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SchizophrenicMC

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Everything posted by SchizophrenicMC

  1. SchizophrenicMC
    Is it just me or is John Davis starting to sound his age, with some of those slurred, slowed-down lines where once would have emanated the rapidfire staccato of television's original automotive journalist? It's hard to believe he's been at this for 35 years. The weight loss really took a number of years off him. I'm sorry, what were we talking about? Couldn't have been very interesting.
  2. SchizophrenicMC
    Slender and Denim, but what, no Jean?
  3. SchizophrenicMC
    Whose robot body is violently ripped apart on more than one occasion.
  4. SchizophrenicMC
    All I'm saying is, crying race about the one moving with racially appropriate casting is only going to hurt the argument when people want to call out movies with racially inappropriate casting. Actually to add to that, everyone's whinging about Scarlett Johansson being cast as a presumably Asian woman with a white robot body, and nobody's said anything about very Danish Pilou Absaek being cast as Batou. (Which I feel is not only ethnically inappropriate to a much more Japanese character, but just not really good casting) Kind of sheds light on the weekend activist side to all of this. Instead of informing themselves of the specific issues with this specific film, people have jumped on a general racism bandwagon and want to cry out about headlines. Even within the scope of this one movie, people have missed the point.
  5. SchizophrenicMC
    The word "whitesplaining" has been used. This thread has officially devolved to tumblr levels of useless.
  6. SchizophrenicMC
    Ah, Mozart. A genius, prodigy, and purveyor of poop jokes.
  7. SchizophrenicMC
    Rage on, Gundam.
  8. SchizophrenicMC
    Brain was a bit frazzled, I'd just woken up, couldn't find the words "unintentional racial ambiguity". Whereas with Kusanagi, there's very much intentional racial ambiguity. Like, typically, a character in anime is racially ambiguous as a side effect of being animated, whereas in Ghost in the Shell, that ambiguity is by design, because robot bodies. But at this point, everything's been talked about and I'm just tired, full stop. I'm out of energy for even my own opinions, and can't see why people are in such a fuss that a full-body cyborg has been cast as one type of human over another type.
  9. SchizophrenicMC
    This is the only part of this I'll reply to, since I didn't bother to read the rest. Race is a garbage concept. It only exists in very broad terms. Ethnicity, however, does exist, and it is both significant and very much tied to small regions. Is it racially, ethnically, or culturally sensitive to cast a Paiute actor to play the role of a Pueblo character, just because they're vaguely the same skin color? It may be the best you can pull off, but you have to admit sensitivity didn't play any part, only pragmatism did. Similarly, Taiwanese are similar in color to Japanese, sometimes, but are dissimilar in many physical regards, and nearly all ethnic regards. Casting Taiwanese to play Japanese characters is another issue of pragmatism, done for reasons beyond ethnic or racial sensitivity. You probably just needed somebody who looked generically Asian to play in your role. Or, in the case of the Initial D adaptation, you needed somebody who spoke fluent Cantonese who also had a fair amount of star power in Hong Kong and wasn't Jackie Chan. Casting a character a certain race just because they're vaguely the right color is a matter of practicality, done without respect to ethnic significance. With characters like those in Ghost in the Shell, where physical race is irrelevant because everyone has a robot body, it's even less sensitive to cast one race versus another, simply because the source material is from somewhere in Asia. In a situation like this, it makes far more sense to cast actors who look the part and have the acting prowess to portray characters who have physical characteristics that are specifically non-Japanese in the source material, on purpose. Casting the Major, whose primary features are ghostly skin and pale blue eyes, as an Asian would reek of tokenism, and it's intellectually dishonest to say that looking the part doesn't matter, in a discussion about race. And it's not even like the original movie and manga gave everyone that typical-anime-whiteface. That world was populated with decidedly Asian-looking people, with robot-bodied characters at the forefront who often defied that aesthetic because their bodies were, in fact, not human and not bound to their birth race. So to say Motoko Kusanagi has to be Asian, just because her name is Japanese, is silly from just about every perspective I can think of. Especially once you consider that much of the cast, and apparently nearly all of the background cast are already Asian. (Because it's pragmatic to hire Asians to play vaguely-the-right-color background infill in a movie that's supposed to be set in urban Japan)
  10. SchizophrenicMC
    While it is possible to generate dirlist.txt from a folder and dump that into an Excel document, it is expressly not possible to do the same with a Library.
  11. SchizophrenicMC
    Keep It Simple, Stupid Take some time, consolidate everything to a master directory, and don't try to overcomplicate things. Create frequent backups and when you take pictures, move them to the master directory instead of trying to shuffle them around removable media. On the topic of NAS, I've always found it more cost effective to fill a cheap chassis full of drives and run a basic system on that. If you can find a quiet place to put one, an old server might even be a good option. Old server components are definitely a good choice for low-performance, high-reliability applications. For example, an enterprise grade Adaptec 5805 drive controller can be had used for $60 all day, and will run up to 100 drives when paired with an active backplane, or 8 drives on its own, through PCI-E x8. I work with these cards and they run for years and years and years. The batteries get a bit tricky after awhile- they do use optional external lipo batteries for cache stability in the event of power failure. But the modern equivalent is over $600, and you'll only notice the difference in an actual webserver. They can also run SAS if you're into that. And that's just one example. Server RAM has excellent stability, it's just really slow. Buy it used and you can pick up 32GB for $50, and you will probably never stress it enough to break it. You can get a SuperMicro X9SCI motherboard with a Xeon 1220 installed for $200 on the used market, and that's a SandyBridge quad-core CPU that isn't even 5 years old yet. The list goes on.
  12. SchizophrenicMC
    On the occasions I've bothered to delete duplicates, I've always done it manually when I come across a dupe. But then, I also do most of my manual data organization when I'm bored and there's nothing else I can afford to do at the moment. Personally, I just leave sleeping duplicates lie. Storage space is cheap. You should probably come up with a master directory for storing all of your photos, moving forward though. Take a picture, put it in its appropriate location in the master directory, cross-reference within the directory as needed. This will keep you organized and make the creation of backups much easier.
  13. SchizophrenicMC
    This film is bound to already be treading the fine line between AAA action film and animated action film as it is, with the amount of CG that's become inescapable in movies today. I think that can be our metaphorical parallel to the fine line between human and inhuman for now. I'm still waiting for the second trailer (because the first trailer, whenever we get it, is never indicative) before I make any determinations about the film.
  14. SchizophrenicMC
    At that point, the last vestige of this film being a live action adaptation, disappears, and there's not much reason to play with the charade after that.
  15. SchizophrenicMC
    Oh come now, the studio directly replied to those allegations, stating it was a test shot on a background character that they dropped immediately, and this rag maintains their original statement? And I still think this is the one character you can do this to. The Major's key physical features (the features of her ROBOT BODY) are ghostly white skin and unsettling blue eyes. If this was any other franchise, I'd lend some credence to the whitewashing argument, but this is a movie based on a manga where the main character is literally a robot with a human mind, and that robot body is deliberately made so white it makes me a little uncomfortable. All things aside, at least Johansson fits the bill of the character physically. Making the Major physically Japanese just because the show is Japanese, even though the source material goes out of its way to portray her as something other, would be closer to racism, in my mind. This isn't like casting Sokka and Katara as white people in that Avatar adaptation that didn't get made, no matter how real the nightmare was. It's like casting Taiwanese actor Jay Chou to play Japanese teenager Takumi Fujiwara in the 2005 Hong Kong live action adaptation of Initial D. Or, what, was that mainland Asian-washing that cast? Oh, right, it only counts if a white person does it. Gotcha.
  16. SchizophrenicMC
    I've seen no fewer than 6 of those, and almost bought no fewer than 2. I don't know what this "limited edition" nonsense is, unless they sold all of them in Texas, which is a very real possibility. I've also almost bought a few Z31 Shiro Specials. Those really were limited. Only 1,002 were made. But the ones I found were absolutely trashed and the owners wanted huge sums of cash.
  17. SchizophrenicMC
    They probably would have liked it better with the manual box and something other than the red interior. Actually, the blue interior available on that model wasn't bad. The black interior is just classic. And it's my controversial opinion that the facelifted Z31 hit it out of the park in terms of styling. Softening up those early 80s lines a bit really did a lot to the 300ZX's design.
  18. SchizophrenicMC
    At the end of the day, the character has a robot body, so there's a lot of justifiable flexibility in casting. I just remain unsold on Johansson's ability to perform the role, until I have something more to go on than the first promotional still. I'm convinced she can make a good Action Cop based on previous work, but will she be Motoko Kusanagi? That depends on script and direction I guess. Don't know if I'm gonna spend the money to see it yet. I'll wait for the second trailer.
  19. SchizophrenicMC
    I, too, have an HG Ez8 and Gouf Custom, and they have stood like this for years: *the official spelling is Kergeren, though that's probably a mistranslation of Kerguelen, an island claimed by France
  20. SchizophrenicMC
    Feeling It Status: Not so much
  21. SchizophrenicMC
    All these years and I'm just now finding out MacrossWorld supports Comic Sans. I thought we were a family-friendly site.
  22. SchizophrenicMC
    I spent way too much time not skipping myself.
  23. SchizophrenicMC
    I kind of disagree. I think the opening crawl really helps tie in different works. Most of the Star Wars video games, for example, open with a crawl. What's more typically Star Wars than that opening sequence?
  24. SchizophrenicMC
    At 0% throttle input, either the throttle is left partially open or an air injector feeds more air to the engine, fuel is continuously injected at a rich ratio, and ignition timing switches from ~15 degrees BTDC for regular idle, to ~40 degrees ATDC. This generates a lazy combustion event that doesn't really begin until the exhaust valve is opening, and instead burns primarily in the exhaust tract, imparting all of its energy upon the turbo. This allows the car to generate significant boost even at idle speeds. However, it should be noted that the entire exhaust system comes under significant stress with the use of Anti-Lag Systems. Temperatures measured at the turbo can reach as high as 1100 celsius. Also, you get almost no engine braking effect as a result of some power being made during the power stroke, and more importantly, reduced vacuum resistance due to the open throttle. ALS systems have become less and less popular as WRC rules have made them less and less effective overall. Also the introduction of VVT has changed how some anti-lag technology is deployed.
  25. SchizophrenicMC
    Just downloaded マクロスMACROSS 82-99's Sailorwave because even if it is a joke, I dig it.
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