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Other than wanting original show/DYRL Zentran and Meltran ships to go with the available SDF-1 kits... I'm sort of thinking that other Macross/SDF type ships from later series have the best shot at getting kits from Hasegawa or whoever? I apologize, I don't know all the ships that well, but stuff like Macross Quarter, Macross Frontier, Elysion, Grasion, Megasion, etc. I'd love a Macross Cannon from Macross II but... unlikely.

Cool posters, I'm gonna make a trip to the Atomic Testing Museum here in Vegas, they're doing an official Bethesda Exhibition for Fallout there starting November 14. https://www.ign.com/articles/fallout-is-getting-an-official-bethesda-backed-exhibition-complete-with-easter-eggs-at-the-national-atomic-testing-museum-in-las-vegas

Eh... I don't think there's any saving The Rise of Skywalker. No amount of spackling over the sequel trilogy's constellation of plot holes with moon logic and fanservice will ever make that transition between 8 and 9 feel less like the kind of shift that leaves you picking gear teeth out of your oil for a fortnight. Turns out when Palpatine was telling Anakin how the Dark Side was a pathway to unnatural things, he meant plot developments. I mean, c'mon... they literally replaced the main villain twice in quick succession. Kylo Ren offs Snoke like 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through The Last Jedi and by the next film has proven ineffective to the point that he's summarily replaced by a 119 year old literal corpse who can't even get out of his chair. Honestly, that's the dumbest part of Kylo Ren. He's not even original. If I had a nickel for every time Han Solo's son grew up to become a whiny emo kid who turns evil and starts cosplaying as Darth Vader because of questionable mentorship, I'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice. I have to hand it to pre-Disney LucasFilm though, giving their version a name that conveyed how truly stupid and useless the idea was. They probably meant for his name to mean "Slaughter" or "Murder" (Caedes) but they apparently couldn't be arsed to pick up a Latin dictionary because the word they used was "Caedus" (lit. "can be cut down"). In short, he was Darth Expendable. Yeah, he was. He was a grunt trained as a mortarman and got a medical discharge. Reality and dramatic fiction play by different rules. In the real world, a total badass can look like anything... even a cartoonish mug. In fiction, you want characters to look a certain way that communicates aspects of their personality or character that you don't have time to communicate verbally. A strong character should have a big upper body, an evil one should have an unsettling look, that kind of thing. John Boyega's character may have been trained from childhood to be a soldier, but his role in the story was comic relief for the most part. He's meant to be a bit of a loser among stormtroopers, who are memetic losers for the most part. So not having the appearance of a hardbitten soldier works for him. Especially since he spends a lot of the first film as the plucky comic relief whose very expressive face is best used to convey his outrage and dismay at the latest inconvenient thing happening to him. He's actually a pretty good casting choice, IMO... though it is a shame his character got shortchanged so badly.

I think it actually looked far better animation wise. The hand drawn look always appears better than the simplified cg almost AI look of the majority of modern anime

Wasn’t he a marine or something? Anyway, I didn’t mind him at all in the first of those movies. And he seemed far less nerdy than Boyega who was supposed to have been a life long soldier.

I like the idea, but I don't think any re-write of the connective tissue between 7 and 9 could ever actually make either of those movies work in a "cohesive" way in the first place. Nothing about the setting of the sequels works from the foundations upward, so you can't really rebuild anything without nuking it to bedrock level first. I can't disagree that there was potential in some of the ideas they explored, but it was all built on nonsense that falls apart if you think about any aspect of it for more than 5 seconds.

Mugen Gacha is actually good. Today's episode was interesting. Gold and Nemumu are funny. One thing bothered me is why when Nemumu kissed light's foot it was bare. But in the Light Novel he had a sock on. Why change it.

This is why I feel that Ep8 is a 'lost' movie, that when found it would fill the gap between TFA and TRoS with some meaty, connective story-telling that would make it all work, and not be some disjointed mess that has the line, 'Somehow, Palpatine returned...' to explain away something very, very big. This lost movie has that 'somehow' explained in a cohesive and exciting way that makes it all worthwhile. Sure wish someone would find it. I last heard it had been lost somewhere deep in the Disney Vault... And I was fine with Driver's look and performance. His look is that of a 'good guy,' which you would expect of the child from Han and Leia, and when he finally turns back to the good at the end, it works. But I agree, he came across as too wishy-washy, with a bad mix of conviction tempered with a fair dose of explosive doubt that kept him flipping back and forth from devoted Sith Ren (what the heck is that again?!) to whiny whiner. Which is one reason why I wish they had just kept him bad. Darth Cadeus was bad to the end and if they were even remotely modelling Ben on him, then they should have kept it that way and really dived into the fact that not everyone can be, or wants to be, saved.

SDF-1 re-re-release for those that requested it, Just be aware of the sticker shock to get it shipped out to where ever you guys are!

Younger looking Harrison Ford

Beautiful work!

We have that thread on store policies, I'm going to start listing my shipping and duty experiences there. If it prices out that HLJ is double taxing everyone, then we can adjust our buying habits until they figure it out.

Yeah, it's painfully obvious how much HLJ is overcharging on this. Just straight up 30%. To ship just the VF-19 with FedEx would total about $130, with a rough breakdown of $50 actual shipping, $75 duties, and $5 extra handling whatever. I've got until April to ship it, so it's staying there for the foreseeable future. I'll see how much AE wants to charge me to ship it along with my HMR VF-19P, but I am still not keen on using DHL for anything.

@SpacePirateNekoneeds to make me a few of those jeeps!

How does one work up to an event that's basically unrelated to the plot thus far, though? After all, the main criticism of Palpatine's return for The Rise of Skywalker is that "Somehow, Palpatine returned" comes out of nowhere. There's no sense that he was involved in any way with the goings on in The Last Jedi or The Force Awakens and it's clear that the First Order exists despite him rather than because of him. He was hiding out on Exegol making his own First Order with blackjack and hookers superlaser-spamming star destroyers and red stormtroopers. IMO, any way you shake it Palpatine's return was a stupid idea and all the sequel trilogy did was repeat the same mistakes that made reading pre-Disney EU books feel like picking over the contents of a skid full of medical waste. Granted, two hours of reading slowly scrolling yellow text on a black background would be more exciting than The Last Jedi... IMO, that's just introducing unnecessary complexity in what's meant to be a fairly straightforward Good vs Evil narrative. There was already a powerful evil in the story in the form of Supreme Leader Snoke and his First Order. Why muddy the waters by introducing a second, unrelated one whose role amounts to being a walking plot hole? It would have made more sense to either A. not kill Snoke off in The Last Jedi so that he could be the Big Bad for the trilogy's final movie or B. make Kylo Ren a competent Dragon Ascendant whose soldiers actually fear and respect him instead of a comically serious tantrum-throwing manchild desperate for someone else to take the reins. Y'know what? I'm gonna garnish that last one with a hot take. Adam Driver was the worst casting decision in the sequel trilogy. I'm not saying he's a bad actor, just that he's not the right man for that role of Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren needed to be someone who could project a commanding and intimidating presence with or without the helmet, and Adam Driver just can't deliver that. His overall look is more "nerd" than "warrior" (he does great playing a comedic nerd like "Matt the Radar Technician") but he also has resting sadface, so his neutral expression makes him look like he's trying not to cry. That role needed someone with screen presence more like Ed Skrein or Michael Fassbender. Someone who can look vaguely unsettling and creepy and play "unhinged" very effectively. He's supposed to be an unstable person prone to flying into psychotic rages, but Driver's performance delivers something more like an angsty teenager throwing tantrums. If they'd had a more effective and appropriate actor for the role of Kylo Ren, they could have gotten away with offing Snoke in The Last Jedi and making Kylo Ren the main villain for The Rise of Skywalker. The return of Palpatine is 100% a vote of no confidence on Disney's part in Driver's ability to convincingly play a villain. No, I say the movie they should have made is a new menace from outside the galaxy! All those words flying through space for the opening crawl have to be going somewhere... and the extragalactic alien civilization being bombarded by all that excess verbiage should declare war on the Star Wars galaxy! 🙃

Had a good time with the latest Pass the Monster Meat, Milady. Mechanical Marie's new episode this week is pretty fun too, though in more of a cute-and-harmless sort of way.

That's just showing your age, bro. 😆 "The slop was so much better when I was a young'un, even if we did have to walk uphill both ways in the snow to school!" The only thing separating it from the creatively bankrupt copycat isekai slop currently dominating the airwaves is its genre. There's a lot of good stuff out there, it's just a matter of your individual tastes and having the patience to try shows until you find a winner. There's a lot of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya's DNA in Dan Da Dan IMO, though I usually hear the Monogatari series referenced as the closest thing to it in terms of its genre-bending. I think their most recent title was a bit over a year ago?

I feel like I've been waiting for 15 years for the next Haruhi or Gurren Lagann, and it just hasn't come.

Easy fix – just make your own missiles 😅 I didn't like how the original weapons put so much weight outside of the graceful silhouette of the MS, so I went for a lighter design. Just plastic rods with a tapered tip and added microstrips, and I went for a retro animation color. You still have make 8 of them and fix them on the kit 🤪. This is the result so far:

I’ll take Southern Cross easily over all this Tronime.

I don’t see why not, but i think that’s more of a plamax thing. Anyway, look at that jeep, definitely gonna be next in line for the tv Macross kits. Maybe it will even come with that ground crew 💩ing their pants

Need more ships!! I was the Stealth frigate and this one from Frontier! and this and so many more!!

Hymn of the Battle Thong!