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“Macross: Do You Remember Love?” movie re-released in movie theaters!

To commemorate the release of “Macross: Do You Remember Love?” on 4k bluray, the movie has been simultaneously re-released on the big screen, shown exclusively at Toho Theaters. From where I live, the two closest Toho theaters are either in Fujimi, Saitama Prefecture or Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture.

My friend Adrian and I went to see the movie at the Toho Cinema in Utsunomiya. My friend was only familiar with Plus and Frontier, but had never seen the original. It was shown on screen 6 and there was this mini poster outside of the entrance in the picture above. It was an incredible experience to see this in a theater for the first time.

It was fully surround sound, too. In 2020, during the beginning of the madness of the era of Corona-chan when every other theater seat was taped off for the purposes of the “social distancing” nonsense (junk science), several Studio Ghibli movies were being shown in theaters to keep their revenue going. I took the opportunity to see Nausicaa at the cinema. It was in stereo only, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but only the front two left/right speakers were active. If they would have just had all of the left speakers duplicated for the left channel and all of the right speakers active for the right channel it wouldn’t have been so noticeable, but only the front two speakers by the screen were active and it took a while to get used to that. It was a cool experience to see Nausicaa on the big screen, but with the sound the way it was, it felt like I was watching it on a very big TV screen, far away. Seeing DYRL really dwarfed that experience.

The beginning of the credits with the song “Tenshi no Enogu” featured the animation from Flashback, which has been the standard since the second laserdisc release. The decapitation scenes were not edited, so this was the original movie experience (plus the Flashback concert animation). I’m gonna buy this release.

I’m glad my friend could go with me. My daughter calls this the “uaki (“cheating”) movie” because she was on Team Minmay when she first saw it, and was offended when Hikaru kissed Misa in the underwater city. I have this same movie poster on my wall, so I guess she was expecting the movie to be a love story between Hikaru and Minmay and she got pissed. So whenever I’d play this laserdisc movie, she’d gripe a bit. Now I wanna get it on bluray and make her gripe more!

We both had popcorn in the theater, but after the movie we were hungry for dinner. Since we were in Utsunomiya and it was Adrian’s first time visiting the city, we found a gyoza restaurant in front of Utsunomiya Station. Utsunomiya is famous for gyoza, after all.

There were many types of gyoza to choose from. This is “pakchi gyoza.” “Pakchi” is the Thai word for coriander, or “cilantro” as it’s known by in the USA where we use the Spanish word for the herb. Many people in Japan hate pakchi because to them it smells like stinkbugs. I’ve heard that said often. I really do not think it smells like stinkbugs at all. It has such a fresh, green smell that I find refreshing. Fortunately, my wife likes pakchi. It’s amusing because most Japanese people love eating natto, which stinks and its taste triggers my puking instinct. I can’t describe its stench, but it really smells bad. So in the same way many Japanese people cannot eat pakchi, I cannot eat natto. I could taste spicy nampla (fish sauce), giving the gyoza a Thai-style taste. Garnished with cilantro on top, it was very good. The restaurant also had “negi mayo” (green onion and mayonnaise) as well as cheese gyoza. Fantastic food. I didn’t have any alcohol because I had to drive us back home to Gunma Prefecture.

We listened to a lot of Ramones and The Clash in the car there and back. It was a great evening.

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I got a new hand-me-down laptop! Linux Mint Macross desktop wallpaper

While staying at the in-laws’ place, I upgraded my mom-in-law’s Fujitsu laptop. I had set her up with Mint Cinnamon nearly 5 years ago and she needed a major update. Going from version 19 to 22, she remarked how nearly identical the versions are, unlike Microsoft where they reinvent the frickin’ wheel with every damned iteration of Windows and make it gayer with each release. “Hey, you got used to finding what you needed, huh? Well too bad! Now it’s all in different places. Go ahead and get tons of vaccines and eat bugs while you’re at it, too.” Go to hell, Microsoft!

I was hoping to find a used laptop on Yahoo Shopping or Rakuten or something, but the chances of getting some crappy refurbished laptop that will croak after the warranty expired is too high. Or having the keyboard not work properly, etc. The best scenario would be to obtain a laptop from someone who had taken good care of an old laptop, and that’s what happened! I’m glad I didn’t buy one because I got this for free. I had told myself that whenever I got a laptop that I’d install Zorin OS to try it out, but I ended up just going with Mint Mate, the same as my desktop computer. This laptop is about 12 years old. 750gb HD, 8gb RAM, and even a bluray drive. I can’t get it to play any bluray movies yet, but this is still good. It was designed for Win8, but Yukari had upgraded it to Win10. She said that it would take about 10 minutes just to boot up. Now that it’s running on Linux, it’s quicker, of course! Go to hell, Microsoft! Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Just go straight to hell and don’t come back with your totalitarian bullcrap. Eat a bag, Bill Gates!

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A treasure trove of modeling stuff found at Sanyodo Bookstore

In Komagane City, Nagano Prefecture there is a bookstore called Sanyodo with a fantastic modeling section. There I spotted Aoshima’s new Back to the Future Delorean from the 2nd movie! The first Delorean was released earlier this year. This is the first time seeing this second kit at a store.

I went there to pick up the latest Modelgraphix magazine (featuring Votoms dioramas) and OH BOY they now have a HUGE plamo section! Tons of neat supplies and everything too. Not just Gundams, but plenty of Macross, Votoms, Crusher Joe, shmups game ships, cars, planes… wow. Several years ago I picked up the Bandai mini Millennium Falcon there, but at that time the model section was pretty limited to just some Gundams. So, I was very impressed to see that their modest modeling section has been expanded to a few aisles even.

And check this out. They even stock Vallejo acrylic paints there. You don’t normally see these paints at regular hobby stores in Japan.

So yeah, plenty of great modeling supplies to be found there. I’m very impressed.

I picked up a Bandai “30 Minutes Sisters” kit. Girl #3 named Luluce. She has such a pretty, dark skin complexion and a cute ponytail. She is the one I was interested in getting, but never got around to buying before she disappeared. Maybe these kits were repopped because that model store had tons of them in stock.

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blink blink

The PC-98 must have been quite a computer to have experienced it at the time in Japan. Unfortunately, a lot of it was just adult titles. The last one seems at first to be a promising game with obviously Blade Runner-inspired graphics, but it turns out to be raunchy lez-rape crap.

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Sailor Moon arcade game by Banpresto

Sailor Moon (Banpresto, Arcade 1995)
I played the Super Famicom Sailor Moon and Sailor Moon R brawler games by Bandai quite a lot, but it wasn’t until much later that I learned of this arcade game by Banpresto much letter. The gameplay is pretty solid and I love the screen-clearing magic attacks, but it lacks the standard projectile attacks that the SFC games featured, done by holding the attack button and charging it for a moment. It would have made this arcade game better IMHO.

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Devil Hunter Yohko is an avid video gamer

Retro gaming spotted in a classic anime! From Devil Hunter Yohko episode 2, here we see that Yohko is an avid gamer from the early ‘90s. You can spot an NEC PC Engine Turbo Duo-R, Sega Megadrive, Nintendo Super Famicom, a Sega Game Gear, and even an Atari Lynx! Oh yeah, and there’s some manga there too.

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New Nadia desktop wallpaper Linux Mint October 2024, plus Mint 22 install woes

Here is my newest desktop wallpaper, and it’s Nadia with a beautiful sunset. I was running Mint Mate 20 Ulyssa, and my 1TB SSD hard disk was maxing out. In august I bought a 2TB HD, and in September I installed Mint Mate 22 Wilma. It wasn’t a smooth experience like version 20 was. The first problem I had was when I plugged the old 1TB drive in and tried copying my files directly from there. Upon reboot, it wouldn’t even boot up and was scrolling text. I re-installed Wilma. Then updating the Nvidia driver caused the computer to freeze up. I had to get help on the Linux Mint Forums and learned how to modify the boot kernel. After that, it was fine. However what remains is apparently the USB device manager might not function properly.

I’ve done three fresh installs of Retropie on Linux Mint Mate 22 and each time the controller input is screwed up. I am using a Logitech F310 USB gamepad, which is pretty standard. Retropie on Mint 22 is flawed. Controller problems.

  1. When accessing the in-game menu by pressing the hot key (to take a screenshot, save state, etc), the joypad locks up. I have to press select for it to work again. When returning to the game, the joypad is again locked up and I cannot play the game. I must press select again to regain control.
  2. When accessing Retropie-Setup from within the RetroPie GUI, joypad input ceases to work. Not even the arrow keys can be used. The workaround for this is to run the setup.sh via terminal and the controller works. Just not when accessed through RetroPie itself.

For this third time, I did not copy over any config files and I did the controller setup for my joypad from scratch. I thought perhaps that there might have been a problem by just copying the entirety of the ./opt/retropie folder and all of its subfolders, but this is not the case. I did a full uninstall, then a reinstall. The problem remains.

I am wondering if it is a problem with Mint 22 itself. I had zero problems installing and using RetroPie on Mint 19 and 20. However, with Mint 22 I’ve noticed that at least with Space Invaders Extreme on Steam, the game does not recognize my controller at all, regardless of which version of the Linux Proton compatibility tool I am using.

I’ve been advocating people switching to Linux for years now, but this latest version is making me hesitant. My experiences with installing Mint 19 Tricia and Mint 20 Ulyssa were smooth, but Mint 22 Wilma has given me some headaches. Posting my problems online, I was told by others who are disappointed with 22 Wilma’s USB capabilities. One guy said he has some external hard drives that 22 won’t recognize. Another said that his Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse combo is wonky, and replacing this with a generic wireless set did not solve the problem. I do hope that these issues will be addressed soon. I would not have known what to do with my Nvidia driver without the help of the Mint forum. I was told that my GPU is old, but it’s from 2017 so it can’t be that old.

For now, Steam is fine, more or less. Retropie is fine until I have to bring up the menu. Having to press the select button though, it makes me hesitant to plug in my Saturn controllers, since they do not have a select button.

EDIT 10/27: I ran an update over the weekend and the first issue with RetroPie freezing after calling up the menu is now fixed.

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Nautilus submarine model kit by Bandai

Recently I signed up for a Mercari account. It’s an online fleamarket. Often you can find stuff cheaper there than on YAJ, and a greater variety of smaller items. Lots of neat Sega stuff and whatnot. I’ve sometimes asked my wife to get stuff for me through her account and I’d pay for the items at the convenience store, but I decided to create my own account.

Although I bought the newer 1:1000 scale Nautilus model by Kotobukiya, I wanted to build the old 1:700 scale Bandai kit and give it another go. It is OOP and goes for a bit on YAJ, but I found it cheaply on Mercari (about half of what it goes for on YAJ). I built this when I still lived in America, and it was the first fully-airbrushed kit I ever built. This time, I want to drill lots of holes and use clear UV resin to try to light it. This Bandai kit is from the ’90s, back before they made all of their models snap kits. While this Bandai kit does not have as great of detail as the smaller Kotobukiya Nautilus, since it is not a snap fit model , I believe it has more hollow sections. I think I can drill out the window portals and replace them with Wave H-Eyes lenses, as well as casting the captain’s quarters on top in clear resin to light it up. That would be neat.

I made a page for my old build on my model gallery I stopped updating about 10 years ago here. It comes with a small 1:20 scale Nadia figure, and it was the first figure I ever painted.