Re: Personal Status Updates!

The Samsung S5 is the cheapest option for Samsung Pay with waterproofing and a microSD and it's your only option for those features with a removable battery.

**

I used Final Draft to write "Slide Effects" and Parts 1 - 3 of SLIDERS REBORN, but I have to say that I was. becoming increasingly disgruntled with it. The latest versions did not seem to have been optimized for Windows 8, so I was seeing a lot of freezing and lagging and delayed input was just maddening. Around that time, screenwriter John August revealed a new version of the Courier screenwriting font, Courier Prime.

This new font was so well-suited to screen readers and digital displays while maintaining the typewritten look that I had to go with it. I switched to using the screenwriting software Fade In, which used the new font and was smooth on Windows. In contrast, Final Draft could not use Courier Prime correctly, adding in extreme spaces between each line. I went back and converted all my scripts to Fade In and it's been good.

The only issue I have with Fade In -- dialogue will cut off in mid-sentence to go to the next page. In Final Draft, dialogue would always break at a period, making sure no sentence was split across a page. The setting to adjust this in Fade In doesn't work.

As for writing on tablets -- try swipe typing keyboards, it's a slight improvement over thumbing each key individually.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

The S5 doesn't have Samsung Pay capability. It started with the S6... the Note 5 does have it though.

Rumor has it that Samsung is going to do away with the Note series and focus entirely on the S series. I think that would be a mistake. I know people who like the different lines for different reasons. The brother that I mentioned who just got a Note 4 uses the pen a lot, sketching up plans and diagrams for projects that he's working on. As an artist, it's been a great tool for him. Meanwhile, my sister in law who used to have a Note 2 (which she gave to my brother, who then took it swimming) found the Note too big for her. I believe she has an S5 now, and that seem to work.

I was planning to make the jump to the Note series if I ever did upgrade (again, the prices make it really, really hard to do. They either need to bring back the renewal deals or lower the price of phones). But I have no plan to upgrade anytime soon, so we'll see how it goes. I'm kinda hoping for the foldable phone that they've been talking about... normal size phone that unfolds into a larger tablet. Cooooool


While we're at it, i want the TV from this video:

https://youtu.be/eoIQmWd8LTQ

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Sorry, my mistake. I confused the S5 with the Note 5 and conflated Android Pay with Samsung Pay.

The only way I'd feel comfortable buying a Note 5 is if it were the 128GB model. I think it's ridiculous that companies charge so much for more than 16GB when so many phones offer microSD slots. I've gotten used to buying cheaper phones and usable a 128GB microSD to store multimedia. With my 4.5GB phone, I've even transferred app storage to the microSD. Apps running from the card do indeed run a bit slower, but I make sure that external memory apps aren't ones I use too often or don't need to run fast. Even if FBReader takes a few extra seconds to start up, once the ebook is showing, speed is irrelevant.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

... okay. So, for a very long time, I've been working on the last outline for SLIDERS REBORN. The story was fine and the general outline and overview was complete. But I often didn't have the fine details in place for how to get in and out of each scene or the geographical and regional information for each location or the exact background information for each alternate history or the specific means of illustrating it.

For the last five installments, I always came up with that while I was writing the script and it led to exhaustion and burnout. I tried to do all that research and preparation upfront this time so that when scripting, I could focus on dialogue and physical action rather than trying to work out which San Francisco neighbourhood we're in and where the rope came from. "Quinn solves the situation with his usual braininess" often left things vague and while it was neat to improvise on the spot, it was also very tiring. This time, all the solutions are in the outline.

At this point, I've put in all the details -- "Quinn stops a runaway car with a muffin" has been fully expanded into a proper solution, the location of the Sliders Incorporated office has been selected and all the surrounding details of that particular neighbourhood in San Francisco is in place. I know what all the characters are wearing.

I'm going to start writing the script now, and aim to try to complete at least 4 - 5 pages a day. This will be my final SLIDERS script. Wish me luck!

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Good luck!

I had a similar problem when I was working on a book that I haven't edited or released yet (not part of my F/H series). It was set in New York, but in the past. So I always had to look up maps and whatever videos/pictures I could find, just so I could add the little details that make the world come to life. A lot of the time, those details were just for my sake and didn't end up in the book. Just remember not to include anything that doesn't come up naturally. Too much useless information can come off as awkward.

Actually, it did happen with Freedom/Hate too, come to think of it. I worked out this whole map of how the world ended up the way it did. Every time I tried adding too many details in the story, early readers would respond negatively, because it took them out of the story itself. So I had to go back and remove a lot of the historical details and stop trying to show off how much work I'd put into building my world.

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

My research is more specific. For example, in Part 3, there's a scene where Quinn looks around the city and immediately determines that there's an undiscovered WWII bomb shelter the sliders can go to for safety.

The outline did not specify how Quinn knew that -- I decided I'd just figure it out when writing the script, but at that point, I got stuck, couldn't figure it out, looked blankly at photos of San Francisco, spent a day pondering it before working out a solution where Quinn notices that a missing building on the skyline means the foundations were never dug and the bomb shelter is undiscovered.

Later in Part 3, Quinn looks around a coffee shop and the outline says, "He uses the Sherlock Scan to tell that the whole world is suffering from an ecological crisis." When I got there in the script, I spent two days trying to figure out how Quinn would do this and fretted and got stuck and it just drained me. With Part 6, we've got San Francisco being attacked, so I thought it best to know the names of different neighbourhoods and have basic descriptive detail for them.

And then there's also the sliders' feats of brilliance. In Part 3, I wrote that they successfully stop the destruction of the multiverse, but I hadn't fully worked out a solution yet and thought I'd improvise when I got there only to get stuck and Transmodiar had to bail me out of that one. So for Part 6's outline, I did what I did before and wrote in vagaries ("Rembrandt uses peanuts to stop the animal human hybrids"), but then I went back and made sure to actually write out the solution step by step so I wouldn't have to think of it in the moment of writing the scene in full length script. Hopefully, this will mean a smoother process for this draft.

**

In other news, despite claiming I would stick with my Moto G3, I decided to buy one of those cheap Samsung S5s I've been encouraging Informant to get. I had a bad experience with my G3 this week. I was at an event as a photographer, but due to an incident involving a cat and the curb, I cracked my camera lens. Not the lens, really, just the external filter, but it couldn't be removed immediately and I had no camera to do my job. So I used my phone. The photos were unacceptable. I guess the Moto G3 is fine for still shots and posed photography, but for event photography in an indoor space with light coming not from bulbs but windows, the G3 just flat out failed. Every image was blurry and mislit, nothing was in focus and thankfully, at the halfway mark, a colleague asked me why I was using my phone and loaned me her camera.

Since then, I've been finding myself increasingly irritated with the Moto G3's occasional freezes, brief pauses, moments of lag -- all the stuff you deal with when your phone is a budget model with limited memory augmented by a microSD. These things didn't bother me before because the phone got the job done as my voice recorder / notepad / navigational device / calendar / alarm -- but it let me down as a camera and now everything that seemed acceptable about it seemed unacceptable, especially when the Samsung S5 was on sale at a nearby warehouse at shockingly low prices.

So, I have left the world of 8GB Android phones with slow processors and 1GB of memory and gone back to a flagship, albeit a flagship of 2014. But it's cool. The S5 is like Sharon Stone; not the hot new thing anymore and admittedly past prime time, but as capable today as back in the day and more than up to any challenge other than Samsung Pay. This phone's waterproof and I got one-day shipping on a case and tempered glass protector, so I'm sure it'll survive. I'll keep the Moto G3 as a backup.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

That sounds like a horrible situation to be in. I have to say, I've been really happy with my camera. When I was watching my nephews a couple of years ago, they were goofing around and making clothes out of paper and tape. I got a shot of one nephew that looks like a studio portrait, and the only light was a window. I've gotten a few of those moments captured beautifully. My sister in law actually asked me why I always get such great pictures and she couldn't. I think part of it was just my eye for spotting the moments, but I also rely on the natural lighting. Phone flash kills pictures. I think you'll be happy with the S5 if I can get good pictures from an S4.

I got an Echo Dot. Same day delivery too. Now I have Amazon's Alexa in two rooms, controlling all of my smart switches and stuff. I could only justify getting it because I had points and gift cards to use, but it's pretty cool. I can be super lazy now.

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

So, I rooted the phone, installed Cyanogenmod 13 (Marshmallow), installed Google Camera -- and all my photographs were a blurry mess. I examined the camera lens on the back. It was covered in scratches. I adjusted the focus to see if the lens could focus past the scuffs and embedded marks in the lens. It didn't work. The phone ran great except the very feature I wanted -- a decent camera with image stabilization -- was hopeless. I called the warehouse to protest. They informed me that the phone was an open-box return resold to me (hence the low price), that it had never been used and any damage was my own doing and they could not help me. They referred me to a repair service, saying it would be a cheap repair to replace the lens. I vowed a vengeful reprisal upon their business via Yelp and Google reviews and they hung up on me.

I visited the repair shop in the morning and handed over the phone. The technician briefly examined the camera lens and then carefully peeled off the scratched and distorted protective sticker that was on top of the lens.

I have to go back to the warehouse later in the afternoon to apologize and buy them some coffee and donuts.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

The Walking Dead is straight terrible.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

The Walking Dead is straight terrible.

I tried watching the pilot, but didn't get the appeal either. I just assumed I was missing something; after all, it is wildly popular and there are intelligent folks that like it.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I'm not really a horror fan, so I tend to think all horror is terrible whether it is or isn't.

**

This election cycle has me wondering if I should take a hard look at my life, document every single potential scandal and put it online with apologies and descriptions of corrective measures taken so that it won't come back to haunt me in a decade.

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Ireactions, you have the strangest luck with technology. I can't make fun though, because I would totally forget to take the protective plastic off.

SQ_21, The Walking Dead had a really weak, but fortunately short first season. I started to enjoy it more in season 2.

If that one doesn't appeal to you, try iZombie. That's a good one. smile


New book announcement! The Secret Citizen (book 3 in the Freedom/Hate series) will be released on November 7, just in time for Election Day. It's now available for preorder.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B01M9ENSR7/

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

The problem with the Walking Dead is that I don't care about any of the characters.  Last night's episode was brutal and daring with a villain (played by Sliders alum Jeffrey Dean Morgan) who should be terrifying. 

And, yet, I can't even spoil the big cliffhanger because I can't even remember the character's name who died.  Nor did I care to look it up.  And that was even one of the characters I liked.  They killed a second major character a few minutes later, and it didn't even affect me.

The show was too attached to certain characters (who are essentially Navy SEALs now) so they had to kill off most major characters they add to the show.  So the old characters are boring and the new characters don't last long enough for you to care. 

The fact that the plot is repetitive is the problem that gets referenced the most, but I think that's just sorta the way the show would have to be.  They'd have to look for shelter, and shelter would reasonably be failing all over the place.

The actors are good, and the performances are good.  I just don't care about any of the characters at all.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Informant wrote:

If that one doesn't appeal to you, try iZombie. That's a good one. smile

Ha, I've heard good things but I have too many shows going now as it is.  This is the first year in a while that I didn't even finish the show I picked as a summer catch-up (Orphan Black - although I only have two episodes left there).

Maybe that can be a summer catch-up show down the road.

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Oh my God! Will you people make your own damned zombie show thread? This is the god-damn STATUS UPDATES thread and unless this WALKING DEAD conversation is going to lead to someone revealing a lengthy struggle with necrophilia, it has to go somewhere else.

**

So, I'm setting up an S5. Another one. I'm collaborating with someone on a Christmas gift for a friend. The thing is, as much as I know Informant appreciates Samsung's post-processing and HDR algorithms for flash-free photographic excellence, I deal with absolutely none of it. When I install the Google version of Android on a phone, I lose all of those features. When I deleted Touchwiz from my old S3 and my current S5, I lost the night mode, I lost all the detailed sharpening, I lost the grain reduction, I lost the multi-exposure-merging.

The truth is I don't care about any of that; I like using a flash and I like the texture of grain on photos and I tend to run every photo through Photoshop anyway for flash glare reduction. All those fancy camera features are part of the Touchwiz ROM and without it -- well, you still have a terrific Samsung lens and shutter and that's really all I need. However, after the future recipient ranted about photography a couple days ago, I realized that she would not be happy with losing all of Samsung's camera features. But I also know that she hates Touchwiz.

So, I'm currently in the process of reflashing the phone with the original firmware and OS and I'm going to see if I can work with a new Samsung App called Good Lock. Good Lock is apparently Samsung's new app (well, it's been around since at least April) that lets you theme Touchwiz and it seems that some of that theming can create a Nexus style look. Hopefully, with that and Xposed and rooting, I can get most of the Google style function on the phone while still keeping Samsung's camera app.

I wanted to see if Good Lock could go on the S4, but it seems you need Android 6 for that and the S4 was never updated that far. Damn. But it does have me wondering -- how vital is lowlight photography without a flash? Someone asked me to help them figure out if the Moto X Play was a worthwhile phone for their photography needs. The reviews are all universal: the camera is beautiful in daylight hours, hopeless in low light. But all those low light reviews are taken without a flash. Is it really reasonable to review how a camera performs in night conditions when the flash is turned off?

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Haha, I thought status updates was just a miscellaneous thread.  But, yeah, I don't need a thread for any zombie shows.

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As I work my way through the final SLIDERS REBORN script while working on a freelance article about indie stage theatre storytelling shows, I'm pondering life after SLIDERS.

I keep thinking that I should write a one-man stageplay show about a lead character who is myopically obsessed with a cancelled TV show at the expense of all else in his life.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

ireactions wrote:

I keep thinking that I should write a one-man stageplay show about a lead character who is myopically obsessed with a cancelled TV show at the expense of all else in his life.

They say you should write what you know...

Re: Personal Status Updates!

ireactions wrote:

I keep thinking that I should write a one-man stageplay show about a lead character who is myopically obsessed with a cancelled TV show at the expense of all else in his life.

Can that man be so obsessed that he's surrounded himself with a cute/mousy computer genius, a washed-up singer, and an overweight British professor?

Re: Personal Status Updates!

In my head, I am now casting a very prominent role for my Supergirl redo. Young woman, close to Kara's age. Strong ties to both Kara and Alex. If Alex represents the side of Kara that is constantly pushing herself to be better and more kick-ass heroic, this other character would represent the side of her that appreciates the smaller things in life. The quiet moments. The sunsets. She's someone who wouldn't feel trapped in her hometown, living a quiet, "normal" life. She could spend her life as a librarian or a homemaker, and she would be just as happy as Alex is kicking alien ass (though Alex is being reworked in my head, so she probably isn't going to be the super soldier that she is on the show... I haven't finalized her role yet).


Why am I mentioning this here? I need to think up an actress that I can picture in my head for this role. I may never write this script fully or post it anywhere, but the show continues in my head. So, who would fit in that world with Alex and Kara?

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Depending on how realistic you want it to be, the first person that popped in my mind was Ellie Kemper.  She might've done the show if it was on CBS....she might be bigger than the CW.  She's also probably older than what you're looking for, but she could play a lot younger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellie_Kemper

Season one Community Alison Brie could also do it, I think.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Ellie Kemper is probably too old. The character would probably be around 22 to 24.

Season 1 Alison Brie isn't bad though. I could see her fitting into their world. I might use her in my head for now.

Thanks!

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Informant's character has me thinking of Saoirse Ronan or Taissa Farmiga.

**

The thing about doing a stageplay about a SLIDERS obsessive -- I wonder if my lead character would be a fan of SLIDERS if I'd go the GALAXY QUEST route and make the character a fan of JUMPERS and its lead character, Quintin McConnell. If it's SLIDERS, it ties you to the show more vividly and intimately. If it's JUMPERS, you have the option of potentially hiring someone to play Quintin and let the fan interact with his fictional hero.

The other thing I wonder about -- in order to write a stageplay with conflict and drama, I would need to vastly exaggerate my obsessiveness with SLIDERS. The truth is that I regularly blow SLIDERS off for more important things. I remember Laurie and I sitting down at a market restaurant to work on our projects. But then Laurie started talking about her dead father and my vague grunts in response only seemed to encourage her to keep sharing about him and I put the laptop away and accepted that I would not be getting any scripting done on SLIDERS REBORN because I needed to listen to her talk about her dad.

But, for entertainment purposes, I would probably rewrite that entire scene so that the lead character is so obsessed with SLIDERS that he doesn't notice his friend is trying to share something emotional and important. It would be fictionalized severely. And I would probably make the lead character a woman and ask my stage actress friend Emily to play her because my quirks have always seemed more suited to someone like Emily.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I'm having a bit of trouble stringing some of my setpieces together. This is something Michael Piller wrote about in his unpublished MAKING OF STAR TREK INSURRECTION book:

There’s a new kind of action writing in Hollywood that I simply don’t know how to do. It begins -- even before a word is put down on paper -- with identifying set pieces, big self-contained action moments that are thrilling and memorable, and then finding some way to string all your set pieces into a coherent narrative.

This approach almost never results in a good movie because it abandons the fundamental demands of storytelling. Of course, I want top-notch visuals and effects, but I don’t go to the movies to see them. I go to see stories about interesting characters.

The opening of the last SLIDERS REBORN script involves Quinn taking on a small army of gunrunners followed by a car chase through the streets of San Francisco. I'm having trouble communicating the chain of logic for why Quinn feels compelled to fight these people or chase down three humvees and a stolen police car, why he doesn't just call the cops and go home or why an investigation into secret weapons caches in San Francisco suddenly becomes a rescue mission. The weird thing is that all these reasons are in the outline itself, but when laying them out in the story, it became necessary to truncate them to throwaway lines of dialogue, just enough to somewhat (or barely) justify the action sequences.

However, the action sequences were not intended as eye candy. The idea is that the fight with the gunrunners could show off how sliding technology has advanced significantly and show off some of the sliding flourishes that Quinn's now capable of -- I needed to set up and show off the sliders' superpowers. The car chase was a way of having the story lay out the surroundings of San Francisco and give a sense of what this now-interdimensional version of San Francisco is like. However, in converting the outline to script, a lot of these details are being reduced to the point of having only enough to get to the next scene and it's a struggle to make sure that the details that stay present are at least the alt-history details.

Ah, screenwriting.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Another thing. One key element established in Part 3 is that on Maggie's world, soldiers would be deployed with communications gear where a home base operator would provide the with intel, immediate research, advice and ideas via an earpiece -- like pretty much every superhero show today where you've got Cisco and Dr. Snow giving the Flash advice in his ear.

The sliders work on a similar setup where the home base operator is helping to run the mobile slide system -- except that where in a TV show, you would frequently cut back and forth between the action and the home base, I'm finding that it does not read well on the page. Constantly putting in CUT TO: and a scene heading is going to be too distracting for the reader. As a result, I've put in exactly one shot of the command center and for the rest of it, Maggie and Arturo are simply talking to Quinn via the earpiece and 'off-camera.' Which isn't actually a good visual representation, but it works better in this prose format.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I'm hitting another weird situation -- the opening is a bit like a James Bond movie where we have an introductory action sequence. They're not supposed to be that long. But this opening action sequence is shaping up to be FORTY PAGES of script. The thing is -- there's a lot more description here than in a real screenplay. If filmed, it would only be 15 minutes. But something that takes twenty seconds to show -- like an office complex of gadgets and a quick-paced fight scene -- is taking a page to describe. This could possibly be a 250 page screenplay when it's done.

I guess this effectively destroys the (fragile) illusion that SLIDERS REBORN is a filmed revival of the series. It's a novel that happens to use the screenplay format.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

For your communications issue, please allow me to introduce you to your new vest friend, the intercut.
http://www.screenwriting.info/15.php

For your action scene, a lesson that I learned while writing action sequences in my books is that sometimes, less is more. Describing a fight sequence gets long, repetitive and boring. Cutting a lot of description in them saves the reader the time that it would take to get bored and skim past the action. Hit the highlights, but if you're going blow by blow, I would recommend taking the red pen to a lot of it.

I don't actually have a lot of my Supergirl pilot written (maybe ten pages, because I'm typing with my thumbs and only when bored) but the issue that I'm having is in not wanting an action sequence just for the sake of having one. I'm not sure that this series would necessarily have a monster of the week. I guess it doesn't matter, since I won't have to write a whole series. smile

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Oh, I don't know. Informant, here's the first 32 pages. You tell me what I'm doing wrong.

http://freepdfhosting.com/885454a1c8.pdf

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Actually, I've worked out a solution. I need to divide the script into episodes and make the episodes like separate chapters of a novel. They'll still be one script, but each segment will have a separate title card. Not a title, I want to keep the "Regenesis" banner, but I'll find a decent quote to start each portion and focus on a specific character or pairing. That way, a 46-page SLIDERS-meets the Marvel Cinematic universe episode can be followed by a lightweight Season 1-esque comedy of mistaken identities, then a David Peckinpah-style detective story, then a pacey science fiction adventure like in Season 2, and then back to the superhero material for the last installment. They'll all, individually, feel like TV episodes.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Sounds cool.

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

ireactions wrote:

Oh, I don't know. Informant, here's the first 32 pages. You tell me what I'm doing wrong.

http://freepdfhosting.com/885454a1c8.pdf

ireactions wrote:

Actually, I've worked out a solution. I need to divide the script into episodes and make the episodes like separate chapters of a novel. They'll still be one script, but each segment will have a separate title card. Not a title, I want to keep the "Regenesis" banner, but I'll find a decent quote to start each portion and focus on a specific character or pairing. That way, a 46-page SLIDERS-meets the Marvel Cinematic universe episode can be followed by a lightweight Season 1-esque comedy of mistaken identities, then a David Peckinpah-style detective story, then a pacey science fiction adventure like in Season 2, and then back to the superhero material for the last installment. They'll all, individually, feel like TV episodes.

Informant wrote:

Sounds cool.

Hated the pages, didja?

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Well. I decided to reduce the action in the way that Informant advised and got it down to 26 pages. I guess that's okay for a Bondian opening. http://freepdfhosting.com/885454a1c8.pdf

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I didn't! Actually, I've been having some pretty bad back pain and haven't been able to sit and do any writing/editing/reading work. I came to open a tab and remind myself to read it, saw your other post and replied to that without mentioning that I hadn't been able to read your pages yet.

I'm working on figuring out a way to be able to do some work, but I haven't found a tolerable way to sit yet.

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Informant wrote:

I didn't! Actually, I've been having some pretty bad back pain and haven't been able to sit and do any writing/editing/reading work. I came to open a tab and remind myself to read it, saw your other post and replied to that without mentioning that I hadn't been able to read your pages yet.

I'm working on figuring out a way to be able to do some work, but I haven't found a tolerable way to sit yet.

Not sure if this will help you at all but you may want to check this out: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000FA5SGG/re … amp;btkr=1

There's also a cheaper version here https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Over-Back-P … 0425087417

Re: Personal Status Updates!

That's really interesting. I will check it out. Thanks!

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I'm sorry about your back, Informant. Keep us posted.

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Anyone remember the movie 13th Floor? It's free on some cable providers now through one of the studio/content owners on-demand channels, and I watched it this weekend.  Pretty good, and has some Sliders-like elements.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

So, I sent the outline for the final SLIDERS REBORN to SLIDERS genius Nigel Mitchell like a year ago. But it was written in a thin, vague, general sense without much detail and I found the story a bit lacking in depth, detailing an average day in San Francisco now that it's a city of overlapping alternate realities followed by a big finish. Nigel pronounced that it reached the dizzying heights of good enough, but I knew there wasn't enough material for a screenplay.

Over the course of a year, I added more material to the outline. Subplots. Details of the city and its inhabitants. Side stories and examples. Scenery descriptions. More characters to better illustrate the themes. Anything and everything I might need so that I wouldn't be coming up with ideas on the spot and getting stuck in corners.

Nigel informs me that he cannot make head or tails of this expanded outline, that he can't keep track of who all these supporting cast characters are or why they matter or how they serve the plot or what the hell is going on. And I myself an experiencing something similar -- there's too much material for the script.

As a result, things are being shortened down. A complex chain of deduction is reduced to looking up an address. An extensive car chase has been excised. A complex series of six different mysteries has been reduced to two. It's hell on the editor, but it feels like it's better to have too much than too little?

Re: Personal Status Updates!

More isn't always better.  Sometimes it's just more.

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Eh - just shoehorn all the excised bits into Part SIX: REGURGITATION. wink

Earth Prime | The Definitive Source for Sliders™

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pilight is both right and wrong. He's right that more material hasn't made the outline better in that poor Nigel couldn't understand it whereas the thin, vague and general outline was something of which he approved. However, I think it will make the script better. More *is* better from a time and productivity perspective: when writing the script, I'm not short of ideas or content, I don't have to struggle to give each slider something to do or work out how to get from Point A to B. All that material's already there, but some of it might not be present in the script, addressed through scene cuts, throwaway lines and montages. A lot of material isn't making it into the script pages, but it's still taking place off-camera or in a severely shortened form.

I would love for SLIDERS REBORN to go on forever, but I don't have the talent or skill to keep it going, Nigel Mitchell is responsible for nearly every piece of brilliance and cleverness in the stories and I think I'd better quit with an epic series finale while I'm slightly ahead.

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Nigel has set me some additional constructive criticism -- he thinks that the bulk of the finale outline is filled with irrelevant and confusing incidents and events. He advises that I turn the end of the script into the middle and get rid of the existing middle.

He could be right. Not sure yet. I'd say that I'm attempting a certain effect -- the "As Time Goes By" effect as well as the DOCTOR WHO effect where the story is filled with throwaway ideas that could each potentially be their own episode, the idea being to show how rich and boundless the SLIDERS concept can be where you can have a superhero movie next to an eccentric dramedy next to a hard boiled detective story next to a father-daughter dramedy. Nigel is the second editor to work on SLIDERS REBORN and the second one to think the story is absolutely crazy and out of control. Nigel is the best SLIDERS writer to ever touch the property. Yes, I know we all like Steve Brown and Jon Povill and Mike Truman and Marc Scott Zicree and Chris Black, but Nigel is the best and if he has concerns, they're worth serious consideration.

I think I'll continue onward as I am, but if the script truly becomes unmanageable, then Nigel's proposal is Plan B. I can't deny that what I'm attempting is completely nuts. The entire project, a SLIDERS revival in the feature film format with some extras, is lunacy. But... I mean, I've been thinking of Ian McDuffie (the Think of a Roulette blog) and his appearance on SLIDERSCAST in which Jim Ford described the plot of "In Dinos Veritas" and Ian remarked: "Everything you said is just insane! Dinosaurs! Truth collars! Poachers! Holographic rangers! And then the poacher got eaten! One of the best parts of trying to explain SLIDERS to anyone is a synopsis. They’re always bonkers. Like a sentient worm that poops the elixir of life."

Maybe that's what's happened with Nigel here, although anyone who dismisses Nigel Mitchell's opinion does so at their peril.

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Last year, I bought my mother a Moto E 2nd Gen smartphone. Her very first one ever. She dropped it in water last week. But it's okay! I bought two. I had a feeling she'd need a backup. And on Saturday, I looked around for my mother's next future smartphone and bought another two Moto E 2nd Gens. They're only $90 each. I know Motorola is Informant's mortal enemy, but they've gotten really good ever since Google bought and sold them to Lenovo. They're the cheapest game in town for usable, capable but not top-class smartphones.

The thing that drives me crazy about Samsung, Sony, HTC, ZTE and Huawei is their less than useless, overpoweringly clumsy revisions to Android. The Moto E and Moto G phones were plain Android just as God and Google intended but with one Motorola app (for voice control, motion control and data migration). My mother is not going to be able to wrap her head around Touchwiz or HTC Sense or MIUI fighting Android. The Moto E is no superphone, but it's good enough for my mother's instant messaging and phone calls and the 5GB of storage space is a problem, but not once Marshmallow's adoptable storage adds in 58GB from a microSD. There's a slight performance hit, but it's fine for my mother's limited usage.

That said, I couldn't *quite* bring myself to just hand over the Moto E to my mother without some modifications. The Moto E had no bluelight filter and I had to root it in order to get one working. Motorola's a good brand, although I personally wouldn't want to buy any of their 8GB phones; 16GB of storage plus a microSD should be the minimum.

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So, I am on page 50 of the final SLIDERS REBORN script and... I think this is working. But it stands out to me that two editors at this point declared my outlines and plot synopses to be insane, unworkable, umanageable and incomprehensible and quit. Yet, the things that they hated most tend to be rather well-received by the people who read the finished scripts. I'm wondering if (a) I don't outline in a way that communicates stories effectively to someone else (b) if my humour and content don't come through well in summary format and (c) I'm unable to edit my own outlines effectively until I'm actually writing the scripts.

A lot of Nigel's remarks continue to ring true, but I'm following his advice more inadvertently than willfully. For example, he chastised me for not having any scenes where we see the antagonist plotting and planning -- and in order to make certain scene transitions work, I had to cut away to SOMETHING, and I cut away to what Nigel suggested. He said I had too many characters and too many plots, and in the course of writing individual scenes, I have to decomplicate and declutter the story -- and all of that outline material, simply through the course of being distilled into the screenplay format, is being simplified and trimmed to lean efficiency.

However, it's kind of helpful to have a vast and massive outline because it gives me a lot of raw material and a clear chain of logic for why events are happening and what is causing them even if all the details aren't shown as explicitly as in the outline. I'm starting to wonder if my editors' uniformly negative responses to my writing are less the content and more the initial delivery system.

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This is why I hate outlines and blurbs. I write novels. It takes me 100,000 words (give or take) to fully convey the story that I want to tell. Then I'm asked to take that story and condense it down into a paragraph that will fit on the back of a book cover. It's madness!

We tend to tell people the landmark ideas that we want to put in there, but not the spirit of the story or how the idea is supposed to feel emotionally. Outlines and blurbs leave out everything that makes us relate to stories.

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I think that's definitely a part of it. But I also think that maybe I lack certain skills in communicating my story summaries and also neglect certain elements of storytelling. You've read the first two SLIDERS REBORN scripts; the 4-page prequel and the first 95-page script. The script has a teenaged girl going into Quinn's abandoned basement to drink and experiencing an interdimensional phenomenon to kick off the story.

The original outline gave no explanation for why the girl goes into Quinn's basement. She's just there because... the writer wanted SLIDERS REBORN to begin in the same place as the Pilot. The first editor told me off for failing to include basic motivational reasoning -- but there was a bit of overlap in that I'd started writing the script by the time he sent me that criticism.

When writing the script and distilling the ideas and concepts into actual pages in a screenplay, I realized I needed an explanation for why the girl goes into the basement. I decided to give her a drinking problem. And then I wrote that element into subsequent scenes -- and it's an element that is nowhere to be found in the outline. It was only when writing the screenplay that I realized it was needed. So, if I'm omitting such critical information from outlines and don't even realize they're needed until scripting, it's probably difficult for any editor to envision the final product based on the initial synopsis.

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ireactions, I've been really busy the last few days.  I'm going to look at your pages tomorrow smile

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I think that's just how writing works. TV writers create beat sheets, with a scene by scene outline of what they're planning to do, but things happen in the actual writing of the story that can change that plan. When you have the idea, you're looking through a telescope at the world that you're thinking of visiting. You can describe it, but usually just in broad terms. Once you get into actually writing the story, you are living with those characters. You have their exact words, and the exact feeling of the moment. You're on that world, and that's when you figure out how cold it is and whether or not you need a jacket. You can't always know what the story needs until you are inside of it. I think that's pretty normal.

You've read Strange Fall, right? That story started out as satire, commenting on the absurdity of YA vampire romance stories. The idea was simply to have a teenage girl meeting a zombie in the woods and decide to go with it because it's what teenage girls are supposed to do in those stories.
Then I write the first sentence of the story, and every element of that world changed. It was still basically the same idea that I'd seen from a distance, but it looked very different up close. It turned out to be sad and desperate, but hopeful in a way that only revealed itself to me in the writing process.

I don't think you're as bad as you think you are. Some people just don't outline, or don't outline well. I usually don't write out a full outline for my stories, because I find them useless once I actually start writing.

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I think STRANGE FALL is Informant's very best book yet, although I haven't finished the FREEDOM HATE series. (I did buy them all, though.)

And no worries, Slider_Quinn21. Just know that the fate of the multiverse, Sliders Incorporated, San Francisco and Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo rest partially in your hands. Bwhahaahahahahahahahahaahahah! Sorry.

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Oh Godddddd. I just wrote dialogue for Charlie O'Connell and I HATE Charlie O'Connell.

As I said, I decided to grudgingly name the Sliders Incorporated slide system for San Francisco the Cylcotronic Optical Local Interdimensional Network in order to (reluctantly) pay tribute to Charlie O'Connell. When writing the script, it seemed wasteful to not have Quinn use the system a bit more, so I added a voice interface and now Quinn has to say "Colin" the way other people say "Siri" or "OK Google" -- and I hit a page where it felt reasonable to have the AI respond to Quinn.

... so. Charlie O'Connell has things to say. In SLIDERS REBORN. God damn it. I hate Colin.

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ireactions wrote:

I think STRANGE FALL is Informant's very best book yet, although I haven't finished the FREEDOM HATE series. (I did buy them all, though.)


Much appreciated.


As for writing for Collin, I get where you're coming from. When I was doing fanfic way back when, I had to write for Kennedy from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Talk about an annoying, useless character. smile

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I'm writing some more scenes now and the Colin artificial intelligence is proving to be a magnificent shortcut to speed through exposition and get information to the sliders. I have come to love Colin and adore him. Charlie O'Connell's toneless voice is perfect for an inhuman, robotic AI.

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Slider_Quinn21 has been reading my script pages. It's a new experience for me. With the previous installments, editors read the outlines, but nobody (had time to or could bear to) read the finished scripts before they were posted online.

Something hilarious he observed -- he said that my Arturo dialogue seemed grossly overdone, too many big words, which I found really funny. I like to think that I've internalized all the characters' voices. But the truth is, after each script, I have to take a day to rewatch four episodes of SLIDERS ("As Time Goes By," "Last Days," "The King is Back" and "Eggheads") and then I go through the scripts and rewrite all the dialogue with the actors' deliveries and mannerisms recently in mind. At this point, my Arturo has become a caricature of a caricature. Damn it.

**

Nigel cautioned me that my outline as he read it would result in a thousand page script. I'm at page 90 or so, I'm on the verge of the final action set-piece and the conclusion. I think I should not have sent him the outline that I sent him. It was not an outline. It was a rambling stream of consciousness resource document. What I should have done, instead, was convert the outline into a proper beat sheet and apply all the truncation/shortening/editing/streamlining that I'm doing now as I write the script and then he could have reviewed it properly. This would be very important to apply to my next SLIDERS script except I don't think that I will write one. :-)

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I'm happy to report that I have completed the first draft of the final SLIDERS REBORN script. It's 144 pages right now. I'm going to give myself until December 30 to review, edit, take Slider_Quinn21's suggestions into account and also rewatch some SLIDERS episodes and redo all the dialogue so that my caricatures will become more accurate pastiches of the actors. But we're all set for a December 31 rollout! I can't believe we're here.

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Congrats!

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Re: Personal Status Updates!

As I make final revisions, I find that while I experienced a crazy, manic, joyful glee while in the process of writing the last SLIDERS REBORN script, I'm now reading my own work and my eyes keep glazing over the descriptions because I already know what I'm about to read. I'm ready to post it now. The only reason I'm not -- I am waiting for my editor's notes on the last 40 pages of so of the script and will make final revisions and then immediately post it. But I don't feel like I have anything left to put into it myself.

I guess I'll get started on some original work. The day the last round of notes arrive is probably the last day I'll spend working on SLIDERS fan fiction.

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I'm considering taking a break from the internet. It has just been insane and frustrating lately. Fake news, bickering, whining... And I'm not taking much away from it that is positive anymore.

I'd probably have to make exceptions for work and anything that I can stream without a browser, but I may eventually need to step away from it for a while. The internet used to be educational and fun. Now it's like hanging out in never-ending slums. It's depressing.


This site doesn't count as slums, of course. I'm just taking about the internet in general.

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Have you considered blocking websites that are an impediment to your mental heath and well-being?

I'll be sorry to see you absent. I'm relieved that I finished SLIDERS REBORN before you left and got as much advice out of you as humanly possible. The DC TV show thread won't be the same without you. If you must leave, do you think you might dispatch an understudy or a successor or a surrogate to keep us from getting lonely until you return?

**

When outlining SLIDERS REBORN, one of the three editors on the project protested how I kept splitting the sliders up into separate groups of two throughout the plot, saying it made no sense to split the sliders apart when the point of the story was to reunite them. While I made some effort to keep the quartet together in the scripts -- for the last installment, the sliders are constantly apart because the plot requires it.

However, between writing the fourth and sixth installments, I'd bought a Bluetooth earpiece that is now almost surgically attached to my ear -- and so all the sliders in my scripts have earpieces. As a result, even when the sliders are separated by distance, they are in constant communication, their conversations never stop and even when they are not in the same room, they are still together. Modern technology solved the problem.

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I wish I had an understudy in life. smile

I think that for now, I might just go internet light. And internet diet, if you will. Skip news (which isn't worth much anyway) and maybe cut out social media, but allow low-stress sites like this one. I'm a writer, on a computer for hours at a time... it's hard to not research stuff. It's just been getting way more insane lately. And by "insane", I don't mean what we do here, where we have a pleasant conversation and everyone disagrees but ultimately gets along just fine. No, I'm talking about people who are losing family members because of the post-election hysteria. It's gotten completely irrational, on a very large scale. I generally don't do politics on my private, personal Facebook page, so I observe a lot of what people I know say. And I see some normal people who are usually pretty nice and rational, posting things about how they can't be friends with anyone who voted for Trump because of this or that (usually based on false news stories or things they don't understand, not Trump's actual d-bagginess). It's a shame. There is absolutely no desire to understand the other side of any issue, so they just create these monstrous images of their "enemy", so they can justify the ugliness and the hate that is consuming them.

And even for stupid things... There were images released for the Justice League movie. But I can't get excited about it, because every article and every comment revolves around this notion that DC is doomed and everything is horrible, and there is no way to recover and misery, misery, misery. I don't get what would be so hard about letting people enjoy the movies they like without going insane over it. I don't tear into every Star Wars fan I see. I've discussed the Marvel movies, but I'm not on some active mission to tear down any shred of enjoyment that people might get from them. It seems like the pop culture machine has turned hating those movies into the cool trend. The movies themselves have little to do with it at this point... another situation where facts and details aren't as important as feeding the fire. Meanwhile, Disney could release a movie that is nothing but a chimp eating a banana for two hours, and the world would cheer them on as long as it had "Marvel's" or "Star Wars" before the title (don't get me wrong, there may be examples of good work from each franchise, but there are also definite weaknesses that nobody cares about).


Seem like the internet as a whole is becoming more about destroying anything good that someone else has. But this board is nice. We disagree, but we discuss. I don't get what is so hard about that. Maybe I just don't get the team mentality, where you are undyingly loyal to something, regardless of what it becomes.


Sorry. Ranting.

Please be informed that the political, scientific, sociological, economic and legal views expressed in Informant's posts and social media accounts do not reflect any consensus of Sliders.tv.

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Social media is more politically extreme because it's dominated by younger people, and younger people tend to have a less nuanced view of the world.