State of the blog 2021.

State of the blog 2021. Now with more of that "Secret Sauce."

Hello, everyone out there in the vastness of the internet. This is "S" bringing to you an almost early edition of "State of the blog." This is mostly an overview of where we are going as well as a projection of where we would like to go in the future. Usually, we do a "state of the blog" at the start of a new year as a form of resolution of what projects we want to complete and which ones we want to start.

The overall challenges of blog-hosting in the year where the entire internet is funneled into a handful of networks owned by narcissistic assholes; Ex-television and radio executives just to name a small group of those people. However, within these dark times, we must take an opportunity to thank those who take the time to separate themselves from the giants of the net and visit this blog to read a few of our articles. That alone is worth the costs of running this server. So thank you to those reading.

Would you like to know more?

Read Onward.

The state of self.

Before we continue it's important to start off with how we are doing in this unholy year of 2021. To which from a medical stance all systems are operational. From a mental stance not so well. And it isn't really because of the lockdowns of COVID-19. You see, as a latch-key kid that was left home while parents went off to do go other things to maintain their own sanity. COVID-19 lockdown was the very thing that people like us trained for! Working from home and getting work done? Not risking my life on the freeway while burning gas? This is actually how society should operate WITHOUT a fucking plague! If you're doing paperwork or are using technology to remote and teleconference then you don't really NEED to be anywhere!

Unfortunately, most of the world is still running by people who feel their penis wouldn't nearly be as big if they can't visually see people stuck in a cubicle suffering from other people who don't want to be stuck in those same cubicles. Still holding onto the 1950's ideology that working from home should be what you're doing from 9 pm to 9 am and then you come into work from 9 am to 9 pm. Sleep is for the weak pigfucker. Suck it up! Life balance? These guys gave theirs up long ago to join the world of managers and believe you need to make that same sacrifice.

We're not going to call out an entire generation of people like 'baby-boomers because we know for a fact that others within that generation can see the psychopathy happening and condemn those would be flat out unfair. Now, these psychopaths believe younger people are weak-willed. Not true. Younger people just see the insane levels of inflation and thus are demanding adjusted payment for their services which these psychopaths feel that people with 20+ years of experience should get as if inflation does not exist because their favorite sports red-team/blue-team is in power.

And by the way, we're using the term 'psychopath' correctly. Which is a person without empathy. Because how else would you describe a person that wants to cluster people in a room denying the fact that there's a disease that can kill people within your company? These are the kind of people that believe in capitalism so much that the dollar cannot fail (even though it already has inflation mentioned above) and are willing to destroy people's lives in order to keep that faith going.

Their consequences have actions. And those actions are simple. No one wants to work for fuckers like these. It's all in the details.

From a personal standpoint, we're ready to take a lesser-paying job if it means reclaiming our personal lives back. Perpetually deployed from state to state only to serve an employer for 12-hour shifts may make a lot of money while never really serving your own interest sucks ass.

Like most American dreams all of that hard-earned cash will eventually go towards the hospital complex. Even then it will never be enough to pay off the debts to them. So why bother even having a saving account in the first place? We also feel we're not really isolated on our complaints as it's something we feel every working person is suffering from right now. Watching the dreams of being an artist or creating something vanish behind a bigger and bigger corporation that tells you to work on their vision and dreams.

Speaking of the medical complex.

My current doctor left the field because they were super up there in age and well COVID would be a death sentence for them understandably! Upon getting our new doctor you have to fill out a bunch of paperwork. One of them being your mental health state. It's this paper that goes from 1 to 10 on how you feel about things. 1 being the worst, 10 being the greatest. Because all mental health can be categorized this way! Wooo Beauracracy!

Anyhow, we put a giant "1" on everything except the question of "Likelihood of wanting to take your own life" to which that's a "5" which a "5" is an acceptable rating to give. Apparently, as long as you don't want to kill yourself then you are mentally healthy in the world of the medical industry. With good reason!

They can't send you a bill if you die.

Every decision in America comes down to the bottom line. Not how to keep it from going to the bottom! Just as long as it doesn't take away the butter from their bread.

Finishing up.

If life is about getting that "American Dream" of owning a house (and paying 5-10 percent in property tax in the hopes that inflation will drive your home to the point where you retire off of it) having kids (passing off your problems to the next generation) and retiring (ha... HAHAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHAHAH!!! Right) then you are living life on someone else's ideologies. It's up to you to determine how much you want to work versus how much time you dedicate to yourself towards creation. If you don't then you'll end up miserable.

Alright, enough of my bitching. Long story short. I'm working hard, not sure if I'm working smart. May have to fix that.

State of the site.

Alright, moving onwards to the site itself. There has been a lot of background things that have been happening lately and leads to not so many blog postings. We suppose we should address the most daunting of our tasks which is.

AV1 movie integration.

This has to be one of the most annoying/frustrating things to deploy since we moved our site from shared hosting to VPS without purchasing CPanel. Because if you go to AOMedias website they're incredibly good at talking up their product and how all of these big boy internet companies are supporting them (We guess that if you pay into their club they'll talk all sorts of crazy shit about you). But when you go to their documentation section for perhaps a case example of how does a lowly website blogger such as ourselves deploy av1 as a standard throughout your video-hosting site. You're pretty much banished off of their site and stuck within the hells of GitHub or a GoogleDocs page.

To make matters worse FFMpeg is kind of in the same situation. They will bring the library into FFmpeg (at least one of the libraries, you have to compile by hand if you want anything beyond the stock AV1 library they give you) and from there well, you're kind of on your own!

But there's Reddit and Reddit knows best. - Random Comment.

HAHAHAHAHAH! No.

Sadly, we were able to solve our implementation problem BECAUSE of rando's on Reddit but they never offered a direct solution. Which from a perspective bases is better then what FFMPEG or AOMedia provided. Which a lot of it is based on here-say with no examples of the end-result (or broken links because well. it's Reddit!) So in many respects, Reddit is equally as lost on AV1 website deployment as we were.

Even a question as simple as:

How does a website owner detect if their clients can even accept AV1?

Is left with crazy insane JavaScript code that violates the policies of our readers. Or just a lot of people shrugging their shoulders as everyone's recommendation is to save AV1 encoded videos as .mp4 or .webm since in the very code of FFMpeg you must specify a file type of -f flag of either format. Which if this is a major release codec it should stand on its own. Instead, you're lying to the MIME types of the browser as to what your video really is. Client detection for new codecs is important because if they are on a potato computer or worse any android OS below version 10. OR! On IoS. They will receive the audio of your video but will never receive the video with no error as to why.

Is there a filetype known as .av1 ?

IANA does mention that an effective MIME type for this new codec that AOMedia registered is .AV1 citation here. That despite everyone saying the naming of files to .av1 is rare. It's an accepted standard for any and all web browsers. That if the browser is too old or simply does not support it. My server can pass a simple check if the .av1 format is supported and if not then fall back to .webm and eventually .ogv which is exactly what we wanted to find out!

SO! With Apache OR Nginx the following MIMEs need to be added:

                video/av1                                          av1;

And then as we painfully found out. Do NOT let FFMpeg encode your AV1's as MP4! It will black screen on a modern browser. Leave them as WebM as it's partially based on this codec.

First WEBM now AV1. What the hell?

When you read into it all. It really boils down to major companies wanting to participate in the cosmic circle-jerk about the standards of the internet. That if Cisco, Microsoft, YouTube, Twitch/Amazon aren't involved they'll turn their nose up at it as they did with WebM saying it's a Google-only project. That it will eventually die off.

The fact is, we need more efficient ways of streaming video than what was offered from the early 2000s or WinAmp TV. Not that the crazy glitching and video artifacts bring a sense of nostalgia. Nostalgia is also memory based on the pain of the past. This is why we need to move onward! On top of that as we're approaching the world of 8k video the ability to stream such a heavy video stream looms over even the biggest companies. And, we need ways to stream without assholes like MPEG-LA sitting on the side of the road with their hand out demanding money from anyone who uses their codec commercially.

Finishing up AV1.

Unlike some bloggers which criticize the way that others encode but provide no proof themselves. We write what we learned about this codec and others within our FFMPEG guides. And, we practice what we learn in every Video Blog on this site. We're totally open to new ways to encode for both quality and space as we're not the developer of this codec nor are we developers for FFMPEG. We are learning about this stuff at the same pace you the reader is learning.

What is odd is we do feel like no one else is doing what we do. Which is not only creating the content for the video blog but spending an immense amount of CPU time transcoding these files to be uploaded right on this server. Instead of just giving up and firing it off to YouTube.

 

The future.

There are of course other things we are going to introduce to the blog such as.

• Torture you with more "music".
• Draw more Art.
• Build a voice pack for games. Perhaps step into the world of voice acting.
• Convert more of our blogs into video blogs. Because we found that video in combination with a technical blog seems to be the most effective at showing your readers and audience something.

Desidra.

It should also be noted that we did write a guest article for ProtoHub which is a little odd for me as we're not really Protogen. But as we're fond of science fiction and post-apocalyptic genres. It was fun to read and post our opinions on the culture. As mentioned in the article there may be another character by the name of 'Qwintin' making an appearance in the art section and possibly a Mixcloud session may come out of it.

Never know!

Oh yes, we also took the time to curate our Cellar Door for a little bit. Be sure and check out other cool people that run their own site!

Manhattan, New York City.

Out of all of the pictures we took of this city. The one right outside of my hotel on the 21st floor of West 41st & 8th avenue looking behind the buildings was the most bizarre. Even though we're fully aware that's just an elevator tower. Throughout the night the lights would change from white to all red, to full-tilt party mode at 2-4 am, then the sunrise would show and the lights would turn off again. Didn't go full party lights every night as we stayed at this hotel for two weeks. However, out of all of the buildings in Manhatten, this one was the most interesting to us.

It makes me wonder if the real-life in New York isn't underground. But instead on the rooftops where the city cannot control you or grind you into the dirt. A place where you can gather even during COVID because no one bothers to look up after a while of living there. Gives inspiration that in a city that wants to sell you knock off Gucci airport bags so you can get the fuck out. Or, poison you on 24 dollar pizza slices. That hidden away in places that only Superheros could maybe see. There is beauty.

We're not stopping yet with this blog. More is to come.

That's what server said.

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