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I’ll probably stick to the og as well. 40 something animation is beating out the modern animation these days. And I’m really hoping for those other shows to be better as well. 🤞and I’ll throw down one of these 🍀since it’s that time of year

It sure felt like a series finale. It closed all loose threads introduced in the first episode. One thing I can't accept is the logic behind many of the character's motives. Calib's mom is mad a HH for what reason? What did she expect to happen? She took part in a robbery someone got killed. Of course, you're going to do some time. I don't still see what HH did wrong. I'd describe Paul's performance as trying to do Beetlejuice with none of the charm. How does a common space pirate become a leader an alliance of planets? And do these planets have against the Federation? They were originally all independent worlds who didn't want to join the Federation that are mad the Federation didn't give them stuff. I don't understand why anyone would follow such a crude person like Paul's character. Imagine an entire country following such a crude person in real life ... oh I see what they did there. Tig can't act. But does a good with this character. I had teachers that were this boring. Not a very entertaining performance. Same goes for a lot of the characters. Little personality and boring to watch but brings an element of realism.

Those trailers look pretty bad. I'll stick to the original. Hope the upcoming Votoms, Patlabor and Ghost in the Shell animes are animated better.

Y'know what Starfeet Academy really needs? Hammy 40's newsreel announcer guy from Star Wars: the Clone Wars. I feel like all the absurdity, all the pants-on-head stupidity, and all the completely inane character writing could only be improved with a sassy matter-of-fact voiceover. The season one finale - and, sadly, not series finale - is "Rubincon". Did the screenwriting team (or ChatGPT) forget to use spellcheck? That's not how you spell Rubicon. Oh well, here goes something... This is an Idiot Plot. A story that is literally only possible because everyone in it is behaving as stupidly as possible at all times. There's a wonderful little meta moment where Nus Braka makes a string of forced and painfully unfunny jokes and then gets upset that nobody is laughing. You can almost hear the writers speaking through him, demanding to know why almost nobody likes this show and why the studio had to resort to an astroturfing campaign to try to depict its critics as paid trolls. "Come on, guys, I made a funny! Laugh!" - it's almost the perfect encapsulation of every moment of dogsh*t writing in this series. So... the Doctor's mobile emitter from Voyager is back. It was at this point that the Paramount+ app on my streaming pod died... apparently a valiant suicide attempt to save me from the rest of this episode. Honestly... Braka's making some excellent points here. Yeah, his slant is obvious but he's actually got Ake's number on several topics especially how she dragooned Caleb Mir into Starfleet by giving him a choice between service or a death sentence in an alien gulag. We learn that the guy that Caleb's mom went to prison as an accessory to the murder of was on his last rotation before retirement, because no cliche is getting left behind today. Using a real element in Braka's speech earlier turns out to have been a mistake, as the writers are now inventing fictional properties to the stuff... Honestly, the fleet shots we get in this episode serve to remind how little Starfleet Academy resembles Star Trek. So few of those ships look like they belong to Star Trek at all, many look like they'd be more at home in Star Wars. Very little of the franchise's iconic design language is on display. The credits definitely make it feel like they weren't expecting the series to get renewed too, going through the cast's childhood photos (or younger photos of the older cast) in a setup that feels like it was designed for a series finale. With the first season of Starfleet Academy now officially over, I can say this of it. It sucks. It really sucks. To paraphrase the composer Gioachino Rossini: "It has some good moments, but awful quarters of an hour." There are a few moments of solid character writing scattered across its ten episodes, but the vast majority of the series is just pure low-effort slop. It'd be a fairly generic, but painfully unfunny, coming-of-age school dramedy if it weren't for the paper-thin Star Trek veneer over the proceedings. The writing is fairly cringeworthy throughout and has three main recurring problems: It's incredibly patronizing. The cadets are meant to be audience surrogates, and it's incredibly clear the showrunners do not respect their intended audience. The cadets are audience surrogates and college-age students who the series insistently treats like unruly primary school children most of the time. As much as it tries to respect past Star Trek, it can't help sh*tting all over it. Not just in depicting this class of cadets as immature morons, fratboys, and meatheads who lack all of Starfleet's signature discipline and desire to learn. They also unintentionally assassinate several legacy characters. Especially Ben Sisko, who is ex post facto turned into the absent black father his actor Avery Brooks fought so hard to not present him as. It's clear the respect for past material is purely superficial and an attempt to get fans invested in the series. Every time the series attempts to step away from generic fratboy hijinks and do actual Star Trek-like storytelling it immediately serves up an idiot plot every time. The whole crisis defining the second half of the season was brought about by a string of unforced obvious errors by Captain Ake, whose depiction veers from desperate to reckless to simply out-and-out incompetent most of the time. These problems were/are fixable. This series could be made watchable, if not actually good. I definitely agree with how it landed on Rotten Tomatoes and other review aggregators. It's not as dog**** as Discovery, but it's still noticeably worse than Strange New Worlds's worst effort and light years short of the high mark set by Prodigy and Lower Decks.

A private set of custom aircraft I have developed for MSFS2020/2024. Models are combinations of paid/free/extracted models from various websites and emulator game extraction files. A big thanks to the handful of members that helped me to find all the tools and resources. There is much work to be done as I gradually re-work the aircraft to use only paid/free/self-modeled parts. The game file 3d models are useful but obviously copyrighted material. If there are members who have custom modeled craft or mecha that are interested in providing assets to this mod I am very keen to work with you. Especially if you have or can help to work on the cockpit model.

RossCon.

Silver Surfer.

It's just the box but it looks freaking glorious! Congrats!

These 2 are the best of friends!!! Ranka couldn't attend her concert at Tokyo, so she attended the one at Nagoya (May'n hometown!) After that she even got to go to May'n family home for dinner! Love them!

Oh mercy! It's a thing of beauty

Yes. A very young Dakota Fanning turned in an impressive performance for her age. I haven't seen it since the original airing in 2002, but I remember enjoying it at the time. My memory is sieve, not bucket, so I remember little of it, but Dakota left an impression. Funny that Elle's making more of a splash these days than her older sister, as I always thought Dakota had the stuff to be an A-lister. Disclosure day is filling me with a remarkable sense of "Meh" despite the caliber of actors and director involved. @Seto Kaiba's comments ring oh so true, especially his observations regarding the alien language and its relative similarity to the gurgles. I imagine it's challenging for sound people to come up with something that truly sounds alien, but perhaps this should have gotten the thumbs down (unless this was the best of numerous previous attempts and they finally just got tired of listening to clicks and pops). Funny how aliens' abilities always have to comport to human sensibilities. What if the aliens communicate in a frequency outside of human hearing, making them essentially silent to us? That, to me, is far scarier than snap, crackle, pop. Anyway, I agree that Spielberg hit his high note with Close Encounters of the Third Kind regarding alien stories. Unless they introduce something else more intriguing in subsequent trailers, without giving the whole movie away, I'm thinking this is one for streaming.

Yeah, I mean, at some point the CPU becomes the bottleneck, even if you're running AI models, and not trying to generate frames for gaming...

You know what I thought was better than this trailer? Steven Speilberg's TAKEN mini series.

Very interesting! Color me intrigued.

Nice find! (Twice!!)

Ok last one for today. Been home with a sick kiddo today so have some time on my hands. I wanted to share some pics of my monster build from last year. Spooky stuff right here. Alignment on the main cannons was an issue for me and they look so flat and almost on the same plane and less staggered like in the artwork. Also some seam issues lurking that I never dialed in. I would love an updated version of this kit. This was a fun one and I learned so much from it.

I am in the process of cleaning up my stash, cataloging my kit manuals, decals and extra parts hands etc… and recycling all these empty boxes. Anyway I discovered I had a resin kit in my stash all this time and never opened it and completely overlooked it. I don’t even remember when I bought it. Lol. I’m old and will use that as my excuse. Anyway I pinned it up quick this morning. It’s very very basic with only a few pieces but needs lots of clean up. It’s the Hasegawa Macross DYRL Miria non scale figure. This will be my first figure build and hope to work on it this year if possible. It will look nice next to her Q-Rau

Huh... so... yeah... that was certainly a trailer. Kind of an underwhelming one when all's said and done. I'm sure that was probably meant to be weathergirl getting possessed by aliens, but between the face she was making and the sound effects all it was missing to be a rejected Pepto-Bismol ad spot was the tagline "Where will you be when diarrhea strikes?". Kind of a tension-destroying audio choice... unless you're the one mopping the floors, I guess. Having the aliens come to Humanity speaking the dreaded language of the Ta-ko B'el (or is that Wytte Kast-El?) feels like a "fire your sound engineer" sort of decision. Doing another movie around the fairly generic premise of the government covering up the existence of aliens until first contact because Mankind Is Not Ready is certainly a choice too. That premise aged like milk, and in the present day it seems especially silly and unbelievable. Unless they've got a better trailer waiting in the wings, I'm definitely waiting for this to hit streaming.

I can’t believe I got this.

Rrrready!!! Closer to 39cm when complete.

Millions of seam lines later I’m about to prime this 🦖 today. I’m guessing I’ll have to do additional surface prep once the primer reveals errors in my hasty work. I had lots of ambitious plans for this old fella but I am feeling lazy so this will be a straight build without modding anything.

Yeah, still looks like a video game. May still watch it tho.

Thia and Bud go up for preorder on 3/18.

Walmart Exclusive.