non-sequiturs involving one particular science officer's badly-behaved pet. (Why this needs to be announced over the tannoy instead of being called in to that officer directly is anyone's guess.)

Holodeck malfunctions, at least, don't require the crew to go and waste time making expensive, idiotic, and entirely unnecessary concessions to a bloodthirsty space pirate to resolve. When the safeties do go out, the program still doesn't go off the rails. The only hazards that exist are those that were already native to the program and simply being NERF'd by the holodeck safeties. Simulating the Miyazaki salvage operation would not have put the cadets in danger of being violently murdered by space pirates unless someone had deliberately programmed in a group of murderously violent space pirates. Otherwise, the only safety risks might be asphyxiating in the event of a hull breach or injury in the event that they had one of Star Trek's trademark exploding consoles. (If you didn't want the students to know they were in a simulation, all you'd need to do is beam them into the simulator from the ship.) "Come, Let's Away" was the story of a completely preventable disaster that resulted in the deaths of a cadet, an Academy instructor, and an unknown but implicitly large number of other Starfleet personnel aboard the USS Sargasso and Starbase J19-Alpha because the Academy chancellors decided to do this training exercise for their first year cadets in the most irresponsible and unsafe manner imaginable. Not only in uncontrolled conditions aboard a derelict ship, but in unsecured contested space no less.

There are two right on the front page... one of which is someone else asking basically the same question.😅 Well, without knowing you it's kind of hard to answer an open-ended question like that. Personally, I would say that Macross II: Lovers Again is just as worthy of your time as any other Macross title. It was kind of the odd man among Macross sequels (at least prior to Delta) in that it didn't take a radically new approach to the setting. It's a fairly safe, conventional sequel that builds on what came before but takes no major risks with it. It presents a rather different view of Macross's future than the sequels that came after, built exclusively on DYRL?.

Oh yes, that's Variable Fighter VF-1 Valkyrie Vol.1 page 78. There's a blocked-off section on that page that talks about how OTM-based threaded fasteners work and how the Human engineers from OTEC were flummoxed by what the Protoculture had done with a concept as simple as threaded fasteners. Their analysis found two revolutionary concepts: The bolts/screws they studied were machined with zero fit, meaning they were machined so precisely that there were absolutely no gap of any kind between the root and thread of the screw and the socket they engage with. The surface of the bolts/screws and sockets were treated with molecule-thin layers of two different compounds that contact bond to each other via intermolecular forces and secure the bolt/screw in the socket until a certain amount of torque is applied at which point the bolt/screw turns freely (but which will re-bond cleanly once torque is no longer being applied). You've probably seen videos like the below showing off near-zero tolerance machining... but zero fit machining is even more precise than that. The molecular coating is a bit harder. In principle it's a bit like loctite, but somehow built into the screw/bolt and socket respectively and infinitely rebondable. Something like that is a bit beyond our modern technology and would definitely provide a more secure fit than anything we can currently achieve.

There's a pretty good reason given directly in the episode for why they wouldn't be able to send holograms over... the Miyazaki had no power, so the holoemitters that have lined the corridors of ships for emergency hologram use since VOY "Message in a Bottle" wouldn't be operational. (SAM presumably has something like Arnold Rimmer's light bee keeping her program going?) The idiot ball moment is more "Why was it necessary to go to contested space and put the first-year cadets in actual danger when they could have just as easily simulated this using a training ship or just a regular holodeck where they would not be in any danger of being murdered by space pirates?" We know Starfleet Academy has had simulator training since before the holodeck was even a thing... the infamous Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk infamously cheated was one.

... ... ... sh*t, that's a really good point. Why wasn't this training exercise carried out on a holodeck?

A little bit of Google-fu suggests that The Mandalorian's third season, Ahsoka, and Skeleton Crew all happened roughly concurrently in 9 ABY. They're probably still trapped in that other galaxy.

Maybe it's something like Discovery did with the Breen, where the Human-like face is their original/normal one and their more exotic and alien-looking appearance is something they regard as special or private or something they only adopt situationally.