darkcalling

Can't find anything but dvdrips and a few SD quality webrips on jackett for anything older than the reboot series (post 2004 with names in the format of "Pingu in the City"/Mysterious helper/etc which have 1080p copies).

No immediate results searching to purchase blurays either which is a bad sign for hopes of 1080p copies to be floating around out there.

Remastering costs money so I would be surprised if they had done so and not tried to recoup it via a bluray release. On the other hand sometimes old content (particularly drawn) is sometimes simply upscaled to 1080p for streaming services with variable results (I've seen instances where pirate/fan upscales are far, far superior to the studio stuff released to streaming).

I also checked several private trackers including one dedicated to older cartoons and one for general older content and neither had anything but dvd-rips. According to wikipedia Amazon Prime has streaming rights in the US but I didn't see any amazon rips specifically of the older series so even if they have it in 1080p (questionable, you'd have to check the web page on amazon for the series for technical details) it isn't available.

Disclaimer: I'm not in any cabal trackers so I didn't check any of those. I also don't have that many dedicated non-English/European trackers in my jackett search so could have missed something.

IMO, good quality dvd-rips* at high quality (e.g. not re-encoded xvids done at 1000kbps) generally look acceptable on HDTVs and monitors. (Use mkvtoolnix to remove the Russian subtitle and audio tracks from the release I mentioned if you intend on keeping it long-term, use handbrake to convert any dvd vob files to mkvs, I suggest 4500kbps video bitrate as that's about the most you tend to see in dvds anyways)

*which can be found on public sites, like for example rutracker [dot] org.

Now if you have a 4K TV it becomes more noticeable at which point I guess I'd say it helps to have 1) a TV that has really good built-in upscaling hardware and software (not going to get this with most black friday $400 TVs sadly, you're paying near, above, or several thousand for a TV with this) AND/OR 2) a playback device (e.g. streaming) that has its own upscaling hardware and software (in this stuff like Nvidia Shield, Apple TV Pro's/4k's, and maybe the top end Xiaomi boxes are going to be best in class compared to cheap streaming sticks).

What about the Tiananmen square massacre?

Tiananmen Square "Massacre", A Propaganda Hoax

It wasn't a massacre of peaceful students, but a skirmish between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the pro-capitalist / free market reform movement. The protest movement, as evidenced by their own accounts, called for market liberalisation, and free market reforms, rallying around a replica of the statue of liberty. After the movement had been building in the square for seven weeks, unarmed soldiers were sent in to disperse the protesters, after which many soldiers were beaten to death, torched, and lynched. The New York Times death count went from 2600, to many thousands, to 8000, to tens of thousands. In reality only around ~200 (including soldiers) were killed or trampled, in smaller clashes outside the square. The on-scene New York Times reporter disavowed the article, especially about machine-gunning of protesters. A wikileaks cable from a US ambassador to the US state department, confirmed that no killings or machine-gunnings took place in the square.

A British Lie

Deng XiaoPing was ill at the time, and the CIA had an inside man inside the party, Zhao Ziyang, dubbed China's Gorbachev, who promised to open the door to market liberalisation if the protest movement had succeeded, like those of Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Georgia, and the USSR.

The protest movement followed the line of "color revolutions", in which the US tried to destabilize and create counter-revolutions in eastern Europe and Latin America after the fall of the USSR. The strategy was to stir division within and without, by inundating the media with news of massacres of "peaceful", pro-capitalist / market reformers.

The defeat of a counter revolution in China

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20200118135159/https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/c2b7ma/china_megathread_everything_a_leftist_must_know/

https://www.qiaocollective.com/education/tiananmenreadinglist

https://redsails.org/another-view-of-tiananmen/

I’m really curious how you get millions of people to believe in something that didn’t happen at all.

Why? Any liberal or reactionary can easily imagine millions of people believing in falsities by virtue of the fact that opposites on the liberal political spectrum exist.

I mean come on. Sit down and think a little. Humans have been led to believe all kinds of things that are false and many still do. Mythologies weren't stories everyone was in on, they were once accepted truths in many cases.

How could millions of Americans believe Iraq had chemical weapons when it didn't? How could millions of Americans believe JFK was killed by a lone gunman with no meaningful connections?

I mean this is just simple propaganda and mass communication. Look how many people are seething over the Barenstein bears and convinced reality was changed Matrix style because they remember it being spelled differently and other Mandela effect stuff (named itself after the fact a ton of people for some reason believe they heard in the news that Nelson Mandela died in prison, how can they all think that when it's false).

Americans will readily accept North Korea is a nation of brainwashed drones or Russians are subhumans eagerly doing human wave tactics yet the moment they're asked to consider the contrary, the inverse might be the case their brains malfunction, they can't think straight, they can't conceive of it, it's unreasonable.

Free your mind. Expand the possibilities. Accept the empire pushes projection of its own atrocities both past and craved in the present onto enemies.

Edit Apparently the VPS shat the bed and had to be restored from a back-up. That's why the vanished comment here. No further investigation needed.

"Um acktually sex work is real work and this is no different than the woman being forced to work at Starbucks for rent and anyone against this is a freakin SWERF, though obviously landlords are bad and only good boys like me who work hard for our money should rent women"

- Western Leftist looking up for a moment from his browsing of onlyfans. Hates landlords but his idea of a paradise workers state involves a large contingent of (conventionally attractive) women available to be paid for sexual favors at a moment's notice and imagines THIS idea is true sexual liberation. Unironically has weird ideas in his head about men being entitled to sexual attention and blackpill nonsense about significant amounts being unable to earn this in a decent way with companionship and a real relationship and favors instead continuing the commodity form in terms of commodifying women's bodies and sexuality to meet this need through a perverse "free market" that totally won't result in men looking down on and exploiting women or perpetuating various capitalist and patriarchal problems twisted into human sexuality.

Decomb filter is set and will increase the effort needed. Unless the video is noticeably interlaced (line artifacts, not likely for most blurays) and you’re trying to fix that there’s no reason to run it. (Note however this is the least time intensive thing you’re doing, I just mention it for completeness, to be honest handbrake may have detection so it only runs while needed but I’ve always set it manually and only as needed)

Besides that though you’re using software encoding which while better will take much longer. Try setting the encoding tune under video settings to something faster.

Alternatively set your encoder to use NVENC version of the scheme you want (264) With NVENC encoding 30 minutes without anything else should take 7 minutes or so.

One last thing. You seem to have it set to burn subtitles in. This generates a lot of extra work and is not advisable unless your hardware or software does not support soft-subs as a separate stream in for instance an mkv file. Most modern streaming devices will handle plain text and PGS image subtitles in my experience. Try instead to set the default and forced flags if you want subtitles to be on by default.

The ebil Tankies: No that alleged genocide is (atrocity) propaganda by the US, it all leads back to shoddy research by suspicious people with connections to incredibly biased western state propaganda organs and the hawkish defense industry which has lied us into multiple expensive, devastating wars. Genocide is wrong and bad and we are against all forms of oppression and for solidarity with marginalized communities, we must not allow groups to be scapegoated and must defend minorities from violence of the oppressive west both in its imperialist exports of war, violence and destabilization as well as interior violence such as biased policing. We are for a world where historical injustices are righted, exploited people are given a seat at the table and redress is paid.

Actual fascists: No that alleged genocide/the-holocaust didn't happen, isn't real but uh it would be based and cool if it did and we should totally hope it happens and uh if hope isn't enough we should try and plot some way to get it to happen. Also some groups are subhuman and should be killed off or segregated from the rest of us and by the way west is best and white men did nothing wrong.

Enlightened liberals: Oh shit these are exactly, literally the same thing. The first group would definitely allow the exact same kind of content on their platforms as the second and therefore we should freak out.

Just absolutely lacking in the will-power to use their brains these liberals are. They are abetting fascists by equating us to the fascists, watering down what fascism is and confusing the issue.

What do you think about it? Is the Federation something that modern, real Marxists should strive for?

It can't hurt to have dreams and aspirations. It may not be possible to do many of the things the federation shows being done technology wise such as colonizing and reaching out to the stars beyond out solar system (I mean maybe you could build colony ships with robots, frozen eggs and sperm, artificial wombs and send them on a several hundred or thousand year journey to other solar systems and inhabitable planets to colonize them but it'd be entirely different than what Star Trek shows and they'd be effectively cut off from us and us from them) but it does show the better world/galaxy if we work cooperatively idea well.

As to striving for it? It's not something within reach of any of our lifetimes. It isn't really our purview to strive for it, it would be the job of those who come after us or after those to do that.

If you're asking if it's the type of fiction I like seeing and think we as socialists should encourage them absolutely, 100%. And yes by the way, new Trek is liberal garbage because they couldn't stand seeing socialists winning. Any Trek revival under socialism will retcon everything after DS9 and the TNG movies.

Are the ideals of the Federation compatible with the ideas of communism?

Most of them. Although I've watched all old Trek I'm not a scholar on it or a total lore nerd so someone else might better chime in. I'm sure there are problems here and there as it isn't like Roddenberry had a warehouse full of blackmail on CBS executives and the government to allow him to do whatever he wanted perfectly (though I do love the story about how they wanted to put a preacher on the original enterprise as part of the bridge crew and every time he'd just say "interesting idea" and walk off looking thoughtful).

I don’t mind compactness. I just dislike how it looks here.

1. horizontal space is nowhere near fully utilized, the empty space is wasted. If you’re going to use smaller text with the excuse you can fit more info this is undercut by leaving all this space on the sides eerily empty.

2. If the screen real estate issue is fixed the smaller text needs something to be a bit more readable. A 1pt font size increase, shadows/outlines, I don’t know I’m not a UI expert I just feel this is for me worse than the old one.

This is coming from someone who exclusively used old Reddit by the way. I also don’t mind the old look (compare hex bear right now to this site in terms of screen utilization, readability, etc).

Needs tweaking.

I appreciate all the work but yes, this is truly awful and unusable. My eyes are straining from how small things are. Text should be bigger, should fill more of the page, etc.

Even if you're going for that awful new mobile friendly layout all sites like wikipedia, etc are foisting these days where all content is shoved into the center in a square as if we still live in a 4:3 aspect CRT world, the text, icons, preview images, etc needs em-biggifying (though a reasonable amount, new reddit for example goes too far in the other direction).

I like the idea of a bot but do we want all the trash posts they have from US propaganda sources? I mean do we want our news feed filled with CNN/Fox News/ABC/CBS/NBC/Yahoo anti-communist, pro-US-imperialist VOA nonsense?

If we do have a bot I'd almost want it set to only scrape posts from certain sources. RT is fine most of the time (they play both sides so they host reactionaries with quite some takes sometimes but are mostly acceptable), CGTN, Xinhua are fine as well. Various more blog source type places such as moonofalabama, multipolarista, greyzone, etc. Even AP and to a degree Reuters aren't as seething on fire about it as the non-wire services (though to be clear both are compromised directly by NATO intelligence and full of bootlickers of empire).

Yes. All bloodsuckers should be removed from this plane of existence. It is the luxury of the western academic to make noises and murmur in displeasure masturbatory philosophical thought experiments against it while it is the realm of the poor and animals with far more feeling and ability to experience pain and suffering to experience the actual reality. Fuck em. If they didn't want to go extinct they should have adapted the evolutionary strategy of not being a mass-murdering parasite responsible for murdering hundreds of millions of the apex predator with big brains and just generally being annoying, unpleasant, and a continual disease vector threat.

Not to say it will be easy. It'll be one of the most challenging things humans ever do. It will likely require unified (or at least cooperative) communist party rule over at least 90% of the planet, large amounts of funding, and a complex plan.

Though things like ChatGPT are largely a scam I believe we are just socialist leadership away from something incredible in terms of artificial intelligence (combined with quantum computing). A lot of problems can kind of just be brute forced by just doing a lot of math, simulations, etc. Once you truly understand biology at its most basic levels plus its interactions you can simulate and create molecules, compounds, etc that interact with that biology with a goal in mind. Humans could never do this in any reasonable time-frame, but a super-massive quantum computing complex could do many things from creating drugs to treat diseases and cancers to improving industrial processes, to yes, synthesizing things to effect the removal of certain organisms.

Best of all this plan is far more plausible and feasible than nonsense like moving away from them or somehow geo-engineering earth completely out of climate change into a very cold climate that somehow still supports crops, animal and plant life, etc.

Annoying people who I don't care for say things like they fill certain niches outside of bloodsucking and to that I say, evolution will re-fill those niches once they are gone. Things go extinct from time to time, others prosper, if there are minor consequences then we shall take charge of and accept them. It is purely delusional thinking on the part of liberal minded types who believe in some butterfly effect destabilizing our entire biosphere as a result of a change like this. Fact is our planet and the biosphere we know including organisms we're familiar with has undergone a lot of challenges and changes including extinctions caused by humans as well as population decreases, increases, climate shifts, displacement of habitats by human industry, civilization, habitats, and lots and lots of pollution. Not to mention natural things like droughts, diseases, minor climate shifts, introduction of species that out-compete others from other regions, etc. These people just hesitate to take the wheel. They seem to be very religious in thinking nature sacred and that man can only muck it up. They're anti-humanists and should not be paid heed.

Spoiler: Other species will fill the niches of mosquitoes with time. Evolution is quite good at that. People acting like it will lead to ecological collapse are losers who should be bullied.

Mosquitos were devastated by DDT back in the day and on the back-foot with one foot in the grave. I'm unaware of any mass extinctions as a result.

The biologists may study the world, Marxists seek to change it. Not to remove all species or anything of the sort but to tweak things. We've already made too many changes and more are required for human survival. So either be honest and advocate in a vicious nihilistic fashion for human self-extinction (to preserve the purity of nature as these types see it, with man seen as contaminated which is a very Abrahamic fall of man type nonsense thinking and/or mystical woo-woo, animism energy nonsense when you get right down to this thought process IMO) or sit down and accept that some things need to be done even if they make you feel a little sad.

Smallpox was a virus. WAS. We did that. NOT sorry. It shouldn't have fucked around. Someday it would be nice to see "Mosquitos were" "Ticks were", "lice were".

People accuse this type of thinking I advocate for of having a god-complex but they betray their own primitive biases by invoking that. As if only gods may order or change things. As if what is must always be. As if what we found ourselves in is sacred and to change it is to blaspheme. As if humankind has no right to change the conditions it finds itself in. Go back in time and kidnap a human from 9000 years ago, bring them here then them about our orderly hectares of crops all neatly carved into the land stretching beyond sight, ask them about our towers of steel which defy the gods to soar into the heavens, ask them about our airplanes which likewise defy the gods, ask them about our treatments for lost limbs (prosthetics) which likewise defy the will of the gods, ask them about our defibrillators, about surgery, and now tell me these people who raise this point are not just a continuation of that same backwardness cloaking it in other more modern sounding excuses.