Less Help

I finally learned something new, and it was painful.

I haven't really bettered myself in any objective way in 10 years probably. I know what I know, and do what I do, and that's all I have time for. There are bills to pay, and every day is a new wasted lifetime.

Since college, I have "acquired" "media" through "online networks"... you might say it is like a a collection of "peers" sharing with other "peers." I used to burn like 2-4 yet-to-be released movies onto DVDs and sell them to make some extra money during my summer classes in college.

I had a very early network media player; a novel-at-the-time D-Link DSM-520 network media player that I picked up using my generous Best Buy Employee Discount of Cost plus 15%. I lived in a house with 4 other dudes, and I thought it would be a sick way to do movie nights.

Imagine it's 2006. You and your bros just scooped some wings to-go from Beef O'Brady's. None of you have Friday classes. You plop down on your couches, which have been arranged on top of stolen pallets in a mock stadium-style seating arrangement. You turn on your 52" DLP rear projection TV to watch a 240i camrip of Silent Hill. Living the fucking dream.

LMAO. God I'm dying just remembering that. We all just had to pretend that we could see anything through the dark scenes. Collective consciousness. Telepathic communication about how awful this experience is. But we had chicken wings, each other, and elevated couches. That was enough.

Over the years, I have amassed a media library that isn't particularly large, but I'm proud of most of the stuff I was able to "save." Until maybe 3 years ago most of my library wasn't even accessible on streaming services—solid 7/10 tv shows that were only given one or two seasons like Shark (2008), Eli Stone (2008), and Terriers (2010); seminal Nickelodeon shows like Salute Your Shorts (1991), The Secret World of Alex Mack (1994), The Angry Beavers (1997); and Nick-at-Nite Summer Blockbuster staples that informed much of my adolescent humor like Taxi (1978), Welcome Back Kotter (1975), and Get Smart (1965).

Some of the jewels of my collection are rendered moot due to every studio having a streaming service, but there are still some things that you simply cannot watch anywhere, saying nothing of whether or not you would actually want to. Surf Ninjas (1993), a movie I rented so many times from Phar-Mor that the employee eventually just gave me the VHS when they took it off the shelves, still holds up.

Tripping The Rift (2004)

An FX " adult CGI science fiction comedy television series" whose protagonist is named Chode McBlob. There is a very smart character that was originally built to be a sex robot. You get the gist.

Raines (2007)

A quasi-noir who-dun-it where Jeff Golbum is a detective who has visions of the dead people whose murders he's investigating.

Dogma (1999)

Insane that this movie isn't on streaming somewhere. I have to imagine this is either due to an absolute nightmare of licensing rights or that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon want to suppress the spread of this piece of their past.

Some of these things you can still find and download. Others would require you to purchase actual, physical media to view.

I appreciate people who catalog. People with determination (and maybe just a touch of autism) and a fierce dedication to say "I like this. It should exist in the future, and be easily accessible for others who might like it."

Until Apple purchased the rights to Peanuts, where could you watch any of the 50+ tv specials? The answer was nowhere... until Skills Just Take Extra Time, aka the Charlie Brown torrent group. Just read the process of what each of these people did all to just get a cartoon on the internet.

There are plenty of other examples like Fabutrash, who religiously uploaded 1080P rips of RuPaul's Drag Race (including the hard-to-find Season 1) waaaaaaaaaay before you could just log into Paramount+ and binge 15 seasons.

There's a YouTube user named cashmoneymuzik who had 474 videos of Sqad Up/Lil Wayne music without monetization turned on. Sadly, he and all that content is lost forever (most likely due to Google's arbitrary purge of inactive accounts).

This longwinded setup is pertinent. I promise. The thing that occupies most of my brain is the collapse of media and The Internet. The loss is imperceptible most times. You put your head down then look up 5 years later and Google Search is no longer serviceable. You download an album in Apple Music then a year later listen to the DSP version and suddenly it sounds different, or the tracklist has changed. As someone whose mother is a borderline hoarder, I recognize that gene is in me... I see the value in things that may or may not come to fruition. I'll hold onto some outdated cable adapter in a box in the attic for 8 years, and suddenly I need it. Validation.

I finally decided to set up a Network Attached Storage device to host all my media. Instead of three different hard drives connected to an old iMac in a spare bedroom closet, I would now have an accessible server for streaming. It's been a decade-plus since I had to set up RAID arrays, or were even using an OS other than Mac.

So I decided to learn Linux and get an understanding of Docker to run a suite of apps that would make managing my library and downloading new things automated.

It took me two months. Something that I now realize would take a half-day from start-to-finish, took me two months. There is an obvious learning curve for the idiosyncracies of Linux (file structure, permissions, case-sensitivity.), and I never had the opportunity to sit down for four straight uninterrupted hours to figure out issues. But, still. Two months part-time.

One of the main reasons for this is the lack of centralized information. Are there guides for setting this exact stack (Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Deluge, etc.) up? Yes! They exist on YouTube. They exist on Github. They exist on Reddit. The problem is that every one of them is years old—and even a recent QNAP Software Update from three months ago rendered comprehensive guides useless as settings and screenshots don't match up.

I know I'm old because I cannot stand synthesizing information from video. I would rather have text and screenshots. One afternoon of going through 20 different YouTube videos and being forced into viewing 100 pre-roll/mid-roll videos only to realize three minutes in (because the first two are HWHATTUPYOUTUBE PLEASE LIKE AND SUBSCRIBE intros) that they are not relevant made me ready to commit domestic terrorism. You gotta love watching a video and then seeing in the comments that they have made an updated, separate version of this video...

At best, each guide, whether video or text, was at best 70% complete. In most cases the suggested way of setting up the file structures were incorrect, and the comments would point you to a different years-old guide about how to properly set up things first, but then that way didn't easily translate back over to the other, more recent guide. If I ran into an error or question, I would usually end up on a three-year-old reddit post where a bunch of people chime in with the consensus of "well it depends on your use case" or just simply RTFM responses. I did, you smug piece of shit! But what I need isn't covered there!

I finally threw my hands up. I was at a true loss. I broke my internally sacred belief to never make a reddit account to comment on a reddit post...

I contracted a developer in Greece named Sotiris on Fiverr to set this up for me. Only issue is that I use a Mac, and he knows Windows. I borrowed my mom's HP Laptop to make it easier for him to remote in and do what he needed to. After 3 hours, he had almost nothing completed. He wasn't familiar with the VPN setup I was attempting to bind my VPN to. There were permission errors... I paid him $60 for his time ("my friend if you would like to tip me for my time today then contact me to set up another appointment when you have reset your NAS to fix the permission errors"). I'm such a nice guy.

Seeing what he started to do in real-time, it finally clicked. The next day I had everything set up.

Up to that point, the recurring theme was that even when knowledge base content is excellent, it wasn't maintained; its utility eroded. These things aren't maintained, because who has the time or want? What value does it create now?

I began to realize that there are no "help center" repository-type places. The age of self-service is no more. Knowledge exists in a handful brains, and you have to be hopeful enough that those few people log in to a site every few weeks, and see your question, and reply to your post with actual care and empathy.

The support for a lot of these personal projects and applications is maintained on their own individual Discord servers. And while you could certainly join them and ask a question that's been posed 100 times before and get an unhelpful "👉#FAQ" reply, it's maddening. I would have needed to join 15 different servers that I am never going to continue to be a member of to get a straight answer for questions like "Should this app's volume be set at the root folder level? Or do I need to set up specific shares just for the folders it downloads and hardlinks from, which the README.md instructions say to but then pointed me to an example elsewhere that doesn't do that?" This decentralized approach is not good for the future health of a connected people. It's not easily accessible. It's not easily found. It's not easily preserved. Key niche knowledge is locked away in a reply message, far removed from the context needed to locate it.

The recipes aren't lost; it's just no one knows where to get the ingredients.

After everything was up and running, I was pleasantly surprised to find https://trash-guides.info/ for the optimizations of each of these pieces of software.

When I started using Sonarr/Radarr, I noticed that it didn't grab the releases that I actually wanted, as I'm a bit picky about which releases and what quality I prefer. So I decided to fine tune it to try to get the releases & quality I preferred. On Discord, I also noticed that others run in to the same issue so I explained them how I managed to get it solved. Being that I had to explain it often, I decided to write it down and make it public so I could easily link it to someone when they needed it. After a while I also decided to create guides for frequently asked questions, and started to collect all kind of information gathered from various sources. I try to make my guides as easy as possible for everyone to understand, in my opinion pictures explain often more than just some text.

It laid out every setting reason and definitive answers/recommendations for every use case... not just depending on the use case. It is a vast, comprehensive, well-organized knowledge base. Look at this flowchart below that he created. I am in one of the minority whose answer permutations arrive at the All HDR Formats + DV (WEBDL) with a score of -10000 + HDR10+ Boost CF with a score of +901 result in the bottom left because I have a Samsung OLED (which doesn't support Dolby Vision), and a full SONOS 7.1 set-up. In fact, I ditched my Apple TV 4K and got an NVIDIA Shield Pro because I didn't realize that ATV doesn't pass HD audio.

How long would this shit have taken on a Reddit post? Or on a Discord server chatting with users of various IQs and experience? It's truly a beautiful collection of expert knowledge. Insights as to why you would might do something one way or another. Warnings about combining different settings... I sent him $60 as a thank you. I would have sent more, but Sotiris got to me first.

There is more content today, but not more value. It always ends up being one person driving something that lasts. Creating something valuable out of an insane want or need, and keeping at it even when it seems like there is no point. It is a thankless job, for sure, but one that others won't really see the value in until they do. I think that's helpful to remember.