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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Fan works like garage kits and doujinshi are an industry-wide phenomenon in Japan... these types of fan works only exist in Japan because the IP owners deliberately turn a blind eye to the fact that they are unauthorized works as long as their creators keep it small, discreet, and for petty cash profit at most. Your self-serving misrepresentation of my post aside, what I've outlined is simply the reality of the situation and how what Calibre Wings has done differs from what IP owners in Japan consider "permissible" or at least "ignorable" copyright violations. Regardless of how many people there are behind the Calibre Wings brand, two things put this outside that grey area that fan works like garage kits occupy: Calibre Scale Models is a company. This is For Profit. Even if the owner/operator is a fan, it's still a professional outfit making and selling unauthorized Macross goods. There's no way Big West wouldn't condemn that. To do otherwise would make it harder to defend their brand in court later on. Either way, it's still a criminal act and we shouldn't be promoting counterfeit goods here.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Oh, it's a safe bet they do... anything that could expose them to potential liability or make them a party to litigation against Calibre Wings is going to rustle their jimmies SEVERELY. Potentially... but it would be a far more defensible case than what it is currently, unless HG got involved over unauthorized use of the UN Spacy roundel.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Eh, I think that's more on you guys for failing to take into account the differences in scale and context involved... as well as whether or not the IP owner is OK with it. There's a world of difference between ultra-low volume amateur fanworks like doujinshi and garage kits and mass-produced, factory-made bootlegs. Fanworks like doujinshi or garage garage kits usually get an implicit pass from the IP owners because they're amateur fanworks made in extremely low quantities, with near-nonexistent profit margins, no marketing, and extremely limited (often single day) availability. People who make doujinshi or garage kits aren't doing it to get rich, they're barely making enough to cover the costs of the low-volume labor of love they produced. IP owners usually (but not always) give that kind of activity a pass on the grounds that nobody's making any real money on it, it encourages aspiring artists and model makers to hone their craft with an eye towards going pro, and in some cases it's been demonstrated to actually drive sales of legitimate product. Even then, there have been concerted efforts to legitimate that kind of thing with one-day licenses for events like Comiket. Bootleggers, by contrast, aren't in for the love of the game... they're specifically doing what they do to turn a significant profit and they're doing it on a rather different scale. These are nominal or actual professionals who set out to either copy an existing product with a specific goal of undercutting the legitimate product or are using an IP without permission to make a quick buck. They're not doing individual castings in their basement or running off a hundred thinbooks at their local FedEx Office, they're contracting factories in China to make their unauthorized products on a larger scale and intend to distribute them as widely as possible to make as much profit as they can from it. This kind of activity is explicitly and near-universally frowned upon by IP owners. That distinction is why there are plenty of members here who don't really have any issue with garage kits, but do take exception to bootlegs. It's all about intent and scale. That's why you see IP owners like Big West or Bandai/Sunrise turning a blind eye to things like character garage kits and doujinshi while pursuing toy and model kit bootleggers in court. Calibre Wings are professionals... their announcement of a Macross Zero F-14 was absolutely intended to misrepresent it as an official, licensed Macross product with a goal of making as much money on it as they could. This isn't one guy doing sculpts and resin castings in his basement or his flat's spare bedroom. This is a corporation that decided it was going to use a creator's intellectual property for profit without permission, and engaged the services of a factory to do so on a large scale. In all fairness, we don't actually know if that cancellation was prompted by legal issues or simply poor sales.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    Several news articles from various sites have popped up in my newsfeeds over the last day or two alleging the same thing... that Amazon is dropping titles based on how much explicit content. The example title most of them used was the light novel series Isekai Maō to Shōkan Shōjo no Dorei Majutsu, which is admittedly not a good example of a marginal title given its massive quantities of fanservice. The third episode of Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha went up on Crunchyroll a few hours ago, so I'm watching that right now. So far, the only thing that really makes Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha stand out is its heavy use of Isekai tropes without actually being an Isekai story. Anos - and I am NEVER going to be able to take that name seriously - is a reincarnated protagonist who retained memories from his previous life, possesses immense magical power, and no matter what he does he ends up gaining status and power regardless of how many rules he breaks or who in power he offends. He's the standard Isekai protagonist in everything but the fact that he wasn't sent to another world. Admittedly, the fact that he has perfect recall of his past life has already started to make everyone's reluctance to believe he's the demon king reincarnated feel like it's arbitrary skepticism, and we're only three episodes in. All in all, I've revised my estimation of it up a bit in light of what appears to be the start of an actual plot thread worth following but it doesn't really feel like it's doing anything to stand out, y'know? The character design is very Mahōka Kōkō no Rettōsei and the plot feels like Ichiban Ushiro no Dai Maō.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... some of what you came up with is correct, but your conclusion is wrong. You've missed a couple really important key points here. You see, Big West's use of the Grumman F-14 Tomcat design in Macross Zero does not give them any copyright claim on the F-14's design itself, but this toy still uses Big West's copyrighted intellectual property. Calibre Wings is using the Macross Zero character designs for the pilot figures, as well as the names of Macross Zero characters in the toy's paintjob. THAT'S clear-cut infringement of Big West-owned copyrights. They also still used Macross Zero footage and the title Macross Zero to promote the toy. That's also something Big West can sue them for, btw, as Calibre Wings does not have their consent to use Macross Zero in a commercial context period. The real kicker is that Calibre Wings publicly stated that this was an unauthorized Macross Zero product in a public forum (on Twitter), meaning they have literally zero chance of getting a lawsuit from Big West dismissed because they confessed to the crime publicly and stated their intent to continue with their criminal activity Not being in Japan doesn't exempt Calibre Wings from international copyright law. The only thing I can think of is that they're hoping they're too small a target for Big West to bother suing, becuase they've done just about everything possible to ensure Big West could sue them and win on summary judgement from their own confession. Where this REALLY gets problematic is that, if they claim they're using the UN Forces roundel and "UN Spacy" markings under their license with Harmony Gold... now Harmony Gold is a party to this lawsuit, and Harmony Gold could also sue them. In the past, HG has filed lawsuits against other companies (e.g. Catalyst Game Labs) at the behest of Macross's Japanese owners. HG could sue them on Big West's behalf for infringing upon the UN Spacy logo and name to prevent itself from being blamed in court for having authorized this bootleg (which they almost certainly didn't... their lawyers would have shat out their own hearts if they'd known).
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Strictly speaking, it's actually worse than HG... what HG does is undeniably dickish, but just as undeniably within the letter of the law, if not its spirit. What Calibre Wings is doing is criminal in the most stringently literal sense of the word. If they keep doubling down on this, it will probably get them sued since they've made public statements that this is explicitly being done without the approval of Big West, who are defending the Macross IP with increasing vigilance as they expand the brand into the international marketplace. I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why Calibre Wings picked this hill to die on. They're not some East Asian toy bootlegging firm - or at least they weren't prior to this - these guys know how licensing works. They had to know that they were likely to get sued over this if they proceeded without a license, and that it could have long-term consequences for the survivability of their business since any lawsuit would almost certainly end in a ruling against them. It really doesn't matter... Big West is not obliged to grant licenses to anyone who asks. That doesn't change the fact that they own the Macross IP including Macross Zero, and are well within their rights to protect that IP through litigation if need be. Mind you, there are dozens of possibilities. Calibre Wings could've just not given them sufficient time to respond before going off half-cocked. Maybe Calibre Wings was unwilling to pay a suitable license fee. Maybe Big West couldn't grant their request due to their request conflicting with the terms of pre-existing licenses held by other licensees like Arcadia or Bandai. Maybe it's because Calibre Wings does business with Harmony Gold. We don't know, but they're not exactly obligated to explain their reasons to us either. If Calibre Wings doesn't back down and Big West sues, we'll at least find out from the court documents.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Eh... it hasn't really been much of an issue in the last ten years or so. Back in the 00's it was a bit of a problem, and there were a number of hasty corrections from people where some other poster thought they meant Kawamori when they referred to me as "SK". So... as you recall, the Galactic Whales in Macross Dynamite 7 were being hunted by a group of incredibly well-equipped poachers for the entirety of the OVA. Naturally, such a large and well-equipped organization isn't in it for sport. Some unspecified part of Galactic Whale carcasses is said to be highly sought-after because it can be used in the engines of spacecraft. There is licensed, regulated whale-hunting going on... but these guys are criminals looking to make a substantial amount of money in illegal whaling. As a lifeform, the Galactic Whale is somewhere between vegetable and mineral rather than animal. Their bodies are part crystal, and part plant. They travel the galaxy to absorb energy from stellar radiation and grow by absorbing gas and dust from interplanetary space. Exactly how their anatomy could be made to work in spaceship engines was never explained. The introduction of fold carbon and fold quartz in Macross VF-X2 and Macross Frontier offered one potential explanation. If special crystal resonators are necessary components in all of the various technologies that leverage higher-dimensional space-time and its physics like thermonuclear reactors, gravity control systems, fold navigation and communication systems, and so on, then it's odds-on the reason Galactic Whales are being hunted is because some part of their bodies contains biologically-produced fold carbon at a high level of purity. If those whales are producing purer, higher-quality fold carbon than the synthetic fold carbon that's widely available in Earth's civilian and military tech, that'd be a sound reason to hunt them (and an even sounder reason to regulate hunting of them... nobody wants to kill the golden goose, y'know?). Fold quartz, which is even better than high purity fold carbon, is probably going to kill the market for galactic whale hunting eventually... but it's also harder to get since you either have to mine it from Protoculture ruins (which is dangerous, given how often they buried Things Man Was Not Meant To Find) or hunt Vajra to get it. I can't imagine anyone being suicidal enough to rush into a Vajra-hunting industry... unlike the whales, the bugs shoot back and they're really f*cking good at it.
  8. Seto Kaiba
    That's why I gently discourage people from abbreviating my username "SK"... it tends to give people entirely the wrong idea. Tried changing my handle on a few websites ten years or so ago, but people complained so I had to change it back. The perils of internet notoriety combined with an embarrassing screen name I chose on the spur of the moment when I was a freshman in high school. No, I don't think we've ever been in the same room... but I guarantee you'll have no trouble telling us apart given that I'm about twenty-five years younger, a bit taller, and rather more Scandinavian.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Based on what's been said by ViacomCBS reps, they're planning to merge CBS's CBS All Access with Viacom's PlutoTV and several other token or as-of-yet unrealized streaming service plans for Nickelodeon, BET, MTV, and Comedy Central to create a single unified ViacomCBS streaming service that can more readily compete with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime. No word on what they plan to call it or when they plan to actually do it, but they've been talking about it since February.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    So... Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time... Unsurprisingly, this seems to be yet another low quality, one cour, half-length TV anime that exists almost exclusively for ecchi fanservice that's occasionally played for comedy. All of what passes for exposition is front-loaded into a minute or so before the OP in the first episode. Peter Grill is a knight in Generic Western Fantasy Land #3263827, who'd just become the first human to win the "world's strongest warrior" tournament in over 150 years and now that he's officially the World's Strongest Man every monster girl around wants to ride his pocket Zaku for the sake of having strong children. Peter, of course, already has a painfully sheltered love interest and wants exactly none of this. Lather, rinse, repeat the same one f*cking joke of him being cornered by an (occasionally literally) horny monster girl ad nauseam in Double Standards: Female on Male Sexual Assault: the Series! The OP inexplicably reminded me of a scene from Excel Saga where they're introducing Misaki and she demands to know why they've stopped the camera tilt where they did, focusing on her "assets" and leaving her face out of the frame. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Studio Wolfsbane did a pretty crap job animating it as well. 0/10... if you're going to take a hard pass on one series this season, make it Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Sort of... there was a macguffin in Macross VF-X2 called a hyperspace resonance crystal lens that had very similar properties to fold quartz, and was established to actually be fold quartz in the Macross Frontier TV novelization. It was discovered in 2043, and was said to be the key to next-generation fold communication and fold navigation technology and the focus of a number of military development programs including Die Zauberflöte, a next-gen fold communications transmitter that became the basis of the Jamming Sound System that was the big bad's trump card. The Macross Frontier novelization connected the two by revealing that Die Zauberflöte's creator, the Critical Path Corporation, bankrolled the 117th Research Fleet's mission into Vajra space. EDIT: There is a very brief mention of Die Zauberflöte in Macross Delta as well, as part of the support system created to assist Heinz in broadcasting his fold song interstellar distances.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yup... IIRC, in Macross Frontier: the Wings of Goodbye we see Ranka working a rally for asteroid miners preparing to start work on an asteroid that'd been towed into formation with the fleet. Well, it likely helps that these ships have sophisticated gravity control systems they can use to cheat down their inertial mass to make their engines more effective. They likely don't actually need proportionally huge amounts of raw thrust to do the same job because they have the internal space and power generation ability to support large-scale manipulation of gravity and inertia. (Otherwise it'd take hundreds of millions of kilonewtons of thrust to produce even 1G of acceleration for a ship like Battle Frontier.) Island 1, the main habitat module of the Macross Frontier, was 15km long and 2km tall, training a string of more than twenty 8km x 3km Island modules... and of course that doesn't count Battle Frontier at the front. You mean SDF-05 Megaroad-04? The Megaroad-04 discovered Windermere IV when it ran into the fold faults surrounding/protecting the planet and subsequently landed there and made first contact with the locals, who subsequently joined the New UN Government. Beyond that, we don't know what became of the ship. He survived. Alto and the Vajra Queen that had been forcibly merged with the Battle Frontier escaped by space fold before they could be destroyed by the incoming fire from the Macross Cannons of the Macross Quarter-class ships coming to reinforce the Macross Frontier fleet. One of the illustrations in the Macross Frontier: Sheryl Nome Final Visual Collection book purports to be a picture of Alto and Sheryl being reunited after the events of the movies.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    In what I'm sure by now sounds like me warming to a theme... it does kinda depend on the quality of the fold system, how far you're folding, and the conditions in higher-dimensional space. (This is, of course, partly an excuse for space folding in Macross being an example of "speed of plot" travel.) Under ideal conditions or over short distances, folding is said to be nearly instantaneous even as recently as Macross Frontier. It's when you go from dozens of light years to hundreds or thousands of light years that you start having to spend significant amounts of time in fold space. Admittedly, one thing that's been retconned is how severe the disparity between subject and objective time in fold is. Back in SDF Macross, Misa asserted it was basically a 1:240 relationship with 1 hour in higher dimension space equaling about 10 days in our normal three dimensions. Macross Chronicle was the first to kind of walk that back, and assert the actual disparity is a lot less in practice and that it's been getting smaller as fold tech improves. Fold faults, introduced in Frontier, became the go-to excuse for a near-instant fold becoming a far longer flight that had a time loss of over a week. Less than an hour, according to Misa's watch... we don't know what the subjective time for Isamu's fold jump to Earth was. We do know that, for an old model commercial fold system the Earth-Eden run was an 18-24 hour objective time run (presumably a high time error due to a primitive low-quality fold system). The interior of the starliner in question is set up like an ordinary jumbo jet's, so presumably the passengers only subjectively experienced a few hours of flight at most. (There was one piece in one of those magazine-exclusive design article features in the early 2000s that suggested that a VF-19 with a fold booster and proper flight clearances could go from wheels up on Eden to wheels down on Earth in under two hours objective time... reducing the time commitment to travel interstellar to the same category as intercity commuter flights.) By the time of Macross Frontier, even fold jumps of hundreds of light years seem to be little worse than a standard airline flight is today. Oh, you wouldn't be spending that entire time or even a significant portion of it in fold space. The reason it took Megaroad-04 ten years to get to the Brisingr globular cluster was that you're folding that massive distance in lots of shorter jumps of a few hundred to maybe a thousand light years at a time, then spending weeks or even months charting nearby star systems and mining valuable resources from nearby asteroids, before making the next hour or two-long jump to the next point a thousand light years or so away and doing it all again. The amount of energy required to fold such a massive distance in one go would be gargantuan, far more than any ship could generate. Even in a pinch, it can take hours to fully recharge a fold system for a new long-range jump with full generator resources committed (as in Macross 7, where it took 7 hours to fully recharge City-7's fold system at the fastest possible speed after the Varauta forces hijacked it). (This is why emigrant ships are designed to operate independently for decades, recycling their waste and mining fresh resources from systems they pass that don't contain habitable worlds. And also why they're designed to be nice places to live... you're gonna be there for a while.)
  14. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, I haven't sampled the light novels for Monster Musume no Oisha-san or Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha yet... so you have a point in that I have not read those two specific light novels yet. I was speaking more generally, since there's been an increase in the number of anime series adapted from light novels over the last couple years. There are a couple isolated cases where the show demonstrably suffers because of material from the light novel that was cut in the adaptation process (e.g. Yōjo Senki or The Irregular at Magic High School), but it's vastly more common for the TV anime's flaws to be bad writing that was faithfully carried over from the source material (e.g. KonoSuba, TenSura). Granted, a light novel that's got a half-dozen volumes or more is going to have more time to develop its story than a twelve episode TV anime... but my criticisms weren't about the as-of-yet unanswered questions in the stories. Most of what I mentioned was how obviously derivative Monster Musume no Oisha-san and Maō Gakuin no Futekigōsha are. It's like the authors weren't even trying to disguise whose homework they were copying. It's really spectacularly blatant in Monster Musume no Oisha-san... the promotional materials even feature the same group of standard light fantasy monsters as Monster Musume no Iru Nichijou, and it's so far we're batting 1000 for them having the same defining character traits and personalities. It's just less fanservice-y... or I should say less overtly fanservice-y. If the stories develop in an interesting direction I'll excuse an awful lot... it's just such blatant plagiarism does nothing to rope me in, y'know? TBH, I think the art style is distinct enough... especially since the character designer for Oisha-san seems to not have Okayado's ginormous boob fetish. KonoSuba was good for about one and a half seasons of the anime, or around 4 volumes of the light novel. Past that point, it gets samey really REALLY quick because the author of the light novel apparently thought character development might hinder the one joke the series has. So every since volume of the light novel after they defeat Vanir starts in exactly the same place, with Kazuma having fallen back into his hikikomori lifestyle with approximately half the volume spent trying to get him off his arse. Next up in my list of this season's new offerings is Peter Grill and the Philosopher's Time. This one actually has a freaking content warning on it on Crunchyroll, so I am not hopeful that it'll be watchable.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    They probably had a falling out after Myung complained about him bringing his YF-19 dakimakura to bed.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    All told, I'm not sure the problems with this recent spate of light novel adaptations is a problem with the adaptation process... in almost every case where I've sampled both the original light novel and anime adaptation, the flaws in the story were invariably the original sins of the source material. Like KonoSuba being a tedious mess with exactly one joke it repeats ad nauseam, TenSura being every bit as thrilling as the Microsoft Excel help menu, or 8th Son recounting Wendelin's adventures in the same slightly bored tone one would use to recount how they had forgotten their wallet on the way to the market. The only real exceptions have been The Irregular at Magic High School and The Saga of Tanya the Evil, where details that were left out dramatically changed the interpretation of their main characters.
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Dunno... there's no mention of his activities between the end of Macross Plus in 2040 and his involvement in the YF-24 Evolution program in 2057.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah... humanity's grasp of fold technology has improved considerably over the last sixty or so years of in-universe time, but a fold system's capabilities are determined by a number of factors like the fold system's maximum energy storage capacity, the purity of the fold carbon it uses to produce heavy quanta for gravity manipulation, etc. Oh, yes... fold communication is much faster than traveling by space fold. However, like fold navigation, the time lag on fold communication is heavily dependent on the conditions in higher-dimensional space like the presence of fold faults. The fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were bad enough that there was a significant lag which even relay pods couldn't fully mitigate. Leon mentions to President Glass that, after deploying relays, they'd managed to cut the lag down to 127 minutes. With appropriately powerful transmitters and relay pods to circumvent fold faults, realtime or near-realtime communication across interstellar distances is possible... though I'd guess fold communications with Earth from Brisingr are probably still significantly delayed just because they have to cross the entire galaxy to get there. Not quite? It wasn't that the Frontier fleet learned about the uprising too late because of fold communication lag caused by the fold faults between them and Gallia IV. It was that it was clearly planned in advance, to exploit the fact that the fold faults between the Macross Frontier fleet and Gallia IV were severe enough to delay any reinforcements dispatched to relieve the loyalist Zentradi in the Gallia IV garrison wouldn't arrive at the planet for at least a week. Until Luca revealed the existence of the super fold booster, there wasn't any real option apart from letting the hostages die or giving in to the renegades demands.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I think it was Otona Anime #9 where Kawamori first commented that humanity's farthest-flung settlements were some ten years away from Earth by space fold. That travel time may vary somewhat based on the quality of the fold system and what the conditions in fold space are like. A route that's free of fold faults can be traversed much MUCH faster than one where the ship's forced to either push through or navigate around a series of faults (as discussed in Frontier, where Gallia IV was said to be close enough for an almost instantaneous space fold if not for the fold faults that blew the travel time disparity up to over 172 hours). Not to mention the prevailing conditions in higher-dimensional space (e.g. fold faults) and the quality of the fold system itself... the disparity between subjective and objective time shrank as humanity got better at making and using fold systems, though Chronicle contends it was never anywhere near as bad as Misa posited in the original series.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    It used to be, yeah... it was, in corporate's mind, to prevent employee-provided underwear from bunching up and becoming visible through the costumes. That policy didn't change until 2001. IIRC it was employee protests after an outbreak of pubic lice that caused the policy change. Disney's pretty horrible... I expect a lot of those theme park workers are going to get sick, and a fair few will probably die in Disney-funded hospitals that exist to safeguard the Mouse from liability, much like my grandpa did back in '92.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    Who's buying a CBS All Access subscription for something other than Star Trek? Their catalog of exclusives reads like a suicide note... so much so that ViacomCBS is planning to merge it with another streaming platform in the near future.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    To be frank, I don't think that's the problem. The CBS All Access paywall only exists for customers in the US... and while CBS has been caught manipulating the numbers to make it appear that it has far more subscribers than it does for the benefit of CBS shareholders, the low viewership of Star Trek: Picard and Star Trek: Discovery is a global problem affecting two much more established streaming services that carry those shows outside the US: Netflix and Amazon Prime.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    Not gonna lie, my first reaction was "rebranding the sequel trilogy already?"... but this might be marginally better.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not sure whose it is, really... since CBS All Access had to fudge its subscriber numbers to make it seem like people actually wanted to watch Picard and Discovery, and both Netflix and Amazon Prime were unhappy with new Star Trek's performance on their respective streaming services.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    Here... the link you copied was from the "Report this post" button.
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