Seto Kaiba

Aside from any eccentricities specific to your preferred online storefront, the main thing you have to worry about is sticker shock from the cost of physical media and the cost of the international shipping. CDJapan has been my preferred store for a couple years now. I've generally had a very good, problem-free experience with them. I've typically used DHL or FedEx for international express shipment and that's been largely problem free for me aside from one or two delays in customs. Yes. Yeah, aside from I think one specific box set the Macross Frontier releases are Japanese-only while all the Macross Delta Blu-rays were cheekily given English subs in anticipation of them being purchased internationally in defiance of Harmony Gold's then-ongoing blockage of licensing outside Japan. Quite good, IMO. The movies, mainly. You've already covered Macross II and Macross Plus. The Macross 7 "Complete Fire" two-volume box set has all the Macross 7 supplemental material including the Macross Dynamite 7 OVA, Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me! movie, the Macross 7 PLUS omakes, and the unbroadcasted episodes sometimes referred to as Macross 7 Encore. Macross FB7: Listen to My Song! is sold separately, and the Macross Frontier: the Labyrinth of Time is included with the blu-ray of the second Macross Delta movie. Macross Zero's available in the US already, so you don't have to worry about that one.

I'd just cross my fingers and hope that all copies of that one were lost in the war. ... a few of those you might be able to get away with. 😅 There's a city named Broken Arrow in Oklahoma, for instance, and we know they name ships and classes after municipalities still (e.g. Northampton, Uraga, Brampton). You could probably get away with Hunter's Moon too... we've had Silver Moon and Red Moon. There've been a few warships named Chameleon already. A few named Legion too. Star Runner doesn't sound too out of place either. Kickboxer wouldn't even look that out-of-place... the US and British navies have had a BUNCH of ships named Boxer (and yes, the original ship was named for the sport). I'd be worried about a ship named the Hard Boiled. That seems like they'd cause a lot of unnecessary property damage. In the wise words of Radiohead... "You do it to yourself, you do. And that's what really hurts."

Wasn't Stealth a box office flop? 😆 A Japanese wiki editor reached out to me and mentioned that we do see one named ship of the class, apparently named Akatsuki for one of several old IJN warships. Gotta confirm their source, but that's a start.

I just realized, Nus Braka's whole master plan is just...

S1 E9 "300th Night" really has a hum-dinger of a description. Imagine a protagonist being so completely dim-witted that this is actually a choice at all. I would give real money for the next season to drop Stephen Colbert. His role in this series is not funny. It's cringe. Pure, undiluted cringe. And just in case we thought this setting couldn't get any stupider... it immediately gets EXPONENTIALLY stupider once Admiral Vance calls up Team Incompetence to let them know what their ten-thumbed Pakled-tier ineptitude in that hostage situation allowed the Venari Ral to steal. My head hurts from watching this. Why does every character have a room temperature-at-best IQ? So... why are there transwarp tunnels still? Discovery never really addressed that. The Borg transwarp network collapsed eight hundred years ago when Voyager infected the Borg Queen with that pathogen and blew up the hub. It's at this moment that it struck me... I am unspeakably bored with this. There is no payoff here, because Caleb's mom is an undeveloped flat character and Caleb himself is barely developed and kind of an unlikeable git. We either waited way too long for this, or not nearly long enough. Either way, it lands with a thud. What is with this series and Starfleet ships apparently being made of crepe paper and wishful thinking? Only now that Braka has played his hand does Ake finally figure out what Braka's plan was.

Candidly? No, you really aren't missing anything. There are occasional moments where the writers almost seem to grasp what Star Trek is about, but then they lapse back into churning out faintly patronizing Discoveryslop.

True, though the state of technology and manufacturing even in the early emigrant era would make not using these things arguably much harder than using them. They were using municipal thermonuclear reactors even before the first emigrant ships launched. (With populations living in the spartan conditions of early emigrant fleets already being prone to riot when conditions are bad per Macross Chronicle, needlessly antagonizing the populace seems like a pretty awful long-term career strategy.) Even just plugging a disused Destroid into an energy capacitor to power the grid could provide enough power for hundreds of homes. The Tomahawk's backup generator has the lowest output of any of the Series 04's, and it's still producing 450kW. That's a huge amount of power in household terms. IIRC, 60A/100V is still pretty high-end for a home main breaker in Japan. That's 6kW peak load and by the 80% rule for electrical breakers a peak sustained load of about 4.8kW. That single Tomahawk's backup generator is enough for powering 93 houses at peak sustainable load by Japanese standards. A Phalanx's more robust backup generator could do over 200. A single VF-1 Valkyrie reactor? 135,416 6kW home main panels at nominal output (354,166 at maximum). Maybe, but it seems very unlikely given that no attempt has been made to connect that throwaway line from Macross Plus to fold carbon or fold quartz the way that they have with the hyperspace resonance lens from Macross VF-X2 or the crystalline bodies of the galactic whales in Macross Dynamite 7. I'd have to check, but I don't think Macross 7: the Galaxy is Calling Me! ever explains what the mineral the locals are so keyed up over - Barnagium - is used for. That the locals are ready to pop a cap in Basara's ass just for being there suggests the stuff is really valuable, though we're never told anything about it besides the name. It seems likely to be a liquid or gaseous, though, since the town appears to be full of pumpjacks and we never see any other mining equipment. Oh yeah, no fanfic is ever going to be perfect... but it's clear that they put a lot of love and thought into their work and trying to make it consistent with the show to the greatest extent possible, and I respect the hell out of that. Or it's made of a different material and isn't actually rusted? Materials shouldn't oxidize in space. Describing it as "the remains of a former self-propelled colony capsule" suggests that there used to be more of it... meaning the Akusho district might not even be an entire ship in its own right. It may be a leftover piece of a larger ship that was scrapped or was abandoned for some reason. "Self-propelled" doesn't necessarily mean "fold-capable" either. Yeah, as I'm sure you recall my project over the last few years has been examining how the lore has changed over the years. The coal mining outpost on Banipal still makes no sense in context or out. Especially once fold crystals were introduced to the setting. Humanity doesn't mine fold carbon, since they can synthesize it in industrial quantities. They "mine" for fold quartz... which is a polite euphemism for digging up former Vajra hives or pillaging Protoculture ruins for those rare samples of fold quartz. "Fold coal" is supposedly the lowest purity crude fold quartz... the stuff that we're told is borderline a waste product of thermonuclear reactors and fold systems. It's unlikely they would mine for it when they're making the stuff whether they want to or not. In fairness, the difference there is almost entirely just a superficial terminology change. They didn't really change anything about how it works or the fact that it's energy waves caused by sentient thoughts and emotions in higher-dimensional/fold space. Even making flowers bloom with it was something they were already doing in Macross 7. They just applied a more scientific name to it because the existing in-universe term wouldn't be coined for another thirty-something years of in-universe time. Yeah, the novelization of Macross Frontier explicitly connected the hyperspace resonance lenses of VF-X2 to fold quartz. Prior to that the only connection between fold systems and anything crystalline was the implication from Macross Dynamite 7 that something about the crystalline bodies of the plant-mineral galactic whales could be used to make high-end spaceship engines. That feels a bit misrepresentative... esp. since many of those early terrorist incidents are Zentradi who haven't adapted to peaceful life and the later ones were regular people being put in impossible positions by an increasingly oppressive fascist movement inside the New UN Forces not necessarily something motivated by a desire for independence. One thing to note with Master File is that, like Sky Angels before it, while it may be "not official setting" its information tends to bleed into the official setting fairly easily. Not the historical stuff, but the technical details. Quite a lot of the material related to the Daedalus, Prometheus, ARMD-class, VF-1, SF-3A, and QF-3000 comes to us not from TV series-era official media but the Sky Angels doujinshi and has since been retroactively adopted. We've been seeing examples of that almost since the Master File series started, and that's grown more pronounced since Absolute Live!!!!!! due to the lack of information about the movie's mecha in any official source. There are some obvious problems with the material, but if you leave those aside a lot of what it's in there fits quite nicely with existing material and there are plenty of examples of official material building on it directly. Novels referencing Master File designs, encyclopedias pulling specs from Master File, etc. Considering the coal mines only come up in terms of possible punishment assignments for Isamu, odds are the intent never went any farther than sounding like an absolutely horrid posting the Spacy's #1 regifted problem child would not enjoy. Haruna not Hakuna, lol. It's named either for dormant volcano Mount Haruna in Gunma prefecture or for one of the Japanese warships named for said mountain... either the Kongou-class battleship Haruna from WW2 (that ARMD-10 was named for) or the Haruna-class destroyer JS Haruna used by the JMSDF from 1972-2009.

The Akusho-type is too new... it screams 2030s construction, and seems natively compatible with a late 2030s 3rd Generation emigrant ship. Whether it even has an independent propulsion system is unknown. The Qultra Queleual-class, well... that'd be the obvious choice among Zentradi ships since it's a comparatively lightly-armed ship that is basically a massive box designed to have the maximum possible carrying capacity. If you're looking to haul a lot of stuff in the short term, it's probably about the best option available at the time. They do, though given what we know of fold carbon and the fact that fold quartz was not properly known or understood until the late 2040s it seems unlikely that anyone was out there mining for fold carbon when it could be synthesized in industrial quantities. (The assumption that fold carbon was being mined at all comes from the bizarre statement about the presence of coal mines on one emigrant planet... a material that would be totally useless to a civilization with ultra-high efficiency renewable energy sources and thermonuclear fusion power.) Yeah, Circle FANKY's Battleships of the Galaxy Vol.2 gives the ship the unofficial/fan name of "Osaka-class". Max's first command, which he is promoted to at the end of Macross M3 Episode 6, is the stealth space cruiser Haruna. (ステルス宇宙巡洋艦ハルナ suterusu uchuu jun'youkan Haruna) Oddly, this is the second Spacy ship Haruna with the first having been ARMD-10. We're never told what class the second Haruna was, but given the circumstances it's probably also an Algenicus-type stealth space cruiser. It's perhaps worth mentioning that FANKY's attempt to explain the nonexistence of the Frontier stealth cruiser in Macross 7 is that the class was not introduced until ~2041, which would pass the sniff test as a justification for why it is not seen among the Earth defense flotilla in 2040 or the 37th fleet in 2045-6 but is present in the 55th fleet forces. Official media generally suggests that the Macross 7-era ships are mostly products of the very late 2020s and early-to-mid 2030s. The Northampton-class seems to be the oldest, being present in the Macross 1 fleet alongside ARMD II-class space carriers while later fleets had the Guantanamo-class and Uraga-class.

The New UN Spacy stealth cruiser is presented as a distinct class of warship separate from the Northampton-class frigate it's based on. The problem is that it is has only ever officially been referred to as "stealth cruiser", never by any kind of name in official media. It's listed in Macross Chronicle as "Space Cruiser Stealth Cruiser".

Which was initially difficult to explain, but now has an easy/obvious answer in "they're just using larger and/or higher-purity fold crystals in the fold system". Ever since Macross Frontier - or technically Macross Dynamite 7 - the size and quality of the fold crystals used in many forms of overtechnology has been the go-to explanation for differences in performance and capability in almost every major form of overtechnology. High-purity fold crystals are in high demand in the military and private sectors for use in fold navigation, fold communication, cross-dimensional radar, thermonuclear reactors, gravity and inertia controllers, beam weapons, and so many more technologies essential to Humanity's burgeoning interstellar civilization. It certainly explains why the poachers in Macross Dynamite 7 were so determined and so suspiciously well-connected. The previous vague statements about how the products of galactic whales could be used in spacecraft engines almost certainly means they contain very high-purity fold carbon which would naturally be a rare and high-demand material until synthesis processes caught up. It may well be. Jupiter is a gas giant, after all. It may not have a surface you can stand on but that doesn't mean it doesn't have obvious value beyond pure scientific curiosity. It's basically a giant ball of fuel that mother nature obligingly gathered into one place. The atmosphere is principally hydrogen and helium isotopes, meaning collection and processing of atmospheric gases can yield valuable fuels for thermonuclear reactors as well as elemental hydrogen gas for use in fuel cells and combustion engines. (Gundam's Universal Century timeline has permanent colonies around Jupiter for the same purpose, to extract and process deuterium and helium-3 to be shipped back to Earth in the massive tankers of the Jupiter Energy Fleet.) Yeah, we gotta go through that footage and find the first one that gets named and just use that... the same way Star Trek does for ships without an official class name. Available materials suggest they used lightly converted Zentradi ships from the former Vrlitwhai branch fleet. Having remained within a 100ly distance of Earth means they were able to lean much more heavily on Earth for resources to set up their colonies too. There's definitely an element of luck to it. The process of exploration, at least as it's been defined for the audience, is pretty simple. The emigrant fleet folds into a region of space and dispatches pilot fleets from its escort that scout out the nearby star systems for either usable resources or viable planets to colonize. If they don't find a suitable planet among the star systems they've scouted in that region they jump to the next likely area their advance scouting detail identified. They repeat this process until they find a suitable planet. They lack Star Trek-style FTL sensors that can identify habitable worlds from light years away and the means to scan the worlds they pass while folding (because fold navigation is basically teleporting) so a map of the space they're exploring might look like a string of pearls with each pearl being the sphere of space they studied between fold jumps.

That may have more to do with the 55th Fleet doing a lot more exploring and scouting on its way towards the galactic core since their objective was Vajra space for the sake of a fold quartz gold rush. Fold faults may be denser near the core too, which may also account for it. Megaroad-04 crossed the entire galaxy and ended up running into the fold faults surrounding Windermere IV on the far side of the Brisingr globular cluster in 2027, a bit over ten years after departing Earth c.2015/2016. It seems to vary heavily, explicitly dependent on the quality of the fold system (and its fold carbon core), the precision of the fold navigation calculations, and local conditions (e.g. intense gravity fields, fold faults). (For instance, the trip to Gallia IV that would have been almost instantaneous if not for fold faults that turned it into a day-long trip with a week's time loss.) Master File has one of the very few semi-official statements of an actual distance-over-time, with the account of the Spica III incident noting that the ~260 light year distance between Earth and Spica III in the Alpha Virginis system is less than a day's travel time for a high-speed cruiser c.2037. Prior to that, the only other explicit mention of travel time without stops was a speed record for the Eden-Earth run (11.7ly) at 112 minutes from a piece that was done to promote a model kit.

Probably very few, if any at all. The farthest-flung emigrant fleets and planets are said to be literal years away from Earth by space fold due to a combination of distance, system limitations, and route conditions. By the same token, the military component of an emigrant fleet has always at least nominally been under the authority of the emigrant fleet's civilian government and most if not all of it was always meant to stay with the emigrant government as the foundation of its local New UN Forces. The military reforms imposed after the Second Unification War cemented that local control over an emigrant fleet's attached New UN Forces. IINM the only known case of an emigrant fleet ship ending up back in service of the central New UN Forces that we know of is one or more of the Macross-class SDFNs that were used to scout ahead of early emigrant fleets. The SDFN-04 General Bruno J. Global ended up back in Earth NUNS hands and was later used as flagship of the 117th Research Fleet for their voyage into Vajra space.

To be accurate, what's described there isn't just Earth's defenses. That's the combined forces of the Solar System Defense Perimeter that protects all of the inhabited planets of the Sol system. Fans often forget - because we are not often reminded - that there are a lot of other places in the Sol system that people live besides Earth's surface. Luna has multiple colonies and at least one military base on it. There are O'Neill cylinder space colonies, factory stations, and multiple factory satellites at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points. Mars has cities on its surface. There are "satellite city" constructs orbiting Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune. There are bases and possibly colonies on the Jovian moons including at least seven on Europa (given that Isamu is assigned to Europa Base 7 at one point). There is at least one base in the asteroid belt. This massive fleet that Master File's describing protects all of that. One thing of note is that there are, at least according to official media, a bunch of variants of the Northamption-class and similar that we have simply not seen. Macross Chronicle mentions the Northampton-class having specialized variants intended for enhanced combat capability, reconnaissance, or early warning/picket duties. The same is likely true of its derivatives, like the NUNS stealth cruiser from Frontier. The aforementioned aegis destroyer is probably the early warning variant Northampton. We've only really had two or three classes of cruiser in-series so far, so odds are the guided missile cruiser is a variant of the 2050s-era stealth cruiser fitted with more missile launchers in place of its beam turrets. There's only really one known candidate for a NUNS-affiliated beam gunboat and that's the Zentradi one. Yeah, perhaps too much so given that it's never even mentioned in Project Super Nova. That's not the kind of thing that's easy to cover up. One important thing to note about the numbers published by/for the Russian and Chinese navies is that they tend to inflate the number of available ships by counting anything the government owns that floats as a Navy ship. Including ships like military-owned conventional motorboats, launches, landers, and ships that are not even technically operational but still kept on the fleet register for morale/propaganda reasons like Russia's infamous drydock queen and only aircraft carrier the Admiral Kuznetsov. Yeah, that's a bit large... official media usually says that the Guantanamo-class carries ~45 aircraft and and the Uraga-class ~75 aircraft. It's possible that these air wings are being split across multiple ships in the same taskforce, since some ships like the Northampton-class can carry up to a single platoon of Valkyries in normal operations (meaning just one squadron might be split across 5+ ships). It makes more sense when you consider that, under normal circumstances (at least based on 7 and Frontier) that carriers make up 1/3 or less of a typical fleet formation. The 37th Large-Scale Long-Distance Emigrant Fleet's military component amounted to 186 ships with 66 carriers of various grades and 120 escorts. The balance is arguably a little different from that in normal operation since the Battle-class, four Uraga-class, one Guantanamo-class, and one Northampton-class are tied up with emigrant ships of varying types, leaving the operational fleet with 60 carriers (16 Uraga-class and 44 Guantanamo-class) and 119 Northampton-class frigate escorts.

Even if evacuation is your aim, being able to delay the enemy while you prepare that evacuation is pretty important. From that same account in Master File, the 73 ships and ~600 Valkyries of the Spica III New UN Spacy defense force were able to stall the advance of the Zentradi 1,534th Main Fleet for a period of several hours using their entire stockpile of thermonuclear reaction weapons. Their sacrifice buys enough time for a partial evacuation to be organized and get more than 20,000 civilians offworld and out of harm's way.

He is, but he's also a culture war grifter so accurate reportage is not exactly his thing. 🫤

He often does... with highly questionable accuracy at the best of times.

That's depend on the size of the main fleet... they run from a few hundred thousand to a few million ships. Variable Fighter Master File: VF-19 Excalibur relates the story of an encounter with a 120,000 ship main fleet in 2037 as part of the VF-19/VF-22 development backstory. After losing a colony in the Alpha Virginis system to the Zentradi 1,534th Main Fleet the New UN Forces rounded up every ship and Valkyrie within 300 light years of Earth and proceeded to throw them all at that main fleet spamming pretty much every thermonuclear reaction weapon they could lay hands on until the much-reduced enemy fleet was driven off. Emigrant fleet defense forces of a few hundred ships are meant to be enough to run off or wipe out a Zentradi branch fleet. 2,500+ ships won't run off a Zentradi main fleet the size of Boddole Zer's ~5 million ships, but it will absolutely bring enough hurt to drive off or destroy smaller forces that are more typically encountered.

Presumably it varied a bit depending on how similar the technology in question was to what we already had or whether they were simply practical versions of technology that already existed in theory. After the establishment of OTEC in 2000 and the Earth Unification Government in 2001, the investment in OTM research was both global and massive. Human-made imitations of at least some OTMaterials were available as early as March 2001 (after about 2 years of study), and once they solved certain core principles the dominos started falling faster and faster with a crude OTM thermounuclear reactor being brought online by November 2002, etc. Practical laser weapons seem to have also been developed quite quickly, first seeing use in the mid-2000s. That is a bit different, IMO. Scotty didn't hand the formula for transparent aluminum to a multinational research organization with unlimited funding backed by a world government. He handed it over to a material scientist turned plant supervisor at a small plexiglass manufacturing company in 1980s San Francisco (or Burglingame, per the script). What little information we have on the subject indicates that both US and Russian-made "legacy" fighter designs like the F-14 and Su-27 that were improved with OTM were mainly receiving structural improvements/reinforcements using early/crude pseudo-OTMaterials to make them more durable and slightly stealthier. At least where the F-14++ Tomcat is concerned, it's often mentioned that these were old/retired/mothballed airframes being rushed back into service with whatever improvements could be thrown together quickly due to a critical shortage of viable aircraft. Such improvements were typically limited to replacing certain parts with harder-wearing ones made from early OTM composites, avionics modernization, and newer model engines. Master File opines that the experimental SuX-27 Flanker its writers invented for backstory purposes also received a prototype laser cannon similar to those that would one day be adopted by the Octos and VF-0. We see that MiG-29 deploying early infrared-guided micro missiles, and Master File suggests that those and early hybrid-guided longer-ranged missiles like the OTM-based hybrid guidance AMRAAM2 were also on the table. Since VFs with active stealth had yet to really make their presence known, most of the weapons used were conventional NATO and Warsaw Pact hardware like the AIM-9X, AIM-120D, etc.

Yeah, it's one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it moments. It doesn't get discussed much because we know basically nothing about it and the Macross Zero CG model(s) for the MiG-29 aren't detailed enough to identify which variant of the MiG-29 is even being used. Even Variable Fighter Master File: VF-0 Phoenix, which goes into much more detail, barely mentions Mikoyan Gurevich's designs in passing since it has almost its entire focus on Sukhoi since they did a lot of the heavy lifting in the Alliance's VF program. (The only MiG it really mentions is an OTM testbed called the MiG-2000 that appears to have nothing in common with the real/proposed MiG-2000, and which is itself mentioned only in passing in a section about a Sukhoi transitional model that rejoices in the uninspiring designation of SuX-27.) The only book I know of that actually mentions this aircraft is the first volume of Tenjin Hidetaka's Valkyries artbook series. On page 43, in a note on the box art for the Hasegawa 1/72 Macross Zero MiG-29 Fulcrum kit from 2002, a brief mention is made that a canard-equipped version of the MiG-29 appears in Ep5. Presumably this unknown MiG-29 with canards is a lukewarm/early OTM adopter similar to the UN Forces F-14++ Tomcat Double Plus that was being used to both return an older model aircraft to service and evaluate some technologies being developed for future use in Variable Fighters. Using the SV-51's missile pod/drop tank units isn't terribly surprising since the SV-51 is backwards compatible with Warsaw Pact hardware and given how ineffective the F-14's weapons were against the active stealth-equipped VF-0 they'd probably want some OTM-based munitions so they could actually fight the Asuka II's VF-0s.

No, in this case it's a fellow Starfleet cadet who just happens to be named Genesis. I mean, that's happened too... but, y'know, eight hundred years in the past during a much better Star Trek series.

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.