JsARCLIGHT

Heh, I think that just reading the REGULAR topics around here.

Not speaking for Togo but this has been a running issue with a few members in the Other Anime section for quite a while. I think the core issue at hand that bugs DT is the whole notion of "who decides who lives and who dies"... I think he and a few others would rather have a hard and fast rule rather than the "whim of a mod", which is what seems to be eating everyone up lately.

A pure "off topic" section invites a slew of other problems that I don't think the administration wants to deal with right now. Of the few message boards I have been on and been part of the moderation team on, two of them had no such animal as an "off topic" area. They where small boards, easily patrolled and very clean and efficient. Then one day someone wanted an "off topic" section so the administration created one. One year later the new "off topic" section called "general discussion" became the largest part of that message board. In fact, for every one post in a normal section of the board the general discussion section had ten posts. It quickly went out of control with people posting all sorts of nonsense in that section from "what I had for lunch" to "does this look infected" to "why is the sky blue". I see MW sliding that way now. Other Anime dominates the post numbers on this board to a good degree. Opening the section up more invites trouble. Personally I don't see what the big deal is. It's a message board... things get locked and deleted all the time while other things stay open. The last few topics I locked in Other Anime where protest threads... people making threads protesting the exsistence of another thread. I'd say if enough people had problems with how the section was run then we should just eliminate it completely, because no matter what we do someone will complain. Kind of like the constitution, I feel Roy worded the "rules" for the Other Anime section very carefully to allow us the ability to control the section from becoming a massive free-for-all pig tossing contest... and sometimes that means stepping on toes.

OK this thread has served it's purpose.

Not really IMHO. A true meme is that unique cultural something that just keeps going and going and going, spawning new iterations of itself. The only example I can think of that fits perfectly is the "All Your Base" phenomenon. These days people "force" things into becoming a meme it seems. All the guerilla urge that a true meme seems to only happen once in a blue moon. For something to truly be a all out meme it has to be everywhere, not just on one retarded internet message board... It has to be on ALL the retarded internet message boards.

Keep the politics out please. As for Graham's question a meme is, to quote Badolza, a "piece of culture" that self-propegates. Something like a song or joke that evolves and spreads like wildfire. Think "All Your Base".

4chan... that explains everything then.

Am I so far out of the loop that the whole "Macross Zero-style!" quotes inserted into pictures rampage totally passed me by? Was it supposed to be like the "All your base" type of thing? Google turns up a big load of nothing... I wonder if this was just some sort of wikipedia spoof trivia, I know I've encountered it before.

OK, OK, Time for me to be the fun ruiner. ... and everyone knows you get wood floors then put rugs on them to have the best of both words. Well, that and to watch your cat slip on the floor then gain traction when it hits the rug and fall over.

Yeah that's the place I got almost all of my info from. Wonder when it will be back up and running?

I managed to find the opening on YouTube of all things. Fang of the Sun Dougram Intro The problem with looking for info sites on google seems to be the new revoltech figure, every other hit is about that rather than the show.

The Macross "Perfect Edition" bootleg DVD by FX did something most bootlegs don't do, which is have excellent audio and video quality and encoding and have better than usual subtitle accuracy (though still not good by any means, see Hurin's outstanding re-sub thread for what perfect edition subs should look like). If you have a high tilt home entertainment system then you will see a quality difference between the FX Perfect Edition and the other regular editions. While the perfect edition is still a copy of an original master, it is a darn clean copy. As for your other questions, well... bootlegs are just that, bootlegs. "Quality" is generally a lost concept most of the time. Generally what bootleggers do is get ahold of legit DVD sets, say for case of argument the Macross Zero 1-5 DVDs, and then they rip the video and audio off the original discs, hastily translate the show into chinese and engrish and set up the subtitles, perhaps they will cobble together a simple menu or two and then re-encode (and usually heavily compress) the material back onto fewer discs than it originally came. They can shrink 9 and 10 disc box sets down to 3 discs and they usually do. Meter stick is the more they are cramming onto a smaller disc set the lower the quality will be. And as others have already said the subtitles are translated with usually only a basic understanding of english. While most of the time they get the incidental things right (IE "He went into the house") they usually horribly confuse names, propper nouns and syntax (It is not uncommon in bootleg subs for characters to be given completely wrong names). Also keep in mind that bootlegs are bootlegs. They are illegal copies of someone else's copyrighted material sold without their approval. If at all possible purchase legit copies when available.

Every disc set you have linked to is a bootleg. The price should give them away right off the bat. There are no legit R1 releases of any of those sets you are looking at.

It looks like the website I got my synopsys from is no longer up and running... let me keep looking around to see if perhaps it moved somewhere else.

Yep, in a nutshell. I have a set of bootleg VCDs of the entire series. The video and audio quality of the set I have is superb for their nature and they play back on most modern R1 DVD players just fine. Once you have a set all you really need is a guide to the show, or at least a tollerable synopsys to the show, to know what is going on. The show is not rocket science after all and is mostly a large continuing string of episodic action sequences. A decent online synopsys will give you the gist of the story. I bought my set off of eBay many moons ago. The guy who sells the VCD sets, and I believe there is only one guy who does, puts them up for sale every few months. The sets are not cheap and will cost you upwards of $80 if I remember right. I've loaned my set out in the past to folks who wanted to copy it but at the moment it is out on loan to one of my employees.

Dougram is pretty darn rare these days... I don't believe I've ever seen a complete fansub of it. I could have sworn long ago in the early '90s I saw some fansub tapes at Chicago comic con but that was so long ago and my mind is not what it used to be. I'm just happy with my VCD's. I may not know exactly what's going on but the plot is not so hard to follow that you need cliff notes.

I just picked up an intern at my company who works at a local TRU. He told me that the store he works at has a fierce "you horde and you're fired" policy. He said the managers there always are on the lookout for employees who are hording or scalping toys. He even told me of one guy who had his stash found by a manager and the manager brought it to the attention of everyone working in the store. Talking at length with this guy about his TRU time he pretty much told me that his store gets "a truck a week" on thursdays and from what he said the action figure and collectable stuff only consists of about ten to fifteen boxes off that truck regularly. Then he went on to say that the scalpers know when their trucks come in and that on thursdays when they would be putting out the restock from the truck these people would just hover like vultures waiting for them to put stuff out... sometimes even grabbing boxes off their pallets and opening them and removing the things they wanted. Being honest he told me that sometimes it almost doesn't even matter if people get there on thursday when the new truck arrives as he said usually one or two guys, the "regulars", snatch up all the supposedly rare things right away leaving nothing for everyone else. And then it takes another week to two weeks for a restock which is once again instantly snapped up. If all that is true or not I don't really know but I have actually shopped at the store he works at (and seen him there and waved to him) and that TRU is downright lousy for toys. They mostly have their action figure isle filled with peg warmers and rarely... very rarely, will I find anything that I want at that store. It's almost pointless going in there lately.

And the same can be said about movies and music... just because something comes out now as opposed to fifteen or twenty years ago does not instantly give it superiority. If anything IMHO most of the new things are lower in quality (not just visuals but storyteling as well) due to the new technology innovations like CGI that have reduced the overall cost of making something today so now almost anything can get a greenlight... in fact, "budget" movie and TV show making are certain director's calling cards these days. All that being said I myself would like to see actual budget numbers for Shadow Chronicles just to know what the actual cost of production was... I'm not trying to use this as some sort of fanboy rant, I just want to know how much money they need to make to bring this thing out of the red. A lot of times that will tell you how well something will do... if they totally broke the bank getting this thing made then you could really make a strong argument that no matter how well it does it will fail as the cost to produce will overshadow any future efforts. But at the same time if this thing was made on a shoestring budget and turns a healthy profit then you might see it keep going. Popular or not, liked or not, it's all in the finances... if this project is as low budget as some people keep saying it is then I'd think it would be hard pressed to not turn a profit. At the same time it's also all about the marketing tie-ins... outside of the comics what sort of large ticket stuff does HG have in the works to cross sell? That might also sway the thing.

Not to nit-pick, but just to avoid confusion, I think you mean #3 there, right? 389789[/snapback] And that would probably answer why I confuse myself a lot as well. And yes the new #4 is exactly what I had in mind... but that is only my opinion. I gave all the color options so we could mix and match to whatever the admins wanted. I wonder what Graham thinks?

I myself had in mind #1 as the theme to use, perhaps reusing the red kites for the hot topics and replacing the green kites with the maroon kite for polls just to keep the color palate closer together. That way you have blue, red and bluered. While I like the green and it matches the board well having it in line with the other colors will create that mexican stoplight candy look that everyone seems to hate. I personally think #3 (edited to the right number) is a tad outside by changing to the skulls. Thematic content change still bugs me on some level. I'd also like to take this moment to thank Hurin for his help with this and also to thank Macross Nexus. I like the idea of forging a supportive, cooperative relationship with Nexus. If there is anything I can do to help Nexus just ask. I may not be a member but that does not mean I can't help out if you need a hand. Together we stand, divided we fall... against Robotech.com.

I've been jumping around the site checking on how well the new icons read and getting some feedback from people. The current layout is a tad confusing at the moment, I'm not sure some of the icons are in the right places... Then again it may just not be following the layout I had in mind when designing them and that might be why some of them seem out of place to me.

It still looks very unfinished to me... But I'm still going to watch this just to make sure I'm not going to like it. After all, I gave Macross 7 a full chance and watched all of it, I gave Aliens Vs. Predator a full chance and watched all of it and I gave House of the Dead a full chance and watched all of it... admittedly I puked like a fire hose shortly afterwards and passed out on the bathroom floor but you never know until you watch it. Sure I can bag on it a ton now but it would be baseless... I like to pummel things I dislike with experience rather than guesswork. But you have to admit it is hard to go into this with an unbiased opinion. Everyone on this site posting in these Shadow Chronicles threads has an opinion right now... no one is "unbiased" in any way. After we all watch this then perhaps some people will jump the fence to the other side and some will gain "truth" behind their feelings. You never know until the DVD is in the player.

Please do, thank you.

But you do see that THAT symbol in THAT configuation looks NOTHING like the nazi symbol? Similair in nature but different in presense. That is all that matters. I do not see that new avatar causing a problem in the near future and that is all I wanted you to think about. Thank you. Now Doc, your point has been made please put away the devil's bowtie.

OK this is going too far now.