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punisheddonjuan · 3 months

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

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

So then, what is this tutorial? This is a tutorial on building and setting up your own personal media server running Ubuntu and using Plex (or Jellyfin) to not only manage your media but to stream your media to your devices both locally at home, and remotely anywhere in the world where you have an internet connection. It’s a tutorial on how by building a personal media server and stuffing it full of films, television and music that you acquired through indiscriminate and voracious media piracy ripping your own physical media to disk, you’ll be free to completely ditch paid streaming services altogether. No more will you have to pay for Disney+, Netflix, HBOMAX, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Peacock, CBS All Access, Paramount+ Crave or any other streaming service that is not named Criterion Channel (which is actually good) to watch your favourite films and television shows, instead you’ll have your own custom service that will only feature things you want to see, and where you have control over your own files and how they’re delivered to you. And for music fans, Jellyfin and Plex both support music collection streaming so you can even ditch the music streaming services. Goodbye Spotify, Youtube Music, Tidal and Apple Music, welcome back unreasonably large MP3 collections (or FLAC collections).

On the hardware front, I’m going to offer a few options catered towards various budgets and media library sizes. The cost of getting a media server going using this guide will run you anywhere from $450 CDN/$325 USD at the entry level to $1500 CDN/$1100 USD at the high end. My own server cost closer to the higher figure, with much of that cost being hard drives. If that seems excessive maybe you’ve got a roommate, a friend, or a family member who would be willing to chip in a few bucks towards your little project if they get a share of the bounty. This is how my server was funded. It might also be worth thinking about the cost over time, how much you spend yearly on subscriptions vs. a one time cost of setting a server. Then there's just the joy of being able to shout a "fuck you" at all those show cancelling, movie hating, hedge fund vampire CEOs who run the studios by denying them your money. Drive a stake through David Zaslav's heart.

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

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

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

Nothing in this tutorial will require feats of computing expertise from you. All you will need is a basic level of computer literacy (e.g. an understanding how directories work, being comfortable in settings menus) and a willingness to learn a thing or two. While this guide may look overwhelming at a glance, this is only because I want to be as thorough as possible so that you understand exactly what it is you're doing and you're not just blindly following steps. If you half-way know what you’re doing, you’ll be fine if you ever need to troubleshoot.

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

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

Step One: Choosing Your Hardware

Linux is a light weight operating system, there's almost no bloat and there are recent distributions out there right now that will run perfectly fine on a fourteen year old i3 with 4GB of RAM. Running Plex/Jellyfin media server isn’t very resource intensive either in 90% of use cases. We don’t an expensive or powerful system. So there are several options available to you: use an old computer you already have sitting around but aren't using, buy a used workstation from eBay, or what I believe to be the best option, order an N100 Mini-PC from AliExpress or Amazon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alternatively you could completely forgo having to keep track of what generation of CPU is equipped with Quick Sync cores with support for which codecs, and just buy an N100 mini-PC. For around the same price or less than a good used workstation you can pick up a Mini-PC running an Intel N100 processor. The N100 is a four-core processor based on the 12th gen Alder Lake architecture and comes equipped with the latest revision of the Quick Sync. They offer astounding hardware transcoding capabilities for their size and power draw and otherwise perform equivalent to an i5-6500. A friend of mine uses an N100 machine as a dedicated retro emulation gaming system. These are also remarkably efficient chips, they sip power. In fact, the difference between running one of these and an old workstation could work out to hundreds of dollars a year in energy bills depending on where you live.

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

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

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

Step Two: Choosing Your Storage

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

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

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

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

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

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

A four bay enclosure will cost somewhere in the area of $200 CDN/$140 USD. You don't need anything fancy, nothing with hardware RAID (RAIDz is done entirely in software) or even USB-C. An enclosure with USB 3.0 will perform just fine. Don’t worry about bottlenecks, a mechanical HDD will be limited by the speed of its mechanism long before before it will be limited by the speed of a USB connection. I've seen decent looking enclosures from TerraMaster, Yottamaster, Mediasonic and Sabrent.

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

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

Step Three: Installing Linux

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

First download a copy of Ubuntu desktop (for best performance we could download the Server release, but for new Linux users I would recommend against using the server release as having a GUI can be very helpful, not many people are wholly comfortable doing everything through command line). 22.04.3 Jammy Jellyfish is the current Long Term Service release, this is the one to get.

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

Once you've made a bootable media and you've got your Mini-PC (or old PC/used workstation) in front of you, hook it in directly to your router with an ethernet cable, and plug in the HDD enclosure, a monitor, mouse and a keyboard. Now turn that sucker on and hit whatever key it is that gets you into the BIOS (typically ESC, DEL or F2). If you’re using a Mini-PC check to make sure that the P1 and P2 power limits are set correctly and not arbitrarily lowered, my N100's P1 limit was set at 10W, a full 20W under the chip's power limit. Also make sure that the RAM is running at the advertised speed. My Mini-PC’s RAM was set at 2333Mhz out of the box when it should have been 3200Mhz. Once you’ve done that, key over to the boot order and place the USB drive first in the boot order. Then save the BIOS settings and restart.

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

Step Four: Installing ZFS and Setting Up the RAIDz Array

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

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

Open up the terminal and type the following commands:

sudo apt update

then

sudo apt install zfsutils-linux

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

zfs --version

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

sudo fdisk -1

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

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

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

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

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

To create the pool, use the following command:

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

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

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

If for example you bought five HDDs and wanted more redundancy, and are okay with three disks worth of capacity, we would modify the command to "raidz2" and the command would look something like the following:

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

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

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

zpool status

Or more concisely with:

zpool list

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

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

df -hT | grep zfs

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

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

sudo chown -R "yourlinuxusername" /"zpoolname"

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

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

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

Step Five: Setting Up Samba/Sharing

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

sudo apt-get update

then

sudo apt-get install samba

Next create a password for Samba.

sudo smbpswd -a "yourlinuxusername"

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

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

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

mkdir /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

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

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

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

["foldername"]

path = /"zpoolname"/"foldername"

available = yes

valid users = "yourlinuxusername"

read only = no

writable = yes

browseable = yes

guest ok = no

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

sudo ufw allow samba

Finally restart the Samba service:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

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

nano

Now insert the following code:

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

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

sudo chmod 774 dfree.sh

Now open smb.conf with sudo again:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

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

[global]

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

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

sudo systemctl restart smbd

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

usermod -a -G sambashare “yourlinuxusername”

Then restart samba again:

sudo systemctl restart smbd

If we don’t do this last step, while everything would appear to work fine, and you will be able to see and map the drive from Windows and even begin transferring files, you'd soon run into a lot of frustration. As every ten minutes or so a file would fail to transfer and you would get a window announcing “0x8007003B Unexpected Network Error”. This window would require your manual input to continue the transfer with the file that was next in the queue. It will reattempt to transfer whichever files failed the first time around at the end, and 99% of the time they’ll go through, but this is a major pain in the ass if you’ve got a lot of data you need to transfer and want to step away from the computer for a while. It turns out samba can act a little weirdly with the higher read/write speeds of RAIDz arrays and transfers from Windows, and will intermittently crash and restart itself if this group option isn’t changed. Inputting the above command will prevent you from ever seeing that window.

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

hostname -I

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

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

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

Step Six: Setting Up Remote Desktop Access to Your Server

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

sudo apt install xrdp

Then:

sudo systemctl enable xrdp

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

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

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

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

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

Step Seven: Plex Media Server/Jellyfin

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

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

Plex is closed source and is funded through PlexPass purchases while Jellyfin is open source and entirely user driven. This means a number of things, for one, Plex requires you to purchase a “PlexPass” (purchased as a one time lifetime fee $159.99 CDN/$120 USD or paid for on a monthly yearly subscription basis) for access to certain features, like hardware transcoding (and we want hardware transcoding) and automated intro/credits detection and skipping, while Jellyfin offers this for free. On the other hand, Plex supports a lot more devices than Jellyfin and updates more frequently. That said Jellyfin's Android/iOS apps are completely free, while the Plex Android/iOS apps must be activated for a one time cost of $6 CDN/$5 USD. Additionally the Plex Android/iOS apps are vastly unified in UI and functionality across platforms, offering a much more polished experience, while the Jellyfin apps are a bit of a mess and very different from each other. Jellyfin’s actual media player itself is more fully featured than Plex's, but on the other hand Jellyfin's UI, library customization and automatic media tagging really pale in comparison to Plex. Streaming your music library is free through both Jellyfin and Plex, but Plex offers the PlexAmp app for dedicated music streaming which boasts a number of fantastic features, unfortunately some of those fantastic features require a PlexPass. If your internet is down, Jellyfin can still do local streaming, while Plex can fail to play files. Jellyfin has a slew of neat niche features like support for Comic Book libraries with the .cbz/.cbt file types, but then Plex offers some free ad-supported TV and films, they even have a free channel that plays nothing but Classic Doctor Who.

Ultimately it's up to you, I settled on Plex because although some features are pay-walled, it just works. It's more reliable and easier to use, and a one-time fee is much easier to swallow than a subscription. I do also need to mention that Jellyfin does take a little extra bit of tinkering to get going in Ubuntu, you’ll have to set up process permissions, so if you're more tolerant to tinkering, Jellyfin might be up your alley and I’ll trust that you can follow their installation and configuration guide. For everyone else, I recommend Plex.

So pick your poison: Plex or Jellyfin.

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

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

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

Plex naming guide for Movies

Plex naming guide for Television

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

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

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

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

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

Part Eight: Finding Media

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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magewritesstories · 1 year

Note

I’m not sure if you write for this version of this character in particular but I saw you did an incorrect quote for Harry Osborn, and I was wondering if you could do tasm 2 version Harry Osborn headcanons like a dating him includes?

Harry Osborn // Dating Headcanons

Note: ofc, ofc I would love to share some hc's (btw AU where he doesn't have the Goblin Disease) TW: mentions of fighting, possessiveness (but not in the Wattpad mafia way y'know)

okay so for starters, buckle up for enemies to lovers office romance

but it's one-sided; you dislike him, 'cause y'know he's kinda an asshole, but he just likes teasing you and doesn't actually mean anything he says

after a very drunk confrontation at an office party, you tell him you think he's an absolute asshole, and how much you hate working for him

after a while it just devolves to stupid things you dislike, like the way you hate that he drinks black coffee or that he has to have take-out all the time, or that he just randomly cancels meetings for no apparent reasons

the next day, you just find a box of chocolates on your desk

after that it's a little more smooth sailing

after a few months— which is enough time for harry to fully mourn the death of his dad— things start getting better

he's fully taken over as CEO of oscorp and proven to everybody, that despite the fact that he's young, he's still a good businessman

i imagine it's been a year, and now that you're both fully adjusted to the job, things start getting a little more spicy

at first you don't even notice the change; he puts down a cup of coffee— you're favourite order— on your desk when he arrives at the office, or he asks you to join him in eating take-out when you two are the only ones left in the office after a long day

then it escalates, you complain about the old coffee machines, and he has them replaced, or you offhandedly mention the fact that one of the lifts is always out of order, and the next day you see some poor mechanics who've been working at it all night walk past you, complaining about how much of hardass the "baby osborn" is

your friend is the one that mentions it first; "hey, weren't you complaining about those yesterday?"

at first you just shrug it off, he was being a good boss, so what?

but after a while, it gets into your head anyway

i mean, there are only so many sentences with a flirty undertone a girl can take

so, being you, you decide to outright ask him

"are you flirting with me?"

"i have been for the past three months, but thanks for noticing."

after that he just gives you one of those typical harry osborn smirks and walks off, hands in his pockets 'n everything

Once you guys actually start dating though, he's a total sweetheart

His love languages are most definitely gift giving (giving) and physical touch (receiving)

Speaking of, you bet you're closet goes from being worth 200$ to being worth 8000$ within weeks

It starts off as small things, a cup of coffee on him, or some dinner in the office, just the two of you

But it escalates quickly

By the time you're three month anniversary rolls around, he's bought you just about the entire Jimmy Choo collection, and your amazon wishlist

He remembers everything you tell him, from the fact that you love a certain colour or dislike a certain food, he'll definitely remember

When you tell him you feel bad about the amount of money he spends on you, he just shrugs it off

besides you can pay him back by wearing that Victoria's Secret gift he got you a few weeks ago

Princess treatment all the way

The entire thing, holds your bags, opens the door, has his card out and has paid before you even reach for your wallet

Just loves spoiling you

Dates are usually one of two things:

One: Super extravagant, oh there's this cool restaurant in LA you want to check out when you go there? He has two tickets booked, and he's written it in his agenda for next saturday

Two: Super chill weekend in. The two of you just relax, watch some movies, have breakfast in bed, maybe even some pillow forts if he's feeling fancy, and of course, pillow fights that somehow always end up in make-out sessions

Extremely touch-starved, so will have his hands on you all the time

And he isn't even ashamed about it

Like, y'all will be at dinner, and he'll casually put an arm around your shoulder and pull you closer to him, to the point that you're almost in his lap

"Harry, we're in public!"

"So?"

"People are staring!"

"I reiterate: So?"

Just a sweetheart in general, he loves you and he isn't ashamed of it at all

But of course, there are some downsides too

For starters, he's very unaware of just how privileged he is

He doesn't do it on purpose though, he really doesn't mean to seem like an arrogant jerk. But it just shows

For example, this one time, there was a super sale at Costco, and you were super excited to tell him, and he just stared at you like, "What's the big deal??"

You'd think hanging out with Peter would make him realize that not everyone has the same chances and problems growing up

It gets annoying sometimes, like how he just shrugs off employees overworking themselves with a "So, if they're so stressed, just take a day off."

He's trying though

Secondly, he's extremely possessive, so he gets jealous super easily

For example, the two of you will be at one of his rich people gala's—as you very fondly call them— and this random guy will have a chat with you, normal conversation, but with an obvious flirty undertone

And he'll get very annoyed

"Why didn't you tell him you had a boyfriend?" *insert pout*

"Harry, we were talking about the stock market, where would I just casually add that piece of information?"

He's annoyed for the rest of the night, as well as the car ride home— in which you tell him he's being childish— but the moment you get home he just sighs and tells you he's sorry for overreacting

Those fights usually turn into long night conversations, with tea and blankets

He also has the habit of forgetting dates

This is usually when there's a big project presentation coming up and he's nervous

Usually you don't mind, after all, you've seen first hand how brutal the board can be

But sometimes it's just a little too much, and all the other little things that have been bothering the two of you blow up into one big fight

You're both very stubborn so it just turns into a waiting game of who'll give in first

If he's the one who gives in, he usually turns up at your door with a huge bouquet of your favourite flowers and your favourite chocolates

Definitely the type to drive across the city to get you that one sweet, from that one shop you really like

If you're the one to give in, he'll just pout, and tell you he's still mad

He already gave in the moment you walked in though

He just likes to tease you, but after the third sorry he feels bad and tells you he's sorry for neglecting you too

He likes the idea of communication, and he's trying to get better at it

But when he can't find the words, he just defaults back to buying you stuff

That's how his dad always fixed stuff, so it's the only way he knows

But he tries, because it's you and you deserve nothing less than the best

#harry osborn #harry osborn x reader #tasm!harry osborn #tasm!harry osborn x reader #harry osborn headcanons #tasm!harry osborn x reader headcanons #harry osborn x reader headcanons #the amazing spiderman #spiderman #spiderman headcanons #tasm!harry osborn headcanons #marvel #marvel headcanons

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trollsedits · 19 days

Text

Brozone Headcanon pt2 ft their Voice Actors mentioned…..

John Dory:

-when ever his parents introduced him to his baby brother he would asked his parents if they could return them back to where they came from…

-He copy’s everything that Eric Andre dose he’s eric Andre biggest fan

-Eric Andre Once called John Dory a Amazon box or has mistaken John Dory for an Amazon box

-John Dory once try to sell all of his baby brothers because they couldn’t hit the perfect family harmony which made Floyd cry so loud that John got in trouble

-just like Floyd who chased troye Sivan John would chase Eric Andre for miles

-Eric and John would be good friends John would even embarrass his brother in front of Eric

-After Trolls band together; he will probably hangout with the snack pack cuz poppy made him after branch said “Poppy No!”

-He tells dads/uncle jokes to the snack pack

-The fashion Twins Looks up to John Dory for some reason

-The younger brother play pranks and tricks on him

-Floyd pranks on John Dory was the cruelest of them all back in their bands days John was protective of baby branch Floyd thought it would be funny to hide branch in his hair and told John that branch has been kidnapped by some fans which cause John to panic and called the cops and cancel shows….

-John Dory “Hates Creek.” Despite never meeting him b/c branch told him about creek betrayal

-John was secretly there during barb rock-apocalypse that’s how he knew branch was still alive (That’s my biggest theory)

-He moves around without making a sound so he will appear out of thin air without making a sound just like branch

-John Dory gets along with most trolls

-King peppy; still holds grudges against John cuz he played a prank on king peppy back in the days telling him that his daughter viva has been taken by Bergens (Now I know where Floyd gets that from)

-He cussed a lot even in front of Bruce kids Bruce would make Jonh eat literal soap

-John Dory and clay still have beef w each other (They would secretly get along when no one around)

-Branch caught both clay and John bonding together but they deny it

-Clay was probably Jonh Dory favorite brother beside branch

-Probably screams like a little girl

-John has a harder time opening up his feelings to clay since the two has some grudges against each other

-when branch,poppy and tiny diamond walk out on them Bruce and Clay didn’t stop Jonh Dory from parking on the spot maybe they try too but John refuse to listen to them “reserved for brozone” it was probably Jonh Dory most dumbest moment even Floyd was shaking his head on how dumb his square brother was

-will stare at his brother when sleeping (totally not creepy at all right)

-Beside chasing Eric Andre around John Dory stalk clay the most out of the brothers

———————

Bruce:

-made John Dory ate soap because he keeps cussing in front of his 13 little angels 🥺

-He meet Daveed diggs when he came into his restaurant he and daveed became good friends and he became a regular at Bruce restaurant

-That dude loves hugs he will hug anyone and anything 🫣 he once hugged a cactus brandy spend hours taking the spikes off Bruce

-Bruce would love to be in a musical theater w daveed

-Bruce would describe John Dory as the Wicked Witch of the West

-Bruce also describe clay as the tin man, Floyd as dorothy, branch as the scarecrow and Bruce would describe Queen poppy as the good witch and also describe himself as the lion

-Bruce always talks or quote stuff from any musical when talking to his brother or anyone in general even his kids who dose not get the reference

-Bruce is a smooth talker

-He still got that charm ;)

-Bruce listen to what ever his kids listen too

-Bruce along with clay try to stop Amazon box Dory from parking at the “Reserved for Brozone.” At mount rageous but failed

-Bruce also called John Dory a potty mouth even back in the days

-Bruce didn’t cause much trouble beside giving people wet Willy’s (mostly his brothers)

-Bruce is happy on Vcay island 🏝️

-when he visit pop troll village all of poppy friends would surround him with hugs (that dude will hug anyone) he kiss one of poppy friends hands causing them both to faint *cough cough* satin and chenille

-Bruce always act like he’s living in the Wizard of Oz for some reason

-Bruce asked guy Diamond if he could babysit tiny diamond but branch knows what’s up

-Bruce loves his kids but he hella adore tiny diamond b/c he’s so small (I also adore tiny he’s so cute 🥰)

-he would go to prison for attempting to kidnap guy Diamond child but guy Diamond bailed him out and he could understand why Bruce wanted tiny b/c they bonded and how well Bruce took care of tiny

-After band together; tiny would beg guy Diamond to marry Bruce “Ayo, Daddy can this big hair purple dude be my other daddy please 🥺👉🏻👈🏻”

-guy Diamond and Bruce would be good friends exchanging dad’s advice…

—————————-

Clay:

-missed John Dory the most despite having beef with an Amazon box poor dude missed his big Amazon box brother

-Went to a kid Cudi concert and meet him back stage and he started being his little assistant but left cause he’s a licensed CPA Fools

-He’s and branch share the same exact personality

-He would also describe Jonh Dory as the Wicked witch of the west

-He and viva are like branch and poppy ✨

-Clay and Bruce still hung out with each other before the Bergens escape clay sent a letter telling Bruce that he was alive cuz Bruce was worried sick during his stay at Vcay island

-Clay is the tallest (How is he tall sjshshshs)

-Clay makes fun of John Dory heights

-Clay dose not eat sweet

-Clay has contact name for his brother which are name by Viva she gave him that idea…

John Dory: Square Fish head

Bruce: Grapes

Floyd: Fro-yo

Branch: Blueberries

-Clay has a masters degree?

-John Dory always calls clay for inconvenience stuff

-Clay loves April fools his pranks are scary af even bitty B wasn’t safe around the house during April fools days

-Clay can rap

-Clay will roast each one of his brothers he roasts John the hardest and Floyd the lightest since Floyd is sensitive clay would often roast Floyd with nice words instead of insults 😮‍💨

-Floyd is clingy to clay when they were younger

-Clay adore Floyd still dose at this point

-Clay would often talk about Jonh and Floyd the most to viva and the others trolls

-Clay would rather be locked up in a room with a Bergens rather than his own brother John cuz he had a harder time expressing his feelings towards him

-after trolls band together: Clay,branch and Floyd would have a day where they do stuff together like a younger siblings stuff

——————————-

Floyd:

-edits himself on every single one of Troye Sivan posted (totally not edit by me doe 🫣)

-would kill for Troye Sivan

-Wants to do a song collab w Troye Sivan

-Troye got a restraining order on Floyd what??

-plays pranks on John Dory a lot where he tell John Dory that branch has been kidnapped back in the days which cost him to freak he never trust Floyd afterwards

-his favorite show is “The Idol” because troye Sivan is in it duhh

-Floyd is a grandma boy :)

-Grandma Rosiepuff gives branch and Floyd the most kisses and attention

-Floyd had live with rocks trolls during his solo days

-he is claustrophobic (From being locked up in a diamond prison)

-Floyd listen to Twice so he’s a “Once.” 😙

-His favorite member is probably Momo or sana

-He likes Newjeans song “Super Shy & OMG”

-He dose the best Troye Sivan impression

-Floyd is still afraid of Velvet & Venner 🥺

-Floyd has no clue what happen after he got out of the diamond prison

-Dose Kpop cover dances and stuff

————————

Branch:

-his Bts bias is Rap monster cuz he reminds branch of clay and his blackpink bias is Jisoo (She’s really underrated show some love to jisoo 1 like = love for jisoo 🥹🫶🏻💕)

-He got poppy into kpop aswell

-He used to follow Floyd around when he was younger

-Also a Grandma boy along w Floyd 🫶🏻

-He miss grandma Rosiepuff the most 🥺

-“Singing killed my grandma!” Was his quote even poppy and the snack pack would rephrase it

-He also Listen to Ariana Grande his favorite song is “Yes, and?” And “I wish I hated you” and no tears left to cry and so on

-He would answer almost every question by saying “Yes,and?” Or “No,and” especially to his brothers

-he definitely has gone through phrases (not even one that his brother knows only poppy dose)

-He once got beef with Justin Timberlake b/c they sound alike but they made up for it and confused people with their voices

-Branch is literally the troll size Justin Timberlake 🤧

-Branch went into Floyd room one time and saw massive posters of troye sivan even one that was edit w him and Floyd ._. And even a Pillow of himdon’t ask what Floyd dose w it

-Branch loves all his brothers ✨

-when branch was a baby he has gone through phrases where he would bite his brother Floyd was use to branch bites since they sting like a bee..

-He won’t even try biting Floyd cause Floyd was use to it but for his three older brothers is a hell of a ride

-Branch once got Justin Timberlake to gather Eric,daveed,kid Cudi and troye, to a get together with the brozone brothers troye would sit far away from Floyd as possible ;-;

-Branch would ask king peppy for baby pictures of poppy or viva since she has baby pics of him

-Branch likes it when his brother baby him around just not in front of Queen poppy or anyone else

-Branch don’t need sleep 💤 (HE NEEDS SOME SLEEP YALL!)

-Branch would quote songs when talking like “If anyone gonna love you Queen poppy it’s Gonna be me.” Or “It’s gonna be May~” you get the idea right…

——————

Anyways, I hope you enjoy that funny and random headcanon of Brozone part 2 if you want to request me anything just click on my profile and press on “Ask Me Anything!”

—————

Like + Follow are very much appreciated! ✨

P.S I kinda want to see the Brozone Voice Actor do a video together or even the hot ones video 🫨🥹

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ekwolfwriter-blog · 2 months

Text

I just want to get this out but I am getting tired of people complaining about Live action Katara's lack of rage in the show. Especially because now, because it is missing from the LA show, there is a general trend of people that were annoyed with her behavior before now are defending it being part of her character. And before people think I am hating on them, no. I am not against people defending her rage, as I liked it a lot growing up and watching the show causally just as the next person. Katara was one of my favorite character of being a kind person while also taking names and kicking butt, she was that awesome. So more defense for her the better. Hell, I would say from just the interviews I have seen of Kiawentiio, she has - to me - the Katara sass and I am living for it.

What I am hating on is that the Live action Katara is getting ragged on for a lot of reasons - some valid, but other are (in my opinion) surface level stupid and not knowing of what actually might have been going on during the filming of season and probably the mindset that caused her character to be deflated. Because there is a lot to consider as to why it had to be condensed either for conveniences sake or - in my personal opinion - was done on purpose by two individuals that have a track records of curving that behavior in Katara to their desire.

Also: DON'T use this as an excuse to attack the actress! She is doing her best and giving her all! She is doing her job and any slander on her will be instantly blocked! I will not take any slander on her or any of the actors!

Also, mid spoilers so read at your own risk near the bottom

First thing we should consider: the amount of episodes. Yes, I am aware of the telling and not showing arguments that are being flown around. I get it. Normally, I am one of the biggest supporters that this show needed time to breath and let be to show than telling. If it had more time to breath, Katara's rage might have been more visible and we could have had more time for her arc to improve. And this is not to say that they could not have been able to do it, but I will say that this show NEEDED more than 8 episodes to be able to get as much in (To be clear, there are some shows that this works for - Amazon's Reacher and Legend of Zorro have short seasons and formatted for hour long content. But it makes sense for those shows because they are working within parameters of their medium and are newer (both are adaptions of older stuff but still) shows that can play around with the format better). For as ambitious as this project is, it has a lot to condense. At least that it is a show and not a movie, but still. Let's not forget that it could have been so much worst if it was a movie.

Now some people will say, "Well if they were good enough writers then they could have done more to show than tell," which fair. I will admit that there are infinite number of ways that they could handled some of the topics: such as Sokka's sexism and Katara's rage that everyone is missing. But with the landscape of media as is where you would be damned if you do damned if you don't if you so much as talk about some sensitive topic and you could be canceled for it instantly! Which leads me to the next point!

Second thing to consider: Multiple season renewal was never confirmed prior. Yes, we can all complain that the shows pacing was out of place. Yes, they cut some filler. And yes, it feels like we are getting too much of the world building through talking and now showing. But can you really blame them? To most people, if you saw the reaction of the cast before the news came out, you can see they were saddened by the fact they thought would not get a season 2. They changed their tune when season 2 and 3 was confirmed, and honestly happy for them. But again, that confirms to me that the writing had failed mostly because if they were never going to get their chance, might as well go all out. And with how easy shows can get picked up and canceled, I can see they needed to try and cram it in.

Which also plays into Katara's rage - they did not know if there was going to be a chance for her to grow and get bending abilities or go through her arc as steady as the animated. Again, I am not saying losing it was good, but that we need consider that if they were not going to get another season, they had to progress faster than usual. (Side note, while I like this show, Amazon's Hazbin Hotel has the same problem. We are steam rolling through what could be slow progression and change but can't slow because of episode constriction and no time to sit and allow the show to progress because it is so easy to drop the show for the studios, might as well end it on a note that at least can feel like it was it's own story.)

Speaking of studios, that would be my next point as well: studio and producer control. While I know directors can have a say in it, we should not forget about the studio that is allowing them to make this show in the first place and what they are asking for. As I keep saying, we don't know about what their restrictions are or if they can have more than a certain amount of episodes, and maybe that is a mandate of Netflix or something else, we as the audience don't know. We don't know what happens on set or behind the filming outside of glimpses and interviews, so for all we know, there was some changes to the script or teleplay to make it seem like they needed to cut Katara's rage to make her more meek. Which if this was the whole show, fine, that is a choice but not one I will have to like. But when watching the 3rd and 4th episodes, seeing Katara being a teenage girl and angry for once and even more open about her emotions was possible. Hell, it was the only times she was allowed to snap. And guess what people: it was because of the writing this time. That feminine rage you all wanted - while faint - was there. So clearly Netflix is not solely at fault - they have many mistakes but writing is not one of them.

But it is when you look who wrote what and where and what they were going for that - to me - puts EVERYTHING into place!

Final point: the original creators being brought on.

This might seem weird because one would think having the creators on the original show should be not as bad. The creators of the show is watching to make sure that the show is just right and that the characters feel the same or at least some of the story beats feel similar enough to enjoy. Why would them being on the set cause issues with the pacing and writing?

To a casual fan, yeah that makes sense. But to those that have been in the fandom, have see what they do post cannon to ALL of the characters - especially how they treat Katara in Legend of Korra - then anyone watching might have realized that that should have been a warning sign. Especially with how they would have wanted to depict the characters. And this is also the reason I think Katara's rage is gone: I think they wanted to make her like the comics version of her being a meek and demure girl that while caring was not getting as angry or as passionate about things because that would go against what Bryke wanted Katara to be in the show.

As I mentioned before, Katara's rage or at least genuine anger was only in for about two episodes out of the 8. And if you take out the 5th and 6th where she has been basically damseled with Sokka in the spirit world, that leaves on 4 more episodes to allow her to have her anger. Typically, one can thing, "Okay we can sprinkle it here or there in the other two and it should world". But all it takes is to see who was writing the episodes that truly not only hinder the world building of the show and breaks the rules of show don't tell or crammed it in so blatantly it feels like cringe and got rid of Katara being the one to free Aang because of her anger - was Bryke! They were the ones that were the head writers of the first episode and the 8th episode. The ones that had the most cramming down your throats dialogue, the clunky explaining of Aang's character out of now where and even curving Katara's rage or ability to be angry or snarky like she was in the show. Because Bryke wrote them, and also teleplayed a few - this being like adding notes and what the camera needs to do and how to frame scenes along side the dialogue. Meaning that they had some hand in making Live Action Katara this way.

If you notice in the episodes they didn't write: Omashu and the Cave of Two lovers - they were the only ones where Katara could be a bit more snappy and a bit more annoyed and vocal toward at least Sokka and Jet - not a lot but it was there. And oh would you look at that, the episode that they did not write had HEAVY hints for a certain firebender and waterbender being hinted at and color coded the lovers more vividly. And also, Katara getting to be empathetic while also not over explaining - which many always ragged on her for - where she could be human for once. Those episodes were the ones that they did not write and the story was somewhat better (Not better but I will take it over what we got prior)

And again, casual viewers might not know why this is a bad thing or probably wondering why I am against Bryke. But all it takes is looking at what they did to animated Katara that you all try to say "Was perfect as she was before" without considering what they did to her after the curtain fell. For any fan that has been following the show, you will find that most fans of Katara - the animated one -did not like what they did to her in the comics that continued their story and Legend of Korra, where she was a husk of a shell of her former self. And how she was all about "What Aang would have done, and what Aang did and oh how I missed Aang, he would know what to do". And yet, if she even showed any anger or negative emotions, she was painted as the bad person - easily look up Katara in the comics with a google search and you can see her being pushed around and flattened almost all the time when she is showing negative emotions that are genuine and not the funny mad in the show. Especially in the show as seen through this post, it did not always paint her anger in a natural thing for her or reinforced her angry as more comedic than actually something to consider as important until someone else stepped in to help her see it *cough* Zuko *cough*.

So to all the people that are trying to come after the live action Katara as being "Not the same energy girl power character who was expressive about her anger" you all "loved from the start'', please consider who and what was behind the scenes to make her this way. Especially since the animated show had other writers besides Bryke that understood Katara better if not more. Bryke wanted her to be more demure even in the pilot, and damsel. And yet the other writers gave her an actual story. Byrke have shown time and time again they do not want and angry passionate water bender that wants to be more active in changing the wrongs in the world, they want her to be more meek and docile and not fight back to let others save her in the comics and after. The OG had other writers that gave her her arc and Mae Whitmen give her the sass that we all love.

Live action Katara is no different. She has been trying to come into her own - with limited time to tell a story, limited time to get her arcs in fearful of cancellation, and with different writers, she can work, but not with Bryke. Same goes for the other characters too, not just Katara, but it seems that everyone pokes at Katara more and it is getting frustrating because some of these people just can never be happy with Katara.

Hopefully with season 2 and 3, we can have more time to flesh out the characters and maybe even have more show don't tell moments and being able to explore their feelings more. But only time will tell.

Rant over, sorry for the rambling mess.

#katara #live action avatar the last air bender #katara defense squad #live action atla #not the best but not the worst #anti bryke #actors are trying #the comics sucked #Katara deserves better

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frooogscream · 6 months

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Ok, before the Good Omens Twitter panic also takes hold over here, let me just say, do we actually need to be scared even if it turns out Douglas Mackinnon and Neil hate each others guts now and there is no way he ever wants anything to do with the show again?-

1) Neil Gaiman has assured us on different occasions that he will definitely tell the story, in fact he has already an ending and is writing the script right now! We don’t know if there even will be a season 3 but we will definitely get told what happens to Aziraphale and Crowley, if not on screen then on paper.

2)Again, we don’t know if we get S3, why panic over the director if AmazonPrime could just screw us all up anyway? I know we don’t like to acknowledge it but with the strikes and the huge backlash/possible bans queer shows will experience in the next years in America (Amazon being an American company) there is a very real danger of it being canceled and we are probably better of preparing ourselves for that.

3) IF S3 gets filmed, the shows main focus, what makes it so good, what we are watching it for is the relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale, they are the only really important characters, all the humor and the emotion comes from their interactions. And both David Tennant and Michael Sheen are amazing actors, not just because they are adorable and we love them, but just objectively looking at their work catalog and the technicalities of their acting. And they have already proven in „staged“ that they don’t even need a director, their acting chemistry still works without any input from a third person. I absolutely trust these two to nail their roles and do an immaculate job, no matter who the director of a potential third season will be!

Stay calm, read a book, drink some hot chocolate and don’t forget to water your plants(and yourself)

#As an ofmd-girly I am under enough stress right now #good omens #gomens #good omens fandom #good omens aziraphale #good omens crowley #good omens stuff #neil gaiman #david tennant #michael sheen #go season 2 #go s2 #ineffable husbands #good omens season 3 #good omens 3 #go2 #ineffable divorce #good omens s2

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secretmellowblog · 2 years

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So much internet analysis of media feels like……. if people were trying to criticize Chick-Fil-A, but refused to talk about anything other than the quality of the sandwiches. All that mattered was whether the product was good. So people just debated endlessly over whether the products were Good or not, and no one discussed how Chick-Fil-A donated to conservative homophobic hate groups.

“Is this Disney product Good and does it have good gay representation?” Does Disney still donate to homophobic republican politicans!!!??? Do they still actively censor any queer content during production, cancelling gay projects and actively forcing their writers to cut gay content, to the point where every sad scrap that makes it onscreen is a miracle? Can you meaningfully make any statements about “gay rep at Disney” without bringing in that larger context?

It’s not a perfect analogy— because art shouldn’t be a product, and a movie is theoretically trying to Say something in a way that a sandwich is not. But Idk I feel like the reason we fixate so much on media analysis is because it is Fun. It is fun to talk about lord of the rings and the owl house and Steven universe. It is not fun to talk about the horror and exploitation that is baked into the “entertainment industry;” it’s not fun to research and analyze the systems that created the horrifically expensive movies you love.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because amazon is releasing the most expensive tv series ever made, a spin-off series based on lord of the rings. I have no interest in watching it despite my lifelong love of lotr but the thing is—

I have no doubt the series will be good! It will be fine. Lots of money has been thrown into it, and I have enough friends in the entertainment industry to know that on every massive corporate product there are hundreds of writers and artists sincerely trying their best to create good meaningful art. The Amazon series will be Fine. It will be good.

But my question is: Does it being good actually matter? Does it matter if a chick-Fil-a sandwich is good? Does it matter if this vile evil horrible media monopoly run by a villainous CEO that works its employees to death creates a good product?

I feel like I’m going crazy when most of the criticism of Amazon’s lotr is conservatives and people who act like conservatives ranting on about how “I can’t believe they gave Blorbo GenericElf a personality! That’s so out of character—he didn’t have a personality in the book! Tolkien, our lord and savior who we must worship as an authority, would be infuriated (because we still are bound to submit to this dead guy’s opinion apparently!) Everything would be better if everything stayed exactly as it was in the past, in the Sacred Original Canon. Any attempt to transform Tolkien’s work is morally reprehensible and a sign of the fall of the civilization.”

Sometimes I just want to shake those people and say “PEOPLE ARE DYING! people are dying in Amazon warehouses, and you’re treating your petty fandom opinion about blorbo genericelf’s personality as if it has this laughably enormous moral weight.”

I know that’s unkind, and that people can care about more than one thing; but I don’t know. I used to have this really naive idea that adaptations were a conversation with the original work, and every reinterpretation was a beautiful addition of meaning. I still believe that on some level. I think every author should be free to reinterpret stories however they want, should be able to argue with the original author and set their work on fire if they need to. there’s a lot about Tolkien’s work specifically that deserves to be disrespected, like his vicious racism and sexism. I LOVE transformative work—especially transformative work that meaningfully argues with the original author.

But like….you really can’t talk about these big media franchises without talking about the systems that created them.

Yes, people can sometimes create great beautiful sincere emotional art within these exploitative systems! I love the original lotr films and books. The new Amazon series is so expensive that it will be perfectly Fine.

But creating good art doesn’t change the fact that these giant media monopolies do so much real, constant, tangible harm. Warner Brothers caused massive harm to New Zealand while making the lotr/hobbit films, essentially strong arming the country’s government into changing their film industry laws to benefit massive foreign corporations. And Amazon is a vicious violent exploitative mega monopoly that is literally overworking its underpaid employees until it kills them.

It’s hard because I believe that good art can be very meaningful to people, and that media analysis can be important and valuable.

Its just that— not to swing a bat at a hornet’s nest— sometimes I wish people would stop hyperbolizing about how [petty fandom opinion] will cause lasting harm to the world, while not engaging with the things about the media property that are causing immediate tangible physical objective harm.

#idk if this is coherent but yee #;-;;;;#anyway thank you for reading! i know I haven’t been active here lately #i just wanted to throw this out there before anyone asked me about rings of power #I’ve just become so disillusioned by the entertainment industry and the active tangible harm these giant franchises cause #that I just . don’t #XD #like it’s probably good! it’s probably a good fine show #and lots of marvel movies are good!#and I found meaning in the original lotr trilogy #but I don’t know #i kinda just. am disgusted with the way these mega franchises work #and the way the entertainment industry works #it’s the ‘art school student with entertainment industry friends’ life lol #but yee #anyway I’ve been inactive here but I’m back to be sad about stuff again XD

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thelovelybitten · 4 months

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random loonatics unleashed hcs bc I like childhood comfort show binging

only elites watched loonatics unleashed—so for the ATOM SIZED community who still gaf abt this gem here’s some random hcs I thought of

ACE BUNNY

[+] confident, determined, loving

[-] stubborn, cynical, impulsive

since he’s like. the most heroic MF known to acmetropolis, overconfidence is his thing. sometimes it goes too far and people have to smack some sense into him (lexi & tech, most likely) and y’all thought duck was cocky… ace is cocky and smart vs duck is cocky and dumb.

i imagine he has some sort of cooling eye drops he puts in after battles or over usage of his laser vision.

may wear glasses if needed.

he defo has underlying anxiety about his leader position since he’s basically in charge of the universe and his teammates he considers his family. (he confides in lexi with this eventually)

on a similar note, since he feels the pressure of being the leader, he suppresses his emotions all the time until lexi finds out and they teach each other to heal :’)))))

as much as he and duck annoy the fuck out of each other, they complement each other in the sense that ace needs comedic relief and duck supplies it (bratty ass little brother things)

anime STANNNN. anything that’s got good lore—He and Tech love sword art online. they hook in rev and slam in the second season. he and slam like attack on titan FOR SURE.

duck gives ace social media tips (because ace loves the attention but doesn’t know SHIT ABT creating a following)

japanese culture fascinates him, so he implements traditions and holidays into the loonatics' activities.

stubborn as fuck, it’s his way or the highway. since zadavia has always put him in charge, it's hard for him not to boss people around when he's unable to help. (as seen in s1 ep6)

since in the show it’s hinted all the loonatics are in university, I have ace being the second oldest child. he’s a natural-born leader, but still can’t take certain things seriously. tech is a good influence on him.

LEXI BUNNY

[+] sweet, empathetic, fiesty

[-] emotional, hot-headed, judgemental

she wears noise-cancelling headphones all the time if not needed by others. the absolute peace and quiet she needs to stay sane, tbh

the amount of radio traffic and minds around her causes headaches and migraines—but also some paranoia and slight insanity since she can’t take all of these mind voices all at once. she receives medicine after years of putting it off/testing due to her super powered dna

^^ tech is the one who finds her crying and screaming and he takes care of her until she tells everyone else.

also to touch on that, tech creates wrist bands that lexi can put on. they are supposed to cancel any brain waves or mind reading for a certain amount of time (but not forever, as she is super powered and it’s still a wip for him). (she also needs her powers to protect planet blanc)

actually hates carrots of any sort (minus carrot cake, she would die w/o it) ace thinks she’s crazy.

“can you read this person’s mind” is her biggest gripe and she hates when anyone asks her to do so

due to her upbringing, she hates mean girls and anyone who isn’t a girls girl gets to have a not so nice convo with her.

she’s very social savvy and is always in the newest trends, she hates how self conscious she is but funnily enough she and duck relate to one another and do have shopping sprees and Amazon hauls for therapy 😭

she’d like tiktok but rarely post lol, and when she does her social media pops off

feminist. "oh girls can't be heroes" "girls shouldn't be doing a man's job" SHUT UR TRAP. she will prove u wrong in 1000 different ways.

most popular of the loonatics—she’s the only female.

her age hc I have is she’s third oldest. which kinda leans into my duck/lexi hcs but that’s in another post

TECH E COYOTE

[+] intelligent, punctual, organized

[-] uptight, perfectionist, egotistical

perfectionist syndrome we LOVE HER

he’s so father type (big brother to all of the loonatics, everyone relies on him imo) Ace is the leader, but Tech is the dad 🤪

since he and mallory (mastermind’s) huge falling out, he has a people pleasing complex. this is because he feels guilty about putting her in jail as she is his protégée but knowing what he did was for the best makes him uneasy. so not only does everything have to be perfect, he has a hard time saying no to prevent conflict.

that being said, when it comes to danger and safety he’s gonna put his foot down.

he absolutely loves tinkering with rev. the two of them share one braincell, though. call them thing one and thing two. they’re smart. but not together 😅

while tech likes…well…technology, I feel like he’d also like forensics too. And watching crime shows with Ace and Rev.

he also has a bit of an ego. mostly bc he’s the creator and manager of all the technology in blanc. (And the universe, maybe. at least blanc and acmetropolis.)

has some sort of side gig going on for sponsorships. i hc that he loves to help create new technology, but he'd also like to provide said ideas to companies, kingdoms, etc. usually has the loonatics branding on it.

when his powers upgraded, he had a bit of trouble controlling it to the point where their new HQ had electrical issues for a month. yay metal but also oopsies I can create electrical currents and it’s a lot

the idea of him being immortal due to his regeneration abilities scares him because his friends will eventually die off and he will remain on his own :( (if i had to think about this, so do u.)

very protective of his stuff, and his family. this is not debatable.

he tries to hide itttt but he loves kids. he likes to surprise them with things he makes and teaches them how to build objects (with lego, of course. ain't no way is he letting any cheeto-dusted fingers come in contact with his shit.)

he’s the oldest loonatic NO QUESTION.

REV RUNNER

[+] energetic, comedic, caring

[-] oblivious, childish, sporadic

he’s so baby boy. a child. I love him so.

adhd brain on TOP

fears rejection, but works on it with lexi helping him out

I think he’d also play league with lexi and ace.

he loves running around fast, obviously but he also likes to stop and enjoy views when he can. (Defo uses the wormholes to escape to sunny places.)

definitely has lists to keep himself organized (and slam, which he is blessed for)

likes mechanical machinery and modifications (hates detailing though, fuck that)

recites the entire bee movie script to tech to annoy him

relies on zadavia for advice frequently. she’s a mother to him and she gives him hugs :))))

knows the best spots in the universe for anything ever, (thanks internal gps)

may the lord bless him bc he loves his brother so so so much that he'd do anything for him. rip is always welcome at hq and they play games/invent shit together :)

would pull pranks on all of the loonatics and he’d get away with it (but duck sees right through him—helps him anyways) since it's shown in season 1, episode 6 that ace and rev like to watch sports/attend games, they'd love other ones that are hockey, basketball and football-oriented. (since this is the future and all, the sport they play in this episode is based on soccer anyway) duck is also part of this too.

the metabolism popped off this man can EAT. since he's already burning it off. He's unlike slam though—he eats at a regular speed due to conversation-making.

youngest loonatic.

SLAM TASMANIAN

[+] strong, resilient, comforting

[+] aggressive, uncontrolled, moody

has a hard time with expressing himself due to the language barrier b/w him and the civilians.

good news tho, rev and duck help him to learn english :DDD they get him to read a ton of things (rev with different books while duck just shows him magazines with him as the street model LMFAO, also trends and stuff.)

has an action figure collection that if touched, a tornado will destroy your room. (he had them before the meteor hit, as a coping mechanism from all the fighting he did)

obvi fave food is pizza, specifically meat lovers

gets into origami to control his mind. lexi loves doing this w him :)

tech and slam love to do weapon tests together bc slam is BEEFY and withstands more injury than people think.

ace and slam train together the most. it helps both of them with tiny/large targets.

desperately wants a cat, a kitten, something cat related… but ace says no all the time bc it serves “as a distraction” from their job (ace is delulu ignore him)

a chef. amazing in the kitchen. cooks all the food for the house. a WHOLESOME MAN. watches the food network LMAO

gives the best hugs.

VERY BROTHER BEAR VIBES, he'll tell someone straight up to NOT FUCK W HIS FAMILY. just DON'T.

third youngest loonatic but acts older

DANGER DUCK

[+] loyal, self-aware, amusing

[-] arrogant, overbearing, hypocritical

u know this man is one of the ✨g w o r l s ✨

he attends drag shows with rev and lexi (DID I STUTTER ??? I think not.)

he doesn’t give a FUCK this man will do what he wants, when he wants, for as long as he wants. (until ace or zadavia gives him shit, whoever comes first) attention-seeker, but rightfully so as he is very much overshadowed by all of his teammates, when in reality he is the strongest and most deadly loonatic. i mean think abt it. he has three powers. the most out of all the loonatics. ace has laser vision. lexi has telepathy. tech can manipulate metallic objects and regenerate. rev has super speed and is a human gps. slam can create storms/tornados. DUCK HAS THE POWER TO CREATE HOT LAVA ORBS (EGGS), MANIPULATE WATER, AND TELEPORT. u see the vision???

it also doesn't help when zadavia is always shitting on him for his character. in her defense, he is a superhero and should be a good influence and in a professional manner, when in his defense, he should at least be praised and acknowledged for the work he puts in...js.

TAKES HIS TRAINING SERIOUSLY EVEN IF HE USES IT AS A VIDEO GAME SIM— HE'S ON IT IN SECONDS.

he does get a bit depressed abt the whole overshadowing thing sometimes. but he's so cocky that he hypes himself up and forgets it ever happened.

HIS APPEARANCE IS EVERYTHING TO HIM, which is why he and lexi hang out a lot when lexi is in need of a break. THEY LOVE THE SALON.

he helps the men eventually with tinder profiles so they can get out there and find romance and shit (but not lexi, since she knows she can get whoever she wants) he's pretty successful at it too.

BOARD GAME CHAMPION. BACK-TO-BACK MAY I ADD. Slam hates it bc he almost clutches the win but duck suddenly has a trick up his sleeve then BAAM. winner winner pizza dinner. his favourite board game is monopoly. (for obvious reasons, mans' needs to be able to manage his money for future investments.)

if he could be on a version of america's next top model, he would.

might be a sarcastic asshole, but does deeply care about his family, and other beings for that matter ( I mean, s2 ep12 ANYONE ??) tweetums was his everything that WAS HIS SON.

trolls people on club penguin with rev, don't ask, I just know.

blogger typa beat. is the social media editor and influencer for the team.

second youngest, but acts like the youngest LMAO

aaaaand that's it for now, i will make separate hc posts for pairings (platonic and romantic) and obvs the loonatics in general, so stay tuned. :)

if u read this far u THE GOAT >:D

#faves: lu #loonatics unleashed #loonatics unleashed hcs #viv speaks #i love the loonatics and u will never hear the end of it nope not ever #i thought long and hard about these ok #i think i did a pretty good job !!!#but yeah i love my kids sm so take some brain mush #ace bunny #lexi bunny #slam tasmanian #tech e coyote #danger duck #rev runner #MORE SOON

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chipcheesesandwich · 8 months

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Heartstopper S2 finally gave us the queer revenge we were looking for, or maybe at least I have been looking for.

I've always tended to steer away from queer media these days, because all have been quite depressing. The couple breaks up, one of them dies (or maybe both!), the show gets cancelled after 1 season after promising us with a second (I'm looking at you Amazon and the execs who cut League of Their Own, pay your actors and writers!!!), etc... But what really makes me depressed, is the "forgiving queers" arc.

In almost every queer coming out type story arc in a show, set in the modern day, there is a bully. They will give the characters their first taste of slurs, shaming, and threats to harm them for being openly queer. Through the experiences from the bullying, the coming out character usually becomes tough (maybe after a few mental breakdowns here and there) and fights back the bully, or just ignores them and show that they can live a happy life, or they find out the bully is actually queer too and/or have a reason behind their actions (homophobic home environments and trying to please the people around them, which tends to be the case). And usually, when the queer character finds out about the bully being queer or has their reasoning of "acting" homophobic, they are forgiven. And all I can think watching this unfold, is that is just a load of straight guilt forgiveness smeared on the screen.

Because, tbh, why do we have to forgive them? Why do we have to be the "great learning lesson" for the people who do not have the decency to think of people's feelings? And don't get me wrong, I am not always about this. I have done a fair amount of forgiving in my time of coming out, educating people, being the first contact of this queer world, etc. But it should never be the one and only recommended way of dealing with hate, because those people still hurt us and scarred us for life. It is our life, it is our decision to forgive or not.

So when I saw Charlie, blocking away Harry and Ben's ask for forgiveness with grace, was so, satisfying. And such a great decision in the creatives/writers on this. It was almost like the reverse queer baiting we got from Our Flag Means Death and got slapped into the actual desired direction that no one could dare to wish. It was what I actually wanted to say to those people who asked me for forgiveness after making me think I am not worth living; fuck. off.

...

As I unravel this love I have for Charlie's queer revenge, I cannot stop thinking of the last moments we had with Ben. As Charlie and Nick walk away, leaving Ben completely alone, the beautiful rainbow colors of the queer art gallery just overflow towards him, just inches away. We see him hesitate to leave, but ends with him fully turning around and walking away in the opposite direction. And as viewers, you cannot help but hear your own heart shatter for him. We all know how he wants those inches to reach the rainbow, but it is just far too wide. It's the biggest leap all queer people have experienced. Charlie and Nick have, and they could be Ben's guide to help him cross this. But at the end, it is Ben's decision to make and how he gathers his courage. And all we can do, is watch.

#heartstopper netflix #heartstopper #heartstopper season 2 #heartstopper spoilers #heartstopper s2 #tv shows #nick and charlie #heartstopper ben #heartstopper charlie #lgbtq #queer #coming out #heartstopper nick #heartstopper harry

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mariacallous · 3 months

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Right then, while you fumble for your credit cards, I will talk about the rise of fakery: fake news, fake images, fake audio, fake politics.

Let me begin with someone I know. I admire Michela Wrong enormously. She does what journalists are meant to do: she afflicts the comfortable and comforts the afflicted.

Her beat was Africa, and Michela spent her career puncturing the West’s illusions about its rulers.

After Paul Kagame’s forces overthrew Rwanda’s genocidal Hutu regime in 1994, the world wanted to believe in a fairy story. The mass murder of Rwanda’s Tutsi population would be followed by peace, reconciliation and justice, it thought, as it threw praise and money at Kagame’s government.

Rwanda became the darling of the global aid industry. Under New Labour and the Tories, Kagame was feted.

Now our Conservative government declares that Rwanda is such a serene and safe country, Britain can dump asylum seekers there without the smallest concern for their safety or the faintest suspicion that corrupt officials will siphon off taxpayers’ money.

It was such a compelling story. Kagame and his idealistic group of young rebel fighters overthrow a genocidal regime ushering in an era of peace and stability. Under his leadership Rwanda became the West’s donor darling, hailed as Africa’s “Switzerland” or “Singapore”

The compelling story was also such balls. Michela exposed the lies, and has suffered a campaign of terrifying vilification as a result.

As AI and deep fake technology advance, not only journalists, politicians and celebrities, but potentially all of us can suffer equally ferocious attacks as calumny becomes ever easier to manufacture.

But first let me tell you what happened to Michela, then I will move on to the wider implications.

Her Do Not Disturb, and what a sweet title that was for a book about comfortable myths, was published in 2021.

She looked at the regime’s pursuit of opposition leaders, human rights activists and journalists. She showed how its critics were beaten and cowed into silence. And how, in the most high-profile cases, they “disappeared,” never to be seen again.

Michela has had her own punishment beating

Writing in this morning’s Observer she described how the regime hired a British PR company to coordinate the online hate attacks. She expected abuse after the book was published but….

What followed still took my breath away. A tide of vilification, expressed in petition form, on specially created websites, in pseudonymous Amazon reviews, and spread by literally hundreds of anonymous social media accounts. Almost all ignored the topic of my book – Kagame’s extraterritorial assassination campaign – while repeating certain tropes. I’d always taken it as read I would be accused of racism. What was extraordinary, though, for a journalist who reported on the 1994 genocide for Reuters and the BBC, was to be accused of “genocide denial”. But there was method in this malevolence. Genocide denial is now an accusation hurled at pretty much any government critic – including members of Kagame’s minority Tutsis who lost loved ones during the genocide. But it’s a crime in Rwanda, carrying a potential 10-year sentence, so I could in theory be arrested if I boarded a plane touching down in Kigali. When a Brussels restaurant owner cancelled my event after a tsunami of tweets and emails, I wondered if I even needed to worry about being arrested in Belgium. Rwandan government supporters have pushed for the EU’s laws on Holocaust denial to embrace supposed “negationists” like me.

Michela now wakes screaming in the night. Her nightmares convince her that Rwandan agents have broken into her flat.

“In the morning, I sometimes find chairs, duvets and pillows stuffed against the front door: my anxiety has bubbled up in my sleep. A therapist would probably mutter ‘PTSD’.”

As everyone who has been on the receiving end of hate campaigns knows, they work. Years of accusations that Michaela is a “racist” and “genocide denier” meant that…

“Anyone thinking of inviting me to speak at a conference or write an article will, on Googling my name, be presented with a list of accusations only the most stout-hearted – or those who know Rwanda – will casually brush away.”

The experience of Michela Wrong will become commonplace. Here without me needing to go out of my way to find them is a selection of stories from the past few days

Millions of people came across fake sexually explicit AI-generated images of Taylor Swift on social media. The White House Press Secretary told ABC News the Biden administration was "alarmed" by what happened to Swift online and that Congress "should take legislative action."

As it turns out, there is no federal law in the U.S. that would prevent or deter someone from creating and sharing non-consensual deepfake images. But there is a profitable commercial industry that thrives on creating and sharing digitally manufactured sexual content.

Do not think that fakery is confined to the famous

Yesterday the Times told the story of Helen Mort. In 2020 she found a fake porn film with images of her face taken from social media. Like Micheala she was horrified. She was even more horrified when she discovered that “an estimated 95 per cent of deepfakes online are non-consensual porn featuring women”.

As in the US, there is no single criminal offence in England and Wales that governs the taking, making and sharing of intimate images without consent.

On Thursday digital forensic investigators in Germany uncovered a vast, pro-Russia disinformation campaign against the Berlin government. It used tens of thousands of fake accounts on the social media platform X to attack Germany’s support for Ukraine. Russia generated more than 1m German-language posts from an estimated 50,000 fake accounts. They were dispatched at a rate of two every second.

On Friday Scientific American reported on how artificial intelligence was creating fake tapes of high school principals giving racist speeches. It also automatically generated calls, apparently from Joe Biden, urging citizens not to vote.

“Society,” the journal concluded, “may be woefully unprepared to deal with the resulting inevitable wave of digital fraud and the looming implication that any media item could be fraudulent.”

I don't know where that may in Scientific American’s conclusion came from. Society clearly is woefully unprepared,

Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California described how the malicious actors held all the cards. It was incredibly easy to perpetrate a fraud, he explained.

“I record a person and clone their voice. And then I record myself saying what I want them to say with all the intonation—bad words and all—and it converts my voice into their voice. It’s all the same underlying generative AI technology.”

When it came to uncovering fraud, however…

“Detection is harder because it’s subtle; it’s complicated; the bar is always moving higher. I can count on one hand the number of labs in the world that can do this in a reliable way. That’s disconcerting.”

The falsely accused teachers will find it very hard to clear their name. While those who want to believe malicious fakery will feel justified in doing so.

As well as the innocent being falsely accused, the guilty will be able to say that they are innocent victims and AI generated the evidence against them.

As the technology for fakery explodes, and as states like Rwanda that no one believed capable of running propaganda operations and character assassination campaigns try to distort debate, the question arises what do we do.

I disagree with many of my fellow free-speech defenders who think that little or nothing should be done. We cannot go on with the Clinton era dispensation, which gave legal immunities to tech companies, without the rule of law falling into disrepute.

Everyone caught up in fake news attacks is baffled by the shortage of legal remedies against the AI companies that are profiting from their misery.

But clearly the law can only go so far. A deep fake outfit based in Northern Cyprus or some other bad land is effectively beyond the rule of law.

It strikes me that there are two possible futures.

The first isn’t so bad. People just shrug when dirt is thrown. They assume the evidence poisonous ideologues and movements use against their hate objects is fake. Or they follow the “ye without sin cast the first stone” principle. Or, and you can see this happening now, they say that when so many are attacked or are capable of being attacked, once shocking accusations lose their sting.

The second is, I am afraid, as likely.

Every election is swamped with fake news. The defeated side refuses to accept that they lost in a free-and-fair contest. High levels of trust, on which contented and prosperous societies depend, collapse. As more of us become like Michela Wrong and fear the power of the new technologies to destroy us, the more suspicious our world becomes.

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