#patrollingbeyondfusion — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #patrollingbeyondfusion, aggregated by home.social.
-
Throwback Thursdays Were Made for the Starlost…and no, I didn’t say “Throwaway Thursdays.”
What can you say about the Starlost? It’s infamously awful. It was the brain child of Sci Fi legend Harlan Ellison, but it was abandoned by its creator before the first episode was completed.
Is that Harlan Ellison’s notorious intolerance of any changes to his work? Or perhaps there was something to his ire towards what the show was to become?
From 2010 to 2014 we meticulously — if less than reverently — analyzed each and every episode of science fiction’s most infamnous train wreck.
Each episode has been digitally restored and you can check them out and subscribe here or at Apple Podcasts.
#Announcements #PatrollingBeyondFusion #TheStarlost -
It’s time once again to update the podcast calendar and look forward to what’s scheduled for the first six months of 2025.
Coming into the year, we’re rotating through Star Maidens, Space: Above and Beyond, and Real Humans, Series 1.
We’ll finish our coverage of Space: Above and Beyond in January, and in the ongoing spirit of 1990s military nonsense in space, we’re (finally) starting our complete coverage of 1993’s Space Rangers.
Our coverage of Real Humans’ first series concludes in March, and Simon and Eugene will cover the animated reconstruction of the Doctor Who serial, The Savages, which is due to be released in March. They’ll then move on to the fourth and final season of Bugs.
All good things must end, so it shall be with our coverage of Star Maidens, which is also scheduled to end in March, at which point, John and Eugene will dive into the much-anticipated, and much-requested coverage of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!
But always remember, no matter how meticulously planed our schedule is, the BBC and Disney+ are expected to screw it all up one of these days by announcing the release date of the next series of Doctor Who.
-
On Monday, July 22, 2024, Simon and I will record Fusion Patrol’s 700th episode. We will examine the classic 1951 sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” The episode is scheduled to drop in Early September.
That we’ve produced 700 episodes boggles my mind.
Sometimes, I look at the podcast indexes out there, and I see the littered remains of so many podcasts that started to look at many of the series we’ve already covered and they failed to complete their run for just a single series.
Perhaps they were thinking they were going to make money at it and gave up when they realized it was just the opposite.
It’s these times that I think that my combination of bloody-minded stubbornness and borderline OCD has its place in the world.
Listeners, we don’t get too many opportunities for interactivity, but if you have any comments about The Day the Earth Stood Still or even about the fact that we’re hitting 700 episodes, get them to us before Monday, and they might make the podcast.
-
This week, we begin our coverage of the 2012 Swedish sci-fi series, Äkta människor, more commonly known in the English-speaking world as “Real Humans.”
I’ve waxed on in earlier posts how much we enjoyed watching and talking about Real Humans, and I hope you find it interesting, too.
The series was produced in 2012 by SVT, the Swedish national television channel. It’s set an in alternate 2012 timeline where human-like robots, called “hubots,” are commonplace in homes, businesses, and (perhaps slightly less overtly) bedrooms.
It tackles themes of exploitation, prejudice, free will, friendship, sexual attraction, and the ubiquity of the USB-A port.
The program has two series, each ten episodes long. Our coverage of Series One begins this Saturday, July 20th, 2024.
How you can watch the show for yourself will depend on your country and the tech you have available. Swedish Blu-rays are available in places like Amazon but may not play in your player. If you can get around that, I’m not aware of any releases in English or even with English subtitles. Fan-produced subtitle files are available at opensubtitles.com.
Real Humans may also be available on streaming services in your country. Good luck!
-
Get your comments in for this week’s recordings. Monday, 15-Jan-2024: The X-Files Die Hand Die Verletzt, and Wednesday, 17-Jan-2024: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Unchained Woman.
Next week: Children of the Dog Star, Swamp Light and Alien Summons, and Real Humans, Sly Leo.
I’ve completed my acoustic barrier just in time to record our 666th episode.
Of course, it’s not designed to block out all sound; it’s really about suppressing echoes and dampening outside sounds. Hopefully, it will help. It certainly sounds very different when talking inside the barrier.
See if you can tell a difference. The first episode recorded inside the barrier will drop on Saturday, the 20th of January. It’s our look at The X-Files episode Die Hand, Die Verletzt.
Of course, I’m telling you this on January 14th, less than seven days from release, which means our patrons on Patreon will not get the episode a whole week before the main release. Regrettably, scheduling issues prevented Simon and me from recording before tomorrow.
Which leads me to this week’s apology. You might recall that I had a fiasco during December with the quotas for the releases in December. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work around that, and it did prevent me from posting January’s episodes until the January rollover on my quota. It’s still not quite straightened out.
This really threw off my “routine” of posting, and that is a disaster waiting to happen.
Let me tell you a story about my days in Information Technology. One of the many things I did in my career was manage a data center that had, among other things, IBM AS/400s (later IBM iSeries) midrange computers. These computers are multiuser systems rather like very small mainframes for those unfamiliar. They have lots of redundancy and a very high uptime. These systems were typically used for mission-critical business applications, often in finance, insurance, inventory, etc.
As such, any reputable company will have maintenance agreements on their computers, and IBM, to their credit, will treat you very well when you need service.
When I started working with AS/400s, I worked for a company that wasn’t willing to spend on maintenance contracts, and so I learned and did the maintenance myself. I daresay that, by the end of that, I was qualified to diagnose, field strip, fix, and reassemble most problems with an AS/400.
Then I went to work for an organization that paid for maintenance contracts, and so I would sit on the sidelines when IBM would do maintenance and repairs. We had our usual technician, and I had a lot of respect for him. We’d talk about the systems while he’d work and it was clear to me that (duh) he knew more about the systems than I did.
He knew what he was doing backward and forward. Where I had performed dozens of repairs on just a couple of systems, he’d done hundreds, if not thousands, on many different systems.
…and yet, he used to do something that drove me nuts.
No matter how simple the procedure, he cracked open the manual with a checklist of steps and performed every one every time. Many of those steps were unnecessary depending on the particular circumstances, and he knew that, but he did them and checked them off every single time.
One day, I finally asked him about it, and he fully and freely admitted that he was taking unnecessary steps, but he said, “By doing so, I never make a mistake on somebody else’s mission-critical system by forgetting something or making a false assumption. The customer pays for the job to be done right. Problems can still happen, but I’ve done my due diligence.”
It made sense. It wasn’t his system, and he was being very conscientious, but it didn’t necessarily sway me for “my own” systems.
Then, my organization got cheap. They put the maintenance contract out to bid and another company took over. They too were competent, and the guy who did our work was knowledgeable, and I had no qualms that he was capable of the work. He didn’t use the checklist, though.
You can see where this is going, right?
He fluffed one, and the hard drive RAID array was broken, wiping our system and all the data. We had the proper backups and restored and returned to full operations, but it took 36-48 hours to do the full restores. He was chagrined, and I slept on a cot in the data center for two nights.
After that, I also very much adopted the habit of using checklists, and when following printed instructions, I treat them as checklists, too.
…and when I don’t do that is when I screw up.
I have a checklist for posting podcasts, and I was not following it while I was scrambling with the quota problem. As such, I screwed up the posts for our Patreon subscribers. I noticed the problem when I was posting this past week’s bonus Babylon 5 episode, Exogenesis. I unclogged the jam and dropped two additional episodes that should have been released earlier.
Inexcusable, I’m afraid, and I hate making that mistake in the same week when I have to delay this week’s Patreon post until Monday, but there it is. I’ll see if I can’t come up with a bonus something just for patrons as an apology.
With our recordings this week, we will hopefully return to our routine schedule of two weekly sessions.
https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/01/14/another-sunday-another-mea-culpa/
#BehindTheScenes #BuckRogersInThe25thCentury #ChildrenOfTheDogStar #PatrollingBeyondFusion #RealHumans #TheXFiles