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Just a quick update

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 19:00:00 +0000

I haven't written anything in a while so I wanted to say hi, here's an update!

The construction is over, I have a kitchen again. That happened like the end of the first week of November. Ever since then I have been fighting a mega nasty cold. It laid dormant with sort of a minor cough for a few weeks and then came back with a vengeance over thanksgiving weekend and I'm only getting over it now.

2026 is coming up and I have a few things to think about, one is I need to finish Yakuza 0 finally. I have 15 videos to commentate. The other is that the construction was expensive, a little more than I budgeted for to be honest and while I'm able to make ends meet with all the payments it's real tight. I may have to do a stream to raise some money next year to maybe try and take a chunk out of some of this debt. If I can pay off one of my higher interest rate credit cards (probably the one that has all the "you just got fired from CVS and have to move back in with your parents" debt on it) I'll be able to breathe a little easier each month. I spent the time without a downstairs of my house in my bedroom playing Balatro on a laptop and I think that would make for a good stream warmup game at least.

I dunno! We'll see how it goes.

Once the construction ended I decided to wipe the old version of linux mint on my laptop and try out Bazzite, as it came highly recommended by The Gamers and you know what? Fuck Bazzite, I think it sucks.

The immutable OS thing is extremely frustrating to work with if you're an old-school linux user. Usually the first thing I do is I create a /tools directory where I can throw stuff like conda and docker volume mounts, but you can't do that in Bazzite, no matter how hard you try and whatever clever workarounds you find it is simply not possible. This also means I can't make a /data mount point for my NFS shares.

Then there's the whole Distroshelf thing which is a huge hassle. Why do I have to emulate Ubuntu to install a program to play music files? At least when you're running docker containers it's because you're usually trying to manage like sixteen different nginx instances. Programs also started getting killed by the kernel with Out of Memory errors which was not happening on mint.

So I decided, fuck this, and installed KDE Neon, and so far I've been pretty happy, except the Out of Memory thing was still happening, and it turns out that KDE Neon defaults to a 512MB swap file. That's an insanely low number, I think Linux Mint's been giving a 2 gig swap partition for like 5+ years at this point. I cranked up the size and reinitialized the swap file and now it's perfectly happy to page things out of memory like a normal ass computer. A few years ago I had tried KDE Neon on either this computer or it's predecessor and after an update it started crashing to a black screen with a mouse cursor so I really hope that doesn't start happening again, but I'm optimisitic at this point.

The Linux Mint install on my desktop has some problems that I've not been able to figure out, mostly around how slow it is. When I boot up and open a terminal, it often takes a solid 3 minutes for the bash prompt to appear. I have no idea why. It's a terminal window, it's the most basic of linux components? Without the shell there is nothing. So if KDE Neon proves to be a champ I might fix this by using KDE Neon on the desktop instead.

This post is already sort of disjointed and a mess so here are a few things I've been watching lately:

The Chair Company
Pluribus
QI
Crowd Control
The Last Leg
Rapsittie Street Kids (turns out that's just Debra Wilson making that noise with her mouth)
Very Important People
Started digging into Stargate SG-1 and might write about it once I finish the first season.

not done yet

Sun, 02 Nov 2025 20:45:00 +0000

but we're getting there

Construction is exhausting

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 19:35:00 +0000

Send help

You Don't Know What I Need Better Than I Do: Everything's Gonna Be Okay

Sat, 28 Jun 2025 18:45:00 +0000

A while back, I watched through Everything's Gonna Be Okay, another Josh Thomas joint at the recommendation of a friend, who upon hearing I watched Please Like Me, looked it up, saw it was Josh Thomas, and told me about Everything's Gonna Be Okay.

The problem is, I've been struggling to find the words to explain it. I thought it was great and has some of the best explicit autistic representation I've ever seen.

If you're coming to Josh Thomas's work for the first time, I think this is an easier one to jump into than Please Like Me. They're both deeply tragic and touch on alot of the same themes like long term relationships that don't quite work and parental death, but the shows are very different. Whereas Please Like Me starts with a parental suicide attempt, Everything's Gonna Be Okay instead starts with Nicholas (Josh Thomas)'s wealthy father dying of Cancer. Nick is an insect etymologist who lives in Australia with his mom, and in the first episode is visiting his dad. Throughout the show his collection of insects seems to grow. Upon finding out his dad is dying, Nicholas agrees to move in and take care of his teenage half-sisters, one of whom has Autism. Matilda is 17 and is a brilliant piano composer and also has elements of her character I see reflected in different people I know who have Autism. No one friend is Matilda, her attributes are spread out across a handful of them. Genevieve is 14 and doesn't have autism but she has two friends, Tellulah who is a spoiled brat and Barb who is a loser in the same way Tom in Please Like Me was a loser. Genevieve, having grown up with Matilda, is sensitive to what her sister needs as an Autistic person & does what she can to help her out when the situation calls for it. Then there's Alex, who Nick hooks up with right before he finds out his father is dying, and they form a relationship that lasts throughout the two seasons of the show, until the very end, where it's clear they're not getting along anymore and break up. We see Alex's friends once or twice and I recognized one of Alex's friends as Jim from Our Flag Means Death.

Matilda eventually gets a girlfriend, Drea, who exhibits a different set of common autistic traits. Drea is asexual so eventually they figure out Matilda should hook up with other people and Drea doesn't mind as long as they can be together romantically. Richard Kind and Maria Bamford play her parents and I gotta say they do an incredible job. Maria Bamford's comedy central presents episode from like 20 years ago is burned into my memory. Richard Kind I know from seeing some of Spin City, but I remember him in it just about as much as I remember Michael J. Fox, which is pretty impressive.

I'll keep this short, because I think you should watch it yourself, but as the show goes on, Matilda starts dating Drea, Gen and her friends "do drugs" by taking old blood pressure medication they find in a medicine cabinet, Matilda gets into Juliard, goes to NYC to practice riding the subway and decides she won't be able to do it on her own & withdraws from Julliard, Gen does a stand-up set in NYC at an open mic night about growing up with Matilda, Matilda graduates High School, the Covid pandemic breaks out, Gen goes on her first date with her crush, Barb gets caught in a really bad lie, Matilda proposes to Drea against the advice of all the adults in her life, Nick and Alex break up, Nick discovers he might have Autism and seeks a formal diagnosis, and Matilda and Drea get married.

I don't have much else to say about it beyond I really enjoyed it, it's a journey that I think is worth going on and unlike Please Like Me, I was always ready to jump into the next epsiode, I finished it over the course of three days while I worked. With Please Like Me I felt like I needed a break even doing one episode per day. I'm glad I watched Please Like Me, but I'm unlikely to revisit it, at least for a while. I could easily see myself rewatching Everything's Gonna Be Okay.

It's alot ok

Tue, 20 May 2025 02:10:00 +0000

The repairs and renovations have not started yet. Apparently there's all this stuff you need first like "structural engineer plans" and "approved permits from the city."

There's not much to say about it other than it appears there is also a drainage problem that's contributing to one joist being absolutely fucked.

The process is tiring and I'm trying to get my stomach problems diagnosed again. The knowledge that there's another side of this where I'm sipping a glass of ice cold water and reading a book on my new deck is keeping me going. Also the structural repairs... those are important but not as fun.

Lifelong Insomniac

Sat, 26 Apr 2025 20:53:00 +0000

Hello! If you've known me for a long time or even a little bit of time you may know I'm squarely in my late 30s and the 40's are staring me down menacingly from behind a chain link fence nearby.

This means I'm suddenly acutely aware of how I didn't really do any exercise previously. Most of the exercise I got in my 20's was by working Retail and Food Service and you know what, the big box of 20 ounce plastic cups at Panera went on the top shelf in the back. When I got an office job in my field this pretty much dried up completely. I've spent the last year or so grappling with this: how do I trick myself into exercise? Taking the bus is one I can do, but thats just walking to the bus stop and between the stops I need for my transfers, it's not really Cardio in the way I'm trying to get to. I bought a DDR pad and until Christmas where I got really busy consistently I was using it frequently! Except now that that's over I haven't really grooved lately and should probably get back to it. But anyway, the point of this post isn't really exercise. It's how I'm trying to think about my health a little more.

I have GI Tract problems I'm trying to chase down, rooted in a single case of food poisoning in 2019. I have carpal tunnel because I'm a programmer. I have a mild anxiety disorder (self-diagnosed) because I come from a long line of worriers. I call it mild because I believe I've learned how to ignore those feelings in most situations- worrying never did me any good, bad things will happen even if I do worry, so why should I listen to that part of my brain? And then there's just general aches and pains like my back hurts sometimes and my knee hurts if I lean on it weird and all that good stuff.

But one of the problems with my health I can trace back to a very young age: I've been an insomniac for as long as I can remember. Probably since I was like 8 or 9, which is coincidentally when I was misdiagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin that I didn't need.... I'm sure there's no correlation there. I can focus on stuff just fine, what I think they saw as ADHD in the 90s was probably some degree of Autism, and I say probably because I'm "Undiagnosed But Pretty Sure"

Now, don't get me wrong, I love sleep, if it were up to me I'd be sleeping right now, but my body doesn't agree with me about this most of the time. When I was little, in the summers I'd routinely stay up all night with my sister watching cartoon network (this was pre-Adult Swim). The New Scooby Doo Movies would run pretty much all night until 6 AM. During the school year I'd often try and sneak downstairs to watch TV with the volume turned really low. When I was at my grandmother's house overnight, where my grandparents were terrible at setting boundaries because I'm not her child, I'd be staying up until 5 AM watching Comedy Central, MTV or Cartoon Network. Because of this I can tell you that MTV's Undressed isn't very good, and while it was correct to be pushing safe sex and all that, it was just boring to a pubescent gay teenager that wants to see cocks. Dave Attell's Insominac, also not very good, but I respect the hustle of convincing Comedy Central to pick up your late night bar crawl tabs.

Anyway, I've finally asked for some help from my doctor about this. I've been self medicating with Melatonin and Benadryl for years and I need some more help. Melatonin only works for me in small doses - I'm shocked that anyone sells tablets larger than 5mg, anything over 3mg does not work at all for me. 1mg tablets do the work, until I build up a tolerance and have to switch. Benadryl is just I can do two or three, build up a tolerance, switch. Repeat that for about 20 years and that's where I'm at.

Explained to my doctor, begged for something, anything, he gave me trazodone. Took the first one last night and had one of the better night sleeps I've had in the past few years. He prescribed it "take as needed" but its hard to know I'll have a sleepless night in advance. I might save them for Sunday nights, which is usually the worst because I'm dreading getting up for work. He also mentioned they're used as an antidepressant, I guess the insomnia treatment is off-label? Maybe it'll lift my mood, idk!

Jello Biafra Got His Wish: Reinventing MTV Through Software

Sun, 13 Apr 2025 02:30:00 +0000

It's hard to contextualize what MTV was in a way that'll make sense to someone that didn't grow up with it being relevant. MTV always sucked, at least for as long as I've been old enough to care about it. But it sucked in a way that was different than how it sucks now. When I think of MTV sucking, I think of the shift to Reality TV, which isn't even what they're known for anymore. The Real World basically invented modern reality TV in 1990, and Real World/Road Rules marathons were commonplace by the year 2000, and I won't even get into how their sister channel VH1 slid into the wackiest Reality TV concepts imaginable. Spring Break would see college kids get fucking smashed out of their faces on booze live on TV once a year. They'd spend Summer parked on a beach in Key West, FL and have the members of 2Gether go on Say What? Karaoke. When I was in high school they came up with The Osbornes. I cannot explain why, especially after getting my hands on a copy and attempting to re-watch it but The World Turned With The Osbornes. In reality, it's just alot of Sharon Osborne being an entitled jerk to everyone around her, which is now what she's sorta known for. But there was still a focus on music, TRL was where people voted for music videos, was one of the most important things to a preteen who cared about music. Videos would rise to the top or fall off the list as their popularity ebbed and flowed. Videos would get retired & smashed with baseball bats so that they couldn't be voted for anymore to allow new videos to enter the rotation. In the pre-Youtube days, MTV & VH1 were the only way to see music videos at all. If you wanted 24/7 music videos MTV2 was an option if your parents had it in their cable package.

Of course, because MTV and, in my area Z100, operated in the method they do, they not only stuck to the Top 40, but reinforced what the Top 40 was. Because if this, if you wanted to be famous at all, you needed not only to have a music video, but you were encouraged to make something that stood out. And to some degree this worked - if you were Pearl Jam dropping the video for Jeremy on the unsuspecting public, you got noticed. If you know me, you'll know that my tastes run mostly in the rock and roll side of music, and especially now I really appreciate weird shit. Much of the Billboard Top 40 was not to my tastes, even at the time. MTV2 had alot more music on offer, some of it great, some of it not so great, but if you were paying attention you'd notice up and comers there first, things like Bodies by Drowning Pool, Get Free by The Vines, or Fell in Love with A Girl by The White Stripes.

Anyway, let's rewind to last summer. I spent a week at the Jersey Shore, and one evening me and my husband got stoned and watched The Matrix, and afterwards we put on one of those Vevo music video stations on Hulu. Since I had already gotten some DIY TV channels up and running at home, we spitballed the idea of creating our own. At the time, ErsatzTV didn't seem to have proper Music Video support so we stuck a pin in the idea.

The past few weeks have been crazy. In addition to the very public dismantling of the united states government, I've been trying to hash out the new kitchen design with the construction company I hired, and in the meantime the floor in the kitchen seems to be getting worse. Zac's grandfather's health also took a turn for the worse and he passed away last week. In an attempt to get our minds off stuff, we've revived the project, especially now that ErsatzTV has better support for Music Videos.

It's not *actually* that hard to set this stuff up. ErsatzTV is the software I'm using to generate the IPTV-compatible channels on my local network. I pointed a library at my Music Videos, structured it so that it's like /data/MusicVideos/Artist/Song/Video.mp4, built a smart collection on the search term *, assigned that collection to a schedule, assigned the schedule to a channel playout, and fed it back into both Plex and Jellyfin's Live TV.

Really the bulk of the work has been sourcing the videos, which means gathering up as many music videos as I can think of and running them through yt-dlp, then sorting them. Me and Zac went to bed the other night, and spent an hour rattling off musicians that we wanted to look for berfore we fell asleep. We also had to have some Conversations about people who suck. We're allowing The Smashing Pumpkins despite Billy Corgan being a shithead, but we decided that we will only allow one Kanye West song and it's because we're getting the Zach Galifianakis Dancing on A Farm version of Can't Tell Me Nothing.

To sort and tag everything, I created two python scripts, one regexes out of the filename the Artist and Song, but it only really works if the format is Artist - Song [youtube_id].mp4, so some of them have to get cleaned up. Lots of videos say "official music video" or "official video" or some variation of that, or have quotes, or in some cases just aren't consistent from song to song (I'm looking at you, Ted Leo & the Pharmacists). The regex I wrote for my first crack at this didn't include hypens, so stuff like Heart-Shaped Box got tagged "Heart"

The second script creates Kodi compatible NFO XML files, so that ErsatzTV can show the Artist and Song at the start of each video. It basically relies on the first script doing it's job correctly, as it just takes the Folder Names and applies them as Artist and Song Title. My first attempt at this was to figure out each file's duration and create .SRT files showing the info, but ErsatzTV didn't display them, no matter how I configured it. There's proper support in here for displaying song information using a sbntxt template file that I can't seem to make heads or tails of. I changed one number in a big comma-delimited string from 4 to 0 and it moved the information to the bottom-left from the center-left, but I have no idea what that number represented or how I'm supposed to know it.

Oh and as a bit I slapped the Buzzworthy logo on as a watermark.

The Agony of A 100 Year Old Philadelphia Row Home

Thu, 27 Mar 2025 01:00:00 +0000

Hi gamers. Three years ago I moved to Philadelphia. The reasons for this were many, timing was on my side, and the price was right. I saw an opportunity to own in one of the last affordable walkable cities on the east coast.

My logic being that with a fixed-rate mortgage, my rent can never go up.

Unfortunately after 3 years, there are some structural problems making themselves more known that need to be addressed & I had been putting off. There's pretty severe joist damage under the kitchen, and my kitchen floor tile has started cracking quite badly. Essentially, whole kitchen's gotta come out so they can replace the joists, re-do the subfoor, and then I get a nice shiny new kitchen out of the deal. In addition to this, our back door that exits from the kitchen to the little tiny concrete backyard we have is unusually small and prone to getting stuck, and the stairs are so steep and dangerous I really try to avoid going out there. The window next to the back door in the kitchen is mega drafty, I can put my hand up to it right now and feel a drastic amount of air coming in despite it being closed. Our front door, as well, is a weird size and shape, I think someone took a huge door and cut it to size, because it's wacky and non-standard, and the screen door uses plexiglass instead of perforated metal so as a screen door it's functionally useless. Basically we're gonna rip both of these out, build an 8 by 10 foot deck over the stairs, and slap a sliding door against the back wall.

To this end, me and my husband have been saving since we moved in to get these problems fixed, with the knowledge that we're basically not going to move again. West Philly isn't half bad, despite the trash all over the ground. The location of our house is very SEPTA-accessible, and it's especially convenient that the bus line that runs down our street is about 75% of my bus commute to work. But now it's time to get things rolling. I do not want to, but I must. I've spent a long time trying to convince myself that change is not always scary. But sometimes you can't out-logic an anxiety disorder.

We're at the beginning of this process. I reached out to four companies around here to see what it might cost to get my house fixed up.

One did not respond to me at all.

One e-mailed me that they were booked up for the forseeable future.

One, a home remodeling company that had stuck a 20% off coupon in my window, gave me a quote of eighty thousand of the united states own dollars (this was with the coupon applied)

The final one, my second choice based on reviews after the one that was all booked up, gave me a much more reasonable 46k quote, though some things were called out as not included, materials that I'd be picking out like doors and countertops and such. So that's who I'm going with, I've taken out a loan for this amount, and I'm keeping the savings ready for the other expenses.

Anyway, that thing about my rent never going up? True if you look at it in strict terms about the mortgage payment, but just because this loan isn't in the mortgage payment like my property taxes are doesn't mean it's not an increase to my housing costs.

Ashes to Ashes Season 3: Sympathy for the Devil isn't from the 80s

Fri, 21 Feb 2025 00:40:00 +0000

Howdy gamers, as you may have read previously, I've finished Ashes to Ashes and by extension the Life on Mars cinematic universe. If you didn't read this previously, you may want to get caught up before we get into it: Life On Mars & A2A Season 1, A2A Season 2.

And here we are again, back for a brand new round of supernatural policing in the past, and play the shitty games that suck ass. When we last left our friend Alex Drake, she had been shot and fell into a coma... and then woke up from a coma? Or maybe she's in a new, second coma, like Inception, nobody's really sure what's going on and it's been a season cliffhanger for a while. Well, good news, it's 2025 and all the episodes are out at this point, so there's no waiting!

Season 3's first episode opens with a unique show intro! "My name is Alex Drake, and quite frankly, your guess is as good as mine."

The episode proper starts with Alex Drake talking to a therapist about her experiences in her Coma in a similar way to how Sam was in the last episode of Life on Mars. She questions if 1980's London was real, and is asked if she's still dreaming about "Him," which if you haven't been paying attention is definitely Gene. She says the real world doesn't feel as real as the one she just left, and that Sam felt it too. The therapist reminds her that Sam is dead and in response she goes to an electronics store to look at DVD's.

She picks up a DVD showing her BFF's on it titled "Lethal Force," which spooks her enough to wander off to another part of the store. As she walks by the TV displays, suddenly the channel changes and it's Ray talking to her begging her to wake up, he's got a new kidnapping case and Gene's in hiding and Ray needs help. It flips through similar scenes for Chris and Shaz. Chris reveals it's been three months since Gene accidentally shot her, and that he and Shaz had a breakup that they both knew was for the best. Shaz doesn't reveal anything new but she definitely wants Alex to wake up too.

Suddenly, a new challenger appears. We don't know his name but he seems to think Gene shot her on purpose! Oh well, I'm sure that's not going to be important.

Then, after flipping through everybody begging her to wake up, Gene suddenly pops up, and Alex starts to run out of the store in a panic.

Suddenly, Alex is in what looks like a jail cell, but looking out she can see herself in the hospital. But the 2008 hospital, so Coma #1. There's a news report on about how they found a body of a murdered cop that may have been there for decades. Then, jumpscare! A ghost of a cop with a horrific face wound appears behind Alex and startles her. Straight up haunting.

Before she can really get a reaction in, Gene slaps her awake from her 1980's coma. Ah, it was Inception after all! Also apparently all you need to do to get someone to wake up from a coma is give 'em a good slap. As Gene and Alex catch up a little, Alex says "let's fire up the Quattro" and some lights flicker on and a sheet mysteriously slides off of Gene's Audi Quattro, the sports car he's been driving the whole show. I think it's fair to say The Quattro becomes a much more integral part of the show this season. The duo make their grand re-entrance to the department and find Ray in Gene's office doing his best to keep it together. Everyone's pretty surprised to see them. Ray's a little pissed off that he was running the show for months and Gene waltzes in like nothing's happened & doesn't even get a good job about it.

Soon, the mystery man who was talking to Alex on the TV in the electronics store arrives, we learn that he's DCI Jim Keats, and he's with Discipline and Complaints and he's here to write a big scary report. Get ready to see alot of this guy, he very quickly settles in as the season's Antagonist. The trio, Jim, Alex, and Gene, have dinner to sort out all the unpleasantness of an accidental police-involved shooting, tells Gene to go home for a few days while he gets the "it was an accident" info up the chain, then goes and quotes the bible. At the end of this scene, Jim notices his watch has stopped at 9:06, which was the time on the wall clock in Alex's 2008 hospital room during her out of body experience.

This dominates the first 20 minutes of episode 1. They're putting in the work to make the season 3 arc matter. But you know what, now we have to focus on the kidnapping going on. This is your standard LOM/A2A crime, someone did something fucked up but there's layers of deception. Without getting too much into the weeds of it, we learn there's a suspect who's in the hospital with severe burns and brain damage from a getaway car crash that found religion in jail, then later learn that's a different guy altogether and the original suspect got away and is laying low and is likely the criminal. The way Alex figures this out is that the burned man reaches for a rosary, but the guy who found religion inside was a methodist. OH ALSO turns out this guy used to date the kidnapped girl's stepmom. Some real Revolver Ocelot shit going on in this one. After everything's solved, Gene finally says Good Job to Ray, even though Ray had fucked up real bad earlier and ruined a sting operation.

Jim Keats walks in. Remember that guy? He brings in some champagne to celebrate a case well solved and announces he's investigating but he has "a soft spot for the old ways" which I'm pretty sure is not true. He then immediately walks into Gene's office and goes "hey you asshole, I hate your guts and I'm gonna fuck your department up by investigating"

The new implication hanging in the air by the end of Episode 1 is that Gene killed Sam Tyler and covered it up. This is what drives most of the Season 3 story arc. Keats is constantly talking Alex into looking into it further, getting evidence sent down from Manchester, all that stuff. It works to erode Alex and Gene's relationship throughout.

I guess they figured this was Too Much In One Go and they needed some comic relief, so Episode 2 starts with an Ashes to Ashes Billy Joel Music Video. Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes do not usually get this goofy- sure, there's the occasional funny thing that happens, but it's usually pretty serious in tone, so this caught me completely off guard. Also, Gene takes a moment to toss a wrench up in the air and does NOT catch it cleanly in the take they used, just the small things like this tickle me a little.

Ashes to Ashes, barrelling towards it's finale, has also made a very important and long overdue decision: It's time we learned about who Chris, Ray, and Shaz are a little more. I feel like Chris and Ray don't get much in the way of backstory during Life on Mars, so Shaz is only slightly behind them in terms of how much we know.

Starting from Episode 2, we're gonna learn. Episode 2's subplot belongs to Shaz, who is having a crisis about whether or not she actually likes being a police officer. The murderer of the week seems to be using a dating service to find his victims, who are all recently divorced women.

Shaz's story shakes out as follows:

She seems irritated, has a heart to heart with Alex on a park bench about how she feels off lately, and she thinks it's because she's not cut out to be a cop. Her main complaint seems to be that she's tired of all the sexism and I think that's a reasonable feeling to have. The next day, the gang is out investigating and discovers a dead body in a field, and Shaz runs off upset. Alex invents Speed Dating to try and draw out the perp. Shaz, out a bit later, sees a bunch of teens causing a ruckus with knives and bandanas, and tries to stop them, but they threaten her and she has a breakdown. As a result, she decides to quit. Gene swoops in with "one last job" for her to go on a date with a guy that has terminal cancer that they think might be the killer. She reluctantly agrees and wow what do you know he IS the killer, and when he attacks, Shaz stabs him with a flathead screwdriver that's been laying on the ground. I'm not sure about you but this would not make me want to rescind my resignation from a very dangerous job, but for Shaz it does. Even though she runs away from where she got attacked sobbing, the next day she's back at it and more confident than ever, and accepts when Gene asks her to come back.

The next episode focuses on Ray. There's a series of politically-motivated arsons going on, and Ray rushes into one to save someone. A firefighter rescues him, but then that firefighter ends up being a suspect. Ray, owing his life to this guy, doesn't believe he could possibly be an arsonist. The firefigher in question is a veteran who fought in the Falklands and has some real bad PTSD, and by the way his brother and wife are fucking behind his back. Clues that it may be him include: the reporter that interviewed him for the paper is a target. Chosen because he didn't print all the stuff about the horrors of war that were in the interview.

We mostly learn about Ray's history in one scene at the end, where he uses the leverage as the firefighter's new friend to spill his guts and distract him, keeping him from lighting his house on fire with him and his wife in it. Ray explains that he's from a histories military family, that he wanted to join, but got so drunk the night before that he missed the interview. He says at the time he used a local soccer match victory as a cover for it, but really he was just scared. Ray joined the police as a fallback career, and how it always felt like it was never good enough for his father. Relevant as well since the Eagles just won that football thing. Sorta fills in why he wants to hear "Good job Ray" from Gene so badly. He tells this story, then tries to have a cigarette, and uses a lighter he knows doesn't work. He's gotten some sympathy from the Firefighter about his life story, and now all he has to do is use that to get the lighter out of this guy's hands. It works and they get an arrest in. All in all, it's the most cunning bit of police work we've ever seen from Ray, who's portrayed as a bit of a moron most of the time. This is not *all* of Ray's backstory, but we don't get the last little bit until the final episode.

Chris.... ah, Chris, Chris's is a bit different, there's less focus on it than Shaz and Ray's storylines. We've already gotten some focus on Chris last season, particularly on how he was taking mysterious orders from a guy on the phone. Through his subplot, Chris falls in love with an undercover police officer from another neighboring precinct, her name is Louise. The group Louise's infiltrated just so happens to run into Gene's squad and Gene recognizes her, but is pissed that he had to find out the hard way and that the neighboring precinct hasn't given him a heads up about it. Gene, the big brain genius he is, tries to make contact with Louise where she's undercover, which might be the stupidest thing he does across all five seasons of both shows. The crime family she's working with immediately figures it out and kicks her ass, since Gene has a history with the family patriarch. Louise pops up in the police station covered in blood, needing help, and we learn her DCI has basically abandoned her. Chris is developing a crush on Louise and, Shaz seems to notice even though they're broken up now. Nothing really comes of Shaz noticing but it's interesting they put it there at all. Chris and Louise are having dinner and drinks at Luigi's and Louise tries to explain that the person he's sitting with now isn't the real her, then implies to Chris that she was raped, and Chris flies off the handle and kicks the crime family's son's ass in a cell. Alex has to be like "Chris, you stupid fucking asshole, a judge is going to let him go and he's gonna go after Louise now." and you know what, she's right. At Alex's apartment Louise is spending the night, and the crime family breaks in, knocks Alex out, and kidnaps Louise. Meanwhile, Shaz figures out that Louise's reports aren't getting filed properly, since her reports often refer back to reports on dates that don't have reports, she realizes there are a bunch of them missing and that Louise's DCI is probably intentionally not filing them.... because he's being paid off by the crime family, surprise! Apparently the crime family knew Louise was undercover all along, and her DCI looking the other way was a part of a deal they struck up. But also, it seems like Louise's true allegiances are with the crime family? A rare L in this otherwise excellent season, I feel like this part was underexplained. In a final showdown with everybody, chaos ensues and Louise is killed when she gets hit by a van. For some strange reason, Jim Keats is the one who's comforting her as she dies, telling her it's okay and not to move and all that. I'm sure that doesn't mean anything. It struck me as very strange and then I remembered the show is called Ashes to Ashes, and I started to suspect I knew where the show is going. And, in a rare showing of sympathy, or if you look at it another way, an unprecedented moment of corruption, from DCI Keats, he tells Chris he will be filing a report about the Police Brutality he did that says it was self-defense (it very much was not).

The next episode is probably has the least impact in the overall season story, so I'll be quick, two of Gene's former colleagues from Manchester are looking for a comedian because they say he stole money from the police widow's fund. This as it turns out is not true, and the comedian witnessed one of those colleagues doing a police brutality so hard that he killed someone, and that's the reason he's on the run in London. Because these guys are from Manchester, the subplot focus here is Alex trying to learn more about what happened to Sam, and how there's a police fundraiser dinner going on and Chris is learning to Breakdance and Ray wants to sing O Danny Boy but he's nervous about it. They get the comedian to play the fundraiser dinner and use this to bait the corrupt Manchester cop.

Episode 6 is where we start ramping up to the ending. There's a riot at the prison. Viv, a black man who runs alot of the administrative stuff in the station like the cells and the evidence room, goes in and gets left behind. Viv, up until now, has been mostly a likable background character, sort of equivalent to Phyllis in Life on Mars, they both get an equivalent amount of screen time I think up until today. There is so much happening in this episode. Viv is taken hostage by the prisoners. A former cellmate of the prison riot leader gets pulled in so they can try and get some information out of him, but he claims to be Sam Tyler and even does the whole "Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time?" speech at Alex. He puts in alot of work to try and convince Alex that he's really Sam Tyler. He also says that Viv's not really a hostage, Viv has a cousin that's in prison, and he struck up a deal with the prisoners so that they would have a gun. Alex isn't buying that he's Sam, but while she's grilling him for info, Chris and Ray go in undercover as Journalists. They get sniffed out basically immediately and are now also hostages. Turns out the leader of the prisoners decided to not honor his end of the deal and Viv really is a hostage. The throughline for the riot, really is that Sacks, the leader, wants to be a legend for killing cops. Now he's got three, and when Viv tries to fight back all three of them get wired up to some cell bars with electricity, setting a trap when the rest of the police force storms in. Gene manages to get this out of Fake Sam, so they know enough to smash the breaker box before the other cops can get inside. In the ensuing chaos, Sacks takes Viv off somewhere private and shoots him. Viv lays dying in a hallway, Gene trying to find him while talking to him on the radio. Suspiciously, Jim gets to him first, and once again a troubled cop dies in Jim Keats arms. This one's different though, there's not much comforting. A single shush and Jim grabs Viv's face and stares menacingly into his eyes as he dies. At this point I think that they're screaming the subtext as loud as they can, and I definitely know that Jim Keats is essentially the devil in the world of cop afterlife. Everyone shows up to find Viv already dead in Jim's arms, and everyone's really bummed about it.

The death of Viv has everyone on edge. Over the course of the penultimate and some of the ultimate episode, Gene loses the trust of his squad. Gene's got no idea how to grieve properly so he snaps at everyone. The plot for 7, the penultimate episode, starts with a disturbance at an illegal ANC drinking den, and while checking it out Ray discovers a dead body. They sorta don't get into it in detail, but it would make sense for ANC here to refer to the African National Congress, a political party in South Africa that would have been exiled during this period and had been classified as a terrorist organization in the 80s during apartheid.

Your homework before you read any further is to take a break from the ramblings of a dog that likes TV, and get some global political history under your belt. Go on, I'll wait. It might illucidate something for you about the mess the US is in currently or what Israel has been doing to Palestine for 40 fucking years. Whoever domes Elon Musk will be a hero.

Back to the episode, there's about sixty suspects currently jammed into the police station. Ray and Shaz head back to the scene of the crime and find a bunch of forged paperwork and what looks to be the murder weapon, which causes the girl they're interviewing, Tsitsi, to panic. She's covered in blood under her jacket, as it turns out. This forces a confession out of their leader, Tobias. Ah, but there's a twist, the dead man was an undercover Special Branch guy trying to figure out if ANC was building bombs. Jim breaks the news to Gene and tells him Special Branch wants Tobias, and Gene goes Malicious Compliance and asks for the forms to be signed and dated before he can do that. Chris spends the night guarding the cells. Ray and Shaz go investigate their lead suspect's apartment. Jim Hunt writes Chris, Ray, and Shaz's names on some VHS tapes and smirks ominously. Alex and Gene have dinner, and she tries to grill Gene about Sam but he's not having it. Chris talks to Tobais, who says he didn't do it and Tsitsi is safely on a flight out of London. Tobias recalls how he was a teacher and all his students were killed during a demonstration. Ray and Shaz find dynamite in Tobias's apartment, hidden in a hole in the wall behind a poster. Sounds kinda incriminating actually! While interrogating him, a guy who has an accent that sounds White South African shows up and accuses him of a very old muder and calls him Joshua, AND at the same time a bomb goes off at the South African Embassy. While everyone else checks out the scene of the embassy, Chris spends time with Tobias in the cells, and Tobias says he confiscated the dynamite and he thinks Tsitsi might've taken some on her way out of the country. Chris makes an important decision and sets Tobias free. Gene flies off the handle and they have a fistfight, you know how it is with hotheaded cops. As the night progresses, everyone cools off, Tobias finds Chris on a park bench, thanks him, and vanishes. Gene's at Luigi's, bummed out about snapping at Chris and how his department is falling apart, so Alex tries to talk to him. Shaz and Ray remind Gene he's been a bit of an asshole to Chris the last few months, and right as that happens Chris walks back in and is like "it won't happen again, but I won't be a doormat anymore" and offers a handshake. Gene, in an unexpected moment of tenderness pulls Chris in for a hug. Chris, for a second, hears music and Nelson, owner of the Railway Rarms from Life on Mars saying "what're you having?" and Ray and Shaz say they've had that happen before.

Gene goes up to Alex's apartment above Luigi's and have a few drinks and start dancing, suddenly Jim shows up with some photos that were developed off a roll of film Alex found in Gene's office. On the back of one it says "I think we found our grave" which doesn't make a whole lot of sense, you can't write on the back of a print before the photos are developed.

The episode ends with Chris, Shaz, and Ray walking home, suddenly the three of them are greeted by a vision of the cosmos, as each of them and Alex have experienced previously but separately & therefore afraid to talk about it to eachother, and Alex running off with the photos while Gene is still hiding in her bedroom.

After all this, we've made it. Season 3 is coming to a close, and the show along with it. It's time to find out what the FUCK is going on here.

Alex wakes up from a goofy nightmare where a big mascot costume version of Gene is chasing her, wearing a big mascot costume of herself. Sort of Takeshi's Castle vibes in this scene. Molly shouts for her to run from the stands. She wakes up in the police station at her desk. Suddenly, a crimescene! Gene is there, he seems quite irritated that Alex bailed on him in her own apartment. One of the victims is, as it turns out not actually dead, which makes Gene extremely fucking angry. Back at the station, everyone's saying how it's not been the same since Viv died.

Alex, talking to Jim, wonders out loud why Gene would even kill Sam, how that doesn't make any sense, and how she knows Sam is dead but she's not. Jim obviously being the antagonist does antagonist shit to try and talk her down from her line of thinking and sow more dissent.

The episode's crimesolving progresses for a bit. Chris hears a police whistle and it spooks him, it's been happening for a few days. Alex and Gene have a few arguments, Alex ends up driving out to the farmhouse in the grave photo she got, the one that was on TV in her hospital room. Back at the station, Gene has another argument with Keats and runs off to chase down Alex, and Keats walks in with those oh so mysterious VHS tapes.

Ray finds that a phone number written on a guy's hand is a flight attendant, heads over there, finds she's been murdered. She was apparently working with some dutch gem smugglers.

Alex arrives at the farmhouse, wanders out to a scarecrow in a field. The scarecrow has the numer 6620 on it, a number that's been featured in numerous coincidences Alex has run into all season, carved into a desk, written on a wall, including being on the arm of the ghost that shows up with a big face wound. While Alex stares at it, Gene shows up. Alex asks Gene to tell her it's not Sam.

She gets digging. Gene's not happy about that and points a gun at her and says to stop. She doesn't.

What we learn from here on out gets super interesting. This body isn't Sam's. Alex picks up the police badge she finds on the body and.... the badge belongs to Gene. Gene Hunt is dead. Gene reacts to this in a way that implies he's forgotten that he's dead. He recalls dying on coronation day in the 50's, his first week on the police force. Gene hears a break-in at this farmhouse and kicks the door down, gets his dumb ass blasted by a shotgun. Gene confirms he had forgotten the circumstances around his death, and as we soon learn he's not the only one. Keats appears out of nowhere in the farmhouse. Where'd he come from? How peculiar!

Alex wonders where here is. Keats asks Gene to elucidate. Gene explains that this is sort of a cop afterlife - a place you go to "sort things out" for cops who had troublesome deaths. Keats argues that the people here are imprisoned, Ray, Chris, Shaz, Alex, Sam, Annie. Gene explains he helped Sam move on to the afterlife after he came back. Keats does some more manipulation and says Gene wants her here instead of back in 2008.

While Alex and the Arbiters of The Afterlife drive back to London, Ray decides he's gonna watch the VHS tape. On the tape is his death. Ray died in the early 70's by suicide. They get pretty damn close to showing a hanging on screen before the tape cuts. Ray, shaken as all hell, walks back in and tells Chris and Shaz they need to watch their tapes. Chris goes first, he dies in a police shootout while his supervisor is blowing a police whistle and tells him to "do as he's told" even though Chris wants there to be backup. He walks back in the room and tries to take Shaz's tape before she can see it. Shaz says no give it to me, and watches herself get stabbed in the mid 90's trying to stop a vehicle break-in while Wonderwall plays. Suddenly Shaz understands why she's so dissatisfied with everything, she hasn't really had a life, she died so young. She takes it the worst of the three, but I think given the situation she's probably the most reasonable reaction of the three.

Gene, Keats, and Alex walk back into the police station. Before entering the room Keats starts kicking Gene's ass and begins shouting that they've all been denied the truth. Keats goes fucking ballistic and starts destroying desks and furniture and cackling like a maniac. He smashes a printer so hard the lights go out and we can see the universe.

Keats offers a deal. A "whole new department" waiting for them. Alex tries to talk them into staying, but Ray explains the story of his death, how he was a letdown for not joining the army, and how he took it out on someone in the form of police brutality, killed a guy who was just up to mischief, and how his superior, a man similar to Gene, covered it up. On the way out, Alex tells Keats to go to hell, and his response, predictably, is "All right."

So now you know, Jim Keats is the stand-in for the devil. Not a difficult leap to make, since the subtext has been pretty obvious the whole way through.

Alex, in the now-trashed main setting of the show with Gene, tries to cheer him up. She manages to get a little bit more info out of Gene. A story Gene told earlier, about Sam wanting to go to the pub. Gene says that you finish a job you go to the pub, implying that's how you get beyond police purgatory. But the two are cops at heart, and soon their attention turns to the jewel smugglers and Ray's plan to put Shaz in undercover as a flight attendant. Gene wonders why they're even talking about this, as he's lost his team, but Alex lets him know Chris took a radio. It's time for an impassioned plea to come back before the point of no return.

The squad walks with Keats down a hallway to some Out of Order Elevators right as Alex asks them to listen. Gene takes the radio, gives Ray a compliment, tells Shaz her long overdue promotion is effective immediately, and says Ray and Chris are his finest.

Keats, pissed off, shouts "GET IN" as the elevator opens, and we hear some screaming from below. It's literally an elevator to hell, the subtext is officially as text as it's gonna get. Shaz notices and goes "hey what the FUCK was that." Keats tries to do his own impassioned plea. Shaz 100% about going back, but Ray and Chris aren't so sure.

Shaz walks back into the main room of the station, says Ray and Chris didn't get convinced, but she's ready to rock and roll undercover. They do the stakeout, the gang doesn't recognize Shaz so they try to apprehend her but the cops show up. This surprises the gang and Shaz gets the drop on a guy. A shootout ensues. Gene's Audi Quattro, a car the show has tried to make an iconic setpiece, has been destroyed in the hail of gunfire. Some of them try and drive away but Chris and Ray crash into them and arrest them. It's time to go to the pub.

As it turns out, the Railway Arms, the pub in Life on Mars, can be summoned to London for the express purpose of sending people out of police purgatory. Nelson walks out, we haven't seen him at all since Season 2 of LOM. Nelson's a stand-in for the ferryman I guess. Shaz and Chris share a kiss before they head in, they seem to want to be together again. Ray and Gene have about a tender moment as those two macho knuckleheads can posibly have. Ray, Chris, and Shaz head inside, their stories complete.

Alex realizes this is where Sam and Annie went. She says she "can go home" but Gene's silence tells her what she already probably knew but didn't want to face, she didn't make it. Oh look it's that asshole Keats. He has Molly's scarf and tempts Alex with it, saying he can take her back, but he's lying. Alex sees Gene shake his head no and asks what time it is. It's 9:06. It's been 9:06 for weeks. It's the time on Keats' watch when they first meet, it's the time in her hospital room at the start of the season. There's been no interference from the outside world at all this season, this woman simply did not make it. I think it's probably likely that it was when Gene accidentally shot her and she was simultaneously maxed out on antibiotics. That was the last time we got any sort of supernatural outside world stuff.

Gene gives Keats his right hook, and Keats hisses like a demon and crawls away.

Alex gets right to the bargaining stage, tells Gene that he needs her to stay and help, but Gene's not having it, Alex is ready to move on. They get a little emotional and Alex heads inside the pub, the life on mars cinematic universe draws to a close.

Keats is still writhing around on the pavement, hissing and cackling. Gives Gene a good heckling before leaving. The next morning, there's a new guy in the station asking for where his office has gone and about where his iPhone went. Gene asks him into his office. The show is over.

Season 3 is a huge leap in quality. I wasn't sure if I should watch Ashes to Ashes after Life on Mars but I'm really glad I did, not many shows get the chance to end properly and if you know me you know I get really fucking pissed when shows get un-cancelled after they DO end properly, like Arrested Development. I'm not sure if the plan was always to do another show once Sam's story was over, but they didn't waste any time in between, so I suspect they did know they were gonna do a sequel series & had been developing it while wrapping up LOM.

That being said, I felt like there were some strange decisions in here. One being the move to London, I know officially it was because London would've been the center of UK fashion at the time, but you're really telling me that three cops from Manchester decided to all transfer to London together? Seems weird. I think Season 1 had far too little interference from the modern world, a complaint that I must not have been alone in because they rectified it in Season 2, only to take it away again for story reasons in Season 3. Also, if we're in Cop Afterlife, the decision to introduce The Devil in season 3 is awfully late, especially if Chris, Ray and Shaz have been dead for over a decade. Supermac as an antagonist could've been a *great* stand-in for the devil, a wildly corrupt higher-up had they actually put that together. I also found the disappearance of Evan, who is essentially Alex's adoptive father, really strange, he's in the police station *all the time* in Season 1, because he's a lawyer and you know what, lawyers sometimes have to assist people who have been accused of crimes. There's barely ever a lawyer present from Season 2 onwards. We know he's still in London, we see him in 2008 in the first episode. We do occasionally see Sam's mom in Season 2 of LOM after his dad runs off, it's not like the parents cease to exist once their circumstances come to pass. I dunno, I'm probably nitpicking but it seems like a glaring hole.

Anyway, you need a drama to watch? LOM & A2A are pretty good picks.

Now, before I wrap this up: let's real quick talk about LOM US. The united states has a bad habit of trying to make popular UK tv into popular American TV. It works rarely. NBC seemed to get it right exactly once with The Office. The first episode of the US Office is a shot-for-shot remake of the first episode of the UK Office. I'll be real with you I cannot stand Ricky Gervais anymore, the dude's a huge asshole, and I suspect Stephen Merchant did all the funny bits, but the UK Office is way better. There's an old pilot for Spaced US that's essentially a shot-for-shot remake of the first episode of spaced in San Fransisco, except it doesn't have Simon Pegg or Jessica Hynes in it, and it feels way wrong tonally. Just don't do it. But, LOM got a US remake due to it's smash hit popularity, and I refuse to watch it, but, I read about it's history a little. In the beginning it was written and executive produced by David E. Kelly, who is the guy behind Boston Legal, a fantastic lawyer-drama-comedy show. But, he left and handed over production responsibilities as time went on. Apparently it was alright at first, and was a victim of an unplanned hiatus and timeslot change, so they found out it wasn't going to be renewed before they were done making it and had a chance to wrap it up on their own terms. They do this in the stupidest way imaginable, apparently the whole thing was a dream on a spaceship. Life on Mars is not LITERAL!!!!! What are you DOING!!!!

AUGH!!!!!

Just stop it!

Anyway, this post might be longer than all my previous writing about the show combined, and Majima is calling to me, so this is where I leave you.

If you want to know what I'm watching and how I feel about it in a more real-time type of fashion, that's what bluesky is for, check the sidebar! But please for your own mental health, just block people instead of arguing with them. Words don't work on nazis, only bullets and baseball bats.

Ashes to Ashes Season 2: The Police Are Corrupt As Fuck Bro

Sat, 01 Feb 2025 17:10:00 +0000

Hey gang, I finished Ashes to Ashes and by extension I now have the whole Life on Mars Cinematic Universe Experience under my belt.

If you want to know what I thought about LOM & Season 1 of A2A, there's a post for that. This post is, specifically, about Season 2 and another one will be coming soon for Season 3.

If you already read that first post and just need a quick refresher, Life on Mars was about Sam Tyler who in 2006 got hit by a car, fell into a coma, and woke up in 1973. He wakes up and misses 1973 so bad he throws himself off the roof of an office building so that he can go back! Kind of a boneheaded move if you ask me. Ashes to Ashes, it's sequel series, is about Alex Drake, who in 2008 gets shot and wakes up in 1981 in a world that's congruent with what she's read about Sam's experiences in his psych profile, including meeting the characters Gene Hunt, Ray Carling, and Chris Skelton. The previous post takes us through to the end of Season 1, where Alex Drake tries to save her parents from being blown up by a car bomb, but can't, because you can't change the past like that!

So, if we pick up from Season 2, some of my complaints of A2A season 1 are immediately addressed, so I must not have been the only one. The year has been advanced to 1982, Alex Drake seems to stop muttering "you're not real you live in my subconscious" under her breath constantly, and the first season of Ashes to Ashes didn't have too much in the way of outside world interference like LOM did, this is now back in a big way in Season 2. The Mystery Clown is now gone, but that's because the clown was representative of Alex's dad, who we find out in the last episode of season 1 is the one who masterminded the explosion that killed her parents.

Season 2's overarching plot in-coma has two big running threads in it.

The first about Gene's boss, "Supermac" wanting to stamp out corruption but actually being corrupt as fuck. Funnily enough, Gene was corrupt as hell in Life on Mars, and in Ashes to Ashes he's still very prone to police brutality but he seems to have taken a keener interest in how its bad to be paid off. The first episode uses the death of a cop as the catalyst for this, with the dead cop's partner eventually being the culprit, Gene joining a masonic group of cops that "take care of eachother" in episode 2, and then in episode 3, the culprit of the murder gets mysterious murdered in custody because something weird is going on here! This eventually reaches a conclusion in episode 4 when Mac protects a wealthy buisnessman Jarvis, who's been having sex parties with young girls and is suspected of murder. After they confront Mac and Jarvis, and Jarvis gets away once again, Mac goes rogue and kills Jarvis, then himself.

The second thread picks up the next episode, and is about a mysterious man that tells Alex he knows she doesn't belong in this time. Eventually, we learn that he's in a nearby hospital bed and asks Alex to help him with something called "Operation Rose" that smells of corruption. Operation Rose, coincidentally, being Mac's last words in the previous episode.

Episode 7 of 8. We find out the mysterious man is PC Summers, who in addition to existing as himself from the future, also exists as he did in 1982. Well, at least until he kills his younger self and buries him in Concrete in an attempt to get Alex to play ball in Operation Rose. We discover someone in the police department is leaking information to a guy who owns the construction site where some drug deals (and murders) had gone down, so Gene sets up an elaborate trap. "I have a dossier of evidence I can't keep at the station, in case something happens to me it's at this safety deposit box" and gives each officer a different box. Doing this he deduces it's Chris, who up until this point has been one of the more upstanding characters. Alex and Gene grill him, and we learn that Chris had gone to a guy for a "pay when you can loan" to get Shaz an engagement ring. Later, he gets a call about "doing a favor" and Chris explains that he's the one who'd been losing files on purpose, including the one from earlier that could have saved the cop who killed his partner. Because Chris as a character has been consistently honest if a bit dimwitted at times even going all the way back to the start of Life on Mars, this feels like a really deep betrayal. The department's trust in Chris has been shattered, even his best friend of ten years Ray Carling can't look him in the eye.

Episode 8, the season finale. Alex Drake has had an operation to remove the bullet but she's contracted an infection. The doctors can push 50ml of super strong antibiotics through her system to try and clear it.Alex interprets this as a time limit. Gene receives a tape of Alex spitballing theories about why she's here and saying she needs to fight Gene. Gene confronts Alex about it, and she tries to explain that she's from the Future, but of course Gene doesn't believe it and thinks she's corrupt now. Operation Rose is imminent, with Future PC Summers involved. In order to foil it, they rely on whoever's trying to have Chris sabotage investigations. Chris finds out that the job is a gold bouillon truck robbery. And not just any gold bouillon truck robbery, but one Alex studied at the academy. Gene, who's patience has run thin, suspends Alex.

Of course Alex's understanding of the robbery is correct, a bunch of corrupt cops show up to the robbery but so does Gene's department resulting in a scuffle. Chris chases a corrupt cop up a staircase and gets himself into trouble. Shaz saves him while in her wedding dress. Future PC Summers confronts Alex, explains he was involved in the original robbery and resents how being paid off corrupted him. Gene shoots him. In a resulting scuffle the sister of a criminal we've seen throughout the episode takes Alex hostage, Gene tries to shoot her but misses and shoots Alex.

The episode ends with Alex waking up in the hospital and reuniting with her daughter. Or does she? After a few moments, Hunt is on every screen, begging her to wake up. Guess we'll just have to see what happens in Season 3.

I found this season to be much more successful than Season 1, even at times just as good or better than your average Life on Mars episode. Much like Life on Mars I find the idea that mid 2000's cops are uncorruptable a quaintly optimistic and let's be honest here completely unrealistic vision of the police. I have never trusted a cop and probably never will. I really appreciate that we're now getting some additional complexity out of Chris, Ray, and Shaz, and there's more of that to come in Season 3. Chris's betrayal and subsequent redemption work not only for me as a viewer that likes Chris as a character, but for the story- it's not something that happens in service to a single episode's plot and then is never spoken of again, these actions have consequences that build to the final scenes of the season. I could take or leave most the SuperMac stuff in isolation, but ultimately it is necessary for the story to show that the upper ranks are rotten to the core. The way Alex and Gene's relationship fluctuates throughout this season was likewise really important to the overall story, they started out thick as thieves, which probably a bad analogy for police officers. By the middle of the season finale Gene no longer trusts Alex at all.

There were a few things that stood out to me as strange, one being that we saw Alex's adoptive father(?), Evan, completely vanishes from the show, despite being a lawyer who was almost always at the police station in Season 1. Despite being seen in the 2008 part of the first episode of the show as someone who regularly watches Alex's daughter Molly, he's not even there when Alex wakes up from her coma. We also still don't really know why the guy Alex's dad hired to set the car bomb shot her in 2008 and there's no progress on finding out. I'm all for removing things from your show if they don't seem like they work, but when you set stuff up like that you at least have to provide some closure.

Overall, I was excited to head into season 3, the show had gotten it's hooks in me, even if it took longer than Life on Mars did.

Please Like Me: What if Anxiety wrote a sitcom?

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 02:05:00 +0000

How do you even explain a show like Please Like Me?

A few months ago Taskmaster Australia aired its second season (but it was third in filming order? that's a whole different confusing can of worms) and one of the contestants on it was Josh Thomas, a melancholy twink who stood out to me and my husband as hilarious amongst a pretty funny contestant lineup. As an american, my heartfelt suggestion is to watch all of english-language Taskmaster (except for US which I've written about before, sorry Reggie) if you're interested in finding new comedians to love.

As it turns out, one of the most fun parts about getting into Taskmaster and going through various seasons & contestant lineups has been figuring out what else these comedians have worked on, and then watching those things. As a result I've gotten very into the UK Comedy Panel Show scene and the very limited by comparison Australian and New Zealand panel show scenes. Among them stuff like QI, 7 Days, Would I Lie To You? Hypothetical, Mock the Week, Have You Been Paying Attention?, Guy Montgomery's Guy-Mont Spelling Bee, Thank God You're Here, and Never Mind the Buzzcocks, among others. But, many of these comedians aren't really panel show people, they each have a primary work they're known for such as a sitcom, and in Josh Thomas's case it's the Australian drama disguised as a sitcom Please Like Me.

My husband and I sat down to watch Please Like Me, we had been watching What We Do in the Shadows and we got to the season finale where everyone goes around the world on various journeys so we figured it was a good place to take a break. What I expected was a sitcom. What I got was a drama about being a messy queer young adult that derives comedy in the same way Nathan Fielder's newer projects like The Rehearsal or The Curse do, by focusing on the juxtaposition of goofy shit happening next to uncomfortable tragedy.

I will put a CW here for Suicide, Self-Harm, Abusive Relationships, Sexual Assault, Homophobia and Mental Health Issues.
This show does not sugarcoat these topics, and if you're sensitive to any of those, you should consider whether nor not you want to continue reading this. If you decide the answer is no, that's okay, I get it.
Also, just like, spoilers, in general, this show is dense with drama.

Still with me? Alright. Please Like Me starts with a bang. Josh's girlfriend Claire breaks up with him because she can see that he's Gay and Josh is living in denial. Josh goes and talks to his cishet best friend Tom, who I can only describe as Gormless. He has negative swag & his girlfriend at the start of the show, Niamh, exhibits super toxic manipulative traits. They talk about how he should break up with her and how he'll do it later tonight (he doesn't). Tom's coworker, Geoffrey is gay, and Josh and Geoffrey attempt to hook up but a comedy of errors prevent them from having sex, Geoffrey stays the night. The next morning Josh wakes up to about ten panicked voicemails from his father, because his mother has attempted suicide and is now in the hospital. The hospital determines it's not a good idea for Josh's mom to live on her own, so Josh decides to move back in with her. Aunty Peg, who is I think Josh's mother's aunt, also hangs around to help out when needed, she's quite irritable and homophobic.

The first season is chock full of chaos. Tom repeatedly tries to break up with Niamh. Josh moves in and when Josh has somewhere to be, Peg (who is very old fashioned and no-nonsense) tags in to try and keep an eye on Josh's mom. Josh's mom tries to get back in the dating scene (his parents are divorced by the way), Josh tries to deal with his Father being an anxious mess about everything, including being obsessed with the well-being of Josh's mother & his girlfriend tries to reign him in. Aunty Peg basically announces to an entire church that Josh is gay and that after an initial adjustment period she's okay with it. Tom's girlfriend tells everyone he gave her chlamydia, then lies to him about being pregnant to try and force them back together. Claire falls in love with Tom during all of this, but before Tom knows Niamh was lying about the pregnancy, he has to reject Claire. Josh's Mom starts dating again and gets together with a really dogshit homophobic guy. Josh and Geoffrey repeatedly break up and get back together. Aunty Peg dies sitting in a car with Josh's Mom while they wait for a real estate agent to show her house. The last episode of the season focuses on Peg's funeral, which is taking place on Josh's 21st birthday, and he spends the whole episode wondering why he can't cry almost until the very end when the dam finally breaks. The episode ends with Josh's mom attempting suicide again after breaking up with her dogshit boyfriend. There's alot of comedy to be found in these moments but oh my GOD season one is only six episodes and it has this much in it.

There's too much that happens in seasons 2 and 3 for me to really go over it in detail. This paragraph is going to be big, but keep in mind it's a fraction of what happens. We get some new characters by way of Josh's mom checking herself into a mental hospital, she befriends fellow patient Hannah, Ginger, and Arnold. Hannah's a lesbian who recently had a breakdown; she mostly struggles with depression and self harming tendencies. They do NOT sugarcoat this at all, there are at least a few scenes where Hannah is smashing her feet with a hammer. Ginger has bipolar disorder and the very first time she's ever on-screen Josh's mom walks into her room at the hospital and stops her new roommate's suicide attempt. Arnold suffers from panic attacks and an anxiety disorder, he's about Josh's age and is gay, they end up getting together and Arnold is Josh's boyfriend for most of the rest of the show. Claire's working in Germany for a while so sometimes we see her on skype but she's mostly absent from this season. There's a new roommate in Josh and Tom's house named Patrick who's gay but doesn't seem to be Josh's speed really, and he moves out after a few episodes. Tom starts dating a highschooler (yeah I know) and it's a really bad relationship because Tom has no self-esteem, so Tom gets walked all over; the last time we end up seeing her she sexually assaults Tom and they just like, show it. This show doesn't pull ANY punches. Tom also hires a prostitute and gets scared and hides in the bathroom when she shows up. Josh's dad's girlfriend Mae has a baby, Ginger has a successful suicide attempt, Josh and his mother go on a big hike/camping trip in the wilderness at the end of which Josh's mom opens a note Ginger left for her. Arnold has to come out to his parents and uses Josh's dad to practice, which makes Josh's dad cry. The real thing goes about as smoothly as sandpaper. Claire comes back from Germany, then leaves again, then comes back. Josh's Mom and Hannah move in together to keep an eye on eachother. Tom meets a girl at a club named Ella who accompanies him to the hospital when Tom, high on MDMA, trips and breaks his arm. They end up getting together after that. Josh and Arnold decide they're polyamorous, and Josh hooks up with a guy that has a brain aneurysm that needs brain surgery to fix it. Season 3 ends with all the main characters having a Christmas lunch at Josh's house and it starts deteriorating rapidly as everyone ends up complaining at eachother.

Season 4 is also dense, and is more emblematic of the changes that accompany the closing of a chapter in your life.

Josh and Arnold try and have a threesome but Josh gets self conscious when he feels ignored and wanders off. I personally am not poly, but because I have so many friends who are queer furries it's become very common in my orbit, and if your brain is wired for it and you can pull it off, I say go for it, but to see many of my anxieties about what might happen if I tried it manifested on screen? Whoo boy.

The next episode is a camping trip for Hannah's birthday, and ends with Josh and Arnold breaking up in a tent during a rainstorm.

The episode after this Josh gets back out there and has a series of horrible dates.

The episode after that, Josh takes his parents out to a fancy 15-course dinner where they alternately reminisce and argue.

The penultimate episode sees Ella have a breast cancer scare and Josh visiting his mother only to find she's committed suicide. This is by far the most dramatic episode in the whole show.

The final episode, Josh sells his mother's house and gets 1.5 million for it, then buys a loft with the money. Everyone moves out of the share house, Tom and Ella move in together, and then immediately break up before they're done unpacking, leaving Tom to move back in with Josh in his new loft.

You see what I mean when I say this show is alot? It can be hard to watch at times. We had to take a few breaks.

The comedy in this show is sort of Fielder-esque, if you've seen his post Nathan For You shows like The Rehearsal and The Curse, you'll know what I mean by this. Lots of the comedy is derived by juxtaposition: putting something silly or awkward next to something horrifically tragic. For example, in the finale, immediately after finding out his mother is dead, when he calls his dad to tell him, his father spends about five minutes trying to awkwardly order a burrito bowl before Josh can say it. It's the final escalation point of dozens of moments like this throughout the show.

There are many things this show does well in addition to the comedy, One is that it, as you can see if you made it this far, does not shy away from tackling hard topics and I think while they can be uncomfortable it shows those difficult things for what they are - moments that change you forever. There's no practicing being an adult, it just happens and you have to roll with it. It's also doing a fantastic job of showing that the nature of life is change. Things happen, people move to germany for work and then come back and then they feel like things aren't the same, babies are born, breakups happen. Also, Josh cannot seem to keep his mouth shut. He often tries to make jokes to diffuse tense situations but it nearly always backfires.

I'm not sure if I'll ever revisit Please Like Me but I'm glad I watched it.

The RainLab Blog RSS Fix

Sat, 04 Jan 2025 20:15:00 +0000

Discovered my RSS feed was truncating my posts because my Life On Mars/Ashes to Ashes post was so long..... turns out there's no setting to toggle this in the OctoberCMS RainLab Blog, I had to go edit some code.

In case this ever turns out to be something you want to fix, you should change post.summary to post.content_html in /plugins/rainlab/blog/components/rssfeed/default.htm

post.summary truncates your post, while post.content_html shows the whole thing. if you pass that into |raw, this will not escape the HTML characters, which is nice on a template page where you need it to parse something, but as it turns out will break your RSS feed since it's expecting that stuff to be < and > instead.

Anyway OctoberCMS seems to not be that popular so this stuff isn't really well documented, someone's going to try and do this one day and find this page. Good luck to you. Oh and you'll probably be googling the phrase component blogRssFeed so I'm going to drop that here too.

The Agony of David Bowie Songs and Comatose Time Travel (Life on Mars & Ashes to Ashes)

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 02:15:00 +0000

One of the shows I'd been watching recently while I work was Life On Mars, which was a super megahit on UK TV back in 2006. I think my dad might have even been pirating it as it was airing? After watching through it, I can see why it was popular, it comes together as what I think is more than the sum of it's parts and is really compelling.

In case you're not familiar, Sam Tyler is a cop who gets hit by a car during a murder investigation in 2006 in which his girlfriend (who is also a cop) gets kidnapped by the murderer because she tries to go after him alone. This last part is only a big deal for a few episodes, they seem to forget about that right away. After he gets hit by the car, he wakes up in 1973 with all the knowledge of today. This means he has alot more modern know-how than the cops of 33 years ago, and when he tries to do things like "record interviews with suspects and witnesses on tape" everyone goes "whaaaat you can do that???"

The core of Life on Mars after the first episode establishes the world is twofold. The first is that he's in a coma, though the show tries to keep it vague. There's lots of things happening to Sam that are, for lack of a better term, supernatural. He can hear people talking to him from the hospital; his mother, his girlfriend, the doctors, etc. This manifests, usually, through the TV or the Radio. The girl from the BBC Test Card pops out of the TV sometimes to give him a good old fashioned The Shining Creepy Child moment. Things that happen in 2006 affect Sam's 1973 reality. In one episode, his mother gives the doctors consent to turn off his life support at 2 PM, immediately after Sam learns this, a hostage situation arises and the criminal says he's going to kill a hostage at 2. The second is the relationship Sam builds with the various 1973 inhabitants of Manchester. Gene Hunt is his boss, a few of the other cops such as Gene and Chris he works with frequently, and Annie is his Love Interest™, a WPC (Womans Police Constable) and later on in the series Sam recommends her for a Detective Inspector promotion. Some of the UK cop-lingo like this is lost on me as an American that grew up with a healthy distrust of the police. (ACAB, for the record, especially Gene Hunt & Ray).

Speaking of distrusting the police, turns out the police officers of 1973 are all super shitty and crooked! Gene in particular is prone to violence, racism, and homophobia. The cops are all getting paid off by a local crimelord. This doesn't sit right with Sam, the squeaky clean cop from the future. He tries to impart some of the morals he has onto the team, and he has a little bit of success with Gene here and there, but mostly Gene's still corrupt as hell by the end. Unfortunately this street goes both ways, Sam, being from 30 years in the future, has future knowledge of events and keeps running into people he knows as super dangerous future criminals. But you can't arrest someone for something that hasn't happened yet, he tries to talk to one of the criminal's wives that came to him for protection in the future about it, who says he's full of shit. Sam then offers to frame him, and you can see him realize what he's saying mid sentence and regretting it. Not so squeaky clean now, are you Sam? Sam also runs into his parents frequently, particularly in Season 1. Sam's father ran off in 1973, so Sam deduces (incorrectly) that if he wants to wake up, he's got to prevent his dad from running out on the family. Oops! Anyway, it's really good, makes for alot of interesting individual episodes.

I also found out that it got a sequel series, Ashes to Ashes. This week I finished the first season. The premise is that a different cop gets shot in 2008 and winds up the same group of cops that Sam Tyler was working with in his coma. There's a couple of differences, for example, instead of 1973 it's 1981, Gene, Ray, and Chris reprise their roles from Sam's experience, and the whole thing is now set in London. Sam and Annie are nowhere to be found. A couple of things have stood out about the show watching it immediately after Life on Mars. Most of the time it's trying to not be Life on Mars and have it's own identity... sometimes this works to its detriment, but sometimes it pays off. But sometimes it is not doing this at all, and instead feels like it's trying to capture lightning in a bottle a second time.

Gene, Ray and Chris don't seem to have changed much, character wise, except the show now focuses on Gene through the lens of a love interest, where in Life on Mars he was more of an anti-hero that Sam befriends over time. Ray is still pretty bigoted (as is Gene but he's less racist and the focus in 1981 is more about homophobia), Chris, interestingly, despite eight years having passed between Life on Mars and now, is still a dimwit that seems like he's only been on the force six months. This is especially noticeable because Sam had sort of taken Chris under his wing in Life on Mars, showed him alot of really neat forensics type stuff that just wasn't known back then, and Chris seemed to really take to it. Here, Chris doesn't have a mentor figure. In one episode, he picks up a buttplug not knowing what it is & Alex has to explain it to him. Certainly by 1981 if you've been a cop for eight years you've seen a few buttplugs before, right?

Shraz, who seems like she's meant to replace Annie, is dating Chris. Since Chris is a tertiary character, this doesn't get much attention like Sam and Annie's relationship did, and when Shraz is nearly fatally injured near the end of Season 1, it doesn't carry the same emotional weight as it would have with Annie.

Ashes to Ashes as a whole seems to be focusing more on being a Miami Vice style 80's police action show than Life on Mars did. Now, since I was not around in 1973, it could be that Life on Mars was trying to emulate Police Shows of the era and it just went over my head, but Ashes to Ashes seems to be going harder on the concept. The focus, character-wise, is more on Alex's psychological profiling skills & the crime of the week, Alex being in a coma seems secondary. We get clown hallucinations ala the Test Card Girl sometimes, but we never hear anyone in the hospital trying to talk to her like we did with Sam. Instead, she just gets visions of her daughter Molly, who she has very one-sided conversations with. Molly never answers, but Alex always takes the time to swear she's working hard to get back to reality.... which means she's VERY aware that she's in her own brain. I think Alex was a hostage negotiator, which is why she has all this psychological profiling experience. She uses that on herself constantly, saying things like "Couldn't my subconscious come up with anything better than xyz." Plus she was reading about Sam's hallucination in the first minutes of the first episode, so she's already familiar with what Sam wrote about the 1973 Manchester police office. When she gets to 1981 and realizes she's face to face with Gene Hunt & the crew, she asks where Sam is. Ray claims "he died last year."

Alex, very much like Sam, has family trouble in her history. Her parents were killed by a car bomb in 1981. She's counting down the days until the explosion, trying to do whatever she can to stop it, thinking, foolishly, that she can change the past & that will be what allows her to wake up. The important bit here is that Alex seems to befriend her Mother, who she's excited to reconnect with. She also constantly runs into her godfather who took her in as a child, except now he's young and hot! Oh no! We got a Royal Tenenbaums situation brewing here. Her dad, however, is rarely seen until the end of the season. I won't spoil it more than that but there's alot going on there & the message is still "you can't change the past."

And the shows are right. You can't change the past. Some things you can't fix, even if you went back in time/were in a coma.

I look forward to finishing Ashes to Ashes. It's not as strong as Life on Mars, but they're big shoes to fill and I think it handled Season 1 relatively well.

I think more CEOs should get shot in broad daylight

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 02:20:00 +0000

This is, quite honeslty, a pretty mainstream opinion. But sometimes you have to say it out loud.

Yakuza 0 - 085 - I Love Back!

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 05:00:00 +0000

The Agony of 24/7 Discord Streaming & AutoHotkey

Tue, 19 Nov 2024 01:35:00 +0000

There is one piece of knowledge I was trying to get to, and in doing so I had to learn alot of individual things. The goal was, figure out how to keep a discord stream running 24/7 with how modern computers & my less than stable ISP connection are constantly interrupting all of my shit.

Let's rewind a bit, and get some background on why.

Long time friend of the show EntranceJew, at the start of the pandemic, had an idea to create a discord based TV station. All the tech folks were stuck working from home anyway, so why not watch Perfect Strangers and Head of the Class while we do it? To accomplish this, EntranceJew wrote TV Time version 1, written in Unity with emojis as the interface buttons. Essentially, what it did, was it communicated with VLC to queue things up and kept track of what had already been queued, so that three weeks from now, I can know exactly where I left off on Comedy Bang Bang & pick it up from there.

The rest of this is kind of lost in the blur of the pandemic, I remember sitting in my apartment in New Jersey and working through sourcing things that were widely regarded as good, culturally relevant, or hard to find. Things that were worthy of being seen during the difficult isolation of Covid.

There was also a youtube feed, you could pop links to anything youtube-dl compatible in the dedicated channel for it, and a bot would run it through youtube-dl and queue up the file. Lots of it was manual. You had to Parsec into EJ's laptop to queue things up & would rearrange the playlist to make it so that you didn't just have six hours of star trek but instead it rotated through a few shows throughout the day. We spent alot of mornings asking eachother if we had already queued up Good Mythical Morning, since the links would get deleted from the text channel. I created a new youtube account and wrote a python script that would hourly feed in all the new videos from that account's subscriptions. Sometimes discord would update and take the stream offline. Sometimes windows updates would forcibly reboot the laptop. Sometimes VLC would simply no longer be able to play videos unless you closed it and restarted. Zombie VLC processes would hang around and intercept the queue commands, even if it seemed like VLC was closed.

The media library endured two hard drive failures. The first one necessitated a rebuild of the library, there were spreadsheets listing what we had and lots of time was spent trying to re-source shows we had lost in the failure or finding new shows. Youtube helped fill the gap. EJ sent off the disk to a data recovery company, because there was some hard to find stuff on there like Downtown: Gaki No Tsukai. From what I remember, they recovered quite a bit.

Some time later, there was a second hard drive failure. This one took the program with it. We had now lost our way to ingest youtube videos & manage our library. Free Time was not on our side, so for a while there was only manual management by dragging files into the VLC playlist. EntranceJew eventually wrote TV Time Version 2, which was now... I want to say electron?

At some point earlier this year the laptop hosting things died. We were without even a computer to stream from... My new goal had been set: find a way to, with what I know now, keep a TV station going with minimal intervention.

I installed an old Windows 10 Ameliorated Edition iso I had laying around on the computer I built in 2013 in order to keep it from interrupting the stream.

For this, I'm using Jellyfin (media server) and ErsatzTV (program what can turn the media libraries into HD Home Run compatible tv stations). Setting up a channel in ErsatzTV and then feeding it into Jellyfin's live TV feature is pretty straightforward, all things considered. You need a browser to watch stuff in and I went with Ungoogled Chromium to keep things simple. ErsatzTV took a bit of time to wrap my head around, but ultimately it works. The stream is going through discord, no surprise there. I got a little HDMI dongle to trick windows into thinking it has a monitor screen, since Parsec didn't want to forward a display that didn't exist.

But I'm not done, what I have here is great, except for a few key problems that need solving. The first one is that discord updates more than any other software that's ever existed. Every third day I see the green update arrow. If you ignore it for too long Discord just does it for you. When it does that, stream's outta here, it won't restart on it's own. The second, is that ErsatzTV occasionally seems to have problems finding my video card. The third? Jellyfin, sometimes, will get "stuck" and the page needs to be refreshed. The fourth, and probably the most annoying one, is that my home internet connection is not particularly stable. When I first moved in it was dropping out three times a day. I had to call verizon to troubleshoot, they updated my ONT or something and now it goes out only once a day. I don't have it in me to set aside the time to call them again. It goes out just long enough to kill the stream. Babysitting the stream got real old real fast.

So! Now I know the problems. Let's talk solutions, in the order I tried to implement them.

AutoHotkey, as you may know, is a favorite among complete fucking nerds. And as a complete fucking nerd, who actually now has a use case for AHK other than "i wanted to have my CTRL+ALT+T linux shortcut work on windows," I've found it to be pretty good for this, with a couple of caveats. What if I set up an AutoHotkey script to restart the stream? That should be easy enough, I'm just clicking on the same spots on the screen over and over. And that part works great. But we have a problem- I can't kill and start the stream every 10 minutes, that's not a great experience.

So now I needed a way to detect if Jellyfin (via Chrome) is pulling enough bandwidth for me to be confident it's running, and if discord is sending enough bandwidth for me to be confident the stream is going out. This is pretty difficult without third party tools. The first way I did this was with powershell, but it seems like with powershell, a technology I fucking despise, you can't get process-wise usage, you can only get it off the network interface, which means there's other traffic mixed in. Certainly task manager must be running some kind of powershell command to come up with those per-process charts? Seems like something I should be able to do.

I'd also need to know if discord had an update pending. Autohotkey can check the color of the pixels where the arrow should be and if they're green then let's do the update and wait. What if an update ran without me knowing and knocked out Discord? I can use a function called IfWinExist() to check if the process already exists, and then that "selects" the process for me to maximize it. Same for Chromium - if chrome.exe isn't running I can start it up and maximize it.

The script, with these things in mind, worked like so - check for updates. if so, update, if not, run two powershell commands and dump them to a text file. If the up or down speeds seem too low, restart the stream by clicking disconnect from voice, entering about:blank in the URL bar, clicking the bookmark for the tv channel in jellyfin, clicking play, switching to discord, and doing all the clicks that you have to do to re-join voice, start a stream, and pick the appropriate window. This worked well enough, but had alot of false restarts, and for some reason Parsec can't seem to interact with anything if AutoHotkey has taken focus. I've yet to find anyone else having this issue, I do not have a solution, I'm sorry if you're looking for one. My solution for that problem is walk upstairs and plug in a monitor.

In my quest to improve this process, I learned about a program called AppNetworkCounter, which can output a .json file that contains network usage for each process. It requires running as administrator, which means to spawn it from AHK without popping a UAC prompt, the AHK script has to run as administrator. I wrote a quick and dirty python script to parse out chrome.exe and discord.exe so that AHK can read those numbers.

Did you know? Parsec can't touch anything that's running as administrator, and since I had to elevate the script, this now means Chrome is an administrator process, and if you fullscreen chrome guess what, on parsec you can't un-fullscreen it.

This brings me to the weird part of this post - there doesn't seem to be much use for elevating to administrator just to spawn an unprivileged process, and yet, here I am. I tried a bunch of things in Powershell but came up empty, eventually I stumbled on runas.exe, a tool that's built into Windows. You can specify what user to run as, regardless of the context in which you launched the process. You can also tell it to save the credentials, so that it won't prompt for them. I've essentially elevated and de-elevated a process simultaneously. It's the silliest thing I've ever done with a computer and I do stupid shit all the goddamned time.

Once I had this sorted, I set out to solve the ErsatzTV cuda initialization error... turns out this usually just means the docker host had a driver update & the container needs to get restarted. I can't do it via AHK, since the containers for Jellyfin and ErsatzTV run on a different computer. but I have a cron job running now that greps for "cuvid initialization error" in the ErsatzTV logs, and if it finds it, it stops the container, renames the log file, and starts it back up again.

But, with all these peices of the puzzle, I'm able to launch the AHK script as administrator, call AppNetworkCounter as administrator, run a python script to parse that JSON file and then delete it, and then conjure up Discord and Chrome as unprivileged processes.

There are still a couple of problems to solve. One is that I write my logs to a samba share so that I can look at them from wherever. If the computer that samba share is on is rebooting when the script does it's little dance, AHK pops an error and just sits there until I tell it to ignore the script. I'll have to look into exception handling later. Yet another is Discord. Discord keeps asking me to buy nitro. I do not want nitro. Discord has become feature bloat incarnate. I will not pay for things I don't want. These ads, reminding me I only have three days to get a special discount on a nitro subscription often move or block the UI elements, and AHK isn't necessarily smart enough to know that's what's happened, because it happens in seemingly a different way every time.

A new thing I'm wanting to do now, and I'll have to get this figured out and will maybe follow it up, is I'd like to have a second mode for binging a show. The Jellyfin interface is different for shows versus live tv, so the play button is in a different place, and just sorta behaves differently. My initial thought is to have a configuration file that AHK can parse to get coordinates depending on what mode I'm in, or change the URL for a show vs a tv channel. Maybe something in JSON, but I'm not sure how to parse JSON from AHK, it'll have to be a problem for future me.

Good Morning America

Sun, 10 Nov 2024 18:00:30 +0000

I don't have alot to say about the election, because much of it is complicated and I just don't have the energy to lay out everything that's happened in US Politics between September 12th, 2001 and today, but I'm disappointed and not that surprised. I am also not the smartest, politically, so while I have alot of thoughts that make sense to me specifically, it's possible I'm mistaken on quite a few things, and I'm also simply not great at explaining my thought processes.

There are a few things, in my IMO, that are important to say, because they concern how I'd like to address some things in my personal life.

One is that I think the time has passed for us to be silent at family gatherings - I called my mom yesterday and she seemed to have no idea that if you stop taking puberty blockers you go through puberty. The general populace is ill informed. It's time to be the loud and obnoxious family member. It's not a surprise that the people with hearts are conflict averse - fighting with people feels bad, to me, physically. But you gotta do it sometimes.

Another is that I'm fucking sick of the democrats shit. They've been letting me down my whole life. The two party system is broken and incentivizes the dems to never do anything while the republicans actively make things worse. There are two potential paths, one of which is sort of a pipe dream and the other is also sort of a pipe dream but is a little more realistic. The two ideas are essentially mutually exclusive. The first is that people with leftist ideals need to start running for offices. You don't actually need to be the next AOC, Kori Bush, or Radisha Tlaib, it can be something small like board of education or city council. The idea is to push out the old guard who have become out of touch. The other option is start voting third party.... in a presidential election this is, as it stands, not a realistic solution. But, using the strategy I just laid out- run for local offices, start small. This has a very long tail on it, and likely won't see anything meaningful in a presidential election for a while, but I do think it may be work worth doing. Ideally enough people stumble over this post and end up splitting the difference, with some people taking either path. I was on the city's website trying to figure out how to run for office. I don't know if I will. It's likely that I won't, I have a good cushy job with what I percieve to be job security. I'm not sure how to run a campaign, really, let alone an effective one. I may not be the right person for this. You might be? Who can say.

All I know is something's gotta change.

Yakuza 0 - 084 - Anime VTubers and Crane Games

Sat, 02 Nov 2024 00:25:00 +0000

Yakuza 0 - 083 - Colonial Williamsburg

Tue, 29 Oct 2024 22:10:00 +0000

The Agony of Gender & The Realization That You Don't Have One

Fri, 11 Oct 2024 21:10:00 +0000

What is, gender, really, when you think about it? It's a series of social expectations that will be different depending on what culture you're in and how people perceive you. More importantly, do you want those expectations placed on you? Would you be happier with the other set, mixing and matching things from both sets, or perhaps you're like me where you feel the expectations are unfair. I certainly didn't pick them. Why should I like sports because I'm AMAB? My sister loves watching baseball, I have no clue why, and if my grandfather was still alive, he would likely be really upset that she's a Red Sox fan. The things I like are the things I like, I don't want to change them for anyone. I tried to do that a long time ago when I realized liking N*SYNC and Britney Spears was likely giving up the game on me being gay, and in the mid 2000's society at large was still pretty homophobic so I felt I had to hide.

What I've learned in the years since is that was the worst thing I could have done. A couple of things happened to my personality because of this. The first is that through adopting detachment as a coping method, I managed to ruin my ability to enjoy anything. Uh oh! Sounds pretty bad right? Then, on top of that, add in an unhealthy dose of Cynicism because of all the visible racism and queerphobia present in society while you're queer and your next door neighbor is a Muslim with first-generation immigrant parents.

That means being around me meant you were blasted by a wave of negativity pretty much 100% of the time. My only saving grace in this regard is that I was (and still kind of am) shy, so I often didn't have alot to say. I'm not proud of who I was in my teens and early 20's. I definitely didn't like myself very much at the time. It took me quite a number of years to figure out what it was I didn't like about me, at least in terms of personality. When I was still working at Panera probably when I was 26 or 27, I think I was complaining about something inconsequential, like maybe the rearrangement of the equipment on the salad and sandwich line, it happened frequently enough. My cafe manager heard me complaining and bluntly said I needed to stop being so negative. It stopped me in my tracks, nobody had ever just *said* it to me before. It was like I had finally seen myself and went "oh no."

I'm still kind of negative, I am a complainer by nature, but on that day I had identified a problem with myself and wanted to change it. What I should have probably done was gone to therapy (certainly would've been faster) but instead I forged on making small incremental changes on my own. Did they work? I don't know, really, but I feel better about who I am.

Gender identity is an interesting one, because for most of my life, I didn't know the ins and outs of it. There was some point in 2014, referred to as the Trans Tipping Point, where all of a sudden *everyone* I knew online started coming out as trans women. Even my first boyfriend turns out is retroactively my first *girlfriend* and the depression she had leading to our breakup, turns out, was gender dysphoria. So, at the time, without everything I know now about what my options were, but knowing I was unhappy with being A Man, I had to sit down and think about it. Would I be happier as a woman? Ultimately the answer I landed at was no. I would just be trading some things I don't like for some other things I don't like, it didn't seem like a good deal to me. It still doesn't, I stand by that decision, I'm not a man but I am absolutely not a woman either, and to think of me as one is just as incorrect.

Most of my initial learning about trans issues was done through Tumblr. Lots of trans friends were like "well here's what its like and here's a bunch of signs that led me to figure it out and here's what we want (to be treated like normal people)" but those things were, especially in 2014 and the years immediately after it, was pretty much all about trans women and nothing about non-binary people. This makes sense, since everyone I knew that had come out at that point was a trans woman. And on tumblr, even if you see a post happen across your dashboard, you don't really get a sense of what the person who made that post is like all the time. Tumblr's got a focus on sharing posts which means if I see one funny post from one funny non-binary person, I don't go follow them, because I don't really know who they are, I just know they made a good post.

Around this time I had finally started letting myself be more of a furry. Posting on SA as a furry was always kind of a stressful experience. Oh did I mention that being a furry online in the 2000's was a great way to paint a target on your back? So behind the wall of detachment it went - always at arms length, lest I feel one of those dreaded emotions. In being a furry, you can shed your perception of yourself as a human and just like, be a dog. Being a dog rocks, dog's don't have very much gender binary to conform to. I can have a fat ass and big ears and bark and roll around on my back and wag my tail and just be a dog. I now know this to be Therianthropy. There's always words for how weird you are, you know? By 2018 I had fallen in with the radical leftist furry crowd to some degree. I had started dating my husband over the summer that year. In the fall, he pointed out that there was a mastodon instance all the leftist furries seemed to be creating, and I joined it, and boy am I glad I did. You can say whatever you want about snouts but those two years were some of the most fun I've ever had online. I have such respect for the people who created it and most of the people who posted on it. Many of those people are very dear friends now. This, really, is the place I finally got to interact with Non-Binary people outside of reading a comical metaphor for what genderqueer meant on Tumblr.

By 2020 some things had happened, let's say. I don't want to try & recount the dissolution of snouts because honestly it isn't my story to tell, and I would probably get alot of things wrong or leave things out that I don't know about. But more than that, the pandemic had forced everyone indoors. Suddenly I was alone with my feelings in my living room and trips to the grocery store were harrowing death-defying experiences. In the aftermath of this everyone's just okay with getting sick now, in a way that's really baffling. But until American Society made that stupid idiotic decision, everyone was trapped inside waiting for vaccines that took something like 14 months to arrive. Hot Vax Summer arrived and once again, many people I knew who were boys had been forced to reckon with the fact that they were girls and decided that running from themselves was not the right answer.

In late 2021, two things happened to really accelerate the braincells. The first, is in October my brother had gotten married. I attended the wedding wearing a suit. This, as it turns out, would make me feel like absolute shit. If you know me you'll know I am not much for Formality, had the pandemic not cancelled my graduation from College, I wouldn't have gone anyway. But mostly wearing a Suit makes me feel like I am not myself, that I am in a costume.

The second is that I had built up enough savings for a down payment and considered the idea that owning a house was probably a good idea. I do own a house now and I do think it was mostly a good idea (except for all of the problems.) To this end, I had some discussions with my managers about relocation, since we'd been in remote work mode for nearly two years. To which they said "lol, lmao, no" and since I was already in a very frustrating position at work, I said "fuck this" and began looking elsewhere with the intent to relocate. At first, I looked at Boston, saw how much houses cost, and then decided I would not be buying a house in Boston unless I won powerball.

As luck would have it, my current job was looking for someone with my skillset and was in the greater Philadelphia region, a city I could get down with. I applied, and waited.

The night before Thanksgiving that year I had an edible and epiphanies started going off in my head about maybe being non-binary. This continued after the edible had finished, and is still continuing to this day: I still think I'm non-binary. But the day after was Thanksgiving and the day after that, I got a call back to schedule an interview. I then spent the next several months parsing what being non-binary meant to me while: interviewing for a job, starting that job, buying a house, planning a move, and trying to get to grips with a new job.

In some ways I think piling on all this change at once sort of allowed my brain to go "hey so one more thing - now that I know what non-binary is all about I want in on that too, you're moving after two years of not seeing anyone in person, now is the time" and, knowing I had done a bad job at being gay because I had lived the 2000's in fear, I decided to go for it.

That being said, "going for it," particularly among the Non-Binary means wildly different things person to person. The big one is that many people will get on HRT, I didn't do that. I still don't think I will. Trading one set of problems for another doesn't seem right to me. I don't need tits. If they invent HRT that can TF me into a dog, then we'll talk. This, of course, ran counter to how I had understood the trans community - everyone's on HRT aren't they? Well, no, alot of people are, but not everyone.

Still, I then spent the next three to four months fighting off impostor syndrome, do I belong here if i'm not going to medically transition? Can't I just paint my nails, wear a skirt and get some cute dangly earrings and call it a day? The fact of the matter is, you can do that, and if you want to then do it.

I do these things in part because I think they are fun, look good on me, and because the only direction you can go away from masculinity, much to my dismay in some cases, is towards femininity. If there was some other axis I could travel along on the Gender Graph I would certainly do it. Being agender means, to me, that neither one of these genders are really for me, and that's okay. But I can pick and choose aspects from each as needed to feel like myself. You might feel like this, or you might feel like you want to be both genders and mixing the aspects is your only way to get there. Or you might be a boy or you might be a girl, I simply do not know, it is your business.

After I was done fighting impostor syndrome and tweaking my pronoun combos I landed at they/them and felt good about it, then landed at agender and felt really good about it, and now I am just me. There's still things about me I don't like, some of them are not fixable, some are, and one involves letting a woman blast my face with lasers every four weeks until my stupid beard hair falls out.

Anyway, if you invent a third gender, call me. Let's talk about it.

Hackers (1995)

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 21:54:30 +0000

I'm not sure I have a coherent throughline as I ramble because I was stoned while I watched Hackers for the first time.

I have many thoughts, the first is, I had no idea how queer this movie is. Phreaker's such a fucking twink, would likely ID as Non-Binary with those kinds of outfits in 2024. I could easily see Matthew Lilliard's character as a burnout gay AuDHD Furry looking for a hookup at Furrydelphia. There's a dream sequence where Dade's in a Dress (the terms of him losing a bet he makes with Kate about halfway through the movie). The two guys who host the Hacker TV Show are definitely at least bisexual.

Angelina Jolie is here, but she doesn't look like Angelina Jolie, and I can't put my finger on why. I went "oh yeah, that was her" when the credits rolled. There's a woman that seems to always be in the orbit of the Slimeball Security Guy at Ellington whose role I'm not clear about (His boss? Girlfriend? Not boss but somehow controls funding for his department? She's in on the money-stealing worm I think?) Marc Anthony, the singer, plays a Secret Service Agent and then they give him virtually no screen time. Why pull him for this movie at all? The main character seems kind of uninteresting. For whatever reason, I'm supposed to believe this guy's a social reject when he's conventionally good looking and has huge biceps? I'm not buying it. There's a point where Kate is like "I need to go get some help" and goes to leave a train, in what seems like a move she wants to do by herself, then looks at Dade all pissed-off that he isn't coming with her and goes "you coming or what???". The lighting in this movie is distinctive because it's basically fucking insane. It's really well lit (almost to the point of blowout) in exactly half the frame at nearly all times. The other major lighting decision is that they point a pixelated projection of what's meant to be on the computer screen onto the character's faces frequently. Computer monitors don't work like that, of course, but the effect is memorable and really drives home the aesthetic they're going for. When they're targeting the director of the Hacker Division of the Secret Service as a bet why are they working together, do you not want to win your half of the bet? When Dade reveals he had to hand over a copy of the disk with the garbage file on it to the slimeball security guy from Ellingson (who sweeps in to grab it while skitching on a skateboard by the way) everyone gets rightly furious at him, and then he reveals he was Zero Cool and that's why he was contacted, at which point it no longer matters that he betrayed the group. At the end of the movie, why does he pull out a visor like he's piloting an X-Wing and going after the Death Star? Your computer has a monitor, dipshit, look at it.

This movie makes so many baffling decisions that are, in isolation, really bad ideas, but somehow they all come together & make something greater than the sum of it's parts.

I can tell Mr. Robot is made by people who loved Hackers, but hated how much computer stuff they got wrong. Mr. Robot's not perfect about it, but generally dwells in the realm of accuracy, at least as far as I'm aware. Some stuff like an OpenWRT wlan interface randomly going down just doesn't happen, OpenWRT's claim to fame is being mega-reliable. But that's for the Mr. Robot post, this is the Hackers post, a movie, about Hackers.

88x31

Mon, 23 Sep 2024 15:41:00 +0000

Wawa Pizza Continues to Endure

Wed, 18 Sep 2024 22:33:03 +0000

The fact that Wawa has not discontinued the Pizza yet I think speaks to a level of commitment we have not yet seen from a chain that is not defined as a pizza chain doing pizza.

The strategy most fast food places use is to churn through menu changes frequently to try and get you to go "oh, maybe I should get that." Wawa sort of does this, but honestly every time I'm near a Wawa, I stop in and get something, usually a pretzel, occasionally a sandwich depending on how hungry I am. If there were one on my work commute route I'd absolutely be leaving 10 minues earlier & getting a coffee & breakfast sandwich every morning.

They don't need to get me in the door, because as of right now Wawa is in a sweet spot, they're on the verge of national expansion and are well-respected by customers. Eventually, they will get too big for their britches and erode that respect, the way many have done before them. But for now I look forward to the sausage egg and cheese on a croissant with a mediocre coffee.

The average Panera menu churn was about two and a half months. Celebrations, they called them, because the way Panera thinks of itself in 2015 is really embarrassing, and I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it's still like that. But don't worry, the e-learning narrator knows that feel and wants you to know the Straberry Poppyseed Chicken Salad is coming back next summer, and with it, about twenty 1/6-pans of quartered strawberries per day. My hands are cramping up just thinking about it.

Taco Bell and Wendy's often changed so quickly that I got to eat some things once in my entire life and then never saw again. There was a buffalo chicken sandwich at Wendys they had for like maybe three weeks, and don't get me started on the Taco Bell "naked chicken chips" which were simply triangular chicken nuggets.

Dunkin Donuts did a flatbread pizza in 2007 and I think it was off the menu in 4 months. When I used to work graveyard at CVS, the strip mall we were in had a 24-hour Dunkin, and food options at 3 AM were pretty limited. I had it quite a few times during those four months.

The McPizza is widely considered to be the stuff of legend these days, even when I was growing up in the early 2000's it sounded like a distant memory.

Quick Chek, Wawa's North Jersey equivalent, who have been sort of getting muscled out of the market by Wawa (I saw two former Quick Cheks that are not Quick Cheks anymore just a few weeks ago), used to employ this strategy as well. The 2009 hamburgers were really good, very handy for an overnight shift where your options for something to eat at 3 AM are Dunkin or Quick Chek. They did hot dogs at some point I think while I was living out in central california. They had some pretty bad mac and cheese at one point. When I used to attend county college after moving back to jersey, I used to get a sub for lunch a couple of days a week, and they were always trying something new.

Wawa has already surpassed a full year of pizza, a food I never see anyone order while I'm waiting for a breakfast panini. I ordered it once, the day me and my husband got our Covid boosters in 2023. It was fine.

The whole thing is just sort of strange. It's not how these normally go.

Alot of this stuff doesn't work

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 22:45:03 +0000

So I spent all weekend rebuilding my website from the ground up using a new CMS I've never tried before, and while I was successful, it was really really obnoxious in several regards, many of those things I've laid out already, but there's a solution I had to figure out myself that none of the OctoberCMS forums, tips pages, or anything actually touch on.

Flat Eric and the Palace of Memory

Mon, 16 Sep 2024 00:30:00 +0000

OK so, some of the vending machines in Bomb Rush Cyberfunk say "fugazi coffee" on them. Fugazi is a hardcore punk band that came out of the Washington D.C. 80's hardcore scene, and shares some member lineage with Minor Threat. I don't know much about them otherwise.