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JB0

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  1. JB0
    My god, that was a Happy Meal toy?!? I got one those ages ago(little futuristic car one) and thought it was just such a neat little robot. Always wanted to know more about whatever line it came from, never knew where to look. Edited to add: I'm not saying it was a masterpiece of engineering, mind you. Just that the aesthetics of the thing were awesome.
  2. JB0
    Oddly, that's the same answer I got the other place I asked. ... Nintendo is so much more RISQUE thasn they used to be.
  3. JB0
    One of my few... I think only, actually... to make it to the modern era. Plastic discoloration and paint chipping have taken their toll. But 2-axis shoulders!
  4. JB0
    Look, I don't need all of them back, but the drilltank guy was awesome.
  5. JB0
    I'm confused as to how Bayonetta can have short hair now if her clothes are made from her hair.
  6. JB0
    In fact, just travelling around the world on a jetplane affects time. You're a few microseconds younger than you would be if you'd stayed on the ground. (As Stephen Hawking noted, exploiting this to extend your life doesn't work because the slight gains are more than offset by the poor health effects of eating airline food.) Basically, though... relativity is friggin' magic. No one understands it. Not even Einstein.
  7. JB0
    I had a bunch of 'em, because I was a kid that didn't care as long as they were robots, and it was far easier to sell mom on buying a new GoBot. I recall substituting the GoBot flying saucer for Cosmos in my Transformers toy sessions. And Bug Bite filled in for Bumblebee. Stacks, however, did NOT fill in for Optimus Prime, even though I didn't own a Prime. I do NOT recall what happened to the oatmeal box they were all stored in. One of my few childhood memories I can't account for. I probably left them at someone's house and they never made it back to me, since that oatmeal box went everywhere I did.
  8. JB0
    There you have it. Angled thrust solves all issues!
  9. JB0
    Aren't the FAST boosters also vectored? They could angle them so it's off-axis thrust to counter the rotation. Inefficient, sure, but in my mind the FAST packs were a retrofit anyways, so those limitations are understandable.
  10. JB0
    (And if they aren't locked at 30FPS and with a max resolution of 1920x1080)
  11. JB0
    I think without tan looks far better, but a full-body tan would be better than either option. Your mileage may vary.
  12. JB0
    You forgot "lazy ports of console games six months after everyone else finished them" and "weird 'things' made by one guy in his garage that no one actually wants." Oh, also "japanese porno games."
  13. JB0
    Likewise. I don't regret watching Mac7. I have very mixed feelings about it, and think it could've been done far better with mostly slight changes, but overall I enjoyed the run.
  14. JB0
    Score one more for DYRL. There's some crazy attention to detail in parts of that movie.
  15. JB0
    Absolutely! He counts DOUBLE.
  16. JB0
    Also seems to be near a ridge facing the sun, which is casting a shadow across it. Basically, it bounced from a nice landing spot to darn near a worst-case scenario.
  17. JB0
    Oh, I realize I'm being unfairly critical, but... it still bugs me.
  18. JB0
    Well, in fairness, flying in space is a very different situation than flying in an atmosphere, which makes it harder to give an operational time limit. Your controlled flight time is going to be WILDLY different depending on if you're going in a straight line or maneuvering. You could run out of fuel just parked twenty feet off the ship's bow doing an infinite series of rolls with no forward thrust. And when you run out of reaction mass, you don't stop flying. You just lose all control over that flight. The whims of gravity are far more fickle in space than on Earth. That's honestly something that bugs me about Macross. Valks don't fly like spacecraft, they fly like airplanes. Heck, just showing the main engines unlit sometimes would go a long way towards making me happy(since constant thrust gets you constant acceleration, not constant speed). I can accept the rest as Valk computers being programmed to make the atmospheric-to-space transition easy for the pilot. That actually makes a degree of sense, though it's an inefficient use of limited reaction mass.
  19. JB0
    It's a super robot show. In general, I don't watch them for plot. Until we get to the american-original episodes, where it's definitely him and not a repurposed twin brother. Then why does she show up later? Right, because they wrote an entire second arc for Lion Voltron. But perhaps the most notable Golion/Voltron difference is that the mice don't get their own robot in Golion. If Harmony Gold had commissioned an extra 36 episodes of SDF Macross from Studio Nue, I think we'd all look at Robotech a little kinder. (And I DO give HG credit for trying to NOT sanitize the shows that made up Robotech, though I feel they ultimately made a huge mis-step by trying to present all three shows as a single story instead of three unrelated shows united under the Robotech brand.) In any case, I ultimately view Voltron and Golion as two separate things. They diverge very wildly very rapidly. But ultimately, the main draw here is nostalgia, and I grew up with Voltron, not Golion.
  20. JB0
    *clicks link* Symphoge- wait, that's Chris?! Outfit threw me, it's wildly out of character for her. In-continuity, I'd REALLY like to know how they got her to wear that. That facial expression is dead-on for any possible circumstances, though. It's her transformation crystal. And... apparently the lanyard broke? That catch musta took some quick thinking.
  21. JB0
    I think those are his robot custodian/bodyguards, and his parents died before the show started. He's probably the wealthy heir of some huge technology firm. Waynestarkco or something. He bought a Nyan-Nyan franchise basically on a whim, like that time Howard Hughes tried to buy Las Vegas. Hey, we already said anything goes because he has no established story. You can't prove the company that built those Petite Cola machines didn't have anything more advanced.
  22. JB0
    A. It's NOT a personal exchange, though. And while WEP would likely have ignored it before(just like they had been), now they can't really. If these things show up, they know who made them. And they already told them "you need to stop that, this is our guy you're cloning, and that didn't work out so well for King Zarkon." So Mad Toys can't even claim they thought they were good. A small run sold one at a time to individuals would not be ceasing and desisting(nor nearly as profitable, if at all). They'd basically be hanging a big neon sign out front that says "So sue me already." And WEP WOULD sue, not because they WANT to, but because they can't afford NOT to. Basically, once legal documents get involved, a lot of avenues you COULD have safely pursued before suddenly become closed to you. B. Actually, HG COULD go after you for making your own manufacture-on-demand VF-1 and selling it with PayPal. Well, they'd have as much standing as they did with blocking VF imports. Whether that's none at all or totally in the right is another matter entirely. Perhaps more pertinently, Games Workshop has gone after people for EXACTLY what you describe with modified Warhammer 40,000 figures. Not even selling, just putting the models out there for free. And in what is technically described as "a serious dick move", they also went after people who were making original figures not directly based off any GW product, because they were made in the Warhammer style. Which was true, but not really a legal stance. As always, whoever has the deeper pockets wins, but it cost GW a lot of good will in a situation where they DIDN'T actually have to do anything. Even if they did have trademark concerns on the modified units, the original designs were totally clear(I'm pretty sure you can't trademark "any tank with knives and skulls hanging off it", and Marvel and DC killed "look and feel" cases pretty thoroughly). This is, of course, different in Japan. There are explicit legal protections for small-run fan products there. American law makes no such distinction. C. It's not remotely like the Beta Toys thing. Selling officially-licensed-just-in-a-different-country toys is a completely different legal situation from manufacturing your own completely-unlicensed-in-any-country toy. It's a gray area, and my understanding is that the volume sold seems to be very important*, but... it's not outright illegal like making and selling your own unlicensed toy would be. Also, you know, HG didn't really WANT to sue. They'd've had to show someone the actual license, which we know for a fact can't say what they claim it does. They wanted the THREAT of a lawsuit, but never an ACTUAL lawsuit. Basically, they were mugging people with an unloaded gun. *At some poorly-defined point you stop supplying a specialty product to collectors and become a mass-market competitor, and THEN you're infringing on the licensee's rights, but as long as you're below that threshold you're totally legit.
  23. JB0
    That would be an... exceedingly bad idea. They're being watched right now, if any more toys show up "in the wild", or any hint that they're TRYING to get these toys out there, they're in serious legal trouble. I'd hope for an official license like that (adorable) SD Voltron. It'd really be a case where everyone wins. Mad Toys get to actually CALL the thing Voltron, and gain access to a significantly more powerful marketing force, WEP gets to not look like big mean stinkyheads, and the fans get their merch. Odds seem slim since it would be in direct competition with the Toynami re-release, but... here's hoping.
  24. JB0
    It's impressive, but I wouldn't say it's comparable to Apollo. Apollo put MEN on the moon, not a remote-control lander. And brought them back at the end of the mission. That's FAR harder, and it's why we celebrate Apollo 11 while Luna 9 is forgotten. THAT SAID... that the lander managed a successful landing on effectively unknown terrain, with BOTH initial anchor mechanisms offline(top thruster to thrust down, harpoon gun to kill the whale tether the lander), ON AUTOPILOT(by necessity due to the several minutes of light lag) is VERY impressive. I mean not to belittle the ESA's efforts. Especially their coders, because that's an impressive little bundle of logic there. Now let's put a man on that comet!111 (Actually, a manned mission to Ceres would be awesome. But let's get back to the Moon and get to Mars before we start raiding asteroids.)
  25. JB0
    Successful?! The harpoon didn't even fire, much less kill the dang thing! Captain Ahab is FURIOUS! Seriously, though. Good job, ESA. Got the first, second, AND third cometary landings in one drop. That's impressive on multiple counts, especially as the landing was fully automated on unknown terrain. (Landings 2 and 3 are believed to be because the comet was softer than expected, and thus the anchors on the landing gear failed to secure purchase initially. And without either the top thruster to press it down or the Ahab Gambit to tether it, it bounced back off the comet twice before gaining a toehold.).
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