But what can I, one coward, do alone? you might ask.

It's true. As a solitary person, your fecklessness will make little impact. But if you join together with the most craven senators and representatives in the Capitol, the impact will be immense: The corruption, the disregard for the rule of law, the shipping of residents to foreign gulags, the attacks on judges, the censorship and chilling of speech, the punishment of any and all dissent -- it can be made that much worse if you just find it in yourself to clutch your head in your hands, wet the bed, and cower in the hope of being spared from the White House's wrath.

Update: There's also a video.

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I was today years old when I learned that Patreon offers no mechanism to download all of your own posts from your "creator" account. Because fuck you that's why.

Confirmed with "support" [sic] who sent me a response with the level of overly-verbose obsequiousness that clearly flagged it as having been "AI"-generated.

So if you have ever posted something there, and didn't save a local copy first, maybe don't do that.

There are some Chrome extensions that allege to do bulk downloads, but the ones I have seen appear to be scams.

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Alistair Kitchen:

They were waiting for me when I got off the plane. Officer Martinez intercepted me before I entered primary processing and took me immediately into an interrogation room in the back, where he took my phone and demanded my passcode. When I refused, I was told I would be immediately sent back home if I did not comply. I should have taken that deal and opted for the quick deportation. But in that moment, dazed from my fourteen-hour flight, I believed C.B.P. would let me into the U.S. once they realized they were dealing with a middling writer from regional Australia. So I complied. [...]

Martinez came out and said that I needed to unlock the Hidden folder in my photo album. I told him it would be better for him if I did not. He insisted. I felt I had no choice. I did have a choice, of course: the choice of noncompliance and deportation. But by then my bravery had left me. I was afraid of this man and of the power that he represented. So instead I unlocked the folder and watched as he scrolled through all of my most personal content in front of me. We looked at a photo of my penis together. [...]

Martinez and another officer took me in the back, pushed me against the wall and patted me down. Martinez made sure that I carried no weaponry between my penis and my scrotum. They took the shoelaces out of my shoes and the string out of my elastic pants, presumably so that I would not be able to hang myself. This struck me as overly cautious, but as I entered the detention room I changed my mind.

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(As a Point Break scholar, I agree with this.)

For all its strengths, "Point Break" is sorely lacking in one of the most important departments of any high-octane surfer dude action movie: scenes featuring Red Hot Chili Peppers' frontman Anthony Kiedis getting beat up. Sure, it had some, arguably more than most movies of the era, and that's what makes "Point Break" stand the test of time. [...]

These are our top scenes that, while exciting, were ultimately missed opportunities at normalizing Keidis-violence in film:

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I'm starting to think that the Space Nazi is just not very good at this whole "space ship" thing.

"SpaceX Starship S36 Explodes at Starbase, Texas".

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I think maybe I have gotten the DNA Lounge webcast behaving better, but not entirely, and I could use some help understanding what's going wrong.

I think one of the things that did help was increasing the segment size from 2s to 6s, which flies in the face of 100% of the advice online.

I have also gotten my hls-continuity thing working again, which is the HLS proxy that I wrote with the intent that the stream should never stop sending video even when the source disconnects. I had to basically rewrite it to work with mediamtx instead of nginx, and I don't really understand what about it meant that it had been working fine with nginx, but was working decidedly not-fine with mediamtx. But it seems to mostly be working now?

A few things about it are a little wonky, and if someone who understands this crap could help me diagnose this, that would be greatly appreciated:

1. When it goes into colorbars mode, the player often does a little "loading" animation for a few seconds before showing the first colorbars segment. I absolutely do not understand why this is, because the m3u8 file already has the proper duration and number of segments. I believe all segments start with a keyframe.

2. When coming out of colorbars mode and going back to real video, sometimes the video frame is frozen. Audio continue playing. Video comes back "after a while" or if you bonk the play-head slider.

3. When I was serving the raw, non-proxied stream from mediamtx, the player's play-head behaved as I expected: always pegged to the right side, with the "live" light lit up. But with my proxy in place, very often the play-head will end up lagging behind. Even when colorbars are not involved. Dragging it to the right or bonking the "live" button brings it back, but shortly it happens again.

   As the proxy does not transcode video -- it uses exactly the same TS files, just with a regenerated m3u8 file with different sequence numbers -- I do not understand how this is possible or what is different.

4. Sometimes I'll go a whole day without it going into colorbars mode. Sometimes, like right now for instance, it happens a lot, and usually for short durations, like 12 seconds / 2 segments. It seems that mediamtx is behaving as if the source had disconnected and then immediately reconnected. I don't know whether to blame OBS, mediamtx, Monkeybrains, or all three.

   OBS consistently says 0 dropped frames, 4% CPU.

   Sometimes I see this: the internal mediamtx will say:

   2025/06/13 14:06:14 WAR [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52386] connection is too slow, discarding 2 frames 2025/06/13 14:06:15 WAR [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52386] connection is too slow, discarding 26 frames 2025/06/13 14:06:18 WAR [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52386] connection is too slow, discarding 10 frames 2025/06/13 14:06:19 WAR [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52386] connection is too slow, discarding 37 frames 2025/06/13 14:06:20 WAR [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52386] connection is too slow, discarding 35 frames 2025/06/13 14:06:21 WAR [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52386] connection is too slow, discarding 2 frames 2025/06/13 14:06:25 INF [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52386] closed: too many reordered frames (27) 2025/06/13 14:06:30 INF [RTMP] [conn [::1]:52427] opened

   and the external one will say:

   2025/06/13 14:06:25 INF [RTMP] [conn 52.119.114.44:52388] closed: EOF 2025/06/13 14:06:25 INF [HLS] [muxer live] destroyed: terminated 2025/06/13 14:06:33 INF [RTMP] [conn 52.119.114.44:52429] opened

   This sounds like the server is hanging up on OBS and it is reconnecting, but OBS doesn't give me any indication of that.

   It says a connection is too slow, but how could the connection between localhost OBS and localhost mediamtx be too slow, with 4% OBS load, load average 1.7, on a Mac mini M1? OBS is using Apple hardware MPEG encoding. (Or when it says "too slow" is it referring to the outgoing uplink connection? How would it even know?)

5. Also sometimes the external server says this, which, WTAF, how is this even possible? Sometimes that number just keeps going up:
   2025/06/13 14:13:08 WAR [HLS] [muxer live] segment duration changed from 6s to 8s - this will cause an error in iOS clients

Ways in which you could help me out with this:

1. Examine the DNA Lounge video stream as-is, and tell me what seems to be wrong with it; or

2. Run hls-continuity.pl on your own system, proxying your own OBS / mediamtx stream, and see if you can detect any problems with that when you toggle the source on and off.

The Bothans thank you in advance.

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Spinning Platters did a nice write-up of our Lords of Acid + Little Miss Nasty show. (We almost never get reviews of our shows, or press about upcoming ones, so that's always great to see.)

A few notes on upcoming shows:

RIP Douglas McCarthy of Nitzer Ebb. For those wondering: McCarthy had stepped back from touring with the band due to his health, and had not been scheduled to be a part of this tour, so our Nitzer Ebb show on Sep 11 is still happening as planned, with founding member Bon Harris on vocals.

That's a busy weekend, because the following day we have Missing Persons and the day after that, Glōm Fest, both of which I'm looking forward to.

More immediately, let me draw your attention to:

Jul 4: we have a live performance by Dev (of Like a G6 and Bass Down Low fame.) She hasn't been back here since 2015.

Jun 7: the return of Gothicumbia, which is a really fun party.

Film screenings!

Coming up in just four weeks on Jul 5, Cyberdelia and 8bitSF present Super Mario Bros '93 ! A screening of the audacious 1993 cyberpunk masterpiece that Nintendo wishes we would all forget, this unhinged fever-dream is presented with a re-imagined musical score performed LIVE by San Francisco chiptune legend, Crashfaster! To be followed, of course, by a chiptunes dance party and a Luigi costume contest.

We had some difficulty getting the license for this, because at first they thought that we wanted to screen the 2023 movie, which is "in moratorium".

Reader, we did not.

Then on Sep 5 it's the big event, Cyberdelia proper, celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Hackers.

On Nov 7 we've got Goblin Legacy with Maurizio Guarini, performing selections from their film scores for Suspiria, Patrick, Buio Omega, Deep Red, Tenebrae and Dawn of the Dead. This won't be a screening of an entire movie, but will feature clips from their long repertoire.

Street fair day shows!

We've got the Indie Oasis Big Gay Day Party on Jun 28, Pride weekend, 3pm - 9pm. And we will have a party in DNA Pizza during Dore Alley on Sep 27 with DJ PrepAPig, which is one of the best DJ names I've heard recently.

I haven't done a photo gallery round-up in quite some time, so here are some galleries from some recent notable shows that you should have come to:

Big Country + Tommy Tutone + Gene Loves Jezebel + Bow Wow Wow Lords of Acid + Little Miss Nasty Monday Hubba Obscura + Atheist + Origin Sorry For Party Rocking After Life Space Station Burlesque Tribulation + Unto Others Venjent Eyehategod Sorry For Party Rocking Visions of Atlantis Powerman 5000 Project X Belphegor Lotus Juice AniCLover TRON '82 Pow 13

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The weaponization of Waymo:

Other witnesses and journalists who were there shared the same story: People summoned the cars to light them on fire when they arrived. Protestors were reportedly calling them "spy cars" as they were vandalized and set ablaze, and some noted how the cars can share data with the LAPD.

As a result, there's been some speculation that the cars were burned to destroy evidence. There's likely more to it than that -- and that the cars weren't torched to destroy evidence as much to punish collaborators. [...]

ICE raids are carried out using data provided by Silicon Valley companies -- most notably Peter Thiel and Alex Karp's Palantir, which has a $30 million contract with ICE to manage a "real-time" surveillance system on immigrants. But whether directly or through third party contractors, much of big tech, including Google, has made deals with ICE, too. [...]

In light of previous epidemics of self-driving car trashings and torchings, such actions are liable to spring from the growing reservoir of public anger towards a Silicon Valley that has grown unaccountable and extractive -- and has now largely aligned itself with a punitive state.

Please send more photos of burning or burned murderbots. These images are my new happy place.

I will also accept donations of videos of same, but only if they don't have people talking over them or are loaded with watermarks. Those make me itch. Something with a nice crackle. Like a Yule log.

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