from Roscoe's Quick Notes

Steelers vs Saints

From Paris, France.

Listening now early Sunday morning to the Pittsburgh Steelers Audio Network announcers broadcasting the Pittsburgh Steelers vs the New Orleans Saints NFL Game played this morning in Paris, France; NFL+ giving us the option of hearing home, away, Westwood One, etc. game announcers.

Will this be my game of choice today? Maybe. Possibly. We'll just have to see how this day develops.

And the adventure continues.

 
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from the casual critic

#fiction #books #SF

Warning: Some spoilers

Death comes for us all. But if you happen to be an extra in a movie or an NPC (non-player character) in a videogame, death can come rather gratuitously. Your role, after all, is to serve the plot and potentially make a hero(ine) look good. You are expendable by definition. You are such a trope that you have your own term: red shirt, in homage to the frequently fatally phasered security personnel in Star Trek. Red Shirts are those characters where you just know, as soon as they walk into view, that they will not last until the credits roll.

What ought a group of workers to do when they are systematically maltreated? Organise, of course! That is the starting point for John Scalzi’s Redshirts. Set on the Universal Union (UU) Intrepid, a thinly veiled analogue of the USS Enterprise from Star Trek, it regales the story of four wary ensigns who must uncover why so many people on the UU Intrepid die on away missions under mysterious, avoidable and often gruesome circumstances, and how they might escape the same fate.

Redshirts was my first return to John Scalzi after The Interdependency trilogy, which I found intriguing in setup but underwhelming in execution. Redshirts worked much better for me. It is more tightly written. Scalzi’s style and pace work better at the scale of a small company of friends on a single spaceship than for the grand space opera of a collapsing civilisation. And Scalzi exploits the creative premise much more adroitly than in The Interdependency, tying everything together in a satisfying and touching ending.

What made the conclusion the more pleasing is that about midway through the novel, I started to worry that Scalzi wasn’t going to be able to stick the landing. The first half of Redshirts has our four ensigns figuring out what is going on on the UU Intrepid and, more importantly, how they avoid getting killed by whatever ‘it’ is. The challenge of Redshirt’s conceit is that the reader knows what is going on from the prologue and is thus well ahead of its heroes. Finding out how they unravel the mystery is entertaining, but it is not clear how they might get themselves out of this predicament in a satisfying way.

This is where Redshirt’s first major twist comes in, and I’m not going to spoil that here. Suffice to say that our putative disposable heroes manage to use the power of tropes in their favour to get themselves out of harms’ way. More or less.

And the ‘more or less’ is important here. Not being a redshirt does not guarantee a long and happy ever after. In the long run we’re all dead, and many have perished in circumstances that were more tragic, calamitous or avoidable than those of the sacrificial redshirt. This is where Scalzi pulls a second, more philosophical twist. The complaint of the redshirt is not death itself, but a death that is pointless, stupid, and above all bereft of agency. The demand of the redshirt is not immortality, but a life worth living and a death worth dying. In a way not dissimilar to Castlevania, the latter half of Redshirts is in part a meditation on what it means to act in the world, to have agency, to make choices, and to grow, and the consequences of us either not using that potential or it being taken away from us.

In some way, redshirts are the necessary corollary of Ada Palmer’s heroic protagonist: for the single hero(ine) to hold all the agency in the universe, they must deny it to everyone else. Redistributing agency across a larger group of characters requires a different mode of writing. At a minimum, something like the ensemble cast we see in Redshirts itself, where solving the mystery is the effort of a group of reasonably ordinary people, rather than the predestined fate of the Chosen One. Beyond that are more composite approaches such as The Ten Percent Thief, that abandon the traditional form of the novel altogether.

Redshirts does for single-episode disposable companions what Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! did for the nameless battalions of disposable guards and goons. It does so with similar panache, if not the same level of genius or wit. There are also acknowledged nods to Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series about the lives of fictional characters after they’ve exited stage/screen/page left. Like these inspirations, it is a rewarding combination of witty writing, entertaining plot and cultural commentary, with some philosophical reflection thrown in to boot. It won’t change your life, but it will make you stop, smile and remember for a moment that we don’t all have to be heroes to make a change in the world.

Notes & Suggestions

  • The ‘dead wife’ trope also makes an appearance in Redshirts, and on a sympathetic reading also finds itself subverted. Explicitly positioned as a plot demand, the dead wife in Redshirts is not the motive force for a hero, but instead a reason for withdrawal and fear, with Scalzi compassionately incorporating it in the book’s conclusion. I wrote a bit more about the dead wife trope in my review of Castlevania.
  • Ada Palmer’s essay on the damage caused by a monoculture of heroic tales is well worth reading and can still be read in Uncanny Magazine. I engaged with it in my review of the Mass Effect series, particularly Mass Effect 3, as well as The Ten Percent Thief.
  • How to exert our agency is of course the question of our times, or of life really. It is a question we must each answer for ourselves, but if you are looking for some inspiration on what is to be done, Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century is not a bad starting point.
 
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from The Kintners Music

“Just be yourself.”

One of the many things I’ve discovered about being yourself in the open is a lot of folks don’t like that. People tell you to “be yourself” all the damn time as a musician. But it seems like when you take their advice, they vanish. It’s because it’s true, they do.

You do not know what you think you know.

Advice online is stupid. Unless you’re intimately familiar with someone and their problem, you don’t have anything for them. Yet, folks offer up dumb shit like “just be yourself” on the daily. It’s plain irresponsible.

Many musicians have careers to lose by being themselves, or they could be putting themselves in danger coming out in the open right now. Some may not be good at what they themselves like, but good at what others like. There’s tons of reasons to not be yourself. Good ones! But we aren’t thinking about those reasons when we give advice. We should be. Also, whether or not a person is “themselves” is completely irrelevant to the caliber of music they put out. So why say it? That’s the issue, right? Why do we say this dumb shit?

Is this for me or you?

Giving advice is for the person giving it, typically. They’d like to talk. They can’t be cool and start their own site or write their own songs, write their own stories, so they hound musicians and other folks online, giving them a piece of their mind. Advice is one of the main reasons I quit social media. A daily thing. Folks think they know who you are, then they yap about what you should be doing. No thanks. I got enough people in my head already. 

Projection, (again).

Projection is nearly always involved. Not only do folks think they know the problem, they think they know you. Double dumb shit. They just have good imaginations. 

When I was a woman online..

I know folks project online on social media badly. Before I showed my face online, I just was “Kelly.” Many folks thought I was a woman. I mean, I guess that’s why I got dick pics and called sassy by quasi-“normal” dudes. They projected the wrong sex on me just because of my name and proceeded to treat me like garbage. Another reason I quit social media: no one knows me! That’s kinda’ what I was after. Never happened. Even old “friends” said things like, “you’d be cooler as an artist were it not for your mental health issues.” You can’t possibly know who I am and say that shit without expecting me to take offense to it.

Sorry, guys. But it’s mostly men.

Men, in general, suck. They sucked when I was a kid, they suck as an adult. I don’t trust them. I’ve met more bad ones than good ones. We’re just awful. Lots of reasons. Sure there’s good guys, but I promise we aren’t the norm. Most dudes are bad guys.🤷. I know, they often mistake me for one of them, or I’m the subject of their ire. Advice is generally a men problem. We have to stroke our ego, among other things. I hate it.

How about simple acknowledgement?

If you’re a man giving advice on social media, try not doing that. Try saying “sounds rough,” in your own words. Gauge if folks are asking for that acknowledgment or advice.. you might be surprised. 

You stepped in advice!

Whether you want to converse, feel important, or show off, unwanted advice is like stepping in online dog shit. It really is. Like “dammit, really!?” Many times advice givers give advice before knowing the problem. It’s because they are not there and like hearing themselves talk. I’d do a website.

Do a site!

Sure I like hearing myself talk, but at least this way, with my site, I’m not bothering folks on their posts. Many advice-givers don’t realize they’re really into performing. I made my own platform for that, you’re welcomed to visit. I like my blog. Feel free to email and talk, thekintnersmusic@gmail.com.

Fear is the mind killer.

I think the reason folks do what they do online a lot of times is they’re afraid and alone. No one wants to be irrelevant. It happens. Doesn’t mean you’re bad. Doesn’t mean you’re empty. There’s historically bad shit happening at the moment. It’s going to be rough. It’s going to feel lonely at times when you’re the only one you know with truths. It’s grounds for conflict! They know this. Bullies have been counting on you to feel alone for centuries. Now they have data scientists.

Just say no to giving unwanted advice to strangers online. Thanks.

Kelly Kintner

 
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from Signal Glade

🔵 05 The Archive Begins with Loss Signal Glade™ A reflection on memory, dismissal, and why archives are never still.

What if I were an agent, a secret agent, left on my own; dismissed by my country – a tale as old as time? And what if I had just learned that my purpose, my service, was no longer needed or wanted? My identity and passion, built over decades maybe, abandoned to the wind.

I might be upset, lost; maybe try to crawl back to a former self. Maybe I’d wallow. Maybe I’d move on. I am sure I’d try to rationalize it and make sense of it myself.

Now, if I saw it coming, I might try to stop it. Maybe I was a target, or maybe there were backroom deals against me. No normal person would agree to let others destroy them if they had the means and will to confront it. Right?

In the end, if I were unsuccessful, how would I piece my identity back together? Would I search for my truth, my passion, my purpose going forward? Would I say “hell to it all”? Would I aim to protect others from the same fate? Would I dismiss the insolence and hold my ground and stature despite the assault? Would I expose and shame those who dismissed me? Would I take up arms with others in my same plight?

Be it may if I had no hope, maybe I’d chronicle my decline. Pity me, the fallen soul. An archive journal affecting myself and the world at large. A voice, a cry for help. A window to show others who dare glance that they are not alone.

Social media, the social world, is a composite of our time. Each post interacts with another and alters what follows. Memory, evolution, participation. Where does it begin? Where does it end? Where do we fit in? The mystery we all search for.

An archive, often imagined as a place where history rests, behaves more like a living system. Accumulating, reacting, adapting, reinforcing, contradicting and reshaping. It is not only something to read. It is something to enter. An archive as a pattern that continues to evolve with new memories, interpretations and experiences. The question becomes: who will add to the story?

History repeats itself. An archive illustrates the pattern. It allows us to learn from the past and bring the best out of ourselves. And your story, no matter how hidden, is important and worth sharing as memory and experience shaped by perspective.

What if I really was just a cog in a wheel, my importance and purpose neither grand nor remembered in any way? How might I react? My identity shattered. Would I revolt? Try to take over the world? Wallow in my existence? Or add to the Archive and make my memory known?

I am a cog in a wheel. I am what is brushed by in the wind. I choose instead to follow the pattern, to become part of the memory. A cog in a wheel becomes a cog with purpose if it binds a memory and lets it continue on.

Signal Glade begins with memory, fracture, and the choice to enter the Archive. I invite you to share in the memory. Maybe we will find a single memory, a single truth, that binds us all.

The Archive opens in fragments. Week by week, the pattern begins to answer.

-signalglade.org

 
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from Rippple's Blog

Stay entertained thanks to our Weekly Tracker giving you next week's Anticipated Movies & Shows, Most Watched & Returning Favorites, and Shows Changes & Popular Trailers.

Anticipated Movies

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Returing Favorites

Most Watched Movies this Week

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Hi, I’m Kevin 👋. Product Manager at Trakt and creator of Rippple. If you’d like to support what I'm building, you can download Rippple for Trakt, explore the open source project, or go Trakt VIP.

 
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from The Essayist's Notebook

This note follows a discussion about why I find it difficult to identify concepts such as style without a deep dive into structure; why I am so engaged with the concept of fidelity; and why I see myself as differing from many contemporary essayists who appear to write from a position in which the self stands separate from the world.

I am. I begin with am-ness. I am a being through time. My first experience is neither of philosophy nor abstraction, but of being. Soon after comes the recognition that this being exists under conditions. Hunger, shelter, affection, language, family, landscape, history, scarcity and opportunity all shape the form that being takes.

I am therefore not separate from the world. I am one of its products.

The task of inquiry is not to stand outside the world and describe it, but to dig where I stand and gradually extend perception outward. What I discover are not isolated things but relations. The world reveals itself as relation upon relation upon relation.

Perhaps this is why the essay matters to me. It allows me to explore those relations de bonne foi; beginning from the fact of my own being and moving outward into wider circles of understanding.

I am left with a notion on which to ponder: Am-ness may be the ground from which fidelity arises. One must first be before one can be de bonne foi.

 
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from The Essayist's Notebook

The greatest temptation facing the essayist is not direct dishonesty but vanity. A beautiful sentence can become more attractive than the perception from which it arose. When that happens, fidelity to experience is quietly replaced by fidelity to appearance.

The myth of Cassiopeia offers a useful metaphor. Cassiopeia boasts of her beauty. It is her daughter, Andromeda, who suffers the consequences. So it can be with writing. The beautiful sentence may be Cassiopeia. The thought may be Andromeda. The sentence boasts. The thought suffers.

The writer becomes enamoured of a phrase, an image, a cadence, a turn of language. The sentence draws attention to itself. It shines. It asks to be admired. Meanwhile the perception from which it arose is left chained to the rocks. The question for the essayist is therefore not merely, “Is this well written?” but “Is this faithful?” Beauty is not the enemy of the essay. Vanity is. A beautiful sentence that remains faithful to experience serves the thought. A beautiful sentence that seeks admiration for its own sake abandons it.

Perhaps this is one of the disciplines of essaying: to remain willing, when necessary, to sacrifice the better sentence in order to preserve the truer one. For the essay is not a performance of intelligence, but an attempt to encounter experience de bonne foi, (in good faith).

The task is not to make the thought beautiful. The task is to ensure that Andromeda does not suffer for Cassiopeia's vanity.

 
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from The Essayist's Notebook

This note grows out of two earlier observations, and an essay I am currently crafting. The first concerns the kinetic energy of the essay: the sense that thought is not a static object but something that emerges through movement. The second arises from Montaigne's declaration that he writes de bonne foi; not simply in good faith, but from a position of fidelity to his own experience. The essay is titled A Fragment of Clarity. These may be the same question viewed from different directions.

A thought is rarely born complete. It emerges through movement.

As expressed in an earlier note, the musical octave provides a useful analogy. No single note contains an octave. The octave emerges only in the relation between two notes. The notes are recognisably the same and unmistakably different. Meaning arises not from either note alone, but from the interval between them.

Thought often behaves in the same way. An idea seldom arrives fully formed. It emerges through movement between perceptions, between formulations, between one understanding and the next. The insight lies not at either end of the journey, but in the relation that connects them.

This is why I have become interested in what I call cognitive choreography. Thought is not simply a collection of ideas arranged on a page. It is a sequence of movements, turns, hesitations, reversals, and recognitions. The meaning resides not only in what is thought, but in the movement through which the thought becomes possible. The essay preserves something of that movement.

But movement alone is not enough. A dance without resistance is merely motion. A thought without resistance is merely assertion. Here the notebook becomes important. Writing with pen and paper slows the process sufficiently for the thought to encounter itself. A sentence appears on the page and immediately becomes available for inspection. The question that follows is rarely intellectual. It is not primarily:

“Can I defend this?”

Nor:

“Can I prove this?”

Nor even:

“Is this factually correct?”

Instead there is a quieter question:

“Do I believe this?”

Or perhaps more precisely:

“In my heart of hearts, does this feel true?”

This is not a test of certainty. It is a test of fidelity.

The French essayer means to try, attempt, or test. The essay is therefore not simply an act of expression. It is an act of examination. A thought is placed upon the page precisely so that it may be tested.

What interests me increasingly is that this testing occurs not only between thought and subject, but between thought and self. A sentence acquires force because it survives repeated encounters with the person who wrote it.

The kinetic energy of the essay may therefore arise from more than movement between ideas. It may arise from movement between thought and conscience, thought and experience, thought and self. Every revision asks two questions simultaneously:

What do I mean?

And:

Am I persuaded by what I mean?

The second question is the more difficult.

It cannot be answered by logic alone.

It requires an encounter with oneself.

This may also explain why Montaigne's phrase de bonne foi continues to trouble me. The essay is not founded on certainty. It is founded on fidelity. Not fidelity to doctrine, nor ideology, nor even conclusion, but fidelity to experience as honestly perceived. Perhaps it is fidelity to self. I do not know. But without such fidelity, cognitive choreography becomes intellectual performance. Without movement, fidelity becomes mere sincerity. The essay requires both.

Perhaps this is the connection I have been searching for. The essay preserves the movement of thought, but that movement takes place under a particular discipline: a willingness to test every formulation against one's own deepest apprehension of truth. Not truth as certainty. Not truth as authority. But truth as that which remains believable after rhetoric, vanity, performance, and wishful thinking have been stripped away.

The essay, then, is not a search for what can be said. It is a search for what can still be believed after it has been said. And perhaps the kinetic energy of the essay is nothing other than the trace left behind by that search.

rvw.ie t-line signature panel David Marshall Montory

 
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from The Essayist's Notebook

A thought is rarely born complete. It emerges through movement. The octave may offer a useful analogy. A single note cannot contain an octave. The octave emerges only when one note is heard in relation to another. They are at once identical and different. The ear recognises a continuity between them while simultaneously perceiving a change. The interval itself becomes the source of meaning.

Thought often behaves in the same way. An idea is rarely discovered at a single point. It emerges through movement between perceptions, between formulations, between one understanding and the next. The insight is not located at either end of the journey, but in the relation that connects them.

We often speak as though ideas were objects: things to be possessed, defended, or exchanged. But in experience a thought is more like a dance. It turns, hesitates, returns upon itself, discovers unexpected relations, and only gradually reveals what it is becoming.

The essay belongs to this movement.

Its purpose is not merely to present conclusions but to preserve the kinetic energy of thinking itself. The reader does not simply encounter what was thought. The reader encounters how the thought moved.

This is why sequence matters. A single step in a dance has little meaning by itself. Its significance lies in its relation to the steps that precede and follow it. In the same way, an insight emerges from the choreography of thought rather than from any isolated proposition.

Handwriting interests me for the same reason. Before the ink reaches the paper, thought remains alive and unsettled. Even as the sentence is written it continues to move. Something of that motion remains visible in the notebook. Crossings-out, hesitations, revisions, and changes of direction become part of the record. The essay is not the fossil of a thought. It is the trace of its motion.

Writing with pen and paper slows the process sufficiently for the thought to encounter itself. A sentence is written and immediately becomes available for inspection. The question is not simply whether it is logically coherent, nor whether it can be defended, but whether it feels true. In the privacy of the notebook, before publication and before performance, one asks a quieter question: Do I believe this? Not intellectually, but in my heart of hearts.

This is why the essay remains an act of testing. The French essayer means to try, to attempt, to test. The thought is not placed on the page because it is certain. It is placed there in order that it may be examined. Each sentence becomes a small experiment in meaning. Some survive the test. Others do not. Every revision asks two questions simultaneously. What do I mean? And am I persuaded by what I mean? The second question is the more difficult. It cannot be answered by logic alone. It requires an encounter with oneself. Perhaps, the essay is not a search for what can be said. It is a search for what can still be believed after it has been said.

And perhaps too, that is where the kinetic energy comes from. The energy is not simply movement between thoughts. It is movement between thought and conscience, thought and experience, thought and self. A sentence acquires force because it has survived repeated encounters with the person who wrote it.

rvw.ie t-line signature panel David Marshall Montory

 
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from Things Left Unsaid

This is my last day off. Casting a ballot for the mayoral election on my way home tomorrow. Get home, eat, shower, and then going to see a therapist for the first time in my life. It is all rather stressful and exhausting to think about right now.

I'm about four decades late for therapy. I'm not going into it with an attitude like that though. Not really. Just thinking that I likely could have benefited from it at any point in my life over the last forty years. Same as these pills that I have been taking for just over a week. They say it can take up to four weeks to feel what they are going to do. I'm impatient. Kind of annoyed. Not expecting any kind of miracle.

What attitude am I going into this with? And what am I expecting, if not a miracle? No attitude at all, and zero expectations? I don't know. If I knew what therapy was going to help me with I wouldn't have to go to it. Why am I taking these pills? To help me cope. For change. Altering my brain chemistry with pills, and seeking assistance with my thought processes. All to help me deal with life. Life is shit, and I'm in it up to my neck.

If I were to put my bad attitude into words I would say that I need to go for therapy and take pills so I can tolerate the job that is making me need to go for therapy and take pills. Stop. Rewind. The job gives me benefits to pay for the therapy and pills. Their way of maintaining this malfunctioning machine that I am to them. If it can't be fixed they will just throw me in the garbage and get a new one. That is a terrible attitude to have.

This is supposed to be self care. A thing that has nothing, or very little, to do with my stupid fucking job.

 
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from G A N Z E E R . T O D A Y

From the introduction by Sim Kern:

Speculative fiction started pulling its punches in the 2010s. Stories were scrubbed clean of any grit. Authors sanded down sharp edges, and the safest bet was to write low-stakes, low-conflict, “cozy” fiction—a label that came to define a booming sub-genre.

Don’t get me wrong—these aesthetics stemmed from legitimate critiques of genre fiction that had come before. Western scifi, fantasy, and horror stories of decades prior often did contain white supremacist, sexist, etc. elements, and so conversations about avoiding harmful tropes were long overdue. The culture of interrogating authors’ identities and questioning whether they were “allowed” to write about people unlike them, came from the desire to make room for marginalized voices in a publishing industry that was (and remains) dominated by white people. And the demand for trigger warnings and cozy options in genre fiction was an understandable reaction to the extreme, graphic violence—especially, the gratuitous sexual violence—that dominated the fiction of some of the most successful speculative authors of the decade prior: Frank Miller, Cormac McCarthy, and George R.R. Martin.

But something had clearly gone wrong when these legitimate concerns became strict commandments, used to crush dissent, flatten literature, and destroy the burgeoning careers of young, marginalized authors they were supposed to help. In his book Elite Capture: How the Powerful took over Identity Politics (And Everything Else), philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò calls the weaponization of identity politics “deference politics,” which he defines as, “an etiquette that asks people to pass attention, resources, and initiative to those perceived as more marginalized than themselves.” Táíwò argues that deference politics winds up harming marginalized people—by tokenizing them, reducing their value to the sum of their traumas and oppressions, and by directing “what little attentional power we can control at symbolic sites of power rather than at the root political issues that explain why everything is so fucked up.”

When well-meaning people fall for deference politics, it’s easy for elites to position themselves as the most marginalized person in the room, grab the mic, and direct liberatory energy towards symbolic struggles, while those same elites materially rob, poison, enslave, and kill us. Back in the 2010s, the Twitter literary community was a small legion of well-meaning activists, and we could’ve been doing any number of things with our time—organizing to feed and house people, boycott evil corporations, or seize political power, to name a few ideas. Instead, we each spent hundreds of hours online, focusing our collective ire, not on the pedophilic oligarchs, war profiteers, and oil-and-gas corporations dooming our planet to mass extinction, but on debut twenty-two-year-old authors who’d written space adventures and dragon stories for our amusement.

Ganzeer was evidently aware of these forces, because in 2016, as he inked the first pages of The Solar Grid, he offered one of the most incisive critiques of deference politics I’ve seen in fiction.

It's a big one, coming in at 3147 words, and it is awesome. It can be read in full in the pages of THE SOLAR GRID hardback, now available for preorder.

#tsg

 
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from An Open Letter

Lots of pain, throat hurts so much to do anything. Afraid to swallow. Mom today talked for first time in years, and refused to apologize and said to let things go. Fuck off.

 
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from Kevin Turby

Il y a des jours où j’ai la sensation de ne rien comprendre. D’être comme dans une sorte de brouillard qui m’empêche de voir clairement.

Parfois, ce brouillard persiste.

C’est peut-être juste qu’il me manque des feux anti-brouillard.

Une autre image : les choses ne s’imbriquent pas. Vous savez, comme dans un puzzle où chaque pièce a sa place. Et bien là, ce serait un puzzle de plusieurs puzzles, du coup normal que les pièces ne vont pas ensemble.

Je m’arrête là. Vous avez compris l’image.

 
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from Joyrex

After the recent round of “your TV is spying on you” news, I thought I’d attempt to get off using my Sony (running Android TV) and switch to something that I had a bit more control of. Unfortunately, the TV remote control interface is super smooth and is hard to lose. I recently got the final piece of the setup I made and am now pretty damn happy with it. Here’s the steps I took to jump to something more custom, and how it went.

tl;dr: Fedora KDE + Plasma Bigscreen + Jellyfin MPV Shim + G20S Pro

Previous State

Hardware/OSs

I have a couple options for watching stuff on my TV, with some things working better than others for what I stream on or watch. I either use my TV’s android interface, or my XBox Series X. Both are made for management/use via a remote control, which I love. For the XBox Series X I have 8BitDo Media Remote for Xbox and while it’s a bit battery hungry, it’s great for my purposes.

I have HDMI CEC set up so using the Xbox remote lets me turn on the TV and sound bar automatically.

The XBox is plenty powerful, but MS is likely logging everything for AI purposes, plus it seems like XBox is going through a change and will start to suck, assuming it survives. Also certain apps don’t exist/won’t work with the XBox.

The Sony Android TV is a fairly weak CPU and has less codec support, but works for streaming most stuff. The app selection is better, but I started seeing more ads and stuff creep into the interface, so it’s getting enshittified. The “apps-only” mode helps it, but I’m sure it’s still phoning home to Sony often.

Nothing I have supports Dolby Vision, the bane of my existence.

Apps/Streaming Sites

I have various streaming applications I use on one/both of the systems:

  • Jellyfin – I also have Plex. I only use Plex rarely if Jellyfin is having problems playing a specific video on my systems. That’s becoming much less of an issue these days, thankfully. I should do a blog post about Jellyfin and the community sometime.
  • Shudder – They’ve abandoned the app on Xbox (but left a broken version in the ms store 🙄)
  • MyAEW – No XBox app. Hell, no Android app. Only Android TV.
  • Dropout
  • Grouse House – No XBox app.
  • Nebula – No XBox app.

Wants

My goals are to get something that is powerful enough to direct play most everything I throw at it, while still being able to be controlled with a remote as much as possible. The solution should make using the above services as easy as possible.

Current State

I have a setup I am pretty happy with, mostly using stuff I was fortunate enough to already have.

Hardware/OSs

Over a year ago I needed a physical machine I could use as a desktop for a few things where a VM and/or my Mac weren't sufficient. I ended up with a GMKtec AMD Ryzen 7 5825U w/ 32GB DDR4. It works pretty well, but the fans can be noisy when it really gets going. All the same, I decided to move it to the lounge room to see how it goes as a TV box. It's useful because it has 2 USB-A ports on the front. It still does some of the stuff I originally bought it for (tertiary backups to IDrive), but for actual desktop use, it's done. The fans generally aren't noticeable if something is on (like music or tv playing or something), but it could just be my old man ears.

The system was already running Fedora 44 KDE, so I just stuck with that. Thankfully KDE revived its Plasma Bigscreen project last year. I'm a huge fan of the KDE ecosystem (KDE Connect is a godsend), so trying Bigscreen seemed like the obvious choice. It's packaged in the fedora repos so there was no additional work needed there, however I did have to switch my login manager to Plasma Login so automatic session login could work. It was previously SDDM, possibly due to this box being updated through a few Fedora versions. I think Plasma Login is now default.

I created a tv user to keep the tv stuff separate. I have the system auto-login as that user and it has KDE Bigscreen as its session manager. This got set through the KDE Settings area.

Apps

jellyfin-mpv-shim

Jellyfin Desktop, the primary desktop software for Jellyfin, just went through a shift, where the primary dev for it went totally into slop mode and was just causing chaos in the project, so he left. His project continues as Jellium, one of the million sloppified third party clients that are out there.

Thankfully, another Jellyfin dev was busy in the background upgrading her project, jellyfin-mpv-shim, to have a full UI. She uses AI for it but seems to be more sensible about its use. She released jellyfin-mpv-shim v3 (with full UI) soon after the Jellyfin Desktop dev left, and it has been the go-to standard for Jellyfin on a desktop since. It's also able to work with “standard” keyboard shortcuts and is customisable because it's basically mpv. I installed it from flathub and it goes fine. There are a few notes:

  • When setting up the server connection, you should qualify the full https:// in the server URL, otherwise it silently defaults to http and fails without reason (unless you watch the logs in the console).
  • Once you have it set up, make sure you go to the settings for playback and enable hardware decoding. In my experience, not doing this led to the fans being extremely loud as the CPU went hard.

For all the other services I use, their websites are the go-to. I'm using Zen, but I imagine any browser would work. Plasma Bigscreen has a built-in webview that lets you open up websites directly, but I haven't messed with it much. It may work more nicely with a keyboard (remote) control.

Remote Control

This is primarily why I wrote this post. I hadn't delved into remotes for the PC for about 15 years, and thought it'd be useful to write what I've gathered.

HDMI CEC

HDMI CEC doesn't work with Linux because of shithead corporations. When I was discussing this in the #jellyfin-offtopic matrix channel with others, someone suggested a device that hooks into your HDMI cable and intercepts CEC codes and translates them to keyboard presses, but I didn't opt for that. $50 seems like a lot for that.

USB receiver

There seems to be two types of communication using remotes:

  • Serial/LIRC: I hated this method back in the day. USB serial receiver. Remote sends infrared signals to the receiver. You map them to a keypress (or many keypresses).
  • 2.4 Ghz: These come with a little USB-A dongle that the remote talks to. These appear as a keyboard (and possibly a mouse) to the computer, so there's no key-remapping needed. But that also means you're limited in what keyboard presses you get, and you can't set up a string of them from a single button press.

I went the 2.4Ghz route. Trying various different ones from Ali Express, I found these two worked really well with minimal/no work needing to be done in jellyfin-mpv-shim.:

  • YY30: I actually had to buy this twice because one of my dogs chewed the first one (to be fair the buttons smell weirdly chemically good). The first time I had to map the back button to back in mpv using the name “GO_BACK” in jellyfin-mpv-shim’s config, but then with the second remote that change wasn't necessary (I changed it back while I was waiting for the second remote to arrive). Whatever the case, this works well with jellyfin-mpv-shim. The problem is it didn't have enough buttons for me. There was no “next video” button, you have to navigate. I also didn't like that there wasn't a dedicated “pause” button, but that's just because that's what I'm used to hitting on previous remotes.
  • G20S PRO BT: This is the one I landed on. It's great. More buttons, including media navigation. It also has a built in gyroscopic mouse that you can turn on/off. Using it to browse websites works OK, but the preciseness isn't great. Still usable.

The front USB-A ports on the machine come in handy, as they give the remote a direct shot to the receiver.

KDE Connect

I love KDE Connect. It is super handy for passing clipboards and files around. Thankfully, it also has a keyboard/mouse mode that lets me control another desktop/phone/whatever. This can fill in as a more precise mouse, or give me the ability to enter a lot of text via a real keyboard.

Issues / Conclusion

Honestly, no real issues. Using the browser is cumbersome, but manageable. I don't have a good way to stop/start the server, but I want it up for backup reasons, so I haven't dug into it. I can probably shut it down via the plasma-bigscreen interface, but no idea how to turn it back on besides WoL or flipping the power outlet and setting the BIOS to always turn the machine on after power restoration.

The TV has been disconnected from the Internet and I had some fun learning how to set up something new. Fun project.

 
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