#I got paramount + through prime

[ladyofthelake]

So I emailed channel 5 about the Killing Kind:

Hi I was just wondering why the rest of the episodes of 'The Killing Kind' starring Colin Morgan aren't airing? Channel 5 showed the first episode on Monday 11th September and I was looking forward to the rest of the show. However I couldn't see it listed and its not on your on demand site either.

Are you planning to show the rest of the episodes at a later date?

And I got this response:

Dear Vicki

Thank you for your e – mail regarding Paramount+ Presents: The Killing Kind.

Channel 5 appreciates all viewer feedback, and you can enjoy the full The Killing Kind series exclusively on Paramount+ and the special episode transmitted on Channel 5 will not appear on My5. At present there are no plans for Channel 5 to show any more episodes.

Thank you for your comments and you can see all episodes right now for free – just start a 7-day free trial by going to https://www.paramountplus.com/

So they were never gonna show all the episodes on Channel 5 (which is a bit sucky imo) but at least Paramount + is a free trial but I don't always wanna watch an entire series in a week but hey I'll take binging Colin on my TV over anything xD I'm just glad to know now because I felt crazy not seeing it in the listings.

[donjuaninhell]

How I ditched streaming services and learned to love Linux: A step-by-step guide to building your very own personal media streaming server (V2.0: REVISED AND EXPANDED EDITION)

This is a revised, corrected and expanded version of my tutorial on setting up a personal media server that previously appeared on my old blog (donjuan-auxenfers). I expect that that post is still making the rounds (hopefully with my addendum on modifying group share permissions in Ubuntu to circumvent 0x8007003B "Unexpected Network Error" messages in Windows 10/11 when transferring files) but I have no way of checking. Anyway this new revised version of the tutorial corrects one or two small errors I discovered when rereading what I wrote, adds links to all products mentioned and is just more polished generally. I also expanded it a bit, pointing more adventurous users toward programs such as Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr which can be used for automating user requests and media collection.

So then, what is this tutorial? This is a tutorial on how to build and set up your own personal media server using Ubuntu as an operating system and Plex (or Jellyfin) to not only manage your media, but to also stream that media to your devices both at home and abroad anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection. Its intent is to show you how building a personal media server and stuffing it full of films, TV, and music that you acquired through indiscriminate and voracious media piracy various legal methods will free you to completely ditch paid streaming services. No more will you have to pay for Disney+, Netflix, HBOMAX, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Peacock, CBS All Access, Paramount+, Crave or any other streaming service that is not named Criterion Channel. Instead whenever you want to watch your favourite films and television shows, you’ll have your own personal service that only features things that you want to see, with files that you have control over. And for music fans out there, both Jellyfin and Plex support music streaming, meaning you can even ditch music streaming services. Goodbye Spotify, Youtube Music, Tidal and Apple Music, welcome back unreasonably large MP3 (or FLAC) collections.

On the hardware front, I’m going to offer a few options catered towards different budgets and media library sizes. The cost of getting a media server up and running using this guide will cost you anywhere from $450 CAD/$325 USD at the low end to $1500 CAD/$1100 USD at the high end (it could go higher). My server was priced closer to the higher figure, but I went and got a lot more storage than most people need. If that seems like a little much, consider for a moment, do you have a roommate, a close friend, or a family member who would be willing to chip in a few bucks towards your little project provided they get access? Well that's how I funded my server. It might also be worth thinking about the cost over time, i.e. how much you spend yearly on subscriptions vs. a one time cost of setting up a server. Additionally there's just the joy of being able to scream "fuck you" at all those show cancelling, library deleting, hedge fund vampire CEOs who run the studios through denying them your money. Drive a stake through David Zaslav's heart.

On the software side I will walk you step-by-step through installing Ubuntu as your server's operating system, configuring your storage as a RAIDz array with ZFS, sharing your zpool to Windows with Samba, running a remote connection between your server and your Windows PC, and then a little about started with Plex/Jellyfin. Every terminal command you will need to input will be provided, and I even share a custom #bash script that will make used vs. available drive space on your server display correctly in Windows.

If you have a different preferred flavour of Linux (Arch, Manjaro, Redhat, Fedora, Mint, OpenSUSE, CentOS, Slackware etc. et. al.) and are aching to tell me off for being basic and using Ubuntu, this tutorial is not for you. The sort of person with a preferred Linux distro is the sort of person who can do this sort of thing in their sleep. Also I don't care. This tutorial is intended for the average home computer user. This is also why we’re not using a more exotic home server solution like running everything through Docker Containers and managing it through a dashboard like Homarr or Heimdall. While such solutions are fantastic and can be very easy to maintain once you have it all set up, wrapping your brain around Docker is a whole thing in and of itself. If you do follow this tutorial and had fun putting everything together, then I would encourage you to return in a year’s time, do your research and set up everything with Docker Containers.

Lastly, this is a tutorial aimed at Windows users. Although I was a daily user of OS X for many years (roughly 2008-2023) and I've dabbled quite a bit with various Linux distributions (mostly Ubuntu and Manjaro), my primary OS these days is Windows 11. Many things in this tutorial will still be applicable to Mac users, but others (e.g. setting up shares) you will have to look up for yourself. I doubt it would be difficult to do so.

Nothing in this tutorial will require feats of computing expertise. All you will need is a basic computer literacy (i.e. an understanding of what a filesystem and directory are, and a degree of comfort in the settings menu) and a willingness to learn a thing or two. While this guide may look overwhelming at first glance, it is only because I want to be as thorough as possible. I want you to understand exactly what it is you're doing, I don't want you to just blindly follow steps. If you half-way know what you’re doing, you will be much better prepared if you ever need to troubleshoot.

Honestly, once you have all the hardware ready it shouldn't take more than an afternoon or two to get everything up and running.

(This tutorial is just shy of seven thousand words long so the rest is under the cut.)

Step One: Choosing Your Hardware

Linux is a light weight operating system, depending on the distribution there's close to no bloat. There are recent distributions available at this very moment that will run perfectly fine on a fourteen year old i3 with 4GB of RAM. Moreover, running Plex or Jellyfin isn’t resource intensive in 90% of use cases. All this is to say, we don’t require an expensive or powerful computer. This means that there are several options available: 1) use an old computer you already have sitting around but aren't using 2) buy a used workstation from eBay, or what I believe to be the best option, 3) order an N100 Mini-PC from AliExpress or Amazon.

Note: If you already have an old PC sitting around that you’ve decided to use, fantastic, move on to the next step.

When weighing your options, keep a few things in mind: the number of people you expect to be streaming simultaneously at any one time, the resolution and bitrate of your media library (4k video takes a lot more processing power than 1080p) and most importantly, how many of those clients are going to be transcoding at any one time. Transcoding is what happens when the playback device does not natively support direct playback of the source file. This can happen for a number of reasons, such as the playback device's native resolution being lower than the file's internal resolution, or because the source file was encoded in a video codec unsupported by the playback device.

Ideally we want any transcoding to be performed by hardware. This means we should be looking for a computer with an Intel processor with Quick Sync. Quick Sync is a dedicated core on the CPU die designed specifically for video encoding and decoding. This specialized hardware makes for highly efficient transcoding both in terms of processing overhead and power draw. Without these Quick Sync cores, transcoding must be brute forced through software. This takes up much more of a CPU’s processing power and requires much more energy. But not all Quick Sync cores are created equal and you need to keep this in mind if you've decided either to use an old computer or to shop for a used workstation on eBay

Any Intel processor from second generation Core (Sandy Bridge circa 2011) onward has Quick Sync cores. It's not until 6th gen (Skylake), however, that the cores support the H.265 HEVC codec. Intel’s 10th gen (Comet Lake) processors introduce support for 10bit HEVC and HDR tone mapping. And the recent 12th gen (Alder Lake) processors brought with them hardware AV1 decoding. As an example, while an 8th gen (Kaby Lake) i5-8500 will be able to hardware transcode a H.265 encoded file, it will fall back to software transcoding if given a 10bit H.265 file. If you’ve decided to use that old PC or to look on eBay for an old Dell Optiplex keep this in mind.

Note 1: The price of old workstations varies wildly and fluctuates frequently. If you get lucky and go shopping shortly after a workplace has liquidated a large number of their workstations you can find deals for as low as $100 on a barebones system, but generally an i5-8500 workstation with 16gb RAM will cost you somewhere in the area of $260 CAD/$200 USD.

Note 2: The AMD equivalent to Quick Sync is called Video Core Next, and while it's fine, it's not as efficient and not as mature a technology. It was only introduced with the first generation Ryzen CPUs and it only got decent with their newest CPUs, we want something cheap.

Alternatively you could forgo having to keep track of what generation of CPU is equipped with Quick Sync cores that feature support for which codecs, and just buy an N100 mini-PC. For around the same price or less of a used workstation you can pick up a mini-PC with an Intel N100 processor. The N100 is a four-core processor based on the 12th gen Alder Lake architecture and comes equipped with the latest revision of the Quick Sync cores. These little processors offer astounding hardware transcoding capabilities for their size and power draw. Otherwise they perform equivalent to an i5-6500, which isn't a terrible CPU. A friend of mine uses an N100 machine as a dedicated retro emulation gaming system and it does everything up to 6th generation consoles just fine. The N100 is also a remarkably efficient chip, it sips power. In fact, the difference between running one of these and an old workstation could work out to hundreds of dollars a year in energy bills depending on where you live.

You can find these Mini-PCs all over Amazon or for a little cheaper on AliExpress. They range in price from $170 CAD/$125 USD for a no name N100 with 8GB RAM to $280 CAD/$200 USD for a Beelink S12 Pro with 16GB RAM. The brand doesn't really matter, they're all coming from the same three factories in Shenzen, go for whichever one fits your budget or has features you want. 8GB RAM should be enough, Linux is lightweight and Plex only calls for 2GB RAM. 16GB RAM might result in a slightly snappier experience, especially with ZFS. A 256GB SSD is more than enough for what we need as a boot drive, but going for a bigger drive might allow you to get away with things like creating preview thumbnails for Plex, but it’s up to you and your budget.

The Mini-PC I wound up buying was a Firebat AK2 Plus with 8GB RAM and a 256GB SSD. It looks like this:

Note: Be forewarned that if you decide to order a Mini-PC from AliExpress, note the type of power adapter it ships with. The mini-PC I bought came with an EU power adapter and I had to supply my own North American power supply. Thankfully this is a minor issue as barrel plug 30W/12V/2.5A power adapters are easy to find and can be had for $10.

Step Two: Choosing Your Storage

Storage is the most important part of our build. It is also the most expensive. Thankfully it’s also the most easily upgrade-able down the line.

For people with a smaller media collection (4TB to 8TB), a more limited budget, or who will only ever have two simultaneous streams running, I would say that the most economical course of action would be to buy a USB 3.0 8TB external HDD. Something like this one from Western Digital or this one from Seagate. One of these external drives will cost you in the area of $200 CAD/$140 USD. Down the line you could add a second external drive or replace it with a multi-drive RAIDz set up such as detailed below.

If a single external drive the path for you, move on to step three.

For people with larger media libraries (12TB+), who prefer media in 4k, or care who about data redundancy, the answer is a RAID array featuring multiple HDDs in an enclosure.

Note: If you are using an old PC or used workstatiom as your server and have the room for at least three 3.5" drives, and as many open SATA ports on your mother board you won't need an enclosure, just install the drives into the case. If your old computer is a laptop or doesn’t have room for more internal drives, then I would suggest an enclosure.

The minimum number of drives needed to run a RAIDz array is three, and seeing as RAIDz is what we will be using, you should be looking for an enclosure with three to five bays. I think that four disks makes for a good compromise for a home server. Regardless of whether you go for a three, four, or five bay enclosure, do be aware that in a RAIDz array the space equivalent of one of the drives will be dedicated to parity at a ratio expressed by the equation 1 − 1/n i.e. in a four bay enclosure equipped with four 12TB drives, if we configured our drives in a RAIDz1 array we would be left with a total of 36TB of usable space (48TB raw size). The reason for why we might sacrifice storage space in such a manner will be explained in the next section.

A four bay enclosure will cost somewhere in the area of $200 CDN/$140 USD. You don't need anything fancy, we don't need anything with hardware RAID controls (RAIDz is done entirely in software) or even USB-C. An enclosure with USB 3.0 will perform perfectly fine. Don’t worry too much about USB speed bottlenecks. A mechanical HDD will be limited by the speed of its mechanism long before before it will be limited by the speed of a USB connection. I've seen decent looking enclosures from TerraMaster, Yottamaster, Mediasonic and Sabrent.

When it comes to selecting the drives, as of this writing, the best value (dollar per gigabyte) are those in the range of 12TB to 20TB. I settled on 12TB drives myself. If 12TB to 20TB drives are out of your budget, go with what you can afford, or look into refurbished drives. I'm not sold on the idea of refurbished drives but many people swear by them.

When shopping for harddrives, search for drives designed specifically for NAS use. Drives designed for NAS use typically have better vibration dampening and are designed to be active 24/7. They will also often make use of CMR (conventional magnetic recording) as opposed to SMR (shingled magnetic recording). This nets them a sizable read/write performance bump over typical desktop drives. Seagate Ironwolf and Toshiba NAS are both well regarded brands when it comes to NAS drives. I would avoid Western Digital Red drives at this time. WD Reds were a go to recommendation up until earlier this year when it was revealed that they feature firmware that will throw up false SMART warnings telling you to replace the drive at the three year mark quite often when there is nothing at all wrong with that drive. It will likely even be good for another six, seven, or more years.

Step Three: Installing Linux

For this step you will need a USB thumbdrive of at least 6GB in capacity, an .ISO of Ubuntu, and a way to make that thumbdrive bootable media.

First download a copy of Ubuntu desktop (for best performance we could download the Server release, but for new Linux users I would recommend against the server release. The server release is strictly command line interface only, and having a GUI is very helpful for most people. Not many people are wholly comfortable doing everything through the command line, I'm certainly not one of them, and I grew up with DOS 6.0. 22.04.3 Jammy Jellyfish is the current Long Term Service release, this is the one to get.

Download the .ISO and then download and install balenaEtcher on your Windows PC. BalenaEtcher is an easy to use program for creating bootable media, you simply insert your thumbdrive, select the .ISO you just downloaded, and it will create a bootable installation media for you.

Once you've made a bootable media and you've got your Mini-PC (or you old PC/used workstation) in front of you, hook it directly into your router with an ethernet cable, and then plug in the HDD enclosure, a monitor, a mouse and a keyboard. Now turn that sucker on and hit whatever key gets you into the BIOS (typically ESC, DEL or F2). If you’re using a Mini-PC check to make sure that the P1 and P2 power limits are set correctly, my N100's P1 limit was set at 10W, a full 20W under the chip's power limit. Also make sure that the RAM is running at the advertised speed. My Mini-PC’s RAM was set at 2333Mhz out of the box when it should have been 3200Mhz. Once you’ve done that, key over to the boot order and place the USB drive first in the boot order. Then save the BIOS settings and restart.

After you restart you’ll be greeted by Ubuntu's installation screen. Installing Ubuntu is really straight forward, select the "minimal" installation option, as we won't need anything on this computer except for a browser (Ubuntu comes preinstalled with Firefox) and Plex Media Server/Jellyfin Media Server. Also remember to delete and reformat that Windows partition! We don't need it.

Step Four: Installing ZFS and Setting Up the RAIDz Array

Note: If you opted for just a single external HDD skip this step and move onto setting up a Samba share.

Once Ubuntu is installed it's time to configure our storage by installing ZFS to build our RAIDz array. ZFS is a "next-gen" file system that is both massively flexible and massively complex. It's capable of snapshot backup, self healing error correction, ZFS pools can be configured with drives operating in a supplemental manner alongside the storage vdev (e.g. fast cache, dedicated secondary intent log, hot swap spares etc.). It's also a file system very amenable to fine tuning. Block and sector size are adjustable to use case and you're afforded the option of different methods of inline compression. If you'd like a very detailed overview and explanation of its various features and tips on tuning a ZFS array check out these articles from Ars Technica. For now we're going to ignore all these features and keep it simple, we're going to pull our drives together into a single vdev running in RAIDz which will be the entirety of our zpool, no fancy cache drive or SLOG.

Open up the terminal and type the following commands:

sudo apt update

then

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

This will install the ZFS utility. Verify that it's installed with the following command:

zfs --version

Now, it's time to check that the HDDs we have in the enclosure are healthy, running, and recognized. We also want to find out their device IDs and take note of them:

sudo fdisk -1

Note: You might be wondering why some of these commands require "sudo" in front of them while others don't. "Sudo" is short for "super user do”. When and where "sudo" is used has to do with the way permissions are set up in Linux. Only the "root" user has the access level to perform certain tasks in Linux. As a matter of security and safety regular user accounts are kept separate from the "root" user. It's not advised (or even possible) to boot into Linux as "root" with most modern distributions. Instead by using "sudo" our regular user account is temporarily given the power to do otherwise forbidden things. Don't worry about it too much at this stage, but if you want to know more check out this introduction.

If everything is working you should get a list of the various drives detected along with their device IDs which will look like this: /dev/sdc. You can also check the device IDs of the drives by opening the disk utility app. Jot these IDs down as we'll need them for our next step, creating our RAIDz array.

RAIDz is similar to RAID-5 in that instead of striping your data over multiple disks, exchanging redundancy for speed and available space (RAID-0), or mirroring your data writing by two copies of every piece (RAID-1), it instead writes parity blocks across the disks in addition to striping, this provides a balance of speed, redundancy and available space. If a single drive fails, the parity blocks on the working drives can be used to reconstruct the entire array as soon as a replacement drive is added.

Additionally, RAIDz improves over some of the common RAID-5 flaws. It's more resilient and capable of self healing, as it is capable of automatically checking for errors against a checksum. It's more forgiving in this way, and it's likely that you'll be able to detect when a drive is dying well before it fails. A RAIDz array can survive the loss of any one drive.

Note: While RAIDz is indeed resilient, if a second drive fails during the rebuild, you're fucked. Always keep backups of things you can't afford to lose. This tutorial, however, is not about proper data safety.

To create the pool, use the following command:

sudo zpool create "zpoolnamehere" raidz "device IDs of drives we're putting in the pool"

For example, let's creatively name our zpool "mypool". This poil will consist of four drives which have the device IDs: sdb, sdc, sdd, and sde. The resulting command will look like this:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde

If as an example you bought five HDDs and decided you wanted more redundancy dedicating two drive to this purpose, we would modify the command to "raidz2" and the command would look something like the following:

sudo zpool create mypool raidz2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf

An array configured like this is known as RAIDz2 and is able to survive two disk failures.

Once the zpool has been created, we can check its status with the command:

zpool status

Or more concisely with:

zpool list

The nice thing about ZFS as a file system is that a pool is ready to go immediately after creation. If we were to set up a traditional RAID-5 array using mbam, we'd have to sit through a potentially hours long process of reformatting and partitioning the drives. Instead we're ready to go right out the gates.

The zpool should be automatically mounted to the filesystem after creation, check on that with the following:

df -hT | grep zfs

Note: If your computer ever loses power suddenly, say in event of a power outage, you may have to re-import your pool. In most cases, ZFS will automatically import and mount your pool, but if it doesn’t and you can't see your array, simply open the terminal and type sudo zpool import -a.

By default a zpool is mounted at /"zpoolname". The pool should be under our ownership but let's make sure with the following command:

sudo chown -R "yourlinuxusername" /"zpoolname"

Note: Changing file and folder ownership with "chown" and file and folder permissions with "chmod" are essential commands for much of the admin work in Linux, but we won't be dealing with them extensively in this guide. If you'd like a deeper tutorial and explanation you can check out these two guides: chown and chmod.

You can access the zpool file system through the GUI by opening the file manager (the Ubuntu default file manager is called Nautilus) and clicking on "Other Locations" on the sidebar, then entering the Ubuntu file system and looking for a folder with your pool's name. Bookmark the folder on the sidebar for easy access.

Your storage pool is now ready to go. Assuming that we already have some files on our Windows PC we want to copy to over, we're going to need to install and configure Samba to make the pool accessible in Windows.

Step Five: Setting Up Samba/Sharing

Samba is what's going to let us share the zpool with Windows and allow us to write to it from our Windows machine. First let's install Samba with the following commands:

sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install samba

Next create a password for Samba.

sudo smbpswd -a "yourlinuxusername"

It will then prompt you to create a password. Just reuse your Ubuntu user password for simplicity's sake.

Note: if you're using just a single external drive replace the zpool location in the following commands with wherever it is your external drive is mounted, for more information see this guide on mounting an external drive in Ubuntu.

After you've created a password we're going to create a shareable folder in our pool with this command

mkdir /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

Now we're going to open the smb.conf file and make that folder shareable. Enter the following command.

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

This will open the .conf file in nano, the terminal text editor program. Now at the end of smb.conf add the following entry:

["foldername"]

path = /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

available = yes

valid users = "yourlinuxusername"

read only = no

writable = yes

browseable = yes

guest ok = no

Ensure that there are no line breaks between the lines and that there's a space on both sides of the equals sign. Our next step is to allow Samba traffic through the firewall:

sudo ufw allow samba

Finally restart the Samba service:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

At this point we'll be able to access to the pool, browse its contents, and read and write to it from Windows. But there's one more thing left to do, Windows doesn't natively support the ZFS file systems and will read the used/available/total space in the pool incorrectly. Windows will read available space as total drive space, and all used space as null. This leads to Windows only displaying a dwindling amount of "available" space as the drives are filled. We can fix this! Functionally this doesn't actually matter, we can still write and read to and from the disk, it just makes it difficult to tell at a glance the proportion of used/available space, so this is an optional step but one I recommend (this step is also unnecessary if you're just using a single external drive). What we're going to do is write a little shell script in #bash. Open nano with the terminal with the command:

nano

Now insert the following code:

#!/bin/bash CUR_PATH=`pwd` ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT=$(zfs get type $CUR_PATH 2>&1 > /dev/null) > /dev/null if [[ $ZFS_CHECK_OUTPUT == *not\ a\ ZFS* ]] then IS_ZFS=false else IS_ZFS=true fi if [[ $IS_ZFS = false ]] then df $CUR_PATH | tail -1 | awk '{print $2" "$4}' else USED=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp used $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null AVAIL=$((`zfs get -o value -Hp available $CUR_PATH` / 1024)) > /dev/null TOTAL=$(($USED+$AVAIL)) > /dev/null echo $TOTAL $AVAIL fi

Save the script as "dfree.sh" to /home/"yourlinuxusername" then change the ownership of the file to make it executable with this command:

sudo chmod 774 dfree.sh

Now open smb.conf with sudo again:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

Now add this entry to the top of the configuration file to direct Samba to use the results of our script when Windows asks for a reading on the pool's used/available/total drive space:

[global]

dfree command = /home/"yourlinuxusername"/dfree.sh

Save the changes to smb.conf and then restart Samba again with the terminal:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

Now there’s one more thing we need to do to fully set up the Samba share, and that’s to modify a hidden group permission. In the terminal window type the following command:

usermod -a -G sambashare “yourlinuxusername”

Then restart samba again:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

If we don’t do this last step, everything will appear to work fine, and you will even be able to see and map the drive from Windows and even begin transferring files, but you'd soon run into a lot of frustration. As every ten minutes or so a file would fail to transfer and you would get a window announcing “0x8007003B Unexpected Network Error”. This window would require your manual input to continue the transfer with the file next in the queue. And at the end it would reattempt to transfer whichever files failed the first time around. 99% of the time they’ll go through that second try, but this is still all a major pain in the ass. Especially if you’ve got a lot of data to transfer or you want to step away from the computer for a while.

It turns out samba can act a little weirdly with the higher read/write speeds of RAIDz arrays and transfers from Windows, and will intermittently crash and restart itself if this group option isn’t changed. Inputting the above command will prevent you from ever seeing that window.

The last thing we're going to do before switching over to our Windows PC is grab the IP address of our Linux machine. Enter the following command:

hostname -I

This will spit out this computer's IP address on the local network (it will look something like 192.168.0.x), write it down. It might be a good idea once you're done here to go into your router settings and reserving that IP for your Linux system in the DHCP settings. Check the manual for your specific model router on how to access its settings, typically it can be accessed by opening a browser and typing http:\\192.168.0.1 in the address bar, but your router may be different.

Okay we’re done with our Linux computer for now. Get on over to your Windows PC, open File Explorer, right click on Network and click "Map network drive". Select Z: as the drive letter (you don't want to map the network drive to a letter you could conceivably be using for other purposes) and enter the IP of your Linux machine and location of the share like so: \\"LINUXCOMPUTERLOCALIPADDRESSGOESHERE"\"zpoolnamegoeshere"\. Windows will then ask you for your username and password, enter the ones you set earlier in Samba and you're good. If you've done everything right it should look something like this:

You can now start moving media over from Windows to the share folder. It's a good idea to have a hard line running to all machines. Moving files over Wi-Fi is going to be tortuously slow, the only thing that’s going to make the transfer time tolerable (hours instead of days) is a solid wired connection between both machines and your router.

Step Six: Setting Up Remote Desktop Access to Your Server

After the server is up and going, you’ll want to be able to access it remotely from Windows. Barring serious maintenance/updates, this is how you'll access it most of the time. On your Linux system open the terminal and enter:

sudo apt install xrdp

Then:

sudo systemctl enable xrdp

Once it's finished installing, open “Settings” on the sidebar and turn off "automatic login" in the User category. Then log out of your account. Attempting to remotely connect to your Linux computer while you’re logged in will result in a black screen!

Now get back on your Windows PC, open search and look for "RDP". A program called "Remote Desktop Connection" should pop up, open this program as an administrator by right-clicking and selecting “run as an administrator”. You’ll be greeted with a window. In the field marked “Computer” type in the IP address of your Linux computer. Press connect and you'll be greeted with a new window and prompt asking for your username and password. Enter your Ubuntu username and password here.

If everything went right, you’ll be logged into your Linux computer. If the performance is sluggish, adjust the display options. Lowering the resolution and colour depth do a lot to make the interface feel snappier.

Remote access is how we're going to be using our Linux system from now, barring edge cases like needing to get into the BIOS or upgrading to a new version of Ubuntu. Everything else from performing maintenance like a monthly zpool scrub to checking zpool status and updating software can all be done remotely.

This is how my server lives its life now, happily humming and chirping away on the floor next to the couch in a corner of the living room.

Step Seven: Plex Media Server/Jellyfin

Okay we’ve got all the ground work finished and our server is almost up and running. We’ve got Ubuntu up and running, our storage array is primed, we’ve set up remote connections and sharing, and maybe we’ve moved over some of favourite movies and TV shows.

Now we need to decide on the media server software to use which will stream our media to us and organize our library. For most people I’d recommend Plex. It just works 99% of the time. That said, Jellyfin has a lot to recommend it by too, even if it is rougher around the edges. Some people run both simultaneously, it’s not that big of an extra strain. I do recommend doing a little bit of your own research into the features each platform offers, but as a quick run down, consider some of the following points:

Plex is closed source and is funded through PlexPass purchases while Jellyfin is open source and entirely user driven. This means a number of things: for one, Plex requires you to purchase a “PlexPass” (purchased as a one time lifetime fee $159.99 CDN/$120 USD or paid for on a monthly or yearly subscription basis) in order to access to certain features, like hardware transcoding (and we want hardware transcoding) or automated intro/credits detection and skipping, Jellyfin offers some of these features for free through plugins. Plex supports a lot more devices than Jellyfin and updates more frequently. That said, Jellyfin's Android and iOS apps are completely free, while the Plex Android and iOS apps must be activated for a one time cost of $6 CDN/$5 USD. But that $6 fee gets you a mobile app that is much more functional and features a unified UI across platforms, the Plex mobile apps are simply a more polished experience. The Jellyfin apps are a bit of a mess and the iOS and Android versions are very different from each other.

Jellyfin’s actual media player is more fully featured than Plex's, but on the other hand Jellyfin's UI, library customization and automatic media tagging really pale in comparison to Plex. Streaming your music library is free through both Jellyfin and Plex, but Plex offers the PlexAmp app for dedicated music streaming which boasts a number of fantastic features, unfortunately some of those fantastic features require a PlexPass. If your internet is down, Jellyfin can still do local streaming, while Plex can fail to play files unless you've got it set up a certain way. Jellyfin has a slew of neat niche features like support for Comic Book libraries with the .cbz/.cbt file types, but then Plex offers some free ad-supported TV and films, they even have a free channel that plays nothing but Classic Doctor Who.

Ultimately it's up to you, I settled on Plex because although some features are pay-walled, it just works. It's more reliable and easier to use, and a one-time fee is much easier to swallow than a subscription. I had a pretty easy time getting my boomer parents and tech illiterate brother introduced to and using Plex and I don't know if I would've had as easy a time doing that with Jellyfin. I do also need to mention that Jellyfin does take a little extra bit of tinkering to get going in Ubuntu, you’ll have to set up process permissions, so if you're more tolerant to tinkering, Jellyfin might be up your alley and I’ll trust that you can follow their installation and configuration guide. For everyone else, I recommend Plex.

So pick your poison: Plex or Jellyfin.

Note: The easiest way to download and install either of these packages in Ubuntu is through Snap Store.

After you've installed one (or both), opening either app will launch a browser window into the browser version of the app allowing you to set all the options server side.

The process of adding creating media libraries is essentially the same in both Plex and Jellyfin. You create a separate libraries for Television, Movies, and Music and add the folders which contain the respective types of media to their respective libraries. The only difficult or time consuming aspect is ensuring that your files and folders follow the appropriate naming conventions:

Plex naming guide for Movies

Plex naming guide for Television

Jellyfin follows the same naming rules but I find their media scanner to be a lot less accurate and forgiving than Plex. Once you've selected the folders to be scanned the service will scan your files, tagging everything and adding metadata. Although I find do find Plex more accurate, it can still erroneously tag some things and you might have to manually clean up some tags in a large library. (When I initially created my library it tagged the 1963-1989 Doctor Who as some Korean soap opera and I needed to manually select the correct match after which everything was tagged normally.) It can also be a bit testy with anime (especially OVAs) be sure to check TVDB to ensure that you have your files and folders structured and named correctly. If something is not showing up at all, double check the name.

Once that's done, organizing and customizing your library is easy. You can set up collections, grouping items together to fit a theme or collect together all the entries in a franchise. You can make playlists, and add custom artwork to entries. It's fun setting up collections with posters to match, there are even several websites dedicated to help you do this like PosterDB. As an example, below are two collections in my library, one collecting all the entries in a franchise, the other follows a theme.

My Star Trek collection, featuring all eleven television series, and thirteen films.

My Best of the Worst collection, featuring sixty-nine films previously showcased on RedLetterMedia’s Best of the Worst. They’re all absolutely terrible and I love them.

As for settings, ensure you've got Remote Access going, it should work automatically and be sure to set your upload speed after running a speed test. In the library settings set the database cache to 2000MB to ensure a snappier and more responsive browsing experience, and then check that playback quality is set to original/maximum. If you’re severely bandwidth limited on your upload and have remote users, you might want to limit the remote stream bitrate to something more reasonable, just as a note of comparison Netflix’s 1080p bitrate is approximately 5Mbps, although almost anyone watching through a chromium based browser is streaming at 720p and 3mbps. Other than that you should be good to go. For actually playing your files, there's a Plex app for just about every platform imaginable. I mostly watch television and films on my laptop using the Windows Plex app, but I also use the Android app which can broadcast to the chromecast connected to the TV in the office and the Android TV app for our smart TV. Both are fully functional and easy to navigate, and I can also attest to the OS X version being equally functional.

Part Eight: Finding Media

Now, this is not really a piracy tutorial, there are plenty of those out there. But if you’re unaware, BitTorrent is free and pretty easy to use, just pick a client (qBittorrent is the best) and go find some public trackers to peruse. Just know now that all the best trackers are private and invite only, and that they can be exceptionally difficult to get into. I’m already on a few, and even then, some of the best ones are wholly out of my reach.

If you decide to take the left hand path and turn to Usenet you’ll have to pay. First you’ll need to sign up with a provider like Newshosting or EasyNews for access to Usenet itself, and then to actually find anything you’re going to need to sign up with an indexer like NZBGeek or NZBFinder. There are dozens of indexers, and many people cross post between them, but for more obscure media it’s worth checking multiple. You’ll also need a binary downloader like SABnzbd. That caveat aside, Usenet is faster, bigger, older, less traceable than BitTorrent, and altogether slicker. I honestly prefer it, and I'm kicking myself for taking this long to start using it because I was scared off by the price. I’ve found so many things on Usenet that I had sought in vain elsewhere for years, like a 2010 Italian film about a massacre perpetrated by the SS that played the festival circuit but never received a home media release; some absolute hero uploaded a rip of a festival screener DVD to Usenet. Anyway, figure out the rest of this shit on your own and remember to use protection, get yourself behind a VPN, use a SOCKS5 proxy with your BitTorrent client, etc.

On the legal side of things, if you’re around my age, you (or your family) probably have a big pile of DVDs and Blu-Rays sitting around unwatched and half forgotten. Why not do a bit of amateur media preservation, rip them and upload them to your server for easier access? (Your tools for this are going to be Handbrake to do the ripping and AnyDVD to break any encryption.) I went to the trouble of ripping all my SCTV DVDs (five box sets worth) because none of it is on streaming nor could it be found on any pirate source I tried. I’m glad I did, forty years on it’s still one of the funniest shows to ever be on TV.

Part Nine/Epilogue: Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr and Overseerr

There are a lot of ways to automate your server for better functionality or to add features you and other users might find useful. Sonarr, Radarr, and Lidarr are a part of a suite of “Servarr” services (there’s also Readarr for books and Whisparr for adult content) that allow you to automate the collection of new episodes of TV shows (Sonarr), new movie releases (Radarr) and music releases (Lidarr). They hook in to your BitTorrent client or Usenet binary newsgroup downloader and crawl your preferred Torrent trackers and Usenet indexers, alerting you to new releases and automatically grabbing them. You can also use these services to manually search for new media, and even replace/upgrade your existing media with better quality uploads. They’re really a little tricky to set up on a bare metal Ubuntu install (ideally you should be running them in Docker Containers), and I won’t be providing a step by step on installing and running them, I’m simply making you aware of their existence.

The other bit of kit I want to make you aware of is Overseerr which is a program that scans your Plex media library and will serve recommendations based on what you like. It also allows you and your users to request specific media. It can even be integrated with Sonarr/Radarr/Lidarr so that fulfilling those requests is fully automated.

And you're done. It really wasn't all that hard. Enjoy your media. Enjoy the control you have over that media. And be safe in the knowledge that no hedgefund CEO motherfucker who hates the movies but who is somehow in control of a major studio will be able to disappear anything in your library as a tax write-off.

[sshbpodcast]

I’ll Spock the world and meld with you, Pt 1

By Ames

My mind to your mind. My thoughts to your thoughts. Your dirty, dirty thoughts. Sometimes a mind meld in Star Trek is a clever technique to advance the plot in a sci-fi way. Sometimes, it’s just a way to cop out of a scene when the writers have written themselves into a corner. And other times it’s straight up intrusive and horrifying because no one should have the power to read another person’s mind without their consent!

The A Star to Steer Her By hosts are going through all the mind meld scenes and collecting our thoughts on each one. First up: all the mind melds from The Original Series through the TOS films. So brace yourself for mostly seeing Spock (but somehow not entirely Spock!) touching a lot of people’s faces, random walls, and sometimes just the air around him to cognitively connect with whatever he damn well pleases. The list is longer than I intended since Spock is a bit of a meld slut, so check them all out below and telepathically listen to our chatter (jump to 45:43) over on the podcast. Back to those dirty, dirty thoughts…

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

“Dagger of the Mind” The very first mind meld we see comes pretty early in the release of season one of The Original Series, and it was all a way for the Enterprise crew to figure out what the hell was going on with that lunatic Simon Van Gelder without resorting to bunkum science like hypnosis. Cue Spock pulling some crazy faces throughout an agonizingly long scene to determine that Dr. Adams used the neural neutralizer on Van Gelder and is not to be trusted. Good job advancing the plot and introducing a Vulcan superpower we’ll use over and over and over again!

“A Taste of Armageddon” The next use we see later in the season already makes the whole idea of the mind meld so laughable as to be worthy of ridicule. The crew has been locked up by Eminiarians, as is their wont, and Spock uses a sort of long-distance, touch-free variant of the mind meld on one of the guards on the other side of a wall. Wow, it didn’t take the writers long to buff Spock’s magic powers to allow him to save the day by essentially mind controlling some bloke.

“The Devil in the Dark” We’ve got to commend Leonard Nimoy for some mesmerizing acting when Spock mind melds with the Horta in “The Devil in the Dark.” It’s over-the-top in all the right ways. Watching him feeling the pain of the silicon-based lifeform is haunting. What a great way to humanize a being that is probably among the furthest biologically from humans in the show. This is what science fiction is really for. Plus it opens up Spock’s magic powers to even more different lifeforms!

“The Changeling” Speaking of Spock using his powers on lifeforms that are further and further from the humanoids we’re accustomed to: we’ve got Spock mind melding with Nomad in “The Changeling.” So now Spock can mind meld with people he’s touching, people on the other sides of walls, aliens that look like a big afghan blanket, and even random robots whose sentience is questionable from the start. What can’t this man mind meld with? Things are getting out of control.

“Mirror, Mirror” Finally, our first instance of someone other than Spock melding with a person. It’s… Mirror Spock! Which still counts! This time, that pointy-eared hobgoblin is intruding on McCoy’s thoughts in order to learn the truth behind the origins of the prime-universe crew. And it just makes us wonder why we don’t use the Vulcan mind meld in courtroom scenes or any time we need to learn if someone is lying or not. This superpower is so overpowered that it could solve most TOS plots lickety-split!

“Patterns of Force” That’s just how they use it in “Patterns of Force” when Spock mind melds a mostly catatonic John Gill to learn why the actual hell he would bring Nazism to the Ekosians in the first place. And it introduced an actual limitation to the mind meld for a change! Apparently this power isn’t limitless. Gill has been tranqed so hard that the best Spock can do is allow Gill to answer direct questions asked of him. So play 20 Questions with this guy, and you’ll be all set.

“By Any Other Name” Remember how Spock once mind melded a guy through a wall? We just talked about it a moment ago. Well the writers remembered too because it comes up again when the Kelvins have the crew confined to some cave or other, and it’s almost the exact same scene we got in “At Taste of Armageddon.” Spock tries to mentally influence Kelinda through the rock wall; it’s unclear if she takes the bait or just wants to punish them for trying, but the result is the same.

“The Paradise Syndrome” It’s overacting all around in this use of the mind meld on Kirok, the persona that Kirk has taken on while on Amerind. Spock needs to restore Kirk’s memory and decides the quickest way to do that is go in there and defrag it himself. This meld thing really is a Swiss Army knife, and is probably used way more often than most people even open one of those tools. Are we at the point at which the whole concept of the mind meld is just an escape button from an episode? Guys, we’re not even halfway through this list…

“Is There in Truth No Beauty?” We’ve got a twofer of mind melds in one of my personal faves, “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” and our very first example of someone other than Nimoy performing it. So first we get Spock mind melding with the Medusan, Kollos, in order to merge consciousnesses, I guess? It’s close to a body possession, but Spock is still in there. It’s just that now he and Kollos together have the navigation capabilities to save the ship from doom.

And then Miranda Jones proves to us that humans can master the discipline as well if they are well trained. Sure, Vulcans get a new superpower every week it seems, but this is one that Dr. Jones picked up through years of schooling on Vulcan, and she uses it to save Spock from madness. And then presumably she lives happily ever after with Kollos, my biggest ship of the franchise.

“Spectre of the Gun” Get ready for the rarely seen triple mind meld, courtesy of the absurd western episode “Spectre of the Gun.” Considering at the beginning of TOS, Spock claims he’s never mind melded a human before (something Discovery blatantly retconned), by this point in season three, he’s melding Kirk, McCoy, and Scott in rapid succession to make their minds more pliant so that they’ll believe the bullets from the gunfight at the OK Corral will go through them. It’s a weird one, y’all.

“Requiem for Methuselah” Almost through the live action show now, and we’ve reached what we’ve called both one of Spock’s worst moments and one of the worst uses of a memory wipe on the show. It’s just plain messed up that Spock would remove Kirk’s memories of Rayna, the robot he fell in love with, because he does it without Kirk’s consent. Bones joshes that Spock will never understand love and comments that he wishes the captain could forget… and Spock makes the captain forget! Because Bones was razzing him! Not cool!

“Turnabout Intruder” Our last instance from the run of The Original Series comes from the last episode from the run of The Original Series. That’s when Spock mind melds with Kirk, who happens to be in Janice Lester’s body, to confirm that the two have body swapped. So it’s another lie detector use—further proof that this technique really can solve most conflicts in episodes. That is, if people trust the Vulcan performing it, which Janice Lester, who happens to be in Kirk’s body, emphatically does not.

“One of Our Planets Is Missing” We’ve made it to The Animated Series, and there are more Spock mind melds to cover! Do I have a soft spot for “One of Our Planets Is Missing” because it’s similar to some unrelated fanfic I wrote for the podcast? You bet I do! Both feature Spock mind melding with a sentient cloud while the ship is inside of it, which I’d say is stretching the capacity for mind melds except for the fact that he’s already done much weirder things, so whatever. 

“The Infinite Vulcan” The other instance of a mind meld we get in The Animated Series is the rare Spock-on-Spock meld in “The Infinite Vulcan.” For absolutely no reason except that it would look funny animated (which was shockingly something Filmation had the capacity to do in their very cheap box of tricks), the clone of Spock is fifty feet tall. Spock 2 needs to save original Spock from something or other, and a mind meld via just a massive fingertip to the noggin does the trick.

The Motion Picture Whatever the hell V’Ger is by the time the crew enters it in The Motion Picture, you can bet your ass Spock can mind meld with it. It’s somewhere between cloud, robot, and giant floating Ilia, and Spock is fully committed to putting his hands all over that puppy and figuring out its deal. He doesn’t even have permission to go investigate this thing. My dude just wanders in unannounced to get into that delicious brain, that’s how nuts Spock is at this point.

The Wrath of Khan This afterthought of a scene ended up being so consequential going forward. To pave the way for bringing Spock back to life after his beautiful sacrifice, a scene of Spock using a mind meld to dump his katra into McCoy was added. We at the podcast are still mixed about how necessary this was since we’re also very mixed on the ensuing movie as a whole, but it’s also nice to have Spock back. And it allows for some excellent DeForest Kelley acting in the third film. But it undoes a poignant death scene. So torn!

The Search for Spock Speaking of the movie we’re so torn on, The Search for Spock has some mind melds of its own. We get our first mind meld from Sarek when he comes looking for Spock’s katra and assumes it’s in Kirk. Why he didn’t ask what he was looking for first, we can’t say, but it is totally in Sarek’s character to just stride in and do whatever without explaining himself.

Toward the end of the movie, after we’ve done all the prerequisite searching for Spock, we get a scene at Mount Seleya where the Vulcan priestess T’Lar performs the fal-tor-pan ceremony on McCoy and the newly resurrected Spock, which includes something akin to a mind meld to move the katra over like cut-pasting a file from your My Documents folder.

The Voyage Home The movies really do have a good selection of mind melds to go around, with almost all of the TOS films having the Vulcan power represented. The Voyage Home’s mind meld of choice is on the humpback whales, George and Gracie, when Spock is trying to communicate the plan to the massive Cetacea. It’s absolutely batshit that Spock claims he’s succeeded in conveying to the whales what the plan is and that they’re onboard. Somehow the thing that makes the most sense is Spock learning that Gracie is pregnant.

The Undiscovered Country Our final mind meld for this week is also the most horrifying. Like the squicky mind wipe in “Requiem for Methuselah,” it’s another of Spock’s real low points as a character. Using the mind meld as a weapon to force information from Valeris in The Undiscovered Country really feels like the antithesis of what the practice was contrived for originally. We’ve come a long way since “Dagger of the Mind,” when melding was established so they wouldn’t have to show Spock doing something problematic, like hypnotizing Van Gelder, and now at the end of the movies, it’s even more problematic than that. Heckin’ yikes.

—

When I snap my fingers, you’ll subscribe to this space for more blogtiviities! We’ve got more mind melds to discuss from the other Trek series, and you don’t want to miss those! You also don’t want to miss more Star Trek: Discovery coverage as we watch through the whole thing over on SoundCloud or wherever you get your podcasts. You also don’t want to skip out on friending us on Facebook and BlueSky. Snap!

[blueikeproductions]

They finally posted a trailer and poster for the next batch of EarthSpark. And it’s described as S3, though experience with Netflix makes me think this is just the remainder of S2… Still according to the marketing, fans finally got a third season, so that counts for something. It’s only roughly 7 episodes, but G1’s final fourth season was a three part finale, so a very short season isn’t unheard of.

This poster is a lot better than the past main posters they’ve used over and over.

These are better also, but they don’t get used much.

But after RotB & TFONE, I think we can all agree decent advertising isn’t modern Hasbro & Paramount’s strong suit.

As for the trailer itself, it continues a trend I’ve noticed where most EarthSpark ancillary stuff tends to down play the Terrans. Twitch appears for a split second and Thrash appears in a gag where he gets shot… continuing his “just kinda there” vibe.

The trailer primarily focuses on the traditional Autobot & Decepticon conflict, with a big focus put on Prowl, the newest and seemingly only Transformer added to the cast so far.

A news article further describes Prowl as an “old world” Autobot detective who trusts the hard facts & always finds the truth. He is immediately distrustful of Optimus’ allies, so presumably that includes the Maltos, Terrans and naturally Megatron. It’s interesting how he’s specifically described as a detective, perhaps that’s to avoid ACAB allegations I could see the old writers attempt through him….

Prowl’s G1 profiles cast him as a by the books, semi prickly, military strategist. This doesn’t really get explored in the old cartoon, and while it was touched on briefly in Marvel, IDW went hog wild with it, casting its Prowl as a corrupt cop antagonist towards the end of the run. IDW2 cast him as more of a detective pre-war though, possibly where EarthSpark borrowed it from, and while he was still a hard-aft, he had a soft spot for his pet dinosaur-alien.

The main villains of the season, unsurprisingly, are the Quintessons. Their leader is a female Judge, who the blurb declares it “is her birthright to possess the power of the Emberstone. She’s wise, dangerous, and her ego is so large that it’s no wonder she has five heads”.

What exactly constitutes gender among the Quints has never really been defined before.

It might be safe to say as far as the G1 cartoon is concerned, they’re an all male race.

WFC & CV attempted to insert female gender among the Judges, having some of the masks speak in a female voice.

That adds another oddity to Judge biology, as the G1 cartoon or Marvel UK comics never stated the other faces being separate personalities, instead other media describes them as different emotional states.

Alpha Q in Superlink did have multiple personalities based on which mask was displayed, each one squabbling/talking amongst themselves.

Presumably WFC/CV borrowed from Alpha Q, but the ES Quintesson Judge might be operating on G1 logic, each mask being a single (female) gender, as she has a female voice actor only.

The other big G1 thing the trailer shows is the Hate Plague. The leaked synopsis already revealed it, but like G1, those infected with the plague glow an intense red.

Once infected, they turn incredibly violent and try to kill each other. Despite the G1 show’s violence, nobody actually died ironically, at least it was never confirmed. The synopsis implies the Quintessons unleashed the Hate Plague on the Transformers, and while the 80’s Quints were instead among the victims of the outbreak, they do have a vague connection to it.

The oldest known leader within the Matrix, only known as “It”, resembles a Quintesson, with Japanese media confirming that’s what they are. Optimus Prime asks this ancient Quintesson how to combat the Hate Plague, with It saying the Plague couldn’t be outright destroyed but contained, where a wise man trapped the spores in a star. The spores nevertheless has a weakness to pure wisdom, so Optimus unleashes the power of the Matrix and uses its eons long store of wisdom to eradicate the virus once and for all… Until it briefly returns in Beast Machines.

As mentioned before, the Hate Plague isn’t exactly a popular concept cartoons like to go back to. Comics don’t like using it typically either, so its inclusion here is both unique but also a little… peculiar. I’m leaning towards it being a vague, modern topical metaphor for something, as an infected Megatron is fighting Optimus in particular. Probably some hogwash about Megatron succumbing to his biases and own hatred, but we’ll see soon enough.

Perhaps the most utterly bizarre detail is the blurb seemingly confirming the return of Spitfire and Aftermath.

How…?

Starscream yanked out their Allspar-er-Emberstone Shards, and the rock itself is dust. You can’t get any deader than that.

The only thing I can guess, is similar to Sari’s key, the Sleeves are the repository of the Emberstone’s life giving energies (the sleeves do just about anything else now so why not), and the Malto kids are incentivized to revive the two Decepticon Terrans for some reason.

MetroTitans in IDW also can grant life and that was carried over to Prime Wars, so it’s possible Terratronus can grant life too, and she restores the Terracons.

Worst case scenario is the two hellions are back up and running like nothing happened, and their death is never addressed again.

Crap writing if so, but the previous two scenarios would be preferable.

Not much longer to wait now. This might be the final batch, as the Quintessons make sense as the final end goal in the struggle over the Emberstone. The show has never been super committed to showing what’s going on Cybertron that whatever Prowl and Cosmos have to add to the matter is probably the best we’ll get. Plus the Terrans don’t have much incentive or interest to even go to Cybertron anyway; Alex would get more out of going there than his kids. Only thing I could guess is the Quints took over Cybertron off screen and that loosely ties into the Judge’s role on Earth, but eh. We’ll see.

[lastweeksshirttonight]

LEE'S FAQ!

Over the past nearly-two years, I've noticed that I get some questions about John's work asked repeatedly. That doesn't bother me - half of his prominent work is somewhat lost media, Tumblr's search is super fucked, and I always want to help anyone falling down the JO rabbit hole - but I realized that one central pinned post would be helpful! I'll keep this up to date as much as possible.

I know I have a lot of international followers, and if you have any knowledge of where to stream or find some of these items, please let me know and I'll update this post.

WHERE CAN I FIND...?

Anything really, I've just started going down this rabbit hole:

The John Oliver Masterlist is an incredible resource - while it hasn't been updated since about 2017 and has some broken links (especially in the LWT sections), it has functional links to every JO clip from The Daily Show, all the main segments of LWT through 2017, radio shows, and lots of other material. This was made by @johnoliverphotos and @ilovejohnoliver, and I'm eternally grateful for it.

The Department:

YouTuber Ben Jennings has the entire series on his channel.

Player FM has the series uploaded here as well.

The Bugle:

The Bugle Archive has all Times Online era episodes available to download. PLEASE DOWNLOAD THE EPISODES DIRECTLY; DO NOT STREAM FROM THIS SITE.

The Bugle is starting to upload Times Online era episodes to their official channels, which can be found here. They're up to ep 100 as of May 2025.

All post-Times Online episodes (starting with episode 179) are available on The Bugle's official channels.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart:

Paramount has axed the Daily Show archives online as of 6/26/24. It's absolutely gutting how little they give a shit about this program. Fuck them.

You're gonna have to sail the high seas to watch this. I'm sorry that this is the state of the US' most important comedy show of the 2000s. Since Paramount hasn't done shit with the old episodes for decades, I wouldn't hold your breath on it entering streaming.

Community:

In the US, this can be streamed on Peacock. Individual episodes can be purchased on YouTube, Apple TV, and Amazon Prime.

Worldwide, Community is now on Hulu.

Every season of Community is available on DVD and Blu-Ray.

John Oliver's New York Stand-Up Show:

In the US, the whole show is on Paramount Plus and can be purchased through Amazon and Apple.

This show also got purged in the big Comedy Central erasure, but at least you can buy it still?? Shit silver lining, I know.

Back catalog episodes of Last Week Tonight:

You can buy back catalog episodes on YouTube and Amazon in the US.

The first through eighth seasons of LWT have been uploaded fully on their YouTube in the US, with plans to upload future seasons during breaks in the show's current episodes!

In certain areas outside of the US, LWT is now being uploaded in full on their YouTube channel as well.

HBO Max no longer has back catalog episodes because capitalism is fucking ridiculous, I pay monthly for this service entirely for this show and I can't even watch old news from 5 years ago

The Horne Section:

The whole series is on Taskmaster Supermax+, which should work everywhere except the UK.

In the UK, you can stream this through Channel 4.

Season One is now available on The Horne Section YouTube channel internationally.

Taskmaster:

I've been trying to will this into existence for multiple seasons, no one can stop me

BLOG-SPECIFIC QUESTIONS

How did you get into John Oliver?

I answered this in too much detail in two posts, here and here.

Where is your icon from?

UPDATED: It was made by the lovely @stalebagels for me. She is wonderful <3

Is this blog a bit?/Do you really find this man attractive?

No, this is not an ironic bit, I really like John Oliver and find him genuinely hot. (Tbf, I get this question way more in person than online.)

[skaruresonic]

one thing that bothers me us how inconsistent Sonic's character can be, Sonic Team sees over the work idw does and approve it, sell it in Japan and promote it at the Japanese Sega club days then they refer to Sonic prime as canon where Sonic acts like a nine year old. They promote the movies and let Paramount do whatever they want its like they stopped giving a shit. I miss the Sonic X days where atleast his character in Japanese was consistent and canon.

Well, you gotta remember that Sonic is, among other things, a brand. A product that needs to be sold. Sega wants the fandom's money, so they'll follow it wherever it's at. They're not above distorting brand image to appeal to normies and fans who want to change Sonic into something completely different.

If the consumer base decrees that they want Sonic to be a superhero, by hook or by crook, Sonic is going to don that cape.

(...In adaptations and spinoffs. ST maintains a higher standard of quality for the games. I might have my gripes with Frontiers, but Sonic's characterization is not one of them.)

Everybody go home, we've already done this before

What people portray as "Sonic Team's oversight" or "seal of approval" of the IDW book is likely someone at SoJ giving the script a quick glance and deciding it's okay enough to publish.

Not that it's quality. That it passes the vaguest of vibe checks. Getting a C on your test means you passed the test, technically, but that doesn't make you an honor roll student.

Likewise, just because someone manning the phones at Sega says "welp, I don't see Sonic taking a fat rip on that bong, all clear buddy" doesn't mean IDW!Sonic is suddenly a good and game-faithful portrayal. Especially since Flynn has stated that he has more creative freedom with Sonic and Eggman.

Frankly, it's kind of laughable that people genuinely think ST themselves oversee the book's quality when

A.) the bulk of that job ought to be left to editorial (who are asleep at the wheel half the time, what with all the amateur writing and SPAG errors that manage to slip through)

and B.) ST are busy with their own shit? Vtuber Sonic? Sonic Channel stories? Promo-ing with Korone-chan? Developing video games? You think they've got time to pore over every intricacy of a licensed book that they receive no revenue for?

Can't speak for Prime, but the films are essentially another means of getting one foot in the door. They kind of inherently have to appeal to normies and their erroneous conceptions of Sonic so as to introduce new fans to the series.

[jbaileyfansite]

Jonathan Bailey and Matt Bomer Interview with EW (2023)

Matt Bomer and Jonathan Bailey do some pretty unspeakable things to each other on camera for Fellow Travelers, whether it's the Bridgerton and Wicked star sucking on Bomer's toes in the premiere episode or the White Collar and Magic Mike stud channeling his inner dom daddy throughout. It's the kind of sexual escapades that force you to clutch your pearls and then realize, "I wasn't even wearing pearls. How did these get around my neck?!"

Maybe it's because we don't often see this kind of raw, unfiltered depiction of gay sexuality put on display for television, even on a premium network like Showtime. "I had never read anything like that before in a screenplay," Bomer tells EW.

"It's provocative and it's all the things that will draw an audience in, or at least get people talking," Bailey remarks in a separate interview. "But then, why is it there? Well, it makes sense." To Bailey's point, there's a lot of story packed into the intimate moments of Fellow Travelers. It's like tricking someone to eat their vegetables: the two nearly naked handsome Hollywood actors in their prime is the alluring melted cheese, but that desperation you feel emanating off two societally suppressed gay characters is the broccoli underneath.

"Anything that feels voyeuristic or chemical to the audience whilst watching it is right, because that is just how overwhelming it is when you do finally come together in a world that deems your love and intimacy foul or incorrect," Bailey explains. "So it becomes a multidimensional experience for the performers, but also for the people watching at home. I just think there's no doubt with this that the art of the sex scene is so profound."

Bomer and Bailey star in Fellow Travelers as Hawk and Tim, who first meet and start an intoxicating affair in 1950s Washington, D.C., a time and place when Senator McCarthy (Chris Bauer) has launched the "Lavender Scare" purge of homosexuals from government positions. The series continues to track Hawk and Tim's relationship across decades, often bouncing between the past and the drama's 1980s present, when Bailey's Tim is stricken with AIDS.

The seventh episode, "White Nights," premiering on Paramount+ Friday and on Showtime this Sunday, sees these on-again, off-again lovers in the '70s on Fire Island. Bailey's mustache says it all. The sex reflects this next setting, which was (and still is) a rare safe haven for these men to express themselves openly.

The actors knew how much emotional and physical intimacy would be required of them for Fellow Travelers from the jump. "It was all on the page," Bailey recalls. "I read the script before I spoke with [showrunner] Ron Nyswaner, so I knew exactly what they were trying to do." The pair recall meeting with each other in Toronto, where the show primarily filmed, at Goldstruck Coffee on Cumberland Street. "It writes itself," Bailey jokes of the shop's playful name. "We were like, we need to see how each other are doing. We got to know each other in a way that was vicariously through the characters. That first conversation, we were totally committed to having each other's backs."

The sex scenes weren't something they overly discussed with each other, beyond "certain intricacies" they had to work out, Bomer says. "Obviously, we were very respectful of each other's boundaries. You did the work on the character, you showed up on set, you knew what your job was, and then you just hopefully try to let it fly when they call action."

"When you're going on set and it's 3 in the morning and you've done 16 hours worth of filming and you are about to only start the intimacy scenes, you do have to summon the angels and listen to Enya and draw from the ground to muster up the courage," Bailey says, playfully. "But that feeling of having to build your confidence and to put your armor on to do that is exactly right, because that's what the characters are feeling."

For Bomer, when it came to the onscreen sex, he enjoyed what he calls Hawk's "zero f---s given" vibe. "Hawk does have a public persona that he needs to survive and maneuver in the world that he's in, but underneath it all is a real 'f--- you,'" he says. "That for me was so refreshing to get to play, but it was also really refreshing to see — not that every intimate gay relationship is like that, but to see an aspect of gay sex brought to life in such an authentic and unflinching way."

Source

[popculturebuffet]

Transformers ONE Review: Autonomy is the Right of All Sentient Beings (Comissoin for Brotoman.EXE)

Hello all you happy autobots! This reviews one i'm excited for. See I was hoping One would be good: Rise of the Beasts was a disapointment having some good spots (the soundtrack, Anthony Ramos) but falling into the trap of trying to cram 80 tons of plot into two hours while not developing the robot cast enough. I mean it didn't have robotic gay jokes, racisim, robot testicles, or Optimus Prime gleefully murdering people, instead at worst being an asshole, but it didn't quite reach the heights of Bumblebee , not really taking in it's lessons of "less is more" and "Maybe people like characters"

Thankfully Transformers One takes the later to heart: Transformers One succesfully combines the spectacle people want from robots punching each other on the big screen, with a deep and personal character story of two robots who were like brothers whose ideologies drive them apart. One delivers both huge robot spectacle but grounds it in characters you care about. I'm a more casual fan of the franchise, haven't seen g1 , but I can't be happier as a fan of both transformers and animation itself to see this film and hope it does well over time. The first trailer REALLY didn't help but word of mouth probably will.

So while that's the most I can give without spoilers, I invite you to join me under the cut as I dive into WHY this film is so great, it's characters, ambiguities, great design choices, and the mistep or two. let's call him act 1 bumblebee. It's all under the cut with FULL SPOILERS. Seirously the film relies heavily on a twist about halfway in that while experinced fans and those experinced with fiction can probably see coming, though the marketing did a good job not telegraphing it, is still not something I want to be a dick and spoil outright So join me under the cut, till all are one.

What's Old is New:

Transformers One is the first animated transformers movie in decades: While I really CAN'T explain the 90's as Beast Wars seemed super popular when I was a kid, from the 2000's onward Hasbro largely dubbed anime of the transformers, and once we got to the live action films in the late 2000's through the 2010s Paramount made so much money hand over fist with each entry despite being "they gave devistator truck nuts" levels of baffling and "what seems to be standard micheal bay" levels of racist, they likely felt no need to inovate. If the movies are making them enough money to scrooge mcduck every time one comes out, there's no real reason to fight that if your a studio executive. The cartoons could simply take a queue or two from the films, as both animated and prime did and still make them money.

One comes in during this cash flow: looking into it on wikipedia, I genuinely tried looking elsewhere and couldn't find much, One came about after Age of Exctinction, with Parmount setting up a writers room to pitch sequel ideas. The films title animated nature and basic premise as a prequel came from that.. then as far as I can gather sat on the shelf as they still had binload of money.

Then the last knight happened ,an incoherent mess that had Anthony Hopkins have violent sexual tension with C3PO yet did nothing with it, so naturally it failed at the box office. This lead to Bay steping back from the franchise as a director

And lead to One being dusted off after Bumblebee's success. While the live action films continued with the ehtastic Rise of the Beasts and a GI Joe vs Transformers movie on the horizon, it's clear Parmount saw two things: putting all their transforming eggs in one transforming basket probably wasn't the best idea and animation was making bank post spider-verse. So One was dusted off. It just needed a director. Weirdly despite expresssing intrest in doing it Travis Knight, director of Kubo and the Two Strings, Bumblebee and longtime Laika animator, wasn't tapped.

Instead Parmount went with long time pixar animator and Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley. And cooley ended up being the perfect man for the job: he looked at the script and while he liked the concept he'd been pitched, a prequel focusing on a younger optimus and megatron and their brotherly friendship destegrating into a forever war, he found the script was a bit lighter in tone and wanted to get a tone.

Cooley was a fan of the G1 Cartoon, and in one interview recounted seeing the film as a kid and being blown away by the scope opening on unicron eating a planet. He loved the spectacle of it and wanted to bring that to one, comparing it to epics like ben hur or the tend commandments; big bombastic stories with a very human core, a relationship breaking down at it's core. Cooley also had a great approach to adapting it:he clearly loves the franchise with his reaction to various animators and storyboarders sneaking in their faviorite autobots for cameos simply being

Cooley knew how to adapt the film: honor it's legacy, with plenty of nods to transformers history, but not be beholden to it going for a style that was a mix of g1 astetics but with an art deco sensiblity. Notably his decision not to have orion pax wear the optimus mask a ton was for good reason: instead of just being change for change's sake, it was to let him emote more. It's the same reason Peter Cullen wasn't chosen: Cooley utterly adores cullen but got that this optimus.. isn't him yet. The films about Optimus growing into being a leader and thus needed another tone. More on that later but these interviews gave me even more respect than the film itself already had, showing a man who knew how to adapt something well.

Visually the film is a treat: the animation is done by industrial light and magic, who did the films and who have only done three animated films. To my suprise i'd not only seen them all but one of them wasn't the clone wars. You'd think but no, Lucasfilm outsourced. No instead they did the animation for Rango, also with paramount under nick and Strange Magic, and both films have some impressive animation. I mean the designs for strange magic are questionable, as are a lot of things in that very dumb very fun movie, but it's clear they were just as good at making a fully animated world as they were making animated parts of a live action one. It's been almost a decade since strange magic, but they haven't lost a step.

As a result One looks gorgoeous: we've seen pre war cybertron before, but the big budget means we can see it as a gorgeous gleaming futuristic city with icacon, it' sbucolic surface and it's full glory once the planet is restored at the end. It adds emotoinal weight as the war will likely leave this planet a ravaged cold wreck as usual, but we ge tto see that beauty first. Even with the unlimited budget of comics the cybertron of the idw comics, while not bad looking is a pretty generic city. Here we get a gleaming metropolis that fully takes adantage of the fact some of it's citzens can transform, cramped quarters and mines. It makes cybertron feel truly alive and fils me with the kind of joy and wonder I missed from sci fi. This big colorfulspectacle that dosen't shy away from darker themes or moments, but despite the darkness of it's world, the corruption, the lines, and the tragic destiny that awaits there's a sense of hope. I loved Dune Part 2, still one of my faviorite films of the year and one of the best films i've seen, but it also follows it's characters tragic downfall as he's forced on the path of the chosen one wether he likes it or not and no matter how many genocides he's going to do walking that path. It's nice ot have a thetrical space where you can have a tragic yet hopeful story abotu robots in the same space as a tragic tale of a charsmatic leader's villian origin story. That I can have the kind of fun and thrill I had with star wars before disney decided to make the most pandering film in existance with rise of skywalker and still make no one happy, be a kid again for 90 minutes while still having the intresting stories nd characters that engage me as an adult is nice.

We Were Closer Than Brothers

This quote's been glued to my brain since I first read it in Powers of X, this perfect summation of the disolution of xavier and magento's friendship and why the two were forever at odds. There's a simple gap in who they are, who they want to be that can't be crossed.

And it's that kind of eternally recurring conflict that drives the film. It's one I never realized just how common it is yet so timeless and malleable it's been done a lot. In addition to x-men, both in the comics and the reboot/prequel films, Nartuo and She Ra and the Princess of power both tell the story of two people who are closer than family, but whose lives, egos and core beliefs pull them apart. Granted only one of these takes the obvious route of "and now kiss" but I digress. This is a tale as old as time, the tale of two people who genuinely truly love each other, as family or more. ANd it's one that works really well with these two characters.

This isn't the first version of Transformers to have Optimus and Megatron as former friends: The War for Cybertron Trilogy and Prime both use this idea, as we discussed earlier this month Transformers Cyberverse teased it and the IDW comics i've covered had something close to this: the idea that Pax agress with Megatron that cybertron needs to change and for the better.. but they simply can't agree.

One however gets the time needed to really dig into this: the two aren't just friends.. their best friends. Possibly more but that's left open for interprtation. And in the good way not "QUICK WE NEED TO MAKE THE FILM LESS GAY BECAUSE WE WANT MORE MONEY BECAUSE THAT'S HOW WE THINK THAT'S WORKS. "cooley saw the two as brothers , while it's just as easy to see the two as having feelings for one another. I tend to go towards the latter, with D-16 like he tends to do repressing it and the point being moot by the end as that bridge is burnt beyond recognition.

Transformers One sti feels queer coded, something I noticed pointed out on tv tropes but is hard to ignore once you notice it: it's a story about two young robots one whose proud of who he is and wants to buck the corrupt system they were both born into , the other who keeps his head down and mouth shut, both of whom find out a part of them was kept form them by said system and are allowed to be who they are. It's really not hard to read into that, especailly when the main antagonist is literally stealing a part of who they are. Which is not subtle but the fact a family film is saying this at all and in a way that's hard to ignore is fucking amazing.

Circling back to that first part it's how the two react to the world they live in that defines Pax and D-16 long before they become the bots we all know and love. The world of cybertron is one where a good chunk are seemingly born without cogs, forced to work in mines or other hard labor for hours on end, and all for the glory of their leader Sentinel Prime, played by John Hamm in glorious smarm. The queer coding is hard to tell if it's intentional.. but the film's commentary on how soceites are often built to keep one class, often containg people of color, queer people and others society deems "other", down to profit the rich.

It also shows how those in power create cults of personality: Sentinel gets all this hard work by projecting a show of being this loved glorious figure, going on quests for his people every few days. John Hamm does a damn good job showing just WHY cybertron hangs on his word. In the IDW continuity, Sentinel really didn't hide what a bastard he was beyond what he had to. Here... they all love him and he leaves the dirty work to his minons. They get to bully the lower class and do whatever they please, and he gets the adoration while likely condoning their bullshit because he's just as much of a monster as they are, he just gets to hide it.

It's their reactions to this inequality that define our heroes: Orion is a dreamer. You've seen the type in animation before: he wants a better world, keeps striving and wants his big shot at being someone. But One nicely grounds this: where his now.. is a dangeorus life of mining being bullied constantly and where his heroic act of saving a coworker get shis boss Elita One demoted. It's a world where he can't even look at the past glories of cybertron and it's 13 primes without having to dodge security. Orion senses something is off and that the world can be better. He's an optimist.

What I like though is this isn't without consequence: elita did get demoted and resents him for it, D-16, his best friend, quitely resents him for having to bail him out. He has the heart of Optimus Prime, wanting to try for the best for everybody and wanting to take D-16with him as he gets up in the world... but he lacks the patience he'll gain in time, rushing into things, dragging others with him and generally not thinking before he acts. His actions get a friend demoted and later get him and his best friend sent to the depths.

D-16 on the otherhand.. just wants to keep his head down. Respect authority even if it's unfair, slowly get promoted.. work his way up. The thing is... the system isn't really BUILT to help bots. At most he'll be leading a shift. And while there's nothing wrong with that, as there is in real life blue collar work, he also wants to ignore that there's something.. off with the world. That maybe he dosent' HAVE to be a miner if he dosen't want to or wait centuries to get promoted. He's quick to see the benefits when Pax drags him into thei iacon grand prix.. but just as quick to panic, worrying any slip will get him sent back down. He's resigned that their stuck where they are. And look i'm not saying class disparity is easily sovled in the real world. It's not. But you can still fight for change where you are.

Eventaully though Optimus finds his shot, one that Megatron tries to resisit.. but ultimately can't: what seems to be the matrix. Taking along Elita, who gets dragged along and only agrees if she can arrest their asses if this fails, and B, a bot they find in the depths of waste management, our heroes trek heroically across the planets dangerous surface and duck a quintesson ship.

And the World Screams, Kiss Me Son of God

And it's here.. where the film gets flipped on his head. Now i'll grant the twist isn't super groundbreaking. Having the seemingly nice authority figure turn out to be an asshole is old hat, the film's marketing tried at first to hide the fact Megatron would turn evil till they realized they kinda marketed it bad, it's pretty easy to suspect sentinel. It dosen't help on my end that the previous versions I know are a genocidal racist monster man whose horrible managing of cybertron helped create the decepticons, and a smug prick who needs to be thrown into the sun.

But it works well as Sentinel Prime.. works as a symbol for systemic corruption. The primes were 12 noble people chosen by primus for their character and who ruled justly. Now granted it is iffy having your creator god whose also the planet pick your rulers, but Pax's ascendance later makes it very clear Primus choose not just by destiny but by character. Sentinel claimed he was one and the last survivor after they beat out the quintessons. One's universe uses mostly chunks of the g1 backstory: Primus created transformer kind and became the planet as in the comics, but the Quintessons are still key, just as adversaries rather than a monsterous race that created the transformers as slaves before they rebelled, though still keeping parts of that in spirit. The 13 primes from war for cybertron and prime are added in creating a perfect precursor.

Sentinel however betrayed them, selling them out to the quintessons to become god emperor of cybertron with the mining class born entirely of his own greed, stripping them of their t cogs and indocrinating them. And tha'ts what makes this scary: part of why Sentinel's plan works so well.. is indocrination. To most of Cybertron this is just how things always were. The few people who know gladly keep up the lie. By creating a system he can control, sentinel has guaranteed few will rebel because they have no reason to doubt him. Like any good dictator he's set himself up as the be all end all and as a god unto himself so his people don't question and those like optimus who do are struck down.

Even when Alpha Trion last of the primes played wonderfully by Laurence Fishburne tells them all of this and in a truly beautiful and horrific sequence shows it to them using some dust he controls, only pax and Bumblebee truly digest it. It makes sense for both. Pax has ALWAYS questioned his place in the world so while he's mildly skeptical at worst, for him, someone whose broken into the archives to learn, constantly pushed against the system, finding out "Oh your life is a lie".. is freeing. It's finding out the horrible sytem that hates what you are is wrong. It's where the queer coding comes in finding out no your not wrong.. it's the people who said you not being you were horrible. For Pax this is what he's always wawited for: a mentor who truly respects all he did to get here, a purpose in freeing cybertron, a true world.

For B when we meet him he's spent his life being constantly kicked down rungs for his screw ups, abandoned by Cybertron to it's depths and happy just to have friends. Finding out "oh yeah your leader is a lie and you get to be badass now" is just.. nice. B is just kinda there for the ride. Honestly Bumblebee is just kinda there in the movie. Keegan Michael Key does a great job as the character especially in the second act when he gets to react to the more horrific things going on , but for the first he's just the annoying comic relife. The Badassatron gag gets old FAST and the trailers did not help. The trailers also didn't help focusing entirely on the comedy, which helps offset things and makes the more dramatic and often violent second act work. We get ot know these characters and there world... then see what happens after the curtains lifted and they see what there world always was.

This plays into Elita who i've glanced over, and who dosen't take it well, having to see Sentinel directly selling out to the quintissons to belivie it. Elita did her job, played the system, tried to get out.. and finds out it was rigged the whole time. Elita as we see her is tough, but fair.. wanting to arrest our heroes when they escape to the surface.. but willing to go with them when stranded as if they ARE right she gets what she wants and if their wrong they've agreed to be arrested anyways. Yet when her world turns upside down her response to it is shock.. then acceptance. The world is bad, how can we fix this? She goes with Optimus plan, though dosen't go loyally pointing out it MIGHT not work.. but it's their best option: expose sentinel to the public and hope it turns them.

This... is where D-16 shifts entirely. And his actor Brian Tyree Henry is easily the standout of the cast. No question. We see D-16 as someone who truly belivied in the system and the primes: he's a huge Megatronius Prime fanboy, who in most realities ends up being a tratiorus monster and basically satan.. but here.. is a good person and the strongest of the primes. He respected sentinel, utterly in awe to help him find the matrix, which was said to be lost. So instead he finds out everything he belivied in is a lie and takes it hte hardest: elita was annoyed with the system enough it took light convincing, pax was never for it and B is just happy to be included. But for D... this was everything. This was his LIFE. He rages at Pax for taking them on this adventure, for everything he loved and worshipped being relveaed a lie. Finding out what his life was, or rather what he likely expected it was but refused to admit to himself breaks him.

And that.. unleashes his rage. You get the sense D-16 has a lot of supressed anger: constantly having to tow the line, to clean up after his best friend, to keep his head down.. and finding out it was all for nothing and said friend is the reason he knows this.. unelashes every rage. Every thought he had to keep in every bit of it at once... and he wants Sentinel dead: not brought to justice, not heroically brought down for corruption: DRAGGED THROUGH THE STREETS IN CHAINS TO THE DEPTHS OF THE MINES AND TORN APART. Orion wants justice, he wants revenge.

The film also does a good job not making d-16 just.. evil. He's full of rage, he lashes out at orion.. but you still side with him despite knowing where this angers gonna take him. The system is broken, horrible and nightmarish. Like the IDW megatron, D-16 has EVERY reason to think it needs to burn. Yet you get why Pax wants the softer touch at first: he dosen't care about sentinel fuck that guy but burning it to the ground gets other people caugh tin the fire. Neither is entirley wrong: sentinel probably does need to die, but a brutal execution dosen't help anyone. And as pax can do doing so won't fill the void in his chest. Getting the t-cogs for the literal voids in their chest dosen't either.

The film dosen't entirely stop the lighthearted stuff: We get that great seuqnece form the trailers where our quartet try to transform and end up stuck mid way. It's both a neat idea, as i'ts essentially waking up a whole part of your body you could not use, and fun, based on Cooley's own experinces as a kid where for the more complex transformers they'd end up in a half transformed pile.

But the core is clear... and while the divide between D and Pax deepends as we meet the High Guard

Choked Out

So our heroes are kidnapped by the High Guard, the future decepticons. The High Guard were the primes loyal and noble enforcers but have spent the last however long it's been turned into a rebellion against sentinel, barely scraping by. Granted their also lead by Starscream which has never gone well and there's no giant gun to shoot him with nor volcano to throw him in so their kinda stuck.

I do love Starscream here played by the one and only Steve Buschemi who gets Sceamers smugness and arrogance right while adding in a dash of bloodthirst and class. The High Guard has devovled into a might makes right hellscape. And it's this hellscape.. that finishes creating megatron. I belivie had b had time to process or think , he MIGHT of not become megatron. It's likely why Alpha Trion still trusted him.. though as Brotoman pointed out when we discussed the film it could just as easily be that trion didn't care and wanted D-16 to go on a blood rampage. This still puts him above the G1 version whose only menoring to optimius was bringing him back form the dead like jesus after four robots from the future wondered in.

But the high guard share his views: wanting to burn it down, wanting to use brute force, resenting the rest of cybertron. It's all there. And the high guard are the army he needs to pull off his goals, as he's grown to resent optimus and Bee and Elita are firmly on his side.

So in a fit of Irony it's starscream who helps fully cement the creation of megatron. Megs is annoyed at their postering, doing seemingly nothing and done with their shit. He plans to just fuck off if their not going to do anything. Starscream as usual for him takes this as a challenge. And as usual across space and time megatron's response is exactly as good for starscream as you'd expect.

Megatron fucks him up so bad his VOICE changes. Yeah in this continuity Starscream's whiny voice.. is because megatron choked him out. And Starscream was into it asking for more. Was it a love of violence or is starscream discovering he's a sub?

But it's the point to me where D-16.. is gone. He hasn't turned full villian yet.. but he's found himself surronded by likeminded bots whose reaction to them choking out tehir leader is FUCK YEAH! YOU GET EM MEGS. I grant spending at least a decade around starscream is probably a lot for anyone, but it's still nicely horrifying and I like this barbarian portrayl of the decepticons: that they too started from a good place but having to constantly fight while being seen as traitors and being isoilated casued all their warrior instincts to go to a whole lord of the flies situation.

Megatron dosen't get to bask in his new horde or a nearly destroyed starscream who only lives because Orion is there.. and D makes it VERY clear this won't happen again. The mercy thing. Instead Sentinel kidnaps most of them with only Orion and Elita escaping.

You've Found my Breaking Point, Congradulations

So our two heroes are now seperated.. and while it was clear what path D-16 was on, it's Orion's turn to cement his. Oriion.. is not doing so good

He feels this is all his fault, that his constant diving into stuff hurt people and while before he was able to brush it off, the elita one situation REALLY wasn't his fault, enlisting megatron in the race was an attempt to help them, and even ending up in the cybertron's bowels, he figured Sentinel would come from them. Every reckless action and unintended consequence was just a step up. And he wasn't entirely wrong, his actions were well meaning.. but it's here he finally gets the downside and what makes his earlier character work: that relization that yes, he meant well, yes he wasn't wrong.. but he was still dragging everyone along with him when they kept telling him no and while in the long run, even with what he's about ot become, d-18's better for it, Orion finally gets that he can't just keep assuming people will be better off or he knows what's better.

Granted he takes this as

But Elita has changed. She's seen the good that's happened from it and encourages pax... she also rubs in that she's smarter than him, true, but also that as annoying as he could be to her... he had one thing she didn't, that d-16 didn't... hope. He never gave up, just fell into the system. He never stopped beliving in a better world even after finding out it was a lie. He dosen't try to stop sentinel just because "what else am I going to do" or "revenge" he's doing this because he WANTS a better world for everyone. To lift people up. He dragged d-16 into this not because he was blind, but because he wanted to help him. He wanted them both to see the sun. To build tommorow together. And maybe make out a little. His methods weren't great, but he was always trying to do the right thing.

So with that Pax isn't back to his old self he's better, and thinks out his plan for a second.. and it's a brilliant one, for once not just winging it but thinking it out: they need to take down sentinel. They can't broadcast his misdeeds for now, but they can at least stop him. They dont' have enough of an army as only half the guard escaped, so it's time to split up: Elita will lead the rest of the elite guard to free their captured brethren, Orion will go rally the miners who already trust and look up to him. Shockwave asks "Wait why would I do that" and get sa cup of punch in the face as his answer, while Soundwaves like "eh why the fuck not. " I do love shockwave in this film, he's just a pathetic butt monkey aand sounds like bluster blaster. It's glorious.

Meanwhile Megatron gets some MORE trauma. He refuses to bend the knee for Sentinel. Sentinel's plan is to frame the guard as destrutive rebels and megatron as one. And he has a chilling line I love: "The truth is whatever I say it is: it's the truth and i'ts chilling and Hamm does a fantastic job going from egotistical ass to chilling dictator at the drop of a hat, never dropping the smarm. Sentinel is the perfect vilian for this film: a legit threat and meance.. but also someone clearly there to be the starter villian: someone who unites our heroes at first but gets the fuck out of the way for the emotional climax. It makes the whole 'Oh no the heroes idol is evil" twist we've seen a lot. A lotttt, go down smother as while he's evil enough that his final takedown is satisfying, he's not so menacing or compelling you feel he's wasted. He's just comeplling enough

He's also a massive dick and upon seeing Megatron's sticker, he's been wearing a decal of megatronus, he rips it off.. and fucking BRANDS megatron. Yeah there's.. some racial stuff buried in here that as a white dumbass i'm not qualified to talk about. But it is brutal as hell.

SO while Team Elita crashes a train into a buildling to start the climax, because Elita is the best and I wish I had more to say about her other than she's the most badass one there is and Scarlett Johnasen is having a LOT of fun playing her, Orion goes to inspire a line of cameos. There are a LOT with Ironhide and Arcee being the most prominent.

The Miners are chafing under the strips not helped by Dreadwing, their supervisor and the dickbag who demoted Elita earlier and who in general is a bullying asshat. So naturally Optimus easily deals with him with a punch to the face. It's a nice moment that says a lot with just one punch: Optimus has problems FAR BIGGER than one petty asshole and has grown, literally and metaphorcially past him.

Orion having a t-cog and easily taking out the local bully is enough to get everyone to listen and he gives his first true rousing speech, revealing the truth, admitting they dont' have much reason to belivie him, but beliving ther'es something better.. there has to be and Sentinel has no right ot take it: So with mining equipment and jetpacks, our hero leads the future autobots. AI am a bit iffy about all the autobots being in one group and the decipticons in another, but the sequel could help flesh it out and I get they only had 90 minute sto pack a lot in. One is VERY overstuffed and takes place over maybe two days tops. A lot happens.. but it all feels resonable and well set up: D-16 changes entirely but it's hard to say megatron wasn't lurking under the surfance and a LOT of trauma in less than a day didn't change him. Likewise Optimus and Megatron rising as leaders.. makes perfect sense; The Guard had spent years hiding and stewing and suddenly a new kid comes along with more o fa vision than ducking and weaving and easily chokes out the guy who was likely only leader because he killed a few people who said no to that. He then refuses to bow to sentinel despite knowing what this might means an dkeeps getting up.

Meanwhile Optimus leads not through badassery.. but hope. He puts his dreamer nature to good use and instead of inspiring his troops thorugh violence, inspires them. And because Oriion was already a decent guy who instead of being seen as a weird outcast, was seen as a guy who did what they wished they could, a nice turn of that usual "never accepted weirdo" thing we get, because he was simply a good perosn.. people listen.

So here comes the climax.

Throw My Better Self Overboard, Shoot At Him When He Comes Up for Air

So we get our big climactic battle as our untied rebel forces eat the rich while Elita squares off with Airachnid. I hadn't brought up Airachnid because her plot relevance for most of the movie is to stand around and look menacing, being Sentinel's liutiennt. And I like how they went for something diffrent: true to the name she's part modern helicopter, part spider and usies her spider legs to brutally tear into foes, leaping on them and tearing them to shreds. While the rest of Sentinels mooks, various mass produced drones ala the ones Megatron has in prime, go down easily when fighting Alpha trion she took him down and let sentinel finish him off later because of course he wanted to gloat.

So while the final battle goes down to the two female robots of importance duking it out, it still works as it makes sense: Elita has quickly become the autobots bruiser and Optimus second in command, and Sentinel is busy gloating to his captives. Rather than the cliched "well the women must fight because a man punching her would be too mucH" it feels like a fight between each sides seconds that's also brutal and well done.

Orion however has a plan and while he and an ungreatful B-17 fight Sentinel, who reveals he took Megatronius cog, he has elita grab airachnid as she showed off her creepy camera head before... and thus he realizes she has incriminating footage. So while Bumblbee finds he has knife hands and helps clear the way, our heroes team up.. kinda.

I also have to give it to the fighting here: Something Cooley made sure to include was transforming. In most continuites the transforming is used maybe to ram a fucker and most fighting is as the robots. Here ther'es a lot of transforming in combat: Ariachind uses her alt mode to gain advantage as it can fly nad elita's can't. Sentinel uses his massive jet form's firepower to even the odds before diving back into bot mode. D-16 RAMS into the fucker with his tank mode, uses it frequently for blasting and easily switches back into combat. It's fluid, gorgeous and really takes advantage of the trasnforming to turn every fight into a spectacle.

While D-16 fights Sentinel, Orion inacts his plan: hyjack the radio tower and er.. slam Airachnids face into the console therebye getting the footage he needs.

Sentinel's outed as a bad guy, everythin'gs fine? right? right? Right D-16.. whose inching towards sentinel and... oh... oh no.

So Orion rushes to prevent his friend from doing a murder, whiel Sentinel pathetically crawls away. He begs him not to do this, that this isn't the right way.. but it won't work this time. Pax says the wrong thing: "Don't be like sentinel". He threatnes pax to move and pax instead jumps int he way.. and is shot , barely alive. And thus.. two bots die... D-16 throws Orion Pax into the core of the planet "I'm done saving you". One wanted war, to keep raging forever against a planet that wronged him the other wanted to fix tha tplanet and restore it. In the end it was two roads that simply HAD to diverge but damn do they make it painful. You see just how much these two meant, how much good they acomplished..b ut ultimately B-17 can't let go of his rage and pain.. and he shoudln't.. not entirely. He can still feel hurt and rageful.. but it's in trying to tear the rest of the world down where he failed.

Sometimes the world DOES need to burn, but if you don't think about the people who get hurt, then your in the wrong.

Where You Go Once You Arrive, Where We Go Once We Arrive

The next scene.. is the films best... a truly striking back and forth series of cuts as we see the true ascendance, the birth of megatron and optimus prime given all the gravitas 40 years of stories, conuities and tellings of these two's clash.

Megatron gives a firey horrifying speech as he rips Sentinel in half. The film is unflinching with hit's violence. It did have to cut around things.. but all that did was have cooley let your mind fill in the gaps. For a family film, this is fucking brutal, and it all crecnedoes with a bot getting ripped in half. likely being robots gave them some leeway, but it's still horrifying to see. I don't feel bad for sentinel he fucking deserved it but Megatron giving him a mortal kombat fatality then going on to scream about he's going to burn iacon down, destroy every last person loyal to sentinel to burn the world no matter who gets hurt... it underlines Optimus point. While Sentinel defeintly deserved to die, this dosen't fix anything. This dosen't change iacon for the better, it just replaces a tyrant who made the trains run on time and again deserved his mortal kombat fatality, with one who thinks he's doing the right thing while killing as many people as he has to to do it. Neither version of this is good but Megatron is too blinded by trauma to see that and thus has become something almost as bad as what left.

Thankfully as Megatron rises... so too does another. As he falls into the core, his body dead.... Orion Pax meets the primes, all 12 showing up.. with Alpha Trion himself anointing our hero. This could easily be iffy: chosen one narratives aren't nearly as common these days for a reason and this is the same year where Dune Part 2 showed just how bad that could go based on a book all the way back in the 60s, just taking out the racisim and sexism.

So instead Orion Pax becomes robot jesus this time not because destiny says so.. but simply because he acted well. He acted nobly, selfishless and laid his life down and thus he not only rises from the dead but gets an upgrade: a cool ax ehe does the thor thing with , which had to be intetional, able to take out a hudnered bad guys with swords or at least all three main decipticons with only megatron giving him trouble.

So before our climactic breakup, le'ts talk about primus. Some consider the idea Primus is a two faced prick: he made the matrix of leadership, the source of cybertron's energon in this continuity and why they have to mine without it, not feel so good and go away into dust robbing sentinel of it.

Me... I think it wasn't the smartest move given Sentinel then created a slave race to do the job and it didn't really stop him.. but my take is that it was all primus COULD do. Primus did create the primes to guard cybertron, but that was right after becoming the planet and space god. My honest interpretation, one backed up by talking to brotoman is that primus isn't as fully cognizant without the matrix. In the war for cybertron duology, Primus created the matrix as a way for it to be with the rest of cybertron kind as it really coudln't commuincate outside it's core. If eel that's the same here: that it can only do so much and without the matrix as a conduit, all it could do was thrash blindly, hence the storms of the surface and the mines shifting horribly. THe mines woul dbe closer to cybertrons core, giving him more dexterity. Prime fell directly into a shaft leading down int oCybertron's bowels and into it's core, which gave Primus a chance to look him over, see what he did. If you notice primus doesn't even talk directly. He has to use alpha trion's ghost. Primus transformation into cybertron likely put him beyond most cybertronians and unlike say Unicron if he shows up, please let him show up, he can't go back and forth.

Now that's just my interpretation but it's something I like about the film: the world's well built and set up.. but it dosen't explain everything. It leaves some ambguity: where the primes as perfect as they seemed or was sentinel right to resent them, even if

Did Alpha Trion know the risks he was unleashing with megatron? We don't know, and tha'ts okay. And yes the sequels probably will clear some of this up if we get them, but it's still something really neat to think about.

For now we get an awesome fight with Optimus ending the thing by slicing Megatron's fusion canon. He commands him to leave: he tried to conquer cybertron, killed a man and broke Optimus' heart in the process. Megatron bitterly leaves setting up a sequel that please please please god let us have some form of sequel, and takes the gaurd with him.

This leaves optimus in charge, and their paths set: Optimus turns the miners into the autobots and gives them their cogs back, restoring cybertron.. and Megatron... brands his new peeps the decepticons. THey are not being being decieved and they will open cybertrons eyes and close optimus'. It's a truly painful but well done ending with both rising : Optimus prepares to hold off the quintsions.. and Megatron prepares to do what he planned to do in the first plac.e. burn it down. They were close but now... the war begins.

The One and Only One

Transformers One is a masterpiece, well worth a look in theaters. I'ts a feast ofr the eyes. But it's it' semotinal core that makes it: following two young men as one goes from reckless dreamer to real leader, with his voice lowering the right octaves, and the other going from a stickler for the rules to a radical planning to kill as many people as he has to to save cybertron from hitself. One is a heartfelt epic, with eye popping colors, great social commentary and a hell of an emotional core. This is the best of the transformers films i've seen, probably not a stretch to say the best given it lacks robot testicles or a man waving around a piece of paper saying he can fuck teenagers, but still a truly great film I hope Paramount gives a sequel even if it dosen't do gangbusters. In a year with maybe three animated films i've wanted to see theatrically, this was a welcome treat and is one of the best transformers stories. Go see it, thanks for reading and remmeber you can win if you dare.

[invincible-selfxmade-punk]

After 8 years I got rid of my dish service, DirecTV.

Once my husband gave me his old game system where I could access Prime video, netflix, and YouTube it was all over.

He thought I was using the service and I thought he was using the service and honestly the only thing we were doing was occasionally buying aew pay-per-views and maybe once a month checking in all the actual shows and for this we had to pay $180 a month.

It just so happened that I got a Walmart Plus Membership last year and it came with a Paramount plus free subscription which I never tried out. So we set up an account through Walmart and sure enough we get it for free and between those services and then my husband pays for peacock himself for the WWE oh my God we do not need cable at all!!

Paramount plus even has all these really old TV shows like Love Boat and the original Hawaii Five-O.

AND

There is a brand new Criminal Minds franchise that I didn't even know existed!! I am three episodes in and I am so so happy.

Before I got the game system I would always put on Blue Bloods to watch while I slept. And they have Blue Bloods on Paramount plus as well.

I have also become absolutely obsessed with the movie Talk to Me.

I rented it and watched it twice and I'm about to run it again so hubby and I can watch it together. I will be so glad when it is on a streaming service because it seems like it's been out forever, yet you can only see it by either subscribing to Showtime or renting it.

The calling card of modern horror seems to be to have characters who are so pretentious and unlikable you do not care when they die. And I hate that. That's why I really like movies like talk to me, the Sacrifice game, The Red Rose series, Saint Maude, etc

The teenagers in this are not pretentious, they're dialogue is not what people think teenagers sound like, and they're not just these psychos are sociopaths that are horrible to each other even before the bad stuff starts happening. They are just really really stupid in the moment which is really close to real life.

Tomorrow I go to Midland to finally see Michaela doctor and finally get my drops renewed. I am down to one drop and the stupid cornial surgeon absolutely would not refill any of my glaucoma meds because he said he was not qualified to do that. But I'm doing okay because my pressures were fine when he checked them all the 30th. And since Midland is a hell of a lot closer than Lubbock I am praying for a Very Fast Trip in and out.

A week after tomorrow I have my first professional development day in Midland which is going to be rough cuz it's a whole day of class. But I guess we'll see how it goes.

I still need to get my last shingles shot but considering how bad the first one knocked me out I don't know what I'm going to be able to schedule the next one is going to have to be on a period of time where I know I'm not going to get out of bed for a couple of days. And then I need to schedule my colonoscopy.

I swear summer for everybody else seems to be this great thing but for teachers it's when we have to deal with any health problems that we were not able to deal with during the year and of course all the professional development that we're having to take and honestly this is the first year that we've been required to take it in the summer.

My first three Summers I had to myself and I was able to just lay around and travel whenever I wanted to Period And then it was like every other summer either I was getting another eye surgery or I was studying for another Certification.

I just want to do nothing but stay in bed and read but if I do that I hate myself and I feel lazy.

Ah, the duality of man.

[laresearchette]

Tuesday, March 19, 2024 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

This Video Not Available in Your Country: Tuesday Canadian Lineup (Times Eastern)

WHERE CAN I FIND THOSE PREMIERES? THAT GIRL LAY LAY (Season 2) (Paramount+ Canada) THE VALLEY (Slice) 10:00pm

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

NETFLIX CANADA BRIAN SIMPSON: LIVE FROM THE MOTHERSHIP FOREVER QUEENS (Season 2) (MX) PHYSICAL 100: SEASON (KR)

CURLING (TSN/TSN5) 8:00am: BKT Tires World Women's Curling Championship: Italy vs. Canada (TSN) 6:00pm: BKT Tires World Women's Curling Championship: Canada vs. Switzerland

MLB SPRING TRAINING (SN) 1:00pm: Orioles vs. Jays

NHL HOCKEY (SN) 7:00pm: Penguins vs. Devils (TSN3) 7:00pm: Jets vs. Rangers (TSN4) 7:00pm: Leafs vs. Flyers (TSN5) 7:00pm: Sens vs. Bruins (SNWest/TSN2) 9:00pm: Habs vs. Oilers (SNPacific) 10:00pm: Sabres vs. Canucks (SN1/SNEast/SNOntario) 10:00pm: Lightning vs. Knights

BIG BROTHER CANADA (Global) 7:00pm

NBA BASKETBALL (SN Now) 8:00pm: Mavericks vs. Spurs (TSN) 9:00pm: Nuggets vs. Timberwolves

THIS HOUR HAS 22 MINUTES (CBC) 8:00pm

CANADA'S GOT TALENT (City TV) 8:00pm: The judges get to work finding million-dollar acts and award a Golden Buzzer or two.

MARY MAKES IT EASY (CTV Life) 8:00pm: Veggin' Out on the Grill

SON OF A CRITCH (CBC) 8:30pm: The Critches are doing their annual airing-out-the-house ritual, but when some family secrets are uncovered, it turns out they've got some dirty laundry that needs to be aired too.

COMFORT FOOD WITH SPENCER WATTS (CTV Life) 8:30pm: Snacking on pepperoni arroncini risotto pops, puffed millet and cornmeal coated chicken bites, and popcorn margaritas with margarita popcorn.

ONE MORE TIME (CBC) 9:00pm: After his hearing aids are stolen, DJ must put an end to the chain of gossip surrounding Eddie's infidelity before Eddie finds out who ratted him out to Gwen.

TREATY ROAD (APTN) 9:00pm: In Treaty 3 territory, Erin and Saxon learn about the ongoing struggle to protect the water from contamination; they visit a blockade in Grassy Narrows, Ont., where a woman poisoned by mercury explains environmental racism.

RUN THE BURBS (CBC) 9:30pm: As Camille's cookbook launch day unfolds in chaos, the Phams rally to save the event in a surprising and colorful twist.

PATHOLOGICAL: THE LIES OF JORAN VAN DER SLOOT.(Lifetime Canada) 10:00pm: Years after he brutally murdered American Natalee Holloway and Peruvian Stephany Flores, Joran van der Sloot's lifelong pattern of violence and pathological lying is exposed through rare interviews and new insights.

[siphersaysstuff]

MATCHBOTS!

So for August's Patreon-backed @tfwiki picture update, I thought I'd follow up on the Generation 2 vibe from last month (and with the release of the G2-heavy Toxitron Collection) and (almost) complete the run of Go-Bot mold toys! Introduced in 1995, these little 1:64-scale bots were made to be compatible with Matchbox and Hot Wheels tracks and playsets, and this mold-set would be redecoed a LOT over the following decade. Motormouth above, for example, first caem with transparent robot bits, but the second-wave release was entirely opaque.

Fellow second-waver OPTIMUS PRIME is mostly just an opaque version of wave 1's clear-red Firecracker, but with some extra blue paint on the helmet to make him Optimussier.

Wave 3 was all classic G1 bots in strange new decos. Say hi to BUMBLEBEE, FRENZY, IRONHIDE and MIRAGE (the decos were probably picked before the names were).

Wave 3 SOUNDWAVE is infamous for his bright deco. But what's with that Takara version, with Wave-2 opaque Gearhead's robot parts? Well, that's because the Takara release was gang-molded with...

...the Takara-release MEGATRON and OPTIMUS PRIME, the only three Go-Bots released in Japan. Basically, all 6 Go-Bots are cast from the same set of molds, so if you change one plastic color on any of the 6, you're changing the color for several others in the set. As demonstrated here...

See the pattern? Bear in mind that the rightmost bots have green and gold paint on their car panels, the underlying plastic is black.

These molds would be re-used as the "Spychangers" for 2000's Takara series Car Robots, which got imported as Robots in Disguise in 2001, and I'm not going into all of THOSE here. But there's a lot (the top row on the above pic is just the start!), and I'm focusing on the new pics, so moving on...

Late in the 2003 Universe line, a new batch of G1 characters in Spychanger form were released as KB Toys exclusives, using a set of molds originally planned for G2 but ultimately not released until RiD, like SILVERSTREAK on the left, and new molds made specifically for RiD, like OPTIMUS PRIME here.

The very last release of a Go-Bot/Spychanger style mold came in late 2007, when Takara offered a free "OPTIMUS PRIME FIGURE" with the preorder of the 2007 Transformers movie on DVD/HD-DVD through Paramount Pictures Japan. This little sucker is extensively painted, let me tell you.

And with this, I've taken wiki pics of 76 out of the 88 "finished" Go-Bots/Spychanger toys! Only 12 rare/unreleased items left! Whoadang! ALSO… I've now made over 2500 toy pics for the wiki, many of which are multi-toy pics! Jambalaya, that's a lotta bots!

If you like what I do here and want to get me to a total of 3000 pics faster, I do have a Patreon! You can help get more and more pics out every month, and even pick a theme!

Check it out at patreon dot com slash gregstfwikipics!

[sshbpodcast]

Character Spotlight: Benjamin Sisko

By Ames

We’ve segued so smoothly into Deep Space Nine for our character spotlights here on A Star to Steer Her By that you didn’t even notice it. Thank you, Worf. So this week we’re doing an in-depth look at one of the more complex lead characters of a Trek series, Benjamin Lafayette Sisko. He might be the leader who gets tested the most out of any of our main stars, and he makes probably the most wide-ranging decisions – though typically that decision is “let’s see how this goes.”

From first contacts with the Gamma Quadrant, to yet another standoff with Klingons, to full blown Dominion War, to whatever was going on with the wormhole aliens, Ben’s got a long list of moments for us to consider. So grab yourself a bowl of jambalaya, hop in your solar sail ship, and maybe get a little war crimes as a treat! Scroll on below for our Sisko spotlight and listen to a ton of spare moments on this week’s podcast (jump through the wormhole to 1:04:00). Ow!

[Images © CBS/Paramount]

Best moments

There’s no hurry Our first contact with beings from the Gamma Quadrant is also DS9’s first breaking of the Prime Directive. In “Captive Pursuit,” Miles is trying desperately to save Tosk from his hunters and Sisko is doing his best to technically stay within the rules, and it’s a rare success of doing both. Telling Odo to take his time in apprehending O’Brien shows that Sisko is coming from a place of real morality.

Find something you love, then do it the best you can We could name great moments between Ben and his son all day, but there’s more to our list than that, so let’s sum things up with a perfectly pure moment of excellent parenting from “Shadowplay.” Sisko is immediately accepting of Jake not wanting to follow in his footsteps and join Starfleet, and melts our hearts. Doing something he loves and being true to himself is far more important than legacy.

Cardassians love cosmetic surgery Appropriately, we watched Enterprise’s “Judgment” on the podcast this week and spent most it comparing it to The Undiscovered Country and “Tribunal.” When O’Brien is on trial in Cardassian kangaroo court and his lawyer is doing nothing to defend him, Sisko walks in with an undercover Cardassian spy in tow and wins the whole thing without saying a word. Like a badass.

Humans used to be a lot worse than the Ferengi We brought this up last week in our Worf chat too, but there’s a general racism towards the Ferengi all through Deep Space Nine. Quark calls Sisko out for it in “The Jem’Hadar” when Sisko and he are butting heads, and by the end of the episode, Sisko has seen Quark in a new light and refuses to leave him behind because Sisko got over some his prejudice (at least a little bit).

I’ll see that you get that chance Speaking of that prejudice against our lobed friends, everyone and their moogie is dubious when Nog claims he wants to join Starfleet in “Heart of Stone,” which would be a first for a Ferengi. But when Nog tells Sisko that he’s serious and looking for a life that will earn him real respect, the commander takes him at his word and vouches for him, putting in motion one of the best character arcs in Trek.

Some taboos are made to be broken Throughout the series, the relationships between characters are probably the strongest in Trek, and a true highlight is watching Sisko with his old/new friend Jadzia Dax. It’s such a beautiful scene in the equally beautiful “Rejoined” when Ben tells her that he’d still support her if she decides to break Trill taboo and hook back up with Lenara Khan. He’s that good a friend.

Don’t you see, Admiral? You’re fighting the wrong war. Around season 4, the show really tests Sisko with some ethical conundrums during the Dominion War. This is one he passes with flying colors. In “Paradise Lost,” Sisko is able to see his old mentor and silver medal winner from Jake’s Evil Admirals list, James Leyton, for what he really is: a megalomaniac who uses the Changeling threat as an excuse to incite a coup. Until Ben steps in!

Presenting the newest honoree in the Order of the Bat’leth It takes a certain level of crazy to think you can infiltrate the best warriors the Klingons have to offer, and luck for us, Captain Sisko is just that level of crazy. Avery Brooks seems oddly at home portraying a blood-thirsty Klingon being inducted into the Order of the Bat’leth in “Apocalypse Rising,” and even better, he and Odo (mostly Odo) expose Changeling Martok!

Don’t let Bajor in the Federation! We say it all the time on the podcast and today is no different: Bajor is NOT ready for Federation membership, no matter what Picard says. So when Sisko goes fully nuts after getting zapped by a plinth in “Rapture” and crashes the Federation membership ruling, we are fully supportive of his absolute batshit meddling. And ya know what, it works out for Bajor because of it!

Sisko, you’re baby crazy Any time Sisko is with a baby is truly joyful. This from a podcast of self-professed non-baby people. But this man’s mirth is so pure we’ve got to give it to him. Avery Brooks isn’t even acting in “Children of Time” when he dandles that baby, or in “The Abandoned” when he’s nostalgic about Jake as a baby, or in “Heart of Stone” when he’s delighted that Vilixpran is budding. This man just loves babies.

Let’s pretend that the Major’s not even here… By season 6, Gul Dukat is at his lowest point – he’s lost the station, his daughter is dead, and he’s more nuts than Ben in “Rapture”! And Captain Sisko plays him like a fiddle! “Waltz” is such an amazing showcase of acting talent, with Avery Brooks and Marc Alaimo bouncing off each other like pros. Sisko pushes his Cardassian counterpart over the edge and survives the cave of madness, some-freaking-how!

The Emissary has completed his task Sisko’s final action in this corporeal plane is also the climax of the whole series, culminating the wormhole alien plot that was started at the very beginning. And while we may whine that the Kosst Amojen plotline in “What We Leave Behind” felt rushed at the end, we have to admit that it’s cathartic to have the Emissary make a huge sacrifice to take out the pah-wraiths in the series finale.

—

Worst moments

This is how you hold a grudge Interestingly, the first taste we get of the jambalaya-slinging commander is him being bitter and fickle in the series premiere, “Emissary.” The show immediately introduces him being a dick to Picard, stewing with rage over Locutus’s part in the Battle at Wolf 359 (as if Picard had any control of that!). He also clearly doesn’t want to be in command of the station, starting him off with character conflict that the series will build on.

If I hear of you hanging around with him… Continuing our running gag that the only alien species the show seems to think it’s okay to be racist against is the Ferengi we brought up last week with Worf, we see more instances of it from Sisko early in season one in “A Man Alone.” When Ben basically tells Jake to not hang around with Nog anymore, it’s flavored with that anti-Ferengi racism we’re sadly accustomed to.

When in the Mirror Universe, do as the Mirror Universe people do We have a lot of issues with how DS9 trots out the mirror universe all the time, and it’s at its most uncomfortable when Sisko goes over there and sleeps with his friends’ counterparts in “Through the Looking Glass.” Sure, there’s not much you can do when Intendant Kira sets her sights on you, but it’s simply wrong to take advantage of Mirror Jadzia, regardless of how hot she is.

Abusing your power is so romantic Sisko is so blinded by love in “For the Cause” that he ignores all the signs that his girlfriend Kasidy has been aiding the Maquis. And then Ben abuses his power as commander of the station to get her out of an inspection when she bats her eyes at him, which is straight-up unethical. As we’ll see, Sisko tends to make terrible decisions when the Maquis are involved…

Red – the blood of angry men Arguably the most immoral acts that Sisko commits are the war crimes in “For the Uniform.” Even after Starfleet tries to take him off the Maquis assignment, Sisko’s obsession with taking out Eddington has gotten so personal that it clouds ALL his judgment. If we gave Picard grief about removing the residents of Dorvan V, then we’ve got to rake Sisko over the coals for POISONING A PLANET and relocating more people!

Prophets, take the wheel! Half our Worst Moments come from the last two seasons when Sisko is tested more than any other Trek captain due to the Dominion War. And so often, he chooses the messed up response. I am still trying to figure out his Hail Mary play in “Sacrifice of Angels” when he flies headlong into the wormhole against thousands of ships and ends up asking the wormhole aliens to do a literal deus ex machina for him. Leeeeroy! Jennnnkins!

What’s a better response to a “Yo Mama” joke than this? I shat on this one in our time travel post, but Sisko using his status as Emissary to let Kira play with the Orb of Time in “Wrongs Darker than Death or Night” because Dukat banged her mom and then gabbed to her about it is absolutely incompetent of him! Why anyone has access to that thing is incomprehensible because it just begs for time shenanigans!

I can live with it… because Vreenak can’t Arguably one of Deep Space Nine’s best episodes, “In the Pale Moonlight” forces Sisko to make the hardest decision a Starfleet officer has to make – and he jumps at the chance to pick the option involving committing more war crimes. While it is a huge benefit to get the Romulans on your side, Sisko knowingly accomplishes this through lies, counterfeiting, bribery, murder, and most damning of all: enlisting the help of Elim Garak!

Sisko SMASH! Here’s another instance when Ben abuses his power, this time in order to get access to an ancient artifact from Bajor in “The Reckoning.” And what does the Emissary do once he’s borrowed the tablet without asking permission, promising to take good care of it and that he’ll return it first thing in the morning? He destroys it utterly in a fit of rage, releasing some spirits that nearly gets Jake and Kira killed.

Pick a lane, Ben I will always give Sisko guff about this. In “Accession,” he has accepted his role as Emissary to the prophets while he’s already serving as commander of Deep Space Nine, and frankly, Ben, you can’t be both! It’s a HUGE conflict of interest. In “Tears of the Prophets,” Admiral Ross gives him some hell for this when he’s torn between the Prophets and Starfleet, and he’s right! Step down!

You’re outta here! “Take Me Out to the Holosuite" is a polarizing episode that fans either love or hate (even your SSHB hosts are mixed!), but you’ve got to admit: Sisko is a terrible baseball coach! He forces all of this senior staff to play a baseball game in the middle of wartime, cancels his girlfriend’s shipments to make her to play too, kicks Rom off the team, gets obsessively competitive about it, and then gets himself thrown out anyway! How many strikes was that?

They warned you that marrying me would bring you sorrow Finally, we are still cross with Sisko for knocking up Kasidy. In “The Dogs of War,” Kasidy tells him she’s pregnant because he forgot to take his contraception, even though Bashir is constantly reminding him! This is a world in which having children should always be a choice because future contraceptives are basically magic, AND he’s been told that he’s basically cursed, so take your damn meds, jackwit.

—

Well, we can live with it. We can live with it. We’ve also got more DS9 character spotlights on the way if you keep watching this blog, more Enterprise watch-throughs on the way if you keep listening to us on SoundCloud or wherever you podcast, and more announcements from Ops over on Facebook and Twitter. Computer, erase that entire personal log.

[ncisfranchise-source]

It’s finally here! The hotly anticipated NCIS Sydney is premiering tonight. The Paramount show is the first in the franchise to be filmed outside of the US (excluding Hawaii) and will be shown at prime time in the US on CBS as well as here in Australia. 

With global fame soon to be calling their names, B&T spoke to the cast of NCIS Sydney whilst they still had the time for trade mags like ourselves. 

NCIS might be about as classically American as it gets, but actor Mavournee Hazel (previously on Neighbours),  told B&T that this iteration is very much Aussie. 

“I feel like audiences can expect quintessential Australian landscape landscapes – we’ve got Galahs and Koalas and Kangaroo,” she says. 

“We’ve got the beautiful Sydney Harbour Bridge that we were lucky enough to have on our doorstep and NCIS headquarters is on a pier”. 

 Viewers can also expect Australian humour, however this is “very different from American humour” Hazel warns. 

So different in fact that there was an on-set coach to help with the difference in comedic timings between the two dialects. 

“We had a dialect coach on set who actually is American, she helped with comedic timings -. just those little differences on how Americans set off a joke, like the cadence of how they talk and how they set up comedic timings is very different to ours”. 

Another new language Hazel had to learn was the famously technical language on the show. 

Her character Blue – or Bluebird – is somewhat of a genius, so capturing than fanatical obsession with technical detail was very important Hazel said. 

She asked herself “What do I geek out on like, what do I get nerdy about?” and the answer that came out was “fragrance”. 

“I love fragrance. And I love perfume – I used to work at a perfumery. I’m fascinated by the process of extraction and distilling and tradition”. 

“That’s the level of passion that I need to have when I’m talking about these things,” Hazel says of Blue’s insatiably fascination with forensic crime. 

Whilst NCIS is known as being quite tough and harsh, actor Tuuli Narkle (Mystery Road: Origin, Bad Behaviour) said the reality was very different. 

“This is the biggest job that I’ve had to date. And I was quite scared stepping on [set]. But I just felt like all of the cast just immediately clicked together. And we got to the first read through and we were all kind of nervous, and we were sharing this energy, but it was beautiful. Because you could see how much it meant to each of us individually, to get to be a part of this crazy, incredible franchise”.

British actor Sean Sagar (The Covenant, Fate: The Winx Saga) said the script and the environment really helped settle his nerves at filming in Australia. 

“It’s the best experience that I’ve had hands down in my career. I feel like coming over here was nerve wracking because it was leaving home, leaving family, so to come here and be so welcomed by the cost and the crew and also filming in such beautiful locations was great. And the script has made it easy. Everything that Morgan [Morgan O’neill] put down on paper and all the rest of the writing team just was so easy to flow off the tongue and just made life a lot easier for us to become these characters”. 

[my-timing-is-digital]

"I know the odds aren't good, but we've got to try." (either regular doc or you can have my doc gets to be part of the DTI so i could throw him into the trek universe verse al;sdfj)

The android nodded in silent compliance, ushering in the scientist’s initiative with his signature composure and pragmatism — anything was preferable over being incarcerated in the late Cretaceous period. Momentarily, his chartreuse eyes scanned the horizon, the silhouette of slender necks towering high into the sky, swaying like the palm trees scattered about the Academy in San Francisco, embellished the view. The mountains embracing them climbed high and formed an impressive valley of lush vegetation — a safe haven for herbivores, except that it was not... safe...

His receptors continually received feedback from seismic vibrations either caused by naturally occurring phenomena, a volcano rumbling in the distance, tectonic plates shifting underneath their feet, or the vocal oscillations of sizable land animals communicating with one another, fighting for dominance, for survival... The frequent susurration of the ferns bordering the circumference of the modest lake could host the arrival of a herbivore desperate for a sip of water, or a carnivore stalking the two legged individuals darting around the metallic beast on the edge of the lake, looking for an easy prey to pounce on.

‘I concur. Let us proceed,’ Data said, retrieving his attention to the matter at hand.

The DeLorean had been off by a number of several million years — an understatement, evidently —, a malfunction that they were presently attempting to rectify. Although, he was not unacquainted with solving the conundrum that was the aftermath of a “successful” episode of time travel, he had never traversed through the fabric of time this far into Earth’s past... The only upside to this time travel escapade was that the chances of them violating the Prime Directive were relatively slim, unless, of course, they accidentally terminated the lives of the mammals that were crucial in the evolution of the homosapiens who would later roam the plains of Africa prior to their migrating to other regions of the planet.

‘I believe it is safe to attempt a jump, sir,’ he said, diligently examining the mechanical contraption crammed in the booth of the classic automobile, laying aside the rudimentary devices that had aided him to repair and modify the plutonium-powered time machine. ‘I sincerely hope your vehicle will travel forward in time — if we go further back, we might find ourselves on an Earth during one of its initial stages of formation, when it primarily consisted of molten magma...’

He stressed to himself that he was not deliberately exhibiting signs of pessimism; he was simply emphasising that it was paramount they did not wander deeper into the folds of the past with no way out...

[kylesvariouslistsandstuff]

Mouse/Mountain Updates

On the Disney Animation front: ONCE UPON A STUDIO's trailer got out, and it looks fun, and it's quite the twist that it'll run on ABC a month before showing with WISH. It makes sense, though, for October 2023 *is* the 100th anniversary of the Disney enterprise, and of course the once small cartoon studio that started it all. I particularly appreciated some of the deep cuts here, not just characters from features like BROTHER BEAR and HOME ON THE RANGE, but also from featurettes. Like, we're dipping into Mini-Classics territory here, as Amos the mouse and Benjamin Franklin from BEN AND ME (1953) can be spotted, along with John Henry from his 2000 titular short. One particular detail I greatly appreciated was the Xerox linework on Winifred from THE JUNGLE BOOK in this shot.

I don't have cable anymore, so I'm likely catching ONCE UPON A STUDIO on the big screen first, with WISH, in late November.

Everything also looks pretty good, too. Not bad from the few 2D people they've still got at that studio.

On the Paramount front: Looks like THE TIGER'S APPRENTICE, previously set for a January 2024 release, has also been orphaned, much like the still-without-a-release-date UNDER THE BOARDWALK. It will now release exclusively to Paramount+. I guess Paramount's CEO really meant that about "slightly" more original movies... (I say slightly, before any burping nerds come at me with "TIGER'S APPRENTICE is a BOOK!")

Though it seems the studio still wants to go through with movies that are not based on well-established IPs that have been adapted into movies countless times (Transformers, Ninja Turtles, ya know-), as Paramount Animation is now set to adapt the SUPERWORLD books by Yarrow Cheney (director of THE GRINCH and SECRET LIFE OF PETS) and his wife Carrie. "Set to", being the key words... Paramount Animation has optioned other titles like STRAY DOGS and such over the past few years, and I haven't heard any movement on those pictures. I think the top dogs just want instantly recognizable things for animated features, hence MUTANT MAYHEM, PAW PATROL 2, and TRANSFORMERS: ONE being priorities... and RUMBLE, UNDER THE BOARDWALK, and TIGER'S APPRENTICE not being just that.

With this gap, and likely no feature being put in that 2/9/2024 slot Universal reserved a long while ago... 2024's theatrical animation lineup looks to begin with Pixar's Adrian Molina-directed ELIO on March 1st, with KUNG FU PANDA 4 to follow on the 29th... Should they not get delayed because of the studios being dinguses about paying actors and writers... This means TROLLS Tre, WISH and MIGRATION are the only theatrical offerings for the time being, the rest is all on streaming: LEO, CHICKEN RUN Deux, etc.

SUPERWORLD sounds like it could be a fun animated feature, though. Set in a world where everyone is a superhero, except this one kid named Noah. While it may seem like superheroes are past their prime, fun things can still be done with that format. This year we had ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE absolutely *school* the recent swaths of workmanlike homework MCU/DCU movies on how it's done, even one MCU chapter - GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 3 - managed to surprise me. Flipping the script, doing cool things with superheroes, using the framework for something interesting- And animation is the best medium where that can be pulled off.

But like all things in this industry, it's moot, but the announcement sounds cool.

[aster-daydream404]

NO BECAUSE YOURE SO REAL FOR THIS 😭😭😭

SRSLY THE AMOUNT OF FUCKING TIME I’VE SPENT TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO DRAW SONIC AND SHADOW THE FUCKING HEDGEHOGS EVER SINCE MY SPECIAL INTEREST ON THIS FRANCHISE GOT REIGNITED BECAUSE OF HOW GOATED SONIC 3 IS. A MONTH. It took me. A fucking MONTH TO BE SATISFIED!!!!!!

(Special thanks for the ppl who gave me tips on how they draw their hedgehogs as well as my best friend for encouraging me to continue <3 body doubling n stuff while they also drew them as well. Theyre amazing and i love them ahsnwhsjzhxg)

ANYWAYS! QUILLS! A tip i got from either the idw video for how to draw sonic or the how to draw movie sonic video by Tyson Hesse from paramount is to work your way from the bottom quills to the top(?) especially bc the bottom ones are the ones that tend to be the longest— especially with the case of Sonic. This still depends on how you wanna go with your artstyle tho; overtime i would go back end forth through all the quills till i feel that they are proportionally right. Augh i swear— low key shadow’s was easier for me than sonic’s, but i realize that is most definitely because of how much i love to draw swoop-y and fluffy hair in my illustrations that has the tendancy to point upwards. And with Sonic’s iconic quills turned downwards and how i’ve struggle with drawing hair thats slick down, clean cut, and or not messy? Yeah. Of course i struggled with sonic ahsjbwjwh sobs TwT

Also OMFG DID THEY LOOK WEIRD AS SHIT TO ME WHEN I WAS FIRST FIGURING OUT HOW TO DRAW THEM WITH JUST THE SKETCH. LINING IT HELPED BUT GUHGHGHGH DID THEY FUCKING ELUDE ME FOR A WHILE. Learning the rules then bending and simplifying the process of how i do it definitely also helpse hsjwhwjwhjehe

AUGH THERE’S ALSO THE MATTER OF PERSPECTIVES AND ANGLES AND HOW DIFFERENTLY THE QUILLS CAN LOOK WHEN YOURE LOOKING AT THE CHARACTERS FACE TO FACE, AT A 1/4 (or was it 3/4?) angle, sideview, and their backside. Again, shadow is low key easier for me personally bc of how his quills are structured— HAVE YOU SEEN HIM????? CUTIE PATOOTIE SPACE HEDGEHOG HAS HIS QUILLS SHAPED LIKE A STAR AND IT LOW KEY KINDA HINTS BACK TO HIS RELATIONS TO THE BLACK ARMS IF YOU THINK ABT IT. Dictatorial colonizer space starfishes. SORRY OKAY HE’S MY BABYGIRL AND SONIC IS MY SHAYLA i cant i will ramble about them both another time if i can because low key theyve become so important to me elpshwkabsmsbsjbw maybe as much as moomin and snufkin maybe elppppp.

BUT TO CONTINUE! i strongly recommend also watching not only tutorials and tips on how to draw them, but also watch the speedpaints of other fanartists <33 especially when you aren't actually planning on having the way you draw them to be close to how they canonically look like. i especially had to figure out how i personally wanted to draw them and such pfffft— bc actually! even in canon, they do give him a slight variation on how he looks and such! (and im refering to sonic here mostly but really pfthwnsbjxdnwn)

And through my journey on figuring out how to draw the silly little hedgehogs, i found that its not just the quills that i struggled with, but low key also the eyes and how their body proportions work exactly. But goodness is it so fucking worth it 🥹🥹🥹. Once you figure out how to draw one character, it becomes much easier to draw the rest of the cast bc you can adapt the lessons you learned in drawing the first one into drawing the others as well and catering it to them and how their world’s anatomy and physics works <3 (in your own interpretation and style <3) especially with a cast as diverse as STH’s 🥹

The inspirations i drew from with adapting how my style/how i draw into sonic and shadow is their movie counterparts and sonic prime, especially bc these are currently the two sonic medias that i am impacted to the most (even though i also grew up with a lot of the animated series and a bit of the games). This also works for me (esp with movie sth) bc AUGH I STRUGGLE WITH HOW THEIR EYES AREN’T AND SUCH WHICH IS AUGWHWVQJGQHABAHABA FOR ME PERSONALLY SHHWHWJWB. OOH ALSO! OTHER REALLY COOL STH FANARTISTS WITH REALLY COOL STYLES THAT I LIKE RAGHHHHH

But anyways, in the end, just remember to have fun and enjoy the experience!! <33 i may also link some of the shit i used while figuring out how to draw them elp ahsjwhwjhw but that is gonna depend on whether or not my audhd decides to work with me or against me with this </3 but i really hopes this personal account helps even a bit! 🫶

INSERTING MY FIRST SONIC SKETCHES HERE AS WELL FROM THE PAST FEW MONTHS TO ALSO MAYBE LIKE. SHOW AND SUCH THE PROGRESSION AND A BIT OF MOTIVATION FOR YOU TO KEEP GOING <3

AND THIS IS A WIP I’M CURRENTLY WORKING ON GEKWFWJSGDKGDF

SEEING ALL THE GOOD ART WORK OF SONIC AND SHADOW IS GREAT. BUT WHO MADE HEDGEHOG QUILLS SO HARD TO DRAW?!?!