JB0

35 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

Yeah... it's supposed to be gray prototype, colored prototype, and finished product. 

More like Dead Optimus, Devastation Optimus, and Unpainted Unstickered Bootleg Optimus.

20 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I almost want to say the only acceptable ending is him getting at least all the way to the altar at the wedding before realizing he's been had.  

Having read a whole bunch of the manga... that's how I hope it ends too.

Shocked to see he died of illness. His image was such I just assumed it was a motorcycle accident or something. I need to fire the old XBox up and throw Ninja Gaiden Black in to honor him.

Tekken's Harada posted some words about his friend/senpai(?)/rival. And linked back to an older post about his relationship with Itagaki, which is a good read. I wish I wasn't seeing it because it became a eulogy.

14 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

One thought: use the smart coating to display the background behind them. May not be true optical stealth, but it'd certainly mess with an enemy pilot's visuals!

*Yeah, I know there's a bunch of reasons this wouldn't work. Just being my usual self here!*

My mind went the opposite direction: animated dazzle camouflage. 

Hopefully, I'm in one of those places no one ever talks about because the colony mission was quiet and uneventful, and found a peaceful planet far from any bullcrap.

3 hours ago, TG Remix said:

Which serves to be ironic as when humans started to clone themselves to bolster their numbers to avoid extinction, they had to stop because they came across the issue of hereditary children's diseases popping up 2 decades after. 

Zentradi don't have to worry about hereditary diseases, since there's no inheritance. Protoculture thought of everything!

...

Well, everything except "how to dispose of an evil time machine", "how to dispose of a galaxy-wide brain asploder", "how to stop your clone army from waging tntal war across your empire", and "how to keep interdimensional space vampires from destroying your civilization". Minor details, though. They thought of all the important things!

On 10/4/2025 at 11:04 AM, Scyla said:

I got Binaltech Laserwave to finish my Binaltech/Alternators collection (of two items, the other is Nemesis Prime).

Aww heck yeah!

I believe Alternator Shockwave was my first Transformer as an adult. No longer was I too old for toy robots!

22 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

The Zentradi are all clones, but they're cloned from a large number of different genetic patterns so each force has considerable diversity of attributes among its soldiers.  (Presumably this is more advantageous than just cloning the same guy a billion times the way the Republic did in Star Wars.)

Makes sense. Disease won't rip through an entire unit, and can't be attacked by a custom-engineered bioweapon that targets a specific genetic sequence.

On the other hand, it results in soldiers with diverse heights and builds, complicating supply of equipment. But the protoculture seemed to have solved supply lines with their typical excess.

15 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Hiroshi Onogi apparently didn't just write Macross Zero in the real world, he wrote the book that became the in-universe docu-drama of Macross Zero's events too!

I'm glad to hear he survived the zentradi bombardment in 2010.

3 hours ago, Old_Nash_II said:

Scare Glow? Realy?
Why Not Beast Man of Trapjaw?

Because Starscream's a ghost! Sometimes.

If this abomination of a line continues(and it shouldn't, it is a nightmarishly bad idea compounded by terrible execution), they can do Trapjaw as a sharkticon.

On 9/23/2025 at 11:52 PM, Scyla said:

I wonder why they didn’t bother painting a faction symbol. They clearly knew they could get in trouble thus not marking the box with a company name. So why not go all the way and paint the faction logo.

That becomes overt trademark infringement as opposed to the gray area of reverse-engineered molds. Hasbro doesn't own red trucks that become robots, they don't even own a specific implementation of that concept. Physical objects are not typically afforded copyright protection.

But the logos are protected by trademark and easily identified by customs as unauthorized and thus illegal uses of that trademark. If you want your toy robots to make it into the country, you won't print autobrands on them.

34 minutes ago, mikeszekely said:

Personally I was fine assuming that the Transformers on Earth transformed into vehicles because Teletraan-1 mistakenly thought those vehicles were the dominant life forms on Earth, and beastformers were just what happens when Transformers scan some other life form for their alt mode.  Though, I suppose that does raise the question of how they came up with their alt modes on Cybertron... I digress.  The point is, Minicons came from Micronus, and Beastformers come from Onyx Prime.

How about we split the difference? Onyx Prime is why there's mechanical beasts, like the dinobots, predacons, insecticons, Sky Lynx, etc, and Beast Wars-style forms that actually look like animals are a more modern "disguise" technology, evolved from the invention of pretender shells?

...

And the mixed organic/techno stuff like Fangry are just abominations mocking Primus's light.

Oh man, I really like how Venom came out! I never owned the deluxe insecticons, but I sure wanted them. Wish the whole team could've gotten this treatment, though Venom's probably the one that we win most with. Chop Shop's gotten pretty close with a Shrapnel rework, and the other two ... their original designs aren't near as good.

I agree they should've found something better to do with the wings rather than being slavishly toy-accurate. The orange bit in his torso is a nice accent that I think improves the design. I probably would've updated the axe-head to a kukri knife if they'd asked me.

7 minutes ago, David Hingtgen said:

It's that, AND the whole "can't tell wings from tailplanes, so they just tend to add lots of them all over" syndrome.   It's like everyone has wings on their legs AND tailplanes on their legs, AND wings on the backpack AND the tail on the backpack.  Just, 'stuff everywhere' combining all the robot modes from the whole team on every individual.

Insert "biblically-accurate aerialbots" meme here.

On 9/14/2025 at 8:05 AM, mikeszekely said:

So that regardless of whether you prefer to or toon colors you have to buy both sets.😒

Evil! 

I don't undestand why Dr Wu packaged a toy-inspired Cliffjumper with an utterly hideous toon-inspired Shockwave. It is a weird choice to mix 'em like that, even ignoring my visceral hatred of Shockwave's toon colors.

On 9/11/2025 at 11:37 PM, Seto Kaiba said:

Seriously.  That's not a thing in Star Trek.  "Good" and "Evil" are relative.  They depend on subjective morality.  One culture's Good is another culture's Evil.  There's no such thing as a universal definition of "Evil", never mind a universal origin of "Evil".

More importantly, if you ARE pure distilled evil, you turn into a puddle of metamucil and ink. You don't retain a humanoid form.

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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.)

Janeway's a dice roll. Depends who is writing this week whether she's going to let you off with a warning or beam you down to LV-426 with a smile on her face. 

 

2 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

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. 

I can see it now. 

Beto: "We have a free press. You can't imprison me just because my writing made you mad."

Sisko: "Oh, I'm not mad. I'm disappointed. I've done horrible things. But instead of writing about the time I dropped bioweapons on an inhabited colony, rendering the entire planet uninhabitable-"

Beto: "You did WHAT?"

Sisko: " - or that Romulan ambassador I ordered my tailor from the Obsidian Order to assassinate to open a new front in the Dominion war and buy us some breathing room-"

Beto: "You ordered - wait, your tailor is from WHERE? "

Sisko: "- or any of the other LEGITIMATE crimes I've committed that I DESERVE to be raked over the coals for, you made up a pack of lies about my crew that aren't fit to line the bottom of my barkeeper's bird cage. And you didn't even stop to think what my first officer, a CONVICTED TERRORIST-

Beto: "Your first officer is WHAT?"

Sisko: "- WITH ANGER MANAGEMENT ISSUES would do when she heard the rumors you were fabricating from whole cloth. This isn't about oppressing the freedom of the press you claim to be a part of, this is protective custody. Though I'm told jails are better at keeping people in than they are at keeping people OUT. Pleasant dreams, sir."

Beto: "Excuse me, mister constable sir? Could you maybe post additional guards? Just to make sure I don't escape?"

Odo: "Unfortunately, my post here isn't large enough to add additional personnel. It's just me, the 'changeling infiltrator' you wrote about. And I was just leaving for my evening regeneration. *chuckle* I'll see you in the morning."

Beto: "I didn't know you actually WERE a changeling!"

10 hours ago, M'Kyuun said:

This will be my first official Devastator since I started collecting in '84

True story: I've never owned a complete Devastator.

I don't see that changing soon. Every one I've seen is too expensive, not my taste in toy robots, or both.

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If basketball is still played in the Macross universe, there has to be a Zentradi-only league because that's just plain unfair.

I think this is the topic of a postwar drama, Cyan Men Can't Jump.

8 hours ago, Big s said:

I thought the point of banging a robot was that you wouldn’t have babies 

Armitage III suggested just the opposite.

On 8/18/2025 at 8:26 PM, mikeszekely said:

Last but not least, we have the Takara Godzilla Megatron crossover.  In robot mode, from the neck down it's just Studio Series Grimlock in a mix and dark and light grays, with a little bit of red in some spots. 

Thank goodness for the red, or we'd think he was dead in stasis lock.

On 8/19/2025 at 11:47 AM, Seto Kaiba said:

Random Q for the performance/gaming aficionados here... have you any thoughts on the Intel Core Ultra 9 285K as a processor for a gaming rig?  

I know Intel's kind of on the outs with that community due to the issue with the 13900 and 14900, so I was wondering if that chip has any major drawbacks.

Personally, I do not trust Intel right now. They have overtly lied so hard about the issues with their previous processors I have no faith in their undocumented assuraces that the oxidation problems have been addressed, and their microcode fixes clearly aren't solving the overvolting problems(can't fix hardware with software). Right now, I wouldn't pay for ANY Intel part.

Stats-wise, the 200 series has proven underwhelming. Even Userbenchmark's notoriously wild Intel bias can't generate anything good to say in his 285K writeup, or even find room to throw in an unrelated paragraph of how much AMD sucks. I'm genuinely worried about the poor guy.

"Hey guys! What if Space Seed but also Doomsday Machine!"

On 8/12/2025 at 8:47 PM, Devil 505 said:

The F-22 had the provisional name "Lightning II" before they settled on "Raptor," hence the name of Novalogic's PC flight sim for the F-22, F-22 Lightning II. Speaking of which, the third game in the series, F-22 Lightning 3, has a Macross reference, as "Skull Squadron" is the name of an allied F-14 squadron in the game.

Fair enough. The F-22 does get in just under the wire.

1 hour ago, pengbuzz said:

Guess she never has to worry about Macross collectible preorders, huh?

Nope. She gets a good night's sleep, then pays the scalper markup. Doesn't even hesitate.