Gubaba

BTW, u know the "borrowing" of arrows is fiction right? So is the "Empty Fort strategy", both are part of the many stories made to glorify Kong Ming. The fiction vs fact ratio is very high actually...

For e.g. if the Empty Fort was real, it wasnt logical because Sima Yi might be suspicious of a trap but still it would be logical and expected to at least send in a small troop to check out the "empty fort". Why would he bring such a huge army only to retreat without even finding out if there's indeed a trap? It doesn't make sense. Thus my comment that although the stories were interesting, they are kind of shallow if we realised how it didn't make sense.

The "arrow borrowing" story is probably borrowed from the real event where Sun Quan went deep into Cao Cao's camp on a boat and got rained upon by arrows from the Cao camp. Sun Quan not only displayed his bravery but quick thinking and gained Cao Cao's praise in the famous saying "One should have a son like Sun Quan" (rough translation lol).

I don't care if it was real or not...it was still thoroughly awesome!

Playing the games do count right?

I read parts of it here and there. You can find a copy online. Stilll way too many characters to keep track of. Just like the game. At least the game is illustrated.

Cripes..."I haven't read the book but I've seen the movie" is pretty common, but how many times do you hear, "I haven't read the book but I've played the game."?

And yeah...too many characters. After I finish Three Kingdoms, I'm moving on to Outlaws of the Marsh

(AKA The Water Margin), the story of 108 heroes. 108??? I'm simultaneously looking forward to and dreading that one...

How big is the building in Nakano?

It's basically a two-story mall, with a few stores for manga, a few stores for toys and models, a movie poster store, a couple of gashapon stores, a couple of idol stores, and (of course) around every other corner, there's porn.

Dammit! I meant Nakano...but I've been thinking about Five Star Stories today and mixed myself up...

Anyway, yeah...Nagano is...well...a little further than Nakano. And I don't think it has Mandarake. Or the strange little hamburger shop near it.

I probably would've been better prepared if I had played the games first...Even now, I was struggling to remember who Dian Wei was...one of Cao Cao's general's, IIRC.

That's one of the more difficult aspects of the book...there are HUNDREDS of people mentioned, and sorting out who's who really seems like a job for the specialist, rather than the general reader.

The middle of the book, though, is amazing. Especially the Battle at Red Cliffs. THAT's something I'd like to play a game of...but only if you could play out the hysterical scene where Kongming taunts Cao Cao's army in order for them to shoot arrows at him and his men. He then collects all the arrows, has his men bow and say , "Thank you," and goes back to camp.

I was disappointed in Akihabara...Nagano is the place to be. Just take the Chuo line from Shinjuku Station.

then, Is there no toy of this design?

You really want to spend $80 to $100 on that? Ah well, to each his own...

Cool.

Seen this?

That is one grimy Valk...but it still looks gorgeous!

It's the novel (seven parts history and three parts fiction, as one commentator called it), so yeah, there's the occasional bit of wizardry and sometimes a character will die a year or so earlier or later than he did in real life. But the edition has hundreds of pages of footnotes to explain where the book deviates from history. I'm more into literature than I am into history anyway, so reading the Romance rather than the Record is fine for me.

And yes, Cao Cao is the "bad guy." I still liked him A LOT better than I liked Liu Bei. Kongming's my favorite, and he's still around in Chapter 96 (which is where I currently am), but he really can't carry the story by himself. When he dies (and I'm sure he will, before this whole thing is over), I'm afraid that the last shred of interest I have in the story will be gone, unless someone else of comparable interest is introduced.

That said, when the book is good, it's VERY good indeed.

Okay, it's not anime (although there is an anime) and it's not science fiction (although there are SF adapatations), but I think it kind of fits here...

A while back, I deicded it was time to tackle the Four Chinese Classics, so I picked up Three Kingdoms at a Chinese book store near my house (a brown, boxed, four-volume set, translated by Moss Roberts, with a note inside the first volume that says "NOT FOR SALE IN NORTH AMERICA." Hmmm...), and nine months later, I'm about 400 pages from the end - which sounds like a lot, except that the whole thing is about 2200 pages long.

I'm duty-bound to finish it, but at this point, almost all the characters from the first two-thirds of the book are dead, and it kind of feels like a not-as-good sequel. Finishing it has become a real chore.

Has anyone else here read it, and if you have, did you have the same problem?

Nagano has the Daughter chip like Rogner so he can keep cloning himself.

the problem is we don't have one

Anyway, the thing about FSS is that it was ALREADY completed even before it started - want to know what happens at the end? Read the timeline. That's the special part about this story, we already know whats gonna happen. Nagano's just filling in the gaps and giving us a more indepth look into the events. So in actual fact, he don't need to 'finish' it, because he already did. With that said, i hope he'd start the serialization asap... -.-

Hmm... where did u read that he denies any connection between L-Gaim and FSS? The connection is definitely there: Five planets, Temple Knights -> Mirage Knights, Heavy Metal -> Mortar Headd, Poseidal backwards -> Ladios Sopp (somewhat lol), Daba/Kamon Myroad 6 -> Colus 6, L-Gaim -> Junchoon, Aug -> Auge.... etc etc ... even some designs are the same - those hovercraft vehicles Diggs are same design. Fatimas in mecha head cockpits, in fact there were preliminary designs of those fatima/co-pilots in L-Gaim.

I think it was in an essay in the back of one of the English volumes...somewhere between 23 and 26 (I don't have them handy so I can't check). The writer mentioned (IIRC) that Nagano got upset when someone mentioned that FSS seemed like a prequel to L-Gaim, and responded, "Five Star Stories has never been L-Gaim's rear end!"

The Timeline is funny...some things (like the destruction of Kallamity Goderce) are told in enormous details, while others are much too brief ("Atropos goes into seclusion with an infant LED Dragon"...who would of thought it would take more than 700 pages to explain THAT line?), and a lot of things aren't there are at all. So although we all know that Amaterasu and Lachesis end up together, there's still a lot that will be left unanswered if he drops dead anytime in the next forty years (unless he drops everything and does nothing but draw FSS morning, noon, and night).

It kind of reminds me of Robert Musil's novel, The Man Without Qualities. As it stands, it's incomplete at more than 1700 pages, which are set during the months before WWI. Musil died before he could get any further, but, from his notes, it's clear he planned to take the story through WWI and into WWII, with no big jumps in the story...obviously, this would be impossible, unless he had started writing the book when he was five years old. He really seemed to believe he had infinite time to complete the book.

I'm not really complaining...FSS can be confusing and frustrating, but that's just because it's so damn good, and if he decides that he'll quit writing it, I'll be upset, but I'll still be grateful that I got to read as much as I did.

Reminds me of Daicon III...in more ways than one.

I tried the same thing with no luck...

I want some TV pilots for my Hasegawa kits!

My other thought was to pick up one of the old Imai/Bandai kits and use the pilot from there...but I haven't done it, so I don't know if it works.

I'll have to listen to my Mospeada again tonight, but I don't remember the "flying" sound being very complicated.

It's possible both crews hit upon the same idea for a "neato sci-fi sound."

I doubt it...the TARDIS sound is quite unique...IIRC, it was done with "treating" piano strings. Or it may just have been an elephant in labor...

There is only ONE FSS movie (roughly the story in JP vol 1/ eng vol 1-3), and no plans for any other fss animation at all. as far as i've heard.

Although u might want to watch Heavy Metal L-Gaim ('80s anime) which is basically by the same author and very similar story to FSS Part 2 (where Daba = Colus 6 leads the rebels against the empire). U will find alot of similar designs/characters to those in FSS.

As for the author Mamoru Nagano, he's working on an OVA animation titled GothicMade (GTM not really related to fss) since 2005, and serialization for FSS has since stopped.

To be a FSS fan, u must have lots of patience...

Patience alone doesn't do it...you've also got to REALLY BELIEVE that Nagano is immortal...he's been doing it for, what, 23 years? And he's only covered about 200 of the 5000 years he said he would cover.

Not only that, but with loose ends drifting about from both before and after the FSS timeline, at the rate he's going it'll take him 7777 years to write the thing...

FSS is up there with Sandman as one of my all-time favorite comics, but I've given up hope of Nagano ever actually finishing it.

As a side note, my understanding is that he strenuously denies any connection between FSS and L-Gaim...I wonder why, since you'd have to be brainless NOT to see the connections. Or maybe I misunderstood his comments...

All I know is that if we don't get to see Nite Owl in his big poofy furry winter outfit I will cry.

Ditto for Dr. Manhattan's naughty bits.

It's correct that if it explodes tomorrow, we have 8000 years before we have to start worrying. But it's also true that that it could have exploded 7999 years ago, and we won't know until we see it a year from now. If scientists see it exploding, it's already too late.

Dude, that's TOTALLY the tagline for the movie...

(cue ominous music)

DEEP MOVIE VOICE GUY: The scientists have seen it...and it's already TOO LATE!

Hell, you can download either the ISO files or the first few epsiodes in MKV if you want to check it out...

Conversely, if someone wants to post comparison pics, that would be cool...but has anyone at MW bought either of the sets yet?

Of course it's just an opnion, as is your own view. We are here to share them with each other after all. Fortunately the number of people here that try to pass their opinions off as more than that are few, so we're good. I'm not too worried about Macross Frontier's popularity. I don't think it'll be a smash hit (I can always hope), but I know it'll do well and we'll all enjoy the merchandise. No doubts there

And even if it does get cancelled mid-stream, we can always hope that it goes out like the original Gundam...they scrambled to put together four episodes to wrap everything up after it had ben cancelled, and those are four of the best episodes in the whole series. In fact, based on the "Tomino Memo" for what would have happened in epsiodes 40~52, I think the abbreviated ending is better.

Back to Macross 7, I'm currently rewatching it, and I wish there had been some kind of retroactive cancellation that would have forced them to tighten up the first twenty episodes into maybe nine or ten...

Or, instead of remaking it, maybe we should take a page from one of the guys at Robotech.com, who is rewriting Mac7 to fit in with Robotech...Max is now Admiral Scott Bernard, Ariel is dead, Mylene is now Marlene Bernard, and Basara has been renamed "Nick Vasillis." Sounds like a winner to me!</sarcasm>

You are correct, and yes the figures would have been a really cool touch or at least in their TV flight suits.

It kind of bugs me that Hasegawa hasn't released TV version pilots...a few years back, I tried to file one of the pilot figures down to approximate the TV version...it didn't work very well.

And I drooled with envy with I saw that Superostrich that somebody built with an accurate Minmay figure in the back seat...

Assumedly, Adams plural would refer to Angels, unless this is a bigger re-write than first let on. BTW, what's the current release schedule? At this rate we're going to only get 1 a year, and there are supposed to be 4 movies!

I think it's a bigger re-write. When it said ADAMS and LILIN+, they showed these kind of ghostly things that looked kind of like the little clicky guys in Princess Mononoke...Of course, there are also the two new Evas and glasses girl thrown into the mix...I think EVA 2.0 is going to be very, very different from the TV series.

And yeah, there are four movies, but the last two will only be about 45 minutes each and are a double feature...so REALLY it's only three.

I don't think the original release came with PE

The regular VF-1D did, but the "Virgin Road" version didn't.

I didn't mind that, but I wish it had come with pilot figures of Max and Millia in wedding garb.

I like his respont to my podcast where he just chopped up our show on Macross and randomly paused it to call me or Jeremy a fag. High class stuff.

Okay...I listened to it up to the point where he said you mentioned him solely to ride on his coattails (to, presumably, the same status of fame and fortune that he enjoys). Then I really realized that there were better things I could do with my time...so I downloaded your podcast and listened to that instead. Very funny (and thank you for pointing out what NEEDS to be said...that "Virgin Road" is the worst-animated Macross episode ever, and that Hikaru and Minmay totally did it while she was staying with him (but why was he sleeping on the couch...?)), but I'm glad I'd already seen the show. If I hadn't, I doubt I would've been able to follow your "synopsis."

Oh, poo, I pwned myself!

Don't worry, you're not the the first to have been hoodwinked by that wascally wabbit...

This comment would have carried more weight if you spelled "ignoramus" correctly. ;p

And your comment would have carried more weight if you had watched more Bugs Bunny cartoons.

Say what?!! I thought the Tunguska Event was caused by "the biggest interdimensional cross-rip" ever recorded until the year 1984...

Really? I thought it was a Supervision Army ship that didn't quite make it...

OK, one final parting shot from me today...I love how he goes on about how Robotech hasn't had to "reinvent" itself...but it's not like Harmony Gold hasn't TRIED; they just never got anything completed until recently.

Purity should never be confused with incompetence.