Notices by Andrew (Television Executive) (ajroach42@retro.social), page 3

(I'm real grateful to @djsundog for his design work, printer wrangling, and moral support. I absolutely would have thrown my hands in the air and given up several times over without him egging me on.)

Things in the US are bad right now. I haven't talked about it much recently, and I won't talk about it much for a while.

Not here anyway.

If you want to engage with politics, I am writing a *lot* of political stuff, but it's mostly going up on New Ellijay Television.

Healthcare, for example: https://vod.newellijay.tv/videos/watch/6dd820e1-0b52-427b-bcbc-e40690073715

But there's a lot more coming down the slopes. I don't write all of it, but I write a lot of it.

Right now I'm talking politics elsewhere.

Here, I'm focused on revolutionary joy.

So the toy stuff is going well, and we're thinking about the future.

Let's talk about the present for a second, and then we'll talk about the future.

I make things! I help other people make things. I let other people help me make things.

The act of making things is, by itself, radical.

But I'm trying to take it step further.

I'm centering my values and I'm focusing on joy, on things that bring me joy, on things that create joy for others.

I'm focusing on replacing the things in my life, in the lives of other people, that enrich billionaires or promote harmful ideologies or wreck the planet with things that don't.

This is why I make toys! It's why I run New Ellijay Television.

When I talk about #Skypirates I frequently mention the film The Pirates of 1920 (released in 1910, available now from New Ellijay Television.)

It's great!

It's also a sequel of sorts, to the 1909 film The Skyship Destroyer. I didn't have a good copy of that one until today! But now I do, so you can too: https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/uNf5YWCLtWgeb42sejjoxZ

There's a third #skypirate film in this proto- #steampunk trilogy called The Arial Anarchists, but it has been lost for around 100 years.

It's based on a book, though. The book is called Hartmann, the Anarchist; Or, The Doom of the Great City by E. Douglas Fawcett

That's on PG and Librevox. I haven't read it. I might not ever read it. Who knows?

But if you wanted to watch a 115 year old science fiction film about sky pirates... well, go watch The Pirates of 1920, it's a much better movie than The Airship Destroyer.

But if you wanted to watch a Second 115 year old film about #skypirates... Go watch The Aerial Submarine, it's a much better film than The Airship Destroyer.

But if you wanted to watch a THIRD 115 year old film about #airship pirates... well, The Airship Destroyer is now available.

All of those and a few others to boot are on #NETV and available for free from a few other sources.

They're fun!

If you're interested in dipping your toes in the water of early skypirate scifi movies, you could do worse (well, no. You really couldn't. Pretty much everything else is lost, so these are both the best and the worst that exists!)

Really, though, what you want to see is Filibus. 1915, cross dressing lesbian (bisexual?) sky pirate heist flick. It's great. I should finish scoring it.

I put together a playlist of our steampunk, sky pirate, air adventure, and turn of the century science fiction films on New Ellijay Television.

https://vod.newellijay.tv/w/p/nQmSoz1U7RUUVqSLQdeGn2

I thought I had another one for today, but it turned out to be irredeemable racist trash.

It started strong. Good print, couple takes a trip in an airship.

But then it turned in to irredeemable racist trash.

Shame.

Here's another early airship movie: https://vod.newellijay.tv/videos/watch/74878253-b45b-4d55-8c69-039836d73762

1905, Melies, Le Dirigeable Fantastique (1905)

We're wrestling power away from the billionaire class, in real time.

This is bigger than some technical standard.

This is cultural, political, and economic.

We represent an existential threat to the business model of some of the most wealthy corporations on the planet, and I'll be damned if I'm going to let anyone take that away from us without fighting against it with everything I have.

We are standing on the precipice of a transformative shift in the way we, as a society, relate to one another through the internet.

We are moving away from a Broadcast and Toward a conversation.

This is mutual aid, this is anticapitalism, this is collaborative ideation.

We are living revolutionary values, right here, right now, on a silly little social media network.

And I will fight to my last breathe any God Damn corporation that tries to Monetize that.

This is the future, and you're a part of it now. Be a good steward of the future.

Hey, remember a few weeks ago when dansup went on a weird rant, said some really vile things, and mocked everyone who tried to talk him down?

Pixelfed and his TikTok clone are probably not worth that kind of heat.

@ifixcoinops Stick?

I used to have a sizable collection of fan films, fan edits, etc.

It wasn't well organized, and a lot of it was very low resolution.

A lot of this stuff was produced at a low resolution to begin with, and a bunch of it was poorly tagged and barely distributed.

I still have a lot of it, but there's a bunch of stuff that I had 10-15 years ago that's missing now.

Is there a good place to find this kind of thing today?

We've been stuck at home since friday morning. I'm very grateful we went to the grocery story thursday night.

We were able to leave friday morning for a few minutes, and we got some coffee, and we made it home afterwards, but we haven't been able to leave since then.

It has gotten warm enough for the snow to turn to slush, and then cold enough for it to all turn to ice.

So everything is white and our gravel road is impassable, and a bunch of roads around are closed.

I've seen a dozen videos of people in the nearby resort community trying to leave and just sliding off the road.

Over and over again. Just driving down a narrow slanted road, hitting ice, and then sliding down a small cliff.

Okay, so that's what and why.

Let's talk about How.

So I'm looking at the Radxa Rock 2f as the hardware It's $10+ shipping.

If you want an EMMC it's allegedly $20, but I haven't seen the EMMC version for sale.

So it's $10 + shipping + an SD card + a case + a power supply.

At scale, we're probably looking at $20/unit.

I have sketches for the case, which we'll 3D print. I did a very rough version that's approximately the right size, but doesn't have any of the holes in the right places. I threw it in to our slicer and approximated how many I could fit on the bed, and how much plastic they would use, and how long it would take and ...

Our printer is very large. I could get way too many cases on the bed at one time. They'd take about an hour to print each. With a bunch of them on the bed at once, it's not quite a linear addition of time as you add more cases, but I could do 15 or so in about 10 hours, in about 2KG of plastic.

At the prices we're paying right now, that's like 12 cents of plastic, unless I've got the math way wrong.

Anyway, the hardware is not the hard part here.

The hard part is the software.

And I've gone down a million different rabbit holes, and I've written some software myself, and I keep coming back to a few simple facts:

1) I don't like using, supporting, or configuring Kodi.

2) Literally nothing other than Kodi, including what I've written myself, is even half as useful for what I want to do as Kodi.

3) Every time I try to use Kodi for this I get very angry.

4) I don't know if I can launch games from Kodi. It seems like I should be able to, but I don't know how and I haven't bothered to learn.