JB0

Hey, my absolute world domination wish is BASICALLY the same thing!

Ewww, ear buds. I guarantee 10-buck ear buds DON'T play music just as well as 800-dollar reference gear. At least you aren't using the iPod's pack-in buds. Could always be worse. Or, of course, I could just envy your less discerning ears. It certainly makes life less expensive. As far as the HDMI goes... that's a pretty variable thing, and you could write a book about it. Depending on how long the run is and how much data you're pushing(a 720p signal can work through a wore cable than a 1080p one because it's a far lower bitrate), a crappy cable can be just as good(due to digital showing no damage until bits degrade beyond legibility) or horrible(due to the bits degrading beyond legibility). Of course, HDMI cables are also one of the most absurdly over-markup products on store shelves today, and a lot of places get 30 and 40 bucks for the same damn 5-dollar cable. Soooo... get the cheap cable anyways. If it works, and there's no sparklies or dropped frames or desynced audio, then that rocks! In an analog environment, the cheapest cables WILL show degradation. Almost invariably. If you were pushing HD video signals over component, you'd probably notice a huge difference between the five-buck cables and the 20-buck cables. There's a lot less markup on the classic RCA-connector cables in general, so it's much more a case of "you get what you pay for," barring a few notable exceptions. But with a digital feed that's not hitting the limits of the cable... what model the TV is and how well it's calibrated means a lot more.

Yeah. Depending on gear and situation, cable quality can be more or less of an issue. It's not just down to noise reduction, though. Lower-quality cables have less overall bandwidth, so... if you try to send too complex a signal through, it gets garbled. Amusingly, it's actually more obvious in the digital realm, because rather than "smearing", you get clipping and dropouts. And HDMI was never intended for long runs, so it's very vulnerable to degradation. Analog is pretty durable in that respect. It degrades gracefully. And Monster generally makes overpriced products with greatly exaggerated benefits, even ignoring their incredibly unethical business practices and ridiculous hair-trigger lawsuits. My personal favorite example was a PS2 controller extension cable they used to make that they claimed would actually get signals from your controller to the PS2 faster so your game would be more responsive... which is completely and utterly impossible on so many levels that I'm not really sure where to start. They're one of those companies that spends a lot more on advertising (and lawyers) than they do any actual product development, and have a reputation that's bought, not earned. And this is a hot-button for me, so let me drag out my soapbox and climb up for a minute or three. I find the difference between 128kbit/sec MP3s and even just 192 kb/s MP3s is audible with almost everything. Maybe not through pack-in earbuds(I don't use them for comfort reasons as much as audio quality), but... even a pair of junk PC speakers will fail to mask how awful 128 kb/s is(I DO use junk PC speakers for my computer). 128 kb/s needs to just die. It was chosen as a tradeoff between size and quality when dialup was the only game in town, and the concerns that prompted the tradeoff to land where it did are long gone. There's simply no good reason for it to still exist. I'm not saying everyone needs to start using FLAC exclusively or, god forbid, raw wave, but... Variable bitrate, average 192 kb/s should be the new minimum standard. It sounds MUCH nicer, you aren't wasting bits by encoding dead silence at 192 kb/sec, and it's not like VBR is rare and unsupported at this point. VBR actually makes a LOT of sense, since the low-complexity parts of the track use a lower bitrate than the more complex parts. So a burst of dead silence can be near-0 kb/s, a full-orchestra crash can surge up to 320, and the file is about the size of a 192 kb/s continuous bitrate file. Now, I DO have some tracks where 128 doesn't really hurt them that much. The complexity of the audio WILL affect how badly it gets mangled. But most of the stuff... it shows(or sounds, I should say). And the more complex the music, the worse it will show. If it's a piano solo, that lone piano gets the full 128 kb/s, but if it's part of a full orchestra, it's sort of like it's divided among all the instruments, and the quality plummets. In the interests of full disclosure, I go for lossless files on my PC, and convert to high-quality VBR for use on my MP3 player(average bitrates landing between 192 and 256 kb/s). I'd recommend getting some nice cheap headphones. Used to use a set of Koss KSC-75s. They're pretty well-known for hitting a cheap-but-good window. Of course, my current headphones are pretty much junk, and while they don't sound particularly GOOD, I can still tell the difference between a low-bitrate and high-bitrate file through them. Definitely. But mid-range gear will benefit if you replace those flimsy cables that came with your DVD player with something a little better. I'm not saying go all-out and get some MONSTER Electroblaster Cables with Superconductive Toroidal Insulation and Patented Turbine-Cut Connectors for Maximal Look-Cool Factor and Optimum Wallet Drainage, in fact I am very much NOT saying that, but... something thicker than a sheet of paper is nice.

What, you mean you didn't collect Wire Transport Flywheel media too? Yeah, I collect a little bit of info about everything, it seems. Nice to find a use for it sometimes.

To be fair, records DO have more range than CDs, from a purely technical standpoint. Extracting that extra range without the physical issues of reading the record causing artifacts is another story. And at the end of the day, most of the difference boils down to the different masters used. Lot of CDs are mastered horribly incompetently. Tubes, though... that's indefensible. As far as old hardware VS new hardware... Audio doesn't really change a lot. A good piece of gear from 1987 is still a good piece of gear, as long as it's in good shape. If your CD/DVD/WTF player has good DACs and you aren't using shitty cables, there's not really an advantage to using a digital run instead of an analog one. And to the consternation of many and defiance of logic... analog video works BETTER over long runs than HDMI(because it's not a particularly GOOD digital video standard).

Any theory that ends with "I blame Disney" is okay in my book. They have a lot to answer for.

Yes, but look at it from their viewpoint. A refreshed Macross release would take manpower, shelf space, and eyeballs that could better be spent on the the latest installment/whoring out/slanderous abuse of the Gundam cash cow. Moo. Not MUCH manpower, shelf space, and eyeball time, but... Bandai is not exactly a neutral party here. They know what side their bread is buttered on. There's logic here, it's just not very consumer-friendly logic.

Really?! I may get him on that virtue alone. Had a whole slew of Generations stuff hit the shelf this week. Everything but Megatron and Blurr, I think. When you DO find Thunderwing... his two missile launchers can peg together into a single larger gun. And he has JUST BARELY ENOUGH articulation to hold it with a peg in each hand, which makes for some fairly impressive firepower on a bot that size(but still less impressive than Classics Bumblebee/Cliffjumper with Powermaster Prime's guns...). Sadly, the guns will NOT peg into the "detachable recon drone", which is what I thought those tabs on top of the guns were for initially. Spacing's all wrong. But to be fair, the guns are larger than the drone anyways. The wings can be folded in on teh robot so he looks less super robot-y and more Transformer-y. I'm tempted to tie the wing sweep to the guns, so they're only folded out when he's got the big two-handed gun. Sort of a "super mode" effect. They can also be flipped OUT in jet mode, giving him a forward-swept wing look, albeit not a very good one. But then, he's not a very good jet... though at least his face and upper legs are hidden, and his lower legs look like they belong there, which is better than SOME jets. In exchange, theres' a big hole in the chestplate where the part that hides the face folds up from. And there's just no hiding the arms, though twisting the fists around 90 degrees helps.

The best ellipsis use is in Super Robot Wars Alpha, when Heero and Rei have a conversation consisting ENTIRELY of ...s. Ah, yes. How DID we forget Sinistar, the greatest philosopher of our age? http://onastick.net/drew/sinistar/ Though for raw quotability, I prefer Berzerk. "Chicken, fight like a robot!"

Send 'em all to hell! YEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! EDF! EDF! EDF!

And then the Earth will send two prototype Mosquito fighters with adaptive weapons systems in and crush the rebellion! (Go play Mars Matrix.) Seriously, though... we HAVE to leave Earth if we intend to survive. Global extinctions aren't really an uncommon event, and I'd like to think we'd scattered before the next one hit Earth. We don't need the zentradi to wipe things out. We ALREADY live in a cosmic shooting gallery. And the Earth's had some pretty radical climate shifts in it's history even WITHOUT the help of giant space rocks. Heck, homo sapiens came into existence DURING one. And of course, ultra-long term, the sun has a finite lifespan. Assuming that our descendants are still around in 4 billion years. Of course, we will ignore the long-term in favor of the shortest-term we can think of until the day we see a definite doom. At which point, it'll be too late.

I thought it was a pretty fun movie. If it helps, pretend those AREN'T the 80s cartoon Turtles. They're from a DIFFERENT, but closely related universe. And I make no claims as to whether the originals were that goofy or not. I've actively avoided seeing any of the old Turtles cartoons again. Rewatching my childhood favorites always ends in pain. And me wondering how I could ever have been THAT stupid.

Touche. They'd definitely want a way to patch up injured commanders and archivists. And possibly cybernetic upgrades(if nothing else, Bodol's ship-body in DYRL is one. I admit to being curious if Britai's eyeplate was intended as a replacement for an eye injured in a previous campaign or an "upgrade" of some sort.). Of course, if what we've seen is any indication, the troops on the front lines aren't likely to come back in need of medical treatment because their mechs tend to erupt into fireballs around them. But that could easily be due to the camera pointed at the most exciting things at any given moment, similar to the VF-1 and destroid combustibility.

Does it help if the flippers are an extra feature, and not part of the transformation proper?

4 words: Seaspray has scuba flippers.

I would actually assume the zentradi DON'T have much in the way of medical technology. Why bother, when you can pop the top on a clone chamber and send a fresh troop to the front immediately instead of waiting for the injured guy to heal?

Or since they'd never seen any physical remains or pictures of the former crew, they figured they were fighting a giant version of the Predator, Creature from the Black Lagoon, or something similarly not-quite human. Not that I DOUBT there was misinformation to the troops, but it was implied Roy was "in the loop." Heck, even if they HAD found physical remains, they probably would've assumed they looked more like klingons or romulans than humans.

That's actually an interesting point. You WOULD think that any evidence of mixed-size crew would be noteworthy enough to get mention. The implication DOES seem to be that it was a macro-zentradi-only vessel(and in DYRL, the ASS-1 was a meltrandi vessel in that version of events, making it explicitly macro-only). The question becomes... is this unique to some SA vessels(making the ASS-1 an odd duck), or are all SA ships macro-only or miclone-only? Though they should still be able to extrapolate the general shape of the giants from the giant-sized equipment they used. Size matters not. Look at the zentradi restroom Max does his quick-change in. It's alien and teched up, but more or less recognizable as a restroom(or was intended to be, anyways. Max can tell as soon as he sees the space toilet.) If the zentradi were, say, centaurs instead of human... their restrooms would look a LOT different. And there wouldn't BE chairs, not as we know them anyways. Hallways would probably be a lot wider(need more space to turn around if you have a horse's backside). Airlocks would be deeper. Et cetera. I'd ask why they didn't find anything that would IMMEDIATELY make it clear how human they were(say, images in the crew database or 5-fingered spacesuits), but the ship was sent off as a booby trap. It was probably emptied of any gear that was easily removable, the database purged, the crew evacuated, and the autopilot programmed.

They knew the size. Probably even that the aliens were humanoid. But I think the implication is that NO ONE knew they were 30-foot humans.

And Roy was as surprised as Hikaru when the first zentradi staggered out of that Reguld and it was that human. Even skeletal remains would've told them that.

Yes, because idle comments on a message board are EXACTLY THE SAME as building a real toy. All those internet posters are expert toy designers and taking into consideration molding issues, material stresses, pricing considerations, and all the other little details. NO ONE is making wild guesses based more on what they WANT to see than any real physical evidence. Right. If it doesn't happen, it's because there was a reason it couldn't happen. NOT because they totally dropped the ball and a bunch of guys on a message board could do it better. If it does happen... I still stand by this minirant. The hood is pretty weak evidence. Heck, Masterpiece Prime has an entire second false cab front because the animation chest doesn't match the truck front. There's no reason this can't be true of Hot Rodimus Convoy Prime Directive(with secret NCC-1701 No Bloody A, B, C, or D mode!) as well.

Heck yeah! That game is AWESOME! Shame it didn't do well enough for XSeed to bring over the sequel(But Korg DS-10 DID? What is wrong with this picture?).

So I grabbed Peg and Thrust earlier. Thrust is great, aside from being a Classics Seeker(I still think the base mold is pretty weak). I like the metallic plastic they used for the red. Unfortunately, MY Thrust has no eyes. They didn't paint them. At all. There's just indents above his cheeks. I HOPE this is a quality-control issue and not a case of "colors may vary" from the proto on the back of the box. Peg is an awesome mold. I like how his feet transform. His lower legs are pretty big, but I'm gont gonna complain that he isn't top-heavy. The rubber sword is nowhere near as bad as it could be. It's a little dinky, but not really that bad. ... Then he got some manga. He's been shouting something about Belldandy-sama for the last hour and swings that damn sword at me every time I get near him.

If at all. I don't think Soundblaster/Black Soundwave saw a single episode. But how else you gonna sell the toys? 'S her own fault for not having a toy.

I think it was more directed at the nay-sayers that think that's actually the final toy design and not a character reference. YOU TAKE THAT BACK! YOU TAKE THAT BACK RIGHT NOW! A. They block offsite linking. Gotta copy/paste to a new window to see it. B. IS it blue? I know it LOOKS blue, but that image pretty clearly has something very wrong with the colors. I mean, the background is green instead of white, for Primus' sake. The red data's basically GONE, and blue's not much better. I'd place ZERO stock in any guess about color from that image.