This month involved a number of personal emergencies, some rethinking, and a lot of technical work, but not very much production work. Quite a bit of it is not for public consumption, but a few highlights are worth mentioning (with links to the articles):
Also:
- Review of Computer Hardware Maintenance Status.
- Caught up on Documentation.
- Recorded Additional Foley for the TR-Train Scene.
More broadly, I spent some time doing a little soul-searching about where I want to go, now that animation is finished on the pilot episode for “Lunatics!” A lot of heavy thought there that I’m not really ready to articulate. More prosaically, I spent some time looking at advice from artists, writers, and film-makers about promoting, distributing, and profiting from their work. I’m hoping to work out a good strategy for us as well. Which also involves deciding more definitively what we are as a project and what we’re trying to do.
On a more personal level, our younger offspring have moved out, making us officially “empty nesters” now, and that brings some Thoughts, to say the least. Also a lot of practical moving, cleaning, rearranging, and so on. I’m also trying to get on top of the long-running remodeling projects on our house that I’ve been kind of neglecting for a long time.
It’s been a lot.
But not a whole lot of production work. I recorded a bit of foley, and that was about it. Since it was so little, I’m not creating a production timelapse for this month. The little bit I did will be included with the next one.
August 2026 Video Logs
Video Log 2026-08-09: Hosting IT Crisis
It’s been two weeks since my last report. The main event for that time was IT work — I had to resolve a crisis with our project hosting for the “Virtual Studio” and particularly this PeerTube server.
00:00 Intro
00:19 Reuploading Videos on PeerTube
00:52 Resizing the Server to Handle Transcoding
01:31 Mistake — Resize Irreversible!
02:26 Migrating the Server to a Smaller Droplet
03:15 How Best to Do It..?
03:31 YunoHost Backup/Restore Archive Method
04:34 Misskey nose.js version problems
05:24 PeerTube would not restore! (Was another node.js problem)
07:11 New System Configuration (160GB Droplet + 100GB Volume for App Data)
08:25 Bind Mounts Better than Symlinks
09:57 Money Concerns $200 Mistake, but It’s Still ~ $60/mo (not paying for itself)
10:48 Foley Session for the Train Scene
11:47 Conclusion
11:53 Ceiling Fan (It’s Too Hot!)
Video Log 2026-08-30: Lib-Ray Mitaka
Towards the end of August, I spent some time researching and diving into the details on my fixed-media release format project, “Lib-Ray”, which has been neglected for a really long time now, and I think I’m finally making some real progress there for the first time in a long time, now that I’m ramping down from Lunatics episode production.
So the current video log is about that.
00:00 Intro
00:08 Development Mode: Lib-Ray
00:24 History of Architecture Attempts for Lib-Ray
02:31 Minor Epiphany / Cut the Crap
03:07 Mitaka Architecture
03:21 HTTP Server in Python Standard Library
03:58 Just Use a Browser for the Front End (Chromium, Firefox, Servo?)
05:11 Architecture Overview, with Block Diagram
06:39 LIRC (Linux Infrared Remote Control) Daemon
08:23 Video Player in JavaScript, Running in the Browser
11:19 Python Program Requirements
12:03 Defining “Namespaces”
13:29 Six Namespaces Used in Lib-Ray / 3 for Player
17:29 The 3 Namespaces for the Disc
19:03 Filtering of the Menu Tree
23:09 Handling the Media Files
24:29 Extra Files
24:51 Implementation Considerations for Namespace Behavior in Python
27:22 Reduced to a Manageable Problem
27:35 Scheduling: Implementation in Late Fall? (After Lunatics Audio & Release Work)
28:00 Really Can Just Prototype Menus in Chromium (100% HTML Compatible Menus)
28:24 Deliverables on Lib-Ray: “Sita Sings the Blues”, “Blender Open Movie Collection” (Now bigger?)
29:52 An “Aside” from Lunatics / More About Scheduling and Lunatics (Spaceweek? Early October)
31:11 That’s It for Now…
31:24 A Little Light Show
I cut a different, slightly-shorter video about the Lib-Ray Mitaka proposal for the Film Freedom channel. This is part of a new series of videos I want to work on to produce more “evergreen” content with topics, rather than simply progress reports. For now, I called this one a “Brief”:
Brief: Lib-Ray Mitaka
A brief introduction to the 2026 Architecture Proposal for Lib-Ray, called “Mitaka”.
00:00 Intro
00:50 Overview of Structure
02:39 Namespaces
04:05 Player Namespaces: “Sys”, “Lib”, and “Ark”
07:15 Disc Namespaces “Menu”, “Media”, and “Extra”
08:05 Filtering the Menu Tree
12:31 Media files (served in-place)
13:51 Extra files handling
14:13 Evaluating the Difficulty of the Implementation (Easy?)
15:08 Starting Implementation in Late Fall 2026?
15:45 Light show
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