Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12922

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    That's why I gently discourage people from abbreviating my username "SK"... it tends to give people entirely the wrong idea. Tried changing my handle on a few websites ten years or so ago, but people complained so I had to change it back. The perils of internet notoriety combined with an embarrassing screen name I chose on the spur of the moment when I was a freshman in high school. No, I don't think we've ever been in the same room... but I guarantee you'll have no trouble telling us apart given that I'm about twenty-five years younger, a bit taller, and rather more Scandinavian.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Based on what's been said by ViacomCBS reps, they're planning to merge CBS's CBS All Access with Viacom's PlutoTV and several other token or as-of-yet unrealized streaming service plans for Nickelodeon, BET, MTV, and Comedy Central to create a single unified ViacomCBS streaming service that can more readily compete with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. No word on what they plan to call it or when they plan to actually do it, but they've been talking about it since February.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So... Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time... Unsurprisingly, this seems to be yet another low quality, one cour, half-length TV anime that exists almost exclusively for ecchi fanservice that's occasionally played for comedy. All of what passes for exposition is front-loaded into a minute or so before the OP in the first episode. Peter Grill is a knight in Generic Western Fantasy Land #3263827, who'd just become the first human to win the "world's strongest warrior" tournament in over 150 years and now that he's officially the World's Strongest Man every monster girl around wants to ride his pocket Zaku for the sake of having strong children. Peter, of course, already has a painfully sheltered love interest and wants exactly none of this. Lather, rinse, repeat the same one f*cking joke of him being cornered by an (occasionally literally) horny monster girl ad nauseam in Double Standards: Female on Male Sexual Assault: the Series! The OP inexplicably reminded me of a scene from Excel Saga where they're introducing Misaki and she demands to know why they've stopped the camera tilt where they did, focusing on her "assets" and leaving her face out of the frame. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Studio Wolfsbane did a pretty crap job animating it as well. 0/10... if you're going to take a hard pass on one series this season, make it Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of... there was a macguffin in Macross VF-X2 called a hyperspace resonance crystal lens that had very similar properties to fold quartz, and was established to actually be fold quartz in the Macross Frontier TV novelization. It was discovered in 2043, and was said to be the key to next-generation fold communication and fold navigation technology and the focus of a number of military development programs including Die Zauberflöte, a next-gen fold communications transmitter that became the basis of the Jamming Sound System that was the big bad's trump card. The Macross Frontier novelization connected the two by revealing that Die Zauberflöte's creator, the Critical Path Corporation, bankrolled the 117th Research Fleet's mission into Vajra space. EDIT: There is a very brief mention of Die Zauberflöte in Macross Delta as well, as part of the support system created to assist Heinz in broadcasting his fold song interstellar distances.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... IIRC, in Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye we see Ranka working a rally for asteroid miners preparing to start work on an asteroid that'd been towed into formation with the fleet. Well, it likely helps that these ships have sophisticated gravity control systems they can use to cheat down their inertial mass to make their engines more effective. They likely don't actually need proportionally huge amounts of raw thrust to do the same job because they have the internal space and power generation ability to support large-scale manipulation of gravity and inertia. (Otherwise it'd take hundreds of millions of kilonewtons of thrust to produce even 1G of acceleration for a ship like Battle Frontier.) Island 1, the main habitat module of the Macross Frontier, was 15km long and 2km tall, training a string of more than twenty 8km x 3km Island modules... and of course that doesn't count Battle Frontier at the front. You mean SDF-05 Megaroad-04? The Megaroad-04 discovered Windermere IV when it ran into the fold faults surrounding/protecting the planet and subsequently landed there and made first contact with the locals, who subsequently joined the New UN Government. Beyond that, we don't know what became of the ship. He survived. Alto and the Vajra Queen that had been forcibly merged with the Battle Frontier escaped by space fold before they could be destroyed by the incoming fire from the Macross Cannons of the Macross Quarter-class ships coming to reinforce the Macross Frontier fleet. One of the illustrations in the Macross Frontier: Sheryl Nome Final Visual Collection book purports to be a picture of Alto and Sheryl being reunited after the events of the movies.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    In what I'm sure by now sounds like me warming to a theme... it does kinda depend on the quality of the fold system, how far you're folding, and the conditions in higher-dimensional space. (This is, of course, partly an excuse for space folding in Macross being an example of "speed of plot" travel.) Under ideal conditions or over short distances, folding is said to be nearly instantaneous even as recently as Macross Frontier. It's when you go from dozens of light years to hundreds or thousands of light years that you start having to spend significant amounts of time in fold space. Admittedly, one thing that's been retconned is how severe the disparity between subject and objective time in fold is. Back in SDF Macross, Misa asserted it was basically a 1:240 relationship with 1 hour in higher dimension space equaling about 10 days in our normal three dimensions. Macross Chronicle was the first to kind of walk that back, and assert the actual disparity is a lot less in practice and that it's been getting smaller as fold tech improves. Fold faults, introduced in Frontier, became the go-to excuse for a near-instant fold becoming a far longer flight that had a time loss of over a week. Less than an hour, according to Misa's watch... we don't know what the subjective time for Isamu's fold jump to Earth was. We do know that, for an old model commercial fold system the Earth-Eden run was an 18-24 hour objective time run (presumably a high time error due to a primitive low-quality fold system). The interior of the starliner in question is set up like an ordinary jumbo jet's, so presumably the passengers only subjectively experienced a few hours of flight at most. (There was one piece in one of those magazine-exclusive design article features in the early 2000s that suggested that a VF-19 with a fold booster and proper flight clearances could go from wheels up on Eden to wheels down on Earth in under two hours objective time... reducing the time commitment to travel interstellar to the same category as intercity commuter flights.) By the time of Macross Frontier, even fold jumps of hundreds of light years seem to be little worse than a standard airline flight is today. Oh, you wouldn't be spending that entire time or even a significant portion of it in fold space. The reason it took Megaroad-04 ten years to get to the Brisingr globular cluster was that you're folding that massive distance in lots of shorter jumps of a few hundred to maybe a thousand light years at a time, then spending weeks or even months charting nearby star systems and mining valuable resources from nearby asteroids, before making the next hour or two-long jump to the next point a thousand light years or so away and doing it all again. The amount of energy required to fold such a massive distance in one go would be gargantuan, far more than any ship could generate. Even in a pinch, it can take hours to fully recharge a fold system for a new long-range jump with full generator resources committed (as in Macross 7, where it took 7 hours to fully recharge City-7's fold system at the fastest possible speed after the Varauta forces hijacked it). (This is why emigrant ships are designed to operate independently for decades, recycling their waste and mining fresh resources from systems they pass that don't contain habitable worlds. And also why they're designed to be nice places to live... you're gonna be there for a while.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, I haven't sampled the light novels for Monster Musume no Oisha-san or Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha yet... so you have a point in that I have not read those two specific light novels yet. I was speaking more generally, since there's been an increase in the number of anime series adapted from light novels over the last couple years. There are a couple isolated cases where the show demonstrably suffers because of material from the light novel that was cut in the adaptation process (e.g. Yōjo Senki or The Irregular at Magic High School), but it's vastly more common for the TV anime's flaws to be bad writing that was faithfully carried over from the source material (e.g. KonoSuba, TenSura). Granted, a light novel that's got a half-dozen volumes or more is going to have more time to develop its story than a twelve episode TV anime... but my criticisms weren't about the as-of-yet unanswered questions in the stories. Most of what I mentioned was how obviously derivative Monster Musume no Oisha-san and Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha are. It's like the authors weren't even trying to disguise whose homework they were copying. It's really spectacularly blatant in Monster Musume no Oisha-san... the promotional materials even feature the same group of standard light fantasy monsters as Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou, and it's so far we're batting 1000 for them having the same defining character traits and personalities. It's just less fanservice-y... or I should say less overtly fanservice-y. If the stories develop in an interesting direction I'll excuse an awful lot... it's just such blatant plagiarism does nothing to rope me in, y'know? TBH, I think the art style is distinct enough... especially since the character designer for Oisha-san seems to not have Okayado's ginormous boob fetish. KonoSuba was good for about one and a half seasons of the anime, or around 4 volumes of the light novel. Past that point, it gets samey really REALLY quick because the author of the light novel apparently thought character development might hinder the one joke the series has. So every since volume of the light novel after they defeat Vanir starts in exactly the same place, with Kazuma having fallen back into his hikikomori lifestyle with approximately half the volume spent trying to get him off his arse. Next up in my list of this season's new offerings is Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time. This one actually has a freaking content warning on it on Crunchyroll, so I am not hopeful that it'll be watchable.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    They probably had a falling out after Myung complained about him bringing his YF-19 dakimakura to bed.
  9. 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.
  10. 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.
  11. 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.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Not gonna lie, my first reaction was "rebranding the sequel trilogy already?"... but this might be marginally better.
  17. 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.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Here... the link you copied was from the "Report this post" button.
  19. 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.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    So... the big guy without a mean bone in his body who just wants everyone to have fun?
  21. 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".
  22. 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.
  23. 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.
  24. 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.
  25. 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.)
×
×
  • Create New...