Seto Kaiba

No, I'm not overthinking it. I just explained why that real world term they obviously did not bother to look up before using it in the story is wrong. 😉 Then I did a little bit of theorizing about what narrative purpose this never-before-seen-or-mentioned second Starfleet service academy is meant to serve. Back before the Kurtzman years, Star Trek used to have a fairly robust research team whose job it was to prevent issues like that by checking terminology, making sure that science in the series aligned to real world science as much as possible, etc. Their absence is keenly felt in this new Trek era.

... actually, now that I think on it, there's more wrong with it than that. You see, a Service Academy and a War College are NOT two different names for the same thing and the War College in Starfleet Academy isn't a war college. 🤔 A Service Academy is an educational institution that takes in new recruits as officer cadets and provides them with the necessary education and training for future commissioning into the academy's branch of service as a junior officer. Many also provide students with a university-level education ending in a bachelor's degree. A War College is a higher educational institution that trains experienced senior officers (like Major/Lt. Commander and up)for promotion to senior command and flag officer ranks. It offers Master's degree level qualifications. The War College in Starfleet Academy is presented as a rival service academy to Starfleet Academy, training classes of officer cadets... so it's not actually a war college at all. If it were, its students would be people like Lura Thok or Commander Kelrec. Lt. Commanders and up with a decade or so of service in the officer corps being trained for further promotion to Commander, Captain, and the Admiralty. The implication behind the War College appears to be that the Federation decided to change the curriculum for future Starfleet officers after the Burn led to the Federation's collapse and forced Starfleet to switch from focusing on exploration to focusing on defense. Why they felt the need to create a whole separate institution for that is a mystery. You'd think it would be simplest to change the curriculum at the already well-established Starfleet Academy with its dozens of campuses and call it a day. The implication behind that implication seems to be that the showrunners would like us to think of Starfleet Academy as a gentle rebuke of Discovery-era Star Trek's overly militant mindset with Starfleet and Star Trek once again shifting back towards space exploration and diplomacy. I'd guess the intended arc is that the War College is going to continue to be this wrongheaded, paranoid, aggressive antagonist until it's ultimately dissolved in favor of the Starfleet Academy training program.

Okie-dokie, we got a new episode... "Vitus Reflex". Also in Academy relevant news, apparently Kurtzman is personally directing the season two finale (since this series got renewed before it ever aired in Paramount's usual "set huge piles of money on fire and hope it finds an audience" approach. The episode opens on Cadet Reymi recording a personal message for his parents after about three weeks of classes at the Starfleet Academy San Francisco campus. It seems that his parents hold him to absurdly high standards? Apparently they made him promise to be last to sleep and first to wake up? Seems like he's being set up to be Well Done Son guy. I am, I must admit, obscurely pleased that the old tradition persists... light-up props that absolutely DO NOT need to light up in order to be "futuristic". Cadet Reymi's workout earbuds and jump rope have bright green LED illumination. Kinda gross that he's cracking raw quail eggs into his post-workout creatine tho. It is bizarrely disappointing in retrospect that they didn't make the Academy's actual gymnasium look more futuristic. It looks like a completely ordinary school gymnasium right out of the 1990s. The banners are fun though... the War College sports teams are the fighting Mugatos. Apparently the Starfleet Academy mascot is the Lapling, an endangered species known for being harmless. OK, so apparently all of this is in favor of doing a sports episode centered around the rivalry between Starfleet Academy and the Federation War College? Not gonna lie that does not feel like a great starting point for an episode given how forced the whole thing feels. It's less actual "rival schools" and more Dodgeball: a True Underdog Story level banter. It's trying really hard to be funny and it's not really sticking the landing. Colbert as the computer voice Dean of Students really was not a wise decision since he seems to exist solely to dispense mildly cringeworthy dad jokes... and even the characters in-series are starting to notice. Captain Ake asks if the voiceover for what's apparently a Starfleet Academy promotional video (that looks like it was cut together in 20 minutes) is "too stupid". (Colbert's only role seems to be to interject with what's supposed to be funny dialog anytime the writers think the series has gone too long without someone saying some funny line... it's pretty insipid.) OK, real talk time for a second. Did Quentin Tarantino script this? Because the amount of time spent getting Holly Hunter's bare feet into frame is beyond the point where I can write it off as accidental. We're into "probably someone's fetish" territory. (A point I feel is supported by the fact that the conversation veers into a literal discussion of fetishes shortly thereafter.) There's a shot where the cadets are discussing the prank war in what I guess is supposed to be a botany lab, but the room has an obviously green-screened background that looks less like a botany lab and more like a video game subway tunnel from about 15 years ago? Finally Caleb says something that makes me like him. He doesn't want to engage with the tribalist attitude surrounding the prank war or team sports. Sadly, the series undermines that and some earlier respect shown to Kraag when his decision to abstain was respected by depicting the rest of the cadet class as braindead idiots who are too clumsy, too busy flirting, or so dumb they're literally attempting to eat the potting soil. I really feel badly for Kerrice Brooks because the character she's playing WILL draw a lot of criticism for being a very unkind depiction of autism that's closer to a cognitive deficit. Apparently Calica is a game-ified combat simulation "sport" that is essentially a Serious Business version of laser tag. Enough so that a direct comparison is drawn by SAM. Apparently the War College has actual working security with restricted access. Kelrec even takes a shot at Ake for the swiss cheese security at the Academy. (Thok was not kidding about Kelrec's obsession with tea bordering on a fetish.) As soon as I wrote that, the showrunner started channeling the spirit of Quentin Tarantino again with Holly Hunter needing to get her bare feet in frame. Someone on this show has a foot fetish. It's really REALLY blatant. Apparently they didn't have enough of a budget to redress the gymnasium or construct a proper set for the Calica field, so the Calica match is taking place inside the Academy's atrium which has been relit in red and blue. So Lura and Reno are a thing? Weird relationship dynamic, but whatever. It honestly makes more sense than the Dax/Worf one with the free spirit and stick in the mud. This is two extremely cantankerous women with sharp tongues. Talk about a pairing with Statler and Waldorf energy. The Unspoken Plan Guarantee isn't being invoked here, so something will go off the rails. The first actual laugh the series got out of me was how exaggeratedly casual the cadets look watching the absolute havoc unfold at the War College across the quad. Captain Ake's office has a bunch of model starships scattered about including a refit Excelsior-class (Enterprise-B-type), Oberth-class, NX-class, Defiant-class, Intrepid-class, Galaxy-class, and one or two others too small to identify properly. AND AGAIN WITH THE FEET. I need an old priest and a young priest. We need to cast the ghost of Tarantino out of this series! Creepy and intrusive foot fetish aside, this series appears to be slowly improving. Holly Hunter's character is still an eyesore and the writers are still treating the academy more like a Buffy the Vampire Slayer-era high school than the incredibly exclusive university or post-graduate education it's supposed to be, and its humor is way too contemporary to not feel immediately dated, but graduating from offensively bad to indifference-inducingly mediocre is a hell of an improvement. If they ditch the dad jokes and maybe start treating these 20-something year old cadets like adults instead of braindead children who need to be told not to eat dirt it could actually be... dare I say... good.

So this one is out now... and it seems like I was right that audiences were going to be asking for Refunds for Silent Hill. Critics are absolutely MURDERING it. It's currently rocking a 15% critic score and 30% audience score on RT. I'm gonna go see it Monday night to see how bad bad really is.

Based on what's drawn there, I feel like that head in Kawamori's concept art is meant to look something more like the VF-19P's or YF-25's.

Nope. Sam Witwer is reprising his role as the voice of Darth Maul in Maul: Shadow Lord. He previously voiced Darth Maul in Star Wars: the Clone Wars, Star Wars: Rebels, and some Lego Star Wars projects. His voice was also dubbed over Ray Park's for Maul's cameo appearance in Solo: a Star Wars Story. EDIT: I've seen some claims saying Disney might've cut ties with Park after a social media scandal a few years ago. No idea if that's true. They didn't use him for mocap in Rebels, because that series didn't use mocap.

From the design, it looks like it became the BGP-02 beam gunpod used by the YF-27. Kawamori almost never lets anything go to waste.

I'd call him more of a Villain Protagonist at this point... and he's not so much against the Empire as just Palpatine's most dedicated hater.

OK, so... the key takeaway is that this is one for the "Another Bloody" file. Specifically, another bloody Dave Filoni Star Wars: the Clone Wars spinoff series set in the early years of the Empire in which a legacy character from The Clone Wars takes a young force-sensitive under their wing to keep the Empire from getting their hands on them. The same thing we've seen before in... Rebels, The Bad Batch, and several of the Tales short anthologies. This is truly the new management starting as they mean to go on.

Yeah, the lack of rhyme or reason was what threw me... since Dune Messiah is 3/4 the length of Children of Dune but that one somehow got published as a single volume where the others were split into anywhere from 2-4 pieces. I've been able to confirm that Toru Yano wrote for SF and that he did those translations in that timeframe for the same publisher. I just gotta find if there's a center to that Venn diagram.

Those early fleets likely had some war surplus Destroids (or the knowhow to make same) that could be adapted into the early model Workroids like we see in Macross 7. Not to mention some of those early fleets had Zentradi warships as part of their escort details, meaning they also had Zentradi crew who could assist with construction in lieu of such equipment in a pinch. My assumption - apropos of nothing in particular - would be that it would probably take a small fleet like that several years to build up a large town. They'd probably need to start with bulk manufacturing prefabricated housing units like the ones we see Hikaru living in after the war in SDF Macross and basic infrastructure like water treatment plants and/or power plants. (Though that prefab housing is said to have its own independent power systems via solar panels.) From there they could gradually scale up to urban planning with buildings for businesses, high density housing, and proper infrastructure. (Honestly, feels like I ought to refer this one out to someone who studied the growth of towns during the gold rush.)

That's not a bad headcanon. I like that. Especially since the Lanthanite name is derived from the Greek λανθάνειν (Lanthanein, "to lie hidden"), referencing how they've existed hidden among Humanity on Earth for many thousands of years (allegedly). There were El-Aurians at least visiting Earth in 1893, and it wouldn't be surprising if there were some that decided to stay there permanently in years past. IMO, the main problem with how Holly Hunter's character is written is that Star Trek audiences are used to a certain level of professionalism from Starfleet officers and that's almost totally missing from her character. Pelia can kind of get away with it because she's one of the minor secondary characters on SNW and she's mainly there to be comic relief. Nahla Ake's overly casual attitude definitely feels out of place for someone who's supposed to be running the most exclusive and demanding educational facility in the Federation. Also, since Starfleet Academy is a service academy... shouldn't her title be Superintendent not Chancellor? In past series (TNG, DS9, VOY, etc.), the head of the academy had the title of Superintendent. (Such as Rear Admiral Brand in TNG.) Edit: Come to think of it, isn't her rank a little low for that job too? The superintendent of Starfleet Academy is usually an admiral. Depends on the species and culture, I suppose... the El-Aurians live practically forever and they seem pretty well-balanced throughout. There's a running theme with the two exemplar Lanthenites we have that they both seem ill-equipped to handle their incredibly long lifespans. Pelia's a little unhinged because she's constantly bored and thrill-seeking. Nahla definitely has a lot of unprocessed trauma that's leading her to blow things way out of proportion, like the whole Caleb business.

Lately, one detail I've been looking at is where the inspiration for certain bits of Macross technology came from. Ever since we discussed a while back how Studio Nue's in-house doujinshi circle SF Central Art and its monthly get-together were how Kawamori originally became acquainted with Studio Nue and ultimately what gave rise to a lot of Gundam and Macross's technical setting, I've been wondering what their inspirations were/are. One thing I've come to suspect, but need more details to confirm, is that a good part of Macross's technical setting was inspired by Toru Yano's Japanese translation of Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune that were published by Hayakawa Bunko from 1972 to 1979. Hayakawa Bunko are, not coincidentally, also the publishers of SF magazine, the same science fiction magazine that SF Central Art formed around leading to the creation of Studio Nue. The part I need/want to confirm is that Toru Yano's translation of the books was serialized in SF magazine in addition to being published in stand-alone multi-volume releases. (For some reason, Yano broke Dune into four volumes and Children of Dune into 3.) It feels a bit much to be entirely coincidental that both Dune and Macross have a set of interrelated technologies that allow reactionless flight/hovering, faster-than-light travel by folding space, faster-than-light communication through folded space, and energy shielding via spatial distortion. Esp. when the third Dune book was coming out in Japan around when Kawamori first started drafting Macross. They even have similar limitations, like the Macross's dimensional fault-based barrier exploding when hit with too much firepower or needing relays to retransmit fold communications across long distances.

My standards are so low that I'll really take practically any Star Wars story that averts Filoni's tendency to have every established character meet, know, and have at least eight pages of backstory with every other. I'd like a Galaxy Far Far Away that feels a bit bigger than, say, Weehawken, New Jersey.

There's a term for what you just did there. "Damned by faint praise"