kajnrig

Was it Eva or Frontier that announced some 1:1 statues coming out soon-ish like last year or so?

Well regardless, I know there have been other 1:1 statues of Asuka/Rei in the past, so this doesn't surprise me too much. This certainly looks better than the previous ones, too. Though I don't know if less anime and more "real"istic is a plus or not when it comes to life-size...

You know what? I'll just not think about it. At all. Scrub my eyes, ears, and prefrontal cortex with bleach.

Damn thing has an AT Field???

Valve announces the Steam Deck, a portable gaming PC with a custom Zen 2/RDNA 2 APU

Valve announces the Switch Pro

Perhaps it's a VF-29, a scaled-back production model that doesn't cost several moderately-wealthy countries' GDPs to make. Emphasis on scaled-back.

grumblegrumblegrumbleyou win this round bandaigrumblegrumble

I hope they do an EW re-pop alongside this. I missed out on the last run of the EW movie kits, and I don't intend to repeat that mistake.

Actually, speaking of which, what are all the MG EW kits and variations now? There's

"TV/Manga" kits:

• Wing EW
• Deathscythe EW
• Heavyarms EW
• Sandrock EW
• Shenlong EW
• Wing Proto Zero (EW?)
• Tallgeese EW
• Epyon EW
• Tallgeese 2 EW (P-Bandai)

"OVA/Movie" kits:

• Wing Zero Custom / Wing Zero EW Ver. Ka
• Deathscythe Hell EW
• Heavyarms Kai/Custom EW (P-Bandai)
• Sandrock Kai/Custom EW (P-Bandai)
• Altron/Nataku EW (P-Bandai)
• Tallgeese 3 EW (P-Bandai)

"Manga Special Equipment" kits:

• Deathscythe Rousette (P-Bandai)
• Heavyarms Igel (P-Bandai)
• Sandrock Armadillo (P-Bandai)
• Shenlong Laioya (P-Bandai)
• Tallgeese Fluegel (P-Bandai)
• Drei Zwerg option kit (P-Bandai)???

Am I forgetting anything? The optional equipment kits especially I think I might have missed some releases. Unfortunately, the Gundam wikia page doesn't keep track of P-Bandai releases, so I can't check against that...

3 minutes ago, Mommar said:

My reasoning is that's the kind of business savvy that, we gamers aren't necessarily fond of, but is the reason Nintendo is consistently the richest company in Japan.  From my perspective not getting what I was hoping for is preferable to not being to find what I want in stores.  And while Sony and Microsoft simply can't put their stuff on shelves Nintendo can and will have product out, and it will look relatively new.  They can easily snag some new customers and we few suckers (me) with old, busted systems have something marginally better to grab for.  And/or they figured out how to sell me on their old back stock before the new one emerges.  I'll just pass this one on to the Niece and Nephew then,.

Good luck porting all your save data, etc., from the old console to the new. Did they ever offer a workable solution for that, or is it still relatively locked down? Maybe connect the two with a USB cable, copy everything over...

Did Bandai just get lazy with their hands again or is the lance actually supposed to feature handles that are perpendicular to the shaft like that? God forbid they should include dedicated holding hands canted at an angle.

38 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

She's presented as competent, but otherwise the least proficient member of Delta Flight

I didn't get that sense at all. (Granted, it's been a while and I haven't revisited the show since my initial viewing, but) I thought it was pretty clear that the Delta's intended hierarchy of fighter prowess was

- Arad (in terms of overall capability) / Messer (in terms of sheer prowess)
- Mirage (when "dancing") / Hayate (when "dancing")
- Mirage (when alone)
- Hayate (when alone)
- Chuck (just because his abilities as a pilot are never touched on)

with the implication that Mirage is capable of superseding everyone and living up to her family name if only she can get out of her own way and stop trying to live up to her family name.

...or that could be just me inferring things about her character that the show didn't have time to do.

20 hours ago, mikeszekely said:

I dunno, maybe people thought (wished?) Nintendo got a brand new SoC from Nvidia?  I know there was a lot of talk about a Switch Pro using DLSS to upscale to 4K, but I'm fairly certain DLSS can't just run on any old Nvidia chipset.

Yeah, DLSS requires their tensor cores. I was under the impression that they - Nintendo - were leaning in that direction; IIRC there was some leaked developer guidance or something stating that devs should aim for 4k output, and the rumor mill at the time saw that as hints at improved hardware.

Assuming they did want to implement DLSS, that definitely would have required a new SoC. The most recent generation of Tegra has tensor cores - its GPU is Volta-based, two generations ahead of the X1's Maxwell GPU. For reference, Maxwell was 7xx-9xx cards; Volta was used in professional cards after the 10xx Pascal cards and before the 16xx/20xx Turing cards.

Alternatively, they could have asked Nvidia to, if possible, backport tensor cores to the Tegra X1... which would be a custom solution and be even more complicated and costly as using a new SoC. About the only possible positive of going that route is possibly maintaining absolute compatibility with previous Switch games/software. 

19 hours ago, JB0 said:

nVidia had basically designed the hardware for them. The Switch hardware was basically what would have been the Shield Tablet 2.

Well, kind of. Nvidia didn't make the Tegra X1 specifically for the Switch. It made it for its Shield devices and to sell to third parties, but no third parties were interested. Nintendo only settled on it because Nvidia practically let them have it to clear up inventory.

Or at least that's the story I hear.

14 minutes ago, Mommar said:

What if Nintendo did actually have plans for bigger things but various component shortages meant it was easier for them to do a minor refresh with parts they still had readily available instead?  I was certainly hoping for a bigger boost but I’ve got an original release Switch that is bowed and warped and this is as decent an excuse to bump up internal memory and increase battery life and screen size even if it isn’t everything I wanted.

That's also very possible, and it seems reasonable to me.

It's just disappointing, is all.

...then again, I haven't even touched my Switch in years, so what do I have to be disappointed about?  I'm just complaining to complain.

I thought it was pretty clearly shown that she's an at least competent VF pilot on her own, and her "Jenius skill" just needs a dance partner, so to speak, to express itself.

I really wish this show, this setting, could have gone through another draft or two before production really kicked into gear. Or spread itself out over multiple seasons. There's interesting stuff there with all the characters - and Mirage especially - that could have been more fully explored.

40 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

They made some sort of improvement once already that improved the Switch's battery life. Even another battery bump would have been better than the exact same thing, but OLED.

That improvement was due mainly to a more efficient version of the Tegra X1 - made on a 16nm process rather than the original's 20nm. IIRC, the following year Nvidia took orders for one final run of the Tegra X1 before ending its production for good, so there's not much chance of that design moving to another manufacturing node.

Nintendo could probably get one more good battery life extension by increasing the battery size... and maybe the OLED screen is more power efficient, too, I dunno. They could also unlock more of the chip's overclocking headroom, but even that still wouldn't net the performance boost necessary to get, say, Hyrule Warriors 2 running at anywhere near a decent framerate.

I wonder what they would have upgraded it to, though. I don't hear much of anything about any successors to the Tegra X1 - IIRC there were one or two generational improvements and that's it? Presumably Nintendo would want something like that so as to maintain broad software compatibility.

What even is the makeup of the Tegra X1? How specialized is or isn't it such that a hardware upgrade is feasible?

And also IIRC, Nintendo specifically went with the Tegra X1 because stock of it was so high, Nvidia had produced so many chips and no one was using them, so they could be had for cheap. I don't think there's a chip in existence today that could replace the X1 and can be had for similarly cheap.

4 hours ago, Keith said:

Sounds like you may be thinking of Netflix's new TV dub.

I know about the Netflix dub, and so I could swear the talk I heard was in relation to the Rebuild BDs, but I'm too lazy to check for sure.

Mirage doesn't strike me as the kind to "play the waiting game," so to speak.  Or rather, she SHOULDN'T be the kind to play the waiting game. Waiting in the wings. Playing second fiddle. What-have-you.

I remember it being a major disappointment when the show (and first movie? I forget now...) ended with her weirdly, third-wheel-edly telling the two of them, "So yeah, I love you too, it's cool if you don't like me back."

It was such a copout, the show trying to have its cake and eat it too. Just have her be on her own. Let her growth be undefined by romance. It's fine. That's what I hope for with this second movie. If they actually go with "Well Freyja's dead now, guess it's Mirage's turn"... Well, I won't be surprised, just disappointed.

I want to say a page or two back they were discussing the fact that Funimation(?) would be re-dubbing all four films with a new cast. Or maybe it was somewhere else I read that...

2 hours ago, TangledThorns said:

Showed the trailer to my six year old daughter and she loves it! So I guess that's all it matters? lol.

Too true. I didn't mean to imply that FiM was "good" and all other entries therefore "bad" simply by nature of its appeal to an untraditional demographic.

I think bronies were a flash in the pan, but I say that having dropped off FiM after just like the second or third season. I'm sure the majority of them lasted through the entire run of like... seven? eight? seasons + movies + spinoffs.

FiM itself seemed like a flash in the pan, and I don't think they'll be able to match its performance for a good while. But this show might be just as good, who knows.

Isn't Narrative something about time travel? Something something Newtype something Psychoframe something time travel?

For what it's worth, I shipped some items from HLJ and the cost via both DHL and EMS to the USA was the same, roughly $170. DHL remained cheaper as I added items to the shipment, though, up to that point.

I've never taken it off the bottom just because I've never felt the need to. Where do some of you move it, and why/what benefit does it provide?

FYI, in case you were looking for old-school Patlabor kits, it seems Bandai may have done a re-pop (or HLJ found stock somewhere???). I was just charged for the MG Ingram 1 and 3, as well as the 1/60 Helldiver, and HLJ have a bunch of the others currently listed as In Stock.

https://www.hlj.com/search/?q=*&productFilter=series%3APatlabor

Another thing to consider is the presence or lack thereof of a DRAM cache. Cacheless SSDs tend to be cheaper, but they also exhibit worse performance - especially when it comes to writing many small files to SSD - than cached SSDs. The performance in general isn't significantly worse, but in the aforementioned scenario, I had one drive slow down to basically HDD speeds.

Now, that was a years-old drive, and from what I'm reading, modern cacheless SSDs seem to have gotten around that issue. Still, it's something to think about.

NVMe drives can also get pretty hot and throttle, but that's only if you're really hammering the crap out of the drive. I've never experienced throttling on any of my devices that see "regular user" levels of abuse. Still, some drives come with heatsinks, some motherboards include their own heatsinks, and you can also get aftermarket heatsinks for cheap.

I've seen a few of these over the last few years and always assumed they were scratchbuilds or obscure resin kits.

Are these from the same era/technology as the recent vintage 1:144/1:200 re-pops? Because phew, as glad as I am to have those kits, they have... problems.

Uh... So this showed up in my inbox for no reason whatsoever. I think HLJ may have mistakenly added me to a... cultured part of its newsletter.

...or maybe it knows me better than I think...? 

https://www.hlj.com/undeaddress-isis-dx-ver-amx-1190