adventures-in-a-world-of-fiction

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I don't know I'm not done talking about it. It's insane that I can't just uninstall Edge or Copilot. That websites require my phone number to sign up. That people share their contacts to find their friends on social media.

I wouldn't use an adblocker if ads were just banners on the side funding a website I enjoy using and want to support. Ads pop up invasively and fill my whole screen, I misclick and get warped away to another page just for trying to read an article or get a recipe.

Every app shouldn't be like every other app. Instagram didn't need reels and a shop. TikTok doesn't need a store. Instagram doesn't need to be connected to Facebook. I don't want my apps to do everything, I want a hub for a specific thing, and I'll go to that place accordingly.

I love discord, but so much information gets lost to it. I don't want to join to view things. I want to lurk on forums. I want to be a user who can log in and join a conversation by replying to a thread, even if that conversation was two days ago. I know discord has threads, it's not the same. I don't want to have to verify my account with a phone number. I understand safety and digital concerns, but I'm concerned about information like that with leaks everywhere, even with password managers.

I shouldn't have to pay subscriptions to use services and get locked out of old versions. My old disk copy of photoshop should work. I should want to upgrade eventually because I like photoshop and supporting the business. Adobe is a whole other can of worms here.

Streaming is so splintered across everything. Shows release so fast. Things don't get physical releases. I can't stream a movie I own digitally to friends because the share-screen blocks it, even though I own two digital copies, even though I own a physical copy.

I have an iPod, and I had to install a third party OS to easily put my music on it without having to tangle with iTunes. Spotify bricked hardware I purchased because they were unwillingly to upkeep it. They don't pay their artists. iTunes isn't even iTunes anymore and Apple struggles to upkeep it.

My TV shows me ads on the home screen. My dad lost access to eBook he purchased because they were digital and got revoked by the company distributing them. Hitman 1-3 only runs online most of the time. Flash died and is staying alive because people love it and made efforts to keep it up.

I have to click "not now" and can't click "no". I don't just get emails, they want to text me to purchase things online too. My windows start search bar searches online, not just my computer. Everything is blindly called an app now. Everything wants me to upload to the cloud. These are good tools! But why am I forced to use them! Why am I not allowed to own or control them?

No more!!!!! I love my iPod with so much storage and FLAC files. I love having all my fics on my harddrive. I love having USBs and backups. I love running scripts to gut suck stuff out of my Windows computer I don't want that spies on me. I love having forums. I love sending letters. I love neocities and webpages and webrings. I will not be scanning QR codes. Please hand me a physical menu. If I didn't need a smartphone for work I'd get a "dumb" phone so fast. I want things to have buttons. I want to use a mouse. I want replaceable batteries. I want the right to repair. I grew up online and I won't forget how it was!

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I know I'm being a bit of a hater here, but I'm seeing folks going "OMG, Spirk is canon!" over 765874 - Unification, and then I watch it myself and I'm like... that's it? Yeah, it's a well-produced bit of fluff from a technical standpoint, but there were gayer moments in the Original Series, and if your intention is to celebrate a ship, "somewhat less gay than a TV show from 1966" is not an ambitious target!

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I've had an idea and it's a bit too late to implement it for this year given we're already on 20th November, but I thought I'd share it to see if people think it would be worth trying next year.

Clear-out advent calendars.

Basically, I go through my home and find things that are unused/in a good-as-new condition that I don't particularly need or want, and package them up into advent calendars. I could wrap the items up into pretty, numbered parcels and stick the whole lot into a box and ship it to someone. I could sell these calendars for an amount that covers postage and the cost and time involved in wrapping the items up nicely, maybe rounding up by a couple of quid as a token payment toward the cost of the items. It could potentially be a bargain for the people buying the calendars because I wouldn't be charging anything like the value of the items, but I get to clear out my clutter without having to stand in the cold at a car boot sale or similar. And hopefully everyone would have fun with it and if they didn't like/want to use an item for any particular day, at least they wouldn't have paid much money for it.

I could do them by category, so people have a rough idea of the sort of thing to expect.

Craft/sewing supplies - Fat quarters of fabric in a pattern that doesn't appeal to me that I got in a bundle because I wanted a couple of the other fabrics in the bundle, packet of beads that I bought because "ooh shiny" and then never used, supplies I bought to try out a new craft in a moment of enthusiasm only to find it wasn't for me, etc.

Stationery - I have a lot of very nice notebooks that I don't use because I do pretty much all of my writing on my computer, a handful of mechanical pencils (I have so many mechanical pencils - I'm not entirely sure why), pack of unopened Christmas cards because I will buy them from the charity cards display in the library and then not use most of them, etc.

Jewellery - I have beadwork items that I've made and then not done anything with, and ones that I've either bought or been given over the years but don't wear.

Completely random - just whatever else I uncover while doing a clear out and maybe bits from the other three categories where I don't have enough to do a full 24 days

I'm pretty sure I could do a calendar for each of those four themes that has enough stuff in it to feel satisfying.

This idea was inspired by watching advent calendar unboxing videos on YouTube and there was one where someone bought mystery box calendars of Esty where it looked like the seller(s) bought some really cheap stuff from Poundland to throw in, or one had little packets of instant coffee and tea bags that looked like they'd just raided a hotel room they'd stayed in. Someone made a point in the comments about the cost of the calendar basically being for the time taken to wrap everything up nicely (plus the Etsy cut for those ones) and it got me thinking that I could put together a much nicer advent calendar just using things I have but don't use. I would want to be honest that that was what I was doing though.

I wouldn't make enough of them to be worth setting up an Etsy shop or doing listings on some other platform that would take a massive cut, so I would just list them on a Tumblr post and ask people to message me to pick one and pay for it through Paypal. The first person to message asking for one of them would get it.

Do you think it's worth doing?

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Spies are Forever has a motorbike chase using wheeling office chairs. Two actors, each sat in a chair, using their feet to move themselves closer or further away as the chase progresses, hunched over with their hands out like they're controlling bikes. No one ever says "this is a motorbike" and the chairs look absolutely nothing like bikes, but you see the way the characters move and you instantly know that this is a motorbike chase.

Then it moves on to the speedboat chase :)

genuinely, i think watching live theatre can improve your media literacy so much

like people who look at doctor who and are like 'lol the effects are so rubbish'

maybe watch a stage play where there's no backdrops and half the characters are played by the same three guys in different hats and maybe you will calm down

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“How interesting. A priest who blasphemes his god.”

“Of course I bloody do! What’s ‘e gonna do? Smite me? I’m ’is only bloody follower!”

- unnamed old man cleric character who just popped into my head and won’t go away.

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I've fallen down a YouTube rabbit hole of watching advent calendar unboxing videos - including some stupidly expensive ones. A number of them, the person doing the unboxing tries to calculate whether the calendar is worth the price but adding up the cost of the things included.

There are some where the person doing the video concludes that the calendar is really good value, and I'm sitting their gobsmacked because my conclusion is that the retail price for some of this stuff is massively inflated.

There was a stationary one that was supposedly "good value" because one of the pens normally sells at around 600 quid. My conclusion is not that the calendar was worth buying, it's that the company was trying to rip off rich businessmen by charging several hundred quid for a pen.

A lot of the calendars are for makeup and perfume and beauty products, and the person doing the video will do some calculations and go, "So this tiny jar of anti-aging cream is worth about $20 because it normally retails at $75" and I'm just baffled that anyone would spend that much on moisturiser.

With the beauty product ones in particular, it's like getting a glimpse into a strange, alien world that I do not want to enter.

The funniest one though was the swarovski Disney collaboration calendar that cost over $1000 and came with pieces that had manufacturing mistakes in them (there was one with a printed design behind the crystal and they'd stuck the design on backwards).

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Story concept: A post-apocalyptic story that feels more like low fantasy, the setting is explicitly stated to be Earth after some Great War That Ended The World and there's ruins of concrete buildings and fragments of plastic used as tools, but the vibes are more mythical and The World That Was is only legends passed down through generations. One most fantastical element of the setting is how the sun and moon change colours, and people interpret the different colours as omens of future events and calamities, and are usually somehow consistently correct.

The thing is, the changing sun and moon and the corresponding prophecies have a natural explanation: The colours are caused by chemical reactions of different kinds of toxic clouds floating in the air, which also cause the associated calamities. Of course A Green Sunrise is an omen of swarms of ravenous birds flocking in to ruin the crops - the chemical cloud that causes that colour killed off the insects that these specific birds usually feed on.

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I've seen a handful of posts on my dashboard talking about the announcements around Good Omens season three - basically that it will be one 90-minute episode rather than a series. I've seen people talk about being happy that we're getting a conclusion, sad that we won't get as much material, grateful that people fought to not have it just cancelled, etc.

But I've not seen anyone talking about the thing that I'm happiest about. Neil Gaiman isn't going to be involved. There was a comment about how he'd contributed writing (presumably he'd written some scripts and they're taking some of that to make into the one big episode) but he's not going to be involved from this point forward. I saw a couple of posts mention this as a fact from the announcement, but not delve into the implications.

There were multiple, credible accusations against him of abusive behaviour and manipulative relationships, and as a consequence, a company has publicly decided against working with him. We've seen other situations where someone famous has credible (and occasionally proven in court) allegations made against them and yet continue to get work as though nothing has happened. It is worth celebrating that someone has seen some consequences.

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Aldis Hodge as Alec Hardison in Leverage (2008—2012)

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Current top contenders for my advent calendar pick:

Scented tea lights with holder. I would get a different little scented candle every day through advent.

Stacks of books Christmas tree ornaments. The product photos are clearly photoshopped, so I can't tell if the ornaments look like flat images because they're badly photoshopped, or if they look like flat images because each ornament is basically just a cut out of a flat image.

I found a different one with book ornaments based on classic literature that looks really great - but it's already sold out. :(

3. A Stardew Valley one that is clearly not official and doesn't give any sort of indication what's included. I'm tempted to get this one just to satisfy my curiosity.

4. Crafter's advent calendar. Where you sew a little bit of a design each day.

Advent calendar I will definitely not be buying: The £1600 embroidered ornament calendar. It's apparently made by Hand & Lock and it's probably all hand stitched, so I'm not surprised it's expensive, but who the hell spends £1600 on an advent calendar?!?!?

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Could you do a honey themed dragon in a Honeypot?

#79 - 蜂蜜 (fēngmì / honey) - A friend to bees and chamomile teas! 🍯🐝💛

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Nicholas and Danny would assemble Ikea furniture together and the parts Nicholas did would be perfectly aligned and solid, while Danny's would be leaning slightly and missing several key piece. This would be a humorous montage near the start of the film that is largely forgotten by the mid point when Danny sits in one of the chairs and there's a loud creaking noise and the chair wobbles like it's about the fall apart.

Then in the final climactic fight, both Nicholas and an opponent would both grab bits of furniture to hit each other with. The opponent would grab one of Danny's and it would explode into pieces leaving Nicholas unharmed. Nicholas would then hit them with one of the pieces he assembled, which will knock them out cold. The furniture won't have so much as a dent in it.

Assume they have access to ikea furniture

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I still think @gingersnapwolves had a moment of genius by having an injured character deliver the vital information to be passed on to the other characters that would explain the critical plot detail...

Except the character had aphasia that meant he forgot words when stressed, and he was stressed out about nearly dying and forgot the word "twins" and so had to say "two girls from one womb"

And then the person he told this to misheard because she was busy trying to stop him dying, and so all the other characters were left baffled why this message about two girls being in the same room was supposed to be important.

movies where someone hears an important message only once and retains all the details….

girl if that were me, we’d be fucked. I have to reread emails like 4 times.

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I knew someone who managed to luck out. The auto-generated emails were a 1-5 letters from the start of your first name and 1-5 letters from the start of your surname, so that it made up a combo that wasn't already in the system. Most people ended up with something vaguely nonsense based on their names but his surname started with S so he managed to end up with james@email

Even the founder of the company and current CEO didn't have just their first name as their email, but he managed to get his.

thinking about how my old university's automatic email generation gave my friend Andy Ryan the email address ARYAN88

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So it turns out that if you fall under the eligibility threshold, they will take the monetisation away again. I hadn't realised that, but I got an email recently basically telling me that unless I get back above the thresholds again, they'll kick me out of the monetisation program.

I think my odds of getting back above the 4000 hours threshold are slim to none. As I mentioned in the first post in this thread, I had a weird spike in viewing time in October/November last year, but my current view times are the usual trickle low numbers. Which means that a year ago I might have got 30-40 hours of watch time in a day, and this year I'm getting 6-8 hours. Which means my rolling total for the year has dropped enormously, and I'm now sitting at under 3000 hours. I'm not going to get more than a thousand hours more watch time in a month than I did this time last year, when this time last year was the tail end of my peak views.

In my brief stint as a monetised YouTuber, I have earned *drumroll please* £3.09.

At least in theory. I can't withdraw it as money I can actually use because I would need to get more then £60 in my ad sense account.

So really, I continue to have earned nothing.

I’ve had a YouTube channel for nearly two decades. The first video I ever posted was in 2006. It was a Power Rangers fanvid and while it’s not the worst video ever created, it’s definitely not the best. It was a weird choice of song (Spirit of Man from War of the Worlds) and some of the clips are badly trimmed so there’s a frame or two of the next scene/shot at the start or end in a few places.

Since then, I’ve made a bunch of other videos, music videos for shows or fake trailers for some of my fanfics (many of those fics were posted on sites that no longer exist). I don’t post often these days, but every once in a while I’ll get struck with the urge to make a fanvid for a film or TV show that I like. Recently, it’s been The Sandman and the Dreamling ship in particular.

In all this time, my YouTube channel has never been monetised. When I first started the channel, that wasn’t even an option, as YouTube monetisation wasn’t a thing on the platform until December 2007, the year after I posted my first video, and even then, I don’t think it was available for anyone to apply to once they hit certain thresholds the way it is today.

So yeah, when I started, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to monetise my channel. Then I had a real world job and my video creation dropped off and in recent years, I haven’t met the monetisation thresholds, so it hasn’t been an option and I haven’t given it much thought. After all, I didn’t start making silly little fanvids expecting to make money from them, and most of them would be demonetised anyway because of the use of copyrighted material.

But recently I checked my analytics out of curiosity and I’m within reach of those monetisation thresholds. I got a load more views than usual around October and November last year for no reason I can see. There’s an obvious bump in the watch time analytics for a couple of months before it drops down to my usual trickle of views. I’ve no idea why it happened or why it stopped, but it was enough of a bump that I’m now at 3997 hours of watch time for the past year, with the monetisation threshold being 4000 hours.

Given how close I am, it feels like I should try to push to meet the eligibility criteria and apply for the YouTube partner programme, just so that it’s an option for me if I want it. And I clearly need to do it in the next few months, because I don’t expect to replicate that spike in views from October. But over the next month or two, getting 3 more hours of watch time than I got in the same time period last year feels like a realistic thing to achieve, even if almost all of my videos are under 5 minutes long.

Especially if I actually tell people that I have YouTube videos. So here I am, telling people. If you enjoy fan made music videos, please consider giving some of mine a watch.

Here are a few of them:

Ranger Spirit, the first ever video I ever posted on my YouTube channel, made in Windows Movie Maker, with all of the mistakes and badly trimmed shots:

One of my recent videos, Meet Me On The Battlefield, for The Sandman fandom:

Sticking with Neil Gaiman for the time being, an ineffable husbands video for Good Omens season 2, What Hurts the Most:

The video that got the most views during that weird spike in my analytics, I Don’t Deserve You for the show White Collar, focusing on the relationship between Peter, Neal and Elizabeth:

And for a silly challenge I gave myself, I tried to use footage from Dirk Gently’s season two to create a trailer that looked like a serious fantasy film. That was not easy, given how ridiculous the armies looked:

My channel has absolutely no consistency in terms of what I post. I will make videos for whatever happens to grab my attention at the time, so across the lifespan of my channel I have fanvids for Yuri on Ice, the MCU, Teen Wolf, Charmed, Voltron, The Chronicles of Narnia (both the old BBC TV show and the films), Doctor Who (and spin offs), X-Men, Kamen Rider Dragon Knight, The Sentinel, The Tribe, and more Power Rangers than feels comfortable now given my age. If any of those grab your attention, please take a watch and help me hit that 4000 hours threshold.