Gubaba

I've been listening to the Bonzo Dog Band non-stop this weekend...dunno why.

To be quite honest, I haven't started reading the book much at all...nor am I likely to. It'd take forever for me to get through even a few pages of it. Most of the illustrations look very, very good. Some don't, of course, but the good outweighs the average, I think. Mostly, I just think they did a really good job of making it seem like a real aviation book, and things like the pilot interviews are part of that. I don't have the Sky Angels doujin, so I'm not sure how it compares. I think it supplements Chronicle nicely, since the Chronicle pages more or less cover only what's in the animation itself, and the Master File covers quite a lot more (Development history, post-2010 stuff, squadron markings, that kind of thing). (And it does have the FAST packs, although it only devotes one page to them. And it's ¥2500, not ¥3000.) So mostly, for me, it's the art that makes it special. That may not be enough for others, though.

*sigh* That has NOTHING to do with Eva 3.0...but nice try. I'm stil wondering if Eva-07 is going to show up, or will it be another "MIA" Eva, like -04.

Mandragola is good, but I believe Machiavelli's finest work is the Discourses on Livy. Much better than The Prince, and it probably represents Machiavelli's actual opinions on governance (unlike The Prince, which was basically a request). EDIT: for consistency

Should I continue reading after that? That's where I stopped reading, too. Does that make me closed-minded?

Overtechnology never looked so delicious!

I dropped by Kinokuniya in L.A. today, and checked for it. They had two copies (which means they now have one). I haven't had much of a chance to go through it yet, but it looks like it was well worth the price.

Anyone who isn't excited about Macross the First clearly hasn't seen it.

That report doesn't seem to say anything more than the first one did... My gut feeling is that she's on the run, trying to escape the cops. In other words, I doubt she was kidnapped or anything...she's probably safe, but she's probably looking at a few years of jail time, unfortunately.

It's funny...I've read (and loved) books that a lot of people consider to be "unreadable" (the Post-WWI European Modernists are my all-time favorites, especially Proust, Joyce, Mann, and Musil; I also love Thomas Pynchon [hence my new avatar], Tolstoy, Murasaki, Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, Homer, Vergil...this is the stuff I read for fun)...and yet, I cannot make it through an entire Tom Clancy novel. Agreed. The list is MUCH too long.

Your beef with "clear and Present Danger" I can understand, but your problem with "Sum of All Fears" seems..well, EXCEEDINGLY petty. If you go through everything with such a fine-toothed comb, I really don't understand how you can love Lynch's Dune movie as much as you do. That took far greater liberties to MUCH worse effect.

I, uh... Er. *drools*

exACTly.

Yeah...Macross is a piece of cake compared to Gundam...talk about a nightmare of impossible to catalogue (and often contradictory) information... Agreed. It worked for the Yoshino interview when I posted it at AnimeSuki, because a member there asked for it. I doubt anyone went to the trouble of actually verifying it, though. I think the one thing in my favor is that all of the books I have on the checklist to translate are widely (and cheaply) available. Plus, I know that at least a few members here have read them. If I ever DID get my hands on (say) some doujinshi story written by one of the official staff members, I'd definitely feel like I would HAVE to post a scan, just to make sure everyone knows it's all on the level.

Okay, the YF-25 is interesting and all, but aren't we overlooking THE REAL PROBLEM? I mean, we've got special decals for Alto, featuring either Sheryl or Ranka noseart. We've got decals for Ozma featuring Kathy noseart. Now we've got decals for Michael featuring Klan noseart...but something (or someONE) is still missing... Do you see where I'm going with this...?

That's what it says in Macross Chronicle, as well.

Yeah...later I noticed my error...and then I forgot to edit my post. Sorry, all.

I don't think anyone on either site is advocating a site war. Now, if Shaloom had come out and said all of his Ohnogi info were true, and I was ust trying to slander him, if might have been a different story. Luckily, he DID come out and say it was all false. Crisis averted, thank goodness. Even if you translate ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING out there, it might not stop. Remember, Shaloom fabricated sources, from books to magazines to doujinshi. Compiling a complete account of Macross books? Hard work, but do-able. Including magazines? Possibly. Including doujinshi? No one could do that. Add to this the fact that Shaloom had said that Macross World and the Macross Compendium were both incomplete and unreliable, and you have an environment which makes it easy for anyone to create sources whole cloth. Asking for scans of the sources works up to a point. I sometimes refer to old issues of Animag and Animerica, but I don't have easy access to the issues themselves (they're in storage), so anything I say about them will be colored by memory issues AND lack of a scan. Does that mean I should never refer to them? As I've said before, this has a real impact on how I do translations. I don't feel like I can simply rely on the goodwill of Macross Worlders any more, and I really need to start backing stuff up. But how to do that for people who don't know any Japanese? My solution for the Yoshino interview (type out the whole thing in Japanese, so that anyone can copy and paste it into Goggle Translate, and provide scans so that anyone can make sure that the typed version is accurate) is impractical for something like a novel. I know I'm overthinking this, but I want to make sure that all my translations can be easily verified. And I'm not sure how. You may be right, of course. I'd like to think the info would've filtered over there anyway. Having the messenger be someone they know and trust might've helped. Still, spilt milk and all that... And it's not like I'm completely out of it yet...I'm writing up a little account of the mess for Anime Suki, and I'll probably eventually have to address the issue at Galaxy Network. THEN I'll be done.

As for me, I'm just sick of the whole thing. If I could go back and change anything, I wouldn't have posted on MG. It seems to have caused a lot pain for everyone EXCEPT Shaloom. The fibs are important to me, being as they involved a lot of material that I was diligently searching for (and some I even bought) when I still believed the "liner notes." But the "Ohnogi writing Frontier" portion was, as you say, no big deal, except to Anime Suki Forums and Final Vegeta. As for Shaloom himself...well, you summed it up well. And the fact that he put a warning up on MG that all members should verify their info before they post is just laughable. I guess what's most distressing is that, for a while, nearly everyone believed the Egan Loo-wannabe, and now none of us know how much info to trust and how much info to discard. The situation is still a colossal mess, and it's shocking just HOW MUCH of our info about the behind-the-scenes stuff on Frontier came from Shaloom. (He also gave a lot of info about Zero...I wonder if any of THAT ended up here as well?) And the fact that he still has defenders just seems insane to me.

Wasn't that the same number used in the AnimEigo liner notes...?

And I will happily attest to that. The "Ohnogi Question" is entirely settled, even at MG. My thread about it is still open*, and no one has banned me from MG or anything of the sort. Where WD1 and I have our differences is in Shaloom's culpability, whether his apology was genuine, and what steps should be taken to prevent this happening in the future. WD1's position (as I understand it): the apology was enough, Shaloom was mistaken, and if it happens again, combat bad information with good information. My position is that I'm not sure WD1 understands how difficult it was to find enough info to prove Shaloom wrong the first time. He made his sources impossible to check, and so I had to look for contradictory info...which mostly involved looking at interviews, laboriously translating them, and trying to find places where Ohnogi *should* have been referred to, but wasn't. Shaloom's big mistake was saying that he checked the credits. I doubt he'll make that mistake twice. When Shaloom says (as he did), "I have an old magazine from 1983 where Ohnogi says Kawamori wanted a 'triangler ending' for the original SDFM," how exactly are we supposed to combat that? As far as I can tell, Kawamori doesn't say anything remotely like it in "Perfect Memroy," but he doesn't say anything that contradicts it, either. Seems like it's easier for me to ask Shaloom to show sources instead. But he won't listen to me, since I'm apparently his "cyberstalker." Which means it's easiest just to ignore anything he says unless he backs it up with sources. I think pretty much the entire Macross fandom would agree with me here. @March: Was I wrong in my inference that you were taking a harder-line stance towards MG than I was? If so, I apologize. Still, I find it pretty weird that WD1 was using you to club me, considering that you and I are pretty much on the same page here... * EDIT: As of Aug. 10, the "Ohnogi Question" thread at MG is locked. That was the last of four threads on the site discussing the issue to stay open. Now all of them of them are closed.

I was trying to give you the benefit of a doubt, really. Because if you DO understand why it's important to determine whether Shaloom was lying or just mistaken, but you refuse to...well, that reflects poorly on you, doesn't it? But okay, I'll quote you from now on if it becomes more of an issue (which I'm praying it doesn't). Your understadning is correct. Ah, man...now I'll NEVER know how long he could go on asking for the url when it's been staring him in the face the whole time...

I'm not twisting words. I pointed out a book that SHALOOM SAID HE OWNED AND HAD READ, asking if that was also just a "mistake." You replied: And in the bit you cut out from your response of the 26th: But mostly this: Your insistence that the issue is done with (and classifying it as "random flaming") shows me that you don't really understand why the apologies are unacceptable. Plus, "assuming that everything from MG is wrong" is EXACTLY what March is advocating. So if you want to disagree with my point (dismiss Shaloom, but accept other MG members, as long as they can back up their info), and agree with him...well, then I don't know WHAT side you're on anymore. If Shaloom wants to come clean and tell us exactly what's true and what's not, fine. If he still wants to stand by his easily-seen-through "it was all lapses of memory/2ch rumors" excuse, then why should we take anything he says seriously ever again? Fact is, he lied. Either he lied about the information, or else he lied abut how he got it (saying "I read this book" and "I checked the credits" and then saying, "I was all rumors I read on the internet"...if one is true, the other must be false, right?). And he refuses to admit that he lied about anything, but pulls out this victimhood crap. If that's good enough for you, great. But you've been acting like you're the reasonable one for being able to forgive and forget, when the truth is that he is still scamming people with his faux apology. As such, I don't think I'm being unreasonable at all. And why don't you ask him about the time he flew to Japan and interviewed Kawamori himself (or did he just stitch the interview together from various Kawamori interviews that are already out there, with a few bits of his own thrown in)? Anyway, as I've said, I'm not going to pursue it anymore. Maybe he's learned his lesson. If not, you'll have your work cut out for you soon enough. And you might want to fix some of his "errors" on the portal, as well.

There are idiots everywhere. And thanks to Doug Bendo, we know who they are. Ain't nothin' wrong with that.

I could've sworn there was a thread about this this roughly a year ago...