Daigoro

Haha... I've been flying several times a year for just over a decade between Canada and East and SE Asia, and I was just about to jump on you for being a lying sack because of all the bogus details in your story about Air China -- rattling planes, "Chinese Army" instead of PSB, AK-47s -- and then I got to "Sony Discman". Okay, assuming you weren't wearing one for retro appeal but were using Discmans back when they were actually popular, that probably explains everything! I'd say most of the Asian airlines I've tried are great -- Korean Air, JAL, Singapore Airlines, and China's private-owned Hainan Airlines in particular, with great service and -- in the case of KA and Hainan, nice electronic entertainment systems in even the economy-class seatbacks. Cathay Pacific and Hong Kong Express are also good but didn't have the nice entertainment systems. Lower on the scale are the state-owned Chinese giants -- Air China, China Eastern, and China Southern -- but they are still decent to average. Below them all I would rate all the American airlines I've flown, in particular United and Delta. Poorly-equipped Economy cabins, terrible service, getting squished between obese passengers, no free food -- flying in the US is a nightmare compared to Asia. The rundown airports and security theatre don't help the experience either, though those have nothing to do with the airlines. Oh, and the flight attendants... All the Asian airlines have young and attractive flight attendants (both male and female) who are well-coiffed, slim, and move with grace and poise. On Korean Air the women are downright gorgeous. The American ones (and Air Canada) generally have no FAs left under 40, often seem on the verge of burnout, and one Air Canada attendant was so wide that she couldn't walk down the aisle without her hips brushing all the seatbacks...

I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned this, but I recall that Rick lent his revolver to Otis before they set out. After Shane shot Otis he wrestled the revolver away from him, and later returns it to Rick! I haven't read the comics, but I thought this should have been a clear tip off that something was fishy about Shane's story. If Otis died holding off the zombies so that Shane could escape, how could Shane have gotten the revolver back? Did Shane expect everyone to believe that Otis willingly handed the revolver over to him _before_ making a last stand? I thought at the time that perhaps this would be the slip up that would ultimately prevent Shane from getting away with sacrificing Otis, but Dale doesn't mention any of this, he just says he knows what kind of man Shane is...

Hmm, good news if true, but I too would rather see another CFS than another general aviation sim. Way, way back at the 8-bit dawn of personal computing, I would have been thrilled to have a realistic GA sim on my computer, but once sophisticated combat sims started coming out like European Air War or CFS II, I was just too LAZY to ever get into GA sims.

Thailand, not Taiwan. As soon as I read an article about the flooding affecting HD prices a few weeks ago I went out and bought an external 2TB drive, but prices had already gone up.

If you've got a powerful PC, you can run your PS2 games using the PCSX2 emulator. Unfortunately, my i5-equipped laptop isn't quite powerful enough to run the Macross PS2 game without the occasional slowdown, but a lot of PS2 games run fantastically on it, like Resident Evil 4 or the Zeta Gundam game. As a matter of fact, they can look much better on the PC than they do on the PS2 because you can run them at higher resolutions and with anti-aliasing. So long as your computer has a half-decent display card, your CPU is more likely to be the limiting factor. I hook my laptop up via HDMI to my plasma TV and use a wireless Logitech controller to play from the sofa. Good times!

Have seen The Battle of Britain? Or Blue Thunder? The radio-controlled models in both look so convincing you might not have realized they weren't real planes or helicopters. For example, look at the shots of Heinkels crashing into the Channel in BoB. All done with RC models. Note that I'm NOT talking about models in front of bluescreen (like in Firefox or Star Wars), or models hanging from wires in front of a backdrop, but models filmed flying against real backgrounds. I would agree about flying replicas dumping airshow smoke, but I never said that you couldn't use ANY CGI shots. You do realize that CGI can be added to footage of real-life objects, don't you? You could always add CGI flames/smoke to footage of real planes, or use CGI planes only for those shots where they take damage. The Czech film Dark Blue World is a good example of how they used leftover footage from BoB of real planes and modified it by computer to good effect. Also, a mix of effects should be used, depending on what looks best or is practical in a given scene. All of the movies I've mentioned used a combination of methods -- some shots had real planes, others models; some used practical effects like smoke generators, others optical effects or, in the case of Dark Blue World, CGI.

Yep, that is why I said I hoped it wouldn't be _entirely_ CGI. There are probably enough later model P-40s still flying that they could use real planes, but the Japanese planes would either have to be things like Texan trainers or radio-controlled models. (I thought the Heinkel RC-models in BoB that they used for crashing into the sea looked great.) If the budget permitted they could even build flying replicas with real pilots inside. Unfortunately, CGI would most likely be both CHEAPER and SAFER. They had actually built flying replica planes for the movie Flyboys, but a fatal accident early on meant that they switched over to CGI -- which I thought looked terrible. As for the flying, most directors don't seem to have a feel for the real mechanics of flight. Few of them are pilots or flight simulator enthusiasts. And usually the tactics aren't realistic for dramatic purposes. For example, the Mustang looping to get behind a German plane in the trailer is positively ridiculous -- but I suppose it is the sort of tactic that a non-flying movie audience could understand.

I feel the same way too. Not only have I read about them, I've had great fun flying their missions in the IL-2 Sturmovik campaign "White Sun, Blue Sky." It was just electrifying tearing into Japanese bomber formations with only a handful of P-40s. And we're all in luck -- John Woo is directing a film about them! There was talk he was trying to get Liam Neeson to play Chennault, and the film will be shot in IMAX. I think it is currently in production in China, but there doesn't seem to be much news about it. From comments Woo has made, it sounds like it will focus more on the China Air Composite Wing than on the original American Volunteer Group, but that's fine by me -- the CACW probably has fascinating stories too. I'm hoping it won't be entirely a CGI fest though. Looking at the Red Tails trailer, I think it looks cool but also phony as poo. Nothing compares to real footage of real planes like in Battle of Britain. Nonetheless I'm also hoping that Red Tails does well commercially. If it bombs, it could put this Flying Tigers project in jeopardy, as well as other projects like The Dambusters.

Huh? They may be rearming -- like the rest of Asia -- but their current frontline fighter types are the same ones they've been using since the start of that lost decade -- the F-15J and the F-2. I don't get your analogy. EDIT: My mistake -- the F-2 didn't actually enter service until 2000 -- well after the bubble burst, so basically Japan managed to introduce one new type during that time. (Also I didn't know that the F-4 Phantom II is STILL in service with them, though I wonder if that could be called a frontline fighter for them...) The Japanese also drastically reduced their order for the F-2 from 141 planes to 98... Anyway, there is no way the U.S. could emulate the deficit spending of Japan -- 90% of their government bonds are bought by Japanese, while the U.S. relies on foreigners to buy around half of theirs. Not that Americans should want to emulate the Japanese -- with their debt approaching 200% of GDP and their credit rating downrated, some economists are worried Japan might have the next sovereign debt crisis...

August 1 refers to August 1, 1927 -- the founding of the PLA. Nice graphic. But if the U.S. experiences a "Lost Decade" (or Decades) like Japan, you can throw all those dates out the window...

Unfortunately I think CGI will become prevalent for the same reason it has become so dominant in live-action movies -- to save money! For the Spiderman movies, they even used CGI for the alley fight against human thugs. I read about one of the stuntmen complaining that they were set to do the fight scene the old fashion way, but the director or the producer decided to animate Spider-man with CGI instead of using a stunt double -- not because it looked better, but because it was actually CHEAPER than doing it with wire work. As for the Pailsen Files, I too thought that -- in spite of the awesomely depressing opening "Saving Private Ryan" sequence, the series was pretty mediocre dramatically. The exception was the final episode. - FINAL EPISODE SPOILERS BELOW - For some reason, the members of the Perfect Soldier -- er, "Abnormal Survivor" unit -- discovering that they were, in fact, mortal was very moving to me. Normally death in VOTOMS doesn't really register with me because troopers get slaughtered by the dozen, and in this OVA series the death toll seems to run into the thousands. But in the final episode, the deaths of Chirico's squad members seemed much more horrible to me because they had convinced themselves they were immortal. One continuity thing bothers me though. I seem to remember in the original TV series that in the beginning, Chirico doesn't know he is a PS. After what happens in Pailsen Files, how could he NOT realize that he is a freak? Did he lose his memory again? It was so long ago that I watched it that I can't remember.

Yeah, that was bothering me too -- it sounds so familiar, but I just can't place it! The orchestrations sound very similar David Arnold's Independence Day, but the melody isn't the same. There is one part around the 1:05 mark where the melody reminds me of Disney's Beauty and the Beast (the "tales as old as time, songs as old as rhyme" part), but it isn't really a ripoff or homage. Dang, just can't place it... As for the use of The Right Stuff theme, I earlier classified that in ripoff territory... Thanks, that is a great find -- though the two tracks I just downloaded from it were both 128 k rips. Probably not representative. As for everybody else's recommendation, I'll have to try and get Brain Powerd's OST then -- I thought Escaflowne was her greatest ever, but never watched Brain Powerd.

That wouldn't be the least bit surprising if you'd read "The Forever War." Think about it. Starship Troopers presents an "ideal" right-wing society of volunteer soldiers, fighting a righteous war with a well-run army. It's written by a former Naval Academy graduate who was discharged due to medical reasons before he could see any action in WW2. In "The Forever War," the protagonist gets drafted by a lying government into a nightmarish war with virtually no chance of survival. It's written by a former combat engineer in Vietnam who, like his protagonist, was severely wounded in action and spent time recovering in an army hospital. Hmm, now which book is a US military academy going to pick? But seriously, it wouldn't surprise me if they picked Starship Troopers not for ideological reasons but because it is the earlier, more "seminal" work. The fact that "The Forever War" won both the Hugo and Nebula awards was probably irrelevant to them... For me, I didn't find Starship Troopers particularly enjoyable as a story, but as a teenager it had a profound intellectual effect on me. I was already pretty libertarian, so I liked a lot of the ideas in the book, though I think Heinlein's ideal society couldn't possibly work as well as he imagines. (Flogging people for drunkenness?) But after reading The Forever War, I'd have to say it just blew Starship Troopers away as both entertainment and as a literary work. Mandela is a much more interesting character than Johnny Rico (who hardly seems to have any personality at all), and the situations he finds himself in were so much more memorable. I can hardly remember any of the "plot" in Starship Troopers, but many years later I can still vividly remember many parts of The Forever War.

I think the trailer is SUPPOSED to be goofy. The original movie was very tongue-in-cheek. As the other posters have noted, it really is a parody of fascism. I think the director, Verhoeven, was playing a nasty joke on Americans with the first movie. He was trying to show American audiences could get excited at watching a propaganda film just as the Germans were manipulated by Nazi films. Unfortunately, the film sorta flopped, so I guess the joke was on him! The Nazi imagery in this trailer was over-the-top, though... In the book they were actually supposed to be Filipino. Rico states at the end of the book that his native language is Tagalog. I think they changed their country to Argentina because Verhoeven wanted to use Aryan -- err, white people for the film. I think characterization was always a Heinlein weak point. Starship Troopers is really a big polemic for right-wing libertarianism. I think he would have been deeply offended that Verhoeven made it into a Nazi propaganda film... While I'd love to see a more faithful Starship Troopers movie with powered armour, I'd like even more to see an adaptation of Joe Haldeman's "Forever War". That also has combat with powered armour, but because Haldeman was an actual Vietnam vet (Heinlein never saw combat), it is both grittier and more anti-war than Starship Troopers. It wouldn't need any parody to make it interesting.

WTF? Kanno's "Dogfight" track for that scene in the Japanese version has to be greatest orchestral BGM in all Macross... It not only sounds great in its own right, it complements the sequence PERFECTLY, both the tongue-in-cheek humour and the incredible action. I bought the "Macross Plus -- For Fans Only" album JUST for that one track! At the time, it was not available on any of the other Macross Plus CDs. As for OVA vs. movie, while I thought the third OAV volume was incredibly boring, I thought the pacing of the final volume was just phenomenal; the movie climax actually seemed too drawn out to me.

If it's true gg has dropped it, what a pity. I thought the Chihiro sub was so poorly done for Episode 9 that after a few minutes I stopped watching and decided to just wait for gg's release.

Would you believe I'm 43? When I first learned computer programming in high school, we used PUNCH CARDS and sent those cards to another school with a minicomputer! I just happen to be happy to adopt new technology. First started using mp3's back in 1994 when I got my first PC (I'd had Commodore machines before). I bought my first portable mp3 player, the Diamond Rio PMP-300, way back in 1999! That came with a whopping 32 megaBYTES of memory... Huh? Did you mean to say "Lossless for the win, that's why I always go hard copy"? Either way it makes no sense, since you can play lossless files off of a hard drive, either on your computer with a decent sound card, or from a portable mp3 player with a line-out. Nowadays there are several brands of portables that support FLAC. Even if they don't support it natively, you can install the open source firmware Rockbox, which supports a whole crapload of codecs, both lossless and lossy, from OGG to APE to FLAC: http://www.rockbox.org/ Most people won't have a need for it, but if you want certain features that your player normally doesn't have (like supporting drag and drop through Windows, gapless playback, five band graphic equalizer, etc.), it is a godsend. I was using my iRiver H340 portable player (hard drive upgraded to 60 gigs) with Rockbox, hooked up through its line-out to a speaker system. Now that I have an extra computer, I usually use my laptop instead, with a Creative Labs Audigy 2Zs Notebook card in it. Either way, I can have my entire music collection hooked up to my speakers. No fumbling for plastic disks. But seriously, I think 99.99% of people can't tell the difference between lossless and a WELL-ENCODED mp3. Try a blind listening test and see if you can really tell the difference between lossless and the same track encoded with LAME -V0, not something encoded with iTunes. For my portable player, I usually just use V2, which is plenty fine for IEM or headphone use. (Using Shure SE320s.)

By "Attack the Vajra", do you mean the music they played when Klan first fights the Vajra in Episode 4, "Miss Macross"? I thought that track was awesome, and am disappointed it isn't in this volume. I also wish they had Ranka's version of "My Boyfriend is a Pilot" too from that episode... Are you talking about burning to CD? Just use the APE software (http://www.monkeysaudio.com) to decompress to WAV, then use your favorite authoring software to burn the WAVs into a CD. But I must profess amazement that anyone still burns to CD anymore... Asides from the riffs that everyone else noticed, Kanno just TOTALLY ripped off the "Breaking the Sound Barrier" theme from the movie "The Right Stuff." You can hear it in the Deculture edition when Alto first flies off from the school in the EX gear. But I guess everyone here is too young to remember that movie. (Not to mention the fact that the composer for "The Right Stuff" himself plundered heavily from Tchaikovsky and others for that score.) Overall, I would have loved this album IF it had come out a month or two ago. Unfortunately, a lot of the tracks that I was dying to get earlier, like "The Target", just aren't that fresh anymore. Anyway, I'm still enjoying listening to it -- but now I'm already dying for the next album...

Yeah, big files may be a bother to download. But I much prefer it to the alternative -- letting someone else choose the bitrate. I prefer to download the lossless file, and then encode with LAME to mp3. Can't stand the 320 kbps CBR posts -- quicker to download, but a waste of space on my portable player and for 99.99% of people. Double that -- one of the greatest anime soundtracks of all time. Though I don't know if I would think so if I hadn't also seen the anime...

Did you get many S Ranks? I found many of the missions fairly easy to complete, but just can't get S Ranks on them -- I think I've only got two! And some missions required many attempts, like the Daedalus Attack mission. In some of the forum and walkthrough comments I've seen, people say it is pretty easy to S Rank the entire game, but I just can't avoid getting damaged.

Lee asks Romo if he ever feeds the cat, not because he sees the cat, but because he trips on the cat's empty food bowl. WE see the cat, because Romo "sees" the cat, but Lee doesn't -- he says something like "where is that thing?" I think the cat was supposed to be dead from the very beginning, hence the significant shots early on of Romo carrying the black bag. If someone had killed his cat DURING the episode, I think Romo would have said something! Everyone see The Sixth Sense? I've already deleted the Battlestar episode, but I'll bet if anyone looks at it again, no one interacts with the cat but Romo, just the way only the kid responds to Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. I'm betting the writers took their inspiration from that movie. Perhaps the bigger issue is that there was no "election" process. The people of the fleet sure didn't get to vote, because according to the constitution, the Vice President (Zarek) should have become acting President, just like under the U.S. Constitution. The whole "appointment" of a temporary substitute until new elections could be held was because Papa Adama once again said to hell with the constitution (or Articles of Confederation, or whatever they call it in the series). After what happened earlier in the series -- with Adm. Adama staging an outright coup against Roslin -- I would think that the citizens in the rest of the fleet would be up in arms over Lee's appointment. I guess we'll find out soon.

I'd recommend trying to find the IGN FAQ for the game. I enjoyed playing through the TV campaign, but I had a lot of trouble with figuring out orientation, and rotating to face incoming missiles or enemies. After reading the FAQ, I found out you could instantly lock on and rotate to face an opponent in Battroid mode, and then switch to Gerwalk or Fighter to fire missiles at that opponent. I still haven't got the handle on evading missiles. I can do the dodging roll, but I still always get overwhelmed. Shooting them down with lasers seems way too slow. Flip tops and swap disks? I think most big North American cities with a Chinese community should be able to help you get your console modded with a chip instead. I bought mine here in China, and all the PS2's sold here come pre-modded! They haven't cracked the PS3 yet, though...

I'm trying to avoid all of the spoiler messages and "inside scoops" about FUTURE episodes, but fortunately I noticed yours, because I found that scene confusing too, but for different reasons. Unfortunately I deleted my copy a few days ago, but I think I remember enough to answer. 1) Romo said "the dregs of humanity" killed the cat. Unless he is so batshit crazy that he doesn't remember killing it himself, I think we can accept his words at face value -- someone else killed his cat, perhaps because Romo defended Baltar in court. As for whether a cat was really walking around the apartment, the answer I think is no. Note that Lee says he hasn't seen the cat in ages when he trips over the food bowl, which looks old and unused. We only see a cat when the episode is focusing on Romo's Point of View. I don't think "hallucination" is the right word, since Romo knows his cat is dead, but basically we the viewers can see it only because Romo is talking to the cat "in spirit." Plus, this mind-frak on the viewer adds more tension to the gun-to-the-head scene, because then we wonder "Holy frak -- has Romo gone crazy?" 2) Wasn't that in case Roslin returned? This brings up something I can't recall from earlier episodes -- do the captains throughout the fleet get a whole itinerary of future jump destinations, or for security reasons do they only get informed about the next two jumps (allowing for an emergency jump in case they jump to a location with Cylons)? I always assumed it was the latter, and so someone would have to stay behind if Roslin was ever to catch up with the fleet. And it would have to be a person, because you certainly couldn't afford to leave some kind of recording behind and risk the Cylons finding it and deciphering it. Note that before Starbuck et al returned with the garbage scowl and the basestar to the fleet, there was a concern that if they missed the rendezvous they would be frakked -- there would be no way to find the fleet again. Anyway, I have my own question -- what is the real reason that Romo pointed the gun at Lee at the end? While watching, I thought that Romo had been driven over the edge, and really believed that the Adamas were colluding to control both the military AND the civilian government, and so Romo genuinely dispaired for humanity's future. But the wiki on Romo states he was just testing Lee. What do you guys think?

Yeah, agree with you there. It's sad when people don't know anything about Heinlein's original "Starship Troopers" novel, since it pretty much started the whole "powered suit" thing in science fiction. This is Macross World, for crying out loud! I think Verhoeven's film is an entertaining spoof of the novel, as well as an interesting mind-frak for American audiences ("WE are the Nazis...") Unfortunately, that pretty much went right over the heads of 99% of American viewers. I can understand why he hated the original novel -- the book IS an extreme right-wing, libertarian polemic. What is strange though is to have the movie be a _stealth_ spoof, posing as a straight adaptation. Heinlein was probably rolling in his grave... There is definitely room for a more faithful remake, with the powered armor. They would unfortunately probably make it all CGI now, but with mo-cap it might still look good.

The "two space travellers turn out to be Adam and Eve" story is one of the oldest and most despised cliches in _written_ science fiction. The first stories (well, at least the first we know of) were written in the FORTIES. The idea was a horrible cliche by the 60's: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_God_story I enjoyed Gall Force, but laughed in disbelief at the ending.