Seto Kaiba

Considering the usual quality of ADV's handiwork... haven't Southern Cross and Mospeada suffered enough? Eh... out of sheer, bloody-minded boredom, I've gotten back to watching Queen's Blade while I sit and wait for a service pack to finish installing on one of my other computers.

Okay, yeah... you've got me there. Insofar as the present situation affects the general availability of legitimate Macross goods in the Americas, nothing has changed. The circumstances being what they are, it's unlikely you'll see any changes until such time as Harmony Gold USA either voluntarily surrenders, or is forced to give up, the trademarks they hold on the Macross name and logo in the US. Since they seem determined to hold onto those trademarks as a means of protecting Robotech from having to compete with Macross on a level footing (a death sentence for Robotech), the only time we're going to see legitimate releases of the rest of Macross in the states will be when Harmony Gold either goes out of business or finally produces a Robotech sequel so loathsome and pathetic that they decide to cut their losses and just sell the franchise to whoever wants it. Just looking at the general lack of forward motion on the proposed Robotech live-action movie and their decision to put Robotech: Shadow Rising on indefinite hiatus while they wait for Warner to unf*ck the Robotech franchise's piss-poor reputation, I would say that the latter case has never looked more realistic.

Excellent theories, gentlemen... but having actually spoken with the man at a few points in the past, I'm pretty firmly convinced that he's a flesh-and-blood human being or at least a very convincing Mudd-style android. STill, it's a mystery to me how he can manage to be so consistently wrong when he posts. I don't think he's doing it on purpose... Yeah... no kidding.

Better late than never... thanks for the confirmation on that. I hadn't gotten around to installing Windows 7 on my desktop yet since it's having motherboard issues and the manufacturer wants it to go back to get fixed.

'kay... it looks like it's going to fall to me to voice the confusion most of us are probably feeling after your latest nonsensical outburst: What the hell are you saying? I realize this'll probably sound like a personal attack, but I really mean what I'm about to say here and I intend no malice in it. Now, what I want you to do is sit down and spend some quality time with your keyboard as you explain to us your view(s) on Macross and Robotech. I'm not exaggerating even a little when I say that we have no idea why you're even here. I mean, from your posts it doesn't really seem like you're a Macross fan... or that you're even remotely interested in Macross. I know you're a fan of the old and much-maligned Robotech comics, but your position on the rest of Robotech and on Harmony Gold is pretty inconsistent, and you say a lot of sh*t that's just plain misinformed. I'm not even sure what to make of this latest remark of yours because you won't remain consistent. So what I want you do to is explain to us what you think of Macross and Robotech... the bits you like, the bits you don't, your opinion of Harmony Gold, etc. I mean... really. Did you say what you just said because you thought RT25 was a celebration orchestrated by Harmony Gold USA? It's not. Harmony Gold has more or less nothing to do with it, as far as I've heard. It's the brainchild of the few admirable Robotech fans left out there. It's a fan project that shames anything Harmony Gold has done to commemorate the 25th Anniversary of the show. Even as someone who's openly critical of Robotech, I can't help but be impressed by what they've managed to pull off... and frankly I think it's a shame that Cam Clarke isn't going to be there with the rest of his fellow cast-mates. This is possibly the last hurrah for Robotech. That he's not going to attend doesn't mean he refused... he might just have not been able to make it due to other obligations. Entirely possible... though it doesn't look like anyone here is fluent enough in Japanese to successfully explain the complex legal situation to her and have her actually understand it.

Of course... it's only natural that the members of the Robotech lunatic fringe think it's big news that a Japanese girl professes to like the show. In all seriousness, finding out that there's a batshit crazy or improbably stupid housewife somewhere in Japan who actually knows about Robotech is probably the biggest news for Robotech since 2007. It's a safe bet that the handful of fanatics presiding over what's left of the Robotech fandom will be holding this up as a sign that the live-action movie project Tobey Maguire's been ignoring since at least 2008 is destined to be a colossal international hit fit to shame Star Wars and Star Trek. Eh... as far as I can tell, yui1107 got some bad info somewhere and leaped to the entirely incorrect conclusion that the reason the rest of Macross hasn't been licensed for distribution outside of Japan is because Big West is run by jerks who don't want to work with foreign companies. In one particular post, she went much farther and said that their attitude was like the anti-westerner bigotry of the samurai (or rather, the Tokugawa shogunate) from back when Japan was a closed country under the sakoku policy between 1633 and 1853. It looks like she doesn't know or understand the real reason that Big West is unable to distribute the rest of Macross outside of Japan... Harmony Gold's trademark on the Macross name and logo. Basically... like many Robotech fans, she knows just enough to make an ass of herself in a public venue, but not nearly enough to actually understand what's really going on. From one or two of her posts, I also gathered that she's a Southern Cross fan and has an axe to grind with Big West or Harmony Gold about the treatment of that series. It's not clear which company her beef is with, or that she even understands the distinction between the originals and Robotech's amalgam of a story. I would guess, given the substance of her complaint, that she feels that Harmony Gold made a bad call when they rewrote the original Southern Cross and set it on Earth. Her specific complaint seems to be that she feels they should have left the setting as a recently-colonized planet near Earth, not Earth itself, as it would make the universe of the Robotech series feel much bigger. Now, whether that accurately represents the sum total of her statements... I make no promises. I do believe I have at least got the general thrust of her argument/opinion here. Yeah... it's a shame, I was actually asked to go to that not too long ago. Couldn't swing it, unfortunately. Looks like it'll be the first, and quite probably the last, decent shindig to celebrate Robotech's 25th Anniversary. I think Zen72 is going there and will be reporting on it, but I dunno... haven't seen him in a while.

Nah... at the very least, Shaloom wasn't openly malicious in his bullshitting. To be blunt, JuanRT is cut from the same cloth as DougBendo and MEMO1DOMINION. His podcast is less about news that's relevant to the Robotech franchise, and more about pushing his own personal agenda and that of his friend MEMO. He's one of those militant members of the Robotech lunatic fringe who sees anyone with a different opinion as not being a "real Robotech fan" or a "Macross purist troll". One of the things I remember hearing during my brief tenure on RobotechX before MEMO went all ban-happy was that one of the things Harmony Gold was showing around to raise interest for Shadow Rising was footage taken from Shadow Chronicles redone with marginally improved animation quality. It was supposedly trotted out at a few conventions, but since I don't do that scene I have no idea if it actually was. Eh... is there really anything out there that we could call a credible source of Robotech news anymore? It seems like the only people putting news out there anymore are provably untrustworthy people like MEMO, and lunatic fringe fans who see spinning things in Harmony Gold's failure as a ticket to legitimacy and self-advancement.

Uh... okay, Wanz? In the future, do yourself a little favor and end your posts one sentence earlier. I've gone out on a limb plenty of times to defend you to Gubaba and a few others, but when you say things like that I have to ask... really, are you a Macross fan? Apart from the Macross II: Lovers Again OVA/movie, is there a Macross series you actually like? Level with me here dude, because I'm REALLY starting to wonder. Considering that it was typed entirely in caps, I'm going to assume it's the handiwork of MEMO... which is pretty much an automatic "No." any way you shake it. It looks like exactly the same sort of flimflam routine MEMO and Maverick_LSC were doing for the live action movie. They took what little information was actually available and blew it all out of proportion, and then started posting their theories about it as fact. As far as I'm aware, all that has actually been confirmed about this project is that it's supposedly in editing and that it'll be some kind of side story irrelevant to the ongoing plot of Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles. It occurs to me that "SPANISH PODCAST" was mentioned as the source... that almost certainly means JuanRT is involved, which is just a further hit against the credibility of this supposed "news".

Totally... hell, just a few months ago I watched my newly obtained DVD copy and noticed stuff I'd never caught before in the VHS version I've had since I was a kid. Not exactly a masterpiece of cinematography, but it's a fun movie to watch for nostalgia's sake, or just to watch some giant robots kick the sh*t out of each other in a way that you just can't get away with on TV anymore. Hm... while my memories of watching the original Transformers series as a kid are a bit on the fuzzy side after all these years, and I only ever had a handful of episodes on tape, but one thing I remember clearly from back then is that even as a kid I thought Rodimus Prime was a wuss. It would be totally believable for him to be unsure of himself after being asked to fill Optimus Prime's shoes under normal circumstances, but the kid was sharing his bonce with the collective wisdom of every Autobot leader ever. At that point, his lack of confidence in his role as leader loses any pretense of credibility. I actually remember being quite pleased when they brought Optimus Prime back from the dead and one of the first things he did was beat the snot out of Rodimus and take back the Matrix. Ah, such fun childhood memories... I was such a cynical kid.

Indeed, I do... mind you, I actually like the visual aesthetic of Google Chome. I just disagree with this philosophy that you need to hide anything that might actually affect the way the browser functions as though the end users were a pack of ten-thumbed imbeciles. That, and the lack of an ad blocker that actually works, is why I can never manage to use Google Chrome for more than a few days at a go before getting fed up with it. The familiar option menu is still there, it's just that the menu bar has been compacted into that gaudy orange thing, making the lone menu feel a lot more cluttered and disorganized. At the very least, I hope they won't try to dumb down the user accessible options menu to Google Chrome's level. Really, I suppose my objections to it are those of a power user. I would probably be intensely grateful for them having made it harder to screw up the browser's configuration if I were planning to deploy it only on my familiy's computers (you know how it is). *sigh* Maybe it's time to haul my elitist power user ass over to Opera and give it another try. Oh, yeah... first thing I did on encountering the error was send Mozilla a bug report detailing the problem. That's the whole point of beta testing. When I tried it, I found Firefox 4 Beta 5 to be a slick looking and decently stable browser. It's just that there's still some broken (perhaps by design) functionality and the user interface's menus feel a bit cluttered and disorganized. Not an overtly bad browser by any means... but definitely not ready for the big 4.0 release.

Um... actually, quite a few things have changed over the past few years. It's just that the changes didn't include the disappearance of the legal roadblocks preventing Big West from doing an end-run around Harmony Gold and distributing Macross in the US over their objections.

Eh... as waters7 pointed out, that links has been there for ages. In practice, Harmony Gold's explanation of how Robotech II: the Sentinels fits into the continuity establishes that things generally didn't happen as depicted in the aborted animation, novels, comic books, etc. Only the so-called "broad strokes" of the Sentinels story arc are considered accurate (namely, that the SDF-3 was shipped off on a mission to find the RT Masters), up to the conclusion of that particular arc in Prelude. Of course, when you take stock of Prelude and realize it's a continuation of the nominally non-canon Robotech II: the Sentinels comic books by Jason and John Waltrip... that opens up a whole new avenue of WTF.

Eh... by any rational measure, that the animation has consistently abbreviated it as "UN <Noun>" over the past twenty-plus years seems like a pretty fair indication that it is correct... or at least what the show's creators had intended, which is effectively the same thing. If the animation consistently uses "UN", I don't see any reason to second-guess the show's creators. Unity/Unified is used too... but all that's really necessary there is a note that "UN" is short-form for "Unified" or "Unity", whichever you happen to favor. Using "UN" is what most of the fanbase is familiar with... so, as we've just graphically demonstrated, going with "Unified" or "Unity" without explanation is going to inject additional confusion into something that already causes some degree of confusion on its own. Really, what this calls for, if anything, is a bloody footnote.

Eh... dragging the real United Nations into it makes it rather more complicated than it needs to be. At some point or other all the "unified" government are all referred to as some permutation on "U.N. Gov't". It's also probably a bad (and misleading) idea to treat the pre-Space War 1 U.N. Government as being the same entity as the post-Space War 1 "new U.N. Government". Using inconsistent naming conventions isn't going to help either. A less confusing and more explicit progression would go something like this: United Nations (1945 - 2001) - The real-world international organization. U.N. Government (2001 - 11 Feb 2010) - The planetary central government established as a result of the 1999 crash of an alien ship on South Ataria island. new U.N. Government (April 2010 - ~2051) - The re-established planetary central government after Space War 1. New U.N. Government (~2051 - Current) - The decentralized E.U.-style interplanetary governing body present in Macross Frontier. If you really have a hard-on for using "Unity" or "Unified" instead of "U.N." that's fine too... but be consistent, or it can get a lot more confusing than it needs to be.

Eh... really, I think the term "Harmony Gold" would translate much more readily and gracefully into something a bit simpler, like "parasitism" or "serial plagiarist". It's quite tricky to find a word or a pithy little phrase which can neatly encapsulate all the sins of twenty-five years of bad business practices and monumental ineptitude. They got lucky when they came up with a neat little term like "Macekre" to describe the creative process. At times like this, I'm reminded of an old adage attributed to P.T. Barnum: "There's a sucker born every minute." Just about anyone is going to find the level of confidence many Robotech fans seem to have in Harmony Gold's "abilities" profoundly unnatural until they take stock of what Harmony Gold has actually been doing in the past twenty-five years. Rather than devote their fullest attention to the production of new material and trying to do something original with the franchise, Harmony Gold has put a frightening amount of time, money, and energy making it appear their creative input into Robotech was far greater than it actually was. They've capitalized on the ignorance of the fans using exaggeration, deceptive wordings, and occasionally outright lies to make them appear capable and talented when all they've ever actually done (with the sole exception of Robotech 3000) is rehash someone else's work. It's gotten to the point where they're rehashing their rehashes just to keep the ball rolling. Just look at Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles... it's practically worthy of M.C. Escher. Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles is a rehash of the Robotech II: the Sentinels comic books by Jason and John Waltrip, and Robotech's "New Generation". Jason and John Waltrip's run of Robotech II: the Sentinels comic books are, in turn, rehashes of the old Robotech II: the Sentinels novelizations by James Luceno and Brian Daley, though they didn't stick to the source material. James Luceno and Brian Daley's novelizations of Robotech II: the Sentinels are, at least in theory, just a rehash of Carl Macek's planned-but-not-completed Robotech II: the Sentinels TV series. (In practice, the novels were more like a rehash that went snoop-the-loopy halfway through) Carl Macek's incomplete Robotech II: the Sentinels series was a rehash of the Robotech TV series Macross Saga and Robotech Masters Saga, and also drew on some minor elements of Robotech: the Untold Story. Robotech: the Untold Story was a rehash of Megazone 23 that borrowed from Southern Cross. The three sagas of the original 85 episode Robotech series are rehashes/rewrites of the original Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada. And there you have it... the Robotech: the Shadow Chronicles movie represents the fourth consecutive rehashing of the same old material to produce a sequel. We're still dealing with the same core cast of characters and their close relatives, with the same mecha, the same ships, the same plot devices, and we're still retreading the same damn story. I can only guess that Harmony Gold thinks that the creative process works like vodka distilling, that the more times they distill the same material, the better it gets.

Ah, I see... and if your recollection of that guy's reasoning it sound, then it makes no sense at all. I guess I misremembered which show Wanzerfan said he disliked without having actually seen it. It might have been Macross 7... but that's hardly a unique condition, eh?

Incidentally, on a lark I downloaded and installed Mozilla Firefox 4.0 beta 5. The installation process went smoothly enough, and it was kind enough to leave my previous install of Firefox 3.6.9 in place, and even absorb some of the compatible add-ons like AdBlock Plus and Norton IPS. All in all, it's definitely a step backwards, IMO. True, the new user interface looks pretty... in fact, it looks startlingly like Google Chrome. Not that I consider that a bad thing, but it doesn't seem to work very well for the Opera-style top-left all-in-one menu system. The menus are, at present, rather sparse and poorly laid out. Everything is crammed haphazardly into a half-dozen or so folders under the main menu, which makes it feel a bit scattered and disorganized. The only real issues I could find with it in terms of actual function were that it bricks when you try to open a secure connection to Firefox's add-ons update section, and it won't properly render context menus that extend beyond the boundaries of the window itself... displaying the text but not the background. All in all... it's nice looking, but thus far I don't see it as a significant or necessary improvement on Firefox 3.x.

Actually, she posted several threads over there on Robotech.com a day or so before the posted here. Last I'd heard, nobody had responded to any of the three or four threads she posted, primarily because nobody could understand what she was saying. It looks like the only person who's bothered to pay any attention at all over there is MEMO, and he's almost as unintelligible as she is. I've said it before and I'll say it again... I'd like to believe that most Robotech fans out there are decent, sensible people who have their heads screwed on straight and just want to enjoy the nostalgia of watching their favorite childhood show. Unfortunately, the ones I seem to encounter most often are the idiots and the crazies. And yet... every Robotech fan I've talked to at length about this latest project that was allegedly Carl's idea has said that they think it's just Tommy trying to put a bow on that turd in the hope that we'll overlook the stench. Oh yes, they'll claim everything is being done to honor Carl's memory... but we've seen ample proof that they have precious little respect for Carl's memory, and are quite comfortable using his death to promote projects he had nothing to do with.

Inertia Store Converter... it's the new doodad that stops the fighter from pancaking the pilot the way Guld did. No, the VF-171EX did not have an inertia store converter.

Hm... well, I'm not aware of a precise date for the repeal of the cybernetic implant ban on Macross Galaxy. Given evidence from the show and the contents of Pash! Animation File 02: Macross Frontier, I think it safe to say that it had to be sometime around 2047-2048. Grace O'Connor was already formulating her plan for her galaxy-wide implant zero-time fold network prior to the destruction of the SDFN-04 Global in 2048, and told Sheryl she'd had her deliberately infected with the v-type bacteria during the medical examination she received after Grace found her and took her in. As we see pictures of Sheryl in the Mao Nome's 2047 piece on the v-type infection, it seems reasonable enough to assume that Sheryl's mother was killed by the supporters of implant legalization at some point before November 2047. I don't recall precisely what the show's dialogue has to say about how recent the legalization is, since I don't have my Macross Frontier DVDs handy. I don't know what Kiss the Galaxy has to say about it either, so perhaps RedWolf could favor us with more from that.

Really... that was to be expected. After all, City-7 and Macross Frontier were democratic governments with elected leaders. It was established quite a while back that Macross Galaxy is not, it's a corporate operation. It's not at all unexpected that the fleet's corporation-style leadership would take pains to remove employees/citizens who are actively undermining its policies.

Eh... really, if your e-mails and paper letters are as full of the same misguided assumptions you've posted here and on your blog, they probably realized that you don't understand the situation at all and decided it would be best not to answer. No, they've met with Harmony Gold USA at least once since 2001 to discuss exporting the rest of Macross, and rejected Harmony Gold USA's terms. One can hardly blame them, since Harmony Gold USA's terms were almost extortion. Good grief, you really are clueless, aren't you? Carl Macek had nothing whatsoever to do with Robotech after the teaser trailer for Robotech 3000 was laughed out of the conventions it was shown at and he was replaced as Robotech's creative director by Tommy Yune. He basically had no say in anything Robotech related after the year 2000. Carl's death had almost no measureable effect on Robotech, except that he was no longer able to attend the disappointing and pathetic 25th anniversary convention tour. Have you ever stopped to consider that he isn't unsociable... that the problem is you and your complete failure to grasp the facts of this situation? Let me spell it out for you in very blunt terms: The company that is stopping the rest of Macross from being exported is Harmony Gold USA, not Big West. You are blaming the wrong company.

IIRC, that's not really new information... Pash! Animation File: Macross Frontier touches on that briefly, and says that Sheryl's mother was a casualty of the violence between supporters and opponents of implant technology.

Eh... really, OptimusX has it right, more or less. In practice, it seems that there have been three distinct entities bearing some permutation of the moniker "U.N. Government". Obviously, the first of these is the original U.N. Government that was drafted in 2000 and became reality in January 2001. It was this incarnation of the Earth U.N. Gov't that established the U.N. Forces and their space division... the U.N. Spacy. After the war ended, the old U.N. Government and its constituency were mostly dead, so the survivors established the little-n "new U.N. Government". One would assume, given the state that Earth's population was in and the what Kawamori had to say in the Otona Anime #9 interview, that it was more or less a re-establishment of the old U.N. Government system they'd had before... something roughly analogous to a strong central planetary (and later, interplanetary) government. In later years, humanity had spread out so far in the galaxy that it became impossible for the little-n "new U.N. Government" to unify its constituents, and it began to change into the big-n "New U.N. Government"... something more along the lines of the EU. Prior to that interview, it was generally assumed that the formation of the big-n New U.N. Government and the subsequent reorganization of the military stemmed from Wilbur Garland's 2051 coup attempt in Macross VF-X2. Now, it seems that's no longer the case... though it was probably a factor.

Um... while I don't recall precisely who it was who said that, I have a nagging feeling that it was Wanzerfan. Or, at the very least, she probably got that information from one of the more vocal Harmony Gold toadies... the only time I've ever seen a Harmony Gold employee actually directly talk about their negotiations with Big West was a brief discussion I had with Tommy Yune, and nothing was mentioned about Big West being intransigent regarding Macross licensing. That part seems to have been an additional interpretation injected onto Tommy's account by the likes of Maverick_LSC and MEMO1DOMINION, who wouldn't hesitate to embroider the story somewhat to absolve Harmony Gold of any blame and point the finger squarely at Big West. Eh... now that seems a bit farfetched. I have a hard time believing there could be a woman out there patient enough to deal with those two and not either bust out laughing at them or flee for the hills.