Sentinelmania

Please join us for the TS chat on Saturday, June 13th, at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC. That could be as early as 12 noon if you’re on the west coast of North America, or 3 pm if you’re on the east coast, or 7 pm in the UK, or Sunday morning in Australia or New Zealand.

We’re in the usual place: http://us25.chatzy.com/81935648447483. There’s nothing to download or install, just choose a name and a color and click on “join chat.”

This week we’ll be watching the episode we should have watched last week – Black and White. Jim reconnects with someone from his rookie days, and we learn just how much of an obfuscator Blair is.

And in two weeks (6/27) we’ll be discussing Moonhunt by Dolimir, which you can find here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/208771

and exomis:

Since we are here might as well share the dhoti and the lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Lungi

https://www.wikihow.com/Wear-a-Pancha-Kachcham?amp=1

It’s only men in the photos but really anyone can wear them. I am wearing a lungi right now.

One of the finest and most beloved Watsons ever to grace the screen has passed away. David Burke was 91 years old, just shy of his 92nd birthday, and he is survived by his wife Anna Calder-Marshall and his son Tom Burke.

By all accounts, he was a gentleman and a wonderful human being. He could have stayed on to play Watson much longer, which would have made many of us very happy, but he chose to leave the show to be nearer to his family, especially since Tom was very young at the time.

His was not the first intelligent and competent Watson, but this version marked a turning point in mainstream depictions, from comedic sidekick to a hero in his own right.

RIP, dear sir. You will be missed. Thank you for everything.

~*~

Tumblr will probably compress this horribly, but here is my first actually good looking attempt to upscale a show I love.

How do you think it looks? Uncanny or decent? See the comparison and upscaled clip in full quality by downloading here. (The previews there are also compressed- gotta download to see actual quality)

I was hoping my fancy RTX 4070 laptop could do whole episodes, but just 3-4 seconds takes 15 minutes😅 Turns out I'm bottle-necked by VRAM. There's always something :( But at least short clips are feasible.

Technical stuff:

I tried some simpler free tools before this, but they were more optimized for anime, and made live action plastic-looking. For this, I used free/open source ComfyUI and SeedVR2. But first! I ordered the first season CBS DVDs, because they're slightly higher quality than the VEI series set, ripped them to MKV, then used StaxRip to format a short clip for upscaling/restoring. Since SeedVR2 doesn't seem to take Prores (like Topaz would?), I instead converted it to a high quality h264 mp4, which involved: using TIVTC to remove 3:2 pulldown interlacing, and to restore 23.976 FPS progressive frame rate, resizing from 720x480 to 720x540 so that the pixels are square (PAR 1:1), and encoding with CRF 16 with film grain. Then, I brought that into the SeedVR2 video enhancing template, and mostly used default settings.

Please join us for the TS chat on Saturday, April 18th, at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC. That could be as early as 12 noon if you’re on the west coast of North America, or 3 pm if you’re on the east coast, or 7 pm in the UK, or Sunday morning in Australia or New Zealand.

We’re in the usual place: http://us25.chatzy.com/81935648447483. There’s nothing to download or install, just choose a name and a color and click on “join chat.”

Our topic this week: since we talked about Naomi last week, let’s talk about Jim’s mother. Grace? Mary Margaret? Why did she leave Jim? Where did she go? Is she still alive? What would happen if she came back into Jim’s life?

And next week we’re going to be discussing some fic – two short pieces, Inches by SassyInkPen (https://archiveofourown.org/works/15661) and The Right to Remain Silent by Kass and Sanj (https://archiveofourown.org/works/1713)

Please join us for the TS chat on Saturday, April 4th, at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC. That could be as early as 12 noon if you’re on the west coast of North America, or 3 pm if you’re on the east coast, or 7 pm in the UK, or Sunday morning in Australia or New Zealand.

Don’t forget that chat might be an hour earlier or an hour later than you’ve been used to if you’ve recently started or ended Daylight Savings Time where you live. Confused? Consult a time zone converter and remember that we are ALWAYS at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC.

We’re in the usual place: http://us25.chatzy.com/81935648447483. There’s nothing to download or install, just choose a name and a color and click on “join chat.”

It’s the first Saturday of the month, so it’s time for an episode watch. We’ll be watching Spare Parts, where we meet Naomi, and see Jim and Blair go undercover as car thieves.

If grandmothers around the world had a rallying cry, it would probably sound something like “You need to eat!”

Photographer Gabriele Galimberti’s grandmother said something similar to him before one of his many globetrotting work trips. To ensure he had at least one good meal, she prepared for him a dish of ravioli before he departed on one of his adventures.  

“In that occasion I said to my grandma ‘You know, Grandma, there are many other grandmas around the world and most of them are really good cooks,” Galimberti wrote via email. “I’m going to meet them and ask them to cook for me so I can show you that you don’t have to be worried for me and the food that I will eat!’ This is the way my project was born!”

The project, “Delicatessen With Love”, took Galimberti to 58 countries where he photographed grandmothers with both the ingredients and finished signature dishes.

He acted as photographer and stylist during each shoot with the grandmothers, taking a portrait of both the women and the food they made for him.

From top to bottom: 

Inara Runtule, 68, Kekava, Latvia. Silke €(herring with potatoes and cottage cheese). Grace Estibero, 82, Mumbai, India. Chicken vindaloo.

Susann Soresen, 81, Homer, Alaska. Moose steak.

Serette Charles, 63, Saint-Jean du Sud, Haiti. Lambi in creole sauce.

The photographer’s grandmother Marisa Batini, 80, Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy. Swiss chard and ricotta Ravioli with meat sauce.

Normita Sambu Arap, 65, Oltepessi (Masaai Mara), Kenya. Mboga and orgali (white corn polenta with vegetables and goat).

Julia Enaigua, 71, La Paz, Bolivia. Queso Humacha (vegetables and fresh cheese soup).

Fifi Makhmer, 62, Cairo, Egypt. Kuoshry (pasta, rice and legumes pie).

Isolina Perez De Vargas, 83, Mendoza, Argentina. Asado criollo (mixed meats barbecue).

Please join us for the TS chat on Saturday, March 21st, at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC. That could be as early as 12 noon if you’re on the west coast of North America, or 3 pm if you’re on the east coast, or 7 pm in the UK, or Sunday morning in Australia or New Zealand.

Folks in US and Canada, be aware that, starting this week, chat is an hour later than it was last week, thanks to Daylight Savings Time (if you live in Arizona, you can ignore this). The UK and Europe will catch up to us in a few weeks, and for folks in Australia, New Zealand, or elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, chat will be an hour earlier once Daylight Savings Time ends.

Confused? Consult a time zone converter and remember that we are ALWAYS at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC.

We’re in the usual place: http://us25.chatzy.com/81935648447483. There’s nothing to download or install, just choose a name and a color and click on “join chat.”

Our topic this week: vids. Let’s watch some vids!

thinking about the practices like beta'ing (please tell me, did it make sense, the way their bodies moved in space? how did it make you feel? did it touch your soul? were there any typos?); translations, illustrations, affectual comments: the ongoing reciprocity of affect and the labor that goes into that.

thinking about fanfics written to be gifted: combing through a friend's ao3/blog/etc to make sure you know exactly what kind of freak they are because you want to give them the ultimate pleasurable fantasy experience (happy birthday, here are some feels, i crafted them for you by hand). then posting it publicly as a tagged gift so everyone else can join in too. a present for all.

thinking about the history of slash fanfiction practices spanning the last 50+ years and the way female and queer fans clawed out spaces for that, not only within the heteronormative patriarchal culture at large but within fandom spaces:

het fanzines and later websites refusing to publish slash or, at best, doing stuff like publishing it with a whole page warning and on a differently colored paper

cishet women writing and drawing slash smut for each other and having to hide it from their husbands; their secret, erotically-charged lives shared only with other women

diy typing out and printing of slash zines, of a 100, 200 pages each, to avoid printer screening and tracking; having to start own printing shops or finding queer-run ones; the materiality of it all

mailing slash zines for free and in secret to avoid not only copyright but sodomy and obscenity laws, like the (still active) federal mail law that criminalized mailing pornography, whether images or text (and how, when the 1964 Supreme Court ruled it inapplicable to noncommercial letters between consensual adults, the precedent excluded homosexual letter exchange)

thinking about fanartist Virginia Lee Smith, who, in the 1980s, drew explicit af K/S smut for a dozen zines, and her interview in 2009 about donating her 200 zines collection, where she said, laughing, "The reason I handed this over is because I know that my poor kid, if I die, will be so embarrassed[...] I know he's gonna burn them. Lost forever. So, I have no idea how many k/s fanzines have been burned quietly for that reason." thinking about how she said she outgrew it when she stopped drawing; and yet she kept all 200 of them anyway.

thinking about the ephemerality of pleasure and the continuance of shame.

I’ve returned from the Northern Hemisphere in a hideous state of jet lag. I did promise some Sentinel related pics, did I not?  This picture of totem poles at the MOA at UBC was taken by me and is in no way intended to infringe on any copyrights or ownership by the original creators or MOA, What it is here for is a ’wait a minute, I’ve seen this before’ moment.  I understand that the Museum of Anthropology has been substantially redeveloped since the nineties, but a beautiful exhibit is a beautiful exhibit, right?