Years’pon years ago (I’m guessing some time in the late 2000s, as in the decade between 2000 and 2009, not 2999 – language is confusing) some creative genius (according to me, not Art Critics) toasted some 140 slices of toast, bought a tube of liquid nails and stuck a rectangle of toasted bread slices to the wall. I always thought it was delightfully quirky. Confident that it was a transient piece, with toast being both biodegradable and delicious, I felt lucky that I got a chance to see it in its full greige and brown glory.
I didn’t really think about the persistence of liquid nails.
Perhaps the artist didn’t either.
It’s now 2025 and whenever I walk past that wall I see the blobs of liquid nails still on the wall and I’m reminded of the bits of toast that once adorned the wall.
I’ve been having some problems with malformed video files from yt-dlp when getting videos from iView. Some videos from the same source come out fine, some are unplayable, and some seem fine but then stop playing part way through. Today I decided to dive reasonably deeply into the downloading options and have come to a prompt that works. Some of the command might be redundant, but this works, so I’m going to stick with it and I’m also going to post it here for future-me when I have forget.
That was what it took to render my system, running Ubuntu 24.04 unbootable. I’d been trying to install the free version of DaVinci Resolve and was running into dependency issues with:
libapr1
libaprutil1
libasound2
libglib2.0-0
I found a page that promised that it skipping the package check would let me install the software, then I could disable the bits of Resolve that needed those packages. Hunky dory. Off we go.
Until I went to reboot my system that was acting a little oddly.
My hotkey for bringing up a file explorer (configured to satisfy years and years of Windows use) was launching the Disk Usage Analyser. I’ve always (or maybe longer) had Windows+1 in Windows bound to the Snipping Tool, so I’ve replicated that in Ubuntu for the screenshot tool. This didn’t work either.
Rebooting the system left it hanging on a text-only screen showing what was had loaded. No notable warnings. Some red herrings that looked like errors (that my disk’s UUID wasn’t being used, for instance) but were just notices. I tried the usual recovery steps from the recovery console. Fix broken packages. Check disks. No issues. Then I read that I should uninstall nvidia drivers and this is where things went wrong again. Different errors. More different errors.
So I tried to find the repair-install mode of my Ubuntu Live USB stick, but I don’t think that exists. But what I could do was this, and it took a fair bit of delving into my brainbank for memories that it was possible. I could mount the existing root partition as the current root partition in the running Live system and do further troubleshooting that way.
Here are the steps. They’re fun.
You have backups, right?
Firstly, find out the name of your root partition. This will need a bit of knowledge that I won’t (or can’t?) explain right here. In essence you’re looking for the correct partition type (Linux filesystem [1]) that is the right size (in my case, around 70GB[2]), on the right disk (I have a 500GB NVMe disk as the system disk[3]).
So the partition I have to mount is /dev/nvme0n1p5
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1p5 /mnt
Then mount /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys and /run with this neat little for loop
for dir in /dev /dev/pts /proc /sys /run; do sudo mount --bind $dir /mnt$dir; done
Now the magic happens with chroot
sudo chroot /mnt
You are now kinda mostly ish sorta running your existing copy of Linux. I ran the following commands and it fixed it. I didn’t reboot between each command, so can’t tell you exactly what fixed it, or if it was maybe the whole thing.
This 5th Kickboxer film feels like it throws all lore out of the window. I can’t remember if it even mentions the Sloane brothers at all. They’ve also selected a new bad-guy country: South Africa. The story-line is much the same as the previous four, but they’ve left out damsel-in-distress trope, which is refreshing.
Here’s a brief rundown of the plot:
The new lead character, Matt Reeves, is a do-good kickboxing champ who runs a dojo for kids in LA. Look at this dreamboat.
He finds out that a psychopath (Mr. Negaal) wants to create a new kickboxing league, and if fighters don’t sign up to the new league, their championship victories and titles are null and void. The chances of you being murdered by the psychopath’s henchmen are pretty high too, which happens to Matt’s friend Johnny.
To avenge Johnny’s death, Matt teams up with a former henchman to take down Mr Negaal.
The best bit of the film is definitely the fight scenes that take place inside the luggage handling area of an airport. It’s particularly entertaining in a post-2001 security theatre world.
No steamy/smoky sex scenes. No damsel in distress. No sexual-violence-towards-women-as-a-plot-device. It’s, by 1990s standards nearly feminist.
Some attempts were made to showcase South Africa’s scenery.
Assuming that no one remembers the first three movies, they kindly give us a full recap of the story thus far at the beginning of this fourth installment. Which was good, because I’d clearly missed some detail.
While Kickboxer 3 was an improvement on the previous two, Kickboxer 4 is significantly worse, and I think they knew it when they were writing it, so they bring in the tried and tested attention grabber: boobs and a smoky sex scene. Why is the room so smoky?
It doesn’t work. No amount of skin is going to make up for the terribleness of the story.
David’s wife is kidnapped by Tong Po while David’s in jail. The only way David can get her back is to go to Tong Po’s Mexican drug-cartel compound (?!) for a contest of fights to the death. David is somehow a ninja now.
I don’t know why they couldn’t convince the original actor for Tong Po to come back, but they had to replace him with Kamil Krifa with a whole lot of poorly colour-matched skin prostheses.
The only good thing about this movie is this neck tattoo.
No good scenery. Terrible fight choreography. Dreadful soundtrack. Bad acting.
One star.
I’m past the half way mark. We’ve got 5: The Redemption next, then the two un-numbered Vengeance and Retaliation to round it out with 7 films.
