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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Star Trek: Discovery's first season has some very impressive visuals but suffers terribly at the hands of its writers and producers trying to make Star Trek dark and edgy. It's fine for characters to have flaws among their character traits, because that gives them something to overcome as they grow and develop and it helps make it easier for the audience to relate to them. Giving the characters nothing BUT flaws... well, that just makes them unlikeable jerks. Commander Burnham and the crew of the USS Discovery manage to be so very difficult to like and do so many questionable things that they fall somewhere between "designated hero" and "villain protagonist". So much so, in fact, that even when the show makes a rather drawn-out detour through the Mirror Universe of Evil Twins the crew's evil alternate selves literally have to resort to onscreen recreational cannibalism to establish that they are, in fact, the (more) evil versions of the characters. Hey, that's still a 100% net increase in the number of functional moral compasses aboard the USS Discovery. Pike's a stand-up officer with an impeccable record. He is absolutely slumming it by letting himself be temporarily reassigned to the Discovery. If it weren't so technologically advanced I'd say it was Star Trek's version of the Soyokaze from Irresponsible Captain Tylor.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Well, that's what happens when you let someone like J.J. Abrams who never understood, and really doesn't like, Star Trek helm a new Star Trek series. The producers and writers who don't "get" Star Trek will only ever be able to produce a generic sci-fi action series with a thin Star Trek veneer. For whatever reason, neither J.J. Abrams nor Discovery's producers seem to understand that what made Star Trek a sci-fi classic was that it was a fundamentally optimistic "High Adventure in Space" story. They're so intent on using space warfare as the quick and easy source of drama in the story that they overlook that it's only one method among many, that it's incredibly overused in American SF, and that NOT being a space warfare story was one of the things that set Star Trek apart. There were occasional skirmishes, the odd major battle or two like Wolf 359, but they typically ended in both sides walking away or solving the dilemma with a clever trickery. To make Star Trek work with the kind of space war story they want to tell they have to twist its optimistic setting into a Bad Future where the Federation and its rival powers are more militant, which makes things comically grimdark. MacFarlane and the various Star Trek fan film makers better understand that Star Trek was about exploration, and that part of what made its stories stand out was that its approach to conflict resolution was conflict avoidance by way of diplomacy or clever trickery rather than brute force. The Orville gets the "spirit" of Star Trek much more than Star Trek: Discovery does.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Smart money says Harmony Gold probably made Strange Machine Games buy the RPG license at the same time they purchased a license to make that board game. Harmony Gold did publicly refute Palladium Books's claim that they (Palladium) were outbid by someone else for the Robotech license, indicating that their license had been revoked because of the failure to deliver on the Robotech RPG Tactics Kickstarter. It's probably that HG licensed the RPG and board game rights to Strange Machine as a package deal, possibly a compulsory one like Harmony Gold's earlier (unsuccessful) attempt to strongarm Palladium Books into acquiring the Robotech 3000 license sight-unseen at an additional cost by making it a requirement for renewal of their existing Robotech license c.2000. Harmony Gold is definitely in "once bitten, twice shy" mode right now as Strange Machine Games explicitly confirmed on their official Facebook page that their license prohibits them from using Kickstarter and other forms of crowdfunding on Robotech projects. HG's actions since their binding arbitration with Tatsunoko Production over royalties definitely have an air of desperation to them, like they're trying to squeeze as much cash as they can out of the Macross license before they lose it with a merchandising blitz before they lose the license in early 2021.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    AFAIK, the original official stance from Star Trek's creators was originally that the timeline diverged from our own history around the time TOS was being filmed (~1966). The original Star Trek series had a few plots that supported that position. "Assignment: Earth" was one of them, depicting a 1968-era Earth where the Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies was either never ratified or never created and where orbital thermonuclear weapons platforms were a thing. It was later shaded back to the 50's by Enterprise's writers, who put the break in the timeline shortly after the discovery of DNA. Star Trek is usually pretty firm about the idea that it takes a really significant event to spin a parallel universe off an existing timeline and that some timelines reconverge and branch off multiple times as probabilities converge and diverge. There's bound to be overlap between Star Trek's later history and ours, but things that happened may not have happened at the same time or the same way. I was really hoping that Star Trek: Discovery's season season would stop trying to be an action series and settle down into a more credible science fiction offering. That hope seems to have been dashed, and it looks like we're in for another season of Star Trek written by people who really don't understand Star Trek and wish they were writing Star Wars. For my money, the worst part of that trailer isn't the juvenile humor. It's the stupid, spinning one-man bubble pod fighter things. Is Star Trek so hard up for ways to make Star Trek an action series that it's resorting to stealing designs from the old Lost in Space movie? I think I'll once again refrain from taking out a CBS All Access membership. I might pirate the show if there's any real recommendation of Season 2's content, but there's no way I'm supporting this mess financially.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    Thus far, the only semi-official attempt I've seen made at addressing the subject of the Eugenics Wars occurring when they did is in the Relaunch novels Department of Temporal Investigations series. The Suliban cabal's sponsor, referred to by the DTI as just "the sponsor" until a new recruit starts sardonically referring to him by the ENT production nickname of "Future Guy", figures prominently in the novel Watching the Clock which ties up a number of the loose ends left by the hasty conclusion of the Temporal Cold War arc in Enterprise. On several occasions, the DTI agents in that novel voice a popular-but-unconfirmed theory the agency has that the Eugenics Wars was a front in the Temporal Cold War. The theory holds that the unnaturally rapid progression from the discovery of DNA in the 1950s to workable genetic enhancement of human subjects in under twenty years was the influence of an unknown party from the future giving anachronistic technology to Cold War era nations to try to derail humanity's development. A related theory that the DTI was able to prove thanks to events that occurred in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's episode "Little Green Men" was that the unusually advanced-for-the-time technology of the DY-100 series sleeper ships was based on technology which the US Government had analyzed when they briefly captured the Ferengi ship Quark's Treasure in Roswell. The ISS is definitely a part of Star Trek's history. Captain Sisko had a model of it in his ready room on DS9. It's possible, given the above, that the ISS in the Star Trek universe also contained (and was built with) anachronistically advanced technology.
  6. Seto Kaiba
    If the quality of the writing is up to snuff, at least we'll have a new fountain of snark.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Didn't the Emaan also have really short lifespans?
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, OCR on Japanese is still a bit of an inexact science. I worked on an early effort to produce a working kanji OCR back in graduate school, and we had very little success once the number of radicals in a single kanji passed eight. It was brought to my attention a short while ago that @Gubaba has been doing synopses of each of the revised Macross the First chapters on his blog as they come out. It enough to at least get the gist of things. (I didn't realize he'd done more than the first one.) https://gubabablog.wordpress.com/category/super-dimension-fortress-macross-the-first/
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Ah, yeah... I remember that. That was the same debate that ultimately killed my and Talos's plans to translate Macross the First. I think he got the farthest tho, two complete volumes before giving up.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    A few of the online free translation tools offer document translation of images, but I think it's just the same OCR they use in cloud form in their cell phone apps in most cases. The most effective method I've heard has been opening the comic in your PC's web browser, and using Google Translate's realtime OCR on your phone by taking snapshots of individual speech bubbles in the web page.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    Splitting hairs here, but it wouldn't be a scanalation since the source material in this case is purely digital. They'd just be rehosting the image (piracy). There are loads of translation groups out there, but I don't know of anyone that's tackling the new edition of Macross the First. Releases were so slow that scanalation groups kind of lost interest in doing the original edition and an English translation sort of ground to a halt near the end of Vol.1. @Talos and I tossed around the idea of doing a full translation of the previous edition a couple of years back, but shelved the project after certain users on these boards started going on about how scans are bad and how stupid it was to want a translation of Macross the First because the story is mostly the same as the original series. Unfortunately my Photoshop-fu is far too weak to tackle a project like that on my own, even if I had the time these days. Your best bet there would probably be opening the manga in your PC's web browser and using your phone to take snapshots of the speech bubbles. Or, if you're OK with going slower, using an editor to cut out the word bubbles as stand-alone images.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Weirdly enough, when you think about it it's arguably more consistent with Macross Max's behavior than Robotech Max's. The Robotech version of Max was kind of quiet and geeky, where Macross's Max was a bit of a playboy whose internal monologue was devoted to mentally undressing Milia as they duked it out in the arcade. Yeah, most of what I turned up when I searched on their catalog was licensed works for movies and TV shows, plus a few "Making of" coffee table books. Quality seems to vary a fair bit if covers are a fair indication (and they usually aren't), but compared to what they're doing for the Robotech comic I'm getting a STRONG vibe that they're running in minimum obligations mode.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    Here's a brief interview with Sunrise President and CEO Yasuo Miyakawa about the live-action film project: http://news.mixi.jp/view_news.pl?id=5204390&media_id=141&from=twitter&share_from=view_news It's very short, but at least we can rest assured Sunrise won't let Legendary turn it into a standard American action movie.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Having no experience with Titan's other work I can't really judge the quality fairly... but it certainly feels like they're phoning this series in.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    ... and the complete confusion that'll set in when the new edition catches back up to Vol.5 and 6 of the previous edition, which diverged into an original flashback story.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    It says a lot about how I was raised that my first exposure to that quote was the dedication plaque from the USS Excelsior. One of the things I love best about Macross is that it's almost always somewhere completely new. It makes the "shared" Macross universe feel much bigger when you can have multiple stories going on and building up without any crosstalk between them, or with two stories in the same place that are going on independently enough that the participants in one are only dimly aware of the goings-on in the other. It's a setting big enough that earthshaking events and life-or-death stakes can be damped down enough by distance, time, and relevance that they can be either headline news half the galaxy away or squeezed in above an ad for mildew remover on page fourteen below the fold. (I suspect that Delta explicitly being set in a remote, generally poorly trafficked part of the galaxy will mean the events of the series will not be widely known outside of the Brisingr globular cluster during future shows. Even the New UN Government barely acknowledged it as anything but a tiff between colony worlds until the very end.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, but in theory they're trying to at least stay within eyeshot of the official setting. It's not a bad thing, by any means. It's just that, as a Macross researcher and translator, I'm quite amused that a doujinshi Masahiro Chiba wrote before Macross: Do You Remember Love? came out and probably never expected anyone to remember or take seriously is apparently STILL referenced as an authoritative work by the writers of Macross publications both official and non over 34 years after he published it. (I confess I do sometimes wonder if he's either as amused by its longevity as I am or if he's a little embarrassed by people going back to his oldest work all the time like artists sometimes get.)
  18. Seto Kaiba
    A point of order... the Space Battleship Yamato franchise isn't developing new material. The last new original story they had was the Space Battleship Yamato: Resurrection movie almost ten years ago. What they've been doing ever since is just remaking the first few Yamato titles. "Left" and "Right" are subjective, and depend entirely upon where you're standing at the time. What's that saying... "Not all who wander are lost"?
  19. Seto Kaiba
    Macross 7 is very like its contemporary, Mobile Fighter G Gundam, in that you really need to be able to disengage yourself from your expectations of what a "traditional" title for the franchise is like and just go with the over-the-top enthusiasm in the show. (They were both intended for a somewhat younger audience, IINM.) If there's one thing that the last few years have proven pretty definitively is that it really IS quite impossible to make a show or film with universal appeal... especially if you're making a sequel to some existing title. You can't please some of the people any of the time. I'd rather Macross experiment and push the boundaries of its concept than stagnate the way that Universal Century Gundam titles have been doing for ages and turn to jerking itself off by making shows explicitly about its own merchandise. If it means one show in a dozen isn't a satisfying and delicious treat, so be it... it's still better than the only question being what we're calling the space nazis this season.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    We've known the Iron Chiefs were attached to the Megaroad-01 fleet for ages... though it's weird to see a SVF-184 Iron Chiefs VF-1, considering their first and only mention was as one of the first units to transition to the VF-4A. It looks like the legacy of the old Sky Angels VF-1 tech manual is still alive and well. The summary there for the SVF-184 Iron Chiefs mentions them being attached to ARMD-06 Constellation in 2011, after the First Space War ended. That means they're going with the unofficial history where there were two surviving ARMDs (Constellation and Midway) that escaped getting blown up by being out at Apollo Base and the L-5 manufacturing station.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    I'm not enough of a bastard to reply to this by singing "When September Ends". Anyway, here's Wonderwall... Seriously though, we probably won't have any real news until the end of September. I'm hoping for something akin to what Kawamori was talking about before the last project became Delta... a show about air racing or flight demonstration teams. (I'd love an adaptation of Macross the Ride, though I suspect the toy companies wouldn't be too thrilled with it since design-wise it's basically a showplace for Macross's version of MSV.)
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Part of the problem being that some folks can't seem to separate "objectively bad" from "I didn't like it". Macross Delta has been a fairly successfully and well-received Macross series despite its flaws. The negative reception it gets from certain parts of the English-speaking fandom seems to have a good deal more to do with fans either not getting certain core themes of Macross or simply not being in the show's target demographic to begin with. Sufficed to say, there's a profound unwillingness in some corners to actually judge the show on its own merits (or lack thereof) rather than based on the viewer's unrealistic expectations of a Macross series. I suspect, on that note, this new series will not make those same malcontent fans happy.
  23. Seto Kaiba
    It can't conceivably be anywhere near as boring as the first book's attempt to explain how they applied overtechnology materials to threaded fasteners. I'm betting it's a structural improvement meant to make them more robust in hand-to-hand. I think he meant more why the design was changed... and what the advantage of the square hands is.
  24. Seto Kaiba
    No, it's not completely drawn from scratch. The character and mecha design hasn't really changed that I've seen.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    A fair amount of a VF's weight is in the legs (the engines), so having the center of gravity pretty low probably helps.
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