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midnight-mourning · 5 months ago

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Build-A-Bot (With Lots of Love)

💘💘Midnight's DCA Valentine's Day 5💘💘

Ohhh i had a lot of fun with this one hehe, silly shennaigans but also, a bit of fluffy sweetness, perfect for a build a bear aslkdjflkasjdfl, hope you like it!

Prompt: Y/n takes Sun and Moon out to someplace like build-a-bear (or a fnaf brand adjacent lol) to make each other lovely valentines day plushies! Sweet audios, noise makers, fun plushie outfits, and of course hearts! Maybe a sweet confession in the mix too hehe <3

Word Count: 2467

Read here if you prefer ao3!

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"Sunshine, I mean this with the best of intent, but why are we here on our day off?"

You turn to him as you walk. "What do you mean? What's wrong with the mall?"

"What Sun is trying to say is that we work at a mall, Star. Spending the day at another one seems, impractical confusing even."

You stop walking then, realizing that that's indeed the case as you're surrounded by shops and a food court, people flitting about and chattering.

"Oh. Right. Well, it's because there's somewhere specific in here that I wanted to take you both!" You start to move again, pulling them both along by their hands.

The mall is busy, though given it's Valentine's day, it's not surprising. Other patrons mingle about, families and couples alike.

The entire interior is decorated for the holiday, red and pink streamers hang from the ceiling, hearts across every possible surface. It would almost be suffocating if you weren't someone who desired to be in love yourself. Instead, you're able to enjoy the festivities to—almost—full capacity.

You finally make it to the store you were looking for. Children can be seen running around inside and coming in and out, stuffed animals in their arms. Even a few couples meander about, which is what you were secretly hoping for. If you'd been the only ones in there you'd be slightly more embarrassed about taking them here.

But, regardless of your feelings, that wouldn't have stopped you. You'd been wanting to come here with the two of them for a while now. You knew how many plushies and the likes Sun and Moon had in their room in the Daycare, ones they unfortunately couldn't bring with them when they moved into your home.

Stupid fazbear entertainment rules and such. The animatronics could leave, but all their belongings had to stay. It made no sense to you, personally. But rules were rules. Their collection at the Daycare was massive, and you think deep down they missed it in comparison to your space at home. Someone else might think it was far too many, but for you, you knew it was a comfort, and it upset you that you couldn't provide that for them.

Not at first, at least.

Thus, your plan to gain them a collection just as impressive—but now in your home—was put into place. Starting with here. You think a stuffed animal they could chose and 'make' for themselves, would help with the loss until you could purchase them more. Not to mention, you wanted to make one for them yourself.

You'd been struggling with your feelings towards the two for some time now, and living together hadn't helped matters. The brief moments in the hall, the small touches here and there. The quiet evenings spent together in a manner that you couldn't have otherwise gotten when they were still in the Plex.

You couldn't help it, not realizing just how much you cared for them until it was put in front of you in such a manner. You wanted more than anything to tell them, to let them know that they were more than just friends to you. But you relented. You had to, you felt.

While they had gotten some freedom, getting to live with you, it came at a price, and they were still adjusting. So, you'd held your tongue. Kept your feelings to yourself, it was for the best. Waiting until the moment was right.

And now, after a couple months, you think it was time. To try, at least. You could never get a read on whether they felt the same for you or not. Always overthinking every little interaction. But with this, you'd find out for sure, and finally have the ache in your heart quelled.

One way or another.

You enter the store with them, ready to get right to it, only to halt when you realize you spy a shelf full of Bonnie plushies staring back at you. And Chica, and Roxy. You quickly realize that this isn't your typical build-a-bear. Or at least, it's changed a lot in the past several years since you've been in one.

"What, is this place?" Sun asks, glancing around.

Moon picks up one of the Freddy plushes laying in a bin nearby, chuckling. "You brought us somewhere that would remind us of the Daycare? How... kind, Starlight."

You groan internally, this is not what you wanted to happen at all.

"Um, not, quite... I wasn't expecting there to be, so much,"—you glance around to the sheer amount of Pizza Plex merch—"Of it to be here. Honestly. This wasn't like it when I came here as a kid."

You shake your head, turning to them and clapping your hands. "But! That's okay. We can still have fun. I'm sure there's got to be some non-work related plushes in here. So let's get to it."

You explain how this is supposed to work, taking them around the store to show them all their options for plushies, clothes and accessories, and so on. They take a particular interest when you stop at the voice boxes and explain that they can use a pre-recorded one or record their own sound if they'd like.

There's some non-Plex related animals you find, to your relief. You let the boys go off on their own, deciding to focus on the task at hand. You want this to be perfect, as perfect as it can be at least.

You start with your choice of animals for them both. For Sun, you found a golden lab, and Moon, one of the last raccoons, stuffed away near the back of the shelf. Fitting for both of them. After that, came finding the proper accessories. You chose a red bowtie for the lab, and the racoon, a black top hat. Though, you struggled for it, you will admit.

There was only a singular top hat left. Resting in the middle of a bin, standing out amongst the others lying there.

Your eyes locked onto it, but become acutely aware that you're being watched. You glance up, locking eyes with someone across the floor from you. Specifically, a child. She couldn't be more than 10 years old. Her eyes shift, and you notice the tuxedo cat in her arms.

You were not going to lose this one.

At the same time, you both lunge towards the bin. You grip the small hat with both hands, lifting it up. Unfortunately, you find that there's a—surprisingly—strong force pulling back against you. Looking down, you see that the girl is gripping the hat just as tightly as you are.

You tug again, but she holds firm, mouth set in a scowl you didn't think possible for a child.

"Excuse me, I'd like this please." You say, trying to be gentle.

She huffs, sneering. "Too bad. I had it first."

"No, I think I did. Look, how about I help you find another—"

"No!" She interrupts. "It's mine. You can't have it!"

You sigh, you really don't want to fight a child, you really don't want to fight a child—

She takes one hand off and digs her nails in your arm, scratching you as you hiss.

Okay, that's it.

You rip the hat from her hands, stepping back and clutching your now stinging arm. Thankfully, it's not a deep set of scratches, but damn if it doesn't sting. The child starts bawling, now sitting on the floor, her mother coming over with a look of confusion and slight anger.

Before she can say anything you just raise your arm, showing what her daughter did, and walk off as she starts to scold the girl.

From there, it's not too much trouble to gather the remaining few things to complete your presents. You find the perfect little hearts, hesitating for a moment, but pressing a quick kiss to the yellow and blue hearts before inserting them into the plushies. You hope no one saw that as you make your final decision; whether or not to use a pre-recorded message.

After several moments of heavily debating, you decide that if you're going to commit to this, you're going all the way.

It takes a few, awkward tries, but you finally get a recording that you're happy with for both stuffed animals.

Satisfied, you decide to go find Sun and Moon.

When you turn around and look for them, it only takes you a few mere moments, as they make it quite obvious where they are.

You're, a bit shocked to see the two of them, arguing over by one of the counters. Not unsimilar to your own experience earlier, the two of them are fighting over something, you can't see what from here.

The people around them seem unsure what to do, either ignoring the argument or just watching from afar.

You realize you have no choice but to intervene, lest it escalates and you get kicked out. You hurry over, breaking the two apart.

Your gaze flits between them, confusion in your eyes. "Guys, guys, what's going on?"

"Somebody is trying to take something that doesn't belong to them." Sun scoffs, crossing his arms.

Moon tsks. "Not yours. Haven't bought it. Therefore, it's up for grabs."

They start bickering once more and you have to step in again. "Okay, okay. Why don't we take a moment here." You turn to Sun. "What's the thing that's the source of trouble here?"

They both choke up at that, avoiding your gaze.

"It's—"

"—nothing."

You open your mouth, only for someone to slap their hand down on the counter. You jump, turning to see a frazzled employee.

"There. We had one more in the back. Now please, I don't want to have to ask you to leave."

They move away then, revealing a small heart that happens to be your favorite color. Your eyebrows shoot up. And sneaking a peek at Sun's hand, still held high above his head, there's another that is also that same color.

Before you can think, Moon scoops up the heart, and hurries off, Sun following suit soon after.

You, don't know what to think of that, but your face is burning now.

You're finished up well before them, so you wait outside the store for them, fidgeting with the two stuffies in your arms. You accidentally squeeze one too hard, your own voice suddenly erupting from it and startling you.

As you calm down again, you look up in time to see them walking towards you, a bag in each of their hands. They seem, nervous as they approach you. Both stop in front of you, gazes on the ground.

"All done—oh!" Without a word, Sun and Moon present their bags to you. You're… more than surprised. "I, for me? Really?"

Both nod, again not making eye contact, it makes the heat on your face grow worse.

You take both bags, and nod once yourself. Now or never. "Thank you, boys. I, wasn't expecting this. These um, are for you." You present their respective plushes to them both, and they snap their heads up, eyes wide.

"Oh, you didn't have to—"

"—get us anything."

You smile, laughing quietly. "Of course I did. That was the point to this trip, truth be told."

As they admire and fawn over their new stuffies, you pull your own surprises out of their bags.

It's… the two of them. In plush form, of course. But they've got accessories. Over top their usual Daycare attire is more casual clothing. Sun is wearing a little silly t-shirt with a jacket, Moon a hoodie. Jeans and little sweatpants, and shoes to match. It takes a moment but it clicks that both outfits are similar to their current looks. The stuff they wear when home with you.

Something compels you to hug both plushies tight, and you're shocked to hear their voices come from both. Not catching what they say you pull away, squeezing Sun's plush, then Moon's.

"Love you more than all the stars in the sky, Sunshine!"

"Love you to the moon and back, Star."

You freeze at the words. You press play on both once more, hearing those same messages.

'Love you.'

You tune back in then, realizing that there's a sound playing nonstop in front of you. Your voice, doubled.

Looking up, you see both bots are laser-focused on their respective stuffed animals. Both pressing the button to hear your voice say "Love you always Sunny!" or "Love you always Moony!" respectively. Over, and over, and over again.

"Um... guys?" You ask.

Instantly, they both whip to look at you.

"Sunshine..."

"Do, do you mean it?"

You start to nod slowly. "Do you um, also mean it?" You lift your gifts from them.

Moon nods, and Sun hums.

Before you can say anything else, you're being picked up and spin around by Sun, he's laughing and yamerring on but you can't fully understand him. He sets you down after you protest, but you're pulled into a hug by Moon soon thereafter. Sun joins as well, and you're left standing there, hand reaching up to hold onto both of them in your slightly dazed state.

You speak first. "So, you like your presents then?"

"Oh I love love love it! But I'm far more excited to get to say I love you." Sun squeezes you tighter.

Moon snickers as you squeak. "I have to say the same. The gift is nice, but I prefer the real thing, personally."

"Un-understood." You mumble, burying your face in their combined arms as they both chuckle.

Yup. You were definitely going to be doing this again. Make it a yearly tradition, even.

A kiss is pressed to one of your cheeks, then the other soon thereafter.

Changed your mind. Make it monthly. Maybe weekly.

They were going to have to build up their collection again somehow, after all.

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Thank you for the super sweet request @luckyyyduckyyy!! I had a lot of fun being silly and fun with these guys hehe, esp the bits at the end there ashfkljsdlf

My writing Masterpost

DCA Valentine's Masterpost

Tag list (if you would like added, simply say so!):

@scarletcowboy @beemyhuneybee @fishm0ther @deviouscrackers @elsajoyagent8 @luckyyyduckyyy @zenkaiankoku @jogimote @local-shrub @milosmantis @robinette-green @everlightreader @sinister-sincerely @starredeclipse @dangerva @juukai @crystalmagpie447 @mothgutz236 @lizyxml @divinit3a @amarynthian-chronicles @crystalfay @that-one-unknown-artist @rosescarletful @buzzybee3

#fnaf dca #dca fandom #fnaf sun #fnaf daycare attendant #sundrop #moondrop #fnaf moon #dca fic #x reader #mm dca valentine's #writing requests #midnight mutterings #making the reader fight a child was a one off idea #but the people (mutuals) went feral over it #(like that child)#also i think about them just spamming those buttons over and over when youre not around aslkdfjlksf #okay thats enough #i shant say more

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nadinescholtes · 7 months ago

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Here is Laia from the new dimension on Eclipse and Puppet Show. Because Sunlight mentioned that he only likes men, she will become Eclipse's partner. This dimension is not a fully genderswap, so Laia stays a woman. And she doesn't have the strength update, she has normal animatronic like strength.

Story:

Laia was the mascot of the candy shop Sugarcoat, but when the old owner AND his wife died, the son didn't want to take over the shop and planed to get the shop demolished and build something else. He was also planing to decommission Laia, because this one hates animatronics. Laia heard this when the son was on the phone and with broken heart she planed her escape. She was very scared, she wanted to live.

The shop didn't close right away it was open for a few months so Laia had some time. But the son was starting to get violent and hurt Laia almost every day and she didn't dare to defend herself. Every other day she stole some money from the cash register and hid it in her room. And then she prepared her outfit to hide her body to look like a tall human woman (if you don't take a closer look).

Even though she had many clothes, she had very few to choose from because they couldn't have the Sugarcoat logo on them and needed to look somewhat normal.

She packed a backpack with the money, a change of clothes, and her portable power bank for an extra 8 hours of electricity (which is much easier to charge than herself directly). Charging cables and her little screwdriver kit just in case and a fuzzy blanket for comfort.

She couldn't take her laptop with games and movies with her in case of tracking. She doesn't have a tracking device built into her, because she was at the shop all the time anyway.

Her outfit: pants and a shirt, a jacket, her Halloween boots, gloves, and a bandana. In her backpack was her outfit like the one from SAMS.

And when she was ready, she escaped the shop at night. It wasn't easy to stay hidden. It was rare for her to find a safe place to charge, so she had to charge her portable power bank where she could (like McDonald's or other) and then plug it in herself to charge hidden in her jacket. She looked like a tall, homeless woman who was resting on a bench or something.

One night a group of people tried to attack and rob her, but she escaped and the next morning she found the building Freddy (Lefty?) Fazbear's Mega Pizzaplex. She snuck in, disguised as a tall woman under many people, and went unnoticed. She found her way in parts and service and hid there. She could rest and charge without being attacked for two weeks.

Poor Laia, she was on the run for 2 months it took a toll on her, she was so tired and scared. She found a crowbar and kept it close in case she needed to defend herself. She didn't have a plan for what to do in the future, all she knew was to survive.

And one day Eclipse found her, he first thought she was a tall human woman intruder but saw very fast that she was an animatronic, but didn't see her face. Laia was very scared, kept saying that Eclipse would not take her back to the shop and not to come any closer, and was ready to swing the crowbar if he did come closer.

Eclipse was confused and irritated, asking questions but Laia slipped out the door of parts and service looking for a new hiding spot. Clips didn't run after her, because he was busy and is not in the mood for this. But he kept an eye out when he left parts and service.

Days after he began researching about missing animatronics, but couldn't find anything. But he saw the news that Sugarcoat closed and saw pictures of Laia when she was working there. He recognizes her eyes.

He went to search the whole plex and found her somewhere in the basement sitting in the corner. When she saw him she got scared again, holding the crowbar up. Clips tried this time to calm her down, he was bad at it but it worked. He just wanted to know why she was there. She hesitated but then told him everything that happened in the shop and in the streets.

He said he would not tell everyone, not to help her but because he didn't care (yeah sure buddy, you are nice, deal with it!). He said she could stay there until he figured something out. He warned her if she hurt anyone or caused trouble, he would kick her out.

After days he kept checking on her and having some small talk. He brings her stuff to keep her occupied. He tried bringing her candy from the daycare (because mascot of the candy shop), but she hates candy now, so he brought her some chips. The ghost kids found her and started visiting her too and then FC found her and then the whole group knew about her.

Within time she befriended everyone and Eclipse hacked into Fazbear's system and registered Laia as an official Fazbear animatronic (the thing he did when he, Foxy, FC, and Puppet moved in). Her job was to be at the cash register at the theater, so Clips could leave to do other things. And because those two hung out a lot at the theater together, they grew close.

#art #sun and moon show #laia cotton #sams #fnaf #five nights at freddy's #the lunar and earth show #eclipse and puppet show #eaps #I'm bad at writing fanfictions #but it's a story #add comic idea on my long list #black sheep

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donjuaninhell · 1 year ago

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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.

#long post #streaming #plex #tutorial #linux #piracy #major works

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bones-of-a-rabbit · 4 months ago

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mirror:rorrim on the wall, who's fault is it all?

an idea for a timeloop/groundhog day fnaf:sb AU, as presented by (throws confetti) meeeee

in this AU, you continually wake up/come to in front of the timeclock at the pizzaplex after having just clocked in for your first night on the job. You die, leave the building, manage to survive until 6AM? You black out and wake up at 12AM, standing right where you were six hours before. No one else seems to remember or realize what's happening unless you directly attempt to make them recall that you've met before. You can't seem to figure out how to get out of this timeloop, and if you're not careful, you might just lose your mind... again.

Lingering in mirrors around the 'plex are reflections of your past selves, the ones that were killed or survived or any other number of things. They tell you about their attempts to break the loop, about how to survive certain encounters with the dangers of the 'plex, give their best attempts at advice on what you could be missing that frees everyone from the cycle of dying and waking up again.

But one of these past selves is a little... off, even compared to the others. Turns out, in one of the most recent loops, you lost your mind and took the matters of life and death into your own hands. You had been killed numerous times- crushed, cut, bitten, bled out, suffocated, bludgeoned, dropped, strangled, stabbed- and at last had decided it was your turn to do some killing. And you had been good at it. You had killed every last moving thing in the building and spent the final hour watching the sun rise on a world that you hadn't touched in god knows how long. And you had felt free for the first time in... months? Years? How long had you been stuck here? Not even your reflections are sure.

To try and keep the loop from becoming a neverending bloodbath, your past selves kept the memories of every previous end from you. They give you advice, tell you of things that helped them, admit that you had bonded with certain animatronics during repeated run-ins over the course of several loops but that so far it had never amounted to anything and it never helped when said animatronic might catch and kill you before you got the chance to talk to them in the next loop, and tell you of every small bit of information they uncovered that might help you find the way out of this purgatory. You are your own last chance to get out of this now, you tell yourself. There has to be a way out of here. Otherwise, you might as well succumb to madness, though you know you already have.

#bones of a rabbit #fnaf sb #fnaf au #fnaf reader #fnaf player #fnaf timeloop au #timeloop au #groundhog day au #bad end reader #fnaf x reader #fnaf x y/n #doodles #sketches #fnaf fanfic #might write a fic based on this idea if i ever get my brain plugged in lol #bloodbath reader #idk what to call 'snapped' reader in this au yet but i'll think of smthn #anyway #babbling

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arodiia · 5 months ago

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currently thinking about security breach!mike and security guard!reader..

you’re a newly hired security guard at the pizza plex, juggling early morning shifts, blinding lights, and screaming children—all while trying to keep up with college.

lately, rumors have been circulating about a man with unnaturally purple skin and hollow, dark eyes wandering the building in a worker’s uniform. you never paid much attention, refusing to fall for what sounded like a bad joke.

today, you were unexpectedly assigned to perform maintenance on glamrock freddy. it wasn’t in your job description, but the promise of extra pay made it an easy yes. the problem? you can’t seem to find his room.

you sigh, rubbing the back of your neck as you glance around the unfamiliar hallway. the pizza plex is a maze, and whoever designed it clearly had a personal vendetta against anyone trying to navigate the place.

after a few more minutes of aimless wandering, you notice a door slightly ajar at the end of the hall. unlike the others, this one doesn’t have a bright, inviting sign plastered above it—just a plain metal door, almost forgotten in the chaos of neon lights and cartoonish decor.

curiosity tugs at you. if this isn’t freddy’s room, maybe you’ll at least find someone who can give you directions. with that reasoning, you push the door open and step inside.

the room is dimly lit, a stark contrast to the rest of the building. dust floats in the beams of weak, flickering fluorescent lights. scattered tools and abandoned blueprints litter the countertops, and old animatronic parts are stacked haphazardly in the corners.

and standing in the middle of it all is him.

the man from the rumors.

you freeze, but not out of fear. if anything, excitement bubbles in your chest like a shaken soda can.

he’s exactly how people described—skin an unnatural shade of purple, like a bruise that never healed, and deep-set, hollow eyes that seem to swallow what little light exists in the room. his uniform is worn, frayed at the edges, the logo barely visible anymore.

michael stares at you, clearly waiting for a reaction. maybe a scream. maybe you running out the door.

instead, you take a step closer, eyes wide with curiosity.

“whoa.”

that was probably not the response he expected.

he blinks. “what?”

“you’re real.” you squint at him, fascinated. “i thought you were just a stupid ghost story to scare new employees.”

michael shifts uncomfortably, as if he’s trying to figure out if you’re messing with him. “…right. and you’re not freaking out because?”

you gasp. “you look so cool!”

silence. he looks genuinely baffled.

“okay—okay, i have so many questions.” you step even closer, practically vibrating with excitement. “are you actually dead? or like, only kind of dead? what’s with the purple thing—was it a side effect of, y’know, dying? how long have you been here? do you just hang around in dark rooms waiting to scare people?”

michael pinches the bridge of his nose, exhaling sharply. “you’ve gotta be kidding me.”

“do you eat? sleep? do you haunt the animatronics or just lurk around like some emo cryptid?”

michael lets out a groan and turns away, muttering under his breath as he rummages through a toolbox. “i don’t have time for this.”

you cross your arms. “you sure? because it kinda looks like you’re just sulking in a random backroom.”

he glares at you, but there’s no real heat behind it—more like the exasperation of someone who just realized they’ve been adopted by an overly enthusiastic stray.

“…you’re not gonna leave, are you?”

“nope.” you quickly step in front of him, eager to get a closer look. his cheeks are abraded, exposing parts of his teeth and the inside of his mouth.

he stares at you, then looks away as you slowly lift a finger, tempted to trace the jagged opening. before you can make contact, he swiftly swats your hand away.

“why are you here?” he asks, already turning back to whatever he was working on.

“got lost looking for freddy’s room.”

michael huffs, shaking his head. “figures.”

you watch as he fiddles with some old animatronic parts, his hands moving with practiced precision. despite the worn-down look of his uniform and the eerie state of his body, he seems oddly… normal. like he’s just another exhausted employee trying to get through his shift.

“so, what are you doing?” you ask, leaning against the cluttered worktable.

he doesn’t look up. “fixing something.”

“super specific.” you glance at the parts scattered around him. wires, gears, metal plating—bits and pieces of something that once resembled an animatronic. “is this, like, a hobby? or are you actually supposed to be doing this?”

michael pauses, then side-eyes you. “let’s just say it’s complicated.”

you hum in thought, watching him work. despite his reluctance, you can tell he’s skilled. his movements are precise, like he’s done this a thousand times before.

“so, you do know how to fix animatronics.” you grin. “great! that means you can help me with freddy.”

he lets out a dry laugh. “yeah, no. not my problem.”

“oh, come on! i have no idea what i’m doing, and this isn’t even part of my job.” you gesture dramatically. “besides, i bet you could fix him way faster than i ever could.”

michael doesn’t respond right away. he just stares at the half-disassembled parts in front of him, like he’s debating whether he actually cares enough to argue. eventually, he sighs.

“fine.” he mutters. “but if this goes south, it’s your fault.”

you grin, clapping your hands together. “deal.”

michael mutters something under his breath before grabbing a few tools from the workbench. “come on,” he says, already heading for the door.

you blink. “wait, seriously?”

he throws you an unamused look over his shoulder. “you begged me to help, didn’t you?”

grinning, you quickly follow him out into the hall. despite his sluggish posture, michael moves like he knows the layout of the pizza plex better than anyone. it makes you wonder just how long he’s been lurking around here.

as you walk, curiosity gets the better of you again. “so, are you like… trapped here? or do you just hang around for fun?”

michael exhales sharply. “yeah, because this place is such a great vacation spot.”

“hey, you never know. some people would kill for unlimited pizza and neon lights.”

he scoffs but doesn’t answer. you don’t press—yet.

eventually, you both reach freddy’s room, and michael steps inside like he’s done it a thousand times before. he surveys the animatronic bear slumped in his chair, unresponsive, with his chest cavity slightly ajar.

michael tilts his head. “what’s wrong with him?”

you shrug. “no clue. they just told me to ‘fix’ him.”

he sighs. “great. vague instructions. my favorite.”

without another word, he crouches next to freddy and starts working, hands moving with precision as he pulls open a panel and checks the wiring.

you lean against the wall, watching with fascination. “so, how do you know all this?”

michael doesn’t look up. “experience.”

“experience from where?”

“does it matter?”

“yes.”

he pauses for a second, then shakes his head and keeps working. “you’re annoying.”

you grin. “yep.”

silence falls between you, but it’s not uncomfortable. you just watch as michael fixes freddy with practiced ease, a strange mix of exhaustion and expertise in every movement.

after a few minutes, you cross your arms. “so, real talk—are you actually dead?”

michael finally stops, looking up at you with a flat expression.

“…do you want me to be?”

“no, but I need to know.” you squint at him. “like, are you a ghost? a zombie? something in between?”

michael groans and rubs his temples. “this was a mistake.”

michael ignores you for a while, focusing on freddy’s wiring like you’re not standing there staring at him. but you’re patient—and relentless.

you squat down next to him, resting your chin on your hand. “sooo… what happens if i poke you?”

his hands pause for a split second before resuming. “don’t.”

“but what if i do?”

“then you lose a finger.”

you hum, considering if that’s a risk worth taking. instead, you tap a finger against your chin. “okay, but like… do you feel things normally? if i punched you, would it hurt?”

michael exhales sharply through his nose. “i think it would hurt you more than me.”

you smirk. “so you do feel pain.”

he glares at you, then turns back to freddy. “why are you like this?”

“i’m just curious,” you say, nudging him lightly with your elbow. “you’re literally a walking corpse or something—I feel like my questions are justified.”

michael doesn’t say anything. instead, he reaches into freddy’s chest cavity, adjusts something, and suddenly, the animatronic’s eyes flicker back to life.

“superstar…?” freddy’s voice is groggy, his systems booting up slowly.

you blink. “wait—that’s all it took?”

michael sits back on his heels, wiping his hands on his already dirty uniform. “yep.”

you gape at him. “you could’ve done that in seconds, and you still acted like this wasn’t your problem?”

michael shrugs. “wasn’t my problem. you made it my problem.”

before you can retort, freddy’s glowing blue eyes focus on michael, and his ears twitch slightly. “who… are you?”

michael stands up, brushing dust off himself. “no one important.”

freddy tilts his head, his mechanical whirs filling the silence. “you seem… familiar.”

michael tenses just slightly, but you notice it.

freddy hums, still studying him. “strange. you remind me of someone. someone from long ago…”

michael clears his throat. “yeah, well. i don’t.”

freddy doesn’t press further, but you’re watching michael carefully now. whatever that was, he didn’t like it.

but you’ll come back to that later. for now, you clap your hands together. “well, mystery man, i think that officially makes you my new go-to animatronic repair guy.”

michael gives you a deadpan look. “absolutely not.”

“too late, you already proved you’re good at it.” you grin. “congrats on your new unofficial job!”

michael groans, dragging a hand down his face. “this is actually my worst nightmare.”

“oh, come on, it won’t be that bad,” you tease. “plus, now you get to spend so much more time with me.”

he stares at you, expression blank. “i’m going to regret not letting you stay lost in that hallway.”

you just flash him a grin.

michael sighs, running a hand through his messy hair. “great. just great.”

you beam at him, clearly unbothered by his exasperation. “glad you think so!”

freddy, now fully operational, watches the interaction with curiosity. “friend, do you know this individual?” he asks, directing the question at you.

“yep!” you say cheerfully before michael can protest. “this is michael! he’s grumpy and weird and apparently really good at fixing animatronics.”

michael glares at you. “i’m not your friend.”

freddy hums. “i believe friendships can form unexpectedly.”

michael groans. “not helping, bear.”

you pat freddy’s arm. “don’t mind him. he’s just in denial.”

michael crosses his arms, clearly regretting every decision that led to this moment. “look, you got what you wanted. freddy’s fixed. we are done here.”

you tilt your head, pretending to consider it. “hmm… nah. i think we’re just getting started.”

michael stares at you like he wants to evaporate into thin air. when that doesn’t happen, he pinches the bridge of his nose and mutters something you’re pretty sure is a string of curses.

freddy, ever the polite animatronic, tilts his head. “perhaps you should accompany us, michael. if you truly possess such knowledge, you could be of great help.”

michael levels freddy with a dry look. “i could also just walk away and pretend none of this ever happened.”

you smile innocently. “you could—but you won’t.”

michael narrows his eyes at you. “and why’s that?”

you shrug. “because you’re curious. about me, about freddy, about why i’m not scared of you. you could leave, but something tells me you won’t.”

for the first time since you met him, michael actually looks caught off guard. just for a second. then, his usual deadpan expression returns.

“…you’re more annoying than i thought.”

“and you’re more interesting than you let on.” you grin. “guess we’re stuck with each other now.”

michael groans dramatically, but you don’t miss the way he hesitates before finally muttering, “fine. but don’t expect me to be nice about it.”

“wouldn’t dream of it.”

freddy claps his hands together. “wonderful! i believe this will be a great team effort.”

michael mutters something under his breath about his life choices, but he doesn’t leave.

michael rubs his temple like this whole situation is giving him an actual headache. “fine,” he mutters. “but i swear, if you start treating me like your personal repairman—”

“—too late,” you cut in with a grin. “you fixed freddy, which means you’re now officially on-call for all animatronic-related emergencies.”

he glares at you, but there’s no real hate behind it. “you’re lucky i don’t just disappear.”

you hum, tapping a finger against your chin. “but you won’t. because despite all that broody, ‘i-hate-everything’ energy, i think you actually like having someone to talk to.”

michael scoffs, looking away. “you’re imagining things.”

“am i, though?” you step a little closer, tilting your head as you study him. up close, the strange, almost translucent quality of his skin is more noticeable. despite the unnatural color, you can see the faintest traces of freckles dusted across his nose and cheekbones, like remnants of a life long past.

his jaw tightens when he notices you staring, but he doesn’t move away.

“what?” he finally asks, voice lower, rougher.

you shrug. “just thinking. you don’t look that bad for a guy who’s technically dead.”

his eyes snap to yours, and for a moment, something flickers in them—surprise? amusement? annoyance? maybe a mix of all three.

“that’s the weirdest compliment i’ve ever gotten,” he mutters.

“yeah, well,” you smile, stepping back, “it’s true.”

he watches you for a beat longer, expression unreadable, before shaking his head with a sigh.

lowkey wanna make this a little mini series, lmk if you guys would want that!! also— freddy my shayla 😭😭

#five nights at freddy's #fnaf #fnaf x reader #michael afton #michael afton x reader #x reader #fnaf security breach #security breach #glamrock freddy

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