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Seto Kaiba

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  1. Seto Kaiba
    Going full Terminator 2 would really, REALLY bad a bad idea. Earth's governments and militaries are under the control of "The Five" megacorporations. It's not until Weyland-Yutani collapses between Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection that the government regains some control. I feel vindicated that someone else noticed this and felt that was unrealistic. 😆 Bangkok at midday, with no traffic on any visible road? Talk about unrealistic. From the dialog, apparently they were supposed to put GPS tags on any survivors they found so follow-on teams could extract them.
  2. Seto Kaiba
    Please no. Just... no. The first two were bad enough, and the writer-director is the same hack behind the first one. Just take the pen away from Christophe Gans already.
  3. Seto Kaiba
    Oh boy, what will I observe in "Observation"? My hope is for a steady improvement in the quality of the writing. My expectation... a lot of faffing about and not a lot else. First big surprise... Interesting if true, as this would concretely explain why animals and particularly cats seem to be much better at detecting the Xenomorph's approach than Humans. If this series were better written, I would suspect that Boy Cavalier's misquotation here is meant to show that even as a genius he is eminently fallible. That was, after all, how they played a similar gaffe in Alien: Covenant when David 8 mistakenly attributes Ozymandias to Lord Byron instead of Percy Shelley. Instead, because this series is a mess and nobody corrects him, I'm just going to assume that the writers used some AI search tool and got hallucinated at because the statement he attributes to Isaac Asimov is actually Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Boy Cavalier is for some reason mightily impressed by his billion dollar AI robot's feat of... adjusting the pitch of a replayed audio file? Show this boy WinAmp plugins or a Gen IV Pokemon game's Pokedex... it'll blow his f***ing mind. Hell, show him the YouTube search results for "Nightcore" and we'll never hear from him again. With this, I come to the realization that I am bored. Deeply and profoundly bored. There is no sense of direction or momentum to this story. This is a horror story with no tension. No menace. No sense of mounting dread. Just a bunch of the freshman year Intro to Philosophy pseduo-profound navel gazing bullsh*t from a double handful of incredibly pretentious characters with some monsters hanging around in the background presumably even more bored than the audience is. Someone really needs to tell Ridley Scott and the others that if they want to do Blade Runner spinoffs they can just DO Blade Runner spinoffs. They don't need to waste everyone's time trying to turn every Alien sequel into a failed soft launch for a Great Value brand version of Blade Runner. The most interesting shot of the episode so far is a random monitor lizard swimming in the foreground. Swimming monitor lizard has my vote for best character. Thanks to Hermit's history lesson we get names for all five of the megacorporations that rule the world: Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, Threshold, Dynamic, and Lynch. I swear they put more effort into picking and licensing music for the credits than they did into actually writing this. Someone help Noah Hawley, his horror series doesn't know how to horror.
  4. Seto Kaiba
    That, in all fairness, has been SOP for the franchise since Aliens. Weyland-Yutani is an older and more established megacorp than Prodigy is and their immense wealth doesn't make them any more careful when it comes to the lives of employees. The one time someone actually tries to exercise proper safety protocols is the original Alien, and Ripley gets overruled on that by Ash because he's got orders to bring the alien back no matter what.
  5. Seto Kaiba
    That's awful. 🤔
  6. Seto Kaiba
    Rewatched "A Quality of Mercy" as part of introducing my Trekkie parents to Strange New Worlds. When it comes to the subject of Pike being a soft touch, no episode really encapsulates it better than "A Quality of Mercy" and its alternate take on the events of TOS's iconic "Balance of Terror". Not only does Pike's softer, more informal style lead to him failing to crack down on the racism on his bridge but even with a second ship for support he ends up fumbling the encounter with the Romulan Bird of Prey so badly that it causes more than a decade of warfare that goes so badly for the entire quadrant that the Klingon monks on Boreth make another once-in-a-generation exception for the same guy to take a time crystal and fix the timeline. And a random thought... since Strange New Worlds definitely wants to skew lighter and softer than other modern Star Trek shows (to its considerable benefit), y'know who'd be a good antagonist to bring back? The Kzinti. They're mentioned in Picard and we actually see a Kzinti Starfleet officer on the Cerritos in Lower Decks. They're a stubborn nuisance-level threat who are apparently still hassling the Federation on some level even in 2401. They were originally going to show the Kzinti starting sh*t with humanity back in Enterprise's fifth season (before the series was cancelled), and it'd be fun to bring them back as a lighter-and-softer nemesis for Pike now that the Gorn have been put back on the shelf until Kirk's era and the Federation's cold war with the Klingons is ongoing.
  7. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, you'd think so. Especially given that Star Trek: Strange New Worlds usually aligns itself with pre-Kurtzman Star Trek in depicting the Federation as an enlightened civilization that places considerable value on ethical behavior and personal integrity. One has to wonder if the writer's an only child... because anyone with siblings would probably find the non-reaction to what happens the strangest thing of all. Worf is probably the least threatening person on that list! He'd just tell them "You have no honor!" and have them confined to quarters. Kirk or Picard would murder them with words before confining them to quarters and ending their careers with a sternly worded letter of complaint. Sisko would hit 'em with the side eye and then tell Odo to throw them in a holding cell, probably more to save them from the wrath of Major Kira than as a punishment. Archer would smile blandly and confine them to quarters. Freeman would just yell impotently and Burnham would just cry about it. FAFO with Janeway... you just don't. Not if you want to live. There is a BODY COUNT and it is NOT small. (Canonically, it's in the trillions by 2401.)
  8. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, I get the feeling they were trying for that Star Trek VI effect where the writers put the racism on the minority character to make it more effective narratively. The ending is really unsatisfying too, because there are no real consequences for him either.
  9. Seto Kaiba
    Had some good episodes of Secrets of the Silent Witch and Betrothed to My Sister's Ex this week. Dan Da Dan was initially a pretty interesting, but has bogged down so very badly in this "Evil Eye" business that I'm just bored with it. You can only make a character so stupid until their voice becomes The Most Annoying Sound. Jin started on the wrong side of that line and he has been tracking steadily in the wrong direction. Having a redeemable villain is a fairly standard staple of shounen anime and has been forever... but there are some types of villain who AREN'T and trying to pretend that they are is just wasting everyone's time.
  10. Seto Kaiba
    This one lost a bit of its context when I got merged into the thread. It was originally a standalone post. IIRC @Swann was comparing it to the cover of the KISS album Dynasty? Not quite a weirdest places reference but more a weird reference in Macross.
  11. Seto Kaiba
    So... "What is Starfleet?" Huh, so the specs of the Constitution-class appear to have been definitively revised. They've decided to go official with the idea that the Enterprise was the Federation flagship even in Pike's time. Previously the first Enterprise to be actually established as the flagship was the Enterprise-D. They've also radically enlarged her. She's 442.6m long now instead of 289m. Pike's Enterprise is about the same size as an Excelsior-class ship now. We get to see Lt. Ortegas's quarters. Seems she's a bit of a gearhead. There's what looks like a small model turbine engine on her desk, a partially disassembled motorbike behind her, and her room is dominated by what looks to be a totally unmodified Husky heavy duty brand 52" wheeled toolchest from Home Depot. I am about 13 minutes into "What is Starfleet?" and this may be the first episode of Strange New Worlds to lose me. This episode's framing device is just plain unpleasant. You'd think a Federation news reporter would be above this kind of painful-to-look-at yellow journalism. Especially about his own sister's ship and career! Ending the episode's A-plot on a threat feels kind of off-message... There's a deep deep cut at 37:11. We see Number One tucking into a tray of those memetically infamous cubes of what look like play-doh from the ambassadorial reception in TOS "Journey to Babel". Definitely the weakest episode of the season so far... and a strong contender to unseat "The Serene Squall" as the worst episode of the series to date IMO.
  12. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, some of those deliberately-alien spellings are downright awful. Probably not. The original Super Dimension Fortress Macross series had a much wider array of sizes for Zentradi soldiers, but it wasn't super great at keeping them in scale with each other. A lot of the background Zentradi seen near VF-1s tended to get drawn around 12-13m tall instead of the 10m they were supposed to be. They were much better about it in the movie. They run the gamut from Milia at a humble 8.55m all the way up to Vrlitwhai at 13.54m and Boddole Zer standing a full head taller than him (~16-17m?). Scale 'em down to Human size the same way they do Milia, and the Commander-type Zentradi are still giants. Quamzin would be 237cm (7'9"), Vrlitwhai would be 271cm (8'11"), and Boddole Zer would be around 320cm (10'6"). If basketball is still played in the Macross universe, there has to be a Zentradi-only league because that's just plain unfair.
  13. Seto Kaiba
    One of the many details that changed between the first Star Trek pilot "The Cage" and the series proper was the size of the Enterprise's crew. Captain Pike mentions the Enterprise's crew as being 203 people (excluding himself) in "The Cage". When the subject of the size of the Enterprise's crew comes up in the first season episode "Charlie X", Captain Kirk's Enterprise is said to have a crew of 428. They stuck with that number for the rest of the series and most of the movies. Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds ran with the numbers from that original series pilot episode as the normal crew of the Enterprise during Pike's era.
  14. Seto Kaiba
    Sanity check... I somehow missed that among all the things going on in the episode, and it seems like a fairly important point that probably should have been obvious to the viewer.
  15. Seto Kaiba
    Hm... it depends on what LEDs they've chosen, but in theory a stack of 8 AG4s should be able to run LEDs like this for maybe a week or so of continuous operation. I'd assume most collectors won't leave the LEDs on continuously, so it hopefully shouldn't be a problem.
  16. Seto Kaiba
    After a bit of poking around Pose+'s website, it looks like it takes LR626 or AG4 button batteries. CollectorsBase's website says it takes eight of them. (A ten pack's like five bucks on Amazon, so not too bad.)
  17. Seto Kaiba
    Bless you for your diligence. 😁 He's a good head shorter than Vrlitwhai and the VF-1 Valkyrie even in the original TV series: The statistically average Zentradi soldier is supposed to be around Exsedol's size in this image at ~10m, though that's a round order average cited in a bunch of different titles and quite a few of the ones listed are actually shorter (with Milia being a mere 8.55m) or taller (e.g. Klan, our poster child for inconsistently rendered height). DYRL? does a much better job of drawing the rank-and-file Zentradi in correct scale to the VF-1 and it also made several characters explicitly shorter. Look at how sharply Vrlitwhai closed the size gap between himself and Exsedol, who stayed the same height in the movie version: It wouldn't be at all surprising if he got a bit shorter in the movie version the same way Vrlitwhai did. Even if he has probably been downgraded from the stuff of basketball legend to merely taller than average, his bios in the Macross: Do You Remember Love? Data Bank, This is Animation: the Select #11, and Macross Chronicle all still describe him as being a Commander-class Zentradi though.
  18. Seto Kaiba
    That happens a lot in Star Trek for some reason. Presumably a symptom of The Main Characters Do Everything. It's been particularly egregious in Kurtzman's Trek though, with just a handful of baddies somehow capturing a ship with a crew of hundreds effortlessly. EDIT: In hindsight, this is probably borderline excusable in Star Trek: Discovery since the ship is both very large and literally larger on the inside after the 32nd century refit and has a crew of less that 150 compared to the 200+ on Pike's Enterprise, the 400+ on Kirk's.
  19. Seto Kaiba
    In Japanese, his name is written ブリタイ・クリダニク (lit. Buritai Kuridaniku). "Britai" is a viable romanization of that. From long (bad) habit, I tend to mostly default to the official "alien" romanizations that were used in Do You Remember Love? since those are used in a lot of product packaging and artbooks. Most of those spellings are "close enough" though some are truly just "alien for the sake of looking alien". The banner in DYRL? when they have the ceasefire agreement spells "Zentradi" as "Zjentohlauedy" if you translate the alien text. The Robotech versions of a lot of the romanizations are often just straightforward slightly tweaked literal readings of the Japanese text that try to make them less tongue twister-y. For example, the Robotech name for the Queadluun Rau battle suit is "Quadrano", which is a lightly tweaked version of the Japanese クァドラン・ロー (lit. Kwadoran Rou). Considering the much improved armor, actuators, and generator capacity of those Gen 3.5 and later machines like the VF-17, VF-19, and VF-22 and the fact that they were several generations on from the understanding that the Zentradi use mecha too, I'd assume that a Zentradi soldier might put up a fight but would probably be outpowered by the sheer torque those superconducting motors can produce when you throw a couple gigavolts at 'em. Quamzin's a commander-type Zentradi in most versions of the story, yeah. He's a good head taller than the normal soldiers under his command.
  20. Seto Kaiba
    In an extremely halfhearted and apathetic defense of the show's writing on this one point: Really? Well, color me VERY surprised.
  21. Seto Kaiba
    All right, episode 3 is out... Not an inspiring start. This is one of the more erect dick moves on the writer's part. Once again, the actual action is all offscreen... and not in the horror movie gory discretion shot kind of way. As in, "there was a fight, but it's happening offscreen so we don't have to choreograph or shoot it". Little bit of meta commentary there... underground truly is a dumbass place to put a spaceship. Well, I think we now know for sure how this incident stays contained. "Welcome, to Jurassic Holocene Park" Well, this definitely doesn't seem like a bright idea. In the final analysis, "Metamorphosis" is a pretty weak episode with some serious writing problems. Its main flaw is that it clearly wants to commit to the horror bit but doesn't seem to know how. They try to build some tension by keeping the Xenomorph offscreen for a while and show some evidence that It Can Think, but they can't bring themselves to stick to it so it has to poke its head into the frame and ask the cameraman to get its good side before it'll do anything. It wants to go the route of the scientists experimenting getting in over their heads, except that it's already shot itself in the foot by revealing the scientists know what they're getting into from the start and are just too dumb to live. They're trying to build anticipation for a human villain, but the delivery is so ham-handed that feels like accidental self-parody. Every twist and plot point is telegraphed so aggressively that there's no potential to build suspense. A lesser problem is that it also wants to do action, but it seems to be afraid to actually show action. I wonder if it's because the Xenomorph is a purely CG construct. They cheat and have the climax of the confrontation happen offscreen and only let us see the aftermath.
  22. Seto Kaiba
    Another random question for anyone who might have flirted with this tech... Has anyone out there tried, or had any success with, using a wireless HDMI adapter to plumb a TV into your PC for conference room-type stuff, streaming, or gaming?
  23. Seto Kaiba
    To be fair, the distinction between a PC and a game console has been shrinking for a long long time now. I remember when the PS3 dropped and half my friends were excited not for the games but because they heard you could load Linux on it and use it as an ad hoc PC. 😆 (We're engineers, it's just how we're wired.) Proprietary dev kits and licensing hassles aside, developing for a console at least offers some stability in terms of the limitations of hardware and hardware variations so I can definitely see the appeal. Especially after years of working with embedded control systems that wish they had even a fraction of a current gen console's oomph. From what I've heard, it sounds like there's a shakeup in the games industry itself that's driven some developers into corners. Mainly the AAA envelope-pushing and live service model isn't paying off like it used to, though since I haven't had a ton of time for gaming I've mainly heard it secondhand in the form of grousing games journalists. Maybe a bit... it really depends on your needs. As I understand it, a lot of the FPS "esports" types favor 240Hz monitors in the 24-27" size range because it's easier to see the whole screen without needing to turn your head. I know a lot of folks who still run monitors in that size, though either because of space constraints on the desk or because they're running a multi-monitor setup. (I'm running three 27" 1440p ROG Swifts in my home setup, for instance, with the outer two on gas shocks so I can spin 'em around as needed.)
  24. Seto Kaiba
    Yeah, my primary concern was whether the 285K was going to be another RMA queen... and my secondary being whether it'd be inferior to the 13th gen chip it's replacing. Nothing on the bleeding edge has really grabbed me, but in the event something does I'm hoping the 285K will at least not be horrendously underpowered.
  25. Seto Kaiba
    According to Macross Chronicle, Commander-type Zentradi like Vrlitwhai are engineered to be larger, stronger, and more durable than the far more numerous "General Soldier-type" clones who make up the bulk of their forces. That said, it's hard to say if one would be up to the task of taking on 4th or 5th Generation Valkyrie the same way due to the improvements that've been made in armor and structural materials since then. The Mechanic Sheet for the 3.5th Generation VF-17D/S Nightmare claims that the improved energy conversion armor of that model gave it durability on a level rivaling an Armored Valkyrie. Exactly how tough the Armored Pack is is a whole other matter. The most authoritative sources generally decline to put specific number and usually go for vague statements like "significantly" or "several times". A few older sources like Sky Angels have put the improvement in defensive ability at anywhere from about 2.5x to 10x the defensive ability of the Valkyrie's own armor. It's likely that that level of durability is beyond what someone like Vrlitwhai could mess up by hand... or if it isn't, they'd really have their work cut out for them.
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