Any thoughts on GitS: Arise?

The Omega Glory. S2E23

It did. But it existed so long it’s like a ghost that will be haunting thoughts and answers for a long time. Even dead it looms large in what it was.

Rutracker dot org has a massive selection of albums in flac quality. Many artists have whole discography uploaded. Use tools like cuetools to convert single album flac to individual tracks and/or to convert to mp3’s or other preferred format (I like aac).

If by socialist policies you mean ruled by a communist party then hell yes. It would be a dream come true to live in for example China.

No idea. I’d personally rip it with YT-DLP with subs and put it on plex or similar but if you don’t have such a setup that may be more work than it’s worth.

YouTube used to have the whole thing. Let me check my bookmarks and get back to you.

edit: And here you go: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A74YChOkSpY&list=PLJpCdaWK6PVpeWbeUSjw4dBWt5IKK5Buj&index=1

Not sure if it’s the whole thing but it’s many, many episodes with English subtitles.

I’ve looked into this before and there is no word or equivalent phrase for what you’re talking about.

Effeminization is more about men seen as too feminine so it’s not it.

Inadequacy as a woman/girl is I guess the closest. There are idealized forms you’re pushed to be like when you’re growing up and into adulthood. Breasts are probably the closest stand-in for testicles in this context but it’s not a perfect one.

The instance you’re on censors slurs. Mainly the b-word (misogynist term for women), but also the n-word (racial slur), various other lesser used racial slurs.

It does not censor general profanity like fuck, ass, shit.

Your only option is to open an account on another instance that doesn’t have as strict of a filter. Lemmy world for instance.

All content even from other instances is subject to this filter because it goes through your instance to get to you via federation.

Do make sure your rips are good high bitrate ones if you can. It makes all the difference in being able to software upscale in video players successfully and generally making them look more acceptable in the HD age (1500-2000kbps for HEVC, 2000-3000kbps for AVC, 3000+ for anything older like mpeg2).

Whenever I need to do DVDs (no HD source) I tend to go for the direct rips with vob files and convert myself (unless I can find good encodes from a group like QxR or TAoE or private trackers Internals) as the older avi rips you find are typically just low quality from another age.

And yeah, proper ML up-scaling is incredibly intensive. You need a good high core count processor and probably 3-6 hours per half hour of video if not twice that.

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).

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.

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).

torrentleech dot org has just opened their doors with an invite code on their homepage for a “very limited time”.

If you are interested in dipping your toes into private trackers TL is pretty good in terms of amount of content. I will warn you though that because they open their doors frequently it’s known that they are not entirely free of copyright trolls so use a VPN or a seedbox. Please be sure to read the rules after you sign up and before you grab anything. Focus on newly released, popular freeleech files first to build ratio and buffer before trying to download anything that isn’t freeleech.

This is so sad and bad. This was the one site that had built-in mediainfo for all uploads. You could tell at a glance what was garbage and what wasn’t with a fair degree of certainty. They also were as a result an informal chapters database for movies (plex still maintains a chapters db but they closed it to new submissions in like 2015/2016 or so, so rarbg had chapters for newer movies if the release you got didn’t include them).

They were also not only an incredible source of scene releases but also last resort stuff. There are incredibly rare movies, tv shows that they had their budget-sized encodes of (better than yify/yts which is just intolerably bad looking) which were seeded which you couldn’t find elsewhere outside of very elite private trackers. If you wanted full season packs of some old not so popular TV show from decades ago, rarbg was the only place you could find it (eztv has some stuff but nowhere near as much and I dislike them for the way they pollute and spam api searches in qbittorrent by returning irrelevant random results when there are no real hits on their site when using movie searaching).

By comparison 1337x is at least a tenth if not a hundredth the size in terms of meaningful content (lots of garbage by bad encoders, encoders who I don’t trust not to insert a big burned in “encoded by asshole<name>, visit my spam and malware friends at totallysafesite dot ua”). With rarbg you could count on having subtitles available 99% of the time. You could count on reasonably well done encodes without visible artifacting except upon frame-by-frame analysis. You could count on direct scene releases from known groups as well as their own. They had amiable stuff, NTB webrips, sparks, many others. It was all curated. You wouldn’t find bad encodes or encodes with text spam in them there.

Now, for a lot of things the only option left on only lower tier (/r/opensignups stuff) private trackers is downloading full BD rips and remuxes and re-encoding at enormous expense of time, cpu cycles, heat, etc. For TV shows this is quite an ask as a season alone could easily be over a hundred GB, a full show (and private trackers usually have rules that mean you either have to download the whole thing and seed for a week or seed forever in a vain hope of reaching 1:1 on a partial) could be a terabyte.

Regarding alternatives:

piratebay is pretty much useless for anything but ancient collection torrents IMO. I mean sure people upload stuff but it seems to only be stuff that’s already been uploaded in better places previously. That plus the lack of vetting, malware torrents for software. Generally seems recommended against in most of the piracy scene for anything but last resort. You won’t find good scene releases there or good stuff from quality release groups (unless someone uploaded it as a one-off), won’t find scene stuff with any frequency, there are no native release groups there of any notable quality that I’m aware of.

torrents-csv.ml though an incredible project is just a mirror. No new torrents can be uploaded there. And it doesn’t contain a place for comments or media info (you have to actually open the magnet link or torrent to see the files and download them for mediainfo running against them). So while that’s useful and I’m definitely thankful to the person behind it as in moments like this it’s invaluable, it also has severe limits and if other sites collapsed it would be no replacement.

I’d say the last standing truly good public sites with any variety are 1337x dot to and rutracker dot org. Admittedly rutracker is semi-private but anyone can get the magnet links without signup and you can sign up easily enough not knowing Russian using translation tools. (Use jackett with a rutracker account so you never have to log in and deal with reading around in russian to actually get content)

1337x’s content is also mirrored or re-uploaded on limetorrents (website looks odd, kind of sucks), kickasstorrents (just people leaching off the name sadly but a nice mirror and tracker announcer at least), torlock (no idea, website not as nice as leetx).

However leetx has frequent outages, frequently doesn’t even respond to api queries via jackett and with the death of UTR years ago has only one major release group (QxR) left along with a few dedicated quality releasers who release stuff on a very small scale and infrequently. Additionally it has no requirements for mediainfo which means you have no idea what you’re getting with many of the uploaders. Maybe it’s some crappy encode with italian and no english track. Maybe it lacks subtitles.

And QxR doesn’t do releases of TV shows except when the season is up and they only do a small number of those compared to the amount of new content produced, a totally inadequate replacement (1/1000th of rarbg TV content easily). I know that for example rips of streaming shows, the latest episodes always hit rarbg first. I’m not even convinced that the uploads on other sites like leetx weren’t just people downloading those then re-uploading or at least using them as a source, quickly re-encoding at crap quality and then uploading.

This all said, if you’re reeling from this, do look into entry private trackers /r/opensignups. You will have to wait a while. Most trackers do open up around Christmas/New Years, TL just had an invite give-away for spring which expired (though with rarbg vanishing they may do some sign-ups soon, hard to say). You do need to check daily or every other day as slots can fill up quickly and sometimes openings are only 48 hours. Beware private trackers have rules and it is very easy to get banned if you do not thoroughly read and understand them. If you don’t have a machine that can seed for 12 out of 24 hours a day or more and can’t buy a seedbox you probably won’t be able to stay on most of them.