Notable can mean many things. Maybe it was high quality, insightful, and provided context for a more artistic scene. Maybe they teased a cut scene that would have radically shifted the tone of the movie. Maybe it was funny. Maybe the director absolutely hated what they produced and is only providing narration because of a...
Some of these are commentaries that I just remember enjoying while I watched them, but they might have been listened to so long ago that I can’t remember what it was that I enjoyed. They’re in alphabetical order because that’s how my movies are organized.
El Camino. (All Vince Gilligan commentaries are fun for me.)
Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (The commentary was fun, but I remember they called Kristen Bell on the phone to include her, and she was driving on the freeway at the time, and wasn’t really interested in talking. That was rather disappointing. But the others who were talking were just clearly having a great time.)
Hot Fuzz
Inception. (My copy didn’t have audio commentary, but I remember the special featurettes on this were fabulous!)
Interstellar. (Again, no audio commentary on my copy, but the special features were noteworthy.)
John Wick 1, 2, 3, and 4. Great commentaries, great special features.
The Last Samurai
Lord of the Rings Extended Edition. (Holy moly, the commentaries on this set are incredible, and there are so many of them! It is worth listening to every second of all of them. These are probably the best commentaries of any film I have ever listened to.)
The Matrix 1, 2, and 3
Mean Girls (2004)
Mission Impossible Movies (I don’t think any of them actually had audio commentaries, but this one sticks out in my memory for having just endless amazing special featurettes that were worth watching. Especially Dead Reckoning!)
Showgirls (Yes, Showgirls. David Schmader’s commentary is … incomparable. There are some amazing lines in this. “Basically Nomi has two emotions: staring, and kicking.” There are some real gems in that commentary. While you’re at it, go watch Red Letter Media’s review of this film. It’s hilarious.)
Spaceballs (Every single Mel Brooks commentary is solid gold. There are so many movies I wrote down because I vaguely remember listening to the commentary, but then I deleted them from the list because I didn’t think they really had much memorable stuff. (Ocean’s 11, Rounders…) But Spaceballs is not like that. Spaceballs has an amazing commentary that is a blast!)
Star Trek II. (Nicholas Meyer did a great commentary that had insights on both Star Treks II and VI. There’s a second commentary with Manny Coto and Nicholas Meyer that I haven’t listened to yet, but the love that gushes out of him in the first few minutes makes me want to keep listening! It sounds like it’s shaping up to be a discussion between the director and a real fan, giving the director a chance to respond to fan reactions.)
Star Trek III (Ronald D. Moore and Michael Taylor have a track on this film for some reason, but I always enjoy Moore’s perspective on Star Trek. The original Leonard Nimoy commentary is the one I listened to, and it is quite good. This is Nimoy’s first feature film that he directed, I think, which is why I listened to the track in the first place, although it has been years and I can’t quite remember the content.)
Star Trek IV (I listened to the Nimoy commentary, but there’s also an Alex Kurtzman commentary on it. There’s a lot of recent dislike for Kurtzman, but frankly he’s a great fan of the franchise and always gives good commentary and special features.)
Star Trek VI
Star Trek Generations (I listened to the Ron Moore and Branon Braga commentary and loved it.)
Star Trek First Contact
Star Trek Insurrection (Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis basically have a great time in this commentary, so I did, too. This commentary is where I first noticed how much adoration Jonathan Frakes has for the franchise and the fans. I’m already a huge fan of his directing, so it was nice to see what he had to say about the craft, too.)
Starship Troopers (Listen to all the commentaries on this movie, especially given the current political climate.)
Superbad (This is another fun commentary.)
Superman II The Donner Cut.
This is the End (I seriously love Seth Rogan commentaries.)
Top Gun (I think this is one of those ensemble commentaries where you get several groups talking on a single commentary track, so some people who are interesting depart after 10-15 minutes, which is unfortunate. But I remember it being good.)
Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
What Dreams May Come (I listened to this years and years ago, but I seem to remember it helped me understand some of the movie’s symbols better.)
Added: Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. (I took this one off, but I’m adding it back again. I think I liked some of the commentaries but not others. Still, it keeps re-entering my brain as a good one, so maybe go listen to the director commentary with the original writer of the comic.)
Bonus! Recommended TV Series commentaries:
Better Call Saul. (As I said above, Vince Gilligan does great, GREAT commentaries. Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad have a huge amount of commentary on their discs, and every second of it is a treasure.)
Breaking Bad
South Park. (Matt and Trey don’t like doing commentaries, so they only talk for a couple of minutes per episode. But they are a lot of fun to listen to regardless.)
Star Trek Lower Decks. (I could listen to Jonathan Frakes and/or Mike McMahon all day. These commentaries are hilarious and fun. Stick around to hear Jonathan Frakes ALMOST get himself fired by spoiling that the Titan is…
Star Trek Picard Season 3. (All TNG fans should listen to the commentary on every episode of Season 3.)
I learned a lot about the production and design choices around Terminator 2 from the commentary – the totally legitimate digital copy I have has 2 tracks (one labeled just director and the other director & writer) and I think I remember most stuff from the one with the writer.
My physical copy doesn’t have any commentary tracks on it! Now I want to hear them!
Star Trek First Contact - Commentary from Director Jonathan Frakes (Commander Riker)
I included several Star Trek commentaries in my list just because of Jonathan Frakes. Star Trek Picard Season 3 and (of all things) Star Trek Insurrection have just superior commentaries thanks in large part to Frakes and his love for the franchise and his respect for the craft of directing and the fans. I often think that the next time someone asks me, “If you could have dinner with anyone alive, who would ti be?” I would pick him. Such a great, intelligent person!
So I collect physical media, and I carefully preserve the audio commentaries and the special features. What I’ve found is that a lot of the special features that are worth keeping are available on youtube. You just have to know about them to find them. For example, the recent Mission Impossible movie had the famous motorcycle jump featurette on youtube, and some of the great John Wick featurettes are on youtube as well. But after buying and cataloging over 1200 movies, I have to say – a lot of the special features just aren’t worthwhile to me to keep. I think this is more of a reflection of the major studios not wanting to spend money on the special features than anything else. You seem to only get good special features on really big movies or movies made before 2010.
You probably only need the iPad. The iPad is great for giving you access to most stuff until you get home and can do the more serious work. If you absolutely must do your work away from home, get the Macbook Pro, because iPads are great, but as you mentioned, they don’t have a desktop OS, and that’s a limiting factor.
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s claim that he should be shielded from criminal prosecution keeps the justices at the center of election-year controversy for several more months and means any verdict on Trump’s alleged subversion of the 2020 vote will not come before summer....
No, the Supreme Court is not “helping” Donald Trump. This is just a rage-bait news piece, and the people who swallow the intimation that the Court is taking the case in order to get Donald Trump elected are falling for it. The Supreme Court isn’t playing kingmaker. They are doing their job.
How exactly do you know the motives of the extreme conservative Justices, half of whom were appointed by Trump? Are you a mind reader?
That’s my point.
We don’t know what the motives are of the Supreme Court. Yet because people who want to see Trump removed from the ballot didn’t get the decision they want to see fast enough, they’re inventing conspiracy theories of the Supreme Court manipulating things to benefit Trump, and the media is playing right along, saying they’re “helping” him. It’s precisely this kind of behavior that makes me despise the far right. (Well, not just this behavior, but still.)
I don’t want to see Donald Trump anywhere near the oval office ever again. But I do want to see a decision from the Supreme Court on this specific question, because I want to forever silence the people who have been trying to create a “unitary executive” in the United States.
And they are being unusually speedy. The article even says as much.
Overall, the timetable is fast compared to the regular calendar for high court briefing, oral arguments, and eventual resolution, which typically plays out over many months or close to a year. (Other cases accepted this month for review will not be heard until next fall, with decisions likely in 2025.)
Looking for some insight into what everyone is using for antivirus. I have AVG a whirl but I experienced some weird stuttering on my M2 MacBook Air, so obviously I want something that is minimally impactful on performance while still being accurate.
ClamAV has a maximum size for files that it will scan, which I believe is 20MB. I can’t tell if clamxav has the same size limit baked in, but it might! So it may not be the best solution if you have large files in your system.
In an environment of painful (almost insulting) food price increases everywhere, Wendy’s decides to remove price predictability from the equation, ensuring that I never know what I’m going to pay, except that I can guarantee I’m going to be gouged when I most want to eat.
Yeah, I don’t care what they sell. I don’t want to be treated like that.
I'm looking for advice on how to get started with a NAS, probably Synology since it's beginner friendly and often well recommended. I'm thinking of a 2 bay case with 2x4TB HDDs in RAID1 setup. What do I have to look out for in a device to get the best bang for my bucks?...
First things first: Synology as a beginner NAS is perfect! It’s what I recommend to everyone that is getting started out. So good move there.
I think you should get a four-bay NAS. You don’t have to put four drives in it; you can put two drives in it and have an upgrade path for later. Plus the drives are far easier to install and remove. The processor will also be better in a four-bay NAS, which will give you more options if you want to play around with a docker container or run a VM.
To answer your questions:
If the NAS you choose has a USB port on it, you will be able to connect things like external hard drives, thumb drives, etc. NASes with USB3 connectors support USB 3 drives. Just be sure to use a file system that is not proprietary. So NTFS is out, but exFat is fine.
I have connected to volumes on the NAS and have connected the NAS to other volumes without issues. It will work fine.
I had two NASes sitting right next to my head in my office at ear level — probably the worst case scenario for noise. I barely noticed them. I could hear them crunching away during backups, but it wasn’t bad. I never heard a fan running — just the internal drives making their read/write noises.
The drives fail before the NASes do. Synology had some issues with bult-in power supplies going bad after a few years. Their modern NASes now have plugs with a power brick on the cable, which I assume was in response to this issue. It’s a lot less expensive to replace a power cable than a whole NAS! But beyond that one issue (which affected one NAS of mine), the NASes I’ve been using have lasted for … oh, 8 years now.
There are many choices for syncing data with your synology NAS. They provide Synology Drive, which gives you a local drop-box-like folder syncing option. They support rsync, and they provide HyperBackup, which is a block-level backup utility. You can choose a Synology shared drive as the destination for a Time Machine backup on a Mac. (I assume you can do this with Windows’ backup solution, but I’ve never personally used it.)
I couldn’t find any specific information. Lots of articles and people talking about him being in the closest or not. Nothing specific though, at least not that I could find. Just, he is unmarried and childless....
This came from a gag Jon Stewart used to do on the Daily Show. It started with the Larry Craig scandal. The Daily Show was good at showing hypocrisy in Republican candidates who were anti-LGBT. In the late 2000s, it seemed like there was a story of an anti-gay Republican being outed as gay every month.
Stewart compared Graham to a melodramatic southern belle and got huge laughs. It stuck. I wan to point out that Jon Stewart never explicitly said Lindsay Graham was gay. But he was an expert at hinting it, and paired with the clips of Lindsay Graham, it was hilarious.
I started rewatching Season 1 after I heard this news. I can confidently say I want this very much. Just … not as a flashback. He can’t be as viscerally threatening if we know this is all in the past and he eventually loses.
However it should be said that a 25mph road should really be designed as a 25mph road, with suitable traffic calming measures. Far too many low speed limit roads are big and wide open, practically encouraging people to speed.
Sorry, but this is nonsensical. The wide road did not make that cop drive 75 miles per hour in a 25 mile per hour zone. That officer was responsible for his own actions, and would have found a way to drive at an unsafe speed regardless of how the road was designed.
I used homebridge for a long time, but found maintaining it to be a bit of a chore. Home Assistant was easier to maintain and configure, thanks to its web-based interface. And it has a bridge to homekit that achieves basically everything that homebridge did. You may want to investigate it!
Employers demonstrated their infidelity to their staff by paying loyal workers, on average, 7% less than new hires — 20 years ago, salaries were largely the same between new and longtime employees.
I’m a hiring manager. I have trouble even imagining the kind of person that would just throw a lead into the trash because of a recording of them getting fired. Who does that? What do you possibly have to gain by doing that? Because you have a lot to lose, especially if that candidate got far enough in the process for you to be researching their background. Nobody gets that far unless they are a very good fit.
Denise Crosby has great talent as a villain. Just look at how she jumped off the screen as Sela. After seeing where the writers went with Ro Laren, I feel confident that Yar would have filled that role. She would have been a friendly foil, either as a member of the Maquis to set up Deep Space Nine, or as an onboard intelligence officer like Malcolm Reed in Enterprise.
In the early seasons — while Roddenberry’s edict that the crew not have conflict was in effect — I think she would have befriended Data and Geordi, and would have been in many scenes with them.
It took months before the first mention of Section 3 in a public document. Free Speech For People, a Massachusetts-based liberal nonprofit, sent letters to top election officials in all 50 states in June 2021, warning them not to place Trump on the ballot should he run again in 2024 because he had violated the provision....
His research was published eight days before the insurrection? This man is clearly a time traveler from a dystopian future who was sent back in time to stop Donald Trump.
The general consensus in that thread is that, while the Vision Pro can play “flat” porn videos on sites like PornHub, there is currently not an easy way to play 180 degree side-by-side videos on the Vision Pro, which is how most commercial VR porn is filmed.
I was reading elsewhere that some companies who want to transition an H1-B worker to a permanent worker are required to post the position first. They never intend to hire anyone other than the experienced H1-B worker, so the ad stays up for a period of time until they can pretend that the H1-B worker is the only qualified candidate. I don’t know how true this is, but it sure sounds plausible.
Here’s a tip for people who do own the Apple Vision Pro: although the Vision Pro doesn’t support side-by-side video playback out of the box yet, you can use this Archive app to view it. The app has a video player included that will handle various modes of stereoscopic file playback. I haven’t tried it yet, but this is a welcome workaround.
Star Trek Lower Decks S4? (kbin.run)
I have been waiting on Star Trek Lower Decks Season 4 to be released on Blu Ray for months, does anyone know where I can buy it?...
What are some movies with notable director's commentary?
Notable can mean many things. Maybe it was high quality, insightful, and provided context for a more artistic scene. Maybe they teased a cut scene that would have radically shifted the tone of the movie. Maybe it was funny. Maybe the director absolutely hated what they produced and is only providing narration because of a...
Americans Don’t Care as Much About Work. And It Isn’t Just Gen Z. (www.wsj.com)
Blame it largely on the pandemic, which weakened the hold the workplace held on people’s psyches...
Future Student Question: MacBook, iPad Pro, both or something else?
Presently I have a MacMini (M2) and iPad Air 4th Gen...
Donald Trump uses the slow legal system to his advantage. The Supreme Court is helping (www.cnn.com)
The Supreme Court’s decision to hear Donald Trump’s claim that he should be shielded from criminal prosecution keeps the justices at the center of election-year controversy for several more months and means any verdict on Trump’s alleged subversion of the 2020 vote will not come before summer....
[MacOS] Anti-virus recommendations?
Looking for some insight into what everyone is using for antivirus. I have AVG a whirl but I experienced some weird stuttering on my M2 MacBook Air, so obviously I want something that is minimally impactful on performance while still being accurate.
Wendy's is introducing Uber style surge pricing. (www.foodandwine.com)
Beginner looking for NAS advice
I'm looking for advice on how to get started with a NAS, probably Synology since it's beginner friendly and often well recommended. I'm thinking of a 2 bay case with 2x4TB HDDs in RAID1 setup. What do I have to look out for in a device to get the best bang for my bucks?...
Why do some people think Lindsey Graham is gay?
I couldn’t find any specific information. Lots of articles and people talking about him being in the closest or not. Nothing specific though, at least not that I could find. Just, he is unmarried and childless....
David Tennant Is Down to Play 'Jessica Jones's Kilgrave Again, and I have Big Feelings (www.themarysue.com)
Speeding Seattle officer who struck and killed student will not face charges (www.theguardian.com)
Death of Jaahnavi Kandula, 23, from India, ignited outrage after fellow officer was recorded making ‘appalling’ remarks about case...
Can you manage your house with a local, no-cloud voice assistant? Mostly, yes. (arstechnica.com)
Gen Z is unhappier at work than any other generation. Here are the two things they want. (www.businessinsider.com)
Employers demonstrated their infidelity to their staff by paying loyal workers, on average, 7% less than new hires — 20 years ago, salaries were largely the same between new and longtime employees.
Gen Z is recording themselves getting fired in growing TikTok trend (www.cbsnews.com)
ST: DS9 - Behind The Scenes (1993/LaserDisc) (archive.org)
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/36f50411-c85b-4b9a-9bb0-48742e338bb9.jpeg...
If Tasha Yar stayed on the show, what do you think would have happened? How would she have been written?
The show really started to hit its stride S3 and everyone was written differently.
Here's how 2 sentences in the Constitution rose from obscurity to ensnare Donald Trump (apnews.com)
It took months before the first mention of Section 3 in a public document. Free Speech For People, a Massachusetts-based liberal nonprofit, sent letters to top election officials in all 50 states in June 2021, warning them not to place Trump on the ballot should he run again in 2024 because he had violated the provision....
A ‘$3,500 Chastity Belt’: Early Apple Vision Pro Adopters Alarmed to Learn VR Porn Doesn't Work (www.404media.co)
The general consensus in that thread is that, while the Vision Pro can play “flat” porn videos on sites like PornHub, there is currently not an easy way to play 180 degree side-by-side videos on the Vision Pro, which is how most commercial VR porn is filmed.
Economists say the labor market is strong — but job seekers don't share that confidence. Why getting a job feels impossible right now (www.cnbc.com)
‘Star Trek’ Spatial Experience Set To Launch On Apple Vision Pro (deadline.com)