All Activity

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!

Well. Got notice from HLJ that they have a HG VF-31C for me. But I'm in backorder for the 1 DX version and 1 decal set they allowed me to pre-order. Darn. Local shops, here I come (again).

The artwork also prominently features a ship. Ships incoming?

Nooooooooooooooooooo, you are twisting my words!! It's not too far off though! And what I mean is that the opening crawl has the seed of what Ep8 should have been. The Resistance still under assault, but with whispers of a powerful evil returning. getting rid of the stupid chase scene and the stupid bomber scene, have Kylo fire and try to kill Leia, have Finn and Co hunting down what turns out to be the rumors of Palpatine returning, with maybe them being the ones who find out and tell everyone, while having Luke maybe having been trapped by the darkness of the cave-thing for a few years in his hunt for ancient Jedi secrets and more than ready to train Rey, keep Kylo betraying Snoke and asking Rey to join him and ending with Palpatine appearing and Luke and Rey showing up just as the Resistance is about to be crushed and Kylo teaming up with Palpy (for the moment) to put the Resistance out of its misery, culminating and Luke and Leia teaming up to battle them with Luke giving Leia her saber, though both of them end up being injured as they buy time for the Resistance to escape. ROLL CREDITS!

To be fair, it was mostly trash back in the day too the same as American animation. What changed for Western audiences is simply that we are getting more of it and we are getting it faster. Back in the day, we were getting carefully curated collections of only the most popular and successful shows because they were going direct to video and it took like a year or more for them to come out in the west. Distributors weren't willing to risk it all for mediocre or bad shows with their razor thin margins, which is why so many older shows never got licensed at all. Nowadays, streaming is giving us so much broader cross-section of what's available in anime and we're getting it within a few days of it coming out in Japan thanks to anime having adopted the simulcast model for streaming. We get a lot more variety, but as an inevitable result of that we get more of the mediocre to awful stuff that that has always been there that licensees of the past would previously have just ignored. Even back in the '80s, for every Macross or Gundam the Mecha anime trend turned out there were probably half a dozen copycat shows that were borderline unwatchable like Southern Cross. We'll get more information in time.

Same. It almost costs me with shipping the price BBTS is charging. The only real difference is I can get it now and not in a few months but that price is too much

That looks awesome! Can we start a rumor that Hasegawa is going to offer a 1/72 U.N. Spacy vehicle set based on the little “jeep” getting flung about in this artwork?

Yeah, the modern stuff is mostly trash. I miss being excited for anime, but I’m oddly finding more excitement for American animation these days. Can’t wait for more Invincible and curious if Black Knight gets a full series cause that teaser was awesome. But I do feel curious about the upcoming Macross show, although I really know nothing about it

Looks like they went with the classic with Max chasing her down for the showdown

Awesomeness

We have boxart, and it does not disappoint.

Out of the four shows I was watching this summer, I've dumped two. Done with Kaiju No.8 after two seasons. It just wasn't the show I thought it was going to be when I was first watching it. Also, I stopped watching Gachiakatu after 15 episodes. I hated the art style and the story wasn't going anywhere. I'm still on board with Dan Da Dan and Clevatess. DDD really turned itself around after a slog of a start to the second season. I think the new season of Ranma 1/2 just dropped on Netflix. So, need to watch that. Not sure what else I'd watch right now. I have trouble finding stuff that appeals to me in modern anime.

I got hit with shipping shock from HLJ as well. came out to something like $118. Yeah... I'm not buying from them anymore. At least not while this tariff bs is ongoing. I paid it and that will be my last item. It would have been far cheaper to buy it over Amazon at this point. Even the JoyToy stuff I've been collecting doesn't have tariff fees this high and those come straight from China...

You'd think that Tron is a pretty recognizable brand with unlimited merchandise potential across all ages. All it needs is a more compelling narration that A) roots it deep in the 80s retro game vibe culture or B) makes it more relevant in the recent tech/AI development background. Ares was neither, and the narrative failures finished it off IMO.