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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    IIRC, didn't Disney's execs say that the Star Wars movie franchise was going on hiatus after The Rise of Skywalker a bit ago? It sounds like the next move is to back away from Star Wars a bit to avoid oversaturating the market they way they've been doing.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I think that Star Wars's only way forward is to go anywhere that isn't contemporary to the existing trilogy of trilogies... go forwards, backwards, up and a bit to the left, ANYWHERE but in the vicinity of Episodes 1-9. That part of Star Wars has worn out its welcome in a big way thanks to the sequel trilogy. Put a couple centuries of distance between Star Wars and the Skywalker family's affairs. That Old Republic movie trilogy sounds like a good way to do that. My suspicion is that The Mandalorian will wear out the limited utility of its premise fairly quickly and Disney'll either cancel it after a season or two or they'll cling to the series as a Disney+ flagship and ride it down until it's as beloved as Solo: a Star Wars Story like CBS is doing with Star Trek: Discovery.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Rapidly closing in on the ending of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Golden Wind... and holy sh*t there are a lot of reveals piling up on each other.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Kinda what I meant about "too big to fail". It's the finale of the Star Wars main series of movies, so people'll preorder tickets and pile into theaters with reckless abandon to see it just because of what it is... utterly without regard for quality. The side stories don't have the same protection.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Then, for a change, we'll hear the same crowd complaining about how The Rise of Skywalker was too big to fail and turned a profit despite being sh*t simply because it was Star Wars. (Which will, for once, be something that's pretty easy to prove.)
  6. Seto Kaiba
    At least through the end of this film, it would appear that James Bond is still Daniel Craig. Frankly, I find him so appallingly bad in the role that I'll accept practically anything as long as it replaces him. There was talk for a while there that Idris Elba would be the next Bond, which'd be a nice reward for slogging through all the terrible roles he's been stuck with in the last decade. Prior to the James Bond soft reboot with Casino Royale, there was that fairly popular theory that James Bond was an inherited alias for the 007 codename to justify the differences in Bonds throughout the years.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    So instead of the Ewok jamboree, this movie's going to have beach volleyball?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    I know, right? Finn spent a good chunk of the first movie wandering around in Poe's clothes.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Almost certainly not, it was just a terrible joke on my part.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Brokeback Star Destroyer? I'm still inclined to suspect that Disney backed down from a ReyxFinn romance subplot for fear of a racist backlash, leading to the introduction of Rose as a replacement so they could pair Rey and Poe or Rey and Kylo. That said, Finn and Poe do seem to have quite the bromance going on there though.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    As of yet, still an unverified rumor... and an unfounded one, if Executive Producer Barbara Broccoli has her way. It seems to have gained a small amount of credence because of Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig voicing support for the idea of a female Bond in the future, and No Time to Die being tipped as Daniel Craig's final film as James Bond. There does appear to be a grain of truth at the heart of it, though, given the content of the first trailer for No Time to Die. Lashara Lynch's character Nomi is a British 00 agent. Maybe not 007, but a 00 nonetheless. Given how poorly Terminator: Dark Fate and Charlie's Angels did at the box office, I have a feeling the character won't test well with general audiences if the dialog in the trailer is a fair representation of the character. Hollywood's recent infatuation with sh*t-talking "tough girl" leads seems to be burning itself out via a string of box office flops. Telling James Bond to "stay in [his] lane" would, for any other Bond, be foreshadowing that that person's going to die later when he hits them with his latest cool car. For a variety of reasons, including the board's rules, please leave your personal politics out of this. (And let's be honest, almost nobody anywhere on the political spectrum wants to see a female James Bond.) Standard equipment from Q branch, or whomever is responsible for corralling Bond's love interests these days.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Well, my bizarre adventure through David Production's adaptation of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure is almost at its end. I'm ten episodes from the end of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure Part V: Vento Aureo, and it's been a hell of a wild ride.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    To me, Daniel Craig's tenure as James Bond as a whole has felt eminently skippable. They're just... dull. Craig's Bond is just an utterly generic grizzled American action hero, who makes a few (incredibly forced) attempts to ape the dry wit and class of previous Bonds with little success because the actor has exactly one facial expression... staring into the middle distance like he can't remember if he left the oven on. Casino Royale is supposed to be a Bond origin story, but it removes so much of what makes film Bond iconic that it would probably be better if you took the James Bond name off of it altogether. I'll probably get No Time to Die when it hits home video, but I plan on skipping it in theaters as I did with Skyfall and Spectre.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    "Truth in television", as it were... both in terms of the bruised egos on the part of Henry Ford II and Enzo Ferrari, and in terms of the antagonism between Henry Ford II and Lee Iacocca. As Iacocca himself famously put it, "If a guy's over 25% jerk he's in trouble, and Henry was 95%."
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Since everything's digitally-animated these days, I dunno... maybe they can re-render stuff in 4K the way they'd do a new transfer from original reels.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    Not quite what I was getting at, but yeah... there is that aspect to it too. The last trailer and TV ad spots we've been seeing lately for The Rise of Skywalker feel like they belong to a movie where the producers know they have a turd on their hands, and used every good bit of the film in the promotional material in the hopes of getting as many butts in seats as possible during opening week before word can get around that it sucks and the box office revenue drops to practically nothing. That's not really something that you expect from a franchise like Star Wars, which until Solo: a Star Wars Story was considered essentially failure-proof. Really, I suspect the opposite... that the audience is going into The Rise of Skywalker so firmly convinced that it's going to suck that nothing will change their minds. After The Last Jedi went over like a neutron star matter balloon and Solo: a Star Wars Story landed in a broken heap with an almost audible splat, most Star Wars fans (and especially the YouTube gutter snipes) seem to be pretty convinced that Star Wars is Ruined Forever and are just bracing themselves for whatever knee-jerk idiocy J.J. Abrams pulls out of his hat to try to fix Kathleen Kennedy and Rian Johnson's compounding of his own mistakes. They're divided as to whether Abrams will fold or double down, but either way they're sure it's going to suck. I'm rather glad this movie comes out so late in December, because several of my coworkers are Star Wars fans and I won't have to hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth until after the new year so they'll have had a chance to get some of it out of their systems.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    At-home charging for BEVs is a bit of a sticky wicket right now, since most homes aren't wired to deliver more than 36 amps on a 240 volt branch (@50-60Hz). That's what all of the major charger standards are engineered around: SAE J1772 (US), IEC 62196 (Europe), and GB/T 20234.2 (China). Consequently, charging an electric vehicle is still a rather time-intensive operation. Using your garden variety American home electrical outlet at a nominal 120V 15A, you're looking at around 14 hours to recharge a 40kWh Li+ battery pack like those found on many PHEVs and light-duty BEVs. Something like a Tesla needs anywhere from 80 to 100 hours of charging from that same outlet to fully recharge a depleted pack (because their packs are 85kWh or 100kWh). Using a dedicated 240V charger, it's about 2 hours to recharge that 40kWh pack on a PHEV or light-duty BEV and between 9 and 11 hours to recharge the 85-100kWh pack of a BEV like the Tesla Model S. That's about the limit of what you can achieve with home charging right now. The twinned holy grails of BEV design are a battery pack with performance that won't deteriorate noticeably in cold weather (graphene!) and achieving a network of high-voltage DC current charging stations that can achieve near gas station-like "refueling" speed... so you can plug your car in, even in deepest midwinter, and be fully recharged in minutes instead of hours. SAE J1772 DC Level 1 fast charging is up to 450V at up to 80A and its gruntier Level 2 version can go up to 200A. DC Level 1 could charge something like that 40kWh pack in about 30 minutes, or the Tesla's 85-100kWh packs in a bit over 90 minutes. DC Level 2 could do that 40kWh pack in about 10 minutes and the 100kWh pack in about 30 minutes. That's a charger you're not going to want in your house though, because they're big and noisy and they require dedicated branch circuits that aren't normally built into a house. The ones I used when we were working on Phase III of the RAM 1500 PHEV (https://www.allpar.com/model/ram/electric-PHEV.html) for the USDoE were around the size of a vending machine and weren't exactly quiet with all the cooling fans and the big chunky contactors opening and closing. Newer models are slimmer and quieter, but they're still around a foot or two thick and six to seven feet tall with an operating noise like a restaurant-grade refrigerator. It's amazing stuff, and the idea of combining battery production with carbon capture and sequestration technologies really rubs me the right way. Turning pollution into batteries to store clean green energy? I am 200% ready for that sh*t. Yeah, kinda... though it's got more commercial applications than residential ones.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Well, there is... but graphene batteries are still in the process of being scaled up to a usable level for something as big as a PHEV or BEV. Ten years or so down the road, we could get there. Graphene's got a major advantage over lithium since graphene batteries aren't temperature sensitive, eliminating a major roadblock to PHEV and BEV adoption. Yes and no... the US electrical grid is pretty damn dilapidated, but the communications infrastructure necessary to support grid-friendly "smart" charging has actually been in place for a while now. It's the same communications tech many of the more efficient models of water heater, furnace, AC, etc. employ. (IEEE 802.15.4 or ZigBee, and SEP2.) I actually used to be in charge of the SAE interoperability and security panels for this stuff. The actual physical charging stations are stupid easy to install if your house has a 240V branch accessible and they're pretty damn cheap too. The main problem is inadequate capacity in the grid itself, not a lack of infrastructure or difficulty in installing the requisite infrastructure. Depends where you are. Sensible countries that are adopting high levels of renewables and energy sequestration systems can easily support fleets of electric cars without burning fossil fuels. The ones who've doubled down on supporting renewables with nuclear DEFINITELY can. The only reason America can't is because the coal lobby has part of congress by the balls.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Well, yes and no... as an engineer working forward model development, I can say (without breaking any NDAs) that you'll absolutely see more choice in electrification by 2023. That said, most of it is going to be in BSGs1, MHEVs2, and PHEVs3. You'll see a few more vehicle lines offering full BEVs4, but not many because the electrical grid here in the US just isn't ready for en masse adoption of 500V or 800V battery-electric cars and they're not as profitable due to the decrease in tax incentives to buy them in the last year or so. That will likely change with the next administration, though. If a hybrid truck or SUV would be on your radar, you may find yourself spoiled for choice by 2023. You probably heard Sergio Marchionne announcing before he passed that Jeep's entire lineup was going hybrid, and he bloody meant it. (That is literally my department.) Eh... you're 50% correct. We will absolutely see an increase in vehicle electrification in the coming years. Why? Because there is no f*cking way any automaker is going to meet the government-mandated fuel economy and emissions requirements for the next decade without going at least partially electric on most of their vehicle lines. ESPECIALLY for trucks and SUVs, which are not exactly the most fuel efficient of vehicles even under perfect world conditions. Autonomy is a stickier wicket. We'll likely see progress made towards universal adoption of SAE Level 1 and 2 autonomy features like lane stay and adaptive cruise control, but the Elongated Muskrat is living in a fantasy world if he thinks we're going to get workable Level 4 or 5 autonomy (true self-driving in all possible road conditions) anytime soon. There are just too many factors to be accounted for, the sheer level of sensor fusion and processing power necessary to make it workable just isn't practical for a consumer level car right now. SAE Level 4 or 5 autonomy might be workable in somewhere between twenty and fifty years on a consumer level, but definitely not in ten. Tesla's autopilot is a dangerously underequipped attempt at autonomy, which is why Teslas keep running into stationary objects (and why the government keeps riding the Muskrat's *ss about how unsafe it all is). Radar and ultrasonics just aren't enough to do it safely, you need high-precision cameras and LIDAR too. Autonomous taxi fleets will be a thing, but under rigidly controlled conditions in low speed environments like downtown areas in major cities where any speed collision caused by autonomous AI defect or meatbag failure will be easily survivable. Yeah, you'll likely end up with a hybrid... non-hybrid options are going to become something of an endangered species in the coming decade due to the aforementioned tightening CAFE and CARB requirements, and several European countries outright banning the sale of gasoline-only cars in coming decades. You'd probably have fun with a BEV minivan or D-SUV. Maximum torque available from 0rpm. That's beyond even the most optimistic assessments I've seen... but we may one day reach that point in the next fifty years or so. Right now, autonomous vehicle technology just isn't mature enough for that, no matter what the Elongated Muskrat might want to tell his customers. 1. Belt-mounted Starter Generator, for the more aggressive implementations of Auto-start/stop, the lowest-end MHEVs. 2. Low-voltage hybrids that contain one or more emotors to assist the gas engine, and utilize regenerative charging to refill their batteries. 3. High-voltage hybrids that contain one or more emotors that can either assist the gas engine or run independently of it, which use both regenerative charging and power from the grid to replenish the battery. 4. Battery Electric Vehicles, pure electric powertrains with no gas engine component.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that certainly... exists. The Rise of Skywalker doesn't feel like it's making much of an impact with these TV ad spots and trailers. This left the very distinct impression that this is going to be a bad movie, as the trailers are all action sequences with nothing to tease the story beyond the fact that this is the end.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Granted, but most militaries do accept extentuating circumstances if you're taken prisoner or so on... they don't exactly encourage you to do anything to save your skin, but they also don't actively encourage you to do anything in your power to get your *ss shot while being held prisoner. Odds are they do have something like that... which ties into my response to your second point. There probably was something similar to the monitoring station we saw on Snoke's ship that noticed even the momentary flicker in the ship's shields. The First Order, like the Empire before it, ingrains strict (blind) obedience to the military hierarchy into its troops in all divisions of the service. Shield Monitoring Mook A likely saw the shields going down, had a brief "WTF" moment, then saw it was a shield deactivation requested/ordered by Captain Phasma and assumed that if one of the First Order's most senior officers on base was requesting shield deactivation it must be some real sh*t well above their paygrade and questioned it no further. After all, it's not like the Empire or First Order ever encouraged subordinates to ask questions. Drawing attention from one of the most senior officers can be a distinctly unhealthy thing when the chain of command includes unstable psychopaths and magical space monks who can strangle you to death with their mind or chop you into bits with their laser sword with impunity. (I mean, a pair of First Order stormtroopers investigating a disturbance on the detention level at Starkiller Base not only don't investigate an open cell formerly holding a priority prisoner, they practically run away when they notice Darth Tantrum is in there engaging in his vigorous laser sword anger management routine.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Was he? I don't remember him doing much besides whining at Vader and standing around menacingly. Who's going to know? Unless she tells someone herself, literally the only way anyone would find out would be if they were a force user and read her mind, and those are pretty thin on the ground and not part of her normal social circle since her branch of service is normally represented by General Hux. Any access records related to her disabling Starkiller Base's shields went up in smoke with the base itself. They held her at gunpoint and made her deactivate Starkiller Base's shields under the implicit (or perhaps explicit) threat that they'd blow her head off if she didn't. That is the very definition of coercion. I mean, yeah, her actual job is to NOT do that kind of thing but still... If you take the bounty head alive, sure... "storm the place, guns blazing and then pick through the bodies afterwards" doesn't really require much smarts. Boba Fett did have to be warned not to disintegrate the target by Vader. Oh, I'm knocking both... put simply, both the old Star Wars Expanded Universe and the new Disney Star Wars sequel trilogy are the same garbage, just packaged differently. Neither the EU writers nor Disney could conceive of a way to move the story forward without effectively undoing the happy ending of Return of the Jedi. Balance wasn't restored to the Force, the Emperor isn't actually dead, the Empire continues to exist and just retreats a bit from its former key holdings before ultimately reconquering the galaxy, the Republic that our heroes fought so long and hard to restore barely lasts a generation, the next Skywalker generation falls to the Dark Side and repeats Anakin's mistakes, etc. The old, familiar characters from the movies get beaten into the ground until everything likable about them is gone. Remember that time Han, Leia, and a bunch of other characters all collecively got highly selective amnesia about Han's fascist cousin and arbitrarily commit treason against the Republic to help him? That's some quality writing there, eh? Or the time that the galaxy was invaded by the BDSM space bat-people immune to the Force? Or the time Leia almost f*cked a neon green reptilian crime lord who was trying to make Darth Vader jealous and capture Luke while everyone else was trying to track down the Death Star plans and a bad Han Solo knockoff was trying to track down the real Han Solo? Or the time the giant space lizards who had tongues in their noses invaded to turn people into batteries for their technology because it never occurred to them that you can store energy chemically? Or that time Han Solo's kids did a multi-novel anti-drug PSA? Or even a happily after of finite duration... everything must exist in a state of perpetual f*ckedness in order for the galaxy far far away to exist in a state of semi-perpetual war. The Expanded Universe seemed to have a new major conflict or diplomatic crisis every alternate tuesday. Honestly, a novella of Carrie Fisher-style musing on the nature of politics actually sounds like a pretty good time to me... she had very little time for bullsh*t (or diplomacy, a proper subset of bullsh*t). I dunno, I think Disney could've had a real good time with her as an evil queen the way she was originally intended to be... but they don't have the balls to write a face-heel turn for a popular character like that.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Ah yes, what new and exciting holes with the feared and fearless Captain Phasma fall down this time? She's already fallen down the garbage chute and into a hull breach the size of a city... why not go for the gusto and fall into a black hole next time? Surely there won't be another convenient desert-dwelling space anus for her to fall into. It sounds exciting and dramatic until you realize he just tailgated the Falcon to Bespin. Other than that, all he does is growl out a protest that Vader might accidentally kill his bounty head and stand around omniously without talking. Phasma does a lot more talking, for one... she's apparently the First Order's Drill Sergeant Nasty. She doesn't really do much in The Force Awakens besides talk a lot of sh*t and get thrown down the garbage chute after she takes the shields on Starkiller Base down at gunpoint. Phasma gets more in The Last Jedi, since she passes sentence on and presides over the attempted execution of Finn and Rose, then gets an actual fight scene with Finn aboard Snoke's ship before she gets the laser trench club or whatever it is upside the head and falls into the hull breach. That officially puts her one-up on Fett, whose only action scene was shooting Luke in the back of the hand before a blind Han Solo hits his jetpack with a stick, sending him sailing into the side of Jabba's sail barge and then into the mouth of the majestic desert space anus. You could just as easily interpret Vader's rebuke of Fett as Fett being a gung-ho moron like Killcrazy from Red Dwarf... the fact that Darth freaking Vader has to remind you that alive means don't kill them when most people wouldn't need to be told twice by one of the highest ranked Imperial officials (and the galaxy's all-time leader in casual workplace homicide) doesn't argue for intelligence or discretion. Everything the fans built Boba Fett up to be is so weirdly irrational, because he's literally nothing more than another death-prone mook in a slightly cooler mask who checks out with even less dignity than the average masked mook. His only real trait is that he's a very action figure-y design. Y'know, that hadn't really dawned on me until you said it. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan, but I can at least hum a few tunes from the original and sequel trilogies from memory. I can't for the life of me remember a single piece of music from the sequel trilogy. To be fair, this was a problem with the old Star Wars EU as well... the fans just don't want to acknowledge it. Ultimately, to keep the story going and have more wars in Star Wars, everything our heroes did must inevitably come to nothing. The galaxy would never know peace and stability again, and every victory would become a bitter defeat in the long run, because nobody's buying Star Wars without the wars. Characters would get old, and grey, and long in the tooth, and be forced into many situations that would be ridiculously out of character, the government they helped restore would fall again to the ambitions of Imperial posers, the Sith take over again, etc. The more I read of the old Star Wars EU, the more convinced I am that these new movies are actually a MASSIVE step up from what Star Wars had before. It isn't so much that fans didn't want or expect their childhood heroes to grow old, it's that they didn't expect them to grow up. The profound lack of imagination in Star Wars's efforts to grow its story past Return of the Jedi requires certain conditions like the Jedi Order collapsing again, the New Republic that Leia worked so hard to establish to fail hard enough for the Empire to come back, and another Skywalker to take up the mantle of the Dark Side and Darth Vader. Luke's naive farmboy optimism, Leia's belief in the power of democracy, and Han's devil-may-care attitude were never going to survive that. The result? Luke goes into exile the way his mentors did, Leia starts her own damned militia and to hell with the government, and Han falls back on his old bad habits after whatever stability he'd gained in a life with Leia broke down when she became a paramilitary commander and went off the grid. I'm sure there are probably some Gen Z kids who thought The Last Jedi was a perfect movie, but I suspect those are few and far between given how the response sank Solo and that even Jar-Jar Abrams has been forced to admit Star Wars fans hate the new trilogy in interviews. That and, a lot of those younger viewers will have been introduced to Star Wars by their elder siblings and parents and will be judging Disney Star Wars by much the same yardstick as older fans.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, exactly like Boba Fett... who just stood around looking menacing then got one-shotted by a blind man and plunges headlong into a giant anus monster in the desert. Phasma arguably accomplishes more than he ever does, but because she's an obvious attempt to create a designated cool character the attempt fails.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's what happens when you try to deliberately make a "cool" character. She's the Great Value version of Boba Fett.
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