ewilen

Two attractions that haven't been mentioned... The Queen Mary in Long Beach. There's also a Soviet submarine docked alongside. Well worth a trip. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City is one of the weirdest places I've ever seen. Kind of an in-joke, it seems to be a combination of a parody of what a museum is all about, a repository of crackpot science/pseudoscience, and just generally interesting stuff, like art on the tip of a needle.

All RPG systems? Or just those that handle SF? Or just those that handle mecha? I used to be fairly heavily into RPG's but I don't think I've played anything in the last 10-15 years. At the time, GURPS seemed to have the best combat system for quick but semi-realistic resolution, provided you included/excluded the right options; Harnmaster had a realistic but somewhat clunky combat system combined with a great system for healing (which meant that infection was a serious threat in a low-magic pre-modern campaign). Runequest was showing its age but not as badly as AD&D, which was in the throes of becoming AD&D2, and template-based games (Shadowrun, Star Wars RPG) were just coming online...but I never got into them. What I did know somewhat to moderately well included the abovementioned games as well as Rolemaster, Fantasy Hero, Dragonquest (somewhat obscure SPI fantasy RPG), Universe (really obscure SPI SF RPG), 1st ed. Traveller, The Fantasy Trip, Top Secret (1st ed.), Call of Cthulhu, FUDGE, Ysgarth... Somehow I think that of the above, only GURPS would still be of interest to any significant audience.

As long as nothing's broken, the price is good. It's hard to tell from the picture if all the shoulder cannons and bridge antennae are intact.

Utterly useless. Remaster the movie and give it proper softcoded subtitles (no need to bother with a dub), sell it for $20 or thereabouts, and then you'll have my attention.

That's exactly what I was thinking--an excellent rendition in the style of the box covers. Great work.

I don't. What I typed above was based on some quick Google searches, and what I gleaned from those was that the difference could vary from bulb to bulb more than from type to type. The searches I used were things like UV incandescent UV halogen etc. Also you could try art lighting UV Which is how I came across this link: http://www.pegasusassociates.com/products/...s/UVfilter.html

You might try asking or researching about displaying art since UV protection is an issue there as well. Incandescent, fluorescent, and halogen bulbs can all be sources of UV light (yes, there are incandescent "black lights") so you can't just assume that one type is better than another. It might be best to consider the problem in terms of "keeping UV off the object" than merely using a safe source. E.g., the object could be placed behind protective glass, or the light source could have a filter on it.

There are several smallish ones, both transforming and nontransforming. Personally, I think the 1/5700 "block system" toy looks good at least in pictures. A bootleg (apparently by the same company that did the 1/3000 bootleg, possibly Matsushiro) shows up on ebay sometimes. Someone pointed out that the elbows don't bend, but that may be something you could customize. Here's the bootleg on eBay right now: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewI...5973180251&rd=1 The original is at toyboxdx. Direct links to pics: here and here.

http://forums.afterdawn.com/ Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page. The people there can answer answer all your questions, but start with the FAQs. Personally, I got a PS2 with flip-top already installed from our friendly neighborhood Chowser, and it works fine for the Macross game and a couple other Japanese imports I have. Oh, yeah--look here, too: http://forums.psxforum.com/

thanks! 1/144.. that means those Doyusha 1/44 diecast vlaks will look just nice on something like that Probably. Also in that scale: 1/144 diecast destroids from Takatoku/Matchbox/Exo-squad, a 1/144 battroid diecast from Takatoku, and a number of models.

A quick internet search gives the length of the Flagg toy as 7-8 feet. A Nimitz class carrier is 1092 feet, so if we assume the Flagg is supposed to be that big in real life, the scale would be 1/136.5 to 1/156. Call it 1/144 if you want a common scale.

To add to this, there's no difference at all between "Matchbox" and "Bandai". Bandai never sold the toy under their own name, in Japan or elsewhere. They just manufactured it for Matchbox, so it has a Bandai imprint on the bottom of the "foot".

Yeah, I just did some research on the web and usenet (google groups) and (no offense to JB0) Rainbow was tagged along with Kirby and Tristar as a company that sells overpriced equipment through high-pressure door-to-door sales tactics. In fact there were some comments that testing showed the Rainbow recycles a lot of dust back into the air. Among the few lesser-known brands that do seem to get good comments across the board are Miele and Royal (not Royal Dirt Devil, but an arm of the same company that makes commercial-grade vacuums).

I use http://www.consumersearch.com/ which is a sort of meta-review place. They say the Dyson isn't any better than several cheaper models, so after eyeing it, I went and got a Eureka using a Costco coupon. We're happy with it. About the only improvements I could ask for would be a better way of knowing when the bag is full and either a self-sealing bag or a bagless water-filtered system that completely prevents dust from escaping.

The 1/3000 is the transforming one. When I finally got my hands on one, it was a little smaller than I expected, but I was stunned at the construction and transformation mechanism. It's a very impressive toy in my book. But I'm not a hardcore toy collector outside of Macross.

Howabout a WWI plane or else something steampunkish...the robots from Laputa maybe?

Yeah, I think I want them. But I'd really like to make one big Takatoys purchase of all the stickers I've been putting off acquring. Will these be offered through our friendly online retailers? Or can I still get the old stuff (1/48 + FP, and maybe 1/60 stickers) from you? Actually, is there a comprehensive list of what you've done/what's available?

Actually, I think Jackson did an okay job. Not a great job, but not miserable, either. However, that's beside the point. There are obvious obstacles to a random person on MW putting together a motion picture, but these needn't stand in the way of reasoned criticism. And even that gives the "I'd like to see you do better" argument too much credit. All I need is a pencil and paper to write a poem, but if every attempt to discuss the merits of some existing piece of poetry is met with "I'd like to see you do better", then there's little point in the conversation to begin with. Everyone should just shut up, it seems. But if we're talking about motion pictures, it's worth noting that unlike poets, people in the movie industry make and spend enormous amounts of money, far more than most of us will earn in our entire lifetimes. They owe their earning power to a variety of factors, not least of which is the centralized/capital intensive nature of the industry, from production to distribution. Decisions about which films get made are in the hands of a very few, and the resources that go into them mean that other films don't get made. The viewing public certainly isn't consulted directly, and even then its voice is that of a mass, which encourages the production of films aimed at broad swathes of the population, and discourages attention to special interests. Therefore, everyone who is interested in film has an interest in what sorts of films, in general, get produced. If I like sonnets, it doesn't particularly matter to me if someone out there is writing bad limericks. It's not as if his limerick production is sucking all the air out of the sonnet industry. But with movies there's a far greater competition for production resources and theater seats, so if the studios are hiring "hacks" to make mediocre movies, I really have nowhere else to turn (without giving up movies). So it seems to me there's a very good reason to complain, if that's how someone feels about a given movie or a given director.

What does this have to recommend it? I saw the first episode of the series and I didn't think it was anything special.

Lamest argument ever, whether it's applied to Jackson or Lucas or anyone else. Perhaps there's an element of hyperbole and lack of appreciation for the hard work and difficulty involved in making a movie, but if one were to follow this line of reasoning, practically no one should talk about any film, novel, TV show, or piece of music except to praise it.

Sorry to say--imprisoned in boxes these days, unstickered (except if I got them second hand, in which case it's whatever the previous owner stuck on). Someday I'll sticker them up, hopefully with Takatoys stickers. Just not in the mood right now.

Didn't he do Willow?

Is the F/A-22 obsolete/needed/great/a waste/whatever--see the fighter debates super thread where we go round and round on the topic. Anyway, I was just wondering--why does the missile exhaust look like it's coming out in "pulses"?

1328 feet.

Okay, checking up on what I wrote, I found that there are really a fair number of lesser-known game shops/chains, at least in my area. Around here, for example, there's a place called Game Crazy, and I wouldn't be surprised to see them take over some of the EB Games locations, if Gamestop fails to convert all them into Gamestops. Of course, they could then become fodder for Gamestop later on... http://yp.yahoo.com and http://www.google.com/lochp?hl=en&tab=wl&q= are two places I looked.