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 Post subject: Re: How about a Discord ?
Posted: 21 Mar 2019, 19:15 

For me personally it’s just that I don’t need more or faster or easier interactions with people I need higher quality interactions with people. This forum lets us put all our thoughts out in well formatted posts that are actually worth something an hour or a year later, even Trippletopper because let’s face it he has created the most popular topics in the last year. :)

Think of all of Ty’s posts that keep coming up when you search for things and realize that if he had typed all that stuff into Facebook or whatever it would already be lost. When you make your posts on this forum you make it better and better. When you put it on FB it basically just starts trying to make ad revenue and if that fails it essentially disappears. People have abandoned forums for something much much worse.

This forum also has one owner which has its advantages.

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 Post subject: Re: How about a Discord ?
Posted: 21 Mar 2019, 20:08 

I understand. Again this is just me but I only have so much time to contribute so anything I put somewhere means it’s something I’m not putting somewhere else. I quit Twitter on election eve ‘16 and Facebook after the midterms and I’m getting SO much more stuff done.

Ideally what I would like to see is more forum traffic and thats something that’s hard to achieve with FB out there. Here like three people will worship photos of your collection but on LD Forever you’ll get a hundred Likes which will make your brain think that’s a better place of discussion when in fact it’s mostly a cesspool filled with horribly lit photos of crap LDs and transparent compliment fishing. The gratification must be INSTANT and therefore they don’t have time to even take a decent photo let alone write something worth reading.

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 Post subject: Re: How about a Discord ?
Posted: 23 Mar 2019, 06:59 

As a collector of many things I honestly consider a premium LD to be one of the absolute coolest things there is. Since peak LD was pre-public Internet there aren’t a lot of pictures of the really nice stuff out there and this frankly makes it so much more special when I finally get a copy myself. The mystery amplifies it all. If you really do want to impress someone with your LDs (or more likely, try to explain why you aren’t nuts for liking the obsolete boat anchors so much) you need to invite them over so they can see the stuff in person.

There’s honestly a barrier of sorts that exists between people who have only seen sub $100 titles and those lucky enough to have higher end ish. The lavish Japanese stuff and also a few US things like Pioneer Special Editions really blow the minds of even some long time collectors when they do see them. I remember having a discussion with a guy who thought some US item was the biggest box set ever...I don’t remember what it was, maybe the Star Trek movie box something, and it took some convincing to get him to realize otherwise. I was like...no man, there’s a Kamen Rider LD box that is not only an entire season of TV but it has a complete set of trading cards and comes in aluminum flight case, presumably so you can strap it to the back of your motorcycle and fight crime without dinging up the sleeves. The Mighty Atom set was not only dozens of LDs but it has its own wooden shelf with glass door on it. It comes with its own furniture because it needs it! Star Wars CAV...phssh, please. It may as well be a 7” single compared to the UY box. If you know, you know, but you can’t really know LD over the Internet. It just doesn’t translate. That’s the coolest thing.

I’m not saying I’m against posting photos of things if there is some point to it, I do that, but I’m grateful that we aren’t knee deep in high res scans of every surface of every LD just to increase the good chemicals in some noobs brain for three seconds.

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Posted: 24 Mar 2019, 22:20 

If you have a DTS disc it’s DTS only or analog. If it’s PAL, if PAL DTS discs exist, then DTS would be it.

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 Post subject: Re: Macross memorial boxes
Posted: 09 Apr 2019, 01:10 

The contents of disc 11 in the 15th version:

1: no-super (no credits) opening
2: no-super ending
3: no-super opening (mini chara version)
4: no-super ending (Macross Special version)
5: plastic model comercials
6: line art archive

All in CAV, quality is very high. A frame-by-framer’s dream.

FYI: “Macross Special” refers to the way episodes 1 and 2 were originally broadcast as one hour long special and part of that was an alternate ending. In all other markets and in reruns it’s shown as two eps.

The plamo CM archive is ironically mostly if not all ARII kits and not Bandai

The line art archive is very big. If you have the mooks and whatnot you already have all of it but it’s still very impressive to see juat how much design work was done for this show.

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Posted: 12 Apr 2019, 15:10 

Is the live action content on the Daicon LD the same as on Otaku no Video? When I watched Otaku no Video in the '90s I pledged to become an Otaking and also imagined what it would be like if General Products actually existed, but they actually did..even putting out LDs..so good..a definite holy grail of mine and many.

The live action part is different depending on if you got the VHS or LD version. IIRC one is a legend of orochi thing and the other is the legend of No Tenki, a parody SFX hero.

The only thing from these releases that’s in OnV is animated, the Macross stuff they are watching together on tape in one of the otakunization scenes in the first EP.

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Posted: 16 Apr 2019, 17:40 

But where would all these publishers get new bad masters of OVAs just to give CPM? Like four years after the only JP release. Where does bad sound come from?

It seems much more likely to me that CPM just had crap decks, overlay machines, techs, etc. While not as bad as Manga, almost everything CPM release was muddy. The sleeves and the discs. It’s all another generation removed from the JP original which doesn’t help but it also doesn’t have to look worse than a fan sub.

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Posted: 20 Apr 2019, 23:30 

People being raped in half isn’t really something that you can apply normal criticism to, or defense of. That ish is absolutely horrendous and I don’t know what’s wrong with someone that they’d even be able to stomach it let alone enjoy it.

If you’re a fan of shows like that and they happen to be legal where you live then...well, lucky you I guess. Your mother must be very proud of you.

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 Post subject: Re: Macross memorial boxes
Posted: 20 Apr 2019, 23:35 

I was very glad when I found a copy of Run Melos! It’s not the most famous thing but it’s one of my favorites. The story is incredibly moving. It reminds me of The Killer in a lot of ways.

Sadly, the LD isn’t very good, IIRC.

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Posted: 06 May 2019, 16:28 

So like Laserdisc in 1985. I’m fine with that.

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 Post subject: Re: Is the LDDB shop legit?
Posted: 28 May 2019, 23:33 

It’s totally legit. All the boner pills I bought here work fine.

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Posted: 31 May 2019, 15:41 

The Wizard of Speed and Time (actual name) is essential for fans of stop motion and optical FX from that period as well as people who like to see depictions or normal brown crappy West Hollywood on screen. :) I wouldn’t exactly find people in the street and try to convince them that they need to see the movie. Most people don’t care. I discovered it a long time ago in rental VHS so it’s a special movie for me.

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Posted: 11 Jun 2019, 16:45 

I don’t remember that name from when it ran on Super Sunday or whatever in the US. I think it was Ulysses 3000 or something like that.

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Posted: 13 Jun 2019, 00:41 

Another famous japanese co-productions directed by him; Once upon a time...space

https://static.animeguides.com/guides/iletaitunefoisespace/espace2.jpg
https://static.animeguides.com/guides/iletaitunefoisespace/espace4.jpg
I've wanted to watch this series so bad for years but I can't find it in French AND with english subtitles anywhere and it makes me so ANGRY

I refuse to buy it until I can watch it in the original Greek.

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Posted: 13 Jun 2019, 06:20 

I don’t think so. The WiiU game looked exactly like the original series. It took some will power to not buy it but I persevered. I’m sure it’s garbage.

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Posted: 19 Jun 2019, 17:06 

Most LD movies can’t be sold even at 1/4 their original price. I almost never buy anything for more that retail.

The Matrix was like $40-70 when it came out. It had a trillion moron fans who even like the sequels so a brief trend of it selling for $300 twenty years later isn’t really that meaningful. MUSE titles have almost always been expensive because they made so few for such a small time span. Meanwhile %95 of the other 65,000 LD titles are at like $7 if not $0.70

So IMO LD is a hobby you can go totally broke on but it’s also very cheap compared to most hobbies as long as you decide you aren’t a power collector and that you only need 45 sealed discs that all cost $800 each. There are these weirdos who don’t watch LD or have an LD library they have a “collection”, much of it unopened, all the titles are hot stuff they are only buying because other people told them too. They collect late releases mostly. Those champions of humanity will massively drive the price up on a small selection of stuff (often literally just posting a range of catalog numbers they want like a broken robot born with no heart or something) but they will never make the entire hobby go up in price because they don’t even know what movies are unless they are valuable collectables. The almost never buy ANY of the actual cool stuff, just whatever sells for the most on eBay. It’s a blessing that that there are just way too many LDs out there and too few collectards to jack the price up on everything.

I did not invent the word collectard but I have used it a lot because it’s perfect.

If you want a good copy of The Matrix I’d suggest Blu-ray. If the color timing matters make a special calibration for just that purpose and save $250. :)

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Posted: 19 Jun 2019, 17:56 

Oh no! Now my sealed LD of the best movie ever is worthless?

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Posted: 24 Jun 2019, 15:40 

I'm going to need more than one post for this.

Part 1: the Philosophical

While Star Trek is Gene Rodenbury’s thing, it was really the science fiction writers of the 1960s that shaped the show with their stories from week to week it. The most significant may have been Robert Heinlein (even though he never actually wrote an episode). This is an excerpt from his Wiki:

“Heinlein used his science fiction as a way to explore provocative social and political ideas, and to speculate how progress in science and engineering might shape the future of politics, race, religion, and sex. Within the framework of his science-fiction stories, Heinlein repeatedly addressed certain social themes: the importance of individual liberty and self-reliance, the nature of sexual relationships, the obligation individuals owe to their societies, the influence of organized religion on culture and government, and the tendency of society to repress nonconformist thought. He also speculated on the influence of space travel on human cultural practices.”

So that’s Trek and Gundam pretty much right there. You’d think Trek/Gundam’s relative hyper realism alone would contrast with Star War’s almost pure fantasy to the point where nobody would make the association but really its the philosophical stuff that makes it totally different. Sure, Trek and Gundam are both set on near future Earth and SW in some…other place in time….so that its always as foreign and exciting as possible whereas Gundam and Trek deal with issues cultures we current day humans actually recognize (and many are bored of) but that’s just part of it.

Gundam’s central theme is the exploration of humanity and its future. Humans have always evolved but so slowly that many doubt its even happening. Now with visual and audio recordings of everything we as a species will eventually have the ability to look back at our previous less-evolved selves (like footage of Star Wars conventions for example). What will that be like? Gundam has dealt with this from its first episode. In 0079 its becoming common to find humans with new minor psychic abilities that have apparently been awakened by generations of living in space and being subjected to the low G, the radiation, whatever it is. (Its my personal hunch that this part of Gundam was inspired by the words of returning Apollo astronauts.)

“The Force” was basically just one of those consequence free Hollywood ideas people invent when they can tell they are missing something in life but don’t want to bother with any actual religions. It went from an almost minor detail in the old movies to something instantly much stupider when Lucas tried to explain what it was and how it worked in the prequels. It was invented as a plot element, to put a God-like power into the story without offending anyone’s actual religion or lack thereof and reducing toy sales. A plot device that gets worse the closer you look at it.

Gundam isn’t doing that at all because we are all the living proof of human evolution and eventually we all move within in it. Its real and it pre and post dates anything you’ve ever seen. Gundam wants to explore that…but really there is more even than that.

Carl Sagan is famous for saying “The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.” Sagan didn’t write any Trek from what I know but his influence on scifi hippies is such that in the Trek universe there is a monument to him on Mars. In the world of Gundam there is a similar idea. While evolution may make us into something new, what humanity really needs is the wisdom that we hope will come with the New Type of human. And you don’t need to wait countless generations for that. We can work on that now. We can be Newtypes now by making it our focus to attain that understanding now, and that is, if anything, the central thesis of Gundam. Yes, it is a toy ad, but its an ad that challenges is six year old audience to be the generation that saves humanity which honestly sets it pretty far apart from anything.



Part 2 Fundamental Dissimilarities Between Star Wars and Gundam


Star Wars has good guys and bad guys. Like…actual cartoon villains and heroes who are just born that and that’s it. Like..if they are good they have good superpowers…like…OK, fine, but its pretty damn childish or sort of Howard Pile…1950s DC comics. I can buy warp drive in a star fighter but beams of evil? You have to be a baby to believe in “evil” in that way. Its great in a D&D kind of way but not in a “this is a serious drama” kinda way because its just dumb.

Gundam is not for patriots. If you are so damned stupid that you think that any national government is “good” you may have wanked into your flag too many times. Every Government in Gundam is cowardly, corrupt, filled with quislings, sellouts, war profiters, etc and the rebel factions, families, corporations, etc that form the other armies are ten times as jacked up and insane. Just like today! Neo Zion is basically just dynastic trillionaires who moved into space for the same reason their ancestors live on yachts today and much of the stuff from Char’s Counterattack and up almost reads like a cautionary tale…”Stay clear of Rich Energy” Tomino seems to say.

The United Federation of Planets has shown itself to be…not as bad as the UN Spacey or whatever you want to call them in Gundam. However there are several Trek stories that focus on it, such as the film Insurrection. It kind of reminds me of that one time in ZZ when people in the Earth government were going to take a one time payment in gold bullion and leave the planet just before surrendering it to Axis or whoever it was. Politicians! Star Wars has a guy in an actual black hat that shoots beams of evil and throttles senators in the name of “The Dark Side”. The Rebel Alliance is basically just good guys. They do the good.



The biggest thing probably is that there is no Earth in Star Wars or if there is our timeline is probably in its future. Imagine Star Trek without Earth, San Francisco, and humans who came from places like France or China? What’s “world war III” supposed to mean to some other galaxy? Gundam is usually at a tech level that’s not even where Enterprise was as there is no interstellar travel and apparently no more hope for it than we have today. Earth is the center of politics in Gundam since its the only inhabitable planet humankind has ever known of. Going to other stars is rarely ever discussed in Gundam. Everything takes place in the Earth sphere except some rare trips to Jupiter or whatever. You have Mexicans and Italians and all that, just like Trek. There is a Mona Lisa in both Trek and Gundam, as well as an Eiffel Tower and anarchists and Christians and wedding cakes and horseback riding and things that look like iPads. You take the Earth out of Trek or Gundam and its something totally different. You lose the consequence and the frame of reference for everything. In Gundam The Origin V or Narrative when that colony drops…man, that’s some heavy storytelling right there, and it was made more impactful by knowing what Australia actually is instead of it just being some other giant island that got half deleted by a space colony.

Now Star Wars has black people and white people and nobody every mentions it and that’s about all you get for Earth culture. Other than that its a Caravan Kid sort of wild ride through all sorts of crazy planets. You can blow up Alderan and its really just…OK, bad guys, sure, but nobody has a reflexive understanding of Alderan like they do with a real Earth location.

Technology…oh boy. Yeah, Gundam essentially used 1970s popular scientific theory of the near future to lay everything out sans the Newtype stuff, of course. Its very Von Braun and Clarke and NASA and whatever. Even in Unicorn they use solid boosters to get into space, just like today, because theres no other way to do it because of…physics. In Star Wars they have gravity pumps or whatever. Zero G is rarely (never?) seen in Star Wars so they don’t have rotating rooms or handrails that pull you along or any of that quotidian technical accuracy of Gundam. In Star Wars for all I know the universe is a crystal sphere. They don’t really get into any of that. No airbags in the cockpit, no ballutes, no space suit tape. Its easy to travel to other stars. Its so common and consequence-less in fact that people will chase you for parsecs just because you own them *money*. Ha! How much money could someone owe you that it would be worth it to travel 80 billion light years? That’s going to cost planetloads of fuel. In reality if its ever going to be possible to travel those kinds of distances it will still always be a major massive endeavor only possible at a civilizational scale. In Star Wars you can go nearly anywhere in anything at any time although IIRC they only move within the same galaxy.

Trek has warp drive like mad but aside from that and occasional ineptness on behalf of writers its fairly realistic or at least tries to be. Star Wars in no way wanted to be that. Both are great ways of going things, of course, but Rocky and Kung Fu Hustle are different art forms. In Trek people stowaway on the Enterprise all the time just because getting to these crazy places is really hard, sometimes even for the best ship known. Its a big deal to go to any other system in Trek, its impossible in Gundam, but even the unemployed can afford it in Star Wars.



Part 3: Similarities Between Gundam and Star Wars


They both have ghosts and those ghosts are otherwise related to the other supernatural elements in the show. I don’t think SW had ghosts until1980 though except for Obi-Wan’s voice in the trench, am I right about that? Trek has ghosts with scientific explanations more like Gundam I guess and SW ghosts are sort of like Gundam ghosts in that they just smile and tell you to calm down but different in that they are spiritual in nature for the most part.

They both have a roundish comical robot that saves the day, although I think Haro only does it once per series and R2 does it a lot. They both get a glancing laser to the head at one point I think but honestly they don’t look much alike.

Beam sabers…I don’t think either invented the idea but for sure Star Wars put those things on the map, especially the boring skinny ones as opposed to fire or something.


I hope that Publius chimes in on this.


EDITED to include all three parts.

EDITED AGAIN to clarify that RH never wrote a Trek episode.

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Posted: 07 Jul 2019, 20:47 

Anything with a TOSLINK or SPDIF will do the job. There are approximately 180,000 Windows programs that can record audio. Windows probably already comes with everything out of the box.

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Posted: 10 Jul 2019, 01:45 

Did you go off your meds without telling us again?

EDIT: I don’t know much about S9s or Sade but that is a CRAP recording of something. Using the built in mic on a phone with a free upload service? You’re this crazy about audio and that’s the best you can do? Nobody’s going to strain their ear to listen through that crap.

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Posted: 10 Jul 2019, 01:51 

Send the disc to me. I’ll make four perfect recordings from four different Pioneer players on four different CD-Rs and send them all back to you.

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Posted: 10 Jul 2019, 23:39 

I don’t see any problem with that. It may be five more years before anyone needs this kind of info but it’s good to get it written down somewhere.

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Posted: 11 Jul 2019, 18:32 

I will admit I don't really understand most of this stuff. For example the LD-S1 I got is a really nice player but basically doesn't support any CAV functions at all from what I can tell.

Please re-read the thread everyone. EVERY LD PLAYER supports CAV functions. All of them. Even the ones that ran in Buick kiosks in 1978. All of them. Yours, mine, everyone. If you have the correct remote or serial access it will happen.

Now someone is going to produce the one player model number that somehow doesn’t but I’m %99.9 every single player does. It’s integral to the LD spec. It’s not a fancy feature that requires extra hardware. On CAV discs functions like Step and Frame or Time access are built into the format and a good selling feature. There is no reason to ever disable it when designing a player.

I can imagine someone making a deck so high end that they wanted to disable “vulgar” functions like Multi-Speed (like how there is no Scan on McIntosh CD players sometimes) but in the case of Pioneer they didn’t do that. Even the X-0 has the same Step buttons as everything else had so I’m pretty sure this never happened. It may have happened with a Sony but it would be broken by now anyway. The S201, the cheapest ever Pioneer deck also had the same CAV functions as everything else.

If you have CLV discs and want the CAV tricks your player must have digital field memory. That is something that many players, many good ones, don’t have but it was more common as time went on.

Also, all of this is explained in the manuals for the players. Now we live in a age where electronics are designed to be thrown away yearly but printing a manual wouldn’t be green so they don’t make them and we learn to operate stuff by oral tradition or YouTube. LD players however all come with a manual that tells every function it has, describes how to do every one of them, lists all features and formats supported, etc. If you can find a manual and you have the means I highly recommend it. Even a model close to yours may be educational.

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Posted: 11 Jul 2019, 20:53 

Yeah.

If it’s an “analog” deck:

Pause on CAV or CLV will be a blue screen.
Step or Multi-Speed on CAV will freeze frame but will just print “CLV” on the screen and keep playing it the disc is CLV.

If it’s a “digital” deck Trick Play is emulated for CLV also.

Pause on any disc will freeze frame. Multi-Speed is bad but extant on CLV as is Step.

The first “digital” deck was the LD-W1 I think. Maybe not. It did so many things first it’s hard to keep track. By the early 90s it was in $800 decks. By the time of the DVL it was in everything.

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Posted: 12 Jul 2019, 05:03 

There were VHS decks made with the same digital field memory tech as LD players. I had one from NEC. It could freeze anything going through it, even live TV. It never became ubiquitous though, like it did with LD.

Pro Tip: If you record your movies in SLP (EP) format they will look bad but the still frames will be way better because there is more duration on the section of tape that your head is currently spinning on. I figured this out because I used to copy rentals a lot and the original had at least %50 noise when paused but my dubs would look pretty good. I remember that in the movie Ghostbusters the clearest picture of a proton pack is on the cover of a magazine during a montage. I paused it there so I could draw it. Did the same with Transformers The Movie a lot.

I used to freeze frame a lot of stuff as a kid. Big animation/SFX analyzer from the SD era.
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