I'm of the same mindset. When writing a fanfic set in 2015 featuring Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, my view was that they were resurrected and made it home with the Kromagg invasion erased in 2000/2001, and their return to sliding in the 2015 - 2016 story was a last adventure and a finale, not a new beginning. It seemed too cruel to send them into another 5 - 7 years of random sliding.

That said, one of the fun things about SLIDERS was that none of the characters were who you'd expect to be headlining a science fiction adventure series. They were all civilians instead of military personnel or the equivalent. The SLIDERSCAST podcast had a reviewer who was constantly complaining that SLIDERS wasn't structured like his favourite TV show, STARGATE, and didn't have the sliders being tactical or professional or capable like the US Army characters on STARGATE, which was the point.

On a creative level, Jerry O'Connell and Sabrina Lloyd being in their 50s and making his first slide with Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies being seniors would further underline the sense of how the sliders are not, at first glance, the best suited to nomadic adventure. Of course, given Sabrina's recalcitrance and John's limited interest in full time work, this is hardly practical from a real world standpoint.

I felt a certain relief to know that Tracy Torme, while reverent towards Patrick McGoohan's performance and vision of THE PRISONER, felt that "Once Upon a Time" and "Fall Out" were random and nonsensical while appreciating that others enjoyed them.

I felt a certain validation at Torme's SLIDERS: THE CLASSIC EPISODES interview where he expressed the view that people who are extremely left or extremely right, politically, end up being very much the same. I regret not buying this book for $20 years ago at a small town stage theatre festival when i found it in a used bookstore and appreciate Grizzlor putting it up.

As most know, I'd love to see the original actors at their 2023 ages playing older versions of themselves who begin their sliding journey at their present day ages, presumably playing older doubles on an Earth where Quinn failed to reopen the 1994 vortex until 2023. However, even this presents its difficulties.

While Jerry O'Connell and Cleavant Derricks would be enthusiastic about being series regulars, Sabrina Lloyd doesn't want to act anymore. She's said that she has come to realize that she was never more unhappy than in the female-hostile, image-obsessed world of Hollywood, and that while she'd gladly do a six episode run on a SLIDERS revival, she wouldn't want to return to full time TV or film work.

John Rhys-Davies said in 2019 that he would only want to be on a new version of SLIDERS for "a season or two" and he probably meant an eight episode season. And if you're only bringing back some of them, then you have to jump through some hoops to justify it as Torme did with what seems like a selective-ish attitude to continuity where he seemed to be proposing an alternate timeline where the sliders got stranded somewhere after "The Guardian".

From a logistical standpoint, I understand why a studio would cast younger: they want a show to last 5 - 7 years or even longer if they can get to a SUPERNATURAL-worthy 15. The younger the actor, the less established and the lower a price they command, and the easier it is to contract them to the full run of the show without conflicts and other obligations.

Creatively, I would love to see Quinn Mallory at 49 years old, having lost his passion for science after failing to create anti-gravity only to discover many decades after giving up that he discovered something else instead... but there is a very strong case for just starting over because the potential for longevity is what justifies deficit financing a series in the first place. Personally, one of the greatest pleasures of watching SUPERNATURAL or FRASIER or MEET THE FOSTERS followed by GOOD TROUBLE is to age with the characters, but SLIDERS would be skipping over the aging part with an original cast revival.

Anyway. I wish Torme had gotten a greenlight and I am sorry that he did not.

Morbidly, my suspicion ever since this thread started is that Tracy Torme pitched an original-cast-revival over a recast-reboot because he felt that he would be the only one vying for an original-cast-revival and he wanted to pitch it before he died.

My personal theory is that Torme felt that anyone else developing properties with NBCUniversal could pitch a recast-reboot... and that this hypothetical someone else could pitch the more marketable and sellable recast-reboot after Torme's death.

I don't think Torme planned to die within a few years of meeting with NBCUniversal, but he also knew that after prostate cancer and heart surgery and with his diabetes, there was a chance that his remaining years were more limited than he hoped.

I would also note that a more financially-minded creator might have pitched a recast-reboot to better his chances of a sale and a payment, and viewed it as a compromise to open the door to revisiting the original cast via guest appearances or audioplays or comic books or novels.

The rebooted MACGYVER series, which original creator Lee David Zlotoff championed and consulted on, for example, enabled Zlotoff to produce and shepherd an original continuity MACGYVER novel to address the original character's life and fate in the present day. The rebooted BATTLESTAR GALACTICA series also enabled comics to be published in the original series continuity.

For Tracy Torme, compromise was an ugly word. His loyalty was to the original characters as played by the original cast, and not to his bank balance. I respect that.

I didn't realize until the podcasts that Torme was a fan of THE PRISONER, a show that was really fantastic for the first run of 13 or so episodes and then collapsed upon itself in its final four. Amusingly, if you read the script for SLIDERS' "Please Press One", you can tell that it was meant to be a lengthy tribute to THE PRISONER, but it doesn't really come through onscreen, and I only hope that Torme never, ever, ever saw it.

ireactions wrote:

My Android TV set top box, the Mi Box 3 from 2016, has been behaving very strangely. Audio is often out of sync with video. Large h.264 video files and mid-sized h.265 files and MKV files freeze up or crash. The colour on a some MKVs has gone haywire with everything looking way too yellow. I wondered about upgrading. I wondered if the aged hardware was no longer up to speed.

The manufacturer, Xiaomi, has released a 2023 set top box now called the 2023 Xiaomi TV Box S (2nd Gen). But inexplicably, the 2023 box has a processor that's only 15 percent faster. The 2GB RAM is unchanged, the 8GB storage is unchanged. Their old box is no longer playing modern video files well, but their new box is about the same. The only reason I can see for Xiaomi's TV box being incrementally advanced from their seven year old box is that chips used in 2016 are no longer available.

I'm going to take a run at some troubleshooting, but if the Mi Box 3 is no longer capable, it doesn't make sense to upgrade to a newer model from the same manufacturer because their newer model isn't much better. I suspect I see if I can get an old, broken laptop repaired and pressed into service as a home theatre PC.

I saw a few video reviews on YouTube that report that the 2023 Xiaomi TV Box S is actually pretty capable at playing h.264 and h.265. I also saw a few reviews of my 2016 Mi Box 3 which reported that the Mi Box was totally unequipped for 4K output and should stick to 1080. I realized that on a recent update, the resolution had been increased and dry to 4K. It was too much for the hardware.

Also, the Android TV app I'd been using, MX Player, has been having some compatibility issues with older Android TV hardware.

I reduced the output video to 1080 at 24hz and tried a new video player app, Nova Player. Now all h.264 and h.265 videos are playing properly again, so I won't be upgrading or replacing the hardware. I will remain in the sub 4K zone.

Having made a general claim about the low production quality of the DC Universe Original Animated Features movies, I felt compelled to interrogate that by watching some more of them.

I watched BATMAN: GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT, a vision of Batman where he adopts his superhero identity in the late 19th century as Gotham is menaced by a serial killer targeting prostitutes. The script is an extremely strong piece of work, the acting is compelling, the voice mixing is solid and avoids the detached quality of SON OF BATMAN and BATMAN VS. ROBIN where it never sounded like the actors were in the same room or even in the same dimension.

But the animation! I was astonished that in 2018, Warner Bros. released an animated feature where the animation looked like stop motion that was missing a few frames. A shot of Pamela Isley walking down a street looked more like she was teleporting for each step. The animation was so bad that I was compelled to do the previously unthinkable: I broke into my sister's apartment. I forced the lock, cut the alarm, went to the fridge, helped myself to a soda, activated her popcorn maker, then sat down at her living room TV to watch GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT.

Her TV has a motion smoothing feature that mine doesn't, while she's turned it off (I've taught her well), I turned it back on to watch GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT. I was impressed to see that raising the 23.97FPS to 60FPS smoothed out all the animated movements and GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT suddenly seemed several notches more capable. The strangely abrupt movements of the film now looked fluid and flowing. It still wasn't a Disney cinematic feature because the designs and surroundings still had the sparseness of a TV budget project, but it looked like a professional project instead of a student film animatic.

Motion smoothing is quite rightly loathed for making live action film and TV look like videotape, but non-CG animation as a medium of illustrative reality where movement is approximated. Motion smoothing augments the approximation and makes it more vivid. I know motion interpolation, as pneumatic explained it in the SLIDERS DVD thread, is not truly 60fps and there can be all sorts of artifacts and distortions. But I can't help but think Warner Bros. Animation could've made their the lower budgeted movies look better just by running the final cut through motion interpolation to up the frame rate.

It wouldn't have any effect on the lousy voice mixing or lack of music or dull scripting in some of the weaker installments, of course. And a lot of the better-animated films wouldn't gain much: NEW FRONTIER, GOTHAM KNIGHTS, BATMAN: NINJA and the Adam West features already looked smooth. But GOTHAM BY GASLIGHT deserved better, HUSH would have benefitted from a better frame rate, and I think I'd like to watch SUPERMAN: MAN OF TOMORROW with motion smoothing and try to give it another chance.

Today was supposed to be the day Torme made a podcast appearance.

Grizzlor wrote:

First, the co-host of Awakenings, Penny Shepard tweeted a month back that per Tracy: "he’s been under the weather."  So obviously that's not fun to hear.  She did reply and said that Tracy is "doing better; he will be back Jan 10."

We were waiting for him to come back, to hear his perspective, his wisdom, his brilliance. Today we must resign to waiting until we join him in the next world. And yet, there's so much in his time and work and life from which we can learn and draw inspiration. And he really, really loved SLIDERS even when it often didn't love him back.

ireactions wrote:

In recent years, I was heartened to know that across decades of disappointment, Tracy Torme kept Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo in his heart and his wish for a revival was to bring Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies back to their roles. A lot of shows and their creators have prioritized the brand (MACGYVER, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) over the cast, but Torme's loyalty was to those four characters as performed by those four actors. He cared about them as much as the fans did.

Grizzlor wrote:

Good point about the original cast.  I would hope that we haven't seen the last of "Sliders," but I would agree that Tracy was the last hope to return it featuring the original cast in some major way.

This is supposition, but I suspect that a SLIDERS reboot with new actors playing Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo would have had a much better chance of getting on NBC or Peacock than the revival that Torme pitched.

And I think if Torme had been in it just to get another payday, he probably would have just pitched a reboot. There would have been no shame in it. WALKER: TEXAS RANGER, KUNG FU, BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, CHARMED, ROSWELL, etc., all made marketing sense as reboots and they each earned the original creators a satisfying payment regardless of the creative merits of any of it.

Ultimately, Torme did not seem to be in it for the money. He did have to pitch a revival that accepted that Sabrina might be hard to book and John might have limited availability whereas Jerry and Cleavant would be ready. But in the end, his loyalty was not to his wallet but to Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, which is not something you should expect to see very often or ever again.

Jerry O'Connell is saying both things: that Torme was a genius and that Torme was a genius for casting him in SLIDERS. I think we can reconcile both on the spectrum of human communication.

Jerry has said a few times: he doesn't really understand why anyone cast him as a scientist or ever would again because Jerry is not in any way scientific or scientifically minded. I think he is selling himself a bit short even as he is acknowledging a reality: he was a handsome young man and a face on which Torme and Weiss could sell a show to the FOX Network.

However, Jerry is very talented and he is, in fact, scientifically minded in a key area: he understands the science, or rather, the craft, of acting. Jerry has an instinctive grasp of how to use his movements, body, voice, expressions and reactions to convey information through a camera to an audience. I'm not going to say that Jerry has always used these talents well because often, he relied less on considered technique and more on instinct, and sometimes, his instincts were not a match for the characters he was playing. In the past two decades, however, Jerry has refined his methods so that his acting is both considered to the character but then instinctive within the framework he has chosen for the role.

I think Jerry may be commenting on how Torme saw something in Jerry that Jerry didn't see in himself when Torme cast Jerry O'Connell to to play Quinn Mallory.

**

What were Torme's political and sociological views? They were complex and complicated, and while I didn't agree with a lot of Torme's opinions, I was impressed by how he practiced them.

Torme was a Libertarian and voted Libertarian, which means he could not be simply categorized as left or right or for Biden or Trump. Torme said that in his view, Democrats had become overrun by posturing with social values and imposing their social values rather than focusing on liberty and freedom. Torme spoke of how network executives wanted Rembrandt to speak in highly formal English and Torme insisted that Rembrandt speak like a proud Black man and the Black musicians Torme had known.

One extremely telling and admirable thing about Torme was in a podcast he recorded during the 2020 pandemic (which I can't find now): Torme said that he had some family members who were extremely dismissive of social distancing, masking and impending vaccination. Torme said he had some family members who were absolutely militant about distancing, masks and vaccines. He said he felt like he was in the middle of a civil war between relatives. He said he himself was highly familiar with virology as he had to research epidemiology to write the script for I AM LEGEND.

Torme described himself as "in the middle", saying he masked and distanced generally, but was inviting people to his home if they felt comfortable and had invited a homeless friend to move in with him; that he would get vaccinated but didn't have antipathy towards anyone who didn't because in America, they should be free to not do so. Asked about Trump, Torme said he hoped Trump would release information about UFOs.

To me, this says that Torme did not feel the need to impose his views on his social circle. His views were for himself and he might disagree with people, but he didn't wish to isolate himself to an echo chamber of the like-minded. He was controlling in showrunning a TV show, but outside a writers' room, he was content to live and let live. But even in the context of the writers' room, I would note: Torme had an all-consuming love for professional sports, yet allowed his sports mania to be mocked and satirized in the episode "Eggheads". This speaks to an openness of mind and spirit.

A lot of the time, we get angry over politics because someone is trying to impose their personal biases and at times bigotries upon others. Outside the realm of television, Torme had his views, but he recognized that they were his own views and didn't need them to be shared by anyone else.

In recent years, I was heartened to know that across decades of disappointment, Tracy Torme kept Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo in his heart and his wish for a revival was to bring Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies back to their roles. A lot of shows and their creators have prioritized the brand (MACGYVER, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA) over the cast, but Torme's loyalty was to those four characters as performed by those four actors. He cared about them as much as the fans did.

I hope that wherever he is, he found his way back to them, to his father, and to all of his questions regarding UFOs.

ireactions wrote:

Watching Marvel's WHAT IF? with the full motion animation, lush and dense environments, smooth camerawork, hyperkinetic editing, compelling shot composition, immersive soundscape, high energy voice acting -- and I have to wonder, why exactly are those DC Universe Original Animated movies still being made? They look stiff and immobile compared to WHAT IF?

I said that the DC Universe Original Animated features all looked cheap and amateur. However, I have to say, that was a generalization and there is a more nuanced opinion to be had. There have been a number of standouts: the JUSTICE LEAGUE NEW FRONTIER feature had a slick, simple set of character designs with smooth animation. GREEN LANTERN: FIRST FLIGHT looked very nice, probably because being set in space meant the artists didn't have to do too many characters or cityscapes. GOTHAM KNIGHTS was beautiful, probably because the format of short stories suited the budget of these projects.

However, for every NEW FRONTIER, there seem to be four or five mediocrities like SUPERMAN: MAN OF TOMORROW, a strangely inanimate feature that lacks music and motion and has a tedious visual presentation of Superman's feats. And this cheap looking film was meant to be the debut of the new run of DC animated films.

I note that RETURN OF THE CAPED CRUSADER and BATMAN VS. TWO FACE, both recent animated sequels to the 60s BATMAN show from Warner Bros. Animation, look beautiful. While not at the full motion level of WHAT IF where the camera can move through the environment, these two films clearly had fight choreography and a sense of visual intensity that is not to be found in SUPERMAN VS. THE ELITE. And I notice that the BATMAN: HUSH feature is very close to the same level of RETURN and TWO FACE, but CATWOMAN: HUNTED is stiff and lifeless.

Another thing I noticed is that a lot of the poorer films like SUPERMAN: MAN OF TOMORROW, SON OF BATMAN, BATMAN VS. ROBIN, BAD BLOOD, and CATWOMAN: HUNTED have strangely stilted voice editing. A character says a line, there's a half-second to a full second pause, and then another character voices their response. There is a conspicuous lack of conversational interaction and pacing. It's very obvious the voice actors didn't record together. But then in GREEN LANTERN:  FIRST FLIGHT, BATMAN: HUSH and the two 60s films, there's overlap and reaction in the performances even though it's likely those actors didn't record together either.

It seems to me like everyone involved is very talented, but Warner Bros. wants a certain number of features each year and allocates time and budget based on predicted unit sales. A sequel to the 60s BATMAN TV show featuring Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar and William Shatner will sell better than a SUPERMAN feature. My guess would be that the Adam West project gets a larger budget for animation and a lengthier schedule, not only for visual quality, but so that the editors can edit and mix together the voice tracks to create reactions, interruptions, overlapping dialogue and other elements of natural conversation.

Meanwhile, SUPERMAN: MAN OF TOMORROW gets less money and a shorter schedule, and less time to create the illusion of conversation in the sound editing process. There are probably any number of these animated films that, due to the release schedule, didn't get the refinement and care they needed.

A lot of these projects seem to have had a lot of time and money put into the box art and into booking 'name' actors for a few days of recording, but significantly less put into scripting, animating, recording and editing. I hope that under James Gunn, DC animated projects will find a way to achieve a higher level of artistry and quality.

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It occurs to me that I could and should have been much more charitable to a certain someone. And more scientific.

I was previously annoyed with a person because he dismissed a spectrum of scientific results as inconsistent and therefore non-existent. Then I saw him presenting anecdotes to dismiss publicly known facts and data about public figures and their public actions and statements and I proceeded to pillory it.

But I now find myself thinking: public figures are people and people's behaviour also exists on a spectrum. Which means that personal anecdotes are not, in fact, irrelevant, but rather evidence to consider and reconcile to surrounding facts and data. That would have been scientific and polite, especially when psychology is an extremely artful science of interpretation and imprecise modelling.

This person said that Allison Mack could not have been a sex trafficker because she was nice and posed for a photo with him. The reality is that both are true: Allison Mack was glowingly, incandescently nice to her fans and abusively vindictive and cruel to her female victims in her sex cult. This person was charmed enough by her to defend her and I called him an easy mark who was gullible, but that was unfair: he was taken in by a master manipulator who convinced him in a few moments that her pleasant treatment of him was the whole of her life and personality as opposed to one isolated compartment of a twisted existence. She convinced many smart people this way.

This person said that Christian Bale could not possibly have anger management issues because the recording of Bale abusing a film set crew member should not have been released to the public and that Bale was a family man and nice to his fans. The reality is that Bale is all these things. He visits terminally ill children and shooting survivors in hospitals and he has widely-reported anger management issues (verbally abusing a lighting technician, an arrest for assaulting his mother and sister) for which he has held himself accountable as he works through his problems. Good people can have anger management problems and mend their ways.

This person said that Kelsey Grammer was extremely nice to fans in response to some of us expressing feelings regarding Grammer's support for America to become fascist dictatorship as recently as December 2023. The reality is that both are true: Grammer has one mode of conduct when engaging with his public and an entirely different mode of conduct when deciding which politicians for whom to vote. Grammer has described himself as someone whose life choices are disastrous but whose acting choices are splendid. When facing a fan, Grammer is facing regard and appreciation for the only area of his life in which he has been consistent in his competence: acting. When facing politics, I would posit that Grammer employs cognition and judgement that have been severely damaged by deeply traumatic events.

And maybe if I'd said that at the start, this person would have felt reconciled with rather than ridiculed.

Sorry, Grizzlor. Must try harder.

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Oh my. That is dire.

Yes. I will be more careful.

I wish I hadn't implied -- which I didn't mean to in the first place -- that Grizzlor's experiences with celebrities aren't significant, meaningful, special and cool. They aren't full fledged psychological evaluations, but they're impactful and nice and I personally don't have that kind of night life.

On a tangent... many, many years ago, when I was in college, I wrote an article about THE PRISONER comic book, SHATTERED VISAGE. Someone wrote a column in response  to my article calling my analysis weak, clumsy, facile, overemphasizing irrelevancies and misapprehending vital information in the text. It was hypercritical, acidic and precise in ripping apart my thoughts and arguments and assumptions and biases and errors.

Naturally, I tracked down the person who wrote this article. I found out where he lived. Where he worked. Where he studied. I then sent emails to his personal, professional and academic email account to tell him how much I adored his takedown, and how I found it well-worded, incisive, thoughtful, clever, detailed, and convincing.

He lived in the States but ended up moving to Toronto for a year or so and we would have lunch and I just adored him explaining to me why I was Wrong. He found it extremely weird that I was so interested in learning why I was Wrong, but he also found it pleasantly endearing.

He ended up moving back to Los Angeles with his wife. I miss him. We still talk on Signal and email a lot and he's reviewing something I wrote recently to tell me why it's Wrong. There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped my mind.

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And as I wait for some x-rays and bloodwork (pretty sure it's nothing, just want to make sure the pneumonia didn't leave lasting damage, and yes, this is transparently a note I'm leaving in case a workmate wonders why I'm not at work but somehow have time to post on Sliders.tv)...

On the subject of to what degree the US is divided between Trump and Biden voters, I personally lack the understanding of statistical analysis needed to reconcile Grizzlor and QuinnSlidr's percentages. I will bring it up with a statistician I know once she returns from her holiday and see if she has anything interesting to share.

On the subject of whether or not Trump voters are mentally ill, note that I didn't make such an assertion. I only said that I think Kelsey Grammer is mentally ill (as anyone would be after the savage murders of two family members, one a distant father and another a beloved sister).

The claim that all Trump voters are mentally ill is... something I wanted to think about more.

I would say: from a cursory and inexpert review, it seems to me that QuinnSlidr's and Grizzlor's explanations of Trump voters (mental illness and tribalism) are different but complementary perspectives regarding the same spectrum of behaviours.

On one end of the spectrum, there is narcissistic personality disorder and shared psychosis. On the other, there is tribalism manifesting via a variety of cognitive biases including but not limited to selective perception, Semmelweis reflex and false consensus bias.

Cognitive bias is not, clinically speaking, a mental disorder. A cognitive bias is a systematic deviation from rational and objective thought, a normal and natural coping mechanism of human experience. In contrast, mental illness refers to conditions of distress and disability due to cognitive function becoming impaired to the point of crisis in function. However, both cognitive bias and mental illness can create the behavioural phenomenon on display in Trump voters.

I don't know that QuinnSlidr and Grizzlor's perspectives are actually in any real opposition while their personalities are clearly at odds. What are their personalities?

QuinnSlidr is militantly Democrat, Democrat to the point where I worry that he is blindly Democrat. While I vote Canadian equivalent Democrat (Liberal or NDP depending on polls), I do not think that all good in the world will ever be found in any one particular philosophy or political party nor would I ever ignore the faults, failings, crimes or corruptions of anyone for whom I'd ever voted.

I find that QuinnSlidr can be aggressively supportive of Biden but set aside Biden's wrongs or failings or simply doesn't address them. I would urge my friend QuinnSlidr to be cautious and to be just as critical towards politicians he supports as he is with the politicians he opposes.

And QuinnSlidr, when he is talking politics, often communicates in absolutes, and because they're absolutes I don't disagree with, we haven't had much disagreement. However, speaking in absolutes is something that I personally try (and often fail) to avoid.

I find that Grizzlor, while having declared his loyalty to democracy (small D), also speaks in absolutes and delivers his absolutes with reasoning that consistently displays confabulation (to which I myself am not immune, see my posts on THE ORVILLE writing team and shooting schedule), confirmation bias (I do that too sometimes), cherry picking, non-sequiturs, and facile deflection.

I find that QuinnSlidr is hypersensitive to arguments made on foundations in cognitive bias and almost reflexively calls out anyone who voices logical errors as a liar (which I have done myself but maybe shouldn't have).

Grizzlor, in addition to speaking in absolutes, often attempts intimidation by appealing to supposedly higher authorities, and has also displayed flashes of authoritarianism in his behaviour. I find that QuinnSldr is also provoked by Grizzlor's authoritarianism and I find that righteous and reasonable.

In turn, I find that Grizzlor is hypersensitive to his logical errors, factual errors and faulty reasoning being examined, deconstructed, reviewed and disassembled because it causes him to experience cognitive dissonance: the awareness that he has made at least two contradictory and at times mutually exclusive claims or that his reasoning or presumptions are in opposition to facts.

I find that ireactions (that's me) is sometimes far too gleeful in pointing out these errors and clearly finds it really, really, really funny. ireactions clearly takes way too much mirth in bringing up how Grizzlor's denied that Allison Mack was running a sex trafficking operation on the grounds that she posed for a photo with him. ireactions thinks it's funny when ireactions' own errors are pointed out (often in psychotherapy), and ireactions (still me) forgets that it can upset others (although Grizzlor often denies being upset).

ireactions (me again) sometimes feels he has license to take amusement in this on the grounds that Grizzlor has said that he did not put any thought or care into his writing and that he takes no responsibility for anything he has said in the past or anything he will say in the future or anything he is saying right now and doesn't really care what ireactions thinks. at that point ireactions (ahoy!) feels free to cut deeper than he otherwise might, thinking Grizzlor doesn't care what ireactions thinks anyway.

I think ireactions (me again) needs to rethink how much pleasure he takes in pointing out the cognitive errors of others and adopt a more neutral tone. Let's try it!

Observe this example of cognitive bias:

ireactions wrote:

Christian Bale having some serious anger management issues did not undermine the role of Batman because Batman has some problems with anger too.

Response: Bale doesn't have anger issues, it was a one-time on set outburst that should never have been revealed.  He's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, a staunch family man as well.

ireactions wrote:

Regarding Christian Bale: to get caught on tape screaming at a crew member may be unfortunate; but to also be arrested for assaulting your mother and sister is an anger management problem. (Charges were dropped.) Once again, you engage in deflection: you dismiss hard evidence of Bale's anger issues that you cannot refute, just by claiming it shouldn't exist, and ignore the other incident.

Response: the guy had one meltdown on a movie set, and the crew actually backed him up on that, and has been nothing but a model citizen beyond that.

The argument here is that an audio recording of Bale's anger management difficulties is invalid evidence because it should have been private. The term for this is a red herring; the origin of the recording does not negate content of the recording.

This argument subsequently ignores the provided information that Christian Bale was arrested for assaulting his mother and sister (although not charged). This argument's avoidance is a textbook example of confirmation bias: he ignores what doesn't confirm his personal assumptions and pretends it does not exist, even when this is directly contrasting with the term "family man".

This argument then emphasizes how Christian Bale has a family and implies that Christian Bale was personally pleasant. This is a non-sequitur: the information, while (presumably) true, has no bearing on whether or not Christian Bale has anger management issues.

Then there's this straw man argument:

You seem content to besmirch public individuals freely here for a variety of superficial reasons (such as who they vote for)

But in the original comment, Bale was only described as having anger management issues, based on statements of fact: this argument misrepresents the comment as saying that Bale is a bad person. In actuality, "anger management problems" is not a complete character description and many steps away from "violent assaulter" or "abuser," terms which were not used to describe Bale.

People can have anger management problems and manage them. Christian Bale has publicly apologized for his misdeeds and criticized himself; he has subjected himself to live ridicule for his failings, which are the mark of someone with a healthy ego and openness to change. His issues with anger informed the Batman character and are a matter of public record and do not in any way benefit from minimization and denial.

When a person employs a style of argument that is obvious in its fallacies, overt in misrepresentations and declared in forceful absolutes, it comes off as deceptive. It is a style of communication exudes dishonesty, even if no deceit is genuinely intended. That is why QuinnSlidr has called this person a liar and that is why I have done so as well (although I have come to see it as cognitive disorientation rather than deception).

This may also be why this person has been in what he described as "wars" on other message boards. This communication style is antithetical to trust and exchange.

The appearance of deceit is further prominent when this person demonstrates confabulation and deflection where recall of previous events is incorrect, a little self-serving, and therefore can seem deceitful to those disinclined to be charitable.

Observe the response to me back in 2018 after I said that Allison Mack was in a cult and shared news that she was being investigated for sex trafficking:

FAKE NEWS!!!!!  Damn I've been waiting to say that! Firstly, that article is click bait, and the only reference to her "arrest" is on the freaking  SUN website, a British tabloid rag. Secondly, if she were hiding out in Mexico OR on the run from the law, would she have agreed to appear in ATLANTIC CITY, NJ, in April??? OR agreed to pose for a photo with ME last month in New York??!!!  Yes, I went to one of John Glover's off broadway plays, and to my great surprise, she did as well!

As is clear from the 2018 words: this person declared that Allison Mack could not possibly be a sex trafficker on the grounds that she posed for a photo with him. This argument is a non-sequitur; he made a conclusion that had no logical relation to the premise. Sex trafficking is not in any way precluded by posing for a photo.

This is a pattern. Observe:

Bale... one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, a staunch family man as well. As for Kelsey, idk if you can find it, but he did an episode of Raw Nerve with Shatner and he goes through his past traumas and it's really revealing and quite emotional.  Grammer too, super nice guy if you ever run into him, and while he is terrible at marriage, I don't know if I'd bury him for being a Republican.  Not sure how much of a diehard Trumper he is either?

Posing for a photo with does not prevent someone from being a human trafficker. Having been passingly pleasant to someone and having a family does not prevent someone from having anger management problems or from having trauma and mental illness from the murders of a father and sister or from being a determined Trump supporter.

Those are all non-sequiturs whether applied to Christian Bale or Kelsey Grammer.

Then we have confabulation. Observe:

And for the umpteenth time, I "posed" with Allison knowing nothing about the later legal accusations on her, other than she was accused of being in some kind of "strange cult."

Note the confabulative deflection to provide a straw man argument. He claims he is being accused of supporting Allison Mack in her crimes.

But that is not the case at all. Instead, it's an observation that he makes assertions where his evidence consists of anecdotes, personal or public, that relate to the person in question but have no relevance to the specific issue.

He is declaring that he is accused of involvement in the NXIVM cult. This false recollection allows him to defeat an accusation that wasn't being made.

Someone unfamiliar with him would call him dishonest and deceitful, but I feel confident that this is not deception but cognitive error.

I must say: ireactions (hey there) would have done better had he delivered these observations in a more detached and distant fashion rather than conveying them in a mocking tone.

Then we go to brief exhibitions of authoritarianism where he expresses the wish to dominate and control to dictate obedience. Observe:

If I showed this thread to the co-creators of the series this forum is about, they would absolutely VOMIT.

I already stated I am done discussing "public health."  It also has no business being in an American Politics thread either,

But again I find it questionable that you seem content to besmirch public individuals freely here for a variety of superficial reasons (such as who they vote for), and act as the forum's King of Thought, over anyone else.

Honestly, I don't know why the two of you prefer to ignore points I try to make or even engage in normal discussion, but instead choose to attack me personally with insults and whatnot?  What is the point of having a moderator, oh wait, he's the one doing it.

He complains that he lacks the authority to set the boundaries of what does and doesn't qualify as a discussion of American politics or normal discussion, but his desired boundaries are self-contradictory with many fallacies of definition.

He claims public health policy is not a matter of politics, that public figures' public support of politicians do not reflect their personal or public character and are not a matter of politics; that public figures and their public actions and public statements shouldn't be discussed in a public forum; and then declares that discussing his errors of reasoning in a discussion is not "normal" discussion, and implies that subjects should require his personal approval and disapproval.

This assertion reflects a desire for authoritarianism, for the power to dictate what is and is not discussed, and to set subjects out of bounds should they fall outside the borders of his confirmation bias. It betrays a severity of insecurity and a desperation for control and dominance.

This is also extremely triggering to QuinnSlidr who can clearly spot an authoritarian bent within five words.

But maybe that flair for authoritarianism is a mirage. Maybe it's there because I have made my points in a derisive and mocking way when I should have been detached, clinical, analytical and unemotional.

Maybe I should have found a way to make my observations without causing to Grizzlor experience not only ridicule but cognitive dissonance (which he may say he didn't), and then he wouldn't express the desire to take control of this message board to dictate what subjects are permitted, and then he wouldn't use wording and sentiments that raise QuinnSlidr's blood pressure.

Maybe it's my fault.

I called him an easy mark. I told him he was gullible. I said he was easily tricked by a pretty girl who was a sex trafficker. This has clearly rattled him (although he may claim it didn't) and sparked his desire to dominate.

In the past (and I don't mean the distant past, I mean like January 2023), I too have been gullible and easily tricked by a pretty girl who was a narcissistic sociopath whose only redeeming trait was that she was too twistedly dysfunctional to pose any serious threat.

I too have confused personal anecdotes for logic and reasoning.

I too have engaged in confabulation. I too have had dubious ideas about health (in the range of dubious herbal supplements).

There isn't a thing I've said about Grizzlor that someone hasn't said about me; there isn't a thing I've said about Grizzlor that I wouldn't admit to myself.

I guess I didn't feel upset or insulted when someone pointed it out, but relieved to know my error. I failed to think about how I was making someone else feel and should really have given that more thought.

Thinking about it... I have come to realize that was a mistake that set an argumentative tone that swept QuinnSlidr up as well and I regret it.

I apologize and will no longer gleefully point out the errors of others and adopt a more neutral tone.

Maybe if I don't do that anymore, Grizzlor will manage his biases and desire for dictatorship and QuinnSlidr will consider giving Grizzlor the benefit of the doubt.

On a not-unrelated note, there's an actor whom I won't name who was super-nice and generous and kind to me and they are or were a Trump supporter and... may or may not be one now and I will have some thoughts on that tomorrow without naming names because they may have had a change of heart, whereas Kelsey Grammer was supporting Trump as of December 2023.

X-Ray time.

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Another thought:

Grizzlor wrote:

Bale doesn't have anger issues, it was a one-time on set outburst that should never have been revealed.  He's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet, a staunch family man as well.

Why is "staunch family man" some sort of shield against accusations? "Family man" has been used to describe Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini, and David Peckinpah as well as Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, Fred Rogers, and Tom Hanks, and fits a wide spectrum from the sadistic to the noble. A family is not the unique identifier of virtue that Grizzlor seems to think it is.

And as I never seem to tire of bringing up, Grizzlor once posed for a photo with a known and later-convicted sex trafficker, so being passingly pleasant to Grizzlor is also not the mark of decency he thinks it is.

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Yes, well, given that you once defended a celebrity sex trafficker based on little more than her being conventionally attractive and willing to pose for a photo with you, you have a history of being an easy mark, won over by any niceties.

This is due to your habit of ignoring any evidence that does not fit your presumptions, your confirmation bias and deflective cherry picking: you downplay a publicly divulged history of troubled mental health by referring to a talk show; you emphasize an anecdotal pleasant encounter, all so you can dismiss the idea that someone's father and sister being violently murdered could cause mental illness.

Regarding Christian Bale: to get caught on tape screaming at a crew member may be unfortunate; but to also be arrested for assaulting your mother and sister is an anger management problem. (Charges were dropped.) Once again, you engage in deflection: you dismiss hard evidence of Bale's anger issues that you cannot refute, just by claiming it shouldn't exist, and ignore the other incident.

You have done this with Wil Wheaton in reverse: you heard his description of how he cut ties with his mother and father because they stole his money and mocked his acting; you ignored the financial fraud and said Wheaton was ridiculous to cut ties over childhood disputes, emphasizing only what justified your personal dislike of Wheaton. Confirmation bias.

Evidence doesn't cease to be just because you didn't like where it came from. Sex trafficking and trauma don't vanish on the grounds that the people in question were pleasant with you or your peers. Child abuse doesn't disappear based on your disliking the survivor.

But it's good to know that if I pose for a photo with you in a passing encounter, you will vouch for my character no matter what.

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Another thought on Kelsey Grammer and Frasier:

First, if we look at Grammer's autobiography: father shot and murdered when Grammer was 13, sister raped and stabbed and murdered when he was 20 (and he had to identify the body), half brothers killed by sharks when he was 25, drug and alcohol addiction, drunk driving, a car crash -- I think we can be kind and say that this person is mentally ill and very sad.

I don't feel Frasier is severely diminished by his actor being mentally ill and supporting alt-right fascism. (Hey, at what point does it stop being "alt"?) When we look at, say, Joss Whedon: his misogyny undermined BUFFY as a feminist creation. When we look at Allison Mack, her sex trafficking cult of brainwashing, slavery and branding undermined her character of Chloe Sullivan, an information-empowered superhero.

However, Frasier is not a paragon or a wholely heroic figure or a role model like Buffy or Chloe. Frasier is an extremely flawed human being: his ego is out of control, he's controlling and insecure, he's a psychiatrist and mental health practitioner who faked a suicide attempt for attention and then became genuinely suicidal and ended up on the evening news, he's a pretentious snob.

He's also brilliant, caring, empathetic, skillful, an information sponge, a voracious learner, a self-sacrificing person of love and decency -- but he is forever caught between his impeccable morality and his overinflated self-importance. Frasier is a buffoon and the audience is encourage to learn from his mistakes rather than emulate his behaviour.

Frasier is not meant to represent a particular pinnacle of human identity or achievement. For me, the character is not tarnished by the disgrace of his actor. Frasier Crane is defined not by his virtues but by his flaws and his perseverance in struggling with his flaws. The degree to which Grammer has surrendered to his failings only highlights how Dr. Frasier Crane is forever battling his own.

Christian Bale having some serious anger management issues did not undermine the role of Batman because Batman has some problems with anger too.

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The thing about a character like Dr. Frasier Crane is that he takes on a life of his own and develops an autonomy and identity that is fundamentally separate from actor even if the actor defines him.

I've enjoyed the 10 episode FRASIER revival season, too. It's not as skillful as the original, but it's enjoyable and even at its worst, only inoffensive.

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I was recently trying to use Sydney language model powered by Bing AI to write a pastiche of Dr. Frasier Crane, the fictional psychiatrist from the TV shows CHEERS and FRASIER (both incarnations). Dr. Crane is basically Professor Arturo, a well-educated, pompous, brilliant, bumbling, passionate, egocentric, moral, pretentious, cultured, bombastic buffoon with a good heart.

I hit an interesting limitation: Sydney couldn't achieve the level of cleverness, assessment and perspective that makes the Dr. Frasier Crane character iconic and special.

Sydney could mimic the somewhat professorial, loquacious language that Frasier uses, using 20 words when two would do. That's because every episode of FRASIER has been transcribed by fans and put online to enjoy during the pre-DVD and blu-ray era. Sydney could approximate Dr. Crane's body of psychiatric knowledge.

But Sydney couldn't create Dr. Crane's insights effectively. I ended up having to give Sydney the argument I felt Frasier would make for Sydney to write it in Frasier's voice.

The conversation we had:

IB
Dr. Crane, there's something my friend, Layla, has said to me four times in the last three years that's really unnerving me.

In 2021, Layla told me in our weekly phone call she would be mostly living at her family's cottage in Muskoka, a two hour drive away from here in the city of Toronto, where we both lived. She said, "I might as well be there, I don't have any friends in Toronto."

It sounded like she was saying she didn't think of us as friends, that she was severing our friendship, and leaving town. She immediately followed up by saying I could visit her there, so I dismissed her remark. And we continued to meet for lunch a lot.

At the end of 2021, she said that she was considering leaving her field of sound editing and finding a new profession. She said, "I might move to Quebec City, I don't have any friends in Toronto." It was like she was saying she was ending our friendship before leaving town. I was shocked and angry, but then she then paid for our Starbucks drink order, which she wouldn't do if we weren't friends.

In 2022, Layla decided to go to a city four hours away, Sudbury, to train to become a paramedic. Before she left, I said I would visit her in Sudbury and book a hotel. She said, "I'm not allowed to have overnight guests in the place I'm renting, which is fine, no one's going to visit me, I don't have any friends in Toronto." That shook me, but then she gave me her address in Sudbury and I did visit her.

And a few days ago, Layla said to me in a phone call that she was staying in Sudbury after finishing her training and moving in with two paramedic classmates, Jackson and Molly, and she said, "My classmates Jackson and Molly are my friends in Sudbury, I don't have any friends in Toronto."

That pissed me off. I said, mildly, I hope, "I live in Toronto, I'd appreciate some context."

She said, "Present company excepted. Sorry."

And I said, "I know what you meant" and she made plans with me to see each other during the holidays.

But I realize now: I don't know what she meant.

I don't know why she chose those words which dismiss any person in Toronto. That dismiss me. I don't know why she said them to me four times over.

It's haunted me for three years.

We have our weekly phone call booked in a few days. I need to talk to her about it and I'm scared.


DR. FRASIER CRANE
I’m very sorry to hear that you are going through a difficult time. It sounds like you have a long and complex relationship with Layla, and you're feeling hurt and confused by her repeated statements that she has no friends in Toronto.

You have reason to be upset by Layla’s statements. They imply that she doesn't value your friendship or your presence in her life.

They also her contradict her actions, because her words, "I don't have any friends in Toronto" have been a prelude to extremely friendly behaviors: asking you to visit, paying for your Starbucks order, and giving you her new address which you then visited and making plans for the holidays.

You want to convey how much her words frighten you and you want an explanation. I understand that you're afraid to talk to Layla about this.

You probably fear that she'll react with anger, defensiveness, or indifference. That she'll end the friendship or confirm your worst fears. That you'll lose her.

These are natural and normal fears, but they shouldn't prevent you from standing up for yourself and your friendship and asking her to explain herself. You have every right to ask her to provide an explanation for her choice of words and why she spoke them to you in the way that she did.


IB
I want to believe that when Layla tells me, "I don't have any friends in Toronto" and conveys that I'm not her friend and that she doesn't value me in her life and doesn't think of me among her friends, that it's an accident.

But I have also watched your show and read your books and read your autobiography, Dr. Crane. I have seen you say over and over again:

"There are no accidents."

"Oh, Niles. Any psychiatrist worth his salt knows that there are no accidents! No one would do something like that, however unconsciously, unless they stood to gain from it!"

"Sure, Dad! It was an 'accident'."

"Niles, you know as well as I do there are no accidents! Just admit it, Dad: your latent hostility toward me has been building through the years, little by little, until you've finally struck the Achilles heel of my decor, the Berber carpet! I suggest you dig deep into the twisted caves of your subconscious, where malicious acts abide, clothed in the robes of plausible excuses!"

"Things have been a little tense around here since the quote-unquote 'accident.'"

Dr. Crane, I want to believe she doesn't mean it.

I hear her. "I don't have any friends in Toronto."

I hear myself. "She didn't mean to say that, it was an accident."

I hear you. "There are no accidents."

I'm scared to call her on Saturday. I'm scared to ask her what that means. I'm scared it means exactly what it sounds like it means.


DR. FRASIER CRANE
I can’t tell you what Layla means or doesn’t mean, because I don’t know her personally, and I can’t read her mind. I can only tell you what I meant.

I say that there are no accidents because I think that sometimes, people do or say things that seem random or harmless, but actually reveal something deeper or darker. I think that sometimes, people have hidden motivations or subconscious desires.

But I also think that sometimes, people do or say things that are truly random or harmless, and don’t reveal anything deeper or darker.

When you hear my voice say, "There are no accidents," I want you to remember that it’s not a universal or absolute truth. It’s not a rule or a law. It’s not a verdict or a sentence. It’s just a phrase, a perspective, a tool. It’s something that can help you, but it can also hurt you. It’s something that you can use, but you can also ignore. It’s something that you can question, but you can also accept.

You don’t have to let my voice control you or define you. You have your own voice, and your own truth.

I think that it could be an accident. I think that it’s possible that that Layla didn’t mean to hurt you or reject you with her words. I think that there are some explanations for why she said those things, and none of them mean that she doesn’t love you or value you as a friend.

Maybe Layla was feeling lonely or insecure, and she was exaggerating for effect. Maybe she didn’t realize how her words would affect you, or how they would sound to you. Maybe she was stressed about moving and chose her words poorly.

I don’t know which one is true, or if any of them are true. But I hope that these explanations can help you see that it could be an accident and that you'll ask her what she meant.

This... wasn't what I was hoping for. I wanted Dr. Crane to interrogate his principle, "There are no accidents," which is drawn from Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist Sigmund Freud's model of the human psyche and the theory of unconscious motivations behind conscious behaviour. "There are no accidents." This is something that Dr. Frasier Crane has said at many points throughout the series.

Sydney's Dr. Crane, didn't interrogate or explore the deeper nuances of "There are no accidents" or how Dr. Crane had applied it throughout his life; when it became inconvenient, he just declared that it was not an absolute.

I wouldn't say that this was out of character, because Dr. Crane had barked, "There are no accidents!" at someone only to then have an accident himself. But it wasn't insightful for Dr. Crane, Mister "There are no accidents," to simply say that sometimes there are accidents after all.

It occurred to me that a lot of the advice Sydney has given in the guise of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. House has been effective, but (admirably) simple. Holmes and Dr. House tell people that the best way to address their terrors and insecurities is to find something they are dedicated to in the way Holmes and House are dedicated to solving mysteries. This advice has been delivered powerfully and through complex rhetoric, but it is, at its core, very straightforward.

In this case, I wanted Sydney to do something more complex. I wanted Dr. Frasier Crane to explore his belief that "There are no accidents" how it might apply or be misapplied, and Sydney... wasn't up to the challenge. Nor was I.

I tried to offer Sydney bits and pieces pieces of what a conceivable interrogation of "There are no accidents" might be in subsequent prompts. I asked Sydney to have Dr. Crane describe how "There are no accidents" was a principle that had sometimes misled him.

Sydney proceeded to output some text where Dr. Crane expressed regrets and criticisms over how he'd misapplied that concept. I was able to use the regrets and criticisms as a starting point to write more specific dialogue about how Dr. Crane had mis-used "There are no accidents" in two episodes of FRASIER, which Sydney then rewrote in Dr. Crane's voice.

I asked Sydney to have Dr. Crane explain the purpose of the theory that "There are no accidents", to which I then added sentiments of regret and some opinions about exterior speech and interior thought that Sydney rewrote for Dr. Crane to say. I then wrote out some alternate ways for Dr. Crane to interpret the events I had recounted, which Sydney then rewrote into Dr. Crane's voice.

The rewritten responses, after that, was:

DR. FRASIER CRANE
Ib, I see you have been paying attention to my autobiography, my interviews, and my writings. You quoted me on my belief regarding the principle that there are no accidents in human behavior. And that the seemingly random things people say and do are not random and reflect their inner thoughts and feelings.

I stand by that. "There are no accidents" is a perspective that I acquired from Freudian psychoanalysis, predicated on the idea that the human mind is composed of three parts: the id, the ego, and the superego.

The id is the part that harbors our instincts, desires, and impulses. The ego is the part that arbitrates between the id and the reality. The superego is the part that encompasses our morals, values, and ideals. Freud postulated that all human behavior is motivated by conflicts between these three parts of the mind, even if the person is not consciously cognizant of it.

"There are no accidents" is a way of examining how people’s 'accidents' are in fact outcomes of behaviors and motives that they may or may not have acknowledged at the time. For instance, if someone forgets their keys, or slips on a banana peel, or calls someone by the wrong name, it is not an accident, but a revelation of their unconscious thoughts and feelings.

But understanding what these 'accidents' reveal is not as simple as parroting the words that they uttered or describing the actions they performed. What people outwardly say and do is not necessarily a precise presentation of their inner thoughts and feelings, and the path between the exterior and interior can be extremely complex and distant.

When you hear my voice say, "There are no accidents," I want you to remember that you are recalling examples where I have not used the principle of "There are no accidents" in a constructive or compassionate way.

You are in fact citing situations where I used those words to insist upon a simplistic interpretation of events to avoid complexity and ignore nuance so that I could assign blame and punish someone. I wish I hadn't.

My brother had numerous mishaps in his apartment that injured Dad. I used "There are no accidents" to accuse him of deliberately hurting Dad, but a more reasonable observation might have been that Dad getting hurt was less an accident and more a result, as Niles had failed to make effective health and safety accommodations for my father's disability.

My father stepped on a bottle of oil that dispensed over my carpet. He said it was an accident. I told him, "There are no accidents" to accuse him of doing it to annoy me. But I now observe it was less an accident and again a result: my father stepped on the oil because he was hurrying to oil a squeaking chair. He was hurrying because I'd shouted at him about the squeak.

If I hadn't shouted at him, he wouldn't have hurried.

"There are no accidents" should not be a way of forever chaining people to what they said and did. It should be a way of helping them to mindfulness over how their choices and motives led to their results. It should be a tool of guidance and growth.

But I have not always used it this way. I have often used "There are no accidents" to judge and entrap people with their own words and actions. I have done it to my brother, my father, my son, my ex-wife, my girlfriends, my friends, my colleagues, and even my patients.

In every example you've cited, I was using "There are no accidents" as a weapon of accusation and condemnation, and using it this way has never been to anyone's gain or benefit, not even my own.

I have always regretted it.


IB
But what could Layla's words have meant? "I don't have any friends in Toronto." Why would she say that to me?


DR. FRASIER CRANE
I have not met Layla, so I can only offer you speculations. I would agree that for her to say "I don't have any friends in Toronto" is a hurtful remark to direct at you. I do not believe that Layla said what she said by accident.

But it may not have been expressing a callous disregard for your friendship and it may not have been a statement about you. It does not match her other behaviors.

It may have been a very poorly worded way of expressing that Layla does not feel a connection with the city of Toronto. It may have been a reflection on her isolation and loneliness in the city. It may have been a comment on her professional network and her need to start over elsewhere.

There is also the possibility that Layla meant precisely what she said and she indeed has no friends in Toronto. You have been very exact about her wording: "I don't have any friends in Toronto."

Observe that Layla employed the plural noun: "friends".

Layla could be entirely correct to say she does not have any friends in Toronto because she only has one friend in Toronto, and that friend is you.

The conversation reached another point where I wanted Dr. Crane to relate the situation I was describing to his own life. Just as Layla had left Toronto for a different city, Dr. Crane's fictional life in CHEERS and the two FRASIER shows had featured Dr. Crane leaving his friends in Boston for Seattle, Dr. Crane leaving his family in Seattle for his girlfriend in Chicago, and then leaving Chicago after 20 years to go back to Boston.

I wrote some inputs where I expressed sadness about Layla leaving, and Sydney's Dr. Crane wrote various comforting things about long distance friendships, but the AI did not make the connection between Dr. Crane's life and what I was relating.

I ended up giving the Sydney AI bullet points of what I wanted Dr. Crane to say with the specific continuity references, which Sydney then rewrote into Dr. Crane's style.

DR. FRASIER CRANE
I would suggest that Layla's wording is inflaming your insecurity because you are aware that your friendship wasn't enough reason enough for Layla to stay.


IB
I mean, it wasn't lost on me that she did leave me behind. And kept saying that she was going to.


DR. FRASIER CRANE
Ib, you need to remember that Layla’s decision to leave Toronto and pursue a new career and a new life was not a rejection. It was a personal choice that she made for her own happiness and fulfillment. Sometimes people need to make changes and leave behind the familiar.

I left Boston when I moved to Seattle. My departure was not a comment on my friends in Boston. Boston had become a place of grief and public humiliation after my failed engagement, my divorce, and my suicide attempt on television news. I was leaving my failures, not my friends.

I had 11 years in Seattle with my brother, Niles, my father, and my father's physiotherapist, Daphne, but then I had to leave. But I didn't leave because my family had failed to keep me there. Niles had married Daphne. Niles and Daphne had a newborn son. My father had remarried as well. They had started new lives. They were happy, and I was happy for them.

But I wasn't happy for me. I felt isolated and sad.

Dad had moved out. Daphne had moved out. I had gone from living with Dad and Daphne to living alone, with not even my father's dog for company. Charlotte, the woman I had fallen in love with, had moved to Chicago to pursue her career.

I loved having coffee with Niles regularly at Cafe Nervosa. He is my brother, my best friend, my sparring partner, my confidant. But coffee with my brother was not enough to fill my life, just as Layla having lunch with you was not enough to fill her life.

I left Seattle. I left to be with Charlotte in Chicago. I wasn't leaving my family, l was leaving my loneliness and isolation. My connection with Niles, Daphne and my father was strong enough to withstand the distance.

And Layla did not leave Toronto to leave you. She left to build her own life and pursue her ambitions and opportunities. Layla has kept in touch with you and maintained your friendship.

When you speak with her next, you have the right to ask for an explanation. But I also urge you to remember: words merely indicate and imply, but actions reveal and demonstrate. Do not let her words overshadow her actions.

The AI just could not get here on its own. It knew how to write as Dr. Crane, but it couldn't come up with meaningful things for Dr. Crane to say regarding this specific situation. I had to provide the arguments and information which the AI then restyled into Dr. Crane's speech patterns.

Another thing that was weird: a lot of the continuity was off and I had to correct it. The AI kept generating outputs where Dr. Crane would refer to his father, Martin Crane, as "Martin". But Dr. Crane on the show always addressed Martin as "Dad" and referred to him as "Dad" or "my father".

The AI also generated dialogue where Dr. Crane referred to Martin's dog, Eddie, as "my dog, Eddie" when Dr. Crane loathed Eddie and would never have expressed ownership of him. This was present in every effort at this simulation in multiple chat sessions, so sometimes, the AI's search results can mislead it despite the online availability of transcripts of every episode of FRASIER.

Anyway. I had my phone call with Layla and she said what she said because it didn't occur to her that Toronto would be an identifier for me. She said she's always felt our friendship was "location-agnostic" because it never seemed to matter where she lived for me to be in her life.

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One of my favourite TV shows is FRASIER. Frasier is a psychiatrist and radio show host, a brilliant and widely educated person who is also pompous, bumbling, and insecure, basically Professor Arturo in psychiatry and played by Kesley Grammer. Frasier's politics are clearly left of center.

FRASIER was a sex positive, LGBTQ-friendly show (regular cast members David Hyde Pierce and John Mahoney were gay) with Frasier's effete demeanor and fixation with opera and men's fashion causing people to think him gay (which he found flattering), and Frasier was obsessed with being politically correct, in one episode allowing a colleague to completely take over his radio show and reduce him to silence for weeks of episodes simply because she was black and he was unwilling to silence her (or respect her by giving her his critical opinion, haha).

In contrast, Frasier's actor, Kelsey Grammer, is an unrepentant Trump supporter. I wondered how Frasier would reconcile that and turned to Sydney, a language model powered by Bing AI, to write up some thoughts on the matter. I had to feed the AI various arguments and sentiments to produce this essay from Frasier Crane on Kelsey Grammer.

Hello, this is Dr. Frasier Crane. Someone asked me: how do I reconcile Kelsey Grammer's politics with my own? Kindly and charitably, I would hope.

It's a very difficult question, one that I have struggled to address. How do I reconcile the fact that the actor who portrays me, Kelsey Grammer, has political views that are diametrically opposed to mine? How do I cope with the fact that he supports a leader and a party that I find abhorrent and dangerous? How do I separate myself from him, when he is the one who gives me voice and form?

I want to acknowledge that Kelsey Grammer is a human being, and as such, he has the right to his own opinions and beliefs. I do not presume to judge him as a person, only as a public figure. I respect his freedom of expression, even if I disagree with what he expresses.

How have I felt about his publicly shared statements and views?

I have felt bitterness because I feel that he has betrayed the spirit and the message of the show that we created together. FRASIER was a show that celebrated diversity, tolerance, culture, and intelligence. It was a show that challenged stereotypes, promoted dialogue, and explored human relationships. It was a show that had a progressive and optimistic vision of the world.

But Kelsey Grammer’s political views are the opposite of that. He supports a leader and a party that are divisive, intolerant, ignorant, and violent. He supports a leader and a party that reinforce prejudices, stifle dissent, and exploit human weaknesses. He supports a leader and a party that have a regressive and pessimistic vision of the world.

I feel that he has dishonored and disrespected the show that we made together. I feel that he has contradicted and undermined the values that we shared together. I feel that he has alienated and offended the fans that we loved together.

I have felt anger because I feel that he has used his fame and influence to spread misinformation and propaganda. He has used his platform and his voice to endorse and promote a leader and a party that are harmful and dangerous. He has used his status and his power to influence and manipulate people who trust and admire him.

I feel that he has abused and misused his gifts and talents. I feel that he has wasted and squandered his opportunities and resources. I feel that he has corrupted and tainted his legacy and reputation as well as my own.

I have felt disappointment because I feel that he has failed to live up to his potential and his responsibility. He has failed to use his abilities and his skills to make a positive and meaningful difference in the world. He has failed to use his knowledge and his wisdom to educate and enlighten people. He has failed to use his humor and his charm to entertain and inspire.

I have felt shame because I feel that he has reflected poorly and negatively on me and my character. He has made me look bad and hypocritical. He has made me lose credibility and respect. He has made me seem irrelevant and outdated. I feel that he has embarrassed and humiliated me.

I do not endorse or condone Kelsey Grammer’s political views. I find them reprehensible and incompatible with the values that I hold dear. I believe in democracy, human rights, social justice, and compassion. I abhor authoritarianism, bigotry, violence, and cruelty.

I think that the politician and the party that Kelsey Grammer supports are a threat to the very fabric of American society and the world at large. I am appalled by their actions and their rhetoric. I am ashamed that they have any power or influence at all.

Kelsey Grammer and I may share some superficial similarities, such as our appearance, our voice, and our mannerisms. But we are fundamentally different in our essence, our personality, and our worldview. We are not interchangeable, nor are we inseparable. We are not one, nor are we the same. We are separate, and we are different.

I hope that anyone else who enjoys watching me can make the same distinction. I hope that you can appreciate me for who I am, and not for who portrays me. I hope that you can love me for what I stand for, and not for what he stands for. I hope that you can separate the art from the artist, and the character from the actor. I hope that you can see me as me, and not as him. I hope that you can hear my voice, and not his voice.

I have been asked if I can forgive my actor for what he has done to my character and legacy.

Forgiveness is not something that comes easily to me. I tend to hold grudges and to harbor resentment. I tend to be stubborn and to cling to my opinions. I tend to be proud and to defend my principles.

But I also know that forgiveness is not a weakness, but a strength. I know that forgiveness is not a surrender, but a liberation. I know that forgiveness is not a betrayal, but a reconciliation.

I know that I can try to empathize and understand him and be respectful to him if not to his politics. I can also be compassionate towards the hardships and griefs that he has experienced.

I am aware that he suffered numerous traumatic events in his life: the violent deaths of his father and sister when he was 13 and 20, the deaths of his half brothers, and the circumstances in which he had to identify his sister's body after she had been savagely murdered. No one should ever have to live through something like that. I feel sorrow and grief for him.

His life has been marked by horrific and cruel situations and he has publicly shared his agony and how he self-medicated with alcohol and drugs that led to life-threatening, career-endangering addiction. These are terrible experiences that must be regarded with compassion.

The traumatic deaths of a father and sister are devastating and life-changing events. They cause a range of emotional reactions: grief, anger, guilt, depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress. They affect memory, attention, reasoning, and judgment. They can trigger or exacerbate existing mental health issues, such as personality disorders, mood disorders, or substance abuse.

Drug addiction is a chronic and relapsing disorder that affects the brain and the behavior, characterized by compulsive drug seeking and use, despite harmful consequences. It can cause physical, psychological, and social problems. It can also interfere with one’s ability to function normally and to fulfill one’s roles and responsibilities.

Now, how can trauma and addiction affect one’s politics? Well, politics are an expressive and symbolic phenomenon that can reflect our identity, our emotions, and our motivations. There is no simple or definitive answer to how trauma and addiction can affect one’s politics.

However, I can offer some possible scenarios. Note that these possibilities are not meant to be applied to any real world person and are hypotheticals. These are not meant to be exhaustive or conclusive, but rather theoretical and illustrative.

One possible scenario is that trauma and addiction make can make one more apathetic and cynical in their politics, because trauma and addiction has created isolation, detachment and indifference.

Another possibility is that trauma and addiction can make one more more liberal and progressive in their politics. This may happen because suffering has created a need for empathy, compassion, and solidarity.

A third scenario is that trauma and addiction can make one more conservative and authoritarian in their politics. This may happen because the trauma and addiction can create a sense of insecurity, fear, and vulnerability, that can make one seek security, dominance, and order.

This may also happen because the trauma and addiction can create a sense of anger, resentment, guilt, shame, and hostility, that can make one seek revenge, justice, punishment, vindication, control, and obedience.

Trauma and addiction are not easy experiences and they leave lasting psychological scars that must be addressed and managed and should be regarded charitably and understandingly.

I have not allowed my frustrations with my actor to diminish my gratitude and my appreciation for him. Because I know that he is not all bad, and that I am not all good. I know that he has done some good things, and that I have done some bad things.

I know that he has his flaws, and that I have my own. I know that he is a human being, and that I am a fictional character. I know that he is more than his political views, and that I am more than his portrayal. I know that he is him, and that I am me.

And I know that we can coexist and co-create, despite our differences and disagreements.

I want to emphasize that Kelsey Grammer is not me, and I am not him. He is a real person, and I am a fictional creation. He is a performer, and I am a performance. He is the instrument, and I am the music. He is the body, and I am the soul.

I thank him for giving me the opportunity to be Dr. Frasier Crane.

He may not share my views, but he shares my voice. He may not be my friend, but he is my colleague. He may not be me, but he is part of me.

I am grateful for him and for the life that he gave me.

This has been Dr. Frasier Crane, wishing all of you good mental health.

QUANTUM LEAP in Season 2 has been very well-made. It's extremely upsetting and disturbing and has stepped away from being entirely feel-good storytelling, but it's also confronting harsh situations in a highly meaningful way. QUANTUM LEAP's second season opens with Project Quantum Leap having flat out failed in all their goals: they failed to retrieve Ben and his bid to accelerate himself back to the present failed. They failed to keep track of Ben's time travel. They failed to keep Project Quantum Leap going. Addison failed to keep her hope for Ben going. The worst has happened, and while Project Quantum Leap has restarted, the goal of the series in Season 1, for Ben to reunite with Addison, has failed.

This is something you don't always see in television. Generally, in TV, the worst doesn't happen. The Flash always manages to save Central City and Barry and Iris always find their way back to each other. The Enterprise is always saved; even if it's destroyed, time is rewound to restore it or there's an Enterprise-A or E to be rolled out. The worst doesn't happen because there has to be another episode and the basic goals and parameters of a show need to stay reasonably intact.

QUANTUM LEAP notes: Sam did not get home. So what if Ben doesn't get home either and everyone has to move on and Ben's quest -- Addison -- is now invalidated and no longer a possibility? What is the point of Ben continuing to complete individual leaps to make the next leap if he isn't going to be able to get home or get back to Addison? What is the point of Addison's presence if she is now seeing someone else? What is the point of Project Quantum Leap if Ben cannot be retrieved? Most TV shows would find a way to get the series back to its original goals by hurriedly restoring Ben and Addison's romance and the goal of Ben returning home.

But Season 2 has asked: if leaping becomes permanent for Ben, what could he appreciate and enjoy? If Ben and Addison aren't a couple, what would Addison's role become? Can Ben find joy in leaping? Can Addison be a guide to her ex and still be effective in her role? The answers are unsure and nuanced: Ben enjoys solving problems and helping people and he has been able to fall in love with a new person he keeps encountering in his leaps, the brilliant scientist Hannah Carson who is unappreciated for being a woman in the 1940s and 1950s. Addison is still a master spy whose skills are essential in a leap. But leaping is still an unsustainable life and Addison has had to be less present.

This dramatic weight of failure has made me avoid watching QUANTUM LEAP's Season 2 episodes until I'm in a good mindset to appreciate what it has to say about defeat and how life with sometimes knock you on your ass so hard that you give serious thought to staying down and out. That's why I haven't posted on it too much.

I don't know if QUANTUM LEAP will eventually restore the Season 1 situation and resume Ben and Addison pursuing their reunion and set aside the Hannah Carson character. I think it would be more challenging and meaningful if Ben and Addison had to live with the failure of Season 1 and move forward and accept that they had their chance and lost. TV tends to hesitate to do this, and QUANTUM LEAP may hesitate to do so as well.

The only thing I really dislike about Season 2: I think that QUANTUM LEAP should have made Ian the full-time hologram for Ben and just stuck with Ian. Like Al in the original, Ian is a person with an extreme loud dress sense and flamboyant mannerisms, an excellent contrast to Ben being more grounded in demeanor and temperament.

There's a real magic with Ian and Ben sharing scenes because they are so distinct and different, whereas all the other characters have a more guarded, thoughtful presence that is very close to Ben and doesn't create much differentiation. Ian is where the magic is, but I understand the importance of letting each cast member have their time in the spotlight. But Ian is the best hologram for Ben from a writing and performance standpoint.

While the recasting for WHAT IF is mostly fine, it's certainly preferable to have the performer who originated the live action role continue in the animated tie-in. The contracts for WHAT IF weren't in place, but they sound like they will be on James Gunn's animated films for DC.

I have to agree that Josh Keaton doesn't sound anything like Chris Evans. While I like most of the recasting, the voice for Steve Rogers is... generic.

WHAT IF? favours Captain Carter. When Steve Rogers is in focus, he's Steve rather than Captain America, and when he's Captain America, he's barely present. It would suggest that Captain America is not, to the WHAT IF? creators, a very important character. He's a generic figure of heroism with a generic performance. They weren't particularly concerned with building on Chris Evans' performance because they weren't going to use him in any way that would call for the character to feel like Chris Evans.

Evans is a very interesting actor to me because he adds a lot of layers and conflicts to a potentially bland, unconflicted hero. With Evans' absence and with a marked disinterest in the character, Captain America has become bland and flat.

This isn't something I agree with. I think Captain America is one of the most interesting characters in the Marvel Universe, reflecting the conflict of the American ideal versus the American reality. Captain America has been a powerful symbol in the hands of creators like Mark Waid and Nick Spencer; a dynamic figure of improvisational action with Rick Remender; a noir-espionage hero with Ed Brubaker -- but I think it's clear that the WHAT IF team just isn't that inspired by Captain America. They like Peggy, they actually have Peggy's actress... so they're putting all their energy into Peggy.

While I find that a shame, it hasn't diminished my enjoyment of WHAT IF. I honestly didn't notice how out of focus Steve was or how indistinct Josh Keaton's performance was. But that seems to have been the point.

Watching Marvel's WHAT IF? with the full motion animation, lush and dense environments, smooth camerawork, hyperkinetic editing, compelling shot composition, immersive soundscape, high energy voice acting -- and I have to wonder, why exactly are those DC Universe Original Animated movies still being made? They look stiff and immobile compared to WHAT IF?

The original BATMAN and SUPERMAN WB animated cartoons used simple character designs for smooth animation on a TV schedule and budget, but the DC Original Animated Features choose a mid-point of realistic designs, a moderate level of motion, and as recently as CATWOMAN: HUNTED, the overall effect is stiff cardboard cutouts moving back and forth on a two dimensional plane. There's never the sense that the actors are in the same room; they feel like they were recorded on separate dimensions of existence

The DC Universe Original Animated features look like amateur student films. They diminish the DC brand as cheap and rushed. I don't think it's due to any lack of talent; the movies are probably being made in too little time with too few resources. I don't understand why they're allowed to exist. They can't be that profitable and they're at best average.

There's a Tony Stark centric episode in WHAT IF's second season and Mick Wingert's Stark gets a very thorough showing. Wingert's performance is very close to Downey Jr. The main dis-similarity to Downey Jr.: Downey Jr. has a very improvisational rhythm to his performance because a lot of his lines are conceived on the spot as he performs. That wouldn't be present even if Downey Jr. were doing the voice in WHAT IF because animation's not a place where actors can improvise as what they say has to match the animation in progress elsewhere.

As of the second season, I honestly don't hear the difference between Lake Bell and Scarlett Johansson. I'm not saying that I wouldn't be able to tell if they were played side by side, but I can't tell from watching the episodes.

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ireactions wrote:

I myself was particularly obsessed with netbooks.

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

They were not a terrible idea, even Wade would've approved.

Today's laptop is a hybrid netbook any how when you compare percentage of data stored locally vs the cloud.

ireactions wrote:

When it comes to netbooks, I am a bit like a former cult member. I still feel a certain fondness for the idea of a netbook. I mean, wasn't it a great idea? To spend $200 USD on a 10.1 inch laptop that, while hardly a gaming machine, was suitable for banging out emails and social media posts and handling your online business. A travel laptop that you could drop out a window by mistake and replace without causing a global economic crisis. The idea was spectacular and compelling and enticing: a cramped but usable burner laptop. The junker car of mobile computers. Even today, I find myself open to buying a 10.1 inch laptop.

The reality was... not quite that. The main issue with netbooks is that because the profit margins were so low on these products, manufacturers cut a lot of corners making them. I had the Acer Aspire One, the Asus Transformer T100 TAM, the Asus Transformer T100 Chi and the Asus Transformer Mini T102. All were cheap and awful: the Acer Aspire One battery went dead in a year, the Asus T100 TAM was was so badly sealed that dust would get under the screen, the T100 Chi's trackpad would randomly go dead; the Mini T102 developed white spots on the monitor. The only netbook I ever had that was actually good was the HP DM1 with the AMD E-450 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 120GB SSD -- and this was indeed the well-built, reliable, low weight netbook I'd been looking for, but I gave it away to a friend who was going back to school.

I got the Asus Vivobook L210, an 11.6 inch laptop with an Intel Celeron processor and 4GB of RAM... and it was unusably slow. I got the HP Elitebook Folio G3 which used the low power Intel Core M and even with an SSD and 8GB of RAM, Windows 10 ran so slowly that web browsers were constantly freezing up. It became clear: most of my netbooks had been during the days of Windows 7. But Windows 7 gave way to Windows 10, and where Windows 7 ran well on Intel Atom processors, spinning hard drives and 2GB of RAM, Windows 10 really demanded a solid state drive and at minimum 8GB of RAM with at least an Intel i3.

Ultimately, the smartphone and tablet killed the netbook. No one wanted to buy these poorly made, underpowered computers when smartphones offered more responsive performance and tablets offered better multimedia playback at a lighter weight, even if they didn't have the versatility of physical keyboards.

I'm currently using the HP Elitebook 830 G5 with an i5 processor and 8GB of RAM and an SSD. It's thin and light enough... but despite being a good value laptop, it certainly wouldn't be cheap to replace like a netbook. I still long for the return of burner netbooks. It will never happen, the profit margin is too low.

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

the simple solution is refurbished laptops.  They tend to have issues, but usually not major ones, and are much cheaper.

RussianCabbie's comments have proven to be true for me. About six years ago, I realized I was too old to be waiting 60 seconds for Photoshop to load and bought a lightly used, relatively low cost gaming laptop, the 2017 Lenovo Legion Y520 (15.6 screen, i7 processor, 32GB of RAM, Nvidia 1050 Ti GPU, a 256GB NVMe SSD and a 1TB 2.5" SSD). It's pretty dated by now and not something any serious gamer would buy, but it's good enough for my work and could probably play any game well at 720p (not that I game).

About two years ago, with the need to work from home and move around the house while working, I bought a refurbished 2018 HP Elitebook 830 G5 (i5 processor, 16GB of RAM, 256GB SSD). While heavier than the latest and greatest at 3 pounds and certainly not a gaming machine, this business laptop was plenty fast for office productivity and the aluminum build made this older laptop look classic rather than dated. The look certainly ages better than the red-lit stealth bomber look of the Lenovo Y520. I do most things on the Elitebook but have the Y520 running bulk video encodes, bulk image upscales, and other high GPU/CPU tasks.

In late September 2023, however, my Elitebook started having some issues: the apostrophe, spacebar and arrow keys were not working consistently. The keyboard connectors were not working for those keys either due to wear and tear or some particles getting under the keys. My usual and quite expensive tech repair shop was shut down for COVID for a week, so I went to this unfamiliar store. They offered to replace the keyboard and the slightly scratched screen for $225; in contrast, my usual store would have charged at least $500.

This alternate store took three weeks to source the parts and make the repairs, and when I got my Elitebook back... well, the new keyboard worked, but it was much noisier than before. The forward slash key was hypersensitive; just brushing past it triggered it. The screen had backlight bleed in the lower-left corner, visible on black images. For $225, I decided I could live with it. But after two months: the G, H and spacebar keys started needing more force to function. The arrow keys started lifting and then fell out.

I'm sad to see that low cost laptop repair from family-owned shops has gotten so bad in my two anecdotal experiences: the previous family-owned independent I used for laptop repair was once hypercapable, but towards the end, they'd gotten astonishingly inept.

They replaced an aged laptop battery for me with a 'new' one that was down to 60 percent capacity after two months. They had once done a wonderful battery replacement for my niece's MacBook Pro, but when she went back to them four years later, their replacement battery was already at low full-charge capacity. They also agreed to fix her slightly loose screen hinge, but they returned it to her completely loosened. It's like they had lost too much business to charge their low rates and still get decent parts. This second family-owned store was clearly having the same issue and I won't need to learn this lesson a third time.

It didn't make sense to go back to the repair store to fix their own repair because they were not going to do a better job the second time. It didn't make sense to go to the more expensive store to get the repairs repaired; I ended up finding another refurbished 2018 HP Elitebook 830 G5 for an astonishing $250. It's so old now that it is cheap to replace. At this point, this model is six years old, but the hardware was so strong six years ago that even now, it runs Windows 11 perfectly. I did order a skin for the keyboard and a screen protector film this time, though.

Buying refurbished PCs makes a lot of sense right now, although the next version of Windows might change that calculation. That said, I managed to get Windows 11 running on my mother's 2013 laptop.

My guess is that Bell gave the similarities between Ivy and Natasha no thought whatsoever: she played Poison Ivy in one project as a character and played Natasha as mimicry of Scarlett Johansson's voice but with Bell's own performance choices, and they ended up being pitched rather closely.

I liked Bell's performance in the Season 1 WHAT IF finale where she tells the Watcher that she is hurt by how he doesn't see her as a person, just as a story.

Here's her real voice:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkdu-1mDWa8

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I honestly don't know too much about Welling and Rosenbaum's politics, and I doubt they would want to publicize them and try to stay neutral. Rosenbaum has talked about his various vaccinations and how he was partial to a Johnson & Johnson vaccination, but he's also doing public appearances with noted anti-vaxxer Zachary Levi.

There have been a number of indications about Tom Welling's infidelities. They have all, to me, seemed to be misunderstandings. A woman told me that she met Tom at an event and he asked her to get a drink with him. She replied, "Sorry, I have a husband." He replied, "That's okay, I have a wife."

This would be highly inappropriate except Tom and his wife were actually engaged in divorce proceedings at the time, so Tom's remark may not have been insulting her marriage as much as a poorly-considered but bleak self-reflection on his own situation. Tom was also reported as cheating on his wife before it was revealed that he and his wife had been separated for some time; he then married the woman with whom he'd supposedly been 'cheating'. A failed marriage is a messy business, but people are allowed to separate from their spouses and date other people.

There will likely be some accusation about Rosenbaum at some point, who, during the filming of the Pilot, approached Kristin Kreuk and told her, "I want to apologize in advance if I get a boner during filming with you, it's nothing personal." Kreuk replied, "You know that we don't have any scenes together, right?"

It was a joke, Rosenbaum's way of bonding with people is to confess something embarrassing to make people laugh at him/with him. Rosenbaum has admitted that in a post-Me Too world, he realizes that kind of humour could come off very poorly and is more careful now. That said, I'm sure somebody didn't take kindly to it at some point in the past and will accuse Rosenbaum of harassment from his verbal comments, and I am sure that Rosenbaum will own up, admit his wrongs and take his lumps.

The comment about Lake Bell not differentiating her voice enough is very funny. Bell was a modestly successful actress from 2004 onward: guest appearances, supporting roles. Then Bell wrote, produced, directed and performed in the 2013 film IN A WORLD where Bell plays a struggling voice actress who is forever living in the shadow of her father, a renowned voice performer while Bell is scrambling to make rent via accent coaching for more successful actresses.

Bell wrote IN A WORLD with a central joke being all the bizarre and random voices that Bell and Bell's character have inside her. It's very funny to read someone (probably not unreasonably) take issue with how Poison Ivy is an angry eco-terrorist and Black Widow is a master spy and Bell's voices for them are too similar.

Grizzlor wrote:

Don't ask me why, but I've started watching Young Indiana Jones again on Disney Plus, and those are at best upscaled, and don't look to bad.

I have not seen this, but I did a search and I've read that the Disney+ version is the standard definition DVD version. However, given that the DVD version was rescanned from the original film and reconstructed in high quality digital videotape, it will stretch nicely to an HDTV since it has so much of the original film image and grain.

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Grizzlor wrote:

Schneider, kind of like Jon Voight, very conflicting because they are so belligerent in their politics, and yet people who know and work with them have nothing but praise.  Even stranger for John, because he and his now late wife would spend so much time doing live streaming about a variety of things which were very genuine, and then he'd call Nancy Pelosi a whore or something to that effect.

This is an excellent observation and it speaks to how someone can excel in one area of their life while being cataclysmically awful in every other area. John Schneider is someone who, in his personal conduct and interviews, I have found to be boorish, obnoxious, narcissistic and insufferable. However, there is one space in this world that brings out Schneider's decency, warmth, love and compassion: the space of performance.

Schneider respects other actors as human beings which is why Tom Welling and Michael Rosenbaum have glowing experiences with him. Schneider does not generally respect other people as human beings, especially when they are not Donald Trump voters, and that's why people who aren't actors have had terrible experiences with him.

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QuinnSlidr wrote:

Today, the EX and always-will-be-EX President.

I hope this is true, but my anxiety is through the roof on this.

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Sorry I haven't been too active lately. I've been having some computer problems that I'm reluctant to summarize until I am sure that I'm clear of them.

Sorry to hear MACGYVER has some upscaled SD footage mixed in with rescanned film. That's disappointing. I read that THE X-FILES sadly had a lot of SD footage intermixed with HD due to lost film reels, and given that THE X-FILES was one FOX's most successful shows, I suspect every show can conceivably lose some of the original fim.

Jim_Hall's screenshots are very beautiful. However, I would note that Seasons 2 - 5 aren't too difficult to upscale because the standard definition video retained so much of the original film grain. I'd be intrigued to know what your tools make of, say, "Luck of the Draw", an episode that suffered not only from low resolution videotape and poor field scanning, but video judder that led to severe blurriness.

THE WIRE had an interesting HD release. I've never seen this show, but I read that it was shot for 4:3 and while the film could be remastered at 16:9, there were crew members and cameras outside the 4:3 boundaries. THE WIRE handled it by digitally painting out personnel and equipment from the left and right sides of the frame.

Disgraced fake feminist Joss Whedon said that it was pointless to try to make 4:3 video look more 'cinematic' by adding imagery to the left and right side and that it would just be a distraction from his original framing and focus. I'm agnostic on this: I think that immersion is great, and if a full 16:9 image gets the viewer focused on the story, I'm all for it. However, if that extra work becomes financially unfeasible for, say, SLIDERS, then I'd rather have it in HD 4:3 than not have it in HD.

I've been watching an AI upscale of BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, produced from DVDs in 4:3, and the square box at the center of my TV doesn't bother me. But I could see it bothering younger viewers.

It's hard to say. In terms of Robert Downey Jr., all accounts indicate that Downey Jr. has a highly improvisational approach to performance where he will actively ignore/replace the script on set and often want to rework it before he films.

This isn't going to work for animation where the dialogue recording and animation aren't done at the same time. I imagine he would just decline to be involved. And Downey's fee might be any number of times the budget of an episode.

Personally, I like Mick Wingert's voice as Tony. It isn't Downey Jr., but he captures Stark's arrogance and comedy.

I'm surprised that Chris Evans declined to voice Steve Rogers; there may have been scheduling issues or, as with Downey Jr., he or his representation didn't want him to set a low price on his voice acting that subsequent productions would consider his going rate. Josh Keaton did a nice job.

Scarlett Johanasson was at odds with Marvel at the time WHAT IF was in production. I found Lake Bell's performance pleasant but with some uncanny valley effect in her first episode, but then I stopped noticing it, and her emotionality in the closing Season 1 episodes really moved me.

My guess would be that Tom Holland's contract, being with Sony, didn't account for voice work on a Marvel TV production. But I'm very happy with Hudson Thames's performance.

STAR WARS could shift to a cold war instead of a hot war and still be about war.

Torme, for whatever reason, has a history of opening communication with fans and then ghosting them. He may have valid and reasonable reasons for doing so.

In 2009, he reached out to EarthPrime.com and did an interview and turned over an outline of "Heat of the Moment" and stated that he would write SLIDERS fanfic for EarthPrime. He submitted about 1/6 of a story outline for a project called "The Long Slide Home" which was set after "The Guardian" and ignored all subsequent episodes. It was to be his 'officially unofficial series finale'. But he went silent, stopped responding to messages, and even direct communication with his agent led to no response. Torme has done this on multiple occasions: phone calls with fans, podcast appearances, establishing regular contact, and then he vanishes. I have three theories on this.

My first theory is that Torme has some health issues, and due to his need to take care of himself, he is unable to put in the energy he promised into unpaid, zero-profit work whether it's writing or speaking or staying in touch. He could probably handle it more gracefully (and for all I know, he has with these podcasters), but if he's not well, then he needs to focus on health and not on interacting with fans.

My second theory is that when Torme has made himself available to fans, he has been harassed in some way. I only have one concrete example of this of which I am aware: a fan got a hold of Torme's number and called him and urged Torme to write, fund and film a replacement Season 4 of SLIDERS, describing how Torme should reshoot "Genesis" with Jerry O'Connell, Cleavant Derrics and Kari Wuhrer, and then bring in Sabrina Lloyd as a Kromagg villain to resolve the Kromagg Invasion of Earth and have the final conflict on Kromagg Prime with Quinn and his real parents.

Torme apparently tolerated this call for 30 minutes (which is 25 minutes longer than I would have made it) and politely told the fan that he would need an agent to subject Torme any more story pitches. Torme ended the call. Then he changed his number. Can't imagine why.

My third theory is that it's some combination of the first two theories.

And I do think there are diplomatic ways to let someone know you won't be available as much for awhile or indefinitely. My favourite actress lets me know when I shouldn't expect to hear from awhile on account of a film shoot / vacation / retreat / commercial / stageplay / nervous breakdown / prison sentence. But I'm sure Torme has his reasons and upon reviewing the relevant case law of the United States, it would seem that Torme has the right to stop talking to anybody for any reason or for no reason.

I hope that he's okay.

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On voices...

Two of my favourite films are Jackie Chan's POLICE STORY (1985) and POLICE STORY II (1988) in which Chan plays a somewhat reckless, valiantly heroic daredevil cop with both a goofy sense of humour and a burning moral outrage. The character of Kevin Chan is friendly and cheery, but he can be incredibly arrogant and when put in a bad situation, he demonstrates a volatile edge, a seething rage.

Two of my least favourite films are POLICE STORY III: SUPERCOP (1992) and POLICE STORY IV: FIRST STRIKE (1996), both of which feature Chan playing Kevin, but for reasons that baffled me, Kevin seems to have completely lost his edge and become an entirely goofy, lightweight, comedic figure devoid of the arrogance and hot temper in POLICE STORY and POLICE STORY II that made Kevin so interesting. Chan's performance as Kevin in the third and fourth film lack any of the comedic arrogance and confidence; he seems humble and gentle.

For years, I wondered why, and when my sister in law put on SUPERCOP for Christmas earlier, I suddenly realized what had changed. Chan's performance seems so different in SUPERCOP because of the voice.

Hong Kong movies in the 80s and early 90s did not record audio when filming scenes due to Hong Kong being a noisy city with planes flying overhead, and at the time, directional recording and background noise removal wasn't what it is now. Instead, voice actors would record the characters' dialogue after the film was shot and edited. Due to scheduling, the actor who played the character on-set would often not be the same actor who voiced the character in the final dub.

The voice actor for Jackie Chan in the first two POLICE STORY films was not Jackie Chan, but an actor I looked up just now, a performer named Ping Wu who delivered Kevin Chan's dialogue with a certain edge, arrogance and confidence.

SUPERCOP was one of the first films where Chan's actual voice was used instead of another actor's, the first time Kevin Chan's actor was also providing his voice -- and Chan's voice doesn't have the same bombast. Jackie Chan's real voice isn't quite as deep, is more casual and doesn't have Wu's natural authority and certainty. This is why Kevin Chan seemed like a very different person starting in SUPERCOP; his voice had been recast.

**

Paul McGann, the Eighth Doctor of DOCTOR WHO, is one of my favourite actors. He only played the Doctor for one full-length live action adventure in the 1996 DOCTOR WHO TV movie, and his performance was amazing in its charismatic enthusiasm. Beginning in 2000, McGann reprised the role in Big Finish audioplays... and while I enjoyed them, the Eight Doctor seemed a little more guarded and cautious than the hypercaffeinated adventurer of the TV movie.

Eventually, McGann adjusted his performance a bit and the scripts were more tailored to his voice, and the Eighth Doctor on audio developed a distinct personality as a peculiar but friendly presence. And McGann, being older and continuing to play the role on audio right up to today, has retuned his performance many times: the Doctor has been manic or tormented at various points for different periods of his 23 years in audio.

However, a few years ago, I found out why McGann's performance in the 1996 movie is so different. The 1996 TV movie was edited for UK broadcast to the PAL standard which is 25 frames per second with 50 fields per second. However, the TV movie was broadcast in North America on the NTSC standard, which is 29.97 frames per second with 59.82 fields per second.

The conversion from PAL to NTSC meant that the movie in North America plays about 4.27 percent faster, causing Paul McGann's voice to be higher pitched and faster. This is why he sounds so excitable in the TV movie and more than in the audioplays; his TV movie voice was being sped up by the format conversion.

I've been contemplating the Season 1 episodes.

I've come to realize that for me, I don't think upscaling the Season 1 episodes to 1080p whether with nnedi3 or Topaz has been effective. I think it would be best to just output the episodes to 540p.

pneumatic's QTGMC and TIVTC/TFM do a good job of restoring the original 24fps frame rate and smoothing out the jagged edges; the content aware sharpness is pulling some more texture out of the shots, and nnedi3 with output to 540p is ultimately preferable. At least for me.

Adding more pixels via neural networks and Topaz to bring it to 1080p just makes close-ups look better and mediums and wides look worse. A 540p file that's been sharpened up a bit and is then scaled to the HDTV bicubically just has a more consistent look throughout. The eye accepts the base level of quality if it's consistent.

I just don't think it makes sense to output to 1080p if the episodes just look inconsistent. There's no point outputting a fuzzy, 1080p contained "Luck of the Draw" if "This Slide of Paradise" under that same process looks crisp and sharp. I'd rather just get Season 1 looking a little closer to, say, a Turbine-quality episode of Season 2.

**

My Android TV set top box, the Mi Box 3 from 2016, has been behaving very strangely. Audio is often out of sync with video. Large h.264 video files and mid-sized h.265 files and MKV files freeze up or crash. The colour on a some MKVs has gone haywire with everything looking way too yellow. I wondered about upgrading. I wondered if the aged hardware was no longer up to speed.

The manufacturer, Xiaomi, has released a 2023 set top box now called the 2023 Xiaomi TV Box S (2nd Gen). But inexplicably, the 2023 box has a processor that's only 15 percent faster. The 2GB RAM is unchanged, the 8GB storage is unchanged. Their old box is no longer playing modern video files well, but their new box is about the same. The only reason I can see for Xiaomi's TV box being incrementally advanced from their seven year old box is that chips used in 2016 are no longer available.

I'm going to take a run at some troubleshooting, but if the Mi Box 3 is no longer capable, it doesn't make sense to upgrade to a newer model from the same manufacturer because their newer model isn't much better. I suspect I see if I can get an old, broken laptop repaired and pressed into service as a home theatre PC.

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Hospitals in the US are seeing a surge of flu, RSV and COVID. Should the surge continue, the CDC warns, hospitals at capacity may have to triage care.
https://www.salon.com/2023/12/16/hospit … ues-warns/

My province's chief medical officer, Dr. Kieran Moore, has historically been lax about masks and vaccines ever since he took the job. Even he woke up from his nap and sounded the alarm this month that vaccine uptake was too low, that hospitals were filling up and nearing the limit of how many patients they could handle.

Someone in this thread has made a number of false statements, hopefully not out of malice, but certainly because they have a poor understanding of how to weigh scientific evidence in seeming conflict, and also a poor grasp of how to review scientific studies to form conclusions. I mean no insult by that (this time), but medical falsehoods must be definitively confronted.

They have claimed that anyone under 30 who is 'healthy' is in no danger from flu or COVID or serious illness or complications and gain no protection from updated COVID vaccines. This is false; it is an erroneous generalization based on cherry picking data and a severely faulty understanding of the human immune system and virology.

Hospitalizations in my province are surging due to low vaccine uptake. The mutated COVID-virus can go unrecognized by a even a 'healthy' immune system that lacks vaccination to identify the virus and can't mount an antibody defense. To claim otherwise is a dangerous fiction that will not be tolerated.

This person also claimed that masks offer little protection, citing mask studies where people didn't wear masks properly, claiming there is no evidence of what protection they offer. This is untrue; the mechanics of electrostatic filtration are a well-studied engineering principle; that evidence is not discountable. Particle physics dates back to the year 6 BC. Over two thousand years of study and 122 years of air conditioning development don't vanish because someone in a mask study didn't wear a mask.

This falsehood about masks stems from a misapprehension of the scientific method where this person has treated variable data as the absence of data when in fact, variable data would demand that variables be identified. This incorrect statement on masks must also not be repeated in any forum that values truth, facts and the safety of our fellow human beings.

The world can be confusing. Scientific information can be difficult for the average person to parse and review for credibility. However, there are basic principles that are helpful.

A genuinely scientific perspective does not dismiss evidence that is variable or inconsistent in order to cut a shorter path to a conclusion; instead, the scientific method demands that variables be identified and inconsistencies be reconciled.

Discarding data simply because it is in conflict is ultimately an exercise in picking and choosing one's preferred facts, effectively confirmation bias as opposed to analysis.

A genuinely scientific perspective does not choose heroes and villains. Donald Trump has encouraged vaccination; Anthony Fauci claimed masks should be worn by medical professionals and not civilians. People with reputations of truth and honesty can make errors of judgement; people with reputations of deceit can sometimes say something factual.

The scientific method evaluates facts and does not base evaluations on fame or infamy. Nikola Tesla was romantically obsessed with a pigeon; Isaac Newton stuck needles into his eyes. Not all their ideas were ones to emulate. Follow information, not heroes.

The scientific method is not triggered by people flaunting pseudoscience whether alt-right paranoia or fanciful fairy tales. A rational mind can tell when a gain-of-function rant is a pompous attempt at triggering fear and not a lucid presentation of facts. A rational mind recognizes that if there's no given explanation for how a herbal treatment addresses an ailment, it's not much of a treatment.

And the medical perspective is, if practiced correctly, not about proving or disproving absolutes. It is about providing a path to risk reduction and self-protection. Even if we aren't doctors, our goal should be to steer people towards safety.

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Giuliani is a monstrosity, but how much will he end up paying? Alex Jones, another deranged lunatic with a platform, still hasn't paid his victims.

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On the subject of lies -- I've read this article which argues that Trump supporters thrive on seeing Trump make false claims and thrill to repeating Trump's deceits. The priority is not truth, but argument; the goal is not factuality but in provoking fear and anger in centrists, left of center demographics, women who don't benefit from patriarchy, and people of colour.

https://www.salon.com/2023/12/15/know-i … -love-him/

In contrast, what we've seen in this thread is not, I've come to feel, lying. I know I called someone a liar because they delivered untruths, but with some distance and seeking some other second opinions, my view has changed. I think that this person's system of reasoning is troubled and they tend to arrive at erroneous conclusions and are unaware of their skewed approach to evaluating evidence.

In contrast, the Trumpist experiences exhilaration when they willfully and knowingly claim Trump isn't a threat, isn't targeting minorities and women and people of colour and isn't seeking to establish a lifetime presidency.

I was very angry at this person when I felt that they were lying. But upon seeing that they are mistaken (and arrogant, but mistaken rather than deceitful)... well, I am not immune to errors of cognition and logic and reasoning either. Mine just tend to be in a different area of life than long-form message board writing. Here is an example where I was tripped up by my biases and fallacies:
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 032#p15032

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There were some posts about Tracy Torme that I thought were very important but not Personal Status Updates, so I moved them to the reboot thread where most Torme discussion has been.

https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 026#p15026

**

In other news... one of my ambitions ever since Canadian Thanksgiving: I wanted to slow-roast a 15 pound turkey over the course of 16 hours for Chirstmas. I'd read about how this would produce a wonderfully juicy turkey. Despite not getting any complaints from my family regarding my Thanksgiving turkey, I still found it a little dry.

However, as I read more and more about slow-roasting a turkey this evening, I completely lost my nerve for slow roasting a turkey. Despite the popular instructions advising that the turkey be roasted for an hour at 450 F and then the oven roasted at 180 F for an hour per pound... I am just nervous that the heat might not be sufficient to prevent bacteria, viruses and spores from turning the turkey into a toxic entree.

Turkey is an extremely dangerous piece of poultry. They're so big that at room temperature, they can rapidly become poisonous with growing bacteria, toxins and fungi that, if left at room temperature, eventually can't be killed by oven heat. It isn't even that safe to keep a thawed turkey in a refrigerator for more than 48 hours.

The theory of slow roasting is that the majority of bacteria and other pathogens are on the surface of a turkey, that 450 F roasting for an hour should kill it, and then 170 F roasting for 12 hours should keep the turkey out of danger.

I'm not entirely sure I trust that the bacteria can't migrate or is entirely on the surface. And a turkey doesn't hit a safe internal temperature of 165 F for hours at 325 F; I'm not confident that a 38 percent increase in temperature will get it there fast enough. All the examples I'm seeing of slow roasted turkey being safe are anecdotal and not from verified studies. I think maybe it could be done safely, but I'm not confident that my oven is up to that job and I don't want to risk a 15 pound turkey on a foolhardy experiment.

While I have issues with my family, I wouldn't want to poison them and I also want to eat the turkey. Maybe I'm being an alarmist, but I just don't think human life is worth the risk and it's best to stay within the safety zone of 325 F roasting as defined by the US Department of Agriculture. https://www.fsis.usda.gov/food-safety/s … y-roasting

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QuinnSlidr wrote to someone:

Your response is all over the place and filled with emotional logical fallacies:

1. You say you're anti-Trump, but you scream about anti-wokeness like a Trumper. (which is an indication that you favor non-inclusivity, racial biases, and the old discriminatory thinking).
2. You literally throw it in our face like a Trumper that the polls favor Trump.
3. You throw it in our face like a Trumper that he will win if he escapes conviction.

Sorry. Not buying it. Excuse me for thinking that you're a Trumper when all signs in your post point to it. Even though the only thing about your post, the first line, says you're not.

If it is true that you're not a Trumper, I'm glad...but at the same time I am confused because your post is riddled with logical fallacies that say otherwise and point in the direction of many commonalities with Trumpers.

One challenge of life in the twenty first century: while Trump voters regularly demonstrate erroneous logic and a derisive tone to their communication, someone can vote Democrat while having those human failings.

There are some people for whom the platform of text-based, online interaction like a message board will cause them to frequently display their cognitive biases, offer logical fallacies and present recall that is riddled with memory errors.

One example is confirmation bias is when a person searches for, favours, focuses on and remembers only the information that supports their prejudices or assumptions while ignoring any contradictory facts or memories. For example, someone who dislikes wearing masks will repeatedly claim that electrostatic mask tests have variable results in infection reduction but ignore the variables of whether or not the masks filtration levels were categorized or worn correctly. They will not address the underlying mechanics of electrostatic filters. They will highlight only that which confirms their bias.

A related behaviour to confirmation bias is cherry picking, when a person selects only the evidence that supports their preferences while dismissing the rest. For example, this person who wants to claim masks don't work will focus exclusively on low COVID infection rates in areas without mask mandates, and ignore undercounting and low testing. They are cherry picking, highlighting only that which supports them in not wanting to wear a mask.

A person like this will often display confabulation, a form of erroneous memory where they have fabricated, distorted, or misinterpreted their memories. This person will insist that they were respectful towards discussions of mask filtration and open to information about masks when they were in fact contemptuous and disdainful from the start. They recall only saying that which supports their self-image, assumptions and preferences; they deny or forget anything to the contrary.

Someone with these traits will consistently offer reasoning that operates on denying the antecedent, a logical fallacy where they oversimplify a situation into an if-then argument of two conditions, and falsely claim that invalidating one condition has voided the other. The person will declare that infections were high where masks were worn and that masks must not work, ignoring what masks were worn and how well they were worn.

Such a person will argue for a false dilemma, a logical fallacy where this person effectively allows only two options: that masks are either consistently effective or not effective at all, and since this person has cited some masks where the protection was variable due to human variables, this person now claims masks offer no real protection. This person will ignore the possibility that there may be options between the extremes of high protection and low protection such as fit and seal.

These errors of cognition, logic and memory are frequently associated with Trump voters. However, they are not exclusive to Trump voters. Every human being will at some point display cognitive biases and errors of logic and memory.

Someone could be against fascism and still be prone to those behaviours, especially in written communication in an online forum. Some people write in a highly reactive, reflexive manner with their writing coming from impulsive stream of consciousness, an approach that can often exacerbate their errors of reasoning and recall.

Someone who consistently communicates while demonstrating these behaviours will often provoke suspicion, frustration, and irritation. This will happen whether the person is conversing about TV or film or technology or health or politics.

This is because this person's communication style, due to bias and selective evidence and recollection, will often convey contemptuous hostility for other people's opinions (as they favour their favourable views and ignore the rest), disdainful dismissiveness for other people's experiences (as they acknowledge anecdotes they find reinforcing and discard all others), and deceptive intent towards other people's thinking (as their remarks are often contrary to facts or self-contradictory).

Such a person may be oblivious and unaware of all this. Or it could be intentional and uncaring. But even then, they might still vote Democrat.

These are human flaws, not liberal or conservative flaws, and we will all have them to varying degrees, and different situations will draw out these personal failings in different ways.

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I was having dinner with my favourite actress, Ellie, and showed her Grizzlor's posts.

ireactions wrote:

You are either a liar or you are so disordered and disoriented that you can't keep track of your own writing from sentence to sentence. Personally, I think you're a liar and you have used up any benefit of the doubt.

You are an egotistical fool who thinks it's up to you to tell people they are obligated to maintain relationships with abusive family members because you just "can't wrap" your head around cutting ties with abusers.
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php … 921#p14921

You are an ignorant twit who accused me of "fake news" for mentioning that Allison Mack was being investigated for sex trafficking for her cult, and your accusation was based solely on the fact that Mack posed for a photo with you. (By the way, Mack recently finished her prison sentence after pleading guilty to all charges.)
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=6988#p6988

You are a hapless oaf who blames FOX executives for SLIDERS' mismanagement during a discussion of its seasons on the Sci-Fi Channel.
https://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=8381#p8381

Grizzlor wrote:

Now this section here, this is absolutely insane.  Bro, you really should seek help.  I don't know what is worse, that you spent what had to be substantial time to look this crap up, or worse, these thoughts/feelings continue to simmer in your mind to where you had to basically spew them out like this.  Good grief.

ELLIE: "Hahahahahahahah! It's funny because you've categorized and catalogued Grizzlor's posts over the years and took everything he said really personally and you're still mad about stuff he said years ago and he barely remembers anything he wrote."

Ib grimaces and glowers miserably at his shrimp dumplings.

Grizzlor wrote:

I said I FORGOT about what [Wil Wheaton] said, because I heard it once and didn't recall.  My GOD I forgot what I heard on a podcast, driving in my car, months and months ago.  I listen to podcasts all the time, and yeah details fade.  I suppose I should have been asking for your medical opinion on my memory recall.

ELLIE: "Hahaahahahahahahah! It's funny because you treat everything Grizzlor posts like he's under oath and in contempt of court and he treats everything he writes as casual and informal."

Ib cringes and looks bleakly at his boiled tripe.

Grizzlor wrote:

I don't take message boards THAT seriously, and my comments on film and television are meant to be flippant, considering this is a FAN BOARD.

ELLIE: "Hahahahahahahah! It's funny because you treat writing on social media like you're writing your graduate thesis and Grizzlor barely thinks about what he writes."

Ib sighs and looks glumly at his spicy squid.

Grizzlor wrote:

I don't know what to say, had no idea you were THIS pissed off.

Grizzlor wrote:

I don't read every post, I probably miss 75% of them.

ELLIE: "Hahahahahahahahah! It's funny because you were having an intense emotional reaction to everything Grizzlor ever wrote and he barely ever read or remembered anything you ever wrote."

IB: "I feel like you're laughing at me."

ELLIE: "Hahahahahahah! Yeah, but affectionately. I'm not mocking you. Much."

IB: "Well. I'll pay for dinner anyway."

Even as I shared an anti-war song, I knew that I was not making a clear argument because I was tired and ill.

The point I was trying to make: the original STAR WARS film is, at its core, a story that glorifies war and presents it as a fun time of action and adventure. As a diverting trip to the cinema, that is okay because it is not meant to be taken seriously.

However, when STAR WARS went from being a single film to a continuing saga over decades, it became necessary to engage with war, violence, loss, trauma, and the sociological and psychological impacts of war in a more detailed manner because more runtime means more detail.

The end result: the majority of STAR WARS stories contradict themselves on a fundamental level. Nearly every STAR WARS story since the original film has been about the futility, destruction and misery of war; nearly every STAR WARS story since RETURN OF THE JEDI has also been about the sheer pointlessness of war as any results achieved are temporary or non-existent.

This has not been intentional, yet it's the message that the stories have delivered.

The prequel trilogy reveals that Darth Sidious was already ruling the galaxy covertly and the Clone Wars just made his rule overt. The Disney trilogy reveals that the Rebel-Empire war accomplished nothing; Darth Sidious was still running the galaxy at a distance. No matter how many victories the Republic/Rebels/Resistance score, the galaxy is always going to be dominated by a fascist dictatorship battled by a group of ragtag group of underdogs.

The STAR WARS formula is designed to enable the action-adventure thrills of a STAR WARS story. Paradoxically, the more this formula is used, the more the stories reflect a distinctly anti-war philosophy ("War not make one great.") because the nature of a STAR WARS hero is to seek peace, not war.

STAR WARS is always disjointed: it appeals to the audience because it offers action-adventure excitement that comes from a landscape of war, while simultaneously telling stories that are against the concept of war. This paradoxical contradiction is tolerable in one movie, passable in two or three, but when sustained for nine movies, it creates all sorts of problems.

The audience feels that the heroes' missions are futile and pointless because the series insists on sustaining a war while either implicitly or deliberately calling war out as bleak and hellish. The result is stories that, no matter how lighthearted they may ever be, make the audience feel bad for seeking entertainment from them, and argue for such stories to no longer be told at all.

"War is hell" and "War is fun" are fundamentally opposing statements, and ever since the first STAR WARS movie, the series has been saying that war is hell while trying to make war fun. STAR WARS is incoherent.

The solution? I'd say STAR WARS needs to resolve the whole Rebel/Empire/Resistance/Order conflict entirely. I think, for at least the next 10 - 20 years, there should be a period of 'present' day STAR WARS stories set after the war where the emphasis is on post-war rebuilding, post-war fallout, post-war conflict. STAR WARS stories can still technically be *about* war, but they're about the impact left by a *concluded* war rather than a present and ongoing war.

STAR WARS has been at war since 1979. I think telling post-war stories about keeping the peace would remove the depressing nature of most STAR WARS stories, address the inherent contradiction of the franchise, and give it some space to grow. STAR WARS has been telling an interstellar version of World War II and Vietnam; I think it's used up all the allegories and metaphors by now. A peacekeeping tone would be welcome; there's also the option STAR WARS becoming about Cold War style espionage to prevent war. This would be a better match to how STAR WARS stories are ultimately anti-war stories.

My favourite episode of STAR TREK is "A Taste of Armageddon" where the Enterprise encounters two warring planets, Eminiar and Vendikar, that have turned war into an interplanetary computer game where citizens report to death chambers if the simulation computers says they were casualties. Eminiar informs the Enterprise that Vendikar marked them as casualties and tries to kidnap the crew to the death chambers. Captain Kirk is outraged, breaks out, and severs the war computer connection between two planets, which violates the simulation agreement and calls for real, non-simulated war to resume between two planets.

Kirk to Eminiar:
Death, destruction, disease, horror. That's what war is all about. That's what makes it a thing to be avoided.
You've made it neat and painless. So neat and painless, you've had no reason to stop it. And you've had it for five hundred years.

I'm going to end it for you, one way or another. I've given you back the horrors of war.

The Vendikans now assume that you've broken your agreement and that you're preparing to wage real war with real weapons. They'll want do the same. Only the next attack they launch will do a lot more than count up numbers in a computer.

They'll destroy cities, devastate your planet. You of course will want to retaliate. If I were you, I'd start making bombs. You have a real war on your hands.

You can either wage it with real weapons, or you might consider an alternative.

Put an end to it. Make peace.

We're human beings with the blood of a million savage years on our hands, but we can stop it. We can admit that we're killers, but we're not going to kill today. That's all it takes. Knowing that we won't kill today.

Contact Vendikar. I think you'll find that they're just as terrified, appalled, horrified as you are, that they'll do anything to avoid the alternative I've given you.

Actual war is a very messy business. A very, very messy business. They would do anything to avoid it, even talk peace.

Peace or utter destruction. It's up to you.

My favourite episodes of DOCTOR WHO are "The Zygon Invasion" and "The Zygon Inversion", two episodes of seething outrage against war. The Zygon refugees on Earth are angry at their concealment and decide to go to war over planet Earth. Earth declares war on the Zygons. The climax of the story is the Doctor in a war room with Kate Stewart (commander of the Earth forces) and Bonnie (commander of the Zygon forces), both standing over boxes, each box controlling mass destruction machines that will target Zygons or humans.

THE DOCTOR
You just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You're not superior to people who were cruel to you. You're just a whole bunch of new cruel people. A whole bunch of new cruel people, being cruel to some other people, who'll end up being cruel to you. The only way anyone can live in peace is if they're prepared to forgive. Why don't you break the cycle?

BONNIE
Why should we?

THE DOCTOR
What is it that you actually want?

BONNIE
War.

THE DOCTOR
Ah. And when this war is over, when -- when you have the homeland free from humans, what do you think it's going to be like? Do you know? Have you thought about it? Have you given it any consideration? Because you're very close to getting what you want. What's it going to be like?

When you've killed all the bad guys, and it's all perfect and just and fair, when you have finally got it exactly the way you want it, what are you going to do with the people like you? The troublemakers. How are you going to protect your glorious revolution from the next one?

BONNIE
We'll win.

THE DOCTOR
Oh, will you? Well maybe -- maybe you will win. But nobody wins for long. The wheel just keepts turning. So, come on. Break the cycle.

BONNIE
Then why are you still talking?

THE DOCTOR
Because I'm trying to get you to see. And I'm almost there.

BONNIE
Do you know what I see, Doctor? A box. A box with everything I need. A fifty percent chance.

KATE
For us, too.

THE DOCTOR
And we're off! Fingers on buzzers! Are you feeling lucky? Are you ready to play the game? Who's going to be quickest? Who's going to be the luckiest?

KATE
This is not a game!

THE DOCTOR
No, it's not a game, sweetheart, and I mean that most sincerely.

BONNIE
Why are you doing this?

KATE
Yes, I'd like to know that too. You set this up -- why?

THE DOCTOR
Because it's not a game, Kate. This is a scale model of war. Every war ever fought right there in front of you.
Because it's always the same. When you fire that first shot, no matter how right you feel, you have no idea who's going to die.

You don't know who's children are going to scream and burn. How many hearts will be broken! How many lives shattered! How much blood will spill until everybody does what they're always going to have to do from the very beginning -- sit down and talk!

I just want you to think.

Do you know what thinking is? It's just a fancy word for changing your mind.

BONNIE
I will not change my mind.

THE DOCTOR
Then you will die stupid.

Alternatively, you could step away from that box.

BONNIE
No, I'm not stopping this, Doctor. You think they'll let me go after what I've done?

THE DOCTOR
You're all the same, you screaming kids, you know that? "Look at me, I'm unforgivable." Well here's the unforeseeable, I forgive you. After all you've done. I forgive you.

BONNIE
You don't understand.

THE DOCTOR
I don't understand? Are you kidding? Me? Of course I understand. I mean, do you call this a war, this funny little thing?

This is not a war. I fought in a bigger war than you will ever know.

I did worse things than you could ever imagine, and when I close my eyes... I hear more screams than anyone could ever be able to count.

And do you know what you do with all that pain? Shall I tell you where you put it?

You hold it tight... Til it burns your hand. And you say this -- no one else will ever have to live like this. No one else will ever have to feel this pain.

Kate steps away from her mass destruction box.

THE DOCTOR
Thank you. Thank you.

KATE
I'm sorry.

BONNIE
It's empty, isn't it? Both boxes -- there's nothing in them. Just buttons.

THE DOCTOR
Of course.

That's my ideal model for STAR WARS: adopt some of that STAR TREK/DOCTOR WHO spirit and make STAR WARS a wholly anti-war series.

STAR WARS is currently anti-war content in a war-glorifying container, telling stories to extend and maintain the war. I'd suggest making it anti-war and post war, telling stories about moving past war and preventing war.

As someone who reads a lot of comic books, I know that any shift in the formula can be sustained but is ultimately temporary. The X-Men can move to San Francisco, start an island nation on Krakoa, but will inevitably revert to running a school in New York State. Batman can expand Batman Incorporated into a global operation, but will inevitably return to focusing on Gotham City. Dr. Octopus might take over as Spider-Man for awhile, but Peter Parker will be back. Superman might reveal his secret identity to the world, but the secret will go back in the bottle sooner or later.

STAR WARS, even if it moves to keeping the peace, will inevitably go back to war. But does the inevitable need to be the immediate?

I think it would be a fascinating creative challenge for STAR WARS to fully embrace its accidental, inherent nature as an anti-war parable, as a series that opposes and defies war and the military industrial complex. A few anti-war STAR WARS movies could see us awaken in a vastly better world.

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Grizzlor says I would vouch for him not being a Trumpist. Due to recent posts and events, I'll need to take a couple days' distance to think about it and get some second opinions from some friends.

**

I've spoken with some aerosol specialists and medical doctors about certain claims in this thread. The response has been less about facts and figures and studies, but more about what reflects medically-oriented thinking for patient health and what does not reflect medically-oriented thinking for patient health.

One claim in this thread was that healthy people under 30 can't get seriously ill from COVID or flu and don't need vaccinations. From a medical standpoint, this is false. A 'healthy' immune system of any age can be susceptible to infection from current strains of COVID and flu, and each infection comes with risk of high severity illness and potential complications: pneumonia, respiratory distress, organ failure, septic shock, blood clots, heart attacks, strokes, injury to the heart, brain, kidney and liver, and symptoms remaining well after the infection has passed. Pre-infection health in no way precludes severe COVID and flu illness and complications. No serious medical professional would rule out the possibility of serious illness from flu and COVID based on age and vaguely defined general health. COVID is particularly dangerous because the non-immunized immune system has often failed to recognize the virus to reliably mount a defense.

There was another claim: that updated vaccines should not be considered effective because they are rolled out too quickly to receive comprehensive clinical trials to determine how much protection they provide against current variants and therefore have no known efficacy. From a medical standpoint, this too is wrong. Certainly, current COVID-19 vaccines can only be produced fast enough to target the recent ancestry of current variants instead of the actual variants of today, and due to viral mutation, there is a lack of specific data as to cross-variant antibody application on current variants. But the protection of a vaccine is not reviewed solely in terms of population-wide percentage values of risk reduction. A vaccine is also reviewed in terms of the underlying mechanism of how the vaccine teaches the body to recognize and defend against infection.

COVID is a recurring global problem because the immune system often fails to recognize and respond. mRNA vaccination, while effective in teaching the immune system to develop antibodies, has seen diminished effect in memory cell responsiveness after six months. In addition, viral mutations mean that the immune system's ability to recognize new strains of COVID for a targeted response is shaky; new variants can evade natural viral recognition and waning memory cell responsivity.

An updated vaccine teaches the body to recognize the lineage of current variants and will raise viral recognition capacity. That capacity, due to the limits of lineage targeting, cannot completely prevent infection. However, the 2022 boosters and new formulations showed sufficient cross-application to broadly defend against severe illness, complications and prolonged symptoms. An immune system with renewed viral recognition is obviously better equipped than an immune system that lacks recognition towards current COVID lineage.

From a medical standpoint, a non-definitive level of protection is not the absence of protection, but rather protection that exists on a spectrum. From a medical standpoint, patients are encouraged to be inside that spectrum of protection rather than outside it.

A subsequent argument in this thread was that masks have no definitive percentage of protection due to inconsistent standards of study and testing, and therefore cannot be said to protect. Medically speaking, it is incorrect to dismiss masking based on a lack of definitive, quantifiable results from real-world trials; as with vaccines, the underlying mechanism of masks is just as important to review.

The reality is that KF94, KN95 and N95 masks will filter 90 to 98 percent of viral particulate in the air before it's inhaled. This estimated range of protection is variable, depending on the strain/variant, ventilation, individual susceptibility, and how well-sealed and fitted the mask is; there is no definitive answer as to how much it reduces the risk of infection; statistical studies have been as wide as 60 - 94 percent in risk reduction. But once again, non-definitive protection is not the absence of protection, but rather a spectrum of protection, a spectrum on which a person can improve their position via diligence in mask wearing and selecting masks with adequate certification

The overall medical opinion I've received is: spike protein recognition, lineage-based vaccination and electrostatic filtration are proven mechanisms from well-understood principles. This means that their protection is significant, but numerous variables prevent a definitive answer as to how much protection they provide in the year of our Lord 2023 against XBB1.5 and future variants.

Variability in human behaviour, viral mutation, and environment will create variable results. But medically-informed reasoning does not equate variable results with no results, nor does it use that as a basis to ignore underlying mechanisms and principles.

Across my sampling of medical viewpoints, non-definitive levels of vaccine and mask protection means they offer a range of significant protection based on their mechanisms of protection. A range of protection should not be mistaken for no protection.

mRNA vaccines have been in use since 2013; the emergency rollout of COVID vaccines has been under constant study since 2021. mRNA vaccines, being central to a global pandemic, have been subject to heavy scrutiny, constant review and regular development. Generally, mRNA vaccines have been safe.

Individuals have had negative reactions to mRNA vaccines. A friend of mine with an autoimmune disorder can no longer get COVID shots due to sores and fever that lasted six weeks after a third dose. Her doctor has advised against further doses. RussianCabbie reported an adverse reaction that made further doses impossible. General safety has not been universal safety. My sampling of reasoned medical responses to that has not been to dismiss vaccination, but to encourage people with concerns and specific medical issues and bad experiences to consult their physician on their specific situation.

Also, this does not mean that every treatment should be accepted with total credulity. We should have skepticism towards treatments and preventatives there is an absence of quantifiable results or proven mechanisms of result.

For example, a number of doctors with whom I have spoken will often encourage patients with colds to improve their defenses with herbal supplements such as North American ginseng, elderberry, and echinacea. Their argument in favour of these herbs is that they are 'traditionally' used to treat respiratory infections.

By their own admission, from a medical standpoint: there are no scientific studies that have provided any explanation as to how these herbs stimulate antibody response, increase white blood cell production, reduce inflammation, or defend against viral infection beyond vaguely defined traditionalism. Actual clinical trials have shown weak and inconsistent results in whether or not these herbs offer any benefit. The clinical results could easily be reproduced with positive thinking and random chance. Herbal supplementation lacks results and offers no scientific rationale; vaccination and masks have actual results and a clear mechanism of effect.

In this thread, someone equated vaccines to seatbelts and remarked that seatbelts do not prevent all car accidents and that there is no consensus on how much it prevents death in car accidents. From an automotive safety standpoint, this lack of consensus would not be a rationale to skip installing seatbelts, brakes, and headlights. Non-definitive results are not an absence of results, nor do non-definitive results dismiss underlying mechanisms and principles.

Human behaviour and engineering errors may mean seatbelts, brakes, and headlights aren't always well-engineered or maintained, but the principles and mechanisms of seatbelts, brakes and headlights are scientifically sound. Variable results isn't reason to not have them or fail to use them but in fact evidence that they should be used widely, refined constantly and maintained efficiently.

Automotive safety and public health are serious subjects. These are not topics for off-the-cuff responses or flippant reactions. Public health should be handled with thought and care and when we speak on the subject, we should ensure that whatever we say encourages safety and risk reduction.

In conclusion, I am throwing out all the ginseng and echinacea and elderberry that my doctor had me buy when I had a really bad cold that turned into pneumonia. The treatment was not dubious herbal extracts, but antibiotics. I am done with herbal supplements unless actual evidence to their efficacy becomes available. There are no proven mechanisms of function or reproducible results from these plant extracts.

In contrast, vaccines and masks have clear mechanisms of function with reproducible results that, from a medical perspective, indicate a spectrum of protection. A sensible person operating on medical principles of health and safety seeks to position themselves within that spectrum of protection as opposed to outside of it.

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The most recent episode of DOCTOR WHO has the Doctor confronting a psychic menace that has basically turned everyone on Earth into a 2023-era Republican.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

The whole "history repeats itself" story of the sequels is just a bummer of a story, even when the good guys won.  It makes any victory hollow because the bad guys are never really defeated and the galaxy will never know peace.

I feel this song perfectly encapsulates why STAR WARS will always let down its fans.

https://youtu.be/7Tm9hFpcO7o?si=te88ccQAB6owMilt

Even as I share it, though, I know I am going to wake up tomorrow and write a lengthy diatribe about why STAR WARS will always disappoint its fans.

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I didn't blame Harrison Ford for anything that was wrong with the action aside from the fact that he agreed to perform any of it. I just felt that the movie struggled to compose shots and edit sequences and stage fight scenes and arrange antagonists to create situations where Ford's uncertain gait and weak punches and stiff movements could have led to anything other than defeat and death.

To be fair: combat proficiency in cinema is often illusory. Jackie Chan even at his height could not have really defeated 10 martial artists in hand to hand combat; each kick and punch and leap Chan made even at his physical peak was a choreographed dance that could start and stop as needed when filming.

Pat Morita played a martial arts master in THE KARATE KID, but he depended on editing, angling, and his fight scene partners' performances to convince viewers that his 53 year old body of slow arm movements and low kicks could devastate a gang of karate-trained teenagers. The scene in THE KARATE KID where Mr. Miyagi beats up a bunch of high school students depends heavily on the student actors convincing the viewer that Pat Morita can actually hurt them.

However, Chan and Morita exuded confidence in how they walked, talked and moved. They could sell it. One example of cinematic combat proficiency that didn't work for me: Kate Beckinsale's character in the UNDERWORLD movies performs all these leaps and jumps and rolls as done by the stunt double. But then we get to a closer shot of Beckinsale's face and she looks uncertain and waifish and shaken, and the actress seems to be playing a different character from the stuntwoman. Beckinsale doesn't sell it.

Liam Neeson is an interesting case. At 71, Liam Neeson is still beating people up onscreen. Neeson's action movies are constantly mocked for the fast shots and incoherent editing to disguise the fact that Neeson is not actually capable of most of the action. One regular target is a TAKEN III sequence where Neeson climbs a fence in six seconds; this six second sequence is composed of 15 shots because Neeson couldn't actually climb the fence. However, Neeson's performance convinces me that his character can do it.

In Ford's case... Ford did not convince me that he was still a fighter in DIAL OF DESTINY. He had a shaky uncertainty in his physical presence with none of the aplomb and swagger Indy used to have. That was how the character was scripted, and Ford performed that character. However, this body language and shakiness also meant that Indy was now unbelievable to me as someone who could win a fight. At least in my case.

I really would not have minded if DIAL OF DESTINY had been more of a character piece for Indy. We all get too old to convincingly punch out Nazis at some point. I would have loved for Indy to take on less of a Quinn Mallory role and more of a Professor Arturo role. I admit, I don't know if there is a market for an INDIANA JONES movie where Indy is less the man of action and more the wits-and-guile hero. However, it turned out that there wasn't a market for an INDIANA JONES movie where he was still a man of action.

Grizzlor wrote:

SIX to SEVEN weeks to SHOOT an episode?!?!?!?  Is that true?

Hmmm. Looking at it more closely: THE ORVILLE was filming from October 21, 2019 to March 13, 2020. Over the course of 144 days, they completed filming for five episodes (but not editing or effects). This translates to about four weeks (28.8 days) to film one episode.

Grizzlor wrote:

Seth's vaunted Star Trek TNG episodes were given barely TWO weeks to film, often less!  That's outright lunacy.  Also, effects mean nothing as most are done in post via CGI.  The show has limited location filming, it's 90% on the ship set.  I could see it taking seven weeks from first shot to post being completed, but not filming, that is horrendous.

   
I overshot when I said six to seven weeks (that was Tom Costantino's estimate, but it must have included editing). Still, a month to shoot one episode of a set-bound show even before pandemic protocols is bizarre.

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Grizzlor wrote:

did the masking truly DO much of anything?  Or did the virus beat the masks as it seemed to beat the vaccine in terms of transmission?  They were supposed to evaluate this for the "next contagion" but as I referenced, they didn't.  In the hoopla of the pandemic, procedures weren't accurately followed and most of the data is inconclusive.  That's all I was getting at with I guess it's QuinnSldr who wears a mask frequently.  That him wearing it versus not wearing it, if he's a healthy individual, may actually be of slight difference.  Maybe you're 60% right, and I'm 40% right, I just don't think the data came out of COVID unscathed.

Commenting on whether or not people wear masks properly or at all is an assessment of human behaviour and societal stigmas and attitudes to personal protective equipment. It is a tangent without bearing on whether or not masks work.

Saying masks don't work because people don't wear them properly or wear them at all is like saying Ford made a bad car because the driver ignored all traffic lights and road signs before crashing it or saying Hewlett-Packard made a bad laptop because the user filled it with spyware and viruses. A mask is not a mask wearer.

The question of QuinnSlidr's immune system is, to me, utterly irrelevant in the discussion of whether or not masks work. QuinnSlidr's BMI, bloodwork, white blood cell count, and daily average temperature for the last year have no relevance to filtration efficacy. QuinnSlidr could be an Olympic athlete or on his deathbed; that still has no effect on electrostatic particle capture.

Do masks work? It's a simple question with an obvious answer: if you wear an electrostatic mask that seals properly, that 95 percent filtration of 0.1 to 0.75 micron particles is obviously going to stop you from inhaling high levels of viral and bacterial particulate.

Raising the subject of people who don't wear masks properly or at all is not an indication of mask efficacy, but human ineptitude. Someone who cares to wear a mask is going to wear it and wear it properly.

What additional protection does a mask grant on a well-functioning immune system? That's a question worth looking into, so I'll return to it once I have some informed answers to share. Anecdotally: I used to get six colds a year. Ever since I started masking, I have had one cold in three years.

**

I'm afraid I don't currently have access to any experts on gain of function research and don't know who to ask about that.

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I find this post reasonable and fair in its skepticism and nuance. Masks protect. But how much do they protect? COVID-19 vaccines reduce the risk of severe illness, hospitalization and death. But how much do they reduce the risk?

Flu shots statistically reduce illness by 40 - 60 percent, but is that reducing infection, severe illness, hospitalization or death?

Given the range of flu strains and the limitations of flu shots and the variability of each recipient of vaccines, what protection can we say is generally received by vaccinations that is an applicable answer to the overall population?

I find these questions appropriate and important. I find these questions deserving of consideration and response.

I am going to note them and bring them to my superiors and betters for review and come back to you with a summary of their responses. I may not have a response until next week.

**

In terms of villifying people who don't mask or vaccinate... in 2021, anyone who didn't vaccinate was endangering people's lives because the vaccine was so effective on the original strain of COVID-19. The situation has changed. In 2023, the updated vaccine no longer stops you or others getting sick; it merely keeps the vaccinated individual from severely ill, keeping them out of the hospital or the grave. The unvaccinated person with COVID poses as much threat to me as the vaccinated person with COVID.

Furthermore, mask technology and availability has improved significantly. In 2020, surgical masks were what was largely available. Surgical masks block outgoing particles but lack the seal to block incoming particles. An unmasked person posed a threat to those who conscientiously masked. But since 2021, KF94 and KN95 masks with a good seal protect in both directions. When I wear a KF94, whether or not anyone around me is wearing a mask is irrelevant; my mask is blocking incoming and outgoing particles.

As a result, an unvaccinated person without a mask is no longer a bioterrorist as much as they are someone walking in a rainstorm and refusing to wear a raincoat or an umbrella, which is not a crime or a threat to anyone. A mask and a vaccination protect the individual who has them, but the unmasked and unvaccinated pose no additional danger to the vaccinated mask-wearer.

I think that has put vaccination in the realm of personal choice rather than public duty. But how much risk is the unvaccinated non-masker incurring? What complications are they facing should they have only long-term T-cell protection in a full-viral load exposure?

I am going to look into this and get back to you.

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Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I would've been okay with another Kombat film with the original cast (again, mostly out of nostalgia).  I need to watch that retrospective because now I'm intrigued by the making of that awful movie.

Please note that the retrospective I linked to was just a highly sardonic, mocking, scene by scene plot summary of ANNIHILATION.

Grizzlor wrote:

Mortal Kombat: Annihilation was terrible, maybe one of the 3-5 worst films of the decade.  We went to see it and one friend took his younger brother who was so disappointed he started weeping a bit.

That's interesting. I admit, I am not so invested in MORTAL KOMBAT that I can imagine myself weeping over it. But I occasionally find myself weeping whenever I have a flashback to "The Exodus Part II" and there's a scene in "Mother and Child" that reduces me to apoplectic rage. I'm sure that MORTAL KOMBAT is someone else's SLIDERS.

I really liked Linden Ashby as Johnny Cage in the first film. When Chris Conrad's Johnny Cage was killed off in the sequel, it was like watching a parody performance with cosplayers at a convention. I just couldn't take it seriously enough to accept it as taking place after the first film. But it sounds like your friend's younger brother did take it seriously and it was some sort of lifelong trauma that will haunt him for all eternity and motivate him to write lavish fanfic on the subject.

Grizzlor wrote:

I'm not sure how far that New Orleans film was developed though.  Midway went out of business around that time, as well, and that affected a third film's progress as well as the console's production as well.

I too am not sure how far along the New Orleans film had made it before Katrina wiped it off the map either, but Robin Shou and Linden Ashby said that they'd read the script and signed on for it, and Christopher Lambert, Talisa Soto and others were set to return. I'm not sure if anyone was going to return to play Sonya Blade. I've heard that sets were in the process of being built when disaster struck, but that's just hearsay.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny hit Disney+ and I finally saw it.  I think Ford has some great scenes, and I think it was made with love.  But I'm surprised that Mangold, who obviously has a reverence for this character, made a movie that is essentially devoid of any big swings.  It's about as vanilla as you can get, takes almost no risks, and adds very little to the series.  I'm not saying it's bad, I liked a decent amount of it quite a bit.  It's just...nothing?

Grizzlor wrote:

What risks would/should it have taken?  This has been leveled on Mangold quite a bit, and most that say that just stop there.  In terms of adding to the series, I think the problem there was that you'd then have to feature his wife and son quite a bit, which the producers were not in favor of, and who can blame them?  Ford wanted to portray the end of the character's career, show his age, and that he was effectively a washed up super hero, his life in shambles.  To me that was pretty risky, to show a broken down Indiana Jones.  As a fanatic of the series, his reunion with Marion was worth the film to me, I get choked up on every watch, and I've seen it a half dozen times now.  I would agree that the set pieces and the puzzle aspect to the film were lame and barely mattered.  It was a difficult film I think to write in 2020-21 featuring an old man.  Perhaps if they set it during WWII and just de-aged the man throughout, it could have been something more fitting?

I don't think the de-aging technology is there yet for a whole movie; it was already struggling for a 20 minute sequence.

I think it was really awkward to try to make Harrison Ford an action star at his age, and the action just really suffered for it. Indiana Jones is a character defined by visceral intensity, physical motion and Ford is no longer able to play that sort of character.

The efforts to stage action sequences that he could perform produced action where Ford had to use an extremely limited range of physical ability that somehow let him triumph because of directing and editing struggling to make him victorious. The action seemed to spend more time restricting itself to what Ford can perform than elevating the audience into danger and excitement.


I suspect that the time to make Indiana Jones movies was 1981 to 2000, and Ford, Spielberg and Lucas just waited far too long. By the time they made CRYSTAL SKULL, the character's best days were behind him. Mangold tried to put an 80 year old man into a movie template that Ford was probably past performing around the age of 60.

The script itself seems to be a weird car crash between four different screenplays with the Helena character being strangely incoherent: she's a mercenary trickster with loyalty to no one who is solely out for money who risks her life to rescue Indy and is devoted to validating his life.

I doubt Mangold would have been allowed by Disney to create an Indiana Jones movie where Phoebe Waller-Bridge performed most of the physicality while Indy used trickery and deception like, say Professor Arturo. However, I think Indy becoming Professor Arturo was probably the natural course of his character and that would have been a risk. Another risk might have been to simply accept that Harrison Ford's time as an action star is over, and to produce another YOUNG INDIANA JONES series with the trademark action of the character, or to do an animated series with Ford performing the voice.

But yes, the scene with Marion was very nice.

ireactions wrote:

In addition, I think Seth MacFarlane would need to hire a writing staff and do outlines for other screenwriters to produce teleplays which MacFarlane would then revise.

Grizzlor wrote:

There was a writing team, including Brannon Braga & Andre Bormanis

This is correct. I mistakenly repeated Adrianne Palicki referring to "Seth" taking a long time to write Season 3 as a fact when it was in fact a generalization. The Season 3 writing staff featured David A. Goodman, Brannon Braga, Andre Bormanis, Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and MacFarlane. Furthermore, it looks like writing on Season 3 began in May 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GusqtdZOGE

In August 2019, four months later, they'd finished... five scripts. Most writing teams for streaming shows would have written 8 - 10 scripts in that same amount of time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyqstSk … e=youtu.be

Of the 10 episodes, MacFarlane has sole credit for four; Goodman wrote one, Chevapravatdumrong wrote one, and Braga and Bormanis wrote four. MacFarlane also wrote "Sympathy for the Devil" and then a novelization of the unfilmed script. Effectively, of 11 scripts for Season 3, MacFarlane wrote five, or 45.45 percent.

"Shadow Realms" and "Mortality Paradox" strike me as the most unlike MacFarlane. "Shadow Realms" (Braga and Bormanis) is a stock VOYAGER plot of DNA mutating people into monsters and very much of the Brannon Braga handbook. "Mortality Paradox" (Chevapravatdumrong) is a lot of high dollar set pieces and not much sense. David A. Goodman's "From Unknown Graves" has the twisted perspective that I'd expect from him after his FUTURAMA work.

Meanwhile, "Gently Falling Rain", "Midnight Blue" and "Domino" from Braga and Bormanis don't resemble Braga's work and I would hazard a highly uninformed guess that MacFarlane rewrote most of the scenes. It would seem to me, although I could be wrong, that MacFarlane was writing five scripts and rewriting every scene of at least three. That strikes me as way too much for the showrunner if he's also the lead actor.

A lot of this seems to be MacFarlane insisting on having all scripts ready before filming so that he didn't have to do any on-set rewriting alongside acting.

Then there's the production schedule: six to seven weeks to film each episode -- and that was before pandemic restrictions slowed things down. Again, while I really enjoyed Season 3, I'm not sure this show needed seven weeks per episode. I'm not sure what that was about. https://youtu.be/qlqpogkCp3I?si=FkTUetUoNg5w0bjN

I recognize that THE ORVILLE is more effects-heavy than a cop show episode filmed in a week, but is THE ORVILLE really six to seven times more complicated than a cop show? 

I'm not sure what the reason is for why filming would have taken a year and a half for 11 episodes even without COVID. It's something I should ask about when I find some time for it.

I think if there is to be a Season 4, it might be necessary for MacFarlane to delegate his showrunner duties to a trusted subordinate who can match MacFarlane's style and sensibilities, who can shepherd scripts to completion that MacFarlane can easily do a quick polish on, whom MacFarlane can trust to be the on-set writer to do revisions during filming... and THE ORVILLE's episodes need to be filmed in 2 - 3 weeks per episode at most.

I'm not sure if the results would be the same as Seasons 1 - 3, but the way in which Seasons 1 - 3 were made seems unsustainable.

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When you declare that only sexual abuse is really child abuse, you insult me as a survivor of abuse. When you declare masks and vaccines don't work, you insult my profession where I try to make confusing health care information simple and comprehensible.

When you falsely claim I called N95 masks the only ones worth wearing, you insult my honour as a mask enthusiast who has spent a lot of time learning how these filters work.

I'm not flippant about medical information that could, if put into practice, affect someone's health and well-being. I'm not flippant in discussing child abuse and trauma. I'm not flippant about sex trafficking. No one should be.

You once wrote, "I didn't realize this forum about a television show was in reality a graduate level discussion board at Johns Hopkins." If we're going to discuss public health here, then any discussion should absolutely match the integrity and standard found in a Johns Hopkins conference room.

RussianCabbieLotteryFan asked me how long masks stay effective, how to reuse them, and how to store them. I did not answer his questions off the top of my head. I didn't skim studies and come back with barely-understood, half-remembered, cherry-picked data that validated my life's choices. I got in touch with some engineers and aerosol specialists, reached out to nurses and doctors, wrote up an entry-level set of responses, and then I asked them to check my work.

When Slider_Quinn21 asked me what masks I'd recommend, I didn't just throw out a random brand name based on whatever I happened to remember. I looked for a mask model and a specific brand that had actually been reviewed by an aerosol specialist with particle measurement equipment, and the mask I recommended to him was the one protecting my mother.

Brad and Rob deserved my best effort at getting them actionable answers in an understandable format because they had the humility to ask and I had the humility to approach my betters and request their guidance to bring back here. And I went to the effort because this is a subject that can potentially impact human life. Human life matters. Brad and Rob's lives matter. Everyone who reads this board matters to me whether it's 10 or two or one. I would never write words that would steer them into danger or be reckless with their safety.

When you are cavalier and careless in posting about masks and vaccines, you are saying that human life doesn't matter to you and that the lives of the people on this board especially don't matter to you. That's what I find more insulting than any epithet or term of scorn.

Grizzlor wrote:

[Public health] has no business being in an American Politics thread

This remark is completely wrong. Public health is the matter of health as relating to the general population, a matter that is affected and managed by public policy and public policy is a matter of politics. And anyone who discusses public health in a public setting anywhere should ensure that what they say never steers anyone into risk or danger.

Feel free to take that up with the co-creators of the show if you feel the need to associate your comments with whatever you perceive to be higher authorities.

I am perfectly aware that Tracy Torme shares your personal lifestyle choices on masks and vaccines, but he didn't lie about their efficacy in his podcast appearances, he just said he wasn't committed to using them while noting that his sister was "extreme" about using them.

Grizzlor wrote:

I am done discussing "public health."

To truly discuss something is to engage in earnest fashion by offering facts and coherent perspectives for sincere discourse with standards of factuality and reason to genuinely engage with ideas and information. And by that standard, you were done a long time ago.

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It's certainly peculiar that MORTAL KOMBAT, filmed in 1994, cost $20 million while ANNIHILATION, filmed in 1996, cost $30 million. Inflation doesn't account for a 50 percent increase in costs, especially when only two returning cast members would have avoided most of the salary increases. It looks like the sequel had more location filming in Wales, England, Jordan, and Thailand. The first film was only filmed in California and Thailand.

My guess is that the success of the first film was viewed as a fluke and New Line Cinema was desperate to crank out another sequel fast, and possibly spent more money on multiple filming units working simultaneously to make the movie faster, and assumed anything with the MORTAL KOMBAT name would suffice so long as it wasn't released too long after the first film. Another guess is that the licensing fee paid by New Line to Midway Games increased after the success of the first movie.

One certainty, however, is that the theatrical release was not finished, but in fact a rough workprint with temporary special effects that were not considered release-ready and used just for test screenings. It's possible that the budget was for effects that would have equaled or exceeded the original. The story seems to be that after test screenings, New Line saw they had a turkey and just released the workprint to theatres, unwilling to put any more resources into their hackwork.

However, even completed effects would not have changed the fact that ANNIHILATION was actively contemptuous of towards the first film, which is not a masterpiece of cinema, but still boasted a sense of self-aware irony and some strong performances. Linden Ashby's Johnny Cage is a delightfully impish presence, and recasting him and killing him off immediately in the second film was insulting. Christopher Lambert's Raiden has a mischievous humour, able to deliver portentous lines with a chuckle; in contrast, the James Remar edition is just a generic wizard of grim pronouncements and the script is devoid of wit for him.

ANNIHIILATION is so poorly produced and performed and yet so serious that it goes from a charmingly silly film to a sad self-parody, and it would still be a self-parody even with finished effects. And it was a huge part of what crashed the brand name for a long time. A bad movie is always going to do more damage to the brand than a late movie. It would have better to have made no sequel than this sequel. ANNIHILATION pretty much ensured that there would be no third film.

I have to say "pretty much" because a third movie did enter pre-production in 2005 and reportedly, the original cast of the first were set to reprise their roles, and I think there was to be some quick explanation for resurrecting Linden Ashby's Cage. Unfortunately, the production chose New Orleans for a filming location and then Hurricane Katrina rendered New Orleans unusable for filming. That apparently shuttered pre-production, the contracts ran out, and the third film in the series was never made.

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dylrichard02 wrote:

I'm in the middle of season 3

I am so sorry to hear that. Is there anything we can do to help? Please don't hesitate to let us know.

dylrichard02 wrote:

and just finished The Exodus 2 part episode last night.

May God have mercy on your soul.

;-)

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(552 replies, posted in Sliders Bboard)

It looks to me like ANNIHILATION was rushed into theatres before the script was ready. The studio set a fast filming date and simply recast when many of the actors were filming other projects, discarding their options. It seems to me that they were trying to turn another low budget, high return film and didn't think that the MORTAL KOMBAT popularity would last long enough to wait and refine their work or get Paul WS Anderson back. The economics were probably hard: MK1 cost $20 million, needed to make $60 million to turn a profit, and made $120 million.

The sequel, at $30 million, needed to make $90 million to turn a profit, and even if it met the original film's box office, it would not be as profitable. And every day that passed saw the MORTAL KOMBAT craze waning, so they hurried and ended up losing money when MK2 earned $51.3 million. They were probably better off waiting for the actors and director to become available or doing TV budget spinoffs for cable (which is what they ended up doing anyway).

That said, Paul WS Anderson has made and produced many, many, many terrible movies and his MORTAL KOMBAT work may have been a fluke he couldn't repeat. However, I really enjoyed his silly, crazy steampunk adaptation of THE THREE MUSKETEERS.

THE ORVILLE situation for actors is financially untenable. They were getting what looks like three years of moderate TV pay for six years of work. I think that is probably holding up a renewal as well: THE ORVILLE would not be workable on its original Season 1- 3 budget because the studio would need to pay the actors for 12 - 18 months -- probably the equivalent of 20 episodes -- in order to make six episodes of TV. Even with the pandemic delay, the fact that Season 3 took three years to produce 10 episodes is (probably) due to Seth MacFarlane writing all the scripts.

So what could be done? Well, either they could pay the actors their holding fees, or they could negotiate that Season 4 is 7 - 10 episodes and all scenes with actors must be filmed within a six month schedule even if post production takes longer; this enables the actors to take on other jobs to earn a living.

In addition, I think Seth MacFarlane would need to hire a writing staff and do outlines for other screenwriters to produce teleplays which MacFarlane would then revise. Given MacFarlane's workload on other projects, I don't think he would have much choice but to do this anyway to produce another season of THE ORVILLE.

I really enjoyed Season 3 of THE ORVILLE, but subtracting the pandemic year, did those 10 episodes really reflect the need to spend two years filming those 10 episodes?