Jump to content

Seto Kaiba

Members
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    12929

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Everything posted by Seto Kaiba

  1. Seto Kaiba
    There's a good set of views in the GERWALK and Battroid portion of the VF-31 Master File, though I'm afraid my scanner's busted again so I'm kinda SOL unless a cell phone picture will suffice...
  2. Seto Kaiba
    An eyes-on count shows approximately twenty-two gun turrets of various sizes. 4 on each dorsal boom 2 on each knee joint 10 on the torso
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, that'll do it. The default Android web browser on Android 4.4 and beyond is Chrome for Mobile, and earlier versions use a Chrome derivative based on the Blink engine. I've found if you use one of those setting sync features like Firefox and Chrome both have, the logins on one device seem to be portable to several other devices simultaneously. Using Firefox for Mobile on your phone may solve the problem. I think it's something with the IPS session manager.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Are you using different browsers on those devices (e.g. Firefox on one and Chrome on the other)? I had the same problem when I was using Chrome on one machine and the company-mandated nonsense that is Microsoft Edge on the other. When I switched to Chrome on both it stopped happening.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Personally, I'd say Fassbender did a more than competent job as both David and Walter... he really sold that uncanny valley Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? kind of robot, and as David managed to make his obsession with creation genuinely unnerving. It's not a lack of competent acting or a gripping story that ails Alien: Covenant and its predecessor, it's that the movie just can't decide what kind of story it wants to be and that Western directors really seem to have forgotten how to do suspenseful horror. Alien was a great horror film for precisely the same reason Jaws was: because you saw so little of "the monster". The way the shark and the xenomorph kill in a targeted but indiscriminate manner is scary, yes, but what made it a source of genuine horror was that creeping realization that the characters are trapped there with the unseen monster lurking nearby waiting for its chance to make a snack of someone. There are two guidelines that Alien sequels keep ignoring that have contributed massively to the "scariness decay" of the franchise: The more you see of the monster, the less scary the monster becomes. The more monsters there are, the less scary each individual monster becomes. Alien: Covenant would have been a much scarier, more unsettling film if the xenomorph and neomorph never appeared. They had a really good plot going with David's hubris and what he did to the Engineers in the name of disappointment and arrogance, and made the horrible mistake of making that psychological horror a B-plot in favor of a mediocre monster splatter flick revolving predominantly around jump scares. The same problem happened in Prometheus, where they wasted half the film on jump scares and trying to chew over some half-assed Aesop about religion at the expense of a plot about how humanity's creators had decided for their own unknowable reasons to destroy humanity with the most appalling weapons of mass destruction.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Now that's a shame and a waste. Ladies and gentlemen, Professor Rubeus Hagrid... The thing the Neomorph reminded me of most was, honestly, those creepy hairless cats that look like an ambulatory scrotum. IIRC, didn't Evangelion's creators explicitly refute that... saying that the alleged religious symbolism was pure BS, and they'd just thrown Christian religious references in there because it's a minority religion in Japan and sounds exotic as a result.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    We've had them all in HD for a while now, actually... some of them, like DYRL?, have even had multiple remasters in HD. There've been multiple editions of several of them as well. Mind you, a single monolithic box set collection would be insanely expensive. Japanese media prices are steep in general, and they don't usually incentivize buying a box set over buying the volumes individually. If you look at many of the blu-ray editions of Macross titles released in the last couple years and run the numbers, it's about $63.50 per disc regardless of whether you buy a collected edition or the individual discs. An "all of Macross" collected edition would be several grand. Macross 7 alone was like $600 new.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... that "perfect collection" wasn't a Macross release, it belonged to that one show we don't talk about on here. (Admittedly "perfect" was probably the single least accurate adjective Streamline Pictures could've applied to that hot mess. Not only did they not finish, the translation quality of the subtitled episodes they released consistently hovered between "poor" and "Chinese VCR manual".)
  9. Seto Kaiba
    You keep using that word, and it's fairly evident you don't know what it means... Let's not get crazy... As with Prometheus, Alien: Covenant is practically "They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: the Movie" several times over. It sucks that we'll have to wait until the home video release to get our hands on the commentary to find out how many cooks were involved in spoiling this particular batch of horrifying xenobiological broth. We have to ask if the producers screwed the pooch all on their own or if they had help from the studio executives who wanted a nice, safe action/splatter flick ala Aliens instead of the colossal lore dump that Ridley Scott was clearly hoping to put out and gotten blocked on twice now. (Maybe they need to give James Cameron a call...)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    We actually kind of already had that with, ironically, Macross 30: Voices Across the Galaxy and Macross Delta. Uroboros was established in Macross 30 to be an ancient Protoculture stronghold, and it was abandoned and overrun by the Dyaus... though admittedly the Protoculture seems to have made the technorganic Dyaus specifically to (non-destructively?) infest the ruins of their settlements on Uroboros as a security measure to protect the systems maintaining the seal on the Fold Evil they'd buried and abandoned under the Madis glacier. The worlds of the Brisingr globular cluster in Macross Delta are theorized, in-series, to be one of the last enclaves of the ancient Protoculture during the collapse of their civilization, which are now overrun by the sub-Protoculture species they created and then abandoned (e.g. humanity, the Ragnans, Voldorans, and Windermereans).
  11. Seto Kaiba
    It's pretty good, IMO... at least as sci-fi horror goes. Due to the subject matter and some incidental dialog it's often touted as an unofficial prequel to the Warhammer 40,000 setting. (Thankfully, while hyperspace is still a weird place in most sci-fi it's not out-and-out terrifying like in Event Horizon.)
  12. Seto Kaiba
    It does sound like it's headed that direction, doesn't it?
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Well... that was awful. I mean, what was Ridley Scott thinking? This isn't so much an all-new feature as it is Alien as interpreted by Mr. Bean and The Benny Hill Show.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    From what I've read, they've pitched the idea of merging the Alien and Blade Runner universes several times and backed down from it almost immediately after on each occasion. Seems like a no-go. Well, I'm headed out to see Covenant tonight. Tried to get myself in the right mindset for it by rewatching Alien, Aliens, and Prometheus over the last couple days. My expectations are quite low now, given the number of my friends here in the US and abroad who've described the film in such colorful terms as "a dumpster fire", "shark-jumping bullshit", and the F-word repeated about five hundred times. The bar, for me, is set low enough that the Morlocks had to put up signs warning of a trip hazard.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    They wrecked more than a few that way, but I'd expect if they did go back for them they probably did it well after the war ended... so they could recycle them for materials to build their emigrant fleets. For the VF-31? Nope.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    He will surely be missed. His tenure as James Bond was an incredible one.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I was floored when Paramount announced it was no longer non-canon... it had its good moments ("How Sharper than a Serpent's Tooth") and its lousy moments ("Bem", "The Slaver Weapon"), but for most fans it was firmly in discontinuity territory even if it did basically introduce the holodeck. I only got to see it because my dad got some bootleg tapes at a con. I don't recall the cousin thing in the Abrams movies, but I confess I barely paid attention to any of them once it became apparent they were just sci-fi/action movies with the Star Trek name slapped on. Spock was a fresh-out-of-the-academy ensign when he joined Pike's first five-year mission partway through... so if Discovery is 10 years before Kirk's tenure as the Enterprise's captain that means this half-Vulcan Lieutenant Commander in Discovery has to predate Spock by no small margin. After all, Discovery is set just one year after Spock's assignment to Enterprise. The Caitians existed way WAY before Star Trek Online... they go back at least to TAS, where Uhura's relief officer on the Enterprise's bridge communications station was a Caitian. The Caitians are long-time Federation members too, so they wouldn't be a good choice for a hostile power. (The Kzinti's backstory had them as having around a century of bad blood between themselves and Earth in "The Slaver Weapon".)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    What mechaninac said... honestly. We had the whole "Vulcan who decides to explore their emotions freely" schtick several times before, and it led to two of the most contentious/hated Vulcans in Star Trek... that prat Sybok from Star Trek V, and Subcommander T'Pol from Enterprise. (The latter being a case like that of Wesley Crusher or Chakotay, where even the actor hated how the character developed.) They also kind of overplayed the whole "The Vulcans are racist (speciesist?) a-holes" in Enterprise and the J.J. Abrams movies, which was entirely out of character for what was ostensibly an alien species whose "hat" was being mercilessly and entirely rational. (Mind you, Spock was having "all the other reindeer" moments as far back as TAS, but those were more because he was kind of an undisciplined kid who had trouble maintaining control of his emotions until his future self - via the Guardian of Forever - taught him a few life lessons while pretending to be a cousin from afar.) Even factoring in the Syrranite reformation in Enterprise, by 10 years before TOS the Vulcans should be the milder, friendlier breed of TOS and TNG. Having a Vulcan or Vulcan-equivalent merciless logician on the bridge is definitely a nod to the old formula (Spock, Data, Tuvok, T'Pol), but as Discovery looks like it's going to have more of an action focus than previous shows (in an easy bid for viewership) one has to wonder if the logical space pacifist isn't going to be a wet blanket. (At least as much as Mister "I sense the approach of death", anyway... that would've been so much funnier if he'd been a redshirt.)
  19. Seto Kaiba
    That was the plan... to come away with as little plot-contextual information as humanly possible and just get a read on what people thought of the film without succumbing to any spoileriffic reviews.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    I've tried to avoid reading reviews, so I thought I was fairly safe taking in the TVTropes page with Spoilers off... I'm a bit worried by the fact that its Narm and Too Dumb To Live entries are whole pages in their own right, and that there's frequent mention of setting a particular action sequence to Yakity Sax. I'm still gonna see it, but I'm a little worried now.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    As noted previously, Paramount was actively developing content for a Kzinti story arc for Enterprise Season 5 before word came down that the ratings plummet had prompted the network not to renew it at the end of Season 4, so they seem to have at least believed they could use make free use of the Kzinti concepts Niven put forward in "The Slaver Weapon". (Probably with less of a "Petting Zoo People" look, the way they did with the CG Gorn for the Mirror Universe episode.) That was one of a bunch of plots that ended up in the dustbin, along with a post-facto "fix fic" episode to explain that T'Pol was so emotional even early in the series because her dad is a Romulan deep-cover operative. Still, Spock's original accolade of "First Vulcan in Starfleet" keeps taking hits... prequel writers can't seem to resist having a Vulcan around for deadpan snark. T'Pol got 'round it on a technicality, but what about this new girl who's basically ripping off Spock's entire half-Vulcan schtick? Star Trek's already got several different species of felinoid kicking around the Federation and its neighbors... which, since Paramount reversed themselves on TAS's canonicity to the prime timeline, includes the Kzinti. (This, sadly, means tons of other Scooby-Doo level BS is also canon, like "BEM" and that one episode where the Enterprise's computer goes nuts and starts handing out dribble glasses and screen-printing insults on Kirk's uniform.) Actually, in hindsight, I'd love it if Discovery did that. It'd lend sort of a Red Dwarf feel to the show. We always see the Federation's shiny new toys with the best crews boldly going wherever, we never see the poor sods who are stuck with the old clunkers Starfleet keeps in service for aeons because they can't be arsed to scrap them (like all those old Miranda-class, Excelsior-class, and Oberth-class ships). Yeah, they were pretty explicit about that in the dialog... the Kzinti psychic decidedly did not enjoy the experience. That new alien in the Discovery trailer who was raised to sense the approach of death... that may be replacing the Kzinti as the new apex of narm in the Star Trek franchise. They'd better hope the show lasts, otherwise the jokes about sensing cancellation will be unending.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Eech... you... haven't seen the TAS episode "The Slaver Weapon", have you? The Kzinti from Star Trek: the Animated Series are from a Star Trek screenplay adaptation of Larry Niven's The Soft Weapon, and the episode's screenplay was written by Larry Niven himself. As they've already paid for them, they shouldn't have a problem using them (and indeed were considering making the Kzinti the Enterprise season 5 main antagonist before the show was canceled). They're not Niven's Kzin though. The politest way to describe them would be "too dumb to live". A more honest assessor might consider them, based on their behavior and their history as explained by Sulu, "the cruelest prank evolution ever played". They are the polar opposite of being "hardcore", and they make the Pakled look like geniuses. (It didn't help matters that the episode was directed by Hal Sutherland, who was red-green colorblind, so everything the Kzinti have is an interesting shade of pink.) Star Trek's version of the Kzinti were gag villains, who'd fought four wars against humanity in the 21st century and lost all four of them so badly that they were forbidden by treaty from having any weapons other than stun-only phasers, and only then for their law enforcement. They steal a stasis box containing a Slaver spy's multitool from Spock, Sulu, and Uhura, and proceed to be serially outsmarted by all three, their attempted psychic interrogation is foiled by Sulu remembering what eating a salad is like (it drives the Kzinti psychic practically hysterical), and they're outsmarted by the tiny computer in the Slaver weapon and are quickly tricked into blowing themselves and their stolen police ship up. It's not hard to see why the network would consider Star Trek's producers and writers wanting to bring the Kzinti back as a sign of serious shark-jumping malarkey in Enterprise. Let's just hope Discovery, if it lasts long enough, decides to stick with Klingons and Romulans instead of revisiting Niven's pink pussycats.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Parallel universe/alternate timeline stories aren't the problem with time travel in Star Trek... it's the inevitable continuity problems that occur when time travel is used (or abused) gratuitously in the bounds of a single timeline/universe. Star Trek: First Contact is a prime example of how the fallout can negatively impact other stories. It was a fairly benign time travel example on the surface, since only a handful of people in past-Earth had any contact with the 24th century Starfleet crew and their influence could be covered over with a handful of lies at most. It still caused one of the worst idiot plots in the Star Trek: Enterprise series. "Regeneration" somehow had Zefram Cochrane try to warn people about cyborgs from the future attacking Earth and not get written off as a crazy person, and the plot entailed 24th century Borg who'd had Starfleet's 24th century finest and their state of the art flagship on the ropes defeated by a 22nd century Enterprise for which phasers were still a new technology and the supposedly nigh-irreversible-by-24th-century-medicine assimilation that doomed almost the entire crew of the Enterprise-E is bested by a single 22nd century doctor via nothing fancier than exotic radiation therapy. (This, after a Voyager episode where a Borg based on future technology was seen as CIVILIZATION-ENDING GALACTIC DOOM if it got loose...) (Of course, there was also the timey-wimey ball question of Enterprise's Temporal Cold War resolution... Daniels said the timeline was resetting itself, so does that mean all the crap in the first three seasons just un-happened? The events of the pilot that changed the circumstances of Earth's first contact with Klingons and Enterprise's launch were Temporal Cold War shenanigans. Did Trip's sister and millions of others get un-killed when the Xindi attack un-happened? Did the Paraga II colony come back to life? Daniels did say "History didn't record it".) At times like these, all I can think of is a line from Red Dwarf about the future... "Poppycock! It will be happened; it shall be going to be happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future. Simple as that. Your bucket's been kicked, baby."
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Actually, that's why they're so reluctant to move forwards in the timeline... because, thanks to Voyager and Enterprise, they can't jump very far into the future without landing in the period of the franchise's future history where Starfleet really should be called Timefleet. That's what I've usually seen its failure attributed to... the writers being compelled to throw in continuity-violating shenanigans and then using time travel to excuse it, until time travel-related timeline-screw became a plot arc in its own right. (Creative bankruptcy brought about by formula, so much so that before the show was canned they were considering tapping the Kzinti from the Star Trek cartoon as a new main antagonist... which officially promoted the show's cancellation to a Mercy Kill. When your first choice for a new main antagonist is a joke antagonist who can be defeated by remembering your side salad, it's time to take a break and regroup.)
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Really, I'm not so sure it's the fandom that's the reason for Star Trek's lack of innovation. Ever since the original Star Trek series, the studio and the network have had an established formula for the franchise that they were very comfortable with and resisted deviating from as hard as they possibly could. Their light, bubbly, moralistic format was a perfect fit for the audiences of the late 1960s, but it didn't play so well when the franchise was revived in the late 80's for a new series that became Star Trek: the Next Generation. The ratings were garbage, and from then on it was a fight between the studio wanting to take Star Trek in new directions while there was pushback from Gene Roddenberry and the network. They had to fight to be able to depict the Federation personnel as anything less than saints who roved the galaxy sermonizing to the backwards aliens about superior human morals. They had to fight to be able to include darker, more serious stories and to have actual story arcs instead of just planet/anomaly of the week stories and two-parters. They had to fight to be allowed to tackle certain social issues. They had to fight to set stories somewhere other than a starship named Enterprise. The network's intransigence was ultimately what flew Star Trek into the ground in the first place. Ratings were solid once TNG grew the beard and DS9 got rolling in earnest, but when TNG ended and Voyager was on the drawing board the network flatly rejected pretty much the entire premise of the series because it didn't follow Trek formula... resulting in a massive change in the project's tone from a season story arc-driven series like DS9's latter half to a lighter, exploration-focused episodic format like TNG. That was when the ratings started to fall... when the audience started to reject Star Trek's stagnation. Enterprise had the same problem. Despite being deliberately set before Star Trek and even omitting "Star Trek" from the title, the formula was king and they were quickly forced to ditch the stylistic suck and become a cosmetically advanced prequel, which combined with the insistence on continuity-breaking shenanigans in the name of tie-ins and references to previous shows, flew the ratings right into the toilet. The network attributed the reduced ratings from DS9's crappy timeslot as the fandom's indictment of its formula-breaking format, and killed innovation stone dead.
×
×
  • Create New...