Nearly three years ago, I mentioned that I was watching the unriffed versions of MST3K movies. You know, the movies on MST3K, but without the MST3K riffing. Or shadows.

Now, why would I want to do that? Why not? Who doesn’t love bad movies?

I’ve not made a lot of progress, by the way. I can’t blame it on not having the unriffed movies. I don’t have all 210 of them (counting the Classic Series, the Netflix Series, the KTMA series, and The Movie), but I’m finally making progress.

And, while my collection of 210 MST3K-bad films isn’t complete, I’ve begun watching them. Maybe by the time I watch all I have, I’ll be able to complete the collection. In fact, I have leads on all but three of the missing films. So I have hope.

I am working Monday – Friday, though remote. That cuts down on travel time, leaving more time for the important things. Like watching MST3K-bad movies. And, weekends are pretty much confined to the house right now (I’m noting that’s it’s because of COVID-19, in case I look back on this post in the future and wonder why I was spending so much time in the house).

As of this morning, I’ve only watched 41 of the 210 movies. That’s in three years. I’m gonna pick up the pace now.

I may end up hating myself when this is over.

It’s been a pain in everyone’s butt for some time. That darn cookie notice that sometimes pops up at the bottom of the page. Or, that pops up all the time. It’s an inconsistent experience.

Here’s what it’s all about. Wait. We covered all that before. Go read about it if you want.

Short answer is that it’s an EU thing. But do we care? Well, I decided to see just how many of you are from outside the U.S. And the answer is: 18.1% of you. Our stats show that 81.9% of all visitors to the Website are in the U.S. And, if my math is right (and it is) that means that … um … carry the one … a bunch of you … are not in the U.S.

Now, to be sure, not everyone outside the U.S. is in the EU. But, a good number of you non-U.S. folks are in the EU. So, we kept that darn thing around.

But no more.

We didn’t get rid of the cookie notice, we just made it so it doesn’t pop up (or over) any more. It’s sitting there at the top of one of the sidebars.

So, no more annoying cookie pop-up/pop-over. Just an annoying box in the sidebar that won’t go away.

Happy now? Good. Now, go punch a hippie in the face. You’ll feel even happier.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 has been on my mind recently. A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my progress in completing my collection of MST3K movies, the unriffed versions. And I’ve made a little progress, but that’s not what I’m wanting to talk about today. It’s about watching the actual MST3K episodes, particularly, the order in which to watch them.

That doesn’t seem like it would be an issue, but there were some peculiarities in the way the shows were recorded, and other things that make it not so cut and dry.

KTMA Episodes

First, do we include the KTMA shows? That is the original season, consisting of 21 episodes that were done for the local station KTMA TV-23 in Minneapolis-St. Paul (now WUCW) before the show went national.

Reasons to include

• The episodes exist (20 of 21 at least), so they are part of the show.
• 12 of the movies were not re-done during the national run and are unique.

Reasons to not include

• It was a local show, and not actually part of the continuity of the national show.
• Nine were re-done, and done better, in Season 3.
• The local show, while good, pales in comparison to the national show. It’s great for show buffs to see the origins, but not for regular watching. It’s like a pre-season game.

I say do not include KTMA episodes, but if you do, they were broadcast in the order produced, and that’s the way to watch them.

The Movie

After Season 6 and right before the first cancellation, the crew did Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. The crew riffed “This Island Earth” for the big screen. But do we count it?

Reasons to include

• It’s MST3K, just in a little different format. It’s as simple as that.

Reasons to not include

• It wasn’t part of the show. Sure, all the parts are there, but it’s not the show. It’s something different.
• A hard-to-resolve continuity issue arises depending on where you place the film.

I say do include the movie. That does bring up some complications as we’ll see.

The 1995 Turkey Day Special

In 1995 Comedy Central wasn’t as sold on MST3K as they used to be. They only ordered six episodes for the upcoming Season 7. I’ve never seen an explanation for this, and I assume it was a budget thing. The riffing during the movie was separate from the host segments, with no references to what was going on outside the theater. This allowed the movie riffing to be wrapped in Thanksgiving themed segments for the Turkey Day special and for the regular season (and subsequent rebroadcasts).

Reasons to include

• It was part of the show.
• While the movie is the same, the host segments are hilarious and should be part of regular viewing.

Reasons to not include

• It’s not really part of the show. It was a special.
• You end up watching the same movie back-to-back.

I include it, but don’t feel nearly as strongly about including it. On another day, I might say leave it out.

Production Order vs Broadcast Order vs Production Code

The order in which the shows were produced doesn’t always line up with the production number. Those don’t always line up with the order in which they aired.

Season 1 had a major production code vs production order issue with “Women of the Prehistoric Planet.” It was the 13th produced and aired, but retained the production code 104 instead of, as would be expected, 113. Watching in production order creates a continuity issue as there is a reference to “Robot Holocaust” (Episode 110) in “Women of the Prehistoric Planet” (Episode 104). Air date order resolves this.

Season 1 also had some shows air out of order. The first two aired in reverse order, although there is no continuity issue with those two being watched in either order.

Season 3 also had air date order not matching production order. “Teenage Cave Man” (Episode 315) aired after “The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent” (Episode 317), but again, no continuity error if watched in either order.

Season 5, like Season 1, had the first two episodes air in reverse production order. And, again, no continuity issue if watched either way.

Season 6 is the real problem child. It’s a mess, with the production order, production code, and air date in order at the very beginning and at the end, but all jumbled in the middle. It’s hard to describe, but I’ll try.

• The episode “Zombie Nightmare” (604) was held from airing so it could be part of a college tour by the cast. It finally aired after “Kitten with a Whip” (615).
• “The Skydivers” (609) aired after “Colossus and the Headhunters” (605).
• “The Creeping Terror” (606) and “Bloodlust!” (607) aired in reverse order.

Those three changes really jumbled the order things aired. However, no continuity issues arise in watching any of them in either production/code or air date order.

Season 7 has the issue of “Night of the Blood Beast” (701) existing twice. And, if you include the movie, that was released during Season 7 between “Escape 2000” (705) and “Laserblast” (706). However, the Mads differ. Pearl is a regular in Season 7, but doesn’t appear in the movie. And, since Dr. Forrester is “reborn” at the end of the season, the movie can’t move in that direction.

Season 10 aired “Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders” (1003) six weeks after the series finale, “Diabolik” (1013). Watching in production/code order resolves the continuity issue.

My Method

So, production order? Production Code order? Air date order? The answer is … none of those.

I am a bit of a purist, so I prefer air date order, as that’s the order they were originally presented. And, that generally works, except for Season 10, and for the Movie (if you include it).

I use air date order, moving “Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders” (1003) to just before “Diabolik” (1013), and The Movie between Season 6 and Season 7. With those two adjustments, everything works.

On the other hand, watching in Production Code order almost works. You have to move “Women of the Prehistoric Planet” (104) to the last episode of Season 1. You still have to put The Movie between Season 6 and Season 7.

So, pick either order, put the movie between Season 6 and Season 7, then shift one episode (in Season 1 for Production Code order; in Season 10 for air date order) and everything works.

As I said, I prefer air date order.

Of course, it was just a show. I should really just relax.

I haven’t told Walrus yet. I wanted you to know first. He’ll find out soon enough. But we got a thank you from Catwoman.

Maybe.

Probably not.

But, we like the idea so we’re gonna say it’s legit.

Here’s what happened. We got an email via one of our contact forms that purported to be from Julie Newmar. Here, lemme show you.

Yes, that is a note from someone who claims to be Julie Newmar saying she loves our posts. Why would she say that? Well, she blew away the competition in the post by Walrus asking who was the best Catwoman. Julie Newmar (who I voted for) got 46% of the vote. Michelle Pfeiffer and the late Eartha Kitt tied for second with 12% each.

Now, I’m not showing you the IP address that was attached to the message. But I did do a location lookup, and it came back to Los Angeles, where Miss Newmar lives.

I’m also not showing the email address that was submitted… Well, I’m showing you part of it, just not the domain. But it’s an Internet Service Provider that you’d recognize.

Yes, anyone could get whatever username the ISP would allow, but with the large ISP, it leans towards legit.

I still don’t think it is legit. I think it’s a gag, but they did a good job on it.

But if it’s not, I’m quite jealous of Walrus getting a note from Julie Newmar.

I never get emails from Catwoman. The Cat Lady from the Simpsons won’t even have anything to do with me.

Netflix is changing how it counts views.

If you’re like me, you thought, “So what?”

Actually, that’s not what I thought, but I’m just trying to be like you. I actually saw that and thought “Those sneaky bastards.”

Netflix hasn’t shared what constituted a “view” in the past, but now they are saying that they’ve changed the requirement for something playing on your screen to be considered a “view” and it’s two minutes.

Think about that for a second. Netflix changed something about their apps and Website a while back. They’ll automatically start playing content if you hang on it for more than 2-3 seconds. That’s irritating enough in that it starts playing something while you’re trying to read about it, before you make up your mind if you want to see it. They’re like some annoying salesman that won’t leave you alone. Which means that although the content is Walmart, the sales crew isn’t.

Now, they’re going to count two minutes on the video as a “view” of that video. And it’s all about the views.

The more views, the more Netflix can claim viewers, and the more money Netflix can make. And it does make a difference.

The series “Our Planet” got 33-million viewers. But, under the new metrics, the number suddenly jumps to 45-million, according to MarketWatch.

Wait until the Democrats find out. They’ll find a way to get touch screen ballots to count votes their way. “The voter had the Democrat candidate on their screen for 2.5 seconds, so that counts as a vote for the Democrat.” And then people marching in the streets to demand that votes to changed to count that way.

Netflix: going to hell for years, and finding ways to take you with them.

Yeah, we know about the error message. The Web host has to fix that, and we’re just waiting on that to happen. We haven’t figured out who was responsible for it, but I’m thinking Oppo.

Unless it’s that other fellow that’s been hanging around here. I’m not sure what he’s doing. I think somebody forgot to lock the door and this guy just wandered in. I’m not sure who forgot to lock it, but I’m thinking Oppo.

In the meantime, things are actually working on the Website — apart from the security certificate — as you can tell by the stellar quality of the posts. So, yeah, we’re here. This isn’t someone pretending to be us. It’s really us. And we really don’t want to steal your data or anything. I’m mean, we’ve seen your data. I don’t want to see it again.

So, sorry for the trouble. It should be fixed soon.

As you may know, I have a fairly large movie library. Well, it’s larger than most people I know. Over 1,500 movies and growing.

One think I like to do is have my movies available to me, both at home and when I’m away from home. I don’t know why I’d want my movies when I’m away from home, but I do. It seems like something I’d like to do.

Since most of my movies — over 1,200 — were purchased from iTunes (or through other services that are part of Movies Anywhere), I have them available on my iPad. They aren’t available on my Android phone though. Well, a little over 700 are (the Movies Anywhere movies), but the rest aren’t.

At home, I’m running iTunes and have downloaded all of my iTunes movies to the computer. I’ve also ripped out my DVDs and loaded the files into iTunes. That’s over 6 TB in video content (that’s movies and TV shows). I’m able to watch all of that through my Apple TV. However, I have to be at home to watch it all — specifically, the content ripped from DVD. I can’t watch my ripped DVDs away from home.

Well, a while back, I tinkered with Plex. It was okay, but iTunes was really easy. Besides, at the time, it worked on Roku, but not on Apple TV. It also won’t play copy-protected content. I didn’t have a single source for all my content other than iTunes, and that was only on Apple TV.

I’ve decided to take a second look at Plex, now. There are apps for Plex on iOS and Android devices, on Roku, on Apple TV, and most other platforms. So, I can play all of my non-DRM content through Plex.

Well, as good as all that is, I still want a single source for everything. I purchase my content — I’ve even purchased the streaming version of content I already had on DVD in order to watch it anywhere — and I don’t pirate content. I just want to be able to watch my content that I bought. I’m not gonna give it to anyone else. I’m not gonna sell it to anyone else. I want it for my own personal viewing.

Since I don’t mind ripping DVDs, I don’t mind removing copy-protection from my personal local copy of purchased digital content. I’m not advocating that others do that, because I know some people that will turn around and attempt to profit from the work of others. Not me. All of my purchases are for my use only.

Anyway, I set up Plex on my Windows desktop computer and copied over all of my DVD movies from iTunes. All of the content I had ripped out from DVD. I did some file renaming to fit the Plex suggested naming conventions. Then a little bit of housekeeping to ensure everything looked good.

Whaddaya know? I had a good working Plex server and movie library of over 200 films. I was almost impressed with myself. Then I saw the names of all the movies. Most of them are not available streaming for a reason. Lots of really bad films — I not only have all of the MST3K episodes, I have as many of the actual movies they riffed as I can find. That’s a lot of really bad movies. Some I got from a “50 Classic Science Fiction Movies” collection. It was cheap for a reason. And I not only ripped out the MST3K-inspiring films, I ripped out all I could (some discs didn’t rip at all but I’m not gonna pursue that; I’m happy with the 45 movies I got from it). So, I got around 300 movies from DVD, and the vast majority are movies I wouldn’t really want to watch anyway.

Still, I’m committed to this. All of my DVDs are now in Plex, and I’ve begun ripping the digital purchases. That includes the first ten seasons of Doctor Who (classic seasons), or at least, the digital releases. Each night, I’ll set up some digital TV episodes to rip, and the next night I’ll set up some digital movies to rip. I’ll probably switch over to Christmas movies and specials this week.

It’s gonna take me a while to finish this. But, I have been able to do a little bit each day. By the time I’m 96, I should just about be done. Wish me luck!

Yeah, we talked about this before, but it’s been a few months and I wanted to check in on this.

I asked before about not using an ad blocker here on IMAO. We took some time — Harvey did most of it — going through the ads and ad services to ensure that we weren’t guilty of any intrusive or resource intensive ads. Just like you, we use the Internet and absolutely hate it when we can’t read a Website because of all the ads. And, just like you, we make a point to avoid those ads. Sometimes, that mean running an ad blocker extension or plugin on a browser, and sometimes it means just avoiding the Website altogether. Personally, I’ve gone with the latter route.

Our proposal was for you to turn the ad blocker off and you see if that hurt your enjoyment of the Website. And some of you responded. Most of it was positive, and we thank you.

But I wanted to ask again about the ads. Did you turn off the ad blocker, or add IMAO to the plugin’s white list? How did that go? Are the ads a problem? Do they slow down the loading of the Website? To they intrude on the Website? Did you need to turn the ad blocker back on for IMAO? Let us know how it’s going.

Mind you, we aren’t looking to do anything different. We’re not looking to ad more ads or anything. We also aren’t reducing them; we dropped one ad service already. No, we’re just asking how the experience is.

Let us know in the comments what you think. We appreciate it.

We’ve made a few changes here recently, things we’ve had to do. We’ve run into some plugin compatibility issues, and we’ve had to find other solutions.

You may or may not know this, but WordPress, like many software applications, allows functions to be added, modified, or extended though plugins. That’s little software packages that can be added to the existing software.

WordPress will release updates and fixes to their software from time-to-time, and we made a small update recently. And, there’s another update coming, but not just yet.

Ahead of the update, we went through and checked our plugins, and found that some were not compatible with the upcoming update. The people that develop these plugins sometimes don’t update them when that’s needed. When that happens, we have three choices:

1. Remove the plugin entirely, abandoning that functionality.
2. Replace the plugin with another plugin that does the same thing, though it may act a little different.
3. Leave the plugin in place and hope for the best.

Sometimes, we need to simply remove a plugin. If it doesn’t bring any value, it’s just taking up resources. We did that on a couple, mostly behind the scenes.

Sometimes, we leave the plugin in place and hope for the best. I’m not fan of this approach, but if we really want the functionality, we do this until we can find a replacement plugin.

Sometimes we replace the plugin with another.

Our ratings plugins, the Stars and Likes buttons, were not compatible with the upcoming version, so we needed to do something. We tried a few things, such as the WordPress “Like” button. However, some users reported it didn’t work correctly, either doing nothing, or requiring a login. Well, that’s totally unacceptable, so we decided to not rely on that. It’s now gone.

We wanted to be able to have comment ratings, which the “Likes” plugin did. But it placed the “Likes” on both comments and posts, meaning we had two post ratings systems. We kept that for a while, but some of you used one, and others used the other. And some of you used both.

We finally decided to go with the “Likes” alone, but we still needed to find a replacement.

Well, we finally found one. It’s very similar, but since it’s a different plugin from a different developer, the old ratings don’t transfer over. And I really don’t like that. I cannot express how much I do not like that.

The good news is the developer is the same company that makes WordPress, so we won’t have compatibility issues going forward.

We have a new ratings system in place. It seems to work, and it seems to work well. So, I’d like you to give it a shot. No, I’m not asking for likes on this post. This is just a notice about things, not something you come here to enjoy. Oppo or Frank J. or someone will be along shortly with that. This is a request that you take a minute from time to time and think about the new “Likes” functionality, and ratings for posts and comments in general.

If you want to go back and rate some of your favorites, that would be great. If you have any thoughts, comments, or suggestions about the ratings for posts and comments, let us know.

UPDATE: We’re dropping back to the old “Likes” plug-in for now but that’s gonna go away in a future update. We won’t have a choice in the matter. The plug-in isn’t being updated, and won’t work with newer versions. We’re going to conduct additional testing to find a replacement that works, or a configuration setting of the new standard one to find a wat to make it work.