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kajnrig

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  1. kajnrig
    Dang. And I'd been working on a response to various points over the course of the last few days, too. Oh well then. In trying to answer my own question, I came across this: http://movieweb.com/ghost-in-shell-movie-2017-box-office-predictions/ It's predicting a not too hot debut (10-15 million domestic) owing to competition from the likes of Beauty and the Beast and Power Rangers (though the whitewashing certainly doesn't help much either). It also had this press-release synopsis that isn't really spoiler-y but is enough so to warrant it, methinks. Bolded are parts that stuck out to me for better or for worse. Also of interest was this Forbes article, which focuses on the third trailer and potential box office numbers compared to other big March releases (with luck, it'll perform around the same as Lucy owing to ScarJo influence): https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2017/03/27/scarlett-johanssons-ghost-in-the-shell-gets-a-last-ditch-trailer/#448bc17445e9
  2. kajnrig
    This showed up randomly in my Youtube feed. Some info on the reviewers: One of them saw the original movie, the other didn't, neither have seen or read anything else GitS. tl;dr = Falls far short of the original(s), but isn't an out-and-out trainwreck. Middle of the road, underwhelming (basically what I expected it to be, plus racism). Seems that's the opinion of most people here as well.
  3. kajnrig
    Just paid for my two re-releases. Hope everybody got theirs as well.
  4. kajnrig
    5:50 - Apparently yes. Visor and veil.
  5. kajnrig
    I'm not art historian, so take this with a grain of salt, but I'd argue there's nothing about the "Japanese expression" of anime that precludes it from being anime. Actually, it's precisely that expression, those ideas applied to animation that originated in the Japanese industry, that make it the movement that it is. To put it another way, the European Renaissance included distinct expressions that influenced and were influenced by other expressions of that movement. The French Renaissance, Italian, etc. etc. etc. all sort of fed into each other. Maybe it could be said that the "Anime Renaissance" started in Japan and "anime" ideas wormed their way into American animation, French animation, even Middle Eastern animation (apparently a show called "Torkaizer," never heard of it). I dunno. Anyway. ....ehhhhh..... Is there tracking data on this movie at all? As in how well it's projected to do? As much as I'm railing against it, part of me does hope it ultimately does well, but that trailer doesn't fill me with much hope for its quality. It doesn't seem like general enthusiasm levels are all that high, either (what a shock), at least in America. It'll probably do better in China (and Japan? maybe?).
  6. kajnrig
    Neat monster girl anime Interviews with Monster Girls ended this weekend with a decent 12-episode run. While I really liked it, the final two episodes fell victim to the anime trope of The Heartfelt Narration, where the protagonists espouse about all the things they've learned and what they're grateful for and so on. There's a long stretch in the second-to-last episode where it's just three girls talking to the camera one after the other, and the animators did what they could with what they had, but you could tell they were running out of steam. And final episode is the "beach" episode, because of course there has to be one. To its credit, the show subverts the trope as much as it can - it takes place in the school pool, for one - and spends no time at all creepily sexualizing the underage cast; in fact, there's a good amount of focus on the attraction between the two adults. A+ for not being Creepy Anime Bullshit.
  7. kajnrig
    I dunno about that much, but it is a good movie. That ending was all sorts of cheese, though, and kind of took me out of the movie. First Class is still a better overall X-Men movie, but this is as good as a Wolverine movie was ever going to get, I think. I'm glad they decided to get rid of the baggage of all the other movies, too. The relationship between Logan and Charles got a bit too real for me at times, made me honest to god tear up at one point.
  8. kajnrig
    Eh. Someone brought it up, and I'm fine with discussing it. I try not to drag it on because I know most people here aren't as comfortable and/or interested in it as I am, but if someone wants to discuss it, then I'm game. /shrug
  9. kajnrig
    That's... not at all what I said, but I'm not gonna keep arguing the point. Cheers.
  10. kajnrig
    I wonder about this, too, and how prevalent this thinking is in Japan. I was always under the impression that, generally, Japanese audiences understand anime characters as "Japanese" (insofar as nationality is at all applicable to anime) whenever it comes to how they specifically interact with the characters. But then again, anime in Japan encompasses literally all animation; the term isn't used nearly as specifically as it is here. Heck, the "term" isn't even a term, it's just a Japanese tendency to shorthand EVERYTHING. And even here people argue that stuff like Avatar, Wakfu, Samurai Jack, Adventure Time, etc. fall under the American definition of "anime." One Youtuber likens anime to historical art movements like the Renaissance, modernism, etc., which I think is a... better way to understand it, but anyway. They also didn't organize their society around race like we did, so... Like, I get what you guys are trying to say, but you're comparing apples to oranges here. If Japan had won the war, let's say, and they continued their experimenting on Chinese and Korean POWs, and brought over a bunch of Chinese and Koreans and settled them into the slums of Japan and then systematically leeched off of them financially and socially for the next seventy years, meanwhile marveling at how primitive "mainlanders" are, and in the meantime Korea recovered from the war and made a sick-ass action movie, and then Japan started saying to themselves, "You know what? We don't like racism anymore," and then took that sick-ass action movie and recast it using Japanese actors who had infinitely more exposure than their Korean-Japanese counterparts, THEN that would be more comparable to whitewashing. You can bet that Korean-Japanese population would be throwing up as much of a fuss over the casting decision as Asian Americans are over GitS's whitewashing.
  11. kajnrig
    Yeah, I got that same feeling, too, now that I think about it. The beginning dragged, and after the conflict ratcheted up and the alien had no more new tricks up its sleeve, I started getting a bit bored. Not enough to not want to see it to the end, but enough to notice time passing.
  12. kajnrig
    Saw it tonight. Enjoyed it well enough. Spoilers in case you care:
  13. kajnrig
    Are the mecha/monster designs as bad as they look in the trailer? Also, I heard the Power Ranger-ing doesn't actually start until the last 30 minutes or so. Confirmation?
  14. kajnrig
    This also points to the distinction between "Japanese" and "Japanese-American." To Japanese-Americans, World War II's most personal memory is the internment camps; to the Japanese, it's the atom bomb. There's cultural crossover for sure, and it's definitely worth noting how and where they view the same thing differently, but too often this sort of stuff gets used to try and delegitimize minority American perspectives. If Japanese people are okay with whitewashing, then Japanese-Americans should shut their mouths... except Japanese people by and large didn't have to deal with the consequences of whitewashing, Japanese-Americans did. Anyway, however else I feel about the movie, it does have some damn impressive special effects. It's nice to see Weta bringing their A-game; I don't remember them working on any "big" projects since King Kong. The Hobbit movies, I guess, but I didn't watch past the first one, so...
  15. kajnrig
    And yet they consistently find a way...
  16. kajnrig
    For those of you still wondering about extending the battery life:
  17. kajnrig
    The Hasegawa kit allows you to build that section with the guns deployed or stowed; the gold that covers the barrels in fighter mode can apparently open, eject, or otherwise make way to expose them. It's a mechanism that just didn't make the transition to the toys, models, and animation. The Bandai kit omits these covers entirely and just has the barrels exposed all the time, even in fighter mode. Bandai kit: http://dalong.net/review/etc/md03/p/md03_91.jpg
  18. kajnrig
    They're not using TV Flash? That's an odd decision...
  19. kajnrig
    Trainwreck Part 2: The Legend of MARTHAAAAAA edit: Whoops, timing was way off, apparently.
  20. kajnrig
    Did anyone see that theory going around that this was actually the Venom origin movie?
  21. kajnrig
    You and me both. I was hoping for this angle, actually. Hayate and Freyja snog during that birthday with the snow and stuff and the third less invested party just says "eh screw it" and focuses on her other just as relevant and important priorities.
  22. kajnrig
    A bit of an aside: Sheryl Nome's VA has a small role in one of the later Frontier albums. Does she sing, too, or does she primarily stick to VA?
  23. kajnrig
    No no no, no Ranka or Sheryl. It'll be Mirage filling in, after they discover she has fold wave capacity or whatever it is.
  24. kajnrig
    No, those are missiles being launched from the underwing pylons. The micro missile launchers are located in the shoulders in battroid mode. In fighter mode:
  25. kajnrig
    Update: Played a few more hours and the game's running smooth(er) now. A quick summary of the issues most people seem to be having: - Low and choppy framerates, lots of frameskipping - White/Black screen on launch - Game and/or computer freezes after a certain amount of time (if the former, requires game restart; if the latter, requires full system restart) - Fullscreen 1080p is actually 900p upscaled The first of these seems to be a combination of a generally poor porting job, underpowered hardware (people were trying to run it on integrated graphics chips and wondering why it was so slow...), and an anomaly with the way the game does antialiasing. Turning any amount of antialiasing on will interfere with how the game draws textures, so instead of getting a smooth fading in/out of high/low-res grass textures, you'll see patches of grass "pop in," as it were, and causes the frame timing to spike. I turned AA off (the ambient occlusion option apparently has a measure of AA built in, according to Steam forum members), and my game started running buttery-smooth. I didn't experience white/black screens, even though it's apparently more common on AMD cards than Nvidia ones and I have an AMD RX 480. Rolling back video drivers to version 16.11.5 (I'm guessing that's the release date of it? May 11, 2016?) takes care of the problem. I don't know exactly which driver revision works for Nvidia cards, but in either case, hopefully a driver update helps to fix the problem. The same thing fixes the game/computer freezing bit. On my end, it was the computer freezing, as I mentioned in the above post. This particular problem seems to happen to both AMD and Nvidia cards across all sorts of hardware configurations. The last issue can be overcome by downloading a program called Borderless Gaming that allows you to run any (or at least most) game/program/etc. in a borderless window. This forces the game into a 1920x1080 window, so everything looks right. The upscaling seems to be a leftover from the original PS4 version, which renders at 900p. All of these seem like they'll be fairly easy to fix in a debug patch. I imagine even the graphical driver problems can be traced to a problem in the porting process, but even if it's not, I'm fairly confident AMD/Nvidia will release updated drivers to support the game. As it is, I'm 4 hours in and loving it so far, even if I've only just beaten the first tutorial quest.
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