Get your comments in for this week’s recordings. Monday, 15-Jan-2024: The X-Files Die Hand Die Verletzt, and Wednesday, 17-Jan-2024: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Unchained Woman.
Next week: Children of the Dog Star, Swamp Light and Alien Summons, and Real Humans, Sly Leo.
I’ve completed my acoustic barrier just in time to record our 666th episode.
Of course, it’s not designed to block out all sound; it’s really about suppressing echoes and dampening outside sounds. Hopefully, it will help. It certainly sounds very different when talking inside the barrier.
See if you can tell a difference. The first episode recorded inside the barrier will drop on Saturday, the 20th of January. It’s our look at The X-Files episode Die Hand, Die Verletzt.
Of course, I’m telling you this on January 14th, less than seven days from release, which means our patrons on Patreon will not get the episode a whole week before the main release. Regrettably, scheduling issues prevented Simon and me from recording before tomorrow.
Which leads me to this week’s apology. You might recall that I had a fiasco during December with the quotas for the releases in December. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work around that, and it did prevent me from posting January’s episodes until the January rollover on my quota. It’s still not quite straightened out.
This really threw off my “routine” of posting, and that is a disaster waiting to happen.
Let me tell you a story about my days in Information Technology. One of the many things I did in my career was manage a data center that had, among other things, IBM AS/400s (later IBM iSeries) midrange computers. These computers are multiuser systems rather like very small mainframes for those unfamiliar. They have lots of redundancy and a very high uptime. These systems were typically used for mission-critical business applications, often in finance, insurance, inventory, etc.
As such, any reputable company will have maintenance agreements on their computers, and IBM, to their credit, will treat you very well when you need service.
When I started working with AS/400s, I worked for a company that wasn’t willing to spend on maintenance contracts, and so I learned and did the maintenance myself. I daresay that, by the end of that, I was qualified to diagnose, field strip, fix, and reassemble most problems with an AS/400.
Then I went to work for an organization that paid for maintenance contracts, and so I would sit on the sidelines when IBM would do maintenance and repairs. We had our usual technician, and I had a lot of respect for him. We’d talk about the systems while he’d work and it was clear to me that (duh) he knew more about the systems than I did.
He knew what he was doing backward and forward. Where I had performed dozens of repairs on just a couple of systems, he’d done hundreds, if not thousands, on many different systems.
…and yet, he used to do something that drove me nuts.
No matter how simple the procedure, he cracked open the manual with a checklist of steps and performed every one every time. Many of those steps were unnecessary depending on the particular circumstances, and he knew that, but he did them and checked them off every single time.
One day, I finally asked him about it, and he fully and freely admitted that he was taking unnecessary steps, but he said, “By doing so, I never make a mistake on somebody else’s mission-critical system by forgetting something or making a false assumption. The customer pays for the job to be done right. Problems can still happen, but I’ve done my due diligence.”
It made sense. It wasn’t his system, and he was being very conscientious, but it didn’t necessarily sway me for “my own” systems.
Then, my organization got cheap. They put the maintenance contract out to bid and another company took over. They too were competent, and the guy who did our work was knowledgeable, and I had no qualms that he was capable of the work. He didn’t use the checklist, though.
You can see where this is going, right?
He fluffed one, and the hard drive RAID array was broken, wiping our system and all the data. We had the proper backups and restored and returned to full operations, but it took 36-48 hours to do the full restores. He was chagrined, and I slept on a cot in the data center for two nights.
After that, I also very much adopted the habit of using checklists, and when following printed instructions, I treat them as checklists, too.
…and when I don’t do that is when I screw up.
I have a checklist for posting podcasts, and I was not following it while I was scrambling with the quota problem. As such, I screwed up the posts for our Patreon subscribers. I noticed the problem when I was posting this past week’s bonus Babylon 5 episode, Exogenesis. I unclogged the jam and dropped two additional episodes that should have been released earlier.
Inexcusable, I’m afraid, and I hate making that mistake in the same week when I have to delay this week’s Patreon post until Monday, but there it is. I’ll see if I can’t come up with a bonus something just for patrons as an apology.
With our recordings this week, we will hopefully return to our routine schedule of two weekly sessions.
Sometimes, writing the #BehindTheScenes for the week this early in the week doesn’t make as much sense. Typically, by now (or Wednesday at the latest), we’d be done with all recording sessions, but due to external circumstances, we’ve postponed Tuesday’s recording about #RealHumans S01E05 until Saturday.
Last night, Kenneth and I wrapped up recording our 6-part look at 1993’s #SpaceRangers — without delving too deeply here, let’s say that I was glad to get the opportunity to go back and re-watch Space Rangers, but it doesn’t hold up. It isn’t good now; it wasn’t good then.
Not genre-related, but I recently completed a watch-through of all 271 episodes of the 1957-1966 #PerryMason TV series, which was a groundbreaking series in American television history. Why is this germane? Among other things, Perry Mason set the standard for what courtroom drama looks like to American audiences for decades. It still casts a long shadow over television today. Whether its depictions of courtroom procedure were accurate or not doesn’t matter; it was what the audiences came to expect.
The final (unaired) episode of Space Rangers, S01E06, known as “The Trial,” brings our protagonists into a courtroom drama in the 22nd century.
There’s one thing I can say about that: The writer of this episode did not watch enough Perry Mason.
Several times during testimony, I waited for Perry Mason or Hamilton Burger’s voice to ring out, “Objection! Leading the witness” or “Objection! Testimony is irrelevant and immaterial.” There were others. Many others.
Not getting their Perry Mason format right wasn’t the only reason this wasn’t a great episode, but it was surprisingly irritating.
This week also saw me complete the editing of our episode on #Babylon5 S03E04 Passing Through Gesthemene. That was a fun one to record. Simon and I discussed the philosophy of criminal justice and the ideas behind capital punishment versus rehabilitation. We asked ourselves whether we’d wear a sweater that a serial killer had previously worn.
We also looked at the behind-the-scenes brouhaha that saw this B5 episode delayed initially for an entire year just because a fan posted a similar story idea online before the script had been completed. With social media now being massive compared to the online landscape in 1994, is it possible today?
Our B5 episodes are available for our patrons at Patreon. That episode drops on Wednesday, November 7. In the main feed, the #Bugs episode S03E04 Hollow Man drops on Saturday, November 11.
Catch you next week, where, hopefully, things will be hotting up on the #DoctorWho front.
Had a really good conversation with Simon this morning about #RealHumans S01E03. I’m really looking forward to the release of these episodes. It’s a fascinating series with lots of interesting ideas, even if it hasn’t (yet) hit the ground running on the #SexWithRobots themes.
We’re recording only one podcast next week, and that’s Real Humans S01E04.
Dropping into the feed this coming Saturday (28 Oct) is our look at Time Travelers, and 1976 Irwin Allen (intended pilot) TV movie that was intended as a second bite at the Time Tunnel concept, but failed to materialize due to some litigation. With a story credited to #RodSerling, it’s got more chops than the typical Allen SciFi fare.
Although things can change, typically Fusion Patrol recording sessions happen on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, although it rarely happens that we have all three in one week, but two sessions are fairly common.
Spaced as we are in three different time zones and two different continents, for me, the Monday/Tuesday combo weeks have the shortest turnaround with a recording session Monday night and another Tuesday morning - especially if I’m not prepared.
This past week I had a surprise tooth extraction which kept me grumpy until Sunday so it’s been go-go-go prepping for this week’s podcasts. A couple hours ago Kenneth and I completed our discussion of Space Rangers, episode 5, the Entertainer and, considering the paucity of subject matter, it was a good discussion. On the back of that, I’ve had to jump in and watch the episode for tomorrow’s session.
Announcing it here for the first time, after our episodes on Series 3 of Bugs, we’ll be looking at the first season of the 2012 Swedish program, Real Humans. Tonight I watch episode 3, The Lord Shall Be Our Companion.
I think I’m getting dangerously close to losing my bet with Simon as to whether Hans or Tobbe will have sex with the robot Anita first. I’m still betting on Team Hans, but Team Tobbe took some significant steps towards the finish line tonight. Dark horse Inger jumped into the race unannounced this week, though, and that may throw things awry.
Amazed that we’re through three episodes and there’s still been no actual sex with robots. Clearly the hubots were not created by the Delos Corp.
Lots to chew on in the episode and I’m looking forward to a good conversation tomorrow morning.