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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, her character's flippant and often silly behavior is a poor fit for the series. It's pretty obvious she was originally conceived as a Guinan-like "wise advisor" character who could dispense the wisdom from her millennia of life to help crewmembers with whatever problem they faced, but she's basically been demoted to comic relief in a series that doesn't really need it. Less a Guinan and more a Neelix. Hopefully come season four she'll end up replaced by Scotty, which is clearly the trajectory they're heading. The writers using her as their vehicle for their latest attempt to brand a new alien threat as "pure evil" is pretty silly too. Star Trek has always favored the idea that hostile aliens are not evil, just operating on different morality or different priorities, but Strange New Worlds tried to make the Gorn into "pure evil" in its first two seasons before walking it back and now we have this race of not-demons doing Exorcist things who are "pure evil" according to Pelia.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    If you look in the credits, it's her actual name. Sandra Yi Sencindiver is playing a character named "Yutani" (no first name given?) who is the current CEO of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in 2120.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    It's after the merger, but before the events of the first film as far as we know. According to articles in Time, USA Today, etc. Alien: Earth is set in 2120. 16 years after Alien: Covenant and 2 years before the events of the original Alien movie (2122).
  4. Seto Kaiba
    She probably has people for that. 😆 Her tour crew has to have a fair few administrative staff dancing attendance on her wants and needs, as well as the hotel concierge staff wherever she's staying, as well as any personal shopper benefits her black card might afford her. And if that's not enough to get through preorder madness with her sanity intact she's got Grace and/or Brera, both of whom have a literal cyberwarfare suite in their brains. Hell, in Master File, Sheryl is able to get the SMS branch in Macross Olympia to not only assign a pair of VF-25s as her personal guard but to repaint them in custom livery and change their modex numbers purely for symbolic/nostalgic reasons. (To match her and Alto's birthdays... 1123 and 727 respectively.)
  5. Seto Kaiba
    It's happening all over for the last week or so, so much so that a bunch of web hosts are now saying they will block AI crawlers by default.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Ruri Rocks continues to be excellent edutainment. IMO, it's great that it's not just gushing about mineralogy. The series frequently delves into the geology behind the formation of the minerals du jour and the scientific method(s) used to identify them and track samples back to a larger vein or deposit. Most importantly, it shows the pitfalls of taking shortcuts, using sloppy or improper methodology, and making assumptions and shows that even the experts can be wrong if they draw conclusions without all the facts. It's not just Ruri being on the receiving end of a lecture, she's actively involved and learning and making worthwhile contributions in her own right by thinking outside the box. (It's kind of making me miss Mythbusters, in a way... particularly in the sense that there's nothing wrong with being wrong as long as you're applying the scientific method and applying what you learn to refine your hypothesis.)
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Well, it looks like we're getting at least the first half of the Alabasta Saga there... Reverse Mountain, Whisky Peak, and Little Garden are all in the trailer. One thing to love about Netflix's One Piece adaptation... their attention to detail. It's hard to see, but you can see in that brief shot that they've even included the bands of cigars on smoker's arms and on the front of his coat.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Catching up on a bunch of titles this week... finally got to My Dress-Up Darling S2. I'm vexed beyond words that it took so long to get a season two for My Dress-Up Darling. That one was so popular it's flat astonishing it didn't get green-lit immediately. My group (re)watched the entire first season before starting the second, and had a great time with it. Betrothed to My Sister's Ex had another good one this week, it seems our protagonist is finally coming around to realizing that being treated the way her family treated her is nothing remotely approaching "normal" never mind "healthy". Secrets of the Silent Witch also had another good episode, with Monica dealing with the practical etiquette classes and predictably freaking out over such niceties as tea parties and formal dances.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Undoubtably... though it's entirely possible what Sheryl spent on that operation itself could equal or exceed the GDP of a small country in its own right. (You'd be surprised how small the GDP of some of the smallest countries is!) (Never mind her own net worth.)
  10. Seto Kaiba
    Bit of a horror-heavy season, eh? All in all, I'm pretty disappointed by this episode. It's not awful or even particularly bad... but it is painfully mediocre and terribly cliched. Its only real purpose seems to be setting up Dr. Korby's TOS-era fascination with finding a practical way to achieve physical immortality (c. "What Are Little Girls Made of?"), which I have to say doesn't feel particularly necessary or value-added.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Assuming Sheryl's "VEGA" black card works the same way as its real world equivalents, that wouldn't be a concern. That Sheryl has a black card is a pretty clear indicator that her status as the galaxy's #1 idol has made her fabulously wealthy. That the card issuer, "VEGA", doesn't decline Sheryl's attempt to charge what must have been a literal fortune to her personal card in order to hire an entire PMC is proof that she has absolutely ridiculous amounts of money at her disposal. That she's still stunned rigid by the size of the invoice is a pretty solid argument that hiring a PMC like SMS must be a hugely expensive undertaking in its own right too. 😆
  12. Seto Kaiba
    From my experience, that's a generic message that's used for a variety of minor logistical issues on FedEx's side that result in the package being delayed in transit. I've seen this status get used for things like delays caused by severe weather or natural disasters that prevent a shipment from leaving a depot, delays due to mechanical breakdowns (e.g. unscheduled aircraft maintenance or in one memorable case a train derailing), handoff issues between local contract carriers and the backbone freight service, issues in customs paperwork in inbound/outbound customs processing, or just delays in customs processing.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    It's being said that it was to avoid having to worry about correctly showing long hair moving in that brief zero gravity shot as the Enterprise...
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Being trapped inside is fairly common, as are the safety protocols not working, but usually how it plays out is that some outside force somehow screws up the holodeck and the main characters have to stall for time while folks outside try to fix things or otherwise escape the holodeck through irregular means. I don't recall any offhand that required the characters to explicitly finish the program. I'm no style guru for sure... but that new hairstyle they tried out in "Shuttle to Kenfori" definitely has a lot of people saying it's not the right look for the actress. A lot of folks seem to think it looks less like a wig and more like some kind of weird hat.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Yep, I made a similar remark in my original response to the episode. They managed to work in a nod to TAS and do a holodeck episode in a way that not only doesn't contradict any prior series continuity but also provides an explanation for a remark made way back in season one of Voyager about holodecks having dedicated power systems incompatible with the rest of the ship. If only Star Trek: Discovery had showed half as much attention to detail, it might've been a vastly different and far better show.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It could very well be at the level I previously guesstimated and still be 100% in-line with her charging it to a credit card. That sounds insane, but hear me out. At the time, Sheryl Nome was in her second year as the top idol in the galaxy. She charges SMS's services to a credit card, sure... but it's a black card. That term's been devalued a bit in the years since the film came out thanks to some rebrandings and some imitators, but what they're referencing there is the most elite and exclusive by-invitation-only tier of credit cards that only the super wealthy who meet specific secret criteria have. They generally have no credit limit and a variety of other perks catering to rich and famous. (For the record, the largest known single purchase ever charged to a black card was in excess of $170M.) Sheryl's the kind of rich where money is no object. But from the promotional art for the first movie, even she is absolutely gobsmacked by the invoice from SMS after the film's events. Probably, yeah. Then again, the ammunition is also a lot more complicated than today's equivalents thanks to hybrid guidance and the need for sophisticated ECCM on many of the larger missiles so the price may not have gone down by that much.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    It's not exactly the same failure... Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking there. Maybe they were trying for a more Janeway-esque aesthetic since she was in command? Not a style that suits her, IMO. Teasers for what IINM is tomorrow's episode suggest they are absolutely not throwing Ortegas's subplot away, since they're bringing her brother back.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    On a lark, I did some research and the more I think about it the more I wonder how any PMC in the Macross setting can even afford to function. Modern PMCs have it pretty easy. Equipping infantry can be done fairly cheaply, with most nations spending between $5000 and $20,000 per head for basic infantry equipment like basic uniforms, PPE, firearms, and so on. That cost can balloon out to the low six figures if specialist equipment is involved, however. That's got to be peanuts compared to PMCs in Macross, where the standard soldier is a Valkyrie pilot operating a plane that's got to cost at least the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. I guess that explains why every PMC so far seems to have spun off of a megacorporation that was doing business in other industries. They'd need a massive amount of seed capital to start a business like that. Even a used, two-generations-old Valkyrie is not exactly cheap by all indications. The VF-1 and replica VF-0 are apparently cheap enough that the hobbyist market can afford them, but Chelsea Scarlett blows her Vanquish League winnings for the entire 2058 season on three decommissioned VF-11s in order to cobble together just one working aircraft... and that's implied to be like Formula One-level prize money (potentially hundreds of millions of dollars), and it's still two generations old at that point. It's enough to make you wonder how much these PMCs are getting paid that they can afford this equipment, and how it compares to just having a regular New UN Forces unit funded using the same amount of cash. I'm sure I'm overthinking it massively, but that's what I do. I'm an engineer, I analyze things ruthlessly.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Nah, we've seen what happens then... you just get Bond villains and upset your tailor. 🤔 Star Trek really has gotten comfortable dropping references to TAS though, hasn't it? There was a good twenty or so years there where TAS was nearly as verboten as subject as Star Trek V: the Final Frontier, Lower Decks of course hit us with some low-key ones like that Kzinti ensign on the Cerritos, the Pandronian drill instructor, and the corpse of Spock Two on display in a collector's ship. IINM, "A Space Adventure Hour" is the first overt reference to TAS in a live-action series.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of? It's not Xaos's fault that the PMC division was financially unprepared to wage an extended war without the financial backing of their client government. Their contract with Ragna and the Brisingr Alliance was to suppress Var outbreaks and provide preventative measures. Legally speaking, they weren't supposed to be participating in the war at all because they are not strictly speaking soldiers. In truth, what it really shows is how wildly popular Walkure were in that part of space. Walkure were able to raise enough money to resupply Xaos's PMC division forces for continuing combat service in a single cluster-wise "guerilla live" event over the Galaxy Network. They livestreamed a concert to two dozen or so planets and it made enough money to fund a small army for at least a couple weeks! What must have been hundreds of millions of dollars at the very least.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, I have no doubt that it's a true statement because of those factors. Xaos's PMC division is neither the largest nor the best funded PMC operator out there. Nevertheless, the Xaos PMC division's branch office on Ragna is based out of a large Macross warship with two attached aircraft carriers. The upkeep and operating costs alone on the Macross Elysion, Aether, and Hemera have to be pretty darn substantial. When all's said and done, based on these low-end rough real world estimates, just showing up to a fight costs Xaos about $151.9 million dollars... and at the time Xaos is worried about money, they've just lost their only client. Windermere's occupation forces are not likely to let the Ragna government continue cutting checks to Xaos, and to be fair Ragna's government isn't likely to feel obligated to keep cutting those checks either considering Xaos screwed up so bad that Ragna ended up occupied by the enemy. Your average large corporation has enough funds to sustain operation for around 12 months without any revenue before going bankrupt. Small businesses or companies with large operating costs tend to only have around 1 month's expenses in reserves at a time. Considering operating on a war footing is exponentially more expensive than peacetime, Xaos is likely operating without a huge "war chest" of funding since their main operating profile was low impact suppression of Var riots. So it's completely believable to me that they could have eaten through practically all of their cash reserves after losing multiple battles and having to flee from the Brisingr cluster with a ship full of refugees in tow. Especially since they would now have to be sourcing all their supplies from outside the cluster, which is likely to drive costs WAY up given how remote the cluster is.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    It really is. It's even harder to believe Strange New Worlds is literally a spinoff of Discovery. If Starfleet Academy follows on from Discovery's tone and themes, it'll be nigh unwatchable. If it takes after Strange New Worlds it might actually be worth giving a look. The "good vibes" and optimistic outlook are essential for it to feel like Star Trek.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    There was definitely a push to impose new controls on the New UN Forces to ensure that its power couldn't be wielded so freely or unrestrainedly as it had been before. One of them being a new regulatory body to police the VF-X special forces, which had been used by Latence's supporters to crush dissent. Money's money, yeah... though there are some passing mentions to the fact that Xaos Valkyrie Works did economize where they could. The Macross Delta TV series suggests the VF-31 Siegfried's customizations were rather haphazard, and pushed the airframe to or past its design limit making it somewhat fragile and increasing its maintenance requirements. Master File, in its turn, suggests that the Siegfried's fold wave system was a heavily economized model that sacrificed output and the ability to self-start (requiring an external source of fold waves) to achieve a cost reduction sufficient to allow Xaos to manufacture multiple units. Yeah, at the very least I can reuse the most expensive part of the PC... that bloody RTX 4080.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    It probably could have been reworked as a good and hopeful story about the triumph of reason over fear, but only in a very different sort of Star Trek series. One of the (main) reasons it fell so flat with audiences was that the bleak and miserable 32nd century future after the Burn really wasn't all that different from the bleak and miserable 23rd century future Discovery had already spent two seasons showing us. The year on the calendar changed significantly, but little else did. Discovery's crew were miserable bastards who hated themselves and each other, the galaxy was still damned and doomed at the hands of alien warlords from TOS-era species, and the whole thing was one massive idiot plot (The Burn) built on a string of plot holes and continuity errors and orbited by a string of smaller idiot plots. It could have worked if it'd been done with a crew that had... y'know... actually believed in and embodied the Federation's ideals. Discovery's crew seemed to be no more than dimly aware that the Federation even had ideals, and certainly couldn't name them if you asked.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    That may have been part of it, though I'm sure the primary reason was to give the individual member governments full control over their local defense forces. Even if the Xaos PMC division is a small-time operator as a PMC, it's still a division of a much larger conglomerate mega-corporation with vast resources at their disposal. It probably helped that Xaos didn't have to pay for the aircraft themselves. Yep. I had a fairly high-end rig and unfortuantely the time it takes to RMA those defective chips is so tediously long that it's arguably faster to buy a whole new PC at this point.
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