More rarer images of Neil, my beloved:

20 years.

I find it so beautiful that this little rat's life has been remembered with love for 20 years and will be hopefully for decades to come. Truly a marvel of the internet.

Propaganda under cut:

Ok so I’m not crazy other mech-e’s are like this too

No but seriously there’s something to this. Like, there’s a common thread in poetry and other assorted romanticism that to be loved is to be known, right? And nobody knows these mechanical systems as well as the engineers behind them.

How could you not be a little in love with what you make, when you know every intimate detail of it? When you know every rivet, gear, and panel like you know the shape of a lover? When you know forever that this machine is yours?

Weekly Anime Comic: Macross - FINALE!

...aaaaaaaaand we're done!  With a comic that's admittedly more about the entirety of the Macross franchise as a whole than the final episode specifically, but I've had this one kicking around in my head for a while now, and just needed to get it out there.

Because yeah, when I was was first getting into Macross proper, I was under the impression that the whole "They went out into space and nobody know where they wound up" bit was solely for Robotech.  Ya know, just there to explain why no Macross characters were appearing during the Southern Cross or Mospaeda episodes.  But no!  Turns out it's actual official Macross canon that Misa leads humanity's first expedition into space with Hikaru and Minmay in tow... and then the ship vanishes.  After everything these characters go through, their official fate is to be gobbled up by space and have their disappearance covered up by the authorities.  It's an... ODD choice, made odder by so many of the choices the rest of the franchise would make afterwards.

Then after Macross 2 happened, Kawamori and Studio Nue came back and jumped back into it with Plus and 7 undergoing development at the same time. Neither of those necessarily had to reference the megaroad, and it meant they were free to go completely off the wall with a high budget gritty OVA and an off the walls TV anime that they deliberately tried to push as far as they could to vary the options, which actually found huge success with their viewing audience of the time.

Meanwhile Battletech's horrors are mundane. Besides the main conceit of the setting, the giant robots, everything else is fairly grounded. Even the FTL is stringent in its implementation.

Battletech is so dark because it postulates that even if Humanity spreads itself across the stars, we can never escape the problems of the present and past. We will never escape inequality, being ruled over by so-called elites, the general population is strung along by oligarchs, corporations will exploit and corrupt anything and everything to turn a profit, a limitless military industrial complex that sustains a never ending series of wars that are fought over to see which inbred 'noble' House gets to rule over the irradiated ashes of planets that have been warred over for centuries.