pengbuzz

On 3/16/2024 at 2:46 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It's unlikely to be the second one, since it's SOP for the localization distributor to claim a copyright on any parts of the localization they produce themselves... like remastered audio or video tracks, subtitle scripts, dub audio tracks, etc.  HG can't have been in the dark about that because that's the genesis of their copyright on The Other Series.  That's also why the Macross II kickstarter had to acquire the rights to the English dub audio tracks from the 90's release.  It's not automatically included.

It's also a safe bet that they knew in advance Animeigo intended to do a remaster, because that would probably have been a part of the license agreement in the first place.

The most likely explanation is that HG just cheaped out, as they did with so many other things.

Par for the course with them; Frank's daughter is just as stingy as he was.

Also: do not use Dijon Mustard on the model; it will stain the plastic and smell weird.

Don't ask me how I know this; just take my word for it.

6 hours ago, SteveTheFish said:

Yes, it looks like that to me.

So the order of the pewter (?) landing gears for the P-38 Lightning. Am I supposed to prep this somehow, or just apply some metal primer and just paint it? Do I need to soak these in lacquer thinner or something first?

I would probably clean them in dish detergent or something to remove any oils from the manufacturing process.

20 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's Japan, a certain amount of social drinking for work is expected... and those long hours and late nights the animators do surely mean a fair amount of caffeine...

... but I think the best/most probable explanation I've heard anyone pose was over on MAHQ/MechaTalk.  Specifically, that Studio Bones seems to be using Metallic Rouge as a sort of elaborate demo reel to showcase the capabilities of its animation staff and that the kind of threadbare story is an excuse plot crafted to get them from one animator friendly set piece to the next.  That'd definitely explain why the series is visually very impressive but narratively a complete train wreck.

Well in that case, it's certainly a far more understandable reason than say, the driving forces resulting in the utter trainwreck that was Southern Cross.

Maybe I'm comparing apples and oranges here?

Quote

 

Eric Carmen, the former lead vocalist of The Raspberries and singer of “All by Myself,” is dead, according to his website. He was 74, according to IMDb.

“It is with tremendous sadness that we share the heartbreaking news of the passing of Eric Carmen,” a post on his website says. “Our sweet, loving and talented Eric passed away in his sleep, over the weekend.”

“It brought him great joy to know, that for decades, his music touched so many and will be his lasting legacy,” the post said.

No cause of death was given.

 

(more)

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/entertainment/eric-carmen-death/index.html

UPDATE:

As promised (albeit a bit late; had a couple of incidents today that shook me badly), pics of my current progress:

Found out the tailboom (the two "winglets") were too small; when I tried to carefully cut them off, the section of the tail shattered. I managed to repair it and fill it in; that took a lot of work! I didn't get any pics of the in-progress repair, but the new tailbooms are in place and the missing section is repaired (next batch of photos will show the restored area).

Anyways, on to the crew:

I sanded and filed down the figures Thom sent me (thanks again Thom! ) to make them more closely resemble Hawk and Caitlin (I gave Caitlin a bit more slender and graceful figure and made her a little shorter than Hawk). Santini got made even pudgier and all three were primed and painted. I did up a basic EDCC, but I'm not going to try hyper-detailing it (as most of it wouldn't be seen anyways).

Hawk and Caitlin:

Dom Santini:

At this point, I also began custom fabricating my own rotor blades and hub; the old ones were molded wrong, and I wanted a much more realistic set:

On a lark, I chucked these into my Dremel tool to see how they would spin: they did fine at lower speeds, but I ended up accidentally hitting the switch to full speed! I panicked and fumbled with the controls to get them to shut off, which gave the blades about 1-2 seconds at 35,000 RPM!!! O.o

Well....they survived, much to my amazement! Nothing flew off, shattered or even broke! Considering that the real Bell 222's top rotor RPM was 348 RPM, I think mine did quite well!

The Lady, at this current point in construction:

Still needs more work (you can see the brand-new tailplane in the back!), but she's coming along. Need to finish up the cockpit and work out the rotor mast attachment, then we'll see about sealing up the body and getting some other stuff (such as windows and windshields) done!

Stay tuned...

1 hour ago, Big s said:

They had one that was similar not too long ago that was a sweet chili jam, but it was more jello like and hard to dip the nuggies

H-E-L-L NO!!

23 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Nope... Metallic Rouge was written by Yutaka Izubuchi and Toshizo Nemoto.

Izubuchi's principally a mechanical and character designer with a lot of iconic titles on his CV including Gundam 0080 and Gundam ZZ, the Patlabor movies, and Yamato 2199.  Nemoto's a writer whose filmography is less impressive but still contains some major titles like Legend of Galactic Heroes and Macross Delta.

How it ended up such a complete and total cluster**** is anyone's guess.

Heavy drinking and/or drug use? 🤷‍♂️

7 hours ago, MechTech said:

@pengbuzz FUNNY with the jellybeans! Your making great progress with the pilots and cockpit!

Thanks MT!! I have several update pics to post later tonight (have to go do laundry).

1 hour ago, sh9000 said:

https://www.target.com/p/star-trek-the-next-generation-starship-enterprise/-/A-88725523

https://www.amazon.com/Playmates-Next-Generation-Enterprise-Ship/dp/B0CHWV3THF

On sale for $23.99.

Pretty sure they'll have that on clearance for $9.99 in a bit...

1 hour ago, SteveTheFish said:

For the Hasegawa P-38, you attach the nacelles to the underside of the wingspan/cockpit and then the underside of the wings. The connection between the engine nacelles and the top part isn't very good. It will require a lot of filing. The nose requires a lot of weight to keep it from becoming a tail sitter. 35g!

With that kind of weight, you might want to check to see if there are any cast metal landing gear struts for your model. I found a set of 1/48 that should work for you:

https://www.hlj.com/1-48-scale-p-38-landing-gear-for-hasegawa-sac48031

On 3/8/2024 at 8:26 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Not an uncommon reaction to Space Runaway Ideon, truth be told.

It didn't exactly go over great with audiences when it was new either, though Tomino's made noises about wanting to remake the whole bloody thing.  It got truncated by cancellation in its original broadcast run, so the ending was a rushed affair.

To recover, I'm going to be watching Hello Kitty's Furry Time Theater for a while.

And to be frank: "bloody" is putting it mildly when it comes to Ideon. Literally, the mech itself is blood red. That should have been my first clue.

On 3/8/2024 at 8:26 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

It certainly feels that way.

Something about a studio deciding to do an original sci-fi/action series for a major anniversary seems to bring out the absolute worst writers imaginable.  Studio Bones has done lots of great work in its 25 years and counting, and it actually came as a bit of a shock to me that Metallic Rouge was an original IP by them because it's so incredibly underdeveloped and so badly written.  When Tatsunoko Production decided to do a original IP mecha anime for their 55th anniversary I expected it wouldn't be very good but I wasn't expecting they'd just go and make the worst series they'd produced since Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross.  Imagine a sci-fi story so badly written that the only way its plot can function at all is to have Humanity at the level of interstellar travel and planet-scale terraforming forget that Conservation of Energy is a thing.  Studio Bones's Metallic Rouge is nearly as problematic in that it's a conflicting jumble of cyberpunk cliches without any real cohesion and that its writers don't seem to understand that exposition is something a story does have to do every so often so the audience knows what's going on.

Makes me wonder if any of the writers from Southern Cross managed to worm their way onto Metal Rouge's writing team? O.o

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Ah, yeah... Tomino-sensei has had more than a few moments in his career that've left me thinking that he was definitely NOT all right when he made them.

Even his brighter and more upbeat work has a lot of darkness hiding just beneath the surface.  Like Gundam: Reconguista in G, where several characters have to deal with lingering caste-based discrimination despite centuries of peace and prosperity because their ancestors were...

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... lower class people who were designated as emergency food for upper class people during the widespread famines brought about by environmental destruction near the end of the Universal Century.

The bright, happy, generally peaceful and harmonious future of the Reguild Century was built on the ruins of a Universal Century where mankind's self-destructive impulses ruined the planet so completely that humans fell back on institutionalized cannibalism to survive... then discriminated against the descendants of their victims for centuries.

Let's just hope he never decides to do any work for Hello Kitty! O.o

Meantime, I tried watching one more episode of Ideon and just had to abort the entire thing. Going to be avoiding Tomino's work in the future, as it's not good for my mental or emotional health.

13 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

 

Speaking of awful futures... Metallic Rouge has once again stumbled through some awful exposition in its latest episode.

It really is embarrassing how poorly paced and composed this series is.  It's oddly impressive how uninteresting Studio Bones managed to make a series about Rockman X-style sentient androids fighting each other because one side wants to instigate a robot uprising.

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This most recent episode sidestepped most of the exposition they dumped in the previous two... with the fight in the Aletheia building ending abruptly when the Immortal Nine decide they've gotten bored and leave without completing their objective despite having Rouge outnumbered four to one, Rouge fighting and defeating her previously unmentioned evil blue twin, and her "brother" getting kidnapped.  

The rest of the episode changes gears with an almost audible clunk and decides to exposition dump about the aliens.  Rouge visits a Visitor space city in orbit of Earth and actually meets three of them.  Not coincidentally, they look like the Proto-Nean gladiator forms but about twenty feet tall and vaguely mermaid-ish.  We also get the rather pointless reveal that Naomi is ALSO a Nean... a Nean made by the Visitors to interface with Humans directly.

The writers then completely forget about this revenge plot that's been driving the series so far, and now the Immortal Nine are either working with or being used by the Usurpers (bad aliens) in order to cause a robot uprising because that'll enable the Usurpers to declare a new war on the Visitors and Humanity and win.  The real reason behind the conflict is apparently the planet Venus.  Humanity is terraforming it as part of a deal with the Visitors.  The Visitors give humanity their overtechnology and Humanity terraforms Venus for them so they can live there.  The Usurpers want to claim the terraformed Venus for themselves.

The whole thing is just such a massive arse-pull that it completely fails to land... and leaves this ridiculous Rockman X-ing the show's been doing up to this point feeling like far and away the least interesting part of the setting.

 

Sounds like at the rate they're pulling, they may soon lack a digestive system....

4 hours ago, Thom said:

There is a resin model of it that I would love to get that looks proportionally correct and awesome!

@pengbuzz Looking great! Nice to see a full crew in there. Dom is going to look fine back there 'in the pit.' As to the missing feet... I have no answer, though I can promise* there is no fetish involved!😊

Thom

 

 

*In truth, I can make no promises...

rofl!🤣

UPDATE:

Got the figures in today's mail (thanks Thom!!!👍 ); after some filing and whatnot, I have some progress on them. Of course, they'll need a bit more work, but that's nothing much:

On one of them, the feet were missing, so I just took a pair I already had and glued them on and filed them. Dom won't need anything else, as he'll only be visible from the waist up through the front window.

Stay tuned folks...

6 minutes ago, Big s said:

That didn’t stop Arnold

Like anything stops Ah-nuld!

Get to the CHOPPAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

1 minute ago, Big s said:

I didn’t know you were pregnant 

Neither did I... which is amazing because I'm not even female! O.o

1 hour ago, Thom said:

Don't forget the piccies!

Here ya go:

1 hour ago, Thom said:

Yes, it's just set in the Tron universe. That was one of the drawbacks of Legacy, as there was far too little of Tron, though I rewatched it today and, except for the de-aging, it holds up well enough. Looking back, I think they should have spent their money on de-aging Boxleiter in order to show more of Tron rather than having two versions of Flynn, but that's water spilled ten years ago. Plus, the Tron movies should be about (Tron of course!) being on the Grid. AI's done in the real world have been done before, and really hold little interest for me.

So, yeah, so far less reason to watch this.

Hopefully they'll revise the story more, although I don't have any confidence in Disney at this point.

If they want the real world and the grid, they should do a story where the grid is out of control and threatening to consume the real world.

8 minutes ago, Jeff J said:

The first season of House of the Dragon gained some traction. My sister keeps reminding me that Season 2 is coming to MAX in August! 😅 I think GoT's popularity was big enough that even half the viewers is still pretty decent.

Though as far as A Song of Ice and Fire goes, I just don't care at this point. 

At this rate, more like A Song of Lice and Mire. The only good parts left were The Hound's one-liners.

54 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Yeah, Yoshiyuki Tomino was in a dark, dark place when he made Space Runaway Ideon.

If I'd known your intention was to binge the series, I'd have warned you against it.  Ideon is best taken in small doses because of how unstintingly bleak it is... and the movie version is worse.

Yeah, that's my fault. I wasn't going to originally, but it was a rainy gloomy day and I had nothing else to do (waiting on packages so I can continue my projects), so it was kinda last minute.

Shot myself in the foot there.

Anyhow, not really sure I'd want to finish it at the rate it's going, small doses or not. This series makes all the dark parts of Macross look like a bright, cheery day. Kind of surprised Tomino wasn't hospitalized in a mental institution after this series due to his family's concerns for his psychological well-being! O.o

4 hours ago, Thom said:

I remember being (and still) disappointed by Breetai's flagship. Wonder how that happened? Anyway, nice progress @SteveTheFish. Your little Zentradi fleet is coming together!

Same for the P-38!

That reminds me; I have to dig out and finish the one I made from masking tape.

Okay... 14 episodes into this series (been binging this since 8 am with a break for lunch), and yup...

... "Kill 'em all" definitely fits Tomino.

On that note though, I saw the following part in episode 16 (spoilered because it's pretty dark):

Going to watch a few more today and then pick up tomorrow when I can, if I can stand seeing more of this. I may bail out on it.

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Well, it is a Yoshiyuki Tomino series, so at least you know what you're getting yourself into.

Right? War at its' worst, and no one is spared....