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Chas

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Posts posted by Chas

    Whats Lying on your Workbench MK IV

    in The Workshop!

    Posted · Edited by Chas

    Love that red and white. I started building the Zeta (red) a few weeks ago, then,  just as I got to the stage it's at, I got the Eta  (blue) in the mail, from Thom on a trade. I was at a pause in the Zeta build as I was contemplating what colour to use for  the panel lines. So instead of figuring it out I stated the Eta. Now I need to figure out what to do about the panel line colour on the red.

    Model Kit Collection Show It Off!!!

    in Model kits

    Posted

    Thanks Gabe!

    Yeah I've got the Bandai Gunship, and Mowe ( posted in my stash pic earlier), but I wanted a second gunship 'cus I hope to build one with wings folded and one in flight.

    When I saw this Tsukuda edition I thought it'd be cool to compare it to the later Bandai that I already have, so I pulled the trigger.

    Whats Lying on your Workbench MK IV

    in The Workshop!

    Posted · Edited by Chas

     THIS IS KINDA OT but I thought it was interesting OK. So I'm building my Aoshima re-release of the old Imai legioss zeta and I decided to scan the decals to print my own given the age of the included set.  

    While looking at them and trying to figure out orientation for placement of a couple, I decided to break out my cellphone to get an idea of which way the letters were placed on the decal.

    The pics turned out better than I thought and what I read on one was quite funny and on another was kind of bizzare.

    Here are the pics:

    20200812_022623.jpg

    20200812_022507.jpg

    The 1st is kinda bizzare. Like what a strange thing to choose to put on a decal ( someone must have been awfully  proud of his new Honda). The 2nd is just funny. If you are having trouble I'm pretty sure it reads " HOW MANY TIMES MUST THE CANNON BALLS FLY"  bloody peacenics!

    So now I'm  gonna go through all my old kits and see if there are any more of these wierd inscriptions on decals.

    Model Kit Collection Show It Off!!!

    in Model kits

    Posted · Edited by Chas

    Japanese kits of that era weren't shrink wrapped. It is still in it bags though, but I got this one cus I really wanted to build it and still do.

     

    P.S. Great now I'm browsing Mandarake for old-school anime vinyl. Just what I needed something else to start collecting! Thanks MT:sorry::bigshok:

    Model Kit Collection Show It Off!!!

    in Model kits

    Posted · Edited by Chas

    23 minutes ago, MechTech said:

     

    Chas - Are you the winner of the MW owner of the most vinyl records?B)) Nice catch with the Orguss Bronco. That is a rare kit! - MT

    Ha! I've only got about 500 or so records and 4 turntables, some folks have more kits in their stash than that!

    Yeah that Bronco kit was a nice find. I've heard about it's rarity so often that I'm kinda scared to build it, but I'm going to. . .

    Macross Books

    in Collectors

    Posted · Edited by Chas

    Don't know if its kosher to post a link to where they are on the web here, but I have them in a .zip file that can be emailed.

      Fortress, shoot me a pm if you're interested.

    It's  better to have the actual book, but like I said if you wanna have a look before you set out on the hunt. . .

    Macross Books

    in Collectors

    Posted · Edited by Chas

    There are digital files of that book available if you want a look before you try hunting it down. I think in the scans there are something like 60 odd scans of genga from DYRL, about 20 or so of which are colour

    Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

    in Anime or Science Fiction

    Posted

    1 hour ago, Seto Kaiba said:

    So... first episode of Star Trek: Picard.

    Y'know, I really have to hand it to CBS.  The All Access app has come a long way... it committed honorable suicide in an attempt to spare me the horrors of this awkward, stumbling mess of a pilot.  Maybe Control isn't so bad.

    For what little it's worth, it's a slightly better start than Star Trek: Discovery... but only slightly.  All in all, the production values feel a lot lower than what I would expect from a show that cost so much to produce.  There are some bush league editing mistakes and loads and loads of scenes that were clearly shot against a green screen with the backgrounds none-too-skillfully composited in.  I would not have credited the rumor that Star Trek: Discovery season 3 made off with a chunk of Picard's budget before watching it, but now I think they might be onto something.  There is a scintilla of old Trek optimism here, but it's mostly buried under the woe-is-me start the show gets off to.

     

    The Good

      Reveal hidden contents

    The all-CG USS Enterprise-D looks pretty good, what little we get to see of its exterior.  The interior is another matter.

    Chauteau Picard seems to have a pair of surprisingl loyal, apparently Romulan, minders.  I do like that the Romulan makeup in this case appears to be modeled on the TNG/DS9/VOY makeup for the most part, though the ears are the more pronounced ones made for Discovery and look too much like iffy-quality cosplay props.

    The recreations of the TNG uniforms in Picard's second dream sequence are quite good... though I almost wish they'd used the same de-aging CG on Patrick Stewart that they used for Brent Spiner so their ages are respectively correct in the dreams.

    There's some nice memorabilia in Picard's vault at the archives.  Models of the USS Stargazer and the Enterprise-E's Captain's Yacht, a real Bat'leth (not the cruddy design from Discovery), a recreation of the Captain Picard Day banner from TNG, and a few other odds and ends.

    So they're NOT following Star Trek: Countdown after all... Jean-Luc Picard never became Ambassador to Vulcan, and B4 was never able to become a new body for Data.  That's good-ish, I guess.  I was rather expecting them to Star Trek III Data back to life, but it appears death isn't the revolving door it used to be.  Nobody tell Harry Kim, I don't think he could take the stress.

    They killed the Mary Sue in the first episode... unfortunately, someone packed a spare.

     

    The Bad

      Reveal hidden contents

    It's on CBS All Access... one of the worst-designed, least capable streaming platforms conceived by man.

    The recreation of Ten Forward in Picard's dream sequence at the start of the episode is either a very badly constructed set or a laughably bad CGI backdrop.  I am inclined to suspect the latter.

    The OP is more Star Trek: Discovery-esque CG clipart.

    The Picard interview opening is... clipart.  Promotional photographs from previous, and much better, Star Trek shows.  Not even cleaned up scans, it looks like it's taken neat from Google Images.

    The makeup on the Trill camerawoman is REALLY appallingly bad.  Like, worse than cheap cosplay bad.

    Jean-Luc Picard is now a bitter old man who, despite rising up against injustice committed by those in authority time and time again throughout his tenure in Starfleet, just decides to f*cking quit because he's angry Starfleet didn't have the resources left to evacuate Romulus.  The real Picard would have rounded up a bunch of ships with captains either too in awe of him to say no or of similar moral caliber and gone anyway.

    What's with all the prophetic dreams?  Jean-Luc Picard is not psychic.

    The Starfleet Archives, with the exception of Picard's safe there, is another laughably bad CGI backdrop that looks to be just a darker colored copy of the Jedi archives from the Star Wars prequel trilogy.

    If Patrick Stewart is too old to do stunts, don't have him do stunts, m'kay?  That jerk harness maneuver for the phaser on overload explosion looks terrible.  Like, as bad as the deliberately bad one when they demonstrated the jerk harness on that "Blown Away" episode of MythBusters.

    Set design at the Daystrom Institute is also really, REALLY bad.  Just a bunch of cheap desks from Staples, some computer carts, shelf units, and random classroom-grade graduated cylinders and beakers full of what is clearly water and food coloring like it's a third grade science classroom.

    The entire idea that you can clone an android from a single cell is kind of dumb on the face of it, considering they don't have those and the idea that smallest possible element of Data's brain contains the working pattern for the entire thing and all of its code is even sillier.  Y'could've just had Maddox succeed in getting Lal started up again instead of resorting to this.

    Also, whatever happened to "Data is not the property of Starfleet?".  Why was the Federation mass producing androids after a messy legal battle that determined that was pretty much slavery and therefore illegal? 

    Even the Borg cube the Romulans have somehow captured and converted into a space station manages to look somehow under-detailed and unconvincing compared to visual effects from decades ago... which is really f*cking weird.  The shuttles coming and going from it are so generic-looking that it's hard to tell which end is up... which is itself kind of unusual for the Romulans.

     

    The Ugly

      Reveal hidden contents

    Within two minutes of being introduced, it is painfully obvious that Dahj is another Burnham-esque Mary Sue.  The very first thing we see her do after three men beam into her apartment, beat her, and put a bag on her head is that she kills all three in ten seconds flat using their own weapons and without removing the bag.  Then she starts hallucinating Jean-Luc Picard for reasons...?  She literally didn't even make it to the OP before outing herself as a Mary Sue.

    What it is with this current crop of Star Trek creators and racist black women?  The interviewer in the Picard interviewer is a Federation citizen, Earth hasn't had a war with Romulans in over two centuries, and she's literally acting like Romulan life has no value.  Is this a post-retirement time traveling Michael Burnham?

    There's that dystopian bullshit rearing its head.  Starfleet assembles a grand armada to save the Romulan people, with Jean-Luc Picard at its head, and it's destroyed by a LOLRANDOM bunch of robots who not only destroy this fleet for no reason but destroy the Utopia Planitia fleetyards, kill almost a hundred thousand people, and apparently Mars is permanently on fire now despite planetary weather control networks being a thing they've had for over a century.  There were exactly zero Starfleet ships in the Sol system that could've stopped this?  They were able to round up a small fleet when Voyager showed up at short notice.

    Dahj is on a mission to tick every box on the Mary Sue litmus test.  She "just knew" how to automatically kick the asses of a group of apparently trained assassins and mysteriously "just knows" Jean-Luc on a deep, personal level.

    Oh god, the CG in the fight scene on the rooftop... there is literally one scene that looks like someone took the outline tool in Photoshop, cut Dahj out, and then just recorded themselves dragging the cutout across the frame.

     

    O.K. After reading all that I wanted to see how bad it was so Yes I watched it (pirated) and it really wasn't that bad. I should say that I'm not a stickler for effects so everything I saw was fine, sure some of it could have been better, but the only bit that really stood out was the leap on the roof, otherwise it all looked fine.

    Spoiler

    As for the girl being a Mary Sue, sorry but I've got to call foul on that one, The reasons for her abilities are quite clear even before we get the explanation. There is enough set-up in her introductory scene for us to understand that there is something special going on with her (and there are enough hints given to figure out that she is more than human and likely a 'synthetic' or part 'synthetic'). So no I don't think that quite fits with the idea of a Mary Sue. Nothing she does is miraculous or un-grounded. Her abilities are I think the exact opposite. They are all grounded in the story and her place in it - even the reason for her visions of Picard  are given somewhat of a grounding. ( although, one needs to get over a pretty unbelievable explanation in order to suspend enough disbelief for it to work, but hey this is SF after all and the experimental cloning of an android doesn't seem like it would have too negative an impact on the world building that has existed in (the old Star Trek )

    As for the set design of the institute. It is purposefully simple and barren, and the reasons for that are given when Picard first enters it. Given the explanation it makes perfect sense for it to look the way it does.

    As for Picard's bitterness toward Starfleet, and why the feds were making more androids if it was supposed to be illegal, well I think that's mainly down to the 'dystopian'  grounding of the story. However, Picards grumpy cynicism could also be there as the starting place for his charactrers growth arc. I mean if he starts off as the Picard we all came to know in TNG, then really where is there to go from there? Plus that would indicate that his character hasn't grown or changed at all in the intervening years. With what they have done it shows that in those years some pretty serious stuff must have happened to turn the character we knew into what we see, and this allows them to show us how he grows and changes back into that great man. I'm not sure that this is where they are going with the character, but if they are they have a good start with what the have done.

    I think that addresses all of what I see as the serious criticisms from your post.

    Now with all of that said did I like it . . . yeah it wasn't that bad I kind of enjoyed it. Am I interested in seeing more? . . . hesitantly, trepidatiously yes. Excited? most certainly not.

     So what does that mean. Well it's difficult to put into words, but I have this vague, haunting feeling that the plot is going to get very, very complicated ( a-la Discovery) with lots of wondering  if this new character or that is good or bad, and wondering what the next big reveal is going to be. There is also the feeling that we are likely going to get a few magic mcguffins along the way to smooth things out. So, while I expect that I'll be watching more episodes, I am also fairly certain that at some point (likely before the end of the first season) it will all become too much for me and I will bail out.

    Star Trek: Picard (CBS All-Access)

    in Anime or Science Fiction

    Posted

    I posted this over on the Starship Modeler thread about this series.

    Unfortunately I don't like anything Kurtzman has done . . . well, o.k. i have been known to watch the odd re-run of Hercules the Legendary Journeys on a Sunday afternoon, but I'm really not interested in seeing anymore of what this man's idea of Star Trek is. His style and my tastes just don't line up, and I don't think any amount of coaching, or suggestions from Mr. Stewart can change that. It's gonna be a pass for me.

    If I owned a bunch of Fords over a period of time and hated all of them, then they come out with a new model and I'm in the market, it's not likely that I'd consider it as my next vehicle - regardless of the features and promises. I don't see how this is much different. I'm simply not interested in buying what they are selling.

    It truly is a shame that two of my favourite franchises have been taken over by 'creators' that, in my opinion, only create schlock at their best, and usually pump out utter crap. Oh well time to move on to other things I suppose.

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