Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12767

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    It's definitely worth a watch, IMO. It's a lot more grounded than Nichijou is, with more focus on the actual characters, though it does have some truly bizarre and surreal moments.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    ... it definitely has a vibe reminiscent of Azumanga Daioh to it. That said, I don't think I like it as much as I did Azumanga Daioh. A lot of the humor here seems to just be "random things happen", which can be funny if done right but it feels a bit overused at 5 episodes in.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    My backlog slog continues... on to Nichijou, and my first thought is "it's Azumanga Daioh but on even more drugs".
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That does appear to be the case in the Macross Frontier audio drama Luca and the Three Ghosts. In that, L.A.I. obtained special dispensation from the Frontier Government to work on developing a high-performance, fully-autonomous air combat AI for a next-generation Ghost. I don't recall where I read it, I think it was Great Mechanics.DX 14, but I remember it being said that fully autonomous unmanned fighters are restricted as heavily or nearly as heavily as the usage of (thermo)nuclear weapons and that their usage was strictly prohibited except in very specific circumstances.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    So... yeah, Macross Chronicle's Mechanic Sheet for the AIF-9V Ghost "V-9" does mention that it was outfitted with autonomous air combat functions that contravene the New UN Gov't restrictions on AI usage. It's said that its AI is the same type used in the Ghost X-9. Incidentally, Luca Angeloni's three modified AIF-7S Ghost wingmen (QF-4000) also use the same autonomous air combat AI software used in the Ghost X-9.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Macross Chronicle doesn't put quite as much emphasis on the self-preservation instinct aspect. On the Glossary Sheet (17A) entry for it, it credits the New UN Government's ban on the technology more to the fact that the chips produce unpredictable behaviors that have a significant chance of the AI running on the chip going out of control. Given that the Macross Concern was using data from the Sharon Apple project and bio-neural processors themselves in an attempt to make their next-generation unmanned fighter more effective by making it able to respond in less predictable ways, it seems like Myung's neuroses were the Grand Central Station for calamity.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Admittedly, I'm up for almost anything that takes the piss out of Messer... though I don't think any of it could be quite as well done as the Macross Delta shorts where Messer is a pizza delivery boy.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That's not why the New UN Government had outlawed bio-neural processors well before the Sharon Apple incident. The reason that technology was banned was because it was dangerously unstable. It was intended to improve the performance of unmanned fighters by allowing the non-sapient AI to react more flexibly and less predictably. In practice, the bio-neural chips tended to become too unpredictable and exhibited dangerous unintended behaviors that were often linked to the chips developing self-preservation "instincts". It wasn't an ethical concern, it was a safety concern about a microprocessor technology that resulted in standard sci-fi computers-gone-rogue, much like Sharon Apple herself did in the wake of being fitted with one. (Future attempts to improve the reliability and autonomous operation quality of unmanned fighters hinged on similar approaches to pre-bio-neural chip Sharon... virtual modeling of the human mind and personality. In the Macross Frontier audio dramas, L.A.I. is working on a successor to the AIF-7 Ghost that uses human personality AI systems modeled on real people: Luca Angeloni, Alto Saotome, Michael Blanc, and Nanase Matsura.)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... Basara's emotional responses are definitely atypical, but in a way that suits his conflict-averse beliefs and the story's themes. Can you imagine what'd happen if a hack like Michael Bay got ahold of him? Basara's a great pilot but he's basically a non-action protagonist, since he refuses to actually fight anyone. Michael Bay would turn him into some kind of gung-ho punk in order to get the action scenes he can't live without and ruin the story's themes in the process. Imagine Macross 7 where the role of Basara is played by Nathan Explosion.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    If anything, that might actually be worse... Macross 7's Basara is a technical pacifist, which is about as far from what Bay can work with as it gets, and while there are some explosions a lot of the story revolves around Basara's general unwillingness to hurt anyone.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Can any of us even hope to rival the nearly Lovecraftian horror that @Einherjar keeps reminding us already exists? It'd be almost exactly like that, except everything would be on fire or exploding. Well, he is a massive walking American stereotype after all...
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy, wait 'til you hear about Gundam... Get your masked space nazi ace pilots with sister complexes in red uniforms in the money saving twelve pack!
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Freyja kinda ran away with that one, IMO. She's a very similar character to Macross Frontier's Ranka Lee, but Freyja is a more upbeat character who shows initiative in chasing her dream to be an idol where Ranka was indecisive and very passive unless she had Alto, Michael, or Grace twisting her arm. Her inexperience and enthusiasm made her a lot more likeable right off the bat, especially as it allowed her to make mistakes in ways that were comedic but also furthered her story and character development. Ranka was kind of Frontier's chew toy and got a lot of her development from being in depressive episodes until someone else came along to kick in the arse and make her do something. On every level Freyja's just... better Ranka, and almost instantly likeable for it. (Of course, the tradeoff was that Macross Delta had Great Value brand Sheryl Nome in the form of Mikumo "My main character trait is that I have no character traits" Guynemer.) It's energy conversion armor, right? That's also an additional power draw, and possibly requires additional electromagnetic shielding for the cockpit.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Finished The World Ends With You. Holy hell, this was Angel Links levels of bad. So much so that it's legitimately worrying that something like this got approved. For the writers and director, it should be more like Your Careers End With This.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    He's not unfortunate, he earned that laser beam to the face by being a cretin. I mean, he starts off as that one incredibly abrasive and toxic coworker who thinks he's better than everyone else. Yeah, he's the ace... but he's the ace of a low-rent, bush league PMC that's based so far out in the space boonies that you can't go much farther without leaving the galaxy altogether. If that were all, he's just be unpleasant... but he's also super creepy. He's basically Kaname's stalker. Her performance touched his heart, so instead of joining the fan club or maybe buying some Walkure merch he... followed her to another planet, and applied to the company she works for in order to be close to her always, then follows her everywhere at work. That's not romantic, that is 3/4 of the way to being an episode of Law and Order: SVU. I really hope they just leave any mention of him out of this next movie.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Some folks... still aren't clear on the narrative and thematic differences between between authentic Macross and what we'll call "the Macross [they] have at home". Authentic Macross isn't a gritty, action-packed, Things Blowing Up war series. It's a love story and character drama set against the backdrop of a space war. Some things do blow up, but it's a secondary concern to what's going on between the characters. You hire Michael Bay if you want to make a mindless action movie full of Things Blowing Up. He's no good for compelling character drama. It's like hiring a coked-up Gary Busey to be maître d' at your fancy restaurant. He's perfectly capable of showing up for work, but he's fundamentally incapable of producing the desired result.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    So, what you're saying is we need to go deeper... dig up someone's MLP/Star Wars fic so we can kill two birds with one stone by beating an incestuous dead horse? That might be too much, even for people with a truly refined appreciation of sadism. (FWIW, the memes are better than the actual movie IMO.) EDIT: Something something the dark side is a pathway to many topics of discussion some would consider... unnatural.
  18. Seto Kaiba
  19. Seto Kaiba
    I think that's a fair-ish summation? Craig's version of Bond is definitely much more... amenable... to the idea of just Leeroy Jenkins-ing his way out of situations with his fists. That said, I definitely feel like Craig's Bond was done something of a disservice by modernizing the setting of Casino Royale. Quantum's not just as compelling an antagonist as the KGB, and Vesper's punny name no longer scans now that there isn't a West Berlin.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    ... everything about this entire line of inquiry is objectively awful. Then shouldn't Anakin have been a girl? Where'd the Y chromosome come from in this equation? For now, I'm gonna stick with my theory... Anakin's extremely trusting and Luke and Leia's real father is the space milkman on Coruscant.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Started The World Ends With You... so far, it's kind of awful. I know it's a video game adaptation and as such there are some liberties that have to be taken, but the pacing in this series is completely screwed up.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Maybe suggest a director who doesn't have nearly as many Razzie nominations as all other awards and award nominations combined? "A better option than Michael Bay" is a bar set so low it's a trip hazard in Satan's sub-basement.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    That's about the worst case scenario... Macross in the hands of a director who doesn't understand subtlety, pacing, nuance, or character-based drama. Transformers worked out for Bay because, true to the source material, it was a barely-there excuse plot for giant robots to smash each other to pieces while dispensing one liners in an action figure-friendly environment. He's not a man you hire to direct a movie with an actual story. He's the guy you hire if you want to film Things Blowing Up Part XIV.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, there is a modest amount of additional information available in publications like Macross Chronicle and other artbooks. Those publications never really spell out how much of the extra detail they're giving is known in-universe, though. In Macross 7's backstory - via Macross 7 PLUS - there does appear to be some kind of dedicated investigatory body within the New UN Forces that is responsible for investigating any suspected or newly discovered Protoculture relics. It's not entirely clear how they're organized, but they dispatched a Special Investigation Unit with the support of an elite Army unit (Blue Rhinoceros special forces team) under the command of Ivano Gunther, a staff officer from New UN Forces headquarters on Earth. Of course, that went... poorly... when Gunther got ambitious and decided to pursue the investigation independently instead of reporting back to his superiors and ended up having his body hijacked by Gepernich. That investigative body must still exist in some form in the 2060s, given that the New UN Forces command in the Brisingr cluster knew about the Sigur Berrentzs and had at least some understanding of what the Delta Wave System was and what it had the potential to do when they made the decision to drop a dimensional warhead on it. (An assignment subsequently botched to hell and back by Wright Immelmann.) At least to the main Macross timeline, DYRL? is an in-universe historical drama meant to hammer exactly that point home with all the subtlety of a half-brick to the head. That the Zentradi are still a threat, and that there are thousands of other Main Fleets like Boddole Zer's kicking around. Oh, that much is explained in multiple titles. Even in the original series. To the modern Zentradi, the events surrounding the fall of the Protoculture's Stellar Republic are literal ancient history that has faded into the realms of myth as pieces of the record are inevitably lost to time and the conditioned general disinterest the Zentradi have for matters outside of combat and military service. One example cited early in the original series (ep5) by Exsedol is when he cites the directive to avoid the worlds populated by miclones, which we know from backstory materials was the Protoculture's general order prohibiting the Zentradi from interfering with the Protoculture's daily lives. The Protodeviln are the Zentradi's most feared enemy, one that the Zentradi were unable to defeat and had been defeated by the Protoculture at terrible cost 500,000 years ago. It was, to Exsedol, almost exactly like you or I discovering that a nigh-invincible world-ending monster from myth was actually quite real and loose in the world. He had no reason to warn humanity that they might encounter the Protodeviln because, as far as he and the other Zentradi knew, the Protodeviln had been comprehensively defeated by the remnants of the ancient Protoculture in half a million years previously. The only exemplar of a research fleet we see was a privately sponsored affair (run by the Critical Path corporation) that was dispatched into Vajra space to study them after the New UN Government's disastrous first contact with them in 2040. It was principally a xenobiology/xenoanthropology sort of affair meant to let humanity understand them as a species, to investigate the source of the fold quartz they possessed, and hopefully facilitate a future peace once humanity had enough understanding of them to communicate effectively. The Delta Wave System in Macross Delta is pretty explicitly stated to be the Protoculture's attempt to un-f*ck the galaxy by linking everyone's consciousness into a hive mind. The dates aren't given, of course, but it was heavily implied to be the last of the Protoculture's great works in their final surviving enclave before they went extinct.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I don't know if anything is said about why the engines extend backwards the way they do... it probably is something to do with cooling, and/or facilitating their ability to thrust-vector. Deployed like that is probably their default state, with the shorter form they take in atmosphere being something about drag reduction or thereabouts. Much more is said about the little cover that goes over the engine intake. That's a fuel tank.
×
×
  • Create New...