Seto Kaiba
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IMO, it kinda defeats the point... the whole thing about the Zentradi in the original SDF Macross series was that they were virtually identical to humanity on a genetic level. It would make sense that most of them look essentially human, as they did in the series, and continue to do in most of the non-animated works. Giving them all an obvious "I am an alien" trait feels a bit off-message. They're working with a limited amount of airtime, so they have to prioritize... Macross Frontier did a pretty good job with its main cast's backstories, less so with the supporting cast for whom detailed backstories are less necessary. Macross Delta dropped the ball bigtime, because its main cast was several times the size of the ones from previous shows without a proportional increase in airtime. Nah, Mobile Suit Gundam: 08th MS Team is too upbeat... after all, the titular team there are operating Gundams and therefore aren't cannon fodder. (Never mind Shiro's Invinci-Ball from the first episode.) If you want to focus on something like destroids, you need the kind of soul-crushing cannon fodder experience you can get from Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO's three OVAs: The Hidden One Year War, Apocalypse 0079, and Gravity Front. That show's so serious about its death toll that by the third OVA a literal shinigami is one of the show's regulars. Gravity Front's first two episodes are probably the best facsimile of the Destroids one time to shine in the Unification Wars, when land warfare robots were actually terrifyingly OP instead of Made of Explodium. -
That's about the only plausible explanation, though it's dubious how he'd have actually known about it since the wars didn't exactly devastate Earth. For the most part it was little brushfire conflicts the local partisans started after balking at the idea of a unified world government. There are plenty of similar conflicts in this day in age, but they don't exactly provoke such an intense, seething, almost self-destructive hatred in people totally unrelated to the actual casus belli. Such an intense hatred can't have just popped up out of nowhere, and as I noted before the one really plausible-sounding theory that he picked it up while wandering the globe doesn't work because it was his reason for running away from home to begin with. Admittedly, I'd also like an explanation for why Basara is so down on the military. It's a real tough sell that he's so stupendously thick that he doesn't realize that Ray Lovelock is still working for the Macross-7 fleet's NUNS, and that he himself is serving as a test pilot for a black project run by the fleet's military brass. I mean, he can't possibly believe Ray just happened to find a custom VF-19 Excalibur set up for Minmay Attack ops. Nobody could be THAT dense and still dress themselves. Likewise, he has to know Ray's a former ace pilot from an elite combat unit, yet he doesn't give Ray any grief for his military past or his ongoing affiliation with the military. ... that'd make him an even more monstrous hypocrite than he already was, which is admittedly a hell of a trick. About half of the Anti-Unification Alliance's major military actions in the chronology are massacres of one kind or another, like nuking St. Petersburg, hijacking an Oberth-class space destroyer and using it to wipe out the Mars Return Fleet, or bombing the construction crews who were working on Grand Cannon II. (We can't count their bombing of Mayan, since that was still secret at the time.) He'd have to have been a complete psychopath to still support them at the time he was introduced in the series... the UN Government's cover story for the disappearance of the SDF-1 Macross along with South Ataria island itself was that Alliance remnants had nuked it off the map, which would've killed his entire immediate family and his cousin. We don't know a lot, I'm afraid... but the UN Government was supposedly a reasonably effective and levelheaded representative democracy for a free society. They did go too in their efforts to avoid the panic that would ensue if word got out that they were potentially at war with an alien military, but in the case of the few specific grievances we've heard the Anti-Unification Alliance lay at their door, the big ones seem to be a mix of simply not knowing what the real reason for certain actions were and a healthy dose of twisting the facts like Nora's claim the UN Gov't stole the variable system from her homeland when it was freely shared. That's why Kaifun's seething, focused rage toward the military doesn't make a ton of sense... we've never really seen them do anything to actually deserve his loathing.
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Kaifun and Basara are, I think, probably not really pacifists at all... or at least they're using pacifism as an excuse for their own personal problems. Kaifun's character is, in some ways, even stranger than Basara's. Throughout the series, and even in events set before it, his whole life seems to revolve around this seemingly sourceless hatred he's nurturing toward the military. I've never found any explanation for why he has such a hate-on for the UN Forces. You'd think it was something he picked up while wandering the world after he ran away from home, but his hatred for the military was the reason he ran away in the first place... he didn't want to live near the Macross after his family decided to move to South Ataria. In hindsight, his pacifism, his belief in nonviolent conflict resolution, and even his relationship with Minmay look like reactionary behavior triggered by his inexplicable loathing for the military. He didn't seem at all troubled about compromising those principles as long as it meant sticking it to the military, like his exploiting his position as Minmay's manager to instigate borderline riots or emotionally and verbally abusing Minmay herself when she expressed support for the soldiers and government. The guy's clearly got some mental health issues, but we're never told why... which makes him really bizarre considering how often his pathological hatred of soldiers causes problems. Basara's a bit easier to understand, but it's hard to say if his issues are the result of him having an autism spectrum disorder, that Ray did a crappy job raising him, or both. He clearly doesn't relate well to other people outside of a few narrowly-focused interests, and as part of his obsession with music he seems to have created a pacifist philosophy based on an idealized, historically inaccurate version of Minmay as a singer who ended the First Space War with her songs. So he seems to be living his entire life around that ideal of songs ending conflict, and he reacts badly when reality is unable to align with his ideal. I'm sure, in his mind, using speaker pods to FORCE enemy pilots to listen to his song isn't an act of violence because the songs are supposed to end the fighting. His reaction to having to resort to violence when singing doesn't work in a street fight is similar... he's furious with himself for not being able to stop the fight with songs, and because Ray never forced him into normal social interactions he takes his frustration out on Mylene, who he sees as being in the wrong for forcing him to compromise his ideal. So, I guess I'm saying that both fall short of actual pacifism because Kaifun's just using it as an excuse for his personal damage and Basara's so wrapped up in an ideal he doesn't realize the hypocrisy. When it comes to the actual pacifists in the Macross metaseries, I think if you wanted to relate their treatment of pacifism to the show's overarching theme of communication the way we'd have to look at it would be as a refusal to participate in a meaningful dialog. Instead of engaging their opposites in a two-way exchange as equals they're taking a passive-aggressive "say whatever you want, I just won't be listening" approach to communication or a holier-than-thou attitude. Like how Serge Glass's administration on Macross-29 led the fleet to economic ruin by pursuing a non-confrontational approach to EVERYTHING. Because he wouldn't open a dialog with the other fleets on an equal footing to avoid anything resembling aggression, he couldn't even communicate that his fleet was falling apart because of its neighbors' economic policies.
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The run was reduced several times during the show's planning stages, per Macross Perfect Memory. Shoji Kawamori originally plotted Battle City Megaroad as a 52 episode series, which was reduced to 48 episodes before the sponsor went under. After obtaining a new sponsor (Big West), the episode count got pared down to 39 and then to the 27 because that was all Big West was willing to pay for. Once they saw the ratings from the first few episodes, Big West extended the run to 36 episodes. "Fleet of the Strongest Women" isn't a movie... it's an unaired episode, as it says a title card right at the beginning. Most people lump it into Macross 7 Encore as a result. That's a very recent trend that only really started in Macross Frontier. DYRL? gave the Zentradi Spock ears, but only some of them... most of them had human-looking ears, though the Macross Pachinko Fever animation retroactively gave the original series ones all Spock ears. It was only the Zolans who had the huge, Record of Lodoss War elf ears. Mylene's ears were a bit elongated, but rounded. It feels like there are a few characters screwing up the otherwise consistent application of the ear thing... some of which, I think, is post-facto assignment of species to characters. Even in Macross the Ride, they stick to the earlier ear designs... Chelsea, Angers, and Naresuan all look like your standard TV/DYRL Zentradi, and Anri looks like a Dynamite 7 Zolan. Maybe it's some artist fetish thing, since it seems to be only the Zentradi girls who are getting this elf ears thing, the men in the same shows largely don't seem to get it, and it feels like they decided that Reina and Michael are part-Zolan waaaaaaaaaay after the fact. Destroids are low-mobility cannon fodder though... and if you want to watch a ground mecha-snuff film, wouldn't it be easier to just go put on Mobile Suit Gundam MS IGLOO 2: the Gravity Front? Because their civilization collapsed half a million years ago and they've been on the run from their own creations ever since? Mina Forte may or may not be one, at least, and Mikumo's technically a human-Protoculture bioandroid hybrid I guess. (Or if you want to be annoyingly technical, the Zentradi are based on Protoculture, so technically you've seen loads of them... just, y'know, giant clones of them.) We don't know how the Supervision Army replenishes its numbers... if they're using cloning of their original captured forces then there may still be some Protoculture left in the galaxy. If they're "recruiting" from the populations of captured planets and from captured Zentradi crews, then it's another matter...
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... you joking? For like the first twenty odd episodes, literally all that happened when Basara went flying out to meet the enemy was the military would try to protect his dumb arse and tell him to GTFO, and get shot down while his self-absorbed quest to ineffectually sing at the enemy distracted them. How many pilots could've been saved if Diamond Force didn't perpetually have to stop and tell the guy to get out of the combat zone? Ah, the beauty of winning the internet. No idea! I want to know whose idea it was to build a Space Moped. Like hell... anyone who's played Mario Kart knows how easy it is to fall off the f@%ing Rainbow Road.
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Given that the Supervision Army was made up of spiritia-drained and brainwashed Protoculture and Zentradi - and from an advanced arsenal world no less - it seems likely that the Supervision Army is using brainwashing broadly similar to the Zentradi Army's brainwashing/indoctrination. Losing their highest tier in the chain of command wouldn't mean much, since only the most senior commanders would have had any interaction with them at all and standard strategy would've seen them regroup after retreating from the loss of their leaders. Once they finished falling back and regrouping, they would have gone back to business as usual without a thought for the fact that their mission was an incredibly pointless one. It's not clear how the Supervision Army keeps its numbers up... whether it's cloning troops or it's "recruiting" from worlds it finds and from captured Zentradi.
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Basara is really a poorly written character... he's basically what you'd get if you combined the characters of Minmay and Kaifun into one person. An arrogant, self-absorbed, total hypocrite who doesn't mean any harm but is so totally focused on his music career that he forgets to consider the consequences his behavior has on others. It doesn't help that, unlike Minmay, he never grows out of it and unlike Kaifun he never gets ditched by the more sensible people around him for being an asshat. Despite Macross's anti-war message, the actual pacifists in the metaseries never seem to cause anything but problems for everyone around them. The least problematic ones are the Zolans, whose insistence on non-lethal responses only basically turned them into extreme doormats for the whale poachers, and the only member who got sh*t done was the one who thought that philosophy was a load. Kaifun and Basara both used pacifism as an excuse for their irrational hatred of authority, and in both cases it cost a lot of lives. In the case of the ones like Serge Glass, who go full Relina Peacecraft, it always ends badly... he ruined his fleet's economy by being an extreme doormat in negotiations with other emigrant fleets to the point where the previously-violent anti-government protesters came across as far more rational and sensible than him. The beauty of blasting off agaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaain? Just as well, Docker is a prat. They can... just, only when you get Gamlin or Kinryu in the cockpit. Considering the Protodeviln's biotechnology is modeled on Vajra biotechnology... I'd guess advantage Vajra on pure numbers.
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Big West is probably willing to settle for less than 100% of the profits, since anime distribution in the west is largely driven by local distributors even today. The big nagging question is if Tatsunoko will be foolish enough to re-up Harmony Gold's license or not. Relations on that front seem to be a bit sour now. The trademark proceedings in Europe aren't viable as precedent in the US, because trademark law isn't a universal right like copyright is under treaty... and US copyright law is written to favor a first use in market condition over actual ownership of the property. The one most likely to do that is Tatsunoko itself, amusingly... they very badly want a share of the profits from Macross's sequels. So badly, in fact, that they not only went to court in a bid to get a cut, they appealed the ruling against them twice (with the appellate court affirming the previous ruling and the high court refusing to hear it). I'm not sure if they just want to be a part of the Macross phenomenon because they feel that they helped create it, or what... but whatever it is, they were willing to spend a big chunk of change to try to get it and have made a point to show they're still invested in the franchise by trying to be represented at Macross events in even a little way, like sending flowers to the recent Macross anniversary concert.
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Well, sort of... Japanese business culture emphasizes politeness, which does not always take the form of a constructive politeness. They'll just as likely politely listen to your view and nod along, then with equal politeness either refuse to proceed further or dismantle your position bit by bit at a later date or time in a carefully-worded rebuttal. They can be very obstinate when they don't feel a decision is in their best interests... but, in my experience, they'll be obstinate with impeccable politeness and express their sympathies for the inconvenience.
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That'd be an odd call, but not unheard-of... it probably depends on how the terms of the license are drawn up. Yeah, that definitely makes it sound like Tatsunoko will gain ownership of the trademarks that HG has filed for should the license expire. It certainly reinforces my point... even if Tatsunoko throws HG to the wolves like they deserve, they still have the means (at least in the short term) to insist Big West play on their terms outside Japan.
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Eh, to hell with it. Regardless of whether the kit transforms or not. Count me in for one.
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Granted, but the point was that we know Tatsunoko badly wants a share of the profits from all of the Macross sequels... and we know they have a VERY effective means of blocking Big West from distributing Macross's sequels outside Japan. Since US trademark law favors first use over actual ownership of the property, all Tatsunoko has to do is renew HG's license or shack up with another distributor and resume the trademark shenanigans. If Tatsunoko was willing to go to court and appeal the decision against them multiple times in an effort to get a share of the Macross sequel profits, you can bet they wouldn't just let Big West go wild outside Japan. They'll insist upon a piece of the action.
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Unfortunately, if I did exaggerate it was only slightly. At the behest of 1st Border Red Devil and other Southern Cross fans, I've done a fair amount of digging into Southern Cross's mecha via the show's one artbook and a double handful of magazine articles, color inserts, and leaflets for the series. Virtually everything in those publications is in the series proper, even if some of them only appear in the massed charge in the OP, but only a couple designs in the series actually have names. Basically it's just the three main robots, the GMP Garm, the Flash Clapper hoverbike, Arming Doublet, Bioroid, and Biover. Everything else is nameless, as far as official publications go... which for a translator used to excesses of detail, is beyond frustrating. (The Japanese Wikipedia page for the series is, unfortunately, extremely misleading because it has been extensively vandalized with Robotech RPG content by Yui Yuasa.) I do have a soft spot for the Auroran tho. The Sikorsky S-72 "X-Wing" was a neat little concept aircraft, so it was nice to see a fully-realized version as a transforming robot. I might be interested in a kit if one became available, just because it's such an atypical design for the period. I feel like there was a lot more passion in the earlier concept for Science Fiction Sengoku Saga.
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Robotech and REMIX by Titan Comics
Seto Kaiba replied to Old_Nash's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Pretentious literary buffoonery knows no bounds among sentient, cultured species. To be fair, Robotech already kinda shattered that effect... the thing that threw the Zentradi was love songs, emotions they had no frame of reference to process on an intellectual or social level, hence a massive "DOES NOT COMPUTE!". In Robotech, the song they use for the Minmay Attack is basically one long rambling declaration of "we're going to win this fight no matter what", a sentiment the Zentradi should have no trouble processing. *fifteen minutes of continuous atonal shrieking* -
Oh yes, the Robotech DVDs will skyrocket all the way from "almost completely worthless" to "nearly worthless". Remember, most Robotech fans already have three or four editions. That's the beauty of the secondhand Robotech merch market, almost everything can be had for a fraction of the price it was new because the net direction of the fandom's size is negative. You can get their RPG Tactics game for a fraction of what Kickstarter backers and retailers paid from people looking to get it out of their homes. Considering the one thing Tatsunoko covets most of all with respect to Macross is a share of the profits from the sequels, I'd expect they would want to hang onto the original TV series rights and offer to act as intermediary to release all of Macross worldwide for a percentage.
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Even after Macross 7 and Frontier happened they were still miles ahead of anything Southern Cross's designers came up with... Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross was phoned in so hard that over ninety percent of the mecha in it don't even have NAMES.
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Robotech and REMIX by Titan Comics
Seto Kaiba replied to Old_Nash's topic in Anime or Science Fiction
Now that you mention him, it really bothers me that I can't tell which row of teeth that's supposed to be... it looks like he has a wicked underbite. -
Berger Stone's claim that the fold bacteria that cause Var syndrome migrated into humanoids from the Vajra doesn't hold water for a couple different reasons... then again, most of what he says has similar problems. His claim that the Vajra left the universe doesn't hold water because we know that the Vajra hives were still present in multiple regions of the galaxy even after the events of Macross Frontier, as seen in Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and the Macross Delta gaiden manga Macross E. It also doesn't work on the level of what we know regarding the effects of the V-type bacterium the Vajra carry. Macross Delta tells the audience that everyone has fold bacteria living in their brains and that they're not dangerous in and of themselves. But in Macross Frontier it's a major plot point that a V-type bacteria infection in the brain is an incurable lethal illness that'll end you in a matter of at most a few years without treatment and treatment just delays the inevitable. Given that the Vajra are still around and even present on several New UN Government-settled worlds in the 2060s, and that the galaxy's population rather visibly hasn't been wiped out by an incurable fatal disease or even incurred the V-type bacteria's signature Incurable Cough of Doom, it seems fairly safe to say Berger Stone is either spinning a yarn or he's suffering from author-induced stupidity.
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I was literally just watching Alien a few hours ago. He had a good long run, checking out at 91. Still, he'll be missed.
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Totally... and that's why Harmony Gold is so determined to make a mountain of every molehill in the "news" about the proposed Robotech movie. If they can get the ball rolling on that movie then they would have a potentially viable property to exploit and keep the brand alive with even if they lost all their rights obtained under license from Tatsunoko.
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My secret insider sources tell me the Robotech movie is going to come out on February 32nd, 2021. So, the short version... The above-linked page on PacerMonitor describes a petition, accompanying documentation, a couple requests to keep certain disclosed contract and settlement details secret, and the judge's final ruling on Harmony Gold's request for the California Central District Court to enforce the binding settlement from a previous legal dispute with Tatsunoko Production that was resolved in arbitration. That prior settlement was about money owed to Harmony Gold as recompense for court costs and legal fees it incurred while pursuing legal action against various entities violating its (and Tatsunoko's) rights to the original Japanese shows. HG requested to keep some bits of the contracts and settlements from publication in the court record where anyone could see it, some of which was granted and some wasn't (which is how we know what was in the previous settlement). Simpler version... a not-so-long time ago in a galaxy pretty much right frigging here, Harmony Gold went to Tatsunoko and said "dude, you owe me money for protecting our sh*t outside Japan", and Tatsunoko said "No way, plus you still owe ME money". Some legal posturing ensued and it ended up in arbitration instead of in court (WAY cheaper). Tatsunoko couldn't prove Harmony Gold owed them money, so Tatsunoko got stuck with the bill for the previous legal matters AND the arbitration. Skip forward a bit, they still haven't paid, so HG is asking the courts to please make them pay what they owe. The bits about Harmony Gold's license expiring are pretty tangential to the whole thing... Harmony Gold apparently believed that the license was drawn up in such a way that, even if it expired, they had permission to continue using the stuff they'd created based on the original shows forever. An examination of the license proved that was bullsh*t, and the courts told HG so. So now everyone knows Harmony Gold's license is basically a ticking time bomb. If they lose their license from Tatsunoko, Robotech is effectively 100% dead because they will not only lose all their rights to Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA, they'll lose the ability to exploit all the material they've made based on those shows too... like Sentinels, Untold Story, Shadow Chronicles, Love Live Alive, Robotech Academy, and all the novelizations, comic books, video games, and so on. Robotech 3000 will be all they've got left. It'll kill all their merchandising too, so they'll be left with mountains of unsellable crappy merchandise they'll have to either surrender or destroy, and so will their licensees. (Palladium Books might go under if they lose the license before they deliver Wave 2 of Robotech RPG Tactics... they're in hock like half a mil to backers on that one due to undelivered rewards to Kickstarter backers, and if they lose their license in the dustup they won't be able to deliver those rewards and could potentially be forced to issue refunds.)
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But did you do the little dance first? You think it's bad just having to witness it, imagine how frustrating it is to be "Macross answer guy" and have to explain it on a dozen different sites and groups. I'd give years off my life for the bloody news websites to actually get the details completely correct just once... ANN opened their mouths to quash the rumor and made things WORSE.
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Yeah, AnimeNewsNetwork and a few other sites have picked it up too, and attempted to quash the rumor that Harmony Gold lost the Macross license already.
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That's a more recent development. Robotech's fans were giving each other hell over preferences in media long before the internet, but the flame wars they had over it on Usenet were what drove lots of Robotech fans away from the franchise. The whole "Macross purist" thing came along in the 2000s, when the Robotech fandom was looking for something to distract itself from the way Robotech's second coming turned out to be something of a damp squib. It was fueled by the "Macross Saga" dominating Robotech merchandising and by some Macross fans observing that Robotech was pretty much just coasting on Macross's popularity even in its new developments. Once Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles and Macross Frontier came out less than a year apart, it turned into a full blown witch hunt over the obvious disparity in talent, skill, and quality between the two. Even in the Macross Saga novels they took a LOT of liberties... like the "thinking caps" and the VFs having energy shields, or Dr. Lang becoming a genius-level technological savant and having visions of the Invid after coming into contact with the SDF-1's main computer. The Sentinels novels were just where it abandoned all pretense and didn't so much jump the shark as ramp off a stack of burning sharks in a tutu while on fire and singing Asia's "The Lie is Over". I still maintain they were just replacing terms and names in drafts of Star Wars novels that Lucasfilm decided to pass on. The books lost the plot so hard that making a movie based on them would be sheer, gun-eating insanity that would make Plan 9 from Outer Space look like Academy Award material. As seen on several occasions in Super Dimension Fortress Macross and Macross Frontier, pilots can also take direct, manual control of a limb or multiple limbs if a particularly delicate task is required. The TV version of the VF-1 had dedicated joysticks just for the arms. What I'm given to understand WRT hand/arm maneuvers is that they're sort of "flying" the hand through three-dimensional space and using the buttons in the grip on the joystick or throttle lever to control the position of the fingers and palm. Slinging a rifle, I would imagine is probably an automated routine for "stow gunpod" in battroid mode without returning it to the hardpoint.
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Based on the renewals I can see in TESS, at least two years. The trademark that's up for renewal first is 76385551, which would come eligible for renewal around mid-December 2021 (~9 months after the license expires) and would expire 26 December 2022. On the others, we're looking at actual trademark expiration on 30 November 2023. (Unless challenged in court on the basis that HG can no longer use the mark in commerce legally.)
