Sundown

Hilarious. I tried another photo, a shot of 3 of us with Chris Tomlin, who is a celebrity of sorts. He's pretty well known in the Christian music community... My friends get matched with dudes. I get Hillary Duff. Along with a bunch of other semi-hot chicks. What the?! I do not look like a chick. At least I also got Eric Bana, and Benecio Del Toro (41%) actually did show up in the list. Well, they got something right. Chris Tomlin didn't even get recognized as having a face. The one actual celebrity in our picture didn't even register as human. =P Bastage, my friend got also got Benecio Del Toro, at 59%, when he looks nothing like him. Except it's a different picture. Apparently, I look like the more tired, fatigued, and uglier version of Del Toro. Hate.

O_o I'm Keira Knightly (54%). Does she know this? "Hey Keira, baby, we have so much in common. We both don't look like you." I'm also Lucille Ball (53%) and Aung San Suu Kyi (50%). My first male match is Placido Domingo at (49%). This thing doesn't work at all, when in reality, I look a lot more like an asian Bencio Del Toro than anything. I've also been accused of looking like Keanu Reeves and the Jap/Chinese singer Takashi, but those people are largely insane. Hah, I'm also Juan Carlos Ferrero (which I can sorta see), and Robert De Niro. Awesome. And Sam Raimi at (37%) for the geek in me.

I don't remember much of it, other than the totally silly premise and an even worse execution, but I remember it being something of a Kirk vehicle, or maybe I think that because Shatner directed it. Kirk's awesome, but he's awesome when placed in dire situations and opposite compelling characters. Otherwise, he sort of just flops around and goes "look at meee!" Yes, I hated Kirk's parts in Generations. "Oh my! *croak*" I wanted to give him CPR just so I could stab him and properly kill him again. Hmm. *Starts a Macross, Star Wars, 24 crossover fanfic. Starring me.* Well, sometimes the greatness of one thing is diluted by the lesser greatness of the other. No points for guessing which is the greater. So, when's the VF-0's coming out again? What's scary is that I had to read that three times before I figured out what was wrong there. My immediate emotional reaction upon reading it perfectly fits my sentiments on just about everything. Oookaay. Not creepy at all. O_o Now you're talking. I mean with the HP Lovecraftian aliens. Aliens so ancient and inscrutable that our silly notions of right and wrong have absolutely no meaning to them, and their heinous plans much too deep and insidious for us to grasp. You have me, except for the rape part. But then again, M7 does have hentai monsters ready for that sort of thing.

*shudder* I haven't watched enough of it, and I'm still kind of confused what's what. But I don't care what they are. Hentai bulldog monsters and space fairies! You know, this is probably the most screwed up thing I'm ever going to say. But I think I actually liked Star Trek TMP. I probably have to watch it again to accurately gauge its actual suckitude, but the idea of V'ger being Voyager meshed with an alien was pretty darn neat. Search for Spock was watchable, except all that running around on a foggy planet that wasn't Dagobah, and kids ruin movies, even if it's kid Spock. Voyage Home wasn't so much campy as it was Disney and traditionally cheezy. But man, Earth actually gets wasted, and in the end, a good time was had by all. Yes, 5 (I'm not even going to bother trying to remember its name) was of most extreme suckness. That's undebatable. Back on topic: Why'm I here? Nostalgia over SDF and related toys. The 1/48 VF-1 is simply an incredible fulfillment of my childhood dream. I'd always wanted a toy that looked and felt like the 1/48 does, and to my continual dismay, none of the toys that were available in my childhood were satisfying enough. The designs had a certain feel that was always lost in toys and most models, but somehow, the 1/48 captured most of that and more. It really blows my mind that anyone ever made such a thing... I'd thought it impossible. And I stick around for the antics. Even when there's not much Macross news available, MW's still a place to discuss things I enjoy with people who at least have a somewhat like mind, and have at least some of the same tastes. Things usually involve sci-fi, games, and other innane things, although they do veer off into more serious topics that I just have too hard a time resisting the urge to jump into. Anyway, it's a place to chat with folks who've shared a big and somewhat unique chunk of my childhood. So if you liked Macross, you can't be that bad... even if you think boobies on a valk are the greatest things since real ones.

So now he has an Iron Man/Spider-man suit... guess the giant transforming robot will someday be a reality in the comic. 368349[/snapback] I have to saw Ew to the new Spidey suit. Spiderman with gadgetry is, well, kinda lame. And not a fan of the color scheme. Agree with Mr March here... best Spidey suit was the black one... simple, bold, and forgoes some of the campyness we've gotten used to. Who knows, maybe it'll get destroyed at the end of some story arc or another and he'll be back to his old suit as usual. Hopefully we can chalk it up to one of the many temporary fashion faux paus various heroes have had: Superman with long hair, Hulk going grey, and Nick Fury deciding to turn into a black man. Although the latter might not be so temporary.

I'm of the opposite oipnion. I feel the sequels add to the the epic feel of it all. Graham 368323[/snapback] I can understand that. I just find that sometimes I expect things to go a certain way, or retain a certain feel, and the sequels often go in their own direction, and not one that I care for. Sequels and prequels also often explain things you loved about the original away, or cast it in a light that makes it much lesser than what you'd experienced in trying to outdo it. Sometimes the mystery is lost, and is just replaced with, "what, that's it?!" Not every sequel does that of course, especially those planned from the getgo as a trilogy or part of a comprehensive story arc... but I find that the ones written from a mindset several years or decades removed from the original tend to. I mean, at the end of SDF, you imagine the protoculture and supervision army as powerful, otherworldly aliens, even more strange and inscrutable than the Zentradi. And then we get Macross 7, which shows them to be hentai monsters or space elves. Zero's presentation of the Aphos is a little better, but the giant purple flower thing at the end isn't something that really put fear into me. The only exception I can think of offhand are the Star Trek movies with the original crew (or at least the good ones). It added grit along with better special effects and designs to the storytelling, and retained the soul of the original while shedding the campyness. The universe actually felt bigger now that the Klingons wheren't just badly dressed men with evil mustaches. But of course, I'm largely ignoring the odd numbered movies when I say that.

*Pines for a real 1/48 VF-1 HUD-endowed TV Version*

Not a fan of the body, but the head sculpt is pretty decent on the Hikkie man doll. The 1/100's are kind of neat, especially since they'd go well with the Yamato Monster. Were banprestos 1/100? *Laughs at opaque cockpit.* *Looks* *Laughs again at swing bar.* This toy would have been awesome like, 20 years ago.

I'm so much the same way. I'm a Star Trek TMP-series and Star Wars OT fan. Somehow in the sequel series they just manage to lose the grand and epic feel of it all.

I just have to observe one thing although I understand that myk might be done with the discussion already. Here we're talking about everything being "relative"-- what's "true for you is true for you"-- according to the postmodern world view. Yet in the next sentence, we seem aghast someone might not consider it "criminal" to take life. I see a bit of a contradiction there. If we were real moral relativists, there wouldn't be such a thing as "criminal", since we would understand that "criminal" is largely a subjective notion. So it seems to me that myk here isn't really espousing moral relativity. He just has a different understanding of what constitutes wrongful taking of life. To him, it is all wrong, and he is actually making a morally objective claim here. Moral relativity is cited only to explain for the sentiments of those who would disagree and who have come to terms with the loss of their loved ones in war, but here, the same isn't applied to the view that all killing is wrong. To a real relativist, taking a life is neither wrong nor right. No more than ham sandwiches are a wrong or a right. But when it comes down to it, I don't think real relativists exist, except maybe for a few sociopathic serial killers. "TAKING LIFE IS TAKING LIFE, NO MATTER WHAT THE JUSTIFICATION OR THE CIRCUMSTANCES BEHIND IT" is actually about as morally absolute a statement one can make. It implies that taking life is wrong. A moral relativist would actually claim that there IS proper justification for taking life in ANY circumstance, or perhaps, no justification is even needed. And the proper response to that would be, "Yep. So go ahead. Kill if it works for you." Yeah, I'm not comfortable with that either.

Noriko reflects my sentiments exactly. I guess in the end I'd put Zero above MII. I just don't have as much cognitive dissonance watching MII as I do Zero, since MII's already been disowned as part of the continuity. I can watch MII and think, neat... eh, whatever. But Zero gets me nitpicking because it is a prequel.

I LOVE SDF. Then again, I'm a Robotech Convert. But it has the most soul and the designs are my favorite. I like DYRL. Great animation, but the story just isn't the same. I like the new designs, but some revisions seem to be there for flashyness's sake alone. I like Flashback 2038. Superfluous eye candy, although not much to it. I kind of like MII. It feels like a visual successor to SDF, even if the plot was largely meh. I really like M+. Great premise, great portrayal of the pilots and the testing of new airframes. A damn good job. My only regret is that the VF-11 just isn't as nice as the VF-1, even though it looks to be related successor. And I'm not a giant fan of the YF-19, since it's look and feel are very different from SDF designs and it just doesn't work as well for me. I still appreciate it some, and am in love with the YF-22. Mac 7 is vaguely watchable for some of the characterizations and for Milia... but I hate that it has anything to do with SDF (except the parts that are straight out of SDF)... and that the future of what was established in SDF could turn out so... silly. Mac Zero is somewhat tolerable but mostly forgettable. And there are aspects of Zero that actively encourage my forgetting. So really, I'm not a Macross Everything fan. I'm more of an SDF fan than anything, and I end up liking the subsequent series based on how similar it feels to the original. Conversely, my wrath for a series is also based on how much it deviates or even contradicts SDF. The closer a series tries to place itself to the original, the more glaring the contradictions and thus my wrath becomes. Hence my vast irritation towards M7 and to a lesser extent, M0. Mac Plus gets away with some visual deviation since it's just bloody fun to watch, and it doesn't try to explain or retcon anything in SDF with something that totally feels different from the original. EDIT: Heh, I meant Flashback 2012. I have no idea where I got 2038.

I'm not sure that makes divorce a tool for population control. If that's even remotely true-- if most divorces are just a way out of unplanned marriages (which I'm highly dubious of), then the amount of divorces there are simply show that the swinger lifestyle isn't an effective method for controlling population either. More than likely, this scenario is statistically insignificant in terms of population control. As it remains, the bachelor lifestyle is not common longterm, and few take it up their entire life. If it's a conspiracy, it's not a very effective one. This really has little to do with population control or conspiracy. It's more the manifestation of a sensate and self-fixated culture than anything. The stark reality of sacrifice and living for another becomes pretty unappealing to people living in this culture, despite its rewards. Folks don't really need conspiracy to run away from responsibility. It's just the human condition. At any rate, I see the same happening to Macross that I see with other franchises that I'm endeared to. There's something of the original that I fell in love with, but then the creators reinvent their creation in order to appeal to new audiences or because their own sensibilities have changed. Unfortunately, it means that the new things made aren't really made for me, so I end up clinging to the original while the new becomes more unrecognizable and starts to pass me by. I'm sure older-school fans that were there before me feel the same way about the things that I actually like. So if anything, it's just another lesson of many that hammers into our heads that life isn't apparently about us.

Err. Most of the world's overpopulation problem isn't because of married couples in developed nations having 2.5 kids. It's couples elsewhere having 7 to 9 kids, and many of these societies where this is prevalent aren't even really Judeo-Christian to begin with. Not to mention that divorced people still got married, and many, if not most divorced people have kids... so I don't see how divorce is really a means of avoiding marriage or a tool for population control, since a divorce already implies a marriage that's taken place.

Agreed. I'm pretty sure the plastic quality is not Bandai 1/55 quality. It has a translucency that looks like standard 1/48 plastic, but polished smooth instead of a grainy matt finish. The smoothness actually makes the translucency stand out-- it actually looks a great deal cheaper to me, and I'm actually not excited about the semi-glossiness.

We should really count our luck for Macross being alive for as long as it has... sure, new Macross productions might come out in the future, but I'm not sure I'm particularly interested in anything Kawamori feels like putting out at this stage, given his change of aesthetics since M7. The recent revival was nice, as old fans grew old enough to afford silly prices for collector quality toys, but I'm not sure I see this ever happening again. From what I understand, a big reason marriages don't work is often a lack of committment, though that might not be the only reason... but I gotta say that it seems a little odd to give up on committment by citing failures borne often from a lack of committment. And well, I can't agree that humans are simply "just animals". For one, no animal feels the compulsion to justify their own choices, to others or themselves. They wouldn't even have to reason that they're animals before deciding to behave accordingly. They just go and do it. No animal I know of would ever resist any naturally strong urge-- if only to make its body obey it rather than the other way around. Sure, few humans do this on a regular basis, but there have been numerous notable examples who have, and each of us does a little of this at least every day. I think there's more than mere animal instinct going on. And heh, uncommitted sex with no headache and consequence is largely mythical, although it sounds like a nice idea in theory. It's likely even more mythical than a happy marriage.

If I remember right, the TV Roy VF-1S was almost always portrayed as white in the actual animation. My most vivid memories of a grey Roy were those paintings done for Valkyrie model kits in the 80's, most of which were of the TV version.

What's wrong with Jennifer Grey? I remember having a crush on her watching Silver Spoons.

Well, even so, doesn't mean that a police officer is going to spend very much time explaining things to bystanders... and while the Jedi seem to be largely autonomous, they also seem to answer at least in part to the Cancellor and the Senate. Which was sort of their problem in the first place, considering who the Cancellor actually was.

*dances a little happy dance and thumbs nose at the silly people selling Low-Vis's for 400 bucks on ebay*

What the heck is Valk Armored Parts Version 2? It's not a FP cause it rings in at 12000 something yen. Is it the GBP in CF colors? That's the only thing I can think of that exists in the Macross canon that fits that description. But if so, they is so crazy.

Actually no. That seems perfectly reasonable behavior for a law enforcement officer, who likely doesn't want to get mired in lengthy explainations for what just happened to people who the matter either doesn't concern, or who can't really help. It might be curt, but it's a far cry from showing that they're isolated, arrogant, and ineffective. It really isn't their job to coddle every joe schmoe's curiosity, although I suppose it might occasionally be prudent to explain in a few words why someone's limb needed hacking off. I never really saw all the things the Jedi council had been accused of. It's as if we see these things only because Lucas says we're supposed to see them. He talks about the Jedi in interviews, and Palpatine waxes philosophical on them, but Lucas doesn't do much to show this through his actual storytelling. The only things I saw were that they were a little stuffy, pretty blind, and sort of stand-offish with someone who was whiny, arrogant himself, had serious issues going on that would make him a poor candidate for something as mundane as postal work in real life, and who did end up betraying them all and murdering children. Sure, someone might argue that the Jedi pushed him towards the Dark Side, but I think that's a namby pamby copout. Anakin, as he was portrayed, was largely damaged goods. Seems that the Jedi should have either outright rejected him, or trained him with much closer supervision, supervision he likely would have rejected anyway. The last thing they should have done was what Anakin wanted, to have his ego fed and to be treated according to his capability rather than his character. Regardless of the Jedis' actions, Anakin was not a trustworthy individual, so it's no real fault of the Jedi that he was treated accordingly. The only motivation we as an audience are given to hope Anakin gets better treatment is because he's been arbitrarily picked as the protagonist, and because he's good looking. And ultimately, Anakin and Mace (and the Council by association) had mostly made up. Well, that is until Anakin lopped Mace's hand off. I really need to stop thinking about the Prequels. The more I think about them, the more I'm utterly amazed at Lucas's poor storytelling there. I don't feel any of the things it seems Lucas wants me to feel, and I don't root for any of the characters I think I'm supposed to root for. Well, except Obi-Wan. That's the only thing I get out of the PT-- "Obi-Wan... he's, like, kind of cool."

That does sound somewhat more interesting. Of course we'd get a bunch of people villifying Lucas for borrowing so directly from another story... but then again, those who like Star Wars aren't generally bothered by that, since that's how Lucas has always worked. A jab at post-modernism. Illustrating how unworkable and dare I say vapid post-modernism is when applied to Star Wars, just like it is when applied to the real world. I love you.

And here I thought the important thing was how things actually come across on film, how things are portrayed, how that makes or breaks immersion, rather than the actual birthdate of a particular actor. If we have to reference an actor's age when things don't look right to us on screen-- because it's hard to believe Obi-wan in EpIII could look like Obi-wan in ANH in a mere 19 years-- I dare say that something's amiss. A more mature looking Obi-wan in EpIII would be expected if we are to accept the way he looks in EpIV. Anyhow, "The fact remains", Sebastian Shaw who played Pastyvader was 78, when Vader was supposed to be 45 (an age likely given to him retroactively while the PT was being made). If we're going to be throwing the force of real actor ages around like that, then we have to take massive issue with Anakin's casting, Lucas's storytelling, and the believability of the PT altogether, considering that Anakin's "now the main character". Of course, I have no problem with an actor's age so long as their portrayal of a role is convincing. On the flip side, an actor's age doesn't placate me if things just look off from a continuity and storytelling standpoint.

Point was that Guinness appears considerably older than 57 in ANH. He looked a tad older than 62 even, but it could have been partly due to the robes. Yes, he was "only" 62, but at that age, but even five years can make a big difference in appearance, and he really doesn't look like someone in his mid-late 50's. Suspension of belief and everything, I guess.