[turtle]

Oh now that was pure joy to watch!

[PB PM]

What blast.

Youtube must be changing the algorithm as of late, getting all kinds of strange stuff under recommendations these days.

[kscherer]

This is fast becoming one of my favorite YouTube channels.

The Fire Department Chronicles.

Good stuff.

[psmith2.0]

I've found myself recently - the past 2-3 days - watching a bunch of "sovereign citizen" videos of various Internet lawyers/legal scholars pulling that shit in court or during a roadside traffic stop.

Mental patients, all.

I love when a judge has ZERO patience for their ramblings and statement-making.

"I'm not a person, I'm an individual. And I'm acting as a representative for the person in question, your honor."

"Well, you can tell all three that they're under arrest for contempt of court. Bailiff...".



I love seeing troublemaking wingnuts, of all stripes/leanings, hauled off in cuffs.

News flash...despite whatever horseshit you've heard from Alex Jones, you are subject to the same laws as yours truly and everyone else. Knock it off with all your posturing and thinking you're going to dazzle a cop or judge with your brilliant legal/Constitutional analysis and will somehow be allowed to skate on whatever idiotic offense you committed to get dragged into court in the first place.

Always stupid, minor stuff (riding a bike at night without a light, illegal dumping, etc.), and then they literally want to turn the arraignment proceeding into a Federal case.

"How do you plead to the charges, Mr. Allen?"

"I can't answer that, your honor. You hold no jurisdiction over me because...".

Oh shit, here we go...this should be good.

Just do a search for "Sovereign Citizens owned..." to get started, and prepare to laugh.

Until a few days ago, I didn't know such a thing was a thing. I was just searching for clips of people acting stupid in court (yelling/swearing at judges, trying to escape, wigging out upon sentencing, etc.). People being idiots in real life amuses/entertains me more than any sitcom or Netflix standup special ever has. Or could.

[kscherer]

Yeah, that "Sovereign Citizen" thing is hilarious, and I've seen the video you quoted. Priceless.

[turtle]

Knowing the next film with Ghostbusters in the name is about to come out I just found this and had to share it.

Originally Posted by Device Orchestra Ghostbusters theme played by 14 electronic devices including toothbrushes, card machines, typewriters, a steam iron, a body trimmer, an epilator, and a nail polishing device. One of the devices has disguised itself as a ghost. For this video, I also made a 3d printed stand for my credit card machines. I designed the stand together with my patrons on Discord. Enjoy this awesome music piece from the Ghostbusters movie and have a happy Halloween!

[kscherer]

Driving skilz!

[PB PM]

Love that guy, his stuff on stupid things that happen in firefighter shows/movies is golden.

[psmith2.0]

Good grief! I don't even understand how someone makes all those decisions to proceed after that initial contact.

There's no other explanation...some people just wake up stupid, and it never improves as the day progresses. I'm surprised some people remember to eat.

Think of all the things that idiot is now on the hook for: the U-Haul damage, the damage to the pipes/plumbing, he certainly did some damage to the concrete in 2-3 places, did all that water from the sprinklers cause further problems/issues (other cars, etc.), the safety barrier jostling, etc. And after all his nonsense/jockeying, he finally proceeds past that main sprinkler pipe a whole 5-6 feet, only to run into a wall that he had to have seen/known was there the entire time.

$10 says that, when telling the story to his friends, it was "this stupid garage had all their signs and sprinklers too low! I'm thinking about suing for the damage they did to the truck!"

Yes, because U-Haul is coming after your butt because they've watched the footage!

"Wait...we actually rented a truck to this dipwad?"

[psmith2.0]

I assume SNL sketches qualify?

Putting it here anyway because it made me chuckle. As a listener to several podcasts, the random, shoehorned SquareSpace “sponsor read” made me cackle. “Yep, that’s about how they do it.”

Father/Son Podcast Microphone

[kieran]

Related to that, this one from SNL about the Fisher Price Podcast Set is gold.

I love when John Mulaney hosts. His sketches are hilarious. He's done some of the biggest ones of the last few years. I really liked the Subway Churro one this past week and the Bodega Bathroom one is good too.

[psmith2.0]

I suppose the thread title should be updated to include/reflect TikTok, as that now seems to be the primary source of everyone's "learning"/making it through life...

Or we can just create a new, dedicated thread where we relentlessly mock/bash the platform? Either way.

TikToker shares surprising spice hack: 'Feeling like a professional chef'



In related news, if you hold your breath while you're underwater you won't drown! Awesome life-hack, yo!

First off, maybe if people put their phones down for four minutes, they'd learn/figure out obvious shit like this themselves? Secondly, what it is about TikTok types constantly posting stuff as though they discovered/invented it, and/or are the first people to ever do it (up to, and including, breast-feeding and properly using the sun visor in your car).

"You, like, pull it down approximately 90 degrees and...boom, the sun is, like, all blocked! Everyone thinks it's just a place to put your mail and keys, but, yo...it actually does so much more!".

And then the frightening (and soul-crushing) comments from their born-last-week(?) "followers":

"OMFG, that's AMAZING!"

"Dude, so much this!"

"Shook."

"My life will never be the same...I always wondered what that thing was!"

The followers/commenters are always worse than the original thing being show, if you can believe that.



Thanks, Joshh with a "g"...now go eat a Hot Pocket with a straw or whatever your latest claim to fame/life hack is.

[drewprops]

I can't stop watching these deep fakes of Gandalf

Part 1
https://youtube.com/shorts/XuehiS2orTc

Part 2
https://youtube.com/shorts/MKyTxIsZJcY


...

[PB PM]

[Brad]

https://youtu.be/1ZYhXgol8mw



I made this. I was inspired by other legendary remixes like Picard singing Let it Snow/Make it So.

I disappeared into my computer for much of the past weekend and the last several evenings to make this, and of course I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but you gotta find "good enough" and call a potentially unending creative project "done" some time right? I gave myself a "10 days before Christmas" deadline, and here I am. Like, share, subscribe, hit that bell, or something.

If you saw me post this yesterday and then disappear, whoops! I edited and mixed the audio using my desktop speakers, which are pretty good, but once I uploaded it to YouTube and tried using headphones, I found several unpleasant audio issues that I had to go and fix. This version should be much better for both headphones and speakers.

[709]

So great, Brad. Bravo!

I'm not as versed in the Picard, erm, 'verse, as others so I didn't get the ending probably as much, but the whole thing is utterly delightful. Fantastic.

[drewprops]

PLEASE tell me how the process for this played out? How did you find all the clips? How did you capture? What did you cut it in? These always seem like a massive amount of work and care.


...

[Brad]

Originally Posted by 709 So great, Brad. Bravo! I'm not as versed in the Picard, erm, 'verse, as others so I didn't get the ending probably as much, but the whole thing is utterly delightful. Fantastic.

Thank you!

The ending scene is from the episode "Darmok" which has in recent years/decades become kind of a meme of its own. Captain Picard is trapped on a planet with the captain of an alien ship in a first-contact situation, but the universal translator (the magical macguffin that makes everyone appear to speak English) can't make sense of the alien's language because it's made up entirely of metaphors and references to famous past events from his culture. It's a surprisingly forward-thinking and relevant story considering how kids these days can have a whole conversations online just by referencing different memes back and forth.

It's like if the alien is a gen-z-er saying:

"Bernie Sanders once again asking for your support."
"Boromir at the Council of Elrond."
"Will Smith slapping Chris Rock."
"Nervous monkey puppet looking left and right."

And Picard is like an out-of-touch boomer who has no idea what the gen-z-er is talking about, and he's like "who the hell is Boromir?"

Meanwhile, there's a monster on the prowl, and they have to figure out how to work together to stay alive. It's a great episode, and a fan-favorite of many.

Originally Posted by drewprops PLEASE tell me how the process for this played out? How did you find all the clips? How did you capture? What did you cut it in? These always seem like a massive amount of work and care.

I rely on a lot of technology!

I have all the episode transcripts saved in a folder, and I use terminal commands to search for specific words and phrases. For example, finding a line containing "everywhere" spoken by Picard:

❯ grep -ir "^PICARD:" . | grep -i "everywhere"./277.htm:PICARD: They're everywhere. They're laughing at me. Why are they laughing? <br>./269.htm:PICARD: I've seen this symbol everywhere too, but much less prominently displayed. It's always in the background, smaller than the others. <br>

According to this output, he only says "everywhere" twice in the entire show! These transcript file names are episode number +100 (for reasons I won't get into). So, "277.htm" is episode 177 which is "All Good Things" which is where he's an old man saying "They're everywhere."

Elsewhere, I have all of the TNG episodes ripped from Blu-rays as individual files per episode. Yes. 589 GB of my critical, ZFS-replicated storage is dedicated just to TNG episodes. So, I open the script to find roughly when in the episode it's said, and I open the video and scrub to find the exact dialog. If it doesn't sound like I can use it, I start over with the next file or search for something else. Once I have the exact timestamp, I extract a few seconds before and after from the full file into a smaller file. Since Adobe Premier can't open Matroska (.mkv) files, I have to extract and convert to MP4. Otherwise, I'd probably just import the whole episodes into my Premiere project.

❯ ffmpeg -ss 00:13:08 -t 00:00:08 -i '/Volumes/media/shows/Star Trek The Next Generation (1987)/Season 7/S07E17.mkv' -vcodec libx264 -acodec aac -ac 2 's07e17 picard masks everywhere.mp4'

I import that short MP4 into Premiere, and then the hard part starts: editing together video and audio from different episodes in completely different settings to sound less like a totally incomprehensible cacophony.

Every phrase or word got hand-tweaked with different high-pass filters, low-pass filters, and equalizer settings and lots of keyframes on the gain to adjust the volume. They're still far from perfect, I'm not an audio engineer proper and I can only commit so much time to this, but they're still way better than just cutting and pasting directly from the source material. I also added very small (0.05-0.10 seconds) cross-fades to every word or phrase to prevent popping when one audio wave sharply slams into another. I also added background engine or bridge sounds to some parts where I had to completely mute the source audio to try to smooth over the flow.

Sometimes it was too visually overstimulating to jump-cut different videos on individual words. So, in some cases, I fudged it. If the actor was mouthing words close enough in the previous or next clip, I'd let one video clip play over two audio clips. Sometimes I had to time-stretch the video playback, but Premiere mangles the audio really badly when it adjusts the pitch to compensate for timing. There are a couple spots I wish I could have done more tweaks like this, but there's only so much you can fake without even more invasive editing techniques.

Along the way, I manually timed and transcribed all the words into a subtitles track in Premiere, and I formatted them with the right font and color to match the classic LCARS displays. The UI for typing text of any kind, be it captions or titles, suuuucks in Premiere. I hate it. Alas, it's necessary.

A zoomed-out view of the whole sequence in Premiere looks like this:



A closer look at one spot I never quite got perfect to my satisfaction:



That's it. Easy, right?

It look almost all of my weekend, and several hours each evening this week to finish it up.

[drewprops]

I *adore* editing video, so I track all of this. THANK YOU for the details!

I just shared this with some folks. Your view count might increase a bit!

...

[Brad]

Minecraft in 20 Seconds Explained in 20 Minutes

Some mad lad wrote a TAS to beat Minecraft in 20 seconds. 20. Seconds. All the way from initial spawn to the nether, the end, and the credits. In 20 seconds.

I suspect Minecraft still holds a special place in the hearts of a few people here. So, I figured you'd be as amazed as I was watching this explanation.

[turtle]

Wow, that is wild. I would have never thought to do something like that. That is pretty cool!

[PB PM]

It’s the perfect lock for the bots that come here…

https://youtu.be/aOlsy6_Oy_o