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JB0

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Everything posted by JB0

  1. JB0
    I care! I have nothing constructive to add, though. ... Not that it's stopped me before. I guess I just have nothing to add, period. But that's not the same as not caring! Those three ARE adorable.
  2. JB0
    Surely ecchi has far less penetration than hentai? ... What? Someone had to say it.
  3. JB0
    They should screw with everyone and do the next preview clip on April first.
  4. JB0
    Fifteen minutes to say "it's an M. Night Shamalama film"?
  5. JB0
    The Macross Quarter. C'mon, you know you wanted to say it too. Also the Q. Rau. I've got a long running affection for the thing.
  6. JB0
    Heat exchanger. Just like a modern fission power plant, that uses a heat exchanger to boil water and spin a turbine, the Valk uses a heat exchanger to pull heat out of the fusion reactor and superheat some form of reaction mass. I suppose electric heaters could also be used, but why? They aren't going near fast enough for a bussard scoop. And even if they were, the huge magnetic field needed would be a hazard to everyone in the area in a dogfight. You have to scour a LOT of space to get a meaningful amount of hydrogen. While I suppose you COULD use onboard hydrogen, it seems like there should be a better option. Like water. It's stable, readily available in large quantities, easy to handle in a broad range of temperatures, and dense. Boil it to steam and spray it out the back. If you do this with the verniers too, you avoid the traditionally nasty substances associated with them*. But I am not a rocket physicist. *Though simplicity dictates that the verniers are PROBABLY still using hydrazine or some overtech monopropellant. Verniers would have to be heated electrically, which will be less efficient than a heat exchanger. And they have to have their own fuel tanks separate from the main engines ANYWAYS, just due to the plumbing problems inherent to a variable fighter. So why rube goldberg it up when you can just fill a tank with hydrazine and spray it across a metal screen? There's something to be said for simplicity, even in a machine as overengineered as a Valkyrie.
  7. JB0
    In fairness, I actually LIKE that Robotech owned that particular animation error and canonized it. Pity they never embraced the Orguss Valk. I have an unhealthy love of that thing.
  8. JB0
    I'll chalk it up as a brilliant parody piece highlighting Holywood's typical style of adaptation. Because it really did feel like something Hollywood would DO, if a major studio ever signed the rights for a big-budget no-holds-barred motion picture.
  9. JB0
    Admit it, you're just worried I'm right.
  10. JB0
    Contents and colors may vary.
  11. JB0
    Barricade, actually. I got 99% of the way there, but could never get his trunk to hook back in properly, and it felt like something was gonna break every time I tried.
  12. JB0
    Don't forget the 1R!!!! Actually, that's my best guess, he saw an animation error and thought it was a legit 1S. Maybe a gimpy 1D, I think there were a few of those in the wedding.
  13. JB0
    But when they tried to remake Alien, we got Prometheus.
  14. JB0
    Maybe... maybe the Aquarion project IS Delta! Think about it... what if the guys in Aquarion were actually the protoculture?
  15. JB0
    To be fair, Scarlett looks good no matter what role she's playing. Let's be honest here. And here we get to the root problem. Holllywood doesn't want to make new properties. They don't want to make anything without a proven track record amd built-in fanbase. Everything has to be a remake, a sequel, or an adaptation. Preferably a sequel to a remake of an adaptation. But at the same time, they want them sanitized, polished, and just like every other big-budget blockbuster, completely devoid of anything that made the original work compelling. And then they tune them for maximum mass-market appeal by matching them to a checklist of "things done in recent blockbusters" that omits points like "compelling original story" and "superb acting", but includes things like "they froze everything and spun the camera around"(I know it's dated, but the number of completely pointless "bullet-time" effects that showed up in the years following the Matrix was just absurd, and really was why I started noticing the checklist in the first place.) They aren't alone in this practice, but... they might be the worst about it.
  16. JB0
    I never viewed them as enjoyable puzzles. I've issued more than one impolite word while studying Hasbro's pathetic excuse for an instruction sheet. Their insistence on a handful of fixed illustation angles, tendency to omit steps, and refusal to include text notes about complex movements or features like lock tabs make the manuals almost worse than nothing at all, and a new Transformer can be downright frustrating. That said...No one wanted the 1-Step Changers. Hasbro took the wrong message and came away with the conclusion that no one wanted to transform their toys instead of "your staff has created an unholy trifecta of complex, counter-intuitive, and poorly documented toys" I've got one from the first movie line that I've got a 0% success rate on robot->vehicle transformation. I've literally NEVER gotten it properly back into vehicle mode.
  17. JB0
    So I just noticed this thread. This is an awesome project. I'd wager he's recording the actual analog audio output of a PC-98. It's low-tech, but it's the easiest way if you have the hardware, and about the only way to guarantee it sounds RIGHT. Especially with that Ryu Umemoto(OMG!!!) credit on the soundtrack, as he tended to push the synthesizer chips they used in those systems pretty hard, and his tracks don't always work right on "compatible" synthesizers(Umemoto was very disappointed they didn't ask him to redo the Yu-No soundtrack for the Saturn port, as they DID simply feed his existing music data through a "compatible" FM synth chip, and it DIDN'T sound right). Emulation of sound hardware is often less than perfect, even on a simple and well-documented platform. And with the deplorable state of japanese computer emulation, I'd have no faith in the final output sounding like it's supposed to. And of course, just extracting the MIDI data(assuming it's in MIDI and not raw YM commands) is worthless since no modern computer comes with any appropriate synthesizer, and MIDI files don't sound the same on different hardware. Perhaps not the most useful of insights, but... that's my bet.
  18. JB0
    You know, a lot of people would be very happy if 3 and 4 were written off as just a bad dream.
  19. JB0
    Winning with Kakizaki is like double winning.
  20. JB0
    It makes a lot of sense, too. As things get more spread out, it becomes much more difficult to exert any sort of central control. If a colony fleet says "No, I think the VF-19 is stupid and ugly and the VF-11 is just fine, thank you"... what is Earth going to do? Leave a stern message on voicemail? Apparently, they have near-instantaneous real-time commmunications across most, if not all, the colonies and fleets(which makes me wonder about things), but actual physical transport is much slower. if you made someone REALLY mad, you could probably keep whoever was coming for you a few steps behind for a very long time by being creative with your folds. Each fleet is unique. One could readily compare the Macross 7 fleet to the Macross Frontier fleet(With Frontier having significantly more "rural" area and provisions for full-size zentradi that were far lesss readily apparent in 7), but those fleets launched at much different times and Frontier's civilian area is "next generation", so to speak. But to my recollection(which has proven increasingly unreliable of late), each fleet's always had it's own "flavor". The short-range fleets definitely need to know where they're going. I would assume their destinations were found by space probes. Eden was a short-range colony mission, incidentally. To my understanding, the long-range fleets DON'T know where they're going. They have to be fully self-sufficient precisely because they don't know when they'll find a habitable world. They've been given a rough direction to take through the cosmos. They just need to find a good planet somewhere in their wedge of space, land, get comfy, and let the rest of the galaxy know. Oh, and try not to blow the planet up, which has happened more often than you'd expect.
  21. JB0
    That was definitely an issue, but I viewed it as more a symptom than a cause. That said, I was pretty dubious about the need to "begin at the beginning" the FIRST time around. I felt like just about everyone going in already knew that Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive arachnid that gave him the abilities of a spider, and that when his uncle was gunned down by a criminal he had opted not to stop he learned that with great power comes great responsibility. They sold me on it, though. It came out quite nicely, and I retracted my complaints. Which made me all the more dubious when they decided to redo it.
  22. JB0
    I thought the episode carried one on the title card. Maybe I'm just crazy. Edit: And on double-checking, yes, I'm just crazy. Fleet just has a "real episode" feel that confused me greatly, I guess.
  23. JB0
    I might would've enjoyed the movie had I not read the comics first. But I liked the badass gives-no-craps version of the Major WAY more than the depressed introspective Major. Also the manga had cooler guns. And fuchicomas. Given my tastes when I last saw it, I may've been as disappointed by THAT as I was the angsty Major more introspective philosophical tone. And I don't think a 1:1 adaptation would work very well... well, maybe as a high-budget all-the-stops OVA, but ... It'd go better than some franchises, but as a general rule the things that work in print and the things that work onscreen are very different. I truly am all for adapting and taking liberties. That doesn't mean I have to liek the end result, of course, but it's better to have tried than to cut out important details and large swaths of setting information to ensure you never deviate from a scene-by-scene, word-for-word recreation of the original material in moving pictures. And sometimes putting it to animation just reveals flaws that weren't as evident in the print version. Granted, I think some shows have been IMPROVED by people having a minute or two of conversation in the time it takes them to throw a single punch, but... it's still something that shouldn't happen most of the time. (And it's entirely possible in some of these that the author simply expected the reader to fill in the blanks and didn't write down EVERY punch that was thrown, but the TV adaptation adheres too slavishly to the scene as written). Anyways, I'm rambling now. I have low hopes for the Hollywood adaptation, but casting is not at all a concern. I will be happily surprised if it winds up being a decent and thoughtful adaptation. Now, this is not to say there are not PROBLEMS with Hollywood's whitewashing of damn near every story that comes through the town, as it happens to be a rather large problem(and much more pervasive than one single instance of a character with a japanese name being played by a white person). Just that it is rarely a problem to the actual story being told, and this specific character is one of the few instances where it could be justified in-continuity.
  24. JB0
    I'd laugh. I mean, I'd have low expectations to start, but could the movie's casting GET any worse? Those two should CLEARLY be playing Misa and Roy Focker! First chapter of the original comix sez: "Motoko Kusanagi(obviously an alias)" We don't even know her birth name. She was probably born female, but that's really all we know about her. I don't disagree with you, really. But the story could, largely, be set anywhere industrialized. It has a less japanese feel than a lot of other things I've seen. And the Major that Masamune Shirow wrote is as close to a blank slate as you can get. She has no backstory, does not use her birth name, does not use her original face, and by the end of it she's not even the same gender she started the story as. (Tangentally: Can we cast Tom Cruise as the crackhead whose body Batou steals for her?). Oh, I doubt it will be, truly I do. But it could be. And, well, it can't be a worse take on the universe than the first movie was. That movie was a betrayal of everything I expected to see, and I have a deep-seated mistrust of Ghost adaptations because of it. It's probably to blame for why I never watched SAC or Arise, actually. I was filled with dread when I first heard about SAC, and assurances that "they did it right this time" never really soothed my nerves enough. The petition started by someone who thinks the franchise began with the first animated movie, and probably thinks it ended there too. Great. Also, online petitions don't work. Letter campaigns are far more effective. And, of course, an actual boycott sends a far stronger message, But the vast majority of people who signed that petition were either never going to see it regardless, or are going to see it opening weekend regardless. Points to you for sticking to your guns, but... don't watch it on cable either. Don't watch it on Netflix, don't watch it on Bittorrent, don't watch it on your friend's copy that you borrowed. Just DON'T WATCH IT. That's how you do a boycott. It's not about denial of resources, it's about sending a message. Let them know you won't stand for this, under any circumstances. Let your friend know you won't stand for this if he tries to loan you the disk. Bitch on the internet about how you refuse to watch it because it's racist. Get that message out there, make sure people know this matters to you. (While I have done very little bitching, I still refuse to watch Amazing Spiderman on account of Sony ruined Spiderman 3, then after everyone involved quit because they were trying to ruin Spiderman 4 even more, they remade the first movie. Not on cable, not on Netflix, not from Redbox, not by borrowing a friend's copy, not off bittorrent. I don't even care that it was apparently a good movie. I refuse to watch it on principle, and I let people know this when it comes up.)
  25. JB0
    Okay, I've got a question about Macross 7... What the HECK is up with Fleet of the Strongest Women? Not in the "that's just insane" sense, which is answered easily enough simply by being Macross 7. No, I'm wondering more about it being a home video exclusive that was given an actual episode number. Moreover, it was given an episode number that was taken by an actual broadcast episode. What happened there? My best guess was they decided it was too silly(for Macross 7?) and that they shouldn't have that easy of a time with a fleet and it cheapens the threat the remaining zentradi pose(which is totally true), so the episode was pulled from the lineup and replaced with something less damaging. But it's just a guess, and I've been wrong before. Anyways, the whole thing bugs me,and I'm hoping someone has an actual answer.
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