I recently picked up Mighty Orbots: The Complete Series on DVD. It’s a 2-disc DVD set of all 13 episodes of this fantastic, short-lived anime show I loved as a kid. I was already a Voltron fan when this show aired, and I watched it every Saturday morning and then discussed the episode the next day with my friend in Sunday school at church. Then suddenly it was no longer being aired. Then another week went by, and I couldn’t believe that Orbots had been cancelled. It was animated in Japan for the American audience.
So now I’ve got the DVD, and I can watch these episodes that I have not seen since grade school. One cool thing I’ve noticed is the ship flown by Dia, a member of the Galactic Patrol. It’s almost like something between Macross and Lensman. Neat stuff.
Pretty badass-looking ship, I think. Check out it’s landing cycle:
That vertical stabilizer folds up and back out of the way as the landing gears extend. Pretty cool ship design.
Up for some science fiction movie viewing for summer? 1982 was the most prolific movie for science fiction films. I have set about collecting Japanese promotional flyers (chirashi) from Yahoo Auctions Japan. Here they are.
Blade Runner
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
Tron
The Thing. In Japanese, the title is 遊星からの物体X (“Object X from Outer Space” is the best I can translate that as.)
The Dark Crystal
Fire Fox
Mega Force (this one I actually do not own. It’s a pretty silly movie, but I may get this later.)
E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial (another one I do not personally own)
Space Adventure Cobra: The Movie
And although it isn’t a movie, it is worth noting that in 1982 Super Dimensional Fortress Macross aired on TV in Japan.
Yesterday in Japan was Unagi Day, July 23rd. Unagi is broiled freshwater eel with sweet kabayaki (BBQ) sauce and if that sounds gross to you, you don’t know what’s good. It doesn’t even really taste like fish, but it’s soft and delicous. It’s said that eating unagi gives you energy for summer or something.
Typically, stores sell it pre-cooked with it marinated in the kabayaki sauce. My father-in-law in Nagano Prefecture knows where to order the unagi fresh and uncooked. He barbecues it in his backyard himself and he mailed some to us and it arrived yesterday morning. My only gripe is that for some reason, despite the proper cooking method shown on TV constantly, he does not apply the kaybayaki sauce to it while cooking. So the stuff he makes is not so soft and definitely does not have that melt-in-your-mouth property to it. He also sent us some hybrid peppers he grows which are a cross between green pepper and hot pepper. I think originally it was accidentally cross-pollinated and since then he’s just raised them like this.
The high yesterday was only 29 degrees, so it was a nice day.
I picked up Infinos Gaiden via Steam’s summer sale. This is a fantastic game, reminiscent of Thunder Force and other 16-32 bit shmups. Via the Proton utility, this works perfectly on my Linux desktop. Not only does fullscreen mode work fine, but this game supports a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is perfect for my monitor and the overall retro feel. I breezed through the first level, then the difficulty picked up quite a bit.
These are scenes from the animated intro.
Here’s the first level. I cleared it without taking a hit on my first try. Pretty easy. The S powerup is for speed, the B is a barrier/shield similar to Gradius and Darius. The colored orbs provide you bits similar to the Craws from Thunder Force. They can also be used as shields.
I’ve seen a lot of newer shmups that just get repetitive, like Eschatos. It’s a fun game, but it’s just the same enemies charging at you over and over again. In the first level of Infinos Gaiden, you will see the city you are defending getting blasted by the invaders’ lasers in the background. As you can see here, there is quite a variety of enemies that come after you, and they aren’t even the final boss.
The second level takes you to a jungle, and you have to have to deal with this giant, walking mecha on your way into the enemy base!
Inside the base, the boss is this big tank. Neat!
Now you’re in a desert, and oh rats! It’s a sand storm.
This badass sandcrawler mecha is the boss of level 3.
Level 4 is so cool. You fly around this giant airship, and then fly into it.
Oh crap! I ran out of credits. So yeah, this game seems to work just fine on my Linux desktop. I just need to press Ctrl+Enter to get it to full-screen mode. What a neat game! With the 32-bit style pixel graphics and music, you’d swear you were playing a Saturn game. Actually, I saw a comment on Steam that the man responsible for this game’s music also did the music to Hyper Duel and Thunder Force V.
Today is July 7th in Japan, and I woke up to some rather interesting news a friend had sent me via email. Some madlad had managed to detonate a bomb, demolishing one of the slabs of the Georgia Guidestones. Since then, it was ordered to be demolished and a backhoe knocked the rest of it down.
The Liberal World Order be like, “Someone set us up the bomb!” So who was responsible? It’s safe to say that the culprits were not Antifa or BLM, aka Soros’s Uruk-Hai Foot Clan. They prattle on about toppling “monuments of oppression,” but they aren’t interested in taking down the one monument that symbolizes the actual oppression of all of humanity. No, they’d rather topple a monument dedicated to Melvil Dewey, the man who invented the Dewey Decimal System, because… reading is racist or something. It seems that nobody was seen actually setting off a bomb, so… I blame climate change. Or maybe it’s Sudden Monument Death Syndrome.
Bill Gates must be soaking his pillow in tears right now. No amount of kiddie porn can cheer him up at this point. I’m on Gab this morning and there is so much rejoicing over this.
If you are reading this and you do not know what the Georgia Guidestones were, it was basically like the Ten Commandments for the New World Order. The funder remains a mystery, but legend has it that Ted Turner was behind it, especially since he’s a big elite from Georgia. It states:
Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
Guide reproduction wisely — improving fitness and diversity.
Unite humanity with a living new language.
Rule passion — faith — tradition — and all things with tempered reason.
Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
Balance personal rights with social duties.
Prize truth — beauty — love — seeking harmony with the infinite.
Be not a cancer on the Earth — Leave room for nature — Leave room for nature.
One can argue that the part about “let all nations rule internally” could argue against the New World Order to be a top-down, authoritative, one-world government that should dispose of national leaders. I can concede on that, but it is obvious that the likes of Klaus Schwab want national leaders to bend to his will. Much of the guidelines is the typical environmentalist “humanity is a cancer” stuff, but the worst one is the first on the list: “Maintain humanity under 500 million in perpetual balance with nature.” That means that 7+ billion people have got to go. This is a monument to world depopulation. There is no Christian notion of humanity improving nature by being a steward to the world. While we should indeed eliminate pollution, litter, and so on, the typical environmentalist ideology ignores how nature can thrive under the care of humanity, how we can cultivate forests to help them flourish. For example, pruning forests to prevent the spread of forest fires. No, this is the pessimistic approach that assumes that nature is better off left untouched by humans, so therefore the fewer humans, the better. This is why the second on the list is about limiting reproduction. Depopulation and abortion is what gives Bill Gates a boner more than hurting kids can.
Therefore, I do not trust any elitists with this attitude to provide “fair laws and just courts.” It is difficult not to associate this monument with forced vaccinations which kill people in many different ways. I would not advocate for actions like this vandalism and would rather the monument be removed by the will of the people through proper, official action. Still, I am glad to see this was destroyed and that nobody was hurt.
