My newest wallpapers: 2x Lenore Karidian (from The Conscience Of The King), 1x Christine Chapel (The Naked Time) and 1x Kirk (also from The Naked Time) 🙂 Loved making these, and am very happy with them!
Health update after a long while.
I’ve been flaring since early January, with my Crohn’s Disease symptoms somewhat worse in general but getting out of hand particularly when I’m on my period. I had my yearly Crohn’s Disease control labs and doctor’s appointment in the university hospital on February 3rd. There’s inflammation in the bowel and I’m not surprised because of said increase in symptoms, but at least for once it happened right when I had to have the labs done anyway, so didn’t need to do anything extra! The doctor upped azathioprine back to the original dosage and added in cortisteroids for three months because azathioprine takes that long to start to have an effect. Labs every three months and in August I’ll hear if the inflammation has improved. If not, the doctor said we’ll have to consider starting a biologic.
I don’t know yet whether cortisteroids has helped the inflammation any, but I’m certain it’s made both my chronic migraine worse as well as my sleeping problems. Because headache and sleep problems are among the many side affects listed, and both have gotten very much worse in the two weeks since I’ve been taking it. My basic, daily migraine headache pain has gone from 3-4 to 5-6, and I’ve averaged obly 3-4 hours of sleep a night for 1,5 weeks now, not all of it even continuous sleep. I’m having trouble both getting to sleep, and staying asleep, and I’m having a lot of dreams again. These two things are currently really making my life hard. I’m not sure whether I should be in contact with the IBD nurses – the last time I was on cortisteroids, I was in bad enough shape with the migraine and sleep that I didn’t feel any additional effects regards headache or sleep from cortisteroids, or just didn’t have them. But now that both my daily migraine has been somewhat better and especially sleep has been a lot betterer, although not good like it was when I was healthy…. this now feels very hard to endure, and I’m not sure whether I’m supposed to or not? I’m also a little worried that the side effects won’t go away after ending cortisteroids. It was a long road to decent sleep, and I despair thinking it’s gone away again 🙁
So far, I have missed one rehabilitation day (with a doctor’s note) out of three because of the flaring, and would have missed more if there hadn’t been a break in rehabilitation for most of January. I have a rehabilitation day tomorrow (Wednesday), I’ll see how it goes and the rest of the week and then maybe contact the IBD nurses if I still feel as bad? Maybe I actually should be on sick leave?
If I go silent for a while, and don’t make any updates, my health is why. I’m so tired I made an incredible number of spelling and wrong word mistakes while writing this, hope I caught most of them!
Other thoughts... it feels really strange to be finished with capping Star Treks DS9, VOY, TNG and TOS! (Never have had plans to cap ENT or early seasons of VOY, so I’m in effect finished except for new eps of PIC and DSC) Feels like there’s this huge hole now because the need to cap them has been in the background for like 20 years. Good thing there’s Picard, and Discovery. Also, this is the first time in my life when I have ready and easy access to currently airing Star Trek. That feels so weird too!
I’m enjoying Picard a lot, I love the slow, considered space that gives the characters time to breathe! I’ve always loved Romulans, so I’m happy to have much focus on them. And I love that we’ve been getting glimpses of life on Earth, and civilian life too. I don’t think any other Trek ever showed more than brief glimpses of that and it was always with guest-stars, too. And I squeed when 7of9 beamed in in the last few seconds of episode 4 – she’s been missed!
For a huge TOS fan, it’s shocking that I’ve done so few TOS wallpapers! I mean, TOS was the reason I learned to make screencaps and the reason I wanted to do screencaps, one of them anyway, was so I could make fanart. So, here are two TOS wallies. I hope to make many more!
Looks like the next 10 days are going into kill me already and be done with it territory with temperatures between 26-31 Celcius. This past weekend already nearly did me in. I’ll propably be on hiatus as far as all my sites go, until this stupid heat is over, however long that takes – two weeks, two months… who knows! I hope my fan keeps working, it’s six years old now and I worry it’ll break down just when I need it the most!
In breaking news, Jeri Ryan has apparently signed on Star Trek: Picard 😀 Here’s hoping it’s a meaty role, not just a cameo!
I finished screencapping Star Trek: The Next Generation from Bluray a few days ago! Including all seven seasons and all four TNG movies. Frankly I didn’t actually think this day would ever come! It was such a daunting task, which was made hugely easier when last year I upgraded my internet connection to a better one that came with a significant upstream upgrade too! 😀 Since that upgrade, uploading one episode’s worth of screencaps only takes about 5-10 minutes 😀 Contrast that to an hour which it always took before from about 2010 onwards, and two to three hours the decade before that. Gotta love advance in technology!
Anyway, I always felt/thought/kept hoping that by the time I finished (if I ever finish) capping TNG, DS9 and maybe even VOY would be remastered in HD and out on Bluray and that I’d just continue on with DS9 Blurays. BUT, and I can’t believe this, but neither DS9 nor VOY have been remastered in HD! There aren’t even rumours!
I can’t believe it. What are TPTB thinking?! I think that DS9 and VOY will be totally forgotten if they aren’t released in HD – people aren’t going to be wanting to see anything in SD anymore in the future, I know I already don’t if there’s an HD option. Except maybe the hard core, mostly already existing Star Trek fans, who’ll bitterly make do with SD and DVDs. There’ll be no new viewers because even if the shows are on Netflix etc. quality will be so low compared to remastered in HD Star Trek and currrent, modern shows that I don’t believe casual viewers, who could turn into fans, are willing to give SD-only shows a chance. I just really think they’re are in danger of wasting a huge chunk of the Star Trek property by not remastering DS9 and VOY in HD.
Also, the Jeri Ryan fan in me wants to see 7of9 really, really badly in HD. It’d be glorious.
I can’t bloody believe it! The one time I miss Yle’s Six O’clock news, Star Trek makes the news in Finland *headdesk* This is history, man!
Namely, the Destination Star Trek convention in London and a brief interview with William Shatner. This is one of the very few times (the first? the only?) outside of new movie announcements in movie news (which doesn’t count) Star Trek makes any kind of news in Finland, much less one of the main news broadcasts and I miss it?! Praise be to my Mom and Yle Areena – at least I got to see it there if not live!
I’m liking my hiatus, and it will continue at least the end of this month… I’m even contemplating extending it to the end of May. Maybe.
Star Trek TOS screencapping…
I have capped ALL of Star Trek TOS 😀 And even uploaded almost all of it – only have The Original, Uncut, Unaired Version of Where No Man Has Gone Before left to upload… should should get all upped this coming night while I’m sleeping, and then I’ll make the final TOS update. I can’t believe I’m finally here! 😀 VHS, DVD, Bluray screencapping… it’s all been a labor of love, but TPTB had better not come out with an announcement of the release of TOS on whatever-superduperultrahightspecialquolityformat-that-will-replace-bluray-whenever at least for the next 10 years because if I they do, I’m gonna kill someone! 😉
On other hand, it’s going to feel weird, not needing/planning/having to/wanting to cap TOS. I’ve lived and breathed TOS screencapping since I got online in 1997 and if taking photos of television counts log before I ever had a computer, something like 1990 (Yep, I’m obsessed! They’d never included photos of characters I wanted in magazines, so I found my own solution! LOL). There’s no other show I’m as much into as TOS. Dark Skies is the closest second, but I don’t feel the compulsion to cap it the same way I feel TOS. It’s going to be weird, and empty, and I hope, great!
About youtube clone video sharing scripts…
As you may or may not know, several of my sites have Media sections – video clips of my actors and tv shows. I’ve never found exactly the kind of program I wanted – one that would be look like the usual youtube clone scripts such as PHPMotion, Clipbucket etc. but that would not re-convert the files upload. That because, no matter how much I messed with the settings, the outcome quality was never good as what I got when I encoded the video clips myself, using whatever program I favored at the time. I’d tested all of the freeware video sharing scripts, over the years, and found them all wanting.
I also contemplated testing vshare, which is not freeware – it costs only 10 USD, but I read so many people having problems first installing it, and then upgrading it, and quite frankly, I didn’t believe it’d have the feature I was after, that I didn’t want to wasted 10 dollars only to confirm that (they don’t offer a trial version).
Well, I got a copy from somebody to test this weekend, and low and behold, not only was it NOT hard to install, but it also does NOT re-convert FLV files but instead just adds them to the database. And it also does that with also FLVs that are encoded with x/h264 (which is my preferred codec at the moment because of good quality and small file sizes) instead of Sorenson/flash, AND it also plays them!
So what I’ve been desperately looking for and not finding, has been under my nose at least for the past 2 years *head desk* What do I learn from this? Something I should already know: never ever listed to other people when it comes to difficulties with scripts. Always try it out for yourself, and then make your decisions based on your own user experience.
TV Shows…
Started a rewatch of Lost, and been working my way through season 1. And know what? I still love season 1 just as much as I did the first time around. I just… LOVE it!
Lucy Lawless is playing a recurring character in the last three or four episodes of No Ordinary Family. I watched her eps, and they show appeared promising, so I decided to get all the season 1 eps and watch from the beginning. Especially because Julie Benz is in it, and I liked her Buffy/Angel. But it’s just not working… I’m about six or 7 episodes in, and there’s hints and promise there, nothing comes of them. Everything is solved by the end of the ep, anything darkish sizzles out and all is light and hugs and roses and goody-goody and whatever. It’s like the stories try to take a turn for the darker side, but every goddamn time TPTB force it kicking and screaming back into the “for the whole family” mentality. And George/Charlie/Whatever-His-Name-Is, you know, Michael Chiklis’ best friend? Does he have a life? You know, other than being Chiklis’ sidekick? Because so far it sure doesn’t look like that. I think he blinks out of existence whenever he isn’t working with Chiklis on his superheroing. Oh, and speaking of Chiklis – are you telling me nobody sees this short, fat guy jumping around all the bloody time, and making hell of a noise everytime he lands? The sound efffects make it sound like his landings should put him through the rooftops half the time, and the other half, should leave huge dents on the buildings. But whatever.
I was a huge comic books fan in my youth, mostly X-Men and varions of it, but I’ve never really wanted to seem made into movies or tv series. And what happened with Heroes, just confirmed it. And No Ordinary Family isn’t changing my opinion 🙁
Another new show I’m watching is Body Of Proof, in which Jeri Ryan plays a supporting role as Dana Delany’s boss. It’s about a neuro-surgeon come medical examiner and Dana Delany plays the lead, Dr Megan Hunt. Three episodes have aired now, and so far these are the things I like about the show: the fact that all the main actors/characters are at least in their 35-40s (no teenage doctors etc. here!), women are in charge, and the character interactions are getting better by the episode. So far at least.
These are the things I don’t like so far: Dana Delany doesn’t wear the hair-cover-thingy when she’s examining the bodies in her laboratory! D: And in those scenes, it’s all I can think about how unbelievable that is. I know wearing a hair-cover-thingy tends to make the wearer look less glamorous and sexy, but come on! After shows like Silent Witness, you just look vain and sloppy! And for a show that’s supposed to be all about the bodies giving Dana Delany evidence and leads about their murders, there has been zero shown autopsies. Zero as in I thought she hadn’t done it yet to the corpse in question until I saw the sowed up ‘Y’ incision when the camera panned the upper torso of the body. And even the ‘Y’ incision looked wrong – it was different from all the other hundreds of medical examiner scenes I’ve seen in other shows and movies. Instead of doing medical exam things, Delany’s character spends most of her time running around the city and asking the detectives’ questions for them! And in the first two episodes, she pulled the answer to the age old question “Who did it?” out of her ass rather than any examinaton of the body, IMHO. In the third it wasn’t quite as bad, but not good either. There’s insight, and then there’s insight that is just lazy writing.
It’s a pity, because I LOVE good medical examiner stories and I love stories where grown up women tell the story, so this show should be just up my alley. Sadly not 🙁 But Body Of Proof has Jeri Ryan. And while I’m not Dana Delany “fan” fan, I’ve enjoyed seeing her in things ever since her China Beach days. So, I’ll keep watching and hope they’ll change up they handling of the cases in future episodes. Continue reading Random Thoughts