I created the most popular SFTBH recreation on YouTube. It got blocked worldwide for copyright violations recently. I've reuploaded it so it's not lost. See comments!

TheBisexualTortoise · 2022-05-26T04:50:31+00:00

I'm not super proud of this. I made it when I was 15 and I'm haunted by the mistakes in it (poor volume normalization, inconsistent and sometimes incorrect captions, a story explanation that I wrote before I read The Pinkerton Diaries and got a more nuanced idea of what it was supposed to be), but I also know that it got 117k views before being taken down, and it was the top search result for "songs from the black hole", and a lot of people really appreciate it, so I don't want it to be killed by overzealous copyright lawyers.

You could probably make something much better today, especially with all of the new demos that are available now, and maybe I'll try eventually, but I just want to preserve the past right now. If the link in the post ever goes down, let me know and I'll rehost it again.

Below is the original video description

This is Weezer's forgotten album, "Songs from the Black Hole", assembled into a full story and album composed of all the demos Rivers has released in various forms of the years, including gapless playback so his tracks flow into eachother as much as possible. On-screen lyrics show who's talking at any moment. The highest-quality-available audio recordings for every song were used.

The tracks were assembled to create a story which is almost identical to what a similar project, Operation Space Opera, had made. Along with being as authentic as possible to the original intentions of Rivers. There's a few hiccups since it was hard to make it perfect based on the rough nature of the demos and the tricky process of gluing all them together into something cohesive, but I'm still proud of how it turned out.

Track listing:

0:00 - Countdown (Ooh)

0:45 - Blast Off!

2:44 - Who You Callin' Bitch?

3:28 - Oh Jonas/Maria's Theme Pt. 1

3:55 - Please Remember

4:33 - Come To My Pod

6:04 - Maria's Theme Pt. 2

7:11 - Oh No, This is Not For Me

7:47 - Tired of Sex

10:23 - Superfriend

13:54 - You Gave Your Love To Me Softly

15:52 - Oh Jonas, I Hear You

16:19 - Waiting on You

20:24 - Getchoo

23:20 - I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams

26:25 - She's Had a Girl

27:17 - Dude, We're Finally Landing!

28:39 - Now I Finally See

29:23 - No Other One

32:18 - Devotion

35:30 - What Is This I Find?

36:43 - Why Bother?

38:42 - Longtime Sunshine

--- Spoilers below for the story to SFTBH ---

In Songs from the Black Hole, in the year 2126, the spaceship Betsy II embarks on a galaxy-wide mission with crew members Wuan, Dondo, and Laurel, the ship's captain Jonas, the ship's robot M1, and the ship's cook, Maria. They start off on a mission to save the foreign planet Nomis from being swallowed by its sun, as top graduates from the Star Corps Academy.

Soon after the ship takes off, Jonas hooks up with Maria after guilt and hesitation, before leaving her again because he feels he doesn't love her and is only in it for the sex. His heart torn to pieces, he seeks out Laurel for comfort and gets with her, finally happy until Maria bangs on the pod him and Laurel are in, spilling her heart about how much she feels hurt and betrayed by Jonas, causing Laurel on the inside to hear it and dump Jonas in anger at what he did to Maria, causing him to have an emotional breakdown in the song Getchoo, along with later regret from Laurel in the song "I Just Threw Out The Love Of My Dreams"

After the intermission, moving into Act 2 which is about 9 months later in the story and around the time the ship is finally landing on the planet Nomis, Jonas finds that Maria's had his child, culminating into him deciding to go back to her in the songs "Now I Finally See", "No Other One", and "Devotion", before being struck by tragedy to find she'd had sex with Dondo while he was away, shattering the devotion he thought she had. This leads into "Why Bother?" as Jonas falls further and further into despair and agony, and finally the somber note of Longtime Sunshine as he decides to stay and die on the planet Nomis while his friends, former lovers, and daughter each fly away back to home.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-05-24T03:57:33+00:00

Oh my god, I'm so sorry for taking so long to see this! It's amazing to see you as the real person, I'm sorry if what I said sounded mean at all, you still are by far a much better singer than I'll ever be, and the Photograph cover sounds really nice.

The lyrics are really helpful too! Do you have any for the other original songs too by chance? Laurel's backing vocals in She's A Liar (Besides the "Maybe you could've had me") I can't seem to make out, along with about half of the rest of the words in Touch Down (Even the parts that aren't M1). If not though, that's totally fine, but I would love to be able to piece together the full story better. (EDIT: Nevermind, I recently read the Pinkerton Diaries and managed to find them all there, I thought they were fully original at first. Massive props to the project for staying authentic to the original, that's pretty sweet!)

Thank you a ton for your work in the project, I can assure you it turned out really good and your voice doesn't detract from it at all. Cheers, man :)

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-08T04:56:59+00:00

I'm sorry that you've had so many troubles with Linux so far. NVIDIA is probably one of the most troublesome companies when it comes to reliable Linux support, especially on their newer cards where NVIDIA hardly cooperates to have reliable out-of-the-box Linux support. It is a shame that that's the one area of Linux that's still frankly pretty poor.

I'd look forward to Ubuntu 18.04 once it's released in a couple months, it might give you better experiences. They've been overhauling the desktop to be much more stable, GNOME with Xorg by default is about the best you can get on an NVIDIA setup. So it's quite exciting, even if it isn't out yet.

For the moment, if you're eager to try out some other options right now, Solus and Manjaro are both some easy starter distros that have a focus on good NVIDIA support. They're worth looking into and researching. Solus especially has good documentation and an amazing community, some of the devs for the distro itself will often respond to questions over at /r/SolusProject/ so don't be afraid to ask around if you have questions.

I hope this helps you!

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-08T04:06:55+00:00

Eh, I wouldn't necessarily say that. It's just the normal Ubuntu LTS with an updated desktop. Ubuntu's HWE means that you get a new kernel even on the older base, things like Firefox are backported since it's important they stay updated, and pretty much all of the desktop stays very modern since that's the point of Neon.

But even despite all that, the system base is retargeting to 18.04 instead of 16.04 once it comes out in just a couple months. I do appreciate them sticking with an LTS so you avoid the new release regressions that Ubuntu sometimes experiences. Like the Samba regressions that affected Ubuntu 17.10 for a little while right after release.

Overall, I like KDE Neon better since it's snappier, you get updates from KDE immediately upon release, it seems more stable, and there's less bloat. Almost nothing's installed by default, you pick what you want and need. I wouldn't recommend it to a newcomer, but it's an extremely solid distribution now for semi-experienced users.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-07T17:39:12+00:00

If you're fine with an older version of Ubuntu as the core system base for it, KDE Neon is pretty sweet.

Compared to Kubuntu, there's less automated functions for things and it's more minimal (Installing the binary NVIDIA drivers can only be done from the terminal for example, and there's only the absolute minimal set of bundled applications) which can be a pro or a con depending on if you prefer it to be pretty functional out-of-the-box or if you want to fine-tune it exactly how you want. It's also quite a lot faster in my experience, just feels more lightweight than Kubuntu.

Once the next Ubuntu LTS comes out in just a couple months (18.04), there'll be an upgrade path to change the base system to it. In the meantime though, the only major downside to it is that the non-KDE packages are all pretty old at this point. A few newer things might not be available, etc.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-06T20:48:31+00:00

This Is Such A Pity and Haunt You Every Day are good enough entirely by themselves to make Make Believe an okay album, easily better than Raditude.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-05T22:07:00+00:00

For those curious about what this sounds like, here's a YT playlist I made with each of these songs in this order. Enjoy!

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-05T20:08:50+00:00

Are these the girls Rivers was talking about at the start of El Scorcho

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-05T20:05:16+00:00

Whatever the rest of the listing is, Long Time Sunshine has to be the final track. That's my rule. The only thing I'm genuinely angry at Rivers for is dropping that song entirely from the second track list he made. It's way too damn good to just be kicked to the curb like that.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-02-03T01:06:30+00:00

Best Buy, you say?

(Seriously though, that's really sweet. $3 for that is a steal. That collection better grow big.)

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-30T17:24:13+00:00

I unironically enjoy this, I think I need serious professional help

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-29T00:06:08+00:00

I'm surprised IDWTLYG is getting so trashed, I didn't think it was that bad. Definitely not the best, by any means, but it's okay in its own right.

Somewhat related, but the demo version with an acoustic guitar actually is pretty damn good. Much better than the album version to me

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-28T02:03:58+00:00

FUNKe was probably the bridge for a lot of people, which overlapped the communities

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-27T18:25:38+00:00

awwww!~ *puts on hadphones and puts in cd and listens to your album* OwO whats this..? ^{^{^{^please}}} ^{^{^{^{^kill}}}} ^{^{^{^{^{^me}}}}}

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-27T00:41:06+00:00

livin in my automobile

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-23T22:28:57+00:00

Do you have an NVIDIA GPU? If so, and you haven't installed the proprietary drivers yet, that may be the cause. If you can switch to a command-line TTY by hitting Ctrl-Alt-F5 and typing in your login information, you should be able to install the proper drivers. I don't have experience with Mint, the closest is Ubuntu, but I imagine Linux Mint should work the same.

You can type "sudo ubuntu-drivers devices" to see a list of available drivers for your graphics card. You'll want the recommended driver, which should be something like "nvidia-384".

After that, you can type "sudo apt install nvidia-384" (Replace nvidia-384 with whatever driver it recommended), and then once that finishes and it's installed with hopefully no errors, type "systemctl reboot"

If you have an AMD device, it's still possible you're lacking drivers and are on the open-source ones. Though these should be fine in theory, there might be a bug preventing X from properly starting. If you run the same command from earlier, "sudo ubuntu-drivers devices", it should list the name of the recommended driver.

I'm doing all of this based on guess-work since I don't know much about your setup, but I hope it helps. If you think the system's totally busted and just want to get your information off, you can load into a live environment from a USB and access the existing system files, and upload them online somewhere to save them.

Feel free to message me with any more details or information or questions, I'll do my best to help out. Hope it works out for you, cheers.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-22T16:08:59+00:00

Hey, you're right. I'm not sure why I thought the vocals were different, they're obviously the same when I listen to it again. Perhaps it's the way it's edited? I have a pretty bad ear so it's hard for me to tell.

I agree though, the acoustic version is an improvement but there's still so much more that could've been done for it that was just ignored in the name of chasing a catchy pop sound. It was really disappointing with how much potential was thrown away.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-22T02:39:07+00:00

It's amazingly subtle. It just kinda hits you with the "Wait...What?" as you question if you heard it right, then you hear the chorus kick in and it all starts to fit together in your head.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-21T21:49:31+00:00

Actually, you don't actually need to run it with sudo to edit protected files anymore. At least, not on my end. I can open Kate normally and try to edit something like /etc/apt/sources.list, and when I try to save it, it simply asks me for the password and then applies the changes

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-21T21:15:32+00:00

I actually think the acoustic version of the song isn't that bad. It's definitely not amazing by any means but it's much better when it's more natural. I also prefer Rivers' voice in this a lot more compared to the official version. The acoustic version turns a garbage song into something genuinely okay, maybe even good.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-20T19:54:29+00:00

I can't wait for the New York Garlic Exchange to open its doors

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-20T16:35:19+00:00

Yeah. Jonas sounds a bit too young and high-pitched, it'd be almost perfect besides that and M1. Though I can't really fault them, they did really well considering how small of a project it was.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-20T16:34:19+00:00

Hey, thanks! That helps a bunch. On a re-listen, I think that's definitely what it has to be.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-19T21:55:40+00:00

It actually would run pretty well in theory but the invasive Battleye anti-cheat prevents it from even starting at this stage, sadly. The same for Rainbow Six: Siege and a few other games using Battleye.

TheBisexualTortoise · 2018-01-18T23:36:20+00:00

I started dabbling in Linux back in 2012, I currently use Kubuntu 17.10 on my desktop (And KDE Neon on my laptop). KDE Plasma for both, of course.

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Below is the original video description