It’s time once again to update the podcast calendar and look forward to what’s scheduled for the first six months of 2025.

Coming into the year, we’re rotating through Star Maidens, Space: Above and Beyond, and Real Humans, Series 1.

We’ll finish our coverage of Space: Above and Beyond in January, and in the ongoing spirit of 1990s military nonsense in space, we’re (finally) starting our complete coverage of 1993’s Space Rangers.

Our coverage of Real Humans’ first series concludes in March, and Simon and Eugene will cover the animated reconstruction of the Doctor Who serial, The Savages, which is due to be released in March. They’ll then move on to the fourth and final season of Bugs.

All good things must end, so it shall be with our coverage of Star Maidens, which is also scheduled to end in March, at which point, John and Eugene will dive into the much-anticipated, and much-requested coverage of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century!

But always remember, no matter how meticulously planed our schedule is, the BBC and Disney+ are expected to screw it all up one of these days by announcing the release date of the next series of Doctor Who.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/12/30/coming-in-2025/

#BehindTheScenes #PatrollingBeyondFusion

On Monday, July 22, 2024, Simon and I will record Fusion Patrol’s 700th episode. We will examine the classic 1951 sci-fi film, “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” The episode is scheduled to drop in Early September.

That we’ve produced 700 episodes boggles my mind.

Sometimes, I look at the podcast indexes out there, and I see the littered remains of so many podcasts that started to look at many of the series we’ve already covered and they failed to complete their run for just a single series.

Perhaps they were thinking they were going to make money at it and gave up when they realized it was just the opposite.

It’s these times that I think that my combination of bloody-minded stubbornness and borderline OCD has its place in the world.

Listeners, we don’t get too many opportunities for interactivity, but if you have any comments about The Day the Earth Stood Still or even about the fact that we’re hitting 700 episodes, get them to us before Monday, and they might make the podcast.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/07/19/700-and-counting/

#BehindTheScenes #PatrollingBeyondFusion

This week, we begin our coverage of the 2012 Swedish sci-fi series, Äkta människor, more commonly known in the English-speaking world as “Real Humans.”

I’ve waxed on in earlier posts how much we enjoyed watching and talking about Real Humans, and I hope you find it interesting, too.

The series was produced in 2012 by SVT, the Swedish national television channel. It’s set an in alternate 2012 timeline where human-like robots, called “hubots,” are commonplace in homes, businesses, and (perhaps slightly less overtly) bedrooms.

It tackles themes of exploitation, prejudice, free will, friendship, sexual attraction, and the ubiquity of the USB-A port.

The program has two series, each ten episodes long. Our coverage of Series One begins this Saturday, July 20th, 2024.

How you can watch the show for yourself will depend on your country and the tech you have available. Swedish Blu-rays are available in places like Amazon but may not play in your player. If you can get around that, I’m not aware of any releases in English or even with English subtitles. Fan-produced subtitle files are available at opensubtitles.com.

Real Humans may also be available on streaming services in your country. Good luck!

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/07/18/sex-with-robots/

#PatrollingBeyondFusion #RealHumans

We’ve come to the end of another Doctor Who series, which means its time to reflect back and announce what comes next.

When Fusion Patrol was first created, we imagined a podcast that was looking episode-by-episode at TV shows that time had been, perhaps, forgotten. We never envisioned needing to be “timely” because we were planning on looking at shows that were decades old. There’s no rush to edit, produce, and drop a pod talking about a 1970’s episode of Logan’s Run. Today, tomorrow, next month… it’s pretty much all the same.

While that was our original goal, and I would argue that we’ve been quite successful at it (more on that in a later post) when we actually got to a place where our ducks were in enough of a row that we could begin recording, we were right in the middle of the 2010 Doctor Who series – Matt Smith’s first.

Yes, there were then and still are dozens, if not hundreds, of podcasts looking at every episode of Doctor Who, but Ben and I were enjoying Steven Moffat’s revamp of the series, and we decided, “What the hell, why not get our feet wet on one of our all-time favorite programs?”

The first episode of Fusion Patrol was on April 28, 2010, and it looked at Time of Angels.

After the series ended, we did a couple more episodes about Doctor Who, and then we started our “regular programming” in August 2010 with Sapphire & Steel.

Since then, it has been Fusion Patrol tradition to look at every new series of Doctor Who as it premiers. However, this practice throws our standard workflow into the dumpster, which is quite disruptive. We’ve tried several different approaches with varying degrees of success, and none of them work out quite right.

This year, I gave myself a break by completely giving John and Kenneth the months of May and June off from recording episodes, but Simon and I still had to struggle to get Doctor Who done. We have to make the time to watch the episodes ASAP after they drop. We’ve got to schedule a time when we’re both available, and then afterward, I start the fight editing and posting the episodes. It’s never fast enough or soon enough.

While we don’t have ad-based sponsors, and this podcast has never been a commercial venture, we still like to get plays and find new listeners. With so much Doctor Who competition in the podosphere, getting the episodes out as soon as possible maximizes the number of plays. Delays mean people get tired of listening to all the takes on the most recent episode.

Doctor Who breaks our release schedule and tends to push us over our monthly storage quota. Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t post another podcast episode until July. I had to break things to get the last episode out before then.

But that’s all done for 2024 until Christmas Day. Our regular schedule will return starting July 6, 2024, when we begin our look at the 1977/78 NBC series Quark.

Quark was created by Buck Henry (co-creator of the classic series Get Smart) and meant as a spoof of Star Trek. Just a few weeks after the pilot aired, a little thing called Star Wars came along, adding a new twist to the series’ development. The first regular episode of the series, somewhat re-tooled from the pilot, was a Star Wars spoof, “May the Source Be With You,” and aired in February of 1978. Quark featured Richard Benjamin as Captain Adam Quark of an unnamed United Galaxy Sanitation Patrol cruiser with its dysfunctional crew.

Quark was a 30-minute show with neither many episodes nor much intellectual depth. We’ll examine two episodes at a time, covering the entire series in four podcasts.

As we always like to say, “Come join the conversation.“

…also, “The Universe Ad Infinitum!“

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/06/26/doctor-who-season-is-a-slog-and-quark-is-coming/

#DoctorWho #PatrollingBeyondFusion #Quark

It’s been a while since I’ve given you an update, but we have definitive info, so I can finally plan out the mid-year release schedule – more or less.

Doctor Who will start May 11, 2024, so we’ll release our traditional contemporaneous Doctor Who podcast episodes. Since Doctor Who is back to “airing” (although, really, “dropping” in the right word these days) on Saturdays, we are planning to release our episodes exactly one week after they air, with our Patreon early-access feed releasing on the Wednesday prior.

Apparently, two episodes of DW are dropping on May 11th; we do not yet know if these are two distinct episodes or a single two-parter. We may or may not have a second release in the first week.

The timing for DW this year is pretty good for us. Two series, Neo Ultra Q and Bugs Series 3, will end just prior to the start of DW. We’ll pick up with two new series in July when DW finishing airing. Space Above and Beyond will still be mid-series and will go on a release hiatus until July.

In July, we haven’t quite finalized what series we’ll be looking at next. One of them will be Real Humans Series 1, and the other will either be Quark, the 1977 short-lived, Buck Henry-created parody series of Star Trek (and, to a lesser degree, Star Wars), or Star Maidens, the 1976 ITV Sci-Fi gender politics satire. (I think it’s probably considered a satire. Who knows?)

Which would you rather see us release first?

#DoctorWho #NeoUltraQ #Bugs #RealHumans #Quark #StarMaidens #SpaceAboveAndBeyond

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/03/25/mid-year-doctor-who-shake-up/

#BehindTheScenes #Bugs #DoctorWho #NeoUltraQ #PatrollingBeyondFusion #Quark #RealHumans #SpaceAboveAndBeyond #StarMaidens

This week, we only have one recording session. On Wednesday, John and I will discuss the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century episode Planet of the Amazon Women.

Next Week, Kenneth and I will finish off the last two episodes of Children of the Dog Star, and John and I will pick up the pieces of our failed recording of Buck Roger’s Unchained Woman.

I’ve been deeply engrossed in another writing project and just haven’t had much time to write for PBF. I’m hoping to be done with it soon.

In the meantime, this might amuse you. It certainly did me. For years, I’ve been just a bit salty that Fusion Patrol has never made it to Wikipedia. It has no business being there, but many things there have no business.

We got second place, though, as Simon recently discovered that Fusion Patrol is in IMDB!

Why? There’s clearly no reason for it; it looks like, about 73 weeks ago, IMDB must have crawled the Apple Podcasts feeds and created shows for what it found. Subsequently, it’s been keeping up with the new episodes.

I suppose it’s a hollow victory, but it amuses me nonetheless.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/01/29/there-are-only-so-many-words-in-my-head/

#BehindTheScenes #BuckRogersInThe25thCentury #ChildrenOfTheDogStar #PatrollingBeyondFusion

This week’s recording sessions: Real Humans S01E06 Sly Leo and Children of the Dog Star, Episodes 3 & 4.

I feel like there’s always a little drama behind the scenes. Honestly, I could do without the drama.

To explain this week’s drama, let me give you a little infodump on how we record the podcast. It’s gone through many iterations over the years, and perhaps on a later PBF* I’ll fill in some of the historical gaps, but for now, let’s just talk about the current technology.

One of the tricks to getting better podcast audio is to record the participants separately, each recorded locally on their computer. Those separate files are combined in the edit for the final podcast. We currently use an online tool called RINGR which establishes an audio call between the participants, and, through code running locally in each participant’s browser, records and uploads the audio at the source.

It’s a decent service, and we’ve had pretty good luck with it for over two and a half years, but things can and do go wrong. The most common problems are little glitches in the Internet that result in dropped calls or, sometimes, mysterious “stops” in the recording.

It’s these “stops” that caused this week’s grief.

So here’s what happens: As the host, I initiate a call, which sends out invites to the participants. At the designated time, all participants, including the host, join the call.

As the host, I can see the status of the other participant(s), and waveforms for their and my audio. There is a big “Start Recording” button in the middle of the window, offset against a pleasant blue/green background. When you hit that button, it (rather intuitively) changes to “Stop” and the background changes to orange. It’s very effective and you absolutely know when it’s recording.

Now, when you stop recording the call is still connected, it switches back to blue, and it presents you with two new buttons “End Call” (which makes sense) and “Resume Call” (which doesn’t really make sense, since you’re still in the call.) In the background, the Stop Recording button has caused it to finalize the recording files, and complete the uploads to the server.

If you “resume” the call, the Start Recording comes back, and if you start recording, a new set of files is created, but they are still part of the same overall session. We use this all the time for our trailers because it gives us neat, separate files that can be included in the previous week’s episode edit.

Sometimes, as mentioned, we get the mysterious stops. Mid-recording, it just stops. Essentially it behaves exactly as if I hit Stop. There is one welcome difference: There is a distinct alert tone that plays in my headphones when that happens. Even if I didn’t see the screen turn blue, I hear the tone and we know to stop and regroup.

It’s happened a dozen or more times. The participants briefly decide how far back we’re going to regress the conversation. I resume the call, and start recording. It’s a little more work in the edit, but not much.

This time, it happened like that, with the mysterious stop happening about 6 minutes into the discussion, and while we handled it in the usual way, the outcome was very different.

What I got was the equivalent when you think you’ve pressed “Stop” on a video camera but continue to record your feet as you walk away and then, when you want to actually record something, the recording stops at the point you think you’re starting.

When I downloaded the files, I knew the file sizes were off. The first section looked fine, but when I listened to the end, it went like this:

Eugene: “So, John, what did you think about “Unchained Woman?”
John: “I liked it, it moved along…
Eugene: “Hold, hold, hold!
John: “Hey, it stopped recording. Why did it do that?”
Eugene: “I don’t know, it just beeped at me and stopped. We can resume and restart the recording. Hang on, let me hit the “Resume Call” button…
[end of recording]

There’s another file, but much too small, I listen to that, it goes like this:
Eugene: “Ok, call has resumed… can you hear me?”
John: “Yes.”
Eugene: “Good, well, this will be an easy one. We’ll just start with me asking what you thought about it.”
John: “Ok, sounds good.”
Eugene: “Starting the recording… now.”
[end of recording]

Sometimes when you’re recording a podcast you can just feel when the conversation is lively and fun, and other times, you feel it’s a bit flat, but either way you never want to have to do it again. There’s always this hanging cloud in your mind where the spontaneity is gone, and you try to make sure you say everything you did last time.

Our discussion of Unchained Woman was a good one. How could it not be? Sand squids, Jamie Lee Curtis, styrofoam rock-kicking androids, and stucco-covered spacewalls, the episode had everything you need for a good discussion.

Gone. All gone in a puff of technological smoke.

We’re not pressed for time, so we’re going to wait a couple weeks, and even record a different episode, before we re-record Unchained Woman. It’s a just a royal pain.

*Patrolling Beyond Fusion (Did I really need to explain that?)

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/01/21/unchained-woman-unrecorded-patrolling-beyond-fusion/

#BehindTheScenes #BuckRogersInThe25thCentury #ChildrenOfTheDogStar #PatrollingBeyondFusion #RealHumans #RINGR

Get your comments in for this week’s recordings. Monday, 15-Jan-2024: The X-Files Die Hand Die Verletzt, and Wednesday, 17-Jan-2024: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Unchained Woman.

Next week: Children of the Dog Star, Swamp Light and Alien Summons, and Real Humans, Sly Leo.

I’ve completed my acoustic barrier just in time to record our 666th episode.

Of course, it’s not designed to block out all sound; it’s really about suppressing echoes and dampening outside sounds. Hopefully, it will help. It certainly sounds very different when talking inside the barrier.

See if you can tell a difference. The first episode recorded inside the barrier will drop on Saturday, the 20th of January. It’s our look at The X-Files episode Die Hand, Die Verletzt.

Of course, I’m telling you this on January 14th, less than seven days from release, which means our patrons on Patreon will not get the episode a whole week before the main release. Regrettably, scheduling issues prevented Simon and me from recording before tomorrow.

Which leads me to this week’s apology. You might recall that I had a fiasco during December with the quotas for the releases in December. I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to work around that, and it did prevent me from posting January’s episodes until the January rollover on my quota. It’s still not quite straightened out.

This really threw off my “routine” of posting, and that is a disaster waiting to happen.

Let me tell you a story about my days in Information Technology. One of the many things I did in my career was manage a data center that had, among other things, IBM AS/400s (later IBM iSeries) midrange computers. These computers are multiuser systems rather like very small mainframes for those unfamiliar. They have lots of redundancy and a very high uptime. These systems were typically used for mission-critical business applications, often in finance, insurance, inventory, etc.

As such, any reputable company will have maintenance agreements on their computers, and IBM, to their credit, will treat you very well when you need service.

When I started working with AS/400s, I worked for a company that wasn’t willing to spend on maintenance contracts, and so I learned and did the maintenance myself. I daresay that, by the end of that, I was qualified to diagnose, field strip, fix, and reassemble most problems with an AS/400.

Then I went to work for an organization that paid for maintenance contracts, and so I would sit on the sidelines when IBM would do maintenance and repairs. We had our usual technician, and I had a lot of respect for him. We’d talk about the systems while he’d work and it was clear to me that (duh) he knew more about the systems than I did.

He knew what he was doing backward and forward. Where I had performed dozens of repairs on just a couple of systems, he’d done hundreds, if not thousands, on many different systems.

…and yet, he used to do something that drove me nuts.

No matter how simple the procedure, he cracked open the manual with a checklist of steps and performed every one every time. Many of those steps were unnecessary depending on the particular circumstances, and he knew that, but he did them and checked them off every single time.

One day, I finally asked him about it, and he fully and freely admitted that he was taking unnecessary steps, but he said, “By doing so, I never make a mistake on somebody else’s mission-critical system by forgetting something or making a false assumption. The customer pays for the job to be done right. Problems can still happen, but I’ve done my due diligence.”

It made sense. It wasn’t his system, and he was being very conscientious, but it didn’t necessarily sway me for “my own” systems.

Then, my organization got cheap. They put the maintenance contract out to bid and another company took over. They too were competent, and the guy who did our work was knowledgeable, and I had no qualms that he was capable of the work. He didn’t use the checklist, though.

You can see where this is going, right?

He fluffed one, and the hard drive RAID array was broken, wiping our system and all the data. We had the proper backups and restored and returned to full operations, but it took 36-48 hours to do the full restores. He was chagrined, and I slept on a cot in the data center for two nights.

After that, I also very much adopted the habit of using checklists, and when following printed instructions, I treat them as checklists, too.

…and when I don’t do that is when I screw up.

I have a checklist for posting podcasts, and I was not following it while I was scrambling with the quota problem. As such, I screwed up the posts for our Patreon subscribers. I noticed the problem when I was posting this past week’s bonus Babylon 5 episode, Exogenesis. I unclogged the jam and dropped two additional episodes that should have been released earlier.

Inexcusable, I’m afraid, and I hate making that mistake in the same week when I have to delay this week’s Patreon post until Monday, but there it is. I’ll see if I can’t come up with a bonus something just for patrons as an apology.

With our recordings this week, we will hopefully return to our routine schedule of two weekly sessions.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/01/14/another-sunday-another-mea-culpa/

#BehindTheScenes #BuckRogersInThe25thCentury #ChildrenOfTheDogStar #PatrollingBeyondFusion #RealHumans #TheXFiles

Get your comments in. Tomorrow, we’re recording our first episode on Children of the Dog Star, a 1984 New Zealand sci-fi TV series. We’ll discuss episodes 1-2, The Brass Daisy and Power Stop. Next week, we’ll be recording our episode on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, Unchained Woman, and for our 666th episode, we’ll be doing a special recording discussing The X-Files episode, Die Hand, Die Verletzt.

As we’re slowly getting back into swing in the new year, I’m changing things around the studio a bit, and adding some new gear.

Although we have tried to make continual improvements in the quality of the podcast, the fact remains that the only room practically available to me to record podcasts is my home office, which is problematic at best.

Like many American homes, even ones dating back to the 1940s like mine, it’s not uncommon to see neighborhoods built uniformly. The floor plans are often basically the same, but they can come in variations. For example, I don’t have a garage. Others in my neighborhood do, although, given that it was the 1940s when they were built, they have 1-car garages.

In my house, the variation is that the space that would have been a 1-car garage was built as additional living space. This is the room that is my office which sits on the far side of the house, next to the kitchen. It has single-pane windows, abuts the carport, contains the dog door to the backyard, and is the nearest part of my house to the neighbors. It’s long, narrow, and inadequately ducted. It’s too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. It’s a delight.

While I’ve made many changes to improve the sound quality over the years, the room remains a challenge.

Recently, I’ve begun to notice some increasing levels of background noise in my recordings, and I haven’t been able to figure out what it is. I have ruled out hardware – inasmuch as it isn’t my hardware introducing additional noise. It might still be possible that my hardware/software is simply collecting more sound somehow, but the more likely answer is that there is more noise.

This week, I’ve begun constructing a free-standing, four-side barrier made of hanging acoustic blankets around my desk. Two sides are up now, which already makes a noticeable difference to the room’s sound when I’m sitting at my desk. We’ll see if it helps solve the stray noise problem. I know it won’t help with the sound of the dog door flapping as the puppies fickly enter and exit the room.

I’m waiting for parts to assemble the other two sides, and then we shall see.

I can only image how awful it will be in summer, though.

This past week’s discussion on Buck Rogers was a surprise. I never thought it would be that piece of 70s fluff that got us the opportunity to talk about living with disabilities in a Sci-fi future. Maybe I’ll have more thoughts on that in an upcoming Patrolling Beyond Fusion post.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2024/01/07/new-year-new-gear-patrolling-beyond-fusion/

#BehindTheScenes #BuckRogersInThe25thCentury #ChildrenOfTheDogStar #PatrollingBeyondFusion #TheXFiles

I write this on the eve of “normality” returning to the world. With the winter solstice holiday season ending, we’re returning to our regular podcast recording sessions, and I’ve decided that Sundays are the days I’m going to force myself to pen these updates.

As mentioned earlier, I had a rude awakening with the final installment of Whocember, which didn’t go out as planned due to a file quota issue.

I pay a monthly fee for a capped amount of podcast storage. Each month, I can add X amount of podcast files. Knowing that we do one podcast a week, how long the average podcast is, and what bitrate we use, I pay for an amount that not only allows for up to five full podcasts per month but also podcasts that can go a bit long. December 2023 not only had five weekends, but the conversations were longer than usual, and we had to split The Giggle into two parts. It was the perfect storm to slay the quota. I’ll try to keep that from happening again.

This week, John and I are back in the studio on January 3 to record our podcast on Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, S01E08, The Return of the Fighting 69th. Comments on that episode? Get them in before the 3rd, and we might incorporate them in the recording.

Dropping on Saturday the 6th of January will be Bugs, S03E05, Nuclear Family.

From all of us at Fusion Patrol, have a safe and pleasant New Year!

https://fusionpatrol.com/2023/12/31/sundays-are-for-discipline-patrolling-beyond-fusion/

#BehindTheScenes #BuckRogersInThe25thCentury #Bugs #PatrollingBeyondFusion

Looks like we’re done for 2023, but not in the way I expected.

We recorded our podcast episode for The Church on Ruby Road yesterday (Boxing Day), and in a Herculean effort, I dashed out the edit as quickly as possible and released it to our Patreon patrons ASAP.

…and then I scheduled the regular release of the episode at the usual time… Saturday, Midnight (UTC-7) – with just one tiny mistake. I scheduled the podcast for the 27th (Wednesday) not the 30th (Saturday)

I decided, in the Christmas spirit, “Oh, what the hell? Let it fly!” (I’m pretty sure that’s what Santa says just before taking off on his sleigh ride each year.)

But here’s the thing: particularly when I’ve just finished editing a podcast, I’m in no rush to listen to it again.

16 hours later, one of our listeners informs me that the podcast is not working correctly (Ta, Eddy.)

After investigating, I discovered a new and exciting error – we’re over quota for December! That hasn’t happened in years! Apparently, my hosting provider has changed the way they deal with quotas. They used to warn me on upload, but this time, they didn’t release the episode when scheduled.

Long story short, I have withdrawn the episode until the quota resets on January 1. (Two days late instead of three days early.)

Unless I can find a workaround, The Church on Ruby Road will be dropping Monday. Sorry for the inconvenience and the delay.

That really rankled me, though, so I will try to get this out in December, at least because this December is Who December, dammit, not Whocember, and a bit of Whounary.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2023/12/27/podcasting-mea-culpa-style-patrolling-beyond-fusion/

#BehindTheScenes #PatrollingBeyondFusion

Christmas Eve is here, and from all of us at Fusion Patrol, we wish you a joyous holiday season, no matter what season you celebrate (or do not celebrate).

Formatting From Hell

I suppose these could be classified as a quiet couple of weeks here at Fusion Patrol Central. There are no recording sessions until after Christmas, so I’ve been spending my time trying to sort out the changes to the website and the integration with the Fediverse.

I’m pretty sure I said that a week or so back, too, and, to quote a grammatically-challenged sage, “It ain’t there yet.”

It probably never will be.

It sounds like it should be simplistic, but I am having trouble wrapping my head around the intricacies that, under the ActivityPub model, posts on the website aren’t cross-posted to the Fediverse; they are on the Fediverse, but, and this is the key, they don’t look the same on the blog as they do when viewed from common Fediverse clients, which gives them the feel of being cross-posted.

They also don’t appear the same on the various Fediverse clients.

Basically, in old-fashioned MVC programming (Model-View-Controller) design, this blog has two different views: the one presented to web browsers and the one presented to the Fediverse. I also suspect that there are two different controllers – or, more specifically – there is the original WordPress controller and there is a plugin grafted onto that acting as the Fediverse controller. I think that’s why we’re getting some odd variances in the appearance of the exact same data.

Finding the combination that looks good on the website and looks good when presented on the Fediverse is not just slow going, ultimately, it will always be to some degree out of my control.

Luckily, I have a staging website and have posted hundreds of test posts trying every combination of settings and formats I can imagine. I’ve gotten closer, but it is still maddening.

The New Format

We’ve been using the same format for our podcast posts for years now, consisting of a very brief introduction to the conversation, then the written synopsis of the episode under review that is spoken into the podcast.

Going forward we’ll be expanding the intro section to include some production info about the episode under review, then, instead of the full recap, we’ll include a simple, hopefully mostly spoiler-free summary of the recap.

Yes, that’s right, it’s a summary of my recap, not a summary of the episode. I’m hoping to preserve a bit of the snark that I like to inject into some of the recaps, and, as an experiment, I’m letting ChatGPT ingest my recaps and cough up the summaries. I’ve tried a few of the past episode recaps to see how it works and the results, so far, amuse me.

What Series is Next?

Did I say I was going to announce that this week?

I’m not there yet, but I’ve taken it to my mind that I’d like to introduce listeners to something from the road-less-travelled, and pick from something that isn’t just from the US, UK or Japan. The short list, which may change, currently contains New Zealand’s 6-part 1984 series, Children of the Dog Star, Australia’s 13-part 1994 series, Escape from Jupiter, or South Korea’s 8-part 2021 series, The Silent Sea.

All three are serialized stories, with Children of the Dog Star and Escape from Jupiter being classified as being aimed at young audiences (like the UK’s Children of the Stones.). I’m looking forward to watching all three series, as I’ve never seen any of them.

It’s time for me to get back to my traditional Christmas Eve pizza and again wish you a happy holidays!

Addendum: Your mileage may vary depending on your country of origin. In the US, it would appear that Children of the Dog Star is unavailable; however, it can be found on YouTube (as of this writing.) Escape from Jupiter is available for streaming purchase from Amazon Video and less reputably on YouTube. The Silent Sea is a Netflix series and can be found there, although a DVD version is available.

https://fusionpatrol.com/2023/12/24/goblin-up-the-christmas-baby-patrolling-beyond-fusion/

#BehindTheScenes #Fediverse #PatrollingBeyondFusion

We start with wishing you all a Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.

Time to Choose What’s Next

While the episodes are still dropping, Kenneth and I have completed our recording sessions for Space: Above and Beyond. Oh, the Fightin’ 58th, we hardly knew ye.

That means the search has begun for the next show we’ll look at. I have a shelf full of shows, mostly American and some British, but what are the criteria we use to pick a new show?

There was once The List, but sadly, it is now lost in the great digital dustbin in the sky.

The List started in the days before the podcast began and was a stream-of-consciousness document that I created and later Ben and Simon contributed to. To some degree, I can recreate it, for it is the list of shows that I remember from my childhood, and then later my university years.

In no particular order, The List probably looked a little like this:

1. Star Trek
2. Doctor Who
3. The Wild, Wild West
4. The Avengers
5. Blakes 7
6. Kolchak: The Night Stalker
7. Space: 1999
8. UFO
9. Planet of the Apes
10. The Invisible Man
11. Logan’s Run
12. The Gemini Man
13. Beyond Westworld
14. Manimal
15. Quark
16. Battlestar Galactica/Galactica 1980
17. Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
18. Fantastic Journey
19. Otherworld
20. The Prisoner
21. War of the Worlds
22. The Six Million Dollar Man
23. The Bionic Woman
24. The Invaders
25. The Immortal
26. The Time Tunnel

…and I’m confident there were more. There were programs like the Starlost, which I had never managed to watch but had a legendary mythic status to it (and not in a good way), and programs like Sapphire and Steel, which had a great reputation but limited exposure in the United States.

Mostly, though, I think I was eager to relive and revel in all those wonderful childhood memories.

Now that I mention that, I’m fairly certain Land of the Lost was on that list, too.

So, the question is: What criteria do we use to pick a new show?

Initially, we pulled one off the list more-or-less, but we’ve learned some lessons along the way.

For example:

The Blakes 7 Lesson: 52 episodes take a long, long time to complete. We started on Blakes 7 in January 2013 and finished in November 2017 – almost five full years.

And while we’ve done some shows with 40+ episodes since then, we always give them a lot of thought before undertaking them. Space: 1999 is the exception because there was no way we wouldn’t do that show.

The Man From Atlantis Lesson: This show is really bad. It crushed my childhood memories and stomped on them with cleats long past the point that all the blood had drained out of them and soaked into the Earth, which, in turn, nurtured the seeds of despair and enmity in the world. It can be really difficult to make it through an entire series like that.

The Man From Atlantis Corollary: Some hour-long shows don’t have enough substance for an entire podcast episode.

The Invisible Man Lesson: Not everything billed as “science fiction” is science fiction.

While we had fun looking at The Invisible Man, and while H.G. Wells’ original novel is undeniably science fiction, the David McCallum series only used invisibility as a plot gimmick to tell ordinary action-adventure melodrama stories. There are no aliens, time travelers, self-aware computers, or mad scientists plotting world domination here, just Soviet defections, casino heists, art thieves, and industrial espionage. There was that fake psychic once (Only on make-believe TV shows do I need to include the word “fake” in front of “psychic.” In the real world, that’s a given.)

The Bugs Corollary to the Invisible Man Lesson: Some shows change midstream.

Of that list of 26, we’ve done 12. (One has yet to drop, the second is being recorded.)

Let’s look at what remains.

That’s looking back on our initial list, written when we were young, wide-eyed, and innocent, now assessed based on hindsight and aged wisdom.

But, of course, we’ve learned other things. There are more obscure programs from different eras or different countries, and some of the more rewarding series we’ve done have been these lesser-known gems. I think that’s where we’re going to go from here,

Right now, I’m looking at this list to pick something. What are your thoughts? What should we cover?

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https://fusionpatrol.com/2023/12/19/lessons-learned-when-asking-whats-next-patrolling-beyond-fusion/

#BehindTheScenes #PatrollingBeyondFusion

Not Everyone is Laughing at The Giggle

It’s Monday, as I type this. Earlier today, Simon and I recorded our session on #TheGiggle. Although we generally avoid listening to other opinions before we record, it was not lost on us that all the feedback we had seen online so far was pretty much positive.

Can you enjoy(ish) an episode and still find it maddeningly annoying? Listen and find out.

With the Giggle, there was “the story,” and then there was “the gargantuan seismic event that made the Flux look trivial.” It made for a long conversation, and I have broken it into two parts, which will be released over two consecutive days. Part One has already been released for our patrons on Patreon and will be released to everyone else on Saturday (UTC-07).

Menace Beneath the Waves

Yes, we did manage to get the time to record our podcast on the #UnderwaterMenace this past week, and it will be out on December 23rd, just in time for Christmas. Some might say it’s a Christmas miracle, but I wouldn’t.

This is our second take on the Underwater Menace, the first being back in 2016 when they released the story on DVD with the worst photo snap reconstruction in the history of time itself. It was so bad the Time Lords declared the whole thing a war crime.

Now, fully animated, it’s time to reconsider the story. It’s out now in the UK and will be released in the US in early January.

Onramp to the Fediverse

There’s a lot of trial and error involved in getting on board the Fediverse. This week, it has felt mostly like error.

When we first connected, everything we posted went live on the Fediverse. Yes, that’s more or less what we wanted, but there are no backsies. Once it’s out there, it cannot be removed.

Imagine my horror when it posted the scheduled post of #TheStarBeast and included the entire post, including the synopsis.

If you’re listening to Fusion Patrol, you know that there will be spoilers – the very premise of the podcast is that you have to watch the show first (or not be concerned with spoilers.) This is why I have no problem including the synopsis on the website; however, what goes out on the Fediverse serves a couple of different purposes, one of which is to try to induce new listeners to join us. To do that, you have to flag down people who, in the case of the Star Beast, are interested in #DoctorWho, so the content needs to be different, and basically just blasting out the entire plot line of a brand new TV show without content warning was just bad manners.

And there’s no way to delete it and try again.

I’ve not yet found a workaround, so this week’s #WildBlueYonder went out with no synopsis. That’s not ideal either, but for the moment, it will have to do.

This week, we also (finally) managed to get a test website up – this allows me to test changes to the Fusion Patrol website and the Fediverse integration without flooding your feeds with test messages. So far, every idea I’ve tried to reach a compromise has failed.

Release Schedule

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https://fusionpatrol.com/2023/12/11/when-you-know-youre-right-and-refuse-to-back-down-patrolling-beyond-fusion/

#BehindTheScenes #DoctorWho #PatrollingBeyondFusion #TheGiggle #TheStarBeast #UnderwaterMenace #WildBlueYonder

This week’s … Read more

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https://fusionpatrol.com/2023/12/04/patrolling-beyond-fusion-day-of-the-mastodon/