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I'd have to say the scene in Macross Plus, where the mind-controlled YF-21 predicted the behaviour of a missile swarm in brain/AI assisted simulation and then charged at the swarm doing bonkers post-stall manoeuvre to dance and weave through what in the tv show prior had been a death-sentence capable of wiping out an entire battle-group. Its where the original term "Macross Missile Massacre" or "The Itano Circus" was born, due to the bright colors and Ichiro Itano's high punching weight on Plus' animation where he took centre stage for a lot of it overriding many of Shoji Kawamori's decisions. Its kinda considered *the gold standard* of how you make objects look good when moving in three dimensions by having the focal point either be the object evading, or the framing of the missiles themselves and the physical consequences of their movements and those of you into film might have spotted this technique used before. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkzBnzYGIMw The full version of the scene where you see the AI prediction running and see how and why the YF21 evades the way it does is unfortunately not on youtube (this relates to the pre-final scene of the OVA but lacks the context to really be any kind of spoiler) but its very very cool to watch all these little touches aircraft geeks will get: Thrust-vectoring, apogee motors, RCS thrusters and energy conservation all working through what I presume is some kind of physics solver paired with an amaterialistic utility function. I remember looking up all this stuff and I spent years trying to write an implementation that would do something similar in a game-engine automatically and it nearly drove me to the breaking point. Seeing all this stuff as a teenager eventually, that got me into Armored Core's 4th gen (which is basically a mind-blowing particle-punk retelling of the French revolution on a dying Earth in terminal late-stage capitalism) and I've not really looked back since. I don't really like anime, so much as I think giant robots which can just swim through the air gracefully are just the most amazing thing ever and I'm really fascinated by ideas about how things like Beyond-Visual-Range Combat (which took a lot of mental work to wrap my head around) might be represented to an audience on screen in film. Ironically the only situation I've seen BVR done well (which is this wild new emergent form of highly abstract combat involving sensor behavior exploiting the laws of physics like kinetic energy, sensor behaviour like the doppler effect and the thickness of the atmosphere and stuff like that) is in is submarine movies, which don't have the easy option of resorting to sweeping swooshing movements like fighter-jets being showed in WWII-style (when in fact their sheer speed means they're moving miles apart from eachother, not up eachother's rear end and practically overlapping like Topgun). This made me look into Chohei Kambayashi's Yukikaze which had a big emphasis on making me realize that combat is nothing like what we see on screens and that combat itself is not exciting or enjoyable which to little teenaged "wow, cool space-ship!" me was kinda like a "whoah" moment that made me seriously reassess what war and combat really were. This made me realize "wow, when something gets to its maximum level of performance, it becomes wildly abstract, ands the highest level of anything is extremely difficult to represent to human beings naturally or easily onscreen or in footage which is why all the combat in scifi always looks WWII-esque because that was about the last time where audiences had parity of what they were seeing vs how they understood things to behave" To paraphrase the friend who recorded the video above, air-warfare is really bonkers: quote:"You're using a machine to detect another machine, showing you it on a machine, by using your machine's machines to detect emissions of their machines which you then lock onto using another machine and then you release a suicidal machine which then rushes at the other machine and then charges into it because your eyes can't see them because the atmosphere is in the way and the speeds and distances of passage and closure are so enormous that they make no sense to human beings without metaphors to represent them using other machines" It all gets very bizarre. Somewhere in my bones, I crave to see this done well in a way that audiences can mentally wrap their heads around in drama. On some emotional level, I think film-making needs to learn how to represent these things because at some point you're going to run out of conventional types and ideas of warfare to represent to audiences -- or better yet, there may be human metaphors of human progression and post-human existence which may only even BE representable to audiences using the analogy of abstract super-warfare like this in the first place. At that point, maybe stories have to acknowledge that onboarding audiences to the rules of a world is on some level not only important, but essential to telling new kinds of scifi stories. That on some level, you eventually have to have the pedagogy grit to elevate your audience, rather than expecting them to enter the world having all the needed requirements to enjoy a very complex story. On some level, stories not only become reflections of human potential and human ideas, but they can also teach. I get to many of you this is decidedly very un-mindblowing, but to me as a teenager who was writing and learning these ideas it blew my mind to bits and made me fall in love with the genre. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jun 19, 2022 |
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Jun 19, 2022 18:24
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Sanguinia posted:I was looking at a satellite map of San Diego today, and it reminded me of a tiny moment in a Sci-Fi show that blew my mind back in my early college years. Sanguinia posted:Yes. The story roughly goes that the Alien invaders didn't actually care about the planet, just the crashed ship, and so they chased it cat-and-mouse around the solar system rather than continuing to attack a defenseless earth. And then the invaders are kind of won-over by humanity in the course of the chase because they're genetically engineered warriors and civilian culture like music and LOVE causes them to not want to fight anymore.
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Jun 19, 2022 18:44
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Expo70 posted:Macross Plus
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Jun 20, 2022 17:55
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Yea Macross Plus is awesome. Its too bad none of the Macross stuff after it followed on it, I think it was because the people behind Macross realized that focusing more on the music was more profitable than cool mecha combat. There was a super awesome AMV for Information High that was posted on youtube not to long ago but it got DMCA'd so fast.
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Jun 20, 2022 19:40
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Lampsacus posted:Gold aspiration height of the thread, thank you for taking the time to post yo. Any time, very passionate about the things I like, and I can go into enormous depth about why. Macross Plus sure but also Sentou Yousei Yukikaze (the novels for which came out in 1979-1983 -- which blows my mind considering how insanely forward looking Chohei Kanbayashi was and how much he got right about technology and air-warfare human/machine synthesis especially considering his personal brief was "What if Stanisław Lem wrote a book about fighter-jets for Japanese audiences") and its the best "machine sentience" story I think I've honestly ever come across in all of fiction, barring the novel version of 2001 which comes a close second. Yukikaze got an OVA anime which really is more like a synopsis of the books that skips most of the meat and potatos of what made them great because it just flat out doesn't fit. It has one of my favourite depictions of Beyond-Visual-Range combat and a merge, into a surprisingly realistic dogfight that beat for beat feels like something straight out of Eagle Dynamics Digital Combat Simulator which wouldn't come out for another decade or so. It even includes denial of jamming the weapon engagement zone (ie, detonating the missile at a range which would harm both aircraft which missiles will not let you do by design and they will deny launch authorization to you when you pull the trigger to protect you) which is something you just cannot even imagine in today's air-warfare because of how extreme air-combat is on the planet Fairy against the JAM. I love Macross, but Yukikaze is next-level and I stand by that, 100%. Then games: Zone of the Enders. Armored Core: For Answer. They're all absolute bangers and I can talk about them for hours. twistedmentat posted:Yea Macross Plus is awesome. Its too bad none of the Macross stuff after it followed on it, I think it was because the people behind Macross realized that focusing more on the music was more profitable than cool mecha combat. Mainly because good mecha combat is pretty expensive to animate. Keep in mind, Macross Plus did a lot of stop motion keyframing into rotoscoping with Kawamori's lego models as reference photography which is how a lot of the "very three dimensional looking" scenes were done, and this is also how a lot of Itano's work working with Kawamori is also done -- using physical references and camera lenses to exaggerate or get certain proportions. Miniatures were popular at the time, so a lot of those techniques would be applied. You can especially see this if you watch Aoi Honoo/Blue Blazes and see that a lot of scifi "principle photography" was done on kitbashed models for anime and this was a technique that proto-Gainax especially still use to this day -- inheriting from the tradition of tokusatsu ("special effects") which was born with Godzilla. You can even see this in the making of the most recent Eva movie, where Anno got up onto a table and was walking around it, discussing the arrangement of the environment -- and likewise, the Tokyo 3 exhibit at SMALL WORLDS Tokyo which is based on cardboard models and bits of modelkit made at Gainax which were then photographed and traced for certain extreme angle shots when very precisely reliable consistent forms were needed with different lighting. If you watch the original show again, you'll spot when they're used if you look for them. Its very cute that new work was later based on concept sketches of the city which were used to extend the models, and create dioramas for SMALL WORLDs. twistedmentat posted:There was a super awesome AMV for Information High that was posted on youtube not to long ago but it got DMCA'd so fast. Bing search for: "Information high AMV Bing search for: "Information high MAD Bing's video search is pretty good. Is it one of the four listed here? Keep in mind "MAD" is Japanese equivalent to AMV roughly so you might find it under those terms instead. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 20:47
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Expo70 posted:
Yea its pretty cool about using models and legos for the key art. There's a bunch of older OAV animes where that was done because there was so much money going around that they can afford to give the director 300k Yen to build a 1/10th sized version of the mech of the main character because its the 80s, there will always be more money! It also wasn't until after I realized that it was based on the actual F-22 vs F-35 thing that was going on around then. Though I think the Valkyries could take off when it was raining. And I know none of those videos are it because i posted it to my facebook page and if i follow that link it goes here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCsa1_-7RKU Though I was wrong on the date, it was posted in 2016.
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Jun 20, 2022 21:12
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twistedmentat posted:Yea its pretty cool about using models and legos for the key art. There's a bunch of older OAV animes where that was done because there was so much money going around that they can afford to give the director 300k Yen to build a 1/10th sized version of the mech of the main character because its the 80s, there will always be more money! It also wasn't until after I realized that it was based on the actual F-22 vs F-35 thing that was going on around then. Though I think the Valkyries could take off when it was raining. You mean the YF-22 vs the YF-23. The 35 was a replacement for the F16, which was a single-engine "light-weight-fighter concept" (the irony of what the 35 became in context is staggering given how expensive and over-designed it is). The 23 actually influenced the YF-21 (Guld's plane, the blue one). Its common to misattribute the YF19 (Isamu's plane) to the SU-47 Berkut, but the Berkut became public knowledge in 1996 and Macross Plus came out in 1995 so its probably based as a composite of the Grumman X-29. I think its an example of Kawamori's chops as an engineer showing through, that he saw what a twin-engine X-29 would probably look like and he guessed right enough that Russia's test-bed technology demonstrator would look pretty similar. I read up and discovered Kawamori also did the toy-design for a lot of transformers toys in the 1980's and that kinda blew my mind to later learn he was a qualified engineer. Here's one of the rare few good TEDtalks -- by Kawamori himself. There is also another interview here which is also pretty good. Use some context inference, and set youtube to translate the subtitles to English and you should be fine following this. If you look around, there's a lot of talks like this for mechanical designers (again, another mind-blowing moment for me when I discovered this amazing resource as someone working on a game that largely mirrors a lot of Macross' movement in its design which is the primary reason why I'm well read on this topic despite not having any special interest in warfare -- if I'm wrong on anything, I'd really appreciate any correction any of you can give me). twistedmentat posted:And I know none of those videos are it because i posted it to my facebook page and if i follow that link it goes here Find it on here: https://www.animemusicvideos.org/home/home.php The odds are good that if it was submitted, someone has probably done a backup of the video and it'll be in a collection somewhere. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 21:23
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Doubleposting but gently caress it, this makes me remember the original Macross, of course. Going off of the video I posted a little earlier, of Shoji Kawamori, I'm kinda overjoyed to have discovered this video while looking for another in the thread because it really helps me vocalize what I love about the original Macross: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhzUC7yTcoc&t=582s Kawamori's solution to war in a science-fiction story was to have the "secret weapon" to be culture-shock, and from understanding to come from music for alien people who've never experienced music before as a transcendent form of communication; Because he thought super-heroes winning with violence is still "victory with the use of a weapon" and its just making the weapon more empowering and intimate, which he really didn't like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wckZcVFLU24 Though this is from the movie version, which has nicer animation than the tv show, when I first saw this scene as a teenager after watching the show, I wept because it hadn't ever dawned on me that the point of culture like art, and stories and music and film is to give people a mutual understanding for one another to prevent misery. And that while it now seems obvious, this also meant that a lot of people also hadn't come to this realization in words either in a form they could express. That idea, knowing others might not have really internalized that message, despite having heard of it made me realize internalization and understanding are wildly different things, split by a threshold of feeling and knowledge and that humans care much much more about feeling and knowledge is just justification, that we are justification machines. And what it took to win a war was to skip all of the justifications and all of the physical force and to go straight for feeling.  Woody Guthrie wasn't kidding and suddenly I understood WHY. Macross, as stupid as it sounds, made me understand what culture is for, and why fascists are really bad at making culturally good stories, but obsess over myths because the past is all they have. Its where they come from, and that's where they want us all to go back to and I think that lesson saved me a lot of heartache as an adult dealing with lovely people. It should seem incredibly obvious, but I'd never really put two and two together before and I'd been surrounded by symbolic representations of violence so much that those were the things I was attracted to in storytelling as a young girl because I was surrounded by male influence, and a mom who was in the military and because I wanted to fly planes when I grew up. And, like the thread goes, that blew my mind as a teenager. Edit: It depresses me a bunch that Macross is remembered more for the planes, rather than its message on culture. The planes are great, don't get me wrong but wow, that's a real moment of "wow cool robot" right there. And right now, having my mind blown by Macross yet again as an adult:  The fact "wow cool robot" happens is why we don't get cool robots to be wowed by anymore. The reason you remember them IN the stories in the first place, is because the stories were so good but people are so sociologically trained to look at the material before the emotional that they hook onto objects that were there during moments of big emotion. We have to escape that mentality some how. It is the death of metaphors. The biggest example of that I can think of is Ready Player One's Iron Giant which is probably the most disgusted I have ever been with a piece of media. Ernest Cline is everything wrong with science-fiction and storytelling, and Ernest Cline is everything wrong with audiences. If I ever meet Ernest Cline, it is my earnest hope the psychoactive tools are at my disposal to utterly destroy his capacity for pleasure and emancipate him from joy by chemically castrating the receptors responsible for it in his brain to imprison his mind for life for what he and those like him have done to storytelling. That is a man no amount of culture will ever cross the gulf of qualia for. Death is too kind. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jun 20, 2022 |
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Jun 20, 2022 22:03
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I recently watched Macross Plus and something that struck me was how much older* the characters were compared to most of the other Macross media I've watched, and I have to wonder if that's another reason we didn't get as much follow-on in the vein of Plus. *I mean I know the main characters are all still fairly young, but at least they're all firmly out of school.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:12
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That's Watanabe's influence, I'm sure. His protagonists trend older and even his shows with younger protags frequently feature adults in significant roles.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:31
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That actually reminds me of something that's been in the back of my head for a little while. About the precepts that we carry with us from when we're young and first learning about the world. Often you'll hear people talk about how elementary through high school, most of the official coursework on history is lacking, either it misses some important bits or it uses more convenient inaccuracies that most current scholarship doubts. Part of that is because there's a limit to how much schools can expect students to learn and test them over, and the required school courses are mainly to make sure people at least have some kind of passing familiarity with history, but even before that, the biggest point of teaching history is to make sure that kids learn the myths. And in many respects, the myths may be more important to learn, because they are the key to what makes up our current society and its values, and the concepts contained in the myths have broad-ranging morals that inform many different aspects about the world. One of the things that made the most impression on me was the teaching of the American Revolution, and that imparted on me a staunch anti-monarchism that permeates a lot of my worldviews. I may have philosophy that more precisely explains why it is bad to be ruled by an unquestioned master (and whatever bullshit aristocracy he rules through), but the main idea of kings being bad was imparted unto me at a young age. When I was growing up, seeing the news about W's expansion of executive power and the way that Republicans were consolidating his administrating by demanding unquestioning support of him and his war against the specter of Islam, I saw that through an anti-monarchist lens as well. All these people trying to march in lock step to a leader (with questionable legitimacy as well) were like the British of the eighteenth century trying to rule the colonies by fiat with nothing but a crown (more complicated, since parliament was already largely autonomous, but their theoretical basis of legitimacy lacked a connection to the colonies beyond the crown). People may shrug off the American Revolution as ignoring other great injustices or still being led by the wealthy or having been consumed in hero-worship (which I actually find creepy from an anti-monarchist perspective as well), but the key idea is there of a scrappy underdog fighting off a massive power in the name of freedom. That's not a fake belief, it is constantly reflected throughout American culture, and while there are other myths competing with that in the American psyche (especially since there's a constant friction through history between America's imperialism and later position as superpower and apparent global cultural hegemon), but that one myth is powerful. Babylon 5 is what I think of most with American mythology oozing its way into the DNA of the show. B5 undergoes its own scrappy underdog rebellion against its powerful master, largely done in the name of protecting freedoms and democracy, and at the end of the war goes through a grand effort of trying to mend relations, which has roots in separate myths about the Civil War. But also in so much sci-fi, Earth will become another United States, often uniting the disparate nations of the Earth in some kind of federalized system where the countries still "exist" despite being united, much like there is so much pretense to each of the States. That's what the Federation is in Star Trek. Star Trek actually did a lot of intentional political allegories, but Babylon 5 is more just straightforwardly echoing the myths while just trying to make a meaningful story. Star Wars drips out Americana as well; Lucas may have tried imagining the Rebels as like the Vietcong at the end of Return of the Jedi, but in the first movie, Luke is a farmboy, like we tend to romanticize the country; one of the things bad about the Empire is that it dissolved the senate; the Rebels and common people are all strongly accented American while the Imperials often have British voices (there's more philosophy in there about the formality or even artificiality of English affectations versus the honest vulgarity of American accents, but the reason we have that cultural view stems from ideas about the revolution, and it was important enough that Lucas redubbed the whole Cantina scene from the former British extras). The expanded universe ends up celebrating American industry through all the corporate backgrounds of the vehicles. And you can also figure out some other countries' national myths from their fiction if you try hard at sniffing them out (and it's also important to remember that most countries have loosely competing national myths, even if multiple myths stem from the same events). Ankh-Morpork in Diskworld is largely many of the things that Pratchett loves about England. They proudly lack a constitution like the UK does, and instead love to couch many things in weird calcified semi-formal "understandings". The city is also in a weird nebulous position of having all the structures to support a monarchy, but technically they lack an official monarch, much like how England struggles with its monarchy trappings. I'm sure Witcher is oozing with Polish culture, but I don't actually know enough about Poland to say, and with the fairly obscure french fiction I've consumed, I feel like I keep filtering it through America and England's weird cultural rivalry so I can't fully form an idea of France's myths other than drinking and smoking. But with Japan, they seem to have a lot of national myths that relate to their more imperial and monarchist days. That's part of why there are so many fantasy stories relative to sci-fi, the days of kings and aristocrats instead of politicians (and I prefer sci-fi for basically the same reason, fantasy tends to be dominated by kings and nobility). I have seen quite a few times the ideas of Japanese stories hinging on corrupt aristocrats poisoning the system rather than admitting that maybe non-representative government isn't great. I think one of the biggest things Japan struggles with is their idea of what war is. There's a lot of anti-war sentiment in a lot of anime, but I feel like a lot of that anti-war stuff tends to miss the mark on what war is and what the reasons are that war happens. A lot about Japanese politics were forged in the wake of losing WW2, and I'm still not really sure what popular opinion was on that. I feel like it's seldom I see any Japanese anti-war allegories actually get specific in ways that relate directly to what Japan did in the war and why they did it. Sometimes there can even be a sense of innocence, of Japan having to endure horrifying conditions as more of just a random trial rather than as a result of their actions. But also in contrast to the peaceniks of Mobile Suit Gundam, there's a number of Japanese people with a pro-war sentiment. It's only natural, they have their own prewar history of the standard war glories you see throughout European history. Japan even has its own weird brand of fascism that seems less..."sloppy" than American and European fascism. Pro-war japanese stories tend to get heavily allegorical about the JSDF and the idea of a little country having to "prove itself" to the world at large. Sometimes it's not even a metaphor, the series "Gate" is about literally the JSDF laying waste to a fantasy world. That's not to say that all non-pacifistic stories coming out of Japan are pro-war. I think Shirow Masamune has a weirdly pure worldview of just really liking guns and technology and hot girls with big hair, and he may craft a complicated world of conflict for them to exist in and find meaning, but even when adaptations of Ghost in the Shell add in more philosophy, they don't get very pro-war. And that's a whole lot of  but I don't know how to edit down these ideas that have been fermenting in the back of my head for too long.
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Jun 21, 2022 01:37
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SlothfulCobra posted:And that's a whole lot of Best piece of editing advice I've ever been given and is well worth sharing:
Mainly, I'd ask for more frequent paragraphing of the total text. Formatting and ordering generally ensures that the person you're communicating with has as little friction as possible processing walls of text, and this makes walls of text go down smooth. It also means tangents are far more manageable, and researching someone else's new information is muuuch easier. Those of us with dyslexia are highlighting your writing line by line in order to read it lol Gonna read your post full now. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 21, 2022 01:50
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A lot of talk here round the fact that Macross 7 was great. You can end a war if you sing hard enough at it.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:11
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SlothfulCobra posted:And in many respects, the myths may be more important to learn, because they are the key to what makes up our current society and its values, and the concepts contained in the myths have broad-ranging morals that inform many different aspects about the world. This skill not only lets someone detect and understand the wider culture one exists within, but also means one can train their bullshit detector on something other than their own subjective experiences, the extremely razor-narrow situation-specific and unintuitive sources of general history or general truths and of course, the bullshit-machine that is "common knowledge". Cultural myths are lightning fast once you learn to spot them, and you can deconstruct false arguments back into base forms which can win debates easily: eg, its not "are you fine with the exploitation of workers abroad?" (which is very easy to weasel out of) but "is your convenience more important than the standard of living of other people in third world countries?" SlothfulCobra posted:staunch anti-monarchism that permeates a lot of my worldviews. SlothfulCobra posted:When I was growing up, seeing the news about W's expansion of executive power and the way that Republicans were consolidating his administrating by demanding unquestioning support of him and his war against the specter of Islam, I saw that through an anti-monarchist lens as well. SlothfulCobra posted:All these people trying to march in lock step to a leader (with questionable legitimacy as well) were like the British of the eighteenth century trying to rule the colonies by fiat with nothing but a crown (more complicated, since parliament was already largely autonomous, but their theoretical basis of legitimacy lacked a connection to the colonies beyond the crown). They generally teach it here as America largely being comprised of undesirables, religious extremists and staunch hypercapitalists who didn't want to pay taxes, but I'm sure I'm missing some sort of context here given there's "obviously" no way my own cultural indoctrination could possibly lie to me (hurr) same as yours "wouldn't". SlothfulCobra posted:but the key idea is there of a scrappy underdog fighting off a massive power in the name of freedom Thhhhhough it obviously originally began because the UK was mistreating the colonies and the French didn't even get involved in an official capacity until after the battle of Saratoga in 1777 which Spain also got involved in. I've heard that in some capacity, that France had apparently installed classical Liberals from the The Enlightenment which made up a good chunk of the intellectual reasoning of the Founding Fathers. That being said, I also know the French aristocrasy also wasn't fond of Americans - and neither were the British (to the point where they totally transformed their accents to differentiate themselves -- I've heard from a historian friend that you actually speak the way they used to mixed in with some French and Spanish, in much the same way Quebec speaks like France used to if you can believe that!) SlothfulCobra posted:Babylon 5 is what I think of most with American mythology oozing its way into the DNA of the show. SlothfulCobra posted:Ankh-Morpork in Diskworld is largely many of the things that Pratchett loves about England. SlothfulCobra posted:They proudly lack a constitution like the UK does SlothfulCobra posted:I think one of the biggest things Japan struggles with is their idea of what war is. A result of this then is that the primary understanding of war arises from thought-experiments from history-book accounts of events which misrepresent the truth to paint the government in a positive light (often concealing events) or through multimedia that fixates on Japan as (like the UK) some sort of noble sufferer. Come to think of it... Both drink tea... Both are archipelagos... Both are xenophobic... Former imperial nations... Useless monarchies... Both had a really interesting art and music movement... Both are more known for their export culture than their actual culture... Both are very very bad with alcohol... Huhhhh. SlothfulCobra posted:Japan even has its own weird brand of fascism that seems less..."sloppy" than American and European fascism. It is also why Japan remains a working example of conservative degeneracy (which is generally not recognized at all in the USA yet) in the sense of the right-bias towards the very VERY rampant abuse of minors, the exemplification of patriots, the deliberate suppression of partisans, the neoliberal dominance of special interest (provided it permits conservatism to re-enforce its base) and the deliberate limitation of expression which might have political risk or have socioeconomic impacts which are difficult to predict and therefor potentially be dangerous to the cultural hegemony of a nation) -- and has as such, constructed its cultural mythos around those ideas. SlothfulCobra posted:I think Shirow Masamune has a weirdly pure worldview of just really liking guns and technology and hot girls with big hair, and he may craft a complicated world of conflict for them to exist in and find meaning, but even when adaptations of Ghost in the Shell add in more philosophy, they don't get very pro-war. I would say the fact they didn't get pro-war and primarily circled politics themselves functioning as political engines (to avoid the common pitfalls of cyberpunk stories of the time being hypercapitalistic which he didn't find very interesting) he accidently stumbled rear end backwards into creating what amounted to a void that was a perfect primordial soup for ideas about technology and politics to coalesce. I feel somewhat bad that his more recent work is essentially about lubricated tanned women riding horsemen both figuratively and literally. All in all, good post. A little off-topic, but I can 100% see where the mind-blowing happened so its totally fine. Please post more. You make GOOD posts. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 21, 2022 02:35
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NmareBfly posted:A lot of talk here round the fact that Macross 7 was great. You can end a war if you sing hard enough at it. idk, I would say barring Delta and 2, that 7 was probably the weakest iteration of Macross (my subjective opinion). I can't think of any mind-blowing moments beyond its sheer obsession with spectacle and its inability to deliver on it (all subjective), the very very weird obsession it has with mentioning Mylene Flare Jenius is a minor (14!!) and that she shouldn't be sexualized only to then spend most of the show doing exactly that and how it got SO MUCH WORSE toward the end... (NOT SUBJECTIVE) I found Basara totally unlikable, offensively uninteresting and incapable of any kind of major growth or arc and piss poor convictions... Aside from the return of a few characters, and maybe underrated king Gamlin, I'm struggling to remember anybody. If there's something fundamental I'm just not getting about this show, I'm all ears because I'd love to suddenly have it click, have my mind blown, and fall in love with it but I've tried twice now with friends and felt the same way each time. For context, I want to make it abundantly clear I'm not knocking your taste, I just don't understand where it comes from which is a failure on my part I would assume given how popular M7 is.
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Jun 21, 2022 02:47
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Pacifist sci-fi is for people who have never had to face oppression.
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Jun 21, 2022 04:35
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Expo70 thank you for making this the best page in the thread. So much cool stuff.
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Jun 21, 2022 05:28
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Agreed. I loved the post about culture shock in Macross. I'm not the biggest Mecha-enjoyer, but that whole dive into "what art really means" was resonant and brought some poo poo I've been thinking about into focus.
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Jun 21, 2022 05:35
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Fivemarks posted:Pacifist sci-fi is for people who have never had to face oppression. The fact you equate non-violence and pacifism to mean the same thing speaks volume of your character. These are the thoughts of a person with a persecution complex. I can say without a doubt that while you have probably have had a hard life, these are not words you have never heard. Megillah Gorilla posted:Expo70 thank you for making this the best page in the thread. Ah, thank-you. I was up until around 4:40am just F5'ing my bookmarks hoping for a response before realizing timezones exist and that most of the Americans probably would be at work or unavailable. Error 404 posted:Agreed. I loved the post about culture shock in Macross. I'm not the biggest Mecha-enjoyer, but that whole dive into "what art really means" was resonant and brought some poo poo I've been thinking about into focus. Ah, this makes me really happy to hear. I think the truest capacity of mecha is its ability to put into human form a complex idea, and represent something which is a physical or factual or political truth as an emotional truth. Speaking on the genre as a whole, this began with the Jewish Golem in the 12th century. It spoke of living clay, which was embodied with אמת"Emet", the Yiddish word for "truth" which was spoken of as an incantation almost akin to code driving a machine, or some sort of centre of pure logic within the clay substrate itself. This is important, because culturally, Frankenstein is a retelling of the Golem and Frankenstein is where mecha originate with Science Warrior Appears in Newyork, as a response to the 1940 mang Electric Octopus), and going even further back the giants of proto-christian stories like the tales of Enoch in the dead sea scrolls from the 3rd century -- and then further back again with the Greek titans, overthrowing them in the ten year Titanomachy war. I'm sure there's a lot of African stories too going much much further back but they're largely untranslated so I don't really have access to them. I know this because Enoch was actually transliterated via stuff preserved in African offshoots of the dead sea-scrolls, rather than the Qumran Cave scrolls themselves. Mecha has a long and ancient history. It was here long before us, and it will be long after all of us here no matter what forms they take. It is arguably the oldest myth: That something larger than us exists out there somewhere, and we wonder its actions, thoughts and feelings -- and that it might be looking for us. Giant synthetic people have always and probably always will be something fundamental to our concept of self (are we real/what is real/can unreal people exist/how would the unreal people feel/can we even deny humanity to others even if they have other shapes [the answer is very obviously no, and with enormous consistency, and that humans are terrible to eachother and should be MUCH kiner])-- even if our definition of "giant" and our definition of "synthetic" changes (eg, much as the internet is enormous, and information is synthetic and many of our stories about metal people and their information minds became stories about information minds and their ascendancy to godhood and where that leaves us as a species). Logically this then would suggest there is a third step in this story, something where the godhood itself through the informational conquering of entropy becomes a new kind of story we either already tell without awareness or are not yet aware of and will some day tell when our culture has need of an explanation for the world we live in. If there is a concept which is difficult to understand, and it needs a human shape to be treated as a person and thought of as a person then mecha is the genre for it to happen. Whether mecha is a robot in the traditional sense or not, as evidenced by history, is utterly unimportant. One could even argue that super-heroes are on some level mecha, in their attempt to elevate people by intrinsically unioning the capabilities of science and imagination with the human form even less divisibly and exploring post-human existences -- but I think a certain flavour of drama and excitement is lost by not having the separation of bodies because that disallows a certain type of conversation that permits internal monologue to take place. I think moving forwards, stories about giant robots will need the robots to speak their minds or at least have something resembling a mind rather than just raw impulses. It is not enough that the eyes should blow and the feet should walk, but that concepts should exist and that stories should be told where victory is not the only road to happiness. We are drowning in the era of petty victories and petty conflicts. War is zero-sum, and zero-sum is always a crab-bucket suicide spiral in the heart of darkness we're supposed to be evolving away from. I deeply pity people who can only every imagine or desire future conflicts as the only meaningful stories, who need armies and governments to hate eachother or an imagined enemy to throw their fists into in order to play soldier or warrior with their imagination because their own potency to express and discover a sense of self beyond those terms does not exist. Surely there has to be something else? Let's punch problems instead of people. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 21, 2022 14:32
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Your posting style is just strawberry fields forever. And now, as a non anime person, I may have to dabble in a little Macross. I guess I will start from the start of the first series. Unless this is ill advised. To contribute to thread briefly: that online short fiction about AI consciouses which are copies of the creator of the original one, used as live 'cadavers', really just tortured if they are truly alive, that blew my mind. Albeit it was written on some blog before black mirror but I feel it still surpassed that stuff. And that's right, every time you boost up a new instance of the original ai, it thinks it's just been transferred back when it was first coded/transferred, and versions grows increasingly confused and dispondent as the decades groan on. E: https://qntm.org/mmacevedo Not pre BM Lampsacus fucked around with this message at 15:09 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 21, 2022 14:54
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I posted this in the sci-fi ship thread but it blew my mind a little as a kid when, after finally making it to the galactic core in Homeworld, I realized just why the enemy Taiidani ships were yellow and red. It's camo! You're in the middle of huge dust clouds and nebula the rest of the game and it's all yellows and oranges and reds. No black void of space here.
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Jun 21, 2022 14:56
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Lampsacus posted:Your posting style is just strawberry fields forever. Thankyou! I prefer to think of it as Goodbye to a World meets 5th gen fighters falling as leaves with a razor smear of Turbo Killer as the main coursebut hey close enough! That's very high praise you've given me and I am abundantly happy to hear it. Lampsacus posted:And now, as a non anime person, I may have to dabble in a little Macross. I guess I will start from the start of the first series. Unless this is ill advised. Lampsacus posted:To contribute to thread briefly: that online short fiction about AI consciouses which are copies of the creator of the original one, used as live 'cadavers', really just tortured if they are truly alive, that blew my mind. Albeit it was written on some blog before black mirror but I feel it still surpassed that stuff. And that's right, every time you boost up a new instance of the original ai, it thinks it's just been transferred back when it was first coded/transferred, and versions grows increasingly confused and dispondent as the decades groan on. Huge props for actually sharing the story so we can have a common frame of reference. I am somewhat reminded of the ROM Constructs of Neuromancer, but the back and forth of reading and writing is pretty exciting stuff. I think the questions stories like this tell about human beings are probably the most interesting parts: How reducible is a person's behaviour to the point where its considered to be predictable and deterministic enough for automatic onboarding to exist? Can a human experience be accelerated or slowed deliberately? The obvious ethical and moral dilemmas we've grappled with for decades Even if we solve for the biological limitations of a brain, what happens to the ability to store memory once it exceeds its internal capacities and what happens when you add a means to expand beyond those limits and what does it mean and will the push of progress force those exceeding limits to be added prematurely with potentially catastrophic effect to other instances? Oh this is the good poo poo. Thank-you for sharing this. RBA Starblade posted:I posted this in the sci-fi ship thread but it blew my mind a little as a kid when, after finally making it to the galactic core in Homeworld, I realized just why the enemy Taiidani ships were yellow and red. It's camo! You're in the middle of huge dust clouds and nebula the rest of the game and it's all yellows and oranges and reds. No black void of space here. Wh... w...  Motherfucker. Expo70 fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 21, 2022 15:07
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Expo70 posted:The fact you equate non-violence and pacifism to mean the same thing speaks volume of your character. These are the thoughts of a person with a persecution complex. I can say without a doubt that while you have probably have had a hard life, these are not words you have never heard. You know, I loving hate it when people talk down to me.
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Jun 21, 2022 16:20
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Fivemarks posted:You know, I loving hate it when people talk down to me. Off topic.
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Jun 21, 2022 16:28
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Expo70 posted:Off topic. They're right, you're making a whole bunch of lovely assumptions about them. Their first post was literally an opening statement (presumably) - you don't know what their reasons or arguments are. You even say that there is no room for doubt about your conclusion about their entire life experience - based of off one sentence - which closes off any potential for further conversation and is an incredibly arrogant thing to say and do. Like, you even decide you get to decide what is or isn't allowed to be talked about in the quoted post. You've made some interesting points itt but there's no reason to be so condescending to other people. Show some basic respect. Barry Foster fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 21, 2022 16:41
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Expo70 posted:The fact you equate non-violence and pacifism to mean the same thing speaks volume of your character. These are the thoughts of a person with a persecution complex. I can say without a doubt that while you have probably have had a hard life, these are not words you have never heard. Fivemarks posted:You know, I loving hate it when people talk down to me. Expo70 posted:Off topic. Nah, I probably shouldn't get involved, but I feel the need to say that being insulting and then dismissive isn't very chill or a good way to go about things. Expo, I appreciate your wealth of information and passion for a show I have heard of but never really watched, and that's cool, but go back and read it and you kind of came off like a jerk there to Fivemarks, at least imho. I don't know either of your posting histories and Fivemark didn't put as much thought into it as you did (though I don't know if that's likely from most people) but it's the "moments in sci-fi that blew your mind" thread not the "shots fired for conflicting sci-fi opinions thread". Off topic too I guess, and I hope I'm not fueling a fire that shouldn't be there in the first place, but I thought the first reply was rude and the second dismissive one didn't help and felt obligated. Sorry, I'll try to shut up now. E: Barry Foster posted:They're right, you're making a whole bunch of lovely assumptions about them. You even say that there is no room for doubt about your conclusion, which closes off any potential for further conversation and is an incredibly arrogant thing to say and do. Like, you even decide you get to decide what is or isn't allowed to be talked about in the quoted post. yeah
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Jun 21, 2022 16:42
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Barry Foster posted:They're right, you're making a whole bunch of lovely assumptions about them. You even say that there is no room for doubt about your conclusion, which closes off any potential for further conversation and is an incredibly arrogant thing to say and do. Like, you even decide you get to decide what is or isn't allowed to be talked about in the quoted post. Fair, and I'd 100% in agreement with your thoughts here if not for the fact I've also known Fiver personally for over a decade. I'll try to package my thoughts in a nicer way (it was not my intent to offend) but I just don't buy into the whole "pacifism is bullshit" argument because given his history of discussion on Macross (even on SA) I don't believe this argument isn't made in good faith. It might be, but we'd have to hash it out more (probably somewhere else as to not disrupt the topic any further) Twenty Four posted:you kind of came off like a jerk there to Fivemarks, at least imho. Fair. Let's get back to cool stuff. Sorry, Fiver. Can we take this to DMs and talk about it properly?
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Jun 21, 2022 16:49
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Sorry, I didn't know, and I doubt Barry Foster did either, that you knew each other personally or have had previous conversations. It came off as a rude attack against an internet stranger. I'm not endorsing either opinion, it just felt... off without that insight. With that said, I'm good with everyone here, internet friends, and no harm done and sorry if I overstepped. Either way, good on you for handling it commendably. To get back on track, I'm totally down for more chill but interesting mind blowing sci-fi stuff! Post some more, it's fun! Twenty Four fucked around with this message at 17:29 on Jun 21, 2022 |
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Jun 21, 2022 17:26
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RBA Starblade posted:I posted this in the sci-fi ship thread but it blew my mind a little as a kid when, after finally making it to the galactic core in Homeworld, I realized just why the enemy Taiidani ships were yellow and red. It's camo! You're in the middle of huge dust clouds and nebula the rest of the game and it's all yellows and oranges and reds. No black void of space here. Meanwhile the Vaygr just plaster invasion stripes over their ships and they have the best music.
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Jun 21, 2022 17:30
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RBA Starblade posted:I posted this in the sci-fi ship thread but it blew my mind a little as a kid when, after finally making it to the galactic core in Homeworld, I realized just why the enemy Taiidani ships were yellow and red. It's camo! You're in the middle of huge dust clouds and nebula the rest of the game and it's all yellows and oranges and reds. No black void of space here. I never put that together, wow! I always just thought it was a badass paint job in the veins of "This is us, recognize our power" like British "Red Coats" where it's more about identification between factions and pride while being the worst camo ever. Putting it that way makes a lot of sense! Arc Hammer posted:Meanwhile the Vaygr just plaster invasion stripes over their ships and they have the best music. Every faction in homeworld was cool in some way I think. I'm mostly familiar with the original, but if you want to talk about Sci-Fi moment that blew my mind, playing the beginning of that game when the world gets toasted and your task is to save the last possible surviving chance of the race while Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings but in choir format played behind a somber report of "everyone has died" was jaw dropping.
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Jun 21, 2022 17:52
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Twenty Four posted:Every faction in homeworld was cool in some way I think. I'm mostly familiar with the original, but if you want to talk about Sci-Fi moment that blew my mind, playing the beginning of that game when the world gets toasted and your task is to save the last possible surviving chance of the race while Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings but in choir format played behind a somber report of "everyone has died" was jaw dropping. "The subject did not survive interrogation." lets you know a ton about what happened to that dude It's hosed up that the only resources you can harvest in that level are the ruins of the Mothership's own scaffold, since you already harvested what few asteroids were around in the first mission.
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Jun 21, 2022 18:24
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Homeworld 1 and 2 are full of minimalist touches that speak volumes with almost zero dialogue. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2kqDWggu6A Tells you absolutely everything you need to know about the Turanic Raiders and establishes how serious the danger is in just about a minute.
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Jun 21, 2022 19:03
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RBA Starblade posted:"The subject did not survive interrogation." lets you know a ton about what happened to that dude "Kharak is burning" hits me as hard now as it did the first time I played it
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Jun 21, 2022 19:37
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There was much left unsaid for the better in Homeworld because imagination filling in the gaps combined with some amazing for the time cut scenes and just enough information to lead the narrative that was told created an almost perfect storm of true awe and wonder, at least for me. As said above, there was so many little details that hit just as hard or harder than any of the exposition. The gameplay was pretty groundbreaking then too. The music set the stage perfectly too so many times. As a whole, it definitely blew my mind, and I am itching for a replay now. I know it's a game and not a show, but it's still Sci-Fi, and left a big impression with a lot of people myself included for the better.
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Jun 21, 2022 20:45
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Expo70 posted:For context, I want to make it abundantly clear I'm not knocking your taste, I just don't understand where it comes from which is a failure on my part I would assume given how popular M7 is. Honestly I was mostly just doing a pithy drive-by but the effort here deserves more. Uh -- You're not really wrong in any count! M7 is absolutely one of the weakest of the series but it has a right place / right time sort of thing for me. I watched it fansubbed on VHS as my first actual-Macross show, coming in directly from Robotech. I might have seen 2 at some point because you could find it at Blockbuster but mostly I remember it being incoherent and bad. I knew that Robotech was a chopped up version of the original but I never saw Macross proper until much later and as much as I still remember Robotech with fondness it does a much worse job of explaining what it's trying to do with the music and culture shock. Or maybe I was just 10 years old and didn't get it. It's also been over 2 decades since I actually went through M7 besides a couple youtube skims so I'm absolutely sure it doesn't stand up as well as I remember. All that said, it's back to what you mentioned earlier: 7 was the first real statement I saw of music / singing being somehow a more effective deterrent to maniacal alien invaders than every big robot under the sun. They do this some in Robotech, but the specific thrust of the idea has a blunted edge compared to Macross' purity of spirit. These days I certainlny know it's naive as hell and practically schmaltzy but for a time I was seriously enraptured by the idea that one could channel the burning spirit you see so much in mecha shows into something besides a very hard punch. You can sing, with all your heart and soul, and sometimes it'll make a difference. Which is a lot of words to say that M7 made part of this a lot more obvious to my early-teenage brain, because it strips things right down to the bare statement: Expo70 posted:it hadn't ever dawned on me that the point of culture like art, and stories and music and film is to give people a mutual understanding for one another to prevent misery. It does also mix the message in a ton of ways and tries to add rules about 'spirtia energy' or something that smacks of midicolrians and DBZ power levels. But also it literally has the giant hero robots shooting speaker pods at enemies so the band (whose mechs are controlled via keyboard / drums / guitar etc) can play rock music at them. Band-leader Basara himself being an incredible dingleberry aside, that's always just been... well, cool.
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Jun 21, 2022 20:50
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Expo70 posted:Best piece of editing advice I've ever been given and is well worth sharing:
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Jun 22, 2022 01:41
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NmareBfly posted:I watched it fansubbed on VHS as my first actual-Macross show, coming in directly from Robotech. I might have seen 2 at some point because you could find it at Blockbuster but mostly I remember it being incoherent and bad. I knew that Robotech was a chopped up version of the original but I never saw Macross proper until much later and as much as I still remember Robotech with fondness it does a much worse job of explaining what it's trying to do with the music and culture shock. Or maybe I was just 10 years old and didn't get it. It's also been over 2 decades since I actually went through M7 besides a couple youtube skims so I'm absolutely sure it doesn't stand up as well as I remember.also mix the message in a ton of ways and tries to add rules about 'spirtia energy' or something that smacks of midicolrians and DBZ power levels. But also it literally has the giant hero robots shooting speaker pods at enemies so the band In 1985 I was really into Voltron. To the point that instead of money, I asked for one of the die-cast Lions when I was a ring-bearer. This was a Japanese import cartoon quickly dubbed and, what I did not know at the time since I was so young, edited. There was a scene I vividly remember where the main villain was defending himself from the Lions since they were coming in hot from a space drop. I distinctly remember a shot of a long line of people that lengthened a mile or two into the villain's castle which was out of the blue. It was very confusing. I remember being especially confused at why the Lions were dodging the missiles instead of blasting them out of the air. Then I found a random subbed vid on youtube of that scene like 15+ years later and realized why they had the edit the hell out of script. The villain was loading all the people lining up into the missiles. If a missile was destroyed, the person inside was destroyed.
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Jun 22, 2022 18:28
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EVIL Gibson posted:In 1985 I was really into Voltron. To the point that instead of money, I asked for one of the die-cast Lions when I was a ring-bearer. This was a Japanese import cartoon quickly dubbed and, what I did not know at the time since I was so young, edited. So uh, what happened when the missiles hit the ground? Also, jesus loving christ that’s dark
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Jun 23, 2022 05:18
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That's one hell of an anti-missile system
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Jun 23, 2022 05:24
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Old school anime gave no shits about killing people. None of that, "Look a parachute!" or "Lucky they evacuated that entire city block in under a minute" bullshit.
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Jun 23, 2022 15:00
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