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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    They probably had a falling out after Myung complained about him bringing his YF-19 dakimakura to bed.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I'm not sure the problems with this recent spate of light novel adaptations is a problem with the adaptation process... in almost every case where I've sampled both the original light novel and anime adaptation, the flaws in the story were invariably the original sins of the source material. Like KonoSuba being a tedious mess with exactly one joke it repeats ad nauseam, TenSura being every bit as thrilling as the Microsoft Excel help menu, or 8th Son recounting Wendelin's adventures in the same slightly bored tone one would use to recount how they had forgotten their wallet on the way to the market. The only real exceptions have been The Irregular at Magic High School and The Saga of Tanya the Evil, where details that were left out dramatically changed the interpretation of their main characters.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno... there's no mention of his activities between the end of Macross Plus in 2040 and his involvement in the YF-24 Evolution program in 2057.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... humanity's grasp of fold technology has improved considerably over the last sixty or so years of in-universe time, but a fold system's capabilities are determined by a number of factors like the fold system's maximum energy storage capacity, the purity of the fold carbon it uses to produce heavy quanta for gravity manipulation, etc. Oh, yes... fold communication is much faster than traveling by space fold. However, like fold navigation, the time lag on fold communication is heavily dependent on the conditions in higher-dimensional space like the presence of fold faults. The fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were bad enough that there was a significant lag which even relay pods couldn't fully mitigate. Leon mentions to President Glass that, after deploying relays, they'd managed to cut the lag down to 127 minutes. With appropriately powerful transmitters and relay pods to circumvent fold faults, realtime or near-realtime communication across interstellar distances is possible... though I'd guess fold communications with Earth from Brisingr are probably still significantly delayed just because they have to cross the entire galaxy to get there. Not quite? It wasn't that the Frontier fleet learned about the uprising too late because of fold communication lag caused by the fold faults between them and Gallia IV. It was that it was clearly planned in advance, to exploit the fact that the fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were severe enough to delay any reinforcements dispatched to relieve the loyalist Zentradi in the Gallia IV garrison wouldn't arrive at the planet for at least a week. Until Luca revealed the existence of the super fold booster, there wasn't any real option apart from letting the hostages die or giving in to the renegades demands.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I think it was Otona Anime #9 where Kawamori first commented that humanity's farthest-flung settlements were some ten years away from Earth by space fold. That travel time may vary somewhat based on the quality of the fold system and what the conditions in fold space are like. A route that's free of fold faults can be traversed much MUCH faster than one where the ship's forced to either push through or navigate around a series of faults (as discussed in Frontier, where Gallia IV was said to be close enough for an almost instantaneous space fold if not for the fold faults that blew the travel time disparity up to over 172 hours). Not to mention the prevailing conditions in higher-dimensional space (e.g. fold faults) and the quality of the fold system itself... the disparity between subjective and objective time shrank as humanity got better at making and using fold systems, though Chronicle contends it was never anywhere near as bad as Misa posited in the original series.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    It used to be, yeah... it was, in corporate's mind, to prevent employee-provided underwear from bunching up and becoming visible through the costumes. That policy didn't change until 2001. IIRC it was employee protests after an outbreak of pubic lice that caused the policy change. Disney's pretty horrible... I expect a lot of those theme park workers are going to get sick, and a fair few will probably die in Disney-funded hospitals that exist to safeguard the Mouse from liability, much like my grandpa did back in '92.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Who's buying a CBS All Access subscription for something other than Star Trek? Their catalog of exclusives reads like a suicide note... so much so that ViacomCBS is planning to merge it with another streaming platform in the near future.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, I don't think that's the problem. The CBS All Access paywall only exists for customers in the US... and while CBS has been caught manipulating the numbers to make it appear that it has far more subscribers than it does for the benefit of CBS shareholders, the low viewership of Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery is a global problem affecting two much more established streaming services that carry those shows outside the US: Netflix and Amazon Prime.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Not gonna lie, my first reaction was "rebranding the sequel trilogy already?"... but this might be marginally better.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure whose it is, really... since CBS All Access had to fudge its subscriber numbers to make it seem like people actually wanted to watch Picard and Discovery, and both Netflix and Amazon Prime were unhappy with new Star Trek's performance on their respective streaming services.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Here... the link you copied was from the "Report this post" button.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    So... The Misfit of Demon King Academy. This didn't start where I was expecting. We got an opening narration right out of Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou that temporarily veered into Harry Potter territory, with owls delivering the handwritten invitations to magic maou school. Seems like we've got a fairly standard Isekai-style massively overpowered main character... admittedly more along the lines of Ainz Ooal Gown from Overlord, who wasn't afraid to make his demonstrations of overwhelming power messily lethal. It follows all the boring, standard Isekai magic user plot beats, like having a power level that defies measurement. He's only a month old... somehow... is that normal? Basically, this is Ichiban Ushiro no Daimaou if Sai Akuto had actually lived up (or down) to the joke in his name (that he's the ultimate evil) or The Irregular at Magic High School if Shiba didn't have the emotional range of a cress sandwich. Like Monster Musume no Oisha-san, this is borrowing so heavily from other titles that it feels more like a form letter than a story. I'd score it even lower than Oisha-san, since there's no sign of an actual plot here... just an overpowered main character stomping on anyone who crosses him.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    So... the big guy without a mean bone in his body who just wants everyone to have fun?
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, when you said it was connected to a planned book that got shut down... that made it pretty much a slam dunk it was Roger's project. I think we're about a decade past the point where anyone should care. That book that Roger was planning never had any realistic chance of seeing the light of day with Harmony Gold's exclusive rights to MOSPEADA outside of Japan. A lot of that stuff is already published in various other artbooks anyway. Might as well let it stand with a healthy chorus of "and f*ck Harmony Gold".
  15. Seto Kaiba
    It does appear to be highly plausible speculation, if nothing else... it also seems to have kind of helped the arms stay in alignment in Armo-Fighter mode. I'm pretty sure everyone here knows who you're talking about and why the book was "shut down"... Roger Harkavy, the man behind the so-called "Imai Files". It's not much of a secret anymore. Harmony Gold stonewalled his plans to publish the Imai archival material he'd obtained and then handed it all over to Palladium Books, where that material was used as the basis for the last (filler-heavy) Robotech role-playing game supplement book they published before their license was revoked. It's suspected that material will make its way into UDON Entertainment's next Robotech Visual Archive artbook... if they ever actually publish it. The closest he ever got to official acknowledgement was a one-line on the title page of Palladium's UEEF Marines Sourcebook that simply credits him for "IMAI Files and Translation". His handle was just "Roger". His last forum activity date was April 18th of last year, though his last post was apparently back around the end of March of '09 after a short suspension for repeated off-topic posting. I could swear I recall him posting more recently, but either my memory is faulty or the posts were lost in one of MW's occasional server issues.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    USS Cerritos? It feels like tempting fate to name the ship after the suburban LA hometown of the guy who founded the Golden Raspberry Awards. I actually feel a little embarrassed on behalf of the people who made that. Lower Decks is trying so goddamn hard to be Rick and Morty: Star Trek Edition... and that's kind of pathetic, in a LOT of different ways.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    This season's new offerings don't seem to be off to a great start. I started Monster Musume no Oisha-san over lunch today, and... y'know that "copy your homework" meme that goes "just change it up a bit so it doesn't look obvious you copied"? The best way I can sum up this show is "that, for Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou". The protagonist, Glenn Leitbeit, is a young doctor who recently opened a clinic specializing in monster care... and while he doesn't look a thing like the main guy from Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou, he's basically the only one who doesn't look like they were lifted right out of Okayado's manga. Six minutes into episode 1 and we've already got off-brand versions of several members of the MonMusu cast including the clingy jealous lamia girl (who is, in this case, Glenn's de facto nurse) and the blonde centaur princess-knight with the giant rack who immediately decides that the main character is her one-and-only because he's not a musclebound jerk. It is, at least, somewhat less fanservice-heavy than Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou... though they still did manage to make shoeing a centaur sound creepy and sexual. It's not bad per se, it's just painfully unoriginal. Right now, 4/10... we'll see if it actually develops into something worth watching the way To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts did. The next new offering I'm going to have a look at is The Misfit of Demon King Academy... which seems to by holding The Irregular at Magic High School down and stealing its lunch money.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    I guess that's only to be expected, given that the Monogram GoBots kit for Leader-1 WAS the Imai Kagaku AFC-01Z Zeta Legioss kit. When Imai ran into financial trouble in the mid-80's after the success of their Macross kits wasn't replicated by later licenses like Orguss, MOSPEADA, Southern Cross, and Galvion, they sold off a lot of their tooling. Bandai bought a lot of it, but Monogram picked up some of their MOSPEADA molds. That's where their Leader-1 and CY-KILL models came from. I know a lot of Robotech fans lament that the first strike missiles were never in the actual show... given that one of the accusations frequently leveled at the design was a lack of longer-ranged weapons that could be brought to bear before being close enough to the Inbit/Invid to exchange rude hand gestures through the canopy glass. (Even Titan Comics was taking the piss out of the Legioss design in the short-lived Remix comic.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    So... I did a little digging and found the answer in Entertainment Archive #8: MOSPEADA Complete Art Works. This missile pod wasn't designed for the Genesis Climber MOSPEADA anime... it was specifically developed for the show's merchandise lines. To be precise, this missile pod and those "first strike" missiles mounted under the intake were created by Artmic for Imai's line of transforming Legioss plamodels. I've heard the missile pod was at least partly intended to be a structural cheat to make the Imai kit's armo-fighter mode more stable, though the book doesn't say anything about the reason Imai wanted it. They may have just wanted a gimmick Gakken's toys didn't have. This one, on the other hand... ... was used in episode 20, though only to launch fireworks for Mint's birthday.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well... that was a waste of time. Love Tyrant tried to grow a plot in its last two episodes, and it's pretty much complete crap. Easily one of the worst shows I've watched this year. Guri just arbitrarily disappears for most of an episode and turns into a demon for some contrived reason the show forgets to actually explain, and somehow it's all Seiji's fault? It comes out of nowhere, has virtually no impact on the characters, and even the main cast don't really seem all that invested in it as a plot device. You can't even relate to the show's antagonist, who they literally devote a flashback to explaining has no actual motive for being evil... she's just like that. Even the literal devil thinks she's pointlessly over-the-top. There's not even any resistance when the characters go to hell to bring Guri back... they just walk right in and literally nobody attempts to stop them. There's no drama, or intrigue, or even a bad joke to go out on... the whole thing is sorted out in the space of half an episode and that's it. (I do appreciate that Hell in Love Tyrant is apparently an extradimensional metropolitan Tokyo office district full of burned out demon salarymen lamenting the constant long hours and late nights they're forced to work by their humorless, married-to-the-job, workaholic boss.) Glad I'm done with it, and equally glad I'll never have to watch it again.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... nah, most of that stuff wouldn't be "done" if you're talking a higher-quality remake of the original show, even if it's shot-for-shot. Higher quality modern animation means the production committee and studio are going to want to modernize the character, mechanical, background, and prop designs to make it look more appealing to modern audiences. Likewise, they're going to want to either re-record the original BGM in higher fidelity or outright replace it with new arrangements of those songs more suited to modern tastes. Minmay's songs would likely get the same treatment, either re-recorded with new arrangements or at least re-mixed to sound more modern. They'd also likely subject the original dialog tracks to another round of remastering and digital cleanup to bring them up to modern standards too. The refined designs would mean new, more detailed designs for model kits, toys, statues, etc. so the merchandising would have to update. That said, I doubt anyone would approve a shot-for-shot remake... they'd want to throw in continuity nods and so on, like when Zero was re-released and they digitally added Sheryl's earrings to a scene or two to connect it up to Frontier.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it's not really a connotation issue, it's more a question of certain sources like that Wikipedia article using the term loosely or incorrectly. The actual definition of a red light district is a part of an urban area (city, town, etc.) with a high concentration of brothels and other sex-related businesses... either by natural pressure or by an official classification of the area as an effort to contain that kind of business away from more respectable neighborhoods. Kabukichō did at one point honestly deserve to be called a red light district, but it hasn't really fit the bill since the so-called Kabukichō Renaissance that started back in 2004. Tokyo's governor, the National Police Agency, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police made a big push to shut down whole categories of businesses allegedly connected to organized crime as an opening move in the redevelopment of the area. The various flavors of not-technically-a-brothel sex shops that skirted the limits of Japan's ban on prostitution were the main targets of that purge. So it's not really a red light district anymore because what remains of that activity has largely gone underground. Admittedly in the cases of a number of types of businesses like soaplands and pink salons, this is kind of a case of exact words rules lawyer-ing... Yeah, but good luck getting it past the broadcast standards people with that argument. That's why the ONLY mentions of anything even remotely close are confined to passing references in My Fair Minmay and Perfect Memory. Well, the real-world UN doesn't exist in Macross after 2001... it drafted the constitution for the Earth Unification Government and acted as the provisional Unification Government until the formal start-of-business for it... Mind you, five of the six major powers behind the formation of the UN Government have outright bans on prostitution and the sixth has a ban on organized prostitution. It's not the French who are the liberal ones there, it's the Brits weirdly enough.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Love Tyrant is... well, it's certainly a thing that exists. As a parody of the harem genre, it's fairly entertaining and there's some freaking weird cases of showing their work like Guri's boss being a Seraphim correctly drawn as a disembodied face with six wings, but I'm not sure I'm all that invested in the actual story, as there doesn't seem to really be a coherent plot thread.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I sincerely doubt that that claim is true. For starters, no translator with a brain is going to agree to work for a flat rate per episode. Episode lengths vary anywhere from eight minutes to nearly an hour, and depending on the show and its writers you could end up with almost no dialog or you could be emptying entire dustbins of exposition into the horrified faces of the audience like Hideo Kojima. They've got to be invoicing by the character or by the word, the same as any professional translator. Otherwise they wouldn't even be making the federal minimum wage. They could take the language proficiency they have any go to any of thousands of corporations and get exponentially superior pay. There's gotta be a zero or two missing there... the average rate for a professional translation of something like a novel can easily exceed $80 a page. At my day job, I've had to have a number of technical documents translated from Japanese, Chinese, or French into English or vice versa, and that usually runs around $200 a page... but I've had jobs quoted as high as twice that for complex or time-sensitive work. (On a lark, I had two different services I've done business with before write me quotes on what it'd cost to do a volume of Master File. 128 pages? About $25,000 just for translation of the text... no typesetting or anything. The translator's making around $35-$40/hr on that transaction once operating overhead is taken out.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    On a per-variant basis, that's probably correct... the issue I'm getting at is the VF-25 has something like 2-3x the number of variants that usually in service concurrently in any one place. Unless they're in the middle of a transition/upgrade, you'd expect to see just two fighter-role variants at a time... a single-seater and tandem cockpit version of the same specification as we see in the real world on the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18. The VF-4 had the VF-4A/B, and VF-11 had the A/B/C and D types, the VF-19 had the A/B and C/D types, it's speculated the VF-17 had this with its A/B type, the VF-25 has it with its A/B (and in Master File C/D), the VF-31 has it with A/B, etc.
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