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Seto Kaiba

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Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... when you see it, it's sometimes nice to know you're not going insane when the bought-and-paid-for entertainment media are busy gaslighting you on the studio's behalf or telling you you HAVE to like it or you're a racist, sexist, baby-eating nazi velociraptor thinly disguised as a human being. Unrelated: The latest round of leaks from the premiere are a pretty mixed, but mostly negative bag. I hope a lot of it isn't true, like the Rise of the Machines backstory.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... I think the point you'll find a lot of us making is that if that's the only way for someone familiar with the franchise to enjoy the show, something is very badly wrong with the creative process. We'd like to go cherrypicking at cherry farms, not open landfills... you see? To be brutally frank, when it comes to new Star Trek it's more along the lines of "this show is so unapologetically awful and loathed so uniformly among the majority of fans that the assumption is that anyone seriously defending it is probably taking the piss". Yeah, that's about the shape of it. Star Trek: Picard is, on the face of it, a larger-scale version of the same bait-and-switch ploy that CBS tried and failed at in Star Trek: Discovery's second season with Christopher Pike, Spock, and the Enterprise. We all know how that showed promise for an episode or two, then immediately deteriorated into an even worse mess than the first season had been. When Star Trek: Picard was initially announced, we were immediately suspicious that this was another very poorly thought-out concept intended to bait fans back into the franchise not through quality storytelling or a return to the idealistic future that made Star Trek a cross-generational icon of sci-fi, but through a lazy attempt to manipulate us through our nostalgia for real Star Trek to get us to watch another poorly-conceived, bleak, dystopian attempt to turn Star Trek into a generic space war series. Every press piece and leak from the production has just further confirmed what we already suspected it'd be... with Patrick Stewart himself stepping up to administer the coup de grace by confirming that that was EXACTLY what it was going to be. At this point, CBS is so heavily invested in garbage Trek that we won't be free of it for a long time. They know it isn't popular, since they've seen Netflix take a hard pass on Star Trek: Picard and slash Star Trek: Discovery's budget due to the show underperforming worldwide, and they've seen their licensees complain about Star Trek: Discovery not selling worth a damn and also took a pass on the Star Trek: Picard license. CBS is never going to admit fault and try to course-correct though, because it foolishly allowed Star Trek: Discovery's showrunners to spend like mad on development with little oversight and allowed them to go even wilder with the money Netflix put up to do the production work. They've indirectedly indicated they're over a hundred million dollars upside-down on Discovery alone due to that overspending, and the only hope they have of ever recovering that investment is for the series to take off like mad, run for at least seven seasons, and make megabucks in merchandising the way TNG, DS9, and VOY did. Star Trek: Picard is their attempt to trick fans back on board in the hopes that they'll warm up to Star Trek: Discovery too in the process, so the merchandise will finally sell and they can start cleaning up that red ink. I suspect they'll continue doubling down on it until someone on the board yanks their leash and calls a halt to it or Star Trek goes bust again. My suspicion is they're going to be unsatisfied with Star Trek: Picard very quickly too, when it becomes obvious that this new and depressing Jean-Luc Picard isn't appealing to fans and that the other returning characters were glorified cameos. ... this sounds more like something only a replicator malfunction could produce.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    So, no surprises... the language is pretty much exactly as expected, Big West is asserting its rights as owner of the intellectual property and franchise, and Harmony Gold's pro forma appeal of the registration is not going to go anywhere.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Bokutachi wa Benkyō ga Dekinai got stale surprisingly fast. At a bit less than halfway into the second season, the plots of individual episodes have become so repetitive that even the show's characters have not only started to notice but actively predict what's going to happen. The episode I just finished was a rote copy of a season one episode. Like, every single plot point repeated verbatim... and Nariyuki acknowledges it. The first half of the same episode was another recycled plot involving an accidental inappropriate clothing gift.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Wasn't Vader's a competely different ace/custom model?
  6. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC that's basically the first thing that's ever said about them in A New Hope. (Just checked, yes... Obi-wan says it right after they come out of hyperspace in the Alderaan system.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    I dunno, considering how many "worthy foe" and "not so different" moments Picard had with various Romulan leaders over the years he seems like the kind of person they might actually respect... except for that whole "quit Starfleet to become ambassador to Vulcan" thing.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... what I was trying to illustrate there is that really, any way you shake it, the biggest problem with trying to fit Discovery into Star Trek isn't anything to do with continuity. The biggest problem - and the reason Discovery can never be Star Trek - is that it's so fundamentally at odds with the ethics, morals, and values underpinning Gene Roddenberry's vision of a brighter future that every previous Star Trek work is built on that all we can do is marvel at how horrible it is. Instead of rebuking racism, sexism, and xenophobia, it practically puts them on pedistals and tries to make virtues of them. Even if we look at it as in-universe fiction, that's still grounds for a HUGE "What the f*ck?!". The problem is, the more you think about it, the more it becomes evident it's a "square peg, no hole" problem.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, I'm not sure that's actually better... it might actually be worse. I mean, if we assume that Star Trek: Discovery was a work of in-universe fiction then we're left with the awkward question of when this was written and for whom. Never mind all of the blatant historical inaccuracies like technology that wouldn't be available for another hundred years or the Klingons launching an invasion that history says never happened, what about the story as a whole frankly oozing racism and xenophobia towards the Klingon Empire? Discovery not only gets most of the Klingon religion and culture wrong, it basically depicts the entire Klingon species as half-bestial cannibalistic thugs who cheerfully betray oaths at the drop of a hat. Then there's all the rampant misandry, the blatant disrespect towards one two of Starfleet's greatest heroes and one of the greatest Federation diplomats who ever lived, and Starfleet turning a blind eye to - or even rewarding - massive breaches of ethics like the indefinite detention and torture of a newly encountered lifeform to power an experimental stardrive or an attempted genocide on the Klingon homeworld. When would there have been an audience for this kind of thing, in-universe? Star Trek: Discovery would basically be an ultranationalist, xenophobic, sexist work of fiction. This is like a Federation version of the Turner Diaries. It only narrowly averts that course at the very end of the first season when Burnham has a change of heart about attempting to blow Qo'nos the f*ck up. Starfleet didn't tolerate racism, even towards the citizens of hostile powers, way back in 2266 during the height of the Klingon Cold War and the renewal of tensions with the Romulan Star Empire. Kirk himself snapped one young Lieutenant back for voicing racist sentiments about the Romulans way back then, and even Kirk's own sentiments about the Klingons in 2293 (Star Trek VI: the Undiscovered Country) were explicitly handled as values dissonance and grounds for repeated "what the hell, hero?" moments, with the only people who shared those views being the film's antagonists. It certainly wouldn't fly later on in the 24th century of Picard, Sisko, and Janeway. I'm sure Star Trek: Picard, which is from the same pack of cack-handed twits, will be freighted with all kinds of unfortunate implications... though they seem to have left fly with a few right off the bat like the indefinite detention and inhumane medical experiments on captured Borg, and so on, and Starfleet having essentially left the Romulans to die in the events which kicked off the Kelvin timeline.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that's one reason that video piracy is on the rise again... now that every content creator is trying to launch their own dedicated streaming service, the streaming market's so fragmented that the cost to the consumer is growing exponentially. So many of these junk streaming services like CBS All Access, Disney+, and HBO Now are propped up by a single big-budget show that emphatically isn't worth the monthly subscription cost, but they're counting on devoted fans to prop up what would otherwise be an unsustainable business model. I tried CBS All Access, and found it so offensively bad in terms of service quality that I dropped it pretty much right away. With the current state of Star Trek as a new breed of mindless trash TV, I'm not sure I'll even bother to pirate Star Trek: Picard. The entire premise sounds f*cking awful, and it's building off material we already know is awful.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Will such a thing exist? The Amazon-owned media are already going hard and fast attacking Star Trek fans for not being keyed up about Star Trek: Picard. It's a similar version of the trick Disney tried with The Last Jedi, trying to brand critics as racists and sexists.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no. CBS got Netflix to fund production of Star Trek: Discovery in exchange for the exclusive rest-of-world distribution rights to the series. So Netflix carries the series practically everywhere except the United States, where it's only available through CBS's proprietary CBS All Access streaming service. Netflix's discontent with the sluggish viewership numbers of the series in overseas markets and CBS's own exaggerations of viewership and CBS All Access subscription numbers were a big part of what prompted Netflix to consider withdrawing from funding the series last year, and the reduced budget for season three. (CBS reportedly resorted to threatening to sue Netflix if it withdrew from funding the series, claiming that by backing out Netflix would be responsible for CBS's lost investment in developing the series.) CBS struck a similar deal with Amazon to get Star Trek: Picard funded. Amazon Prime carries it in most markets, but US customers have to have a CBS All Access subscription to view the series. Mind you, some feature content is missing in select markets. The "Short Treks" are apparently only available in select markets outside the US due to low interest (according to CBS).
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Let's not, and say we did. I've seen nothing to convince me that Star Trek: Picard isn't more of the same cancer that Discovery represents. I can only hope that Amazon won't bow to pressure from CBS to renew despite sh*tty viewership the way Netflix did. It seems CBS's new approach to keep its shows funded is to threaten to sue any investors who try to bail after a project obviously fails.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    To be honest, inexplicably absent redundant safety measures are such a common sci-fi trope that general audiences have kind of a blind spot regarding them... something that's no doubt only exacerbated by the galaxy far far away clearly being a setting which has no OSHA equivalent given that unsigned bottomless pits with no or minimal guard rails abound in everything from power plants on up to moon-sized battle stations. How many injuries or fatalities have occurred in sci-fi stories because things like seatbelts and door handles are apparently lost technologies? So, like cars? Go offroading and bounce all over hell's half-acre with no damage, then clip a curb in city driving a rack up a couple hundred dollars in wheel damage...
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, Robotech had a shorter lifespan than an antivaxxer's kid... its midlife crisis was decades ago. What Titan's doing is more like the late night History Channel specials where they talk about the Nazis had a covert army of occult ninja zombie cyborg pirates who used the pyramids in Egypt as a place to park their UFOs. Just making crap up because everyone involved is too dead to sue them.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    So, as often as the Millennium Falcon breaks down, Luke was right that it was a piece of junk? I guess it's not that surprising, given that the galaxy far far away has been an interstellar civilization for thousands and thousands of years... they'd have had plenty of time to refine the technology for space travel to improve its overall safety.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    You're supposed to... she's meant to be awful, as a comedic counterpart to Shiraishi. She's the embodiment of that gap between how idols act when the camera's on them vs. in private.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, it got me reading the TVTropes pages for H.P. Lovecraft and some of his more iconic works that get referenced in Crawl up! Nyaruko-san. The series drops a LOT of references to the Call of Cthulhu RPG too. Since I'm feeling cruddy and working partly from home today, I've started a new series after finishing Crawl up! Nyaruko-san. I was in the mood for something light, so I went for We Can't Study! (Bokutachi wa Benkyō ga Dekinai). It seems fairly cute, one episode in.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    "Slowly". About two months after SDCon, I got an unasked-for promotion that about tripled my workload at my day job in the short term. I ended up with a lot less time to devote to the hobby while I was grappling with my new responsibilities and trying to get on top of everything my predecessor left unfinished and undocumented. I finally got everything back onto an even keel right before the Christmas break, so now I'm playing catch-up on development. We've broken (metaphorical) ground on the site design after a good deal of debate about how it's going to look, and now it's mostly coding the layouts. The easy part comes after that: populating the pages with articles and translations. The moral of the story is that having rare and difficult-to-replace skills is great for contract negotiations and job security, but horrible for your health and peace of mind if vacancies on your team are nearly impossible to fill with qualified candidates. Unlike the post-war New UN Government, I can't just clone my way out of a skills shortage.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, kinda... though the Macross 7 PLUS "Spiritia Dreaming" version of the VF-14 (which may or may not appear in Macross Plus in a background shot) has an even better claim to being a "super-advanced YF-12" given that it IS ONE in a more stringently literal sense.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Presumably part of the same cluster of fleets as the Macross Nandemo, Macross Dokodemo, and Macross Dunsel.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yeah... that's the conclusion that the Star Trek fanbase reached after Star Trek: Discovery came out and revealed itself to be an atrocious mess almost entirely unlike the Star Trek fans had known and loved for six previous TV series and ten feature films. CBS (or as viewers have it, "See? BS!") is adamant that what they call Star Trek's "Prime" universe is the same universe and timeline that all pre-Abrams Star Trek works belong to. It's one of many failed efforts to make Star Trek: Discovery more palatable to fans, after fans were rejecting the series before it even aired because of the obvious continuity-f*ckery. Much like how Paramount had to do an awful lot of backpedaling after fans picked up on their intention of treating Star Trek 2009 as a franchise reboot and rushed to insist it was just an alternate universe story in the hopes of not losing their audience. So, at the very least, the official line is that the "Prime" universe is the official canon one of old. They've written a number of their tie-ins for Star Trek: Discovery on the basis of that as well, like having some members of Discovery's crew involved in the arrest of Governor Kodos ("the Executioner") from TOS. Bringing in the Enterprise along with Captain Pike, Number One, and Spock was a move intended to reinforce that line as well. Its cup already runneth over with stupid fanfic-y bullsh*t. I think the best example is right in the trailer, with career stoic Seven of Nine blasting away with a phaser rifle in each hand like she's assimilated the memories of John f*cking Rambo. An isolationist, regressive Federation ripe for all kinds of gritty edgelord bullsh*t narratives? A bunch of main characters "going rogue". Patrick Stewart's said he's got political motivations for setting the story up this way, but TBH the point he's trying to make the what they did with the setting are headed in two completely different directions.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Thought the last news we'd heard was that they were going all the way back to the foundation of the Jedi order?
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Other than the Macross-7, no... it's too blurry to read the names. They're probably later (4th or 5th Gen) fleets if they've got names instead of just numbers though. There are a LOT of the New Macross-class emigrant ships. At least 29 of them given that 29 was the highest-mentioned number for one in an official Macross production (Macross the Musiculture, a stage musical).
  25. Seto Kaiba
    One thing I've always suspected is that the VF-4 would be pretty amazing at extreme high-altitude interception. It's got the engine power to climb like a beast as soon as it gets up to a speed suitable for turning the ramjets on, and it can swap from those to the rockets when it gets above the atmospheric service limitation. According to the available original line art, yes. According to Variable Fighter Master File, yes. According to the various model kits made over the years, yes. How many? Well, that's a matter of opinion. Depending on which source you consult, the VF-4 Lightning III has either six or eight underwing pylon stations. The line art shows eight, two inboard and two outboard of the engine nacelle on either side of the aircraft. Master File also shows eight (two inboard two outboard) in most configurations. Many of the model kits only show six, usually two outboard and one inboard. Master File's version and the old line art differ on one key point... the Musasiya line art sheets show the inboard pylons in a side-by-side layout with all eight pylons in one row, where Master File shows the inboard pair as fore and aft stations equidistant from the centerline and nacelle.
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