Seto Kaiba

Yeah, I figured... Citadel was "decent but overpriced" even when I was in college, longer ago than I care to admit these days. 🤣 Ooo! Thank you! I'll toss a few of these into my next Amazon order. 👍 Yeah, mostly HG-tier stuff. Well, I saw some of those HG Macross kits and Polar Lights snap-fit Star Trek kits in my FLHS and thought "I could do one or two as a decoration for my new office since they're not terribly difficult"... and, well, the kits were on sale and that slope was a bit slippery. So right now I'm looking to tackle, in no particular order, a Bandai HG 1/100 YF-29 Max, a VF-22S Milia, a VF-19 Kai, and a Polar Lights 1/1000 Enterprise refit.

Episodes 3 and 4 of Paul Blart: Maul Cop Maul: Shadow Lord is out... and a series about a creepy old man trying to groom an impressionable young girl into doing things she doesn't want to do still feels a bit tone deaf in the present day. 😅🤣 Seems a safe bet that Darth Maul is in the Palpatine Files if you know what I mean. I have to admit, I am irrationally amused by Maul's right-hand Mando having a helmet tailored to her oddly shaped head that manages to look like the end result of the helmet itself somehow sucking a lemon. It is, in its own way, also kind of inherently funny that known Sith apprentice Maul - whose entire appearance and manner is positively demonic and fairly screams "I am not just a bad man but the worst possible man" - keeps trying to play the "don't judge a book by its cover" card like he doesn't have an extremely well-documented history as a murderously violent psychopath and member of the Puppy-Kicking Baby Eater's Society for General Wrongdoing. Richard Ayoade's definitely been cast to type... his character is just Maurice Moss from The IT Crowd but as a droid. I expected we'd be seeing a big step down in quality after Andor S2 ended, since a series like that is a once-in-a-generation sort of affair. I did not expect the step down would be THIS immense, though. Quality-wise, this is like stepping off the moon and plummeting straight to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The dialog is never better than mediocre and frequently veers into cringeworthy fanfic-tier garbage. The premise itself is basically just a fanfic written to glaze a worthless character that has already been killed off for real in another story. The animation is ok, but is packed to bursting wtih homages to other titles to the point that the whole thing feels vaguely unoriginal. They even homage the killing of Snoke in episode 4, a reference so desperate it's a sign how deeply and desperately this series is digging. This series is so creatively bankrupt I am actually finding myself wishing I were watching Starfleet Academy instead. Also, Maul's lightsaber talks now... according to the subtitles anyway. Y'know what... the more I watch the more I think Dave Filoni has forgotten what Dave Filoni et. al. wrote for Maul's story arc in The Clone Wars. And let's hand it to cop guy, who thinks he's going to take what he can clearly tell is some Jedi-adjacent spree killer crime lord down his a handful of lightly armed droids... like the galaxy didn't have a front row seat to that sh*t consistently not working just a few years prior.

Does anyone have recommendations of a good toolkit for someone who's getting back into model building? I've not done any kit-building in like 20 years and was recently gifted a small pile of the Bandai HG 1/100s but I can't for the life of me find any of the Citadel-branded stuff I used for WH40K back in the day.

Started another new one over lunch today... Kusanoki's Garden of Gods. It's an unusual little slice-of-life story about a young man named Minato whose family send him to be the caretaker of a deceased relative's country retirement house that has been sitting abandoned for a few years. A series of odd happenings during his move-in and subsequent deep cleaning of the property lead him to the unexpected discovery that he has incredibly strong spiritual powers as an exorcist and has been unintentionally exorcising evil spirits everywhere he goes. He finds himself with an unexpected houseguest, the Shinto god of the nearby mountain seeking a respite from evil spirits in the back garden Minato has unwittingly made into sacred ground. After the first episode, I'm intrigued to see where this one goes.

Now there's a transition... from The Drops of God's over-the-top dramatization of the thoroughly fraudulent field of wine criticism to Botan Kamiina Fully Blossoms When Drunk, an anime about a college freshman who has her first taste of alcohol after catching her senpai getting day drinking and immediately makes it her sole focus in life. I am starting to get the feeling that a lot of these shows and some past ones like Solo Camping for Two are getting made for the same reason that western newspapers will not STFU about whatever industry Millennial spending habits are allegedly killing this week. Botan Kamiina definitely feels like a poorly disguised liquor industry ad campaign. The protagonist absolutely falls in love with alcohol at the first taste of her senpai's highball and from that point on every social interaction she has with her fellow residents at the women-only boarding house she lives in revolves around alcohol. Need to talk to her senpai? Invite her over for tea and then have wine instead. Watch a movie? They totally forget to even put the disc in the player and just demolish a bottle of sake instead. Naturally, every girl who lives there drinks like a fish and is depicted as very pretty and very two-drink bisexual-y. They're not even trying to pretend it's edutainment and it makes no effort to actually talk about any aspect of the liquor itself... it's about this level of unsubtle:

The new season of Wistoria: Wand and Sword has started... and it doesn't seem to have improved any in the interim. The new season starts with what the previous season opener promised us was basically inevitable. Magic-less milksop protagonist Will Serfort's time as a student at Legally Distinct Hogwarts is seemingly brought to a long overdue end when he is informed of his failure to graduate at the end of his sixth year. Not being able to use magic meant that he's failed most of his practical lessons and was just barely squeaking by with credits from theory courses and extracurriculars. Legally Distinct Professor Snape serves him up a final exam that requires practical experience and sinks his chances of just barely clearing the requirement to graduate. We're somehow supposed to feel bad for him, despite this being as predictable as someone tone deaf flunking out of Juilliard.

One more before the weekend ends... The Drops of God, an anime about wine snobs. The premise is that the Gol D. Roger of wine snobs passes away and leaves his entire treasure estate including his fabulously valuable wine collection to whomever can guess the brand and year of the twelve great wines he has hand-picked for the occasion. This leads to a competition between the man's biological son and a young wine critic he adopted. This basically sounds like it's going to be the potato chip scene from Death Note but stretched to an entire season and with wines. It's... it certainly exists. This is one of those worlds where one very specific niche interest is treated like worldwide Serious Business upon which the entire economy hinges. The passing of this wine snob father is treated like the death of a Prime Minister and makes breaking headline news, business deals worth hundreds of millions of yen turn on a single pour of a bottle, etc. It's not as insane as Birdie Wing where the entire world revolved around golf for some reason (with a golf mafia and everything) but it's getting there with these Shokugeki no Soma-esque reactions to tasting wine.

Honestly, at this point Max has to be to the New Unification Space Forces what Chesty Puller is to the USMC. A living legend whose service record and reputation sound like a collection of Chuck Norris memes, but with actual fact behind them. As of Absolute Live!!!!!!, Max is a retired flag officer a full decade on the wrong side of mandatory retirement age and yet he's still the single most dangerous thing on a battlefield full of next-generation unmanned Valkyries and 6th Generation Valkyrie prototypes. He canonically no-diffs the entirety of Delta Flight with their own moves in training exercises despite being four times their age before lecturing them on how much they suck and now we're officially being told he is SO GOOD that putting him behind the stick of the lower performance trial production YF-29 is enough to put it on the same level as the OP original YF-29 Alto flew. Clearly the reason his daughter Therese fought in the Second Unification Wars instead of Max is that Max violates strategic arms limitation treaties.

The Food Diary of Miss Maid is 100% a series I will be dropping. There's just nothing there... it's food porn for normal, everyday foods in Japan and the choices are so unremarkable you have to wonder who the series is even for since anyone living there would probably find this obnoxious. Killed Again, Mr. Detective? is... well... let's just say the first five or so minutes can best be described with the words "the author's barely disguised fetish". The rest is what I can only describe as a terribly dull, incredibly poorly-written attempt at a detective story. I say "attempt at a detective story" because the story seems much more interested in fanservice or pratfalls and even the protagonist doesn't seem at all invested in the idea that he's meant to be a private detective (and seems far too dimwitted to actually be one). He is, in fact, so desperately bad at his job that he is promptly stabbed to death at the end of the first episode and the only thing stopping the series from ending there is that he apparently has the ability of resurrective immortality for no adequately explored reason. There doesn't seem to be any real connection between the events of the story either. No deductions or real investigations, just blindly stumbling around doing unrelated things until the culprit tries to kill him a second time.

For the second time in two seasons, I've started a romcom that didn't advertise upfront that it was BL. Go For It, Nakamura-kun! is a (well-disguised) BL romcom about a vaguely antisocial guy who develops a love-at-first-sight massive crush on one of his classmates right at the start of high school and his internal struggle to actually make a move. It's shockingly cute.

Getting to grips with the Spring '26 simulcast season... and we've already had a scandal! Wit Studio got publicly called out for using generative AI in the opening of Ascendance of a Bookworm: Adopted Daughter of an Archduke and are begging forgiveness while making promises to remove/replace the generative AI animation with traditional animation ASAP. Probably thought they were doing something clever, but got clocked on their AI slop with just one episode out the door. Good for fans sticking it to Wit for slop-ifying a great series. Welcome to Demon School, Iruma-kun! is back with a fourth season and all I can say is "Why?". The part of the original manga they're adapting is borderline filler. Two episodes in and all they've really done is chase a literally invisible man around the school. An Observation Log of My Fiancee Who Calls Herself a Villainess is certainly shaping up to be amusing, if nothing else. Standard otome formula with the twist being that the main character is the main capture target not the reincarnatee, and he's simply too amused by the reincarnated-as-a-villainess girl's antics to put a stop to any of it. Always a Catch! has spun its own little twist on the same genre, and it's not as fun but still at least watchable.

Did a more detailed trawl through the new Encyclopedia MACROSS: VALKYRIE and DESTROID today... Lot of nice art, but some weird omissions and additions, and a few tiny snippets of lore hidden in the captions. This is the second book to copy the VF-31AX specs from Master File and the first to do so for the Sv-303. It's also the first book to directly reference Master File's take on the low rate/trial production YF-29s floating around. Its coverage of Max's YF-29 from Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! has a note that seems to be based on Master File's section on the YF-29: Master File had previously posited that the various YF-29s we see in the hands of certain ace pilots in titles like Macross 30 and Absolute Live!!!!!! are considered a different variant from the original YF-29 flown by Alto Saotome on account of being both more technologically complete and having overall lower performance because fold quartz of the required size and purity is so vanishingly rare as to be de facto unobtainable. It presented Alto's YF-29 as "YF-29A", all others as a new spec "YF-29B", and also introduced an original one of its own "YF-29C" which attempted to substitute ultra-pure fold carbon but only achieved about 1% of the fold wave system output. This book doesn't mention the YF-29C, but it does support the idea that the various YF-29s produced after Alto's were inferior aircraft by comparison... while also acknowledging that Max is so hilariously broken as a character that he basically makes up the difference.

Now that I've got a bit more free time, a proper review of Encyclopedia MACROSS: VALKRIE and DESTROID. That the title is misspelled is not a great look for SoftBank Creative.😅 495 pages, all told, inclusive of the index and title page. 3 pages for the index and title page 67 pages for Super Dimension Fortress Macross 21 pages for Macross: Do You Remember Love? 1 page for Macross: Flash Back 2012 9 pages for "Others" incl. the Macross M3 VF-4G, the SDFM VF-X4, VF-X-11, VA-X-3 V-BR-2, VF-X-7, VF-X-3 Star Crusader, LDR-04 Maverick, and Stampede Valkyrie 42 pages of Macross II: Lovers Again 24 pages of Macross Plus 66 pages of Macross 7 20 pages of Macross Dynamite 7 24 pages of "Others" incl. VA-3M, VF-3000A, VF-5000B, VF-9A, VF-X-10, VF-14, VB-6, Gjagravan Va (officially a destroid now I guess!), VF-19A Ravens, Phayos Valkyrie 38 pages of Macross Zero 58 pages of Macross Frontier 4 pages of Macross Frontier: the False Songstress 17 pages of Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye 13 pages of Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy 4 pages of "Others" incl. VF-19ACTIVE Nothung, VF-11B Nothung II, VF-19EF Caliburn, VF-11D ThunderFocus, VF-1X++, VF-0 Kai "Zeak", SV-52 Oryol, YF-27-5 Shahar F 34 pages of Macross Delta 8 pages of Macross Delta: Passionate Walkure 42 pages of Macross Delta: Absolute Live!!!!!! All the usual suspects are covered, with the noteworthy oddities included covering: The cannon fodder VF-1J briefly seen in the original series VF-XS Valkyrie II, a concept art design not used in the Macross II OVA QVF-11A Thunderbolt target drone from Macross Plus VF-19 Kai "filming version" as VF-1 Super Valkyrie VF-19P "covered in galaxy whale red pollen" Multiple VT-1C Ostrich color schemes! 2059-era fold booster (normal type) VF-24 Evolution! YF-25 Prophecy VF-25Fm Family Mart promotional model 30th Anniversary DLC VF-1S "Minmay and Mylene" 30th Anniversary DLC VF-25 "Ranka and Sheryl" MDP-001W Cygnus multidrone plate Sv-262Ba Draken III Royal Guard Sv-154 Svard VF-22 Sturmvogel II Wright Immelmann Type Sv-262Hs Draken III Red Knight Noteworthy designs omitted/not covered: VEFR-1 "Funny Chinese" VF-1SOL-S VF-19F Excalibur test flight colors VF-3000B Bomber Valkyrie Macross 7 PLUS Spiritia Dreaming VF-14 The Macross Galaxy messenger craft VF-25A Messiah mass production type VF-27B Lucifer mass production type VF-9E Cutlass Nicolas Berthier "Vanquish Champion" type VF-22HG Schwalbe Zwei VA-110 Neo Glaug bis Queadluun-Alma Sv-303 Parasite Fighter VF-31AX Super Ghost Parasite Fighter This book has several awkward typos like spelling Cheyenne" as "Sheyenne" or Octos as "Oxtos". Weirdly, they DID fix the spelling of "Shahar" for the YF-27-5 (something that drove me UP A WALL many years ago) but did not correct "Zeak" to "Zeke" like it should be. The most glaring of these typos is that "Valkyrie" is misspelled "Valkrie" on the cover and spine of the book. If the class turns to page 394 they will be greeted by Isamu's VF-19EF/A Excalibur ADVANCE "Isamu Special" from Sayonara no Tsubasa. This book is, overall, a very good "10,000 foot view" of the designs and has very little information besides for their basic stat blocks and little in the way of marked-up line art from animation model sheets. Noteworthy lore additions and confirmations in this book are few, but there are some. The thrust of the VF-1's liquid fueled rockets from Master File is adopted into their stat block officially here. The Master File stats for the VF-31AX Kairos Plus and Sv-303 Vivasvat are also copied here, making this book the second to do so for the VF-31AX and first to do so for the Sv-303. This is also the first book, AFAIK, to reiterate Master File's stance on the production YF-29s having lower performance than the original prototype due to using lower purity fold quartz.

They've certainly been taking their sweet time, haven't they? I wonder if they're just struggling because they can't just change the proper nouns in an older series and ship it again like they do with Gundam and Code Geass.

The problem with GQuuuuuuX's mechanical designs wasn't that they were "skinny". GQuuuuuuX's Mobile Suit designs suffer from the same bad design philosophy as Michael Bay's Transformers. The designs are so visually busy with so much extraneous surface detail and so few (if any) clean lines that they look jumbled and messy just standing still and become a blurry and indistinct mess when in motion. All that surface detail muddies their silhouettes and prevents them from really establishing a distinctive and memorable profile. I don't doubt it probably does look better as a static 3D object you can view from many angles, but on a 2D screen with only the illusion of depth it just looks messy. Of course, all that surface detail is mainly there to obscure the fact that all the hacks at Khara did was slap a Gundam head on an Eva unit and call it a day the same way they tried to pass strapping the skeleton of Rebuild's plot to a UC Elseworlds idea and call it "original". 🤣 (Honestly, the most painful part of GQuuuuuuX isn't that the designs are ugly or that the story is badly composed, it's that there's clearly another MUCH MORE INTERESTING story going on in the background that the writers thought wasn't worth showing.)