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Politics in film and television have been pretty poorly handled for a while now. It is all about pushing agendas, rather than exploring ideas. This results in any character who doesn't share the central belief of the writers to be depicted as soulless and evil. It turns into brainless propaganda at some point (speaking of which, I just wrote a book series which is admittedly, completely biased... Whatever. smile )
Good political satire sounds like it would be refreshing. Unfortunately, I probably wouldn't get British political humor.

Orphan Black is one of those shows which sticks close to the tropes. The big evil of the series is an eeeevil corporation. I feel like people don't even try to build villains anymore. It is just the same corporation, renamed for whichever show is using it. And they don't really add anything to it. People praise the actress for her work in all of those roles. She does a good job, don't get me wrong, but all of those characters are such caricatures that it really doesn't require great nuance. When you compare it to Anna Torv's work on Fringe, it seems so cartoonish.
It is a fun show to binge watch, but it just doesn't offer anything new. It could have aired on the Sci-fi Channel in the 90's.

I tried the new Scream series tonight. The first episode wasn't too bad. I'm surprised. Definitely better than the last two movies.


The Sarah Jane Adventures! I need to try that one. I remember seeing her on Dr. Who and looking up the character's background.

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It's a little hard to comment re Political Satire in some ways as perceptions vary but you are quite right re shallow Propoganda propogating instead of holding up a Mirror in most cases.

Brass Eye for example was very shocking at the time and did not pull it's punches at all while blending the Puerile with some very Sophisticated Ploys and Complex Subject matter.

Mark Thomas for example though WAS Left Wing.... To the Max BUT he did back everything up with evidence via investigation up to and including dangerous Undercover work and Hazourdous Environments.
Regardless of his Politics he was damn brave and didn't just shoot his mouth of based on opinion and assumption yet he still made the material funny while making a point and drawing attention to things like Unsecured Nuclear Waste posing both Health Risks and potential for use in Dirty Bomb Production, Government Corruption, Illegal Arms Sales that had been endorsed by the Govt and in some cases facillitated etc etc.

The Newish Revolution Will be Televised is worth a look. It focuses mainly on National UK stuff which is it's strength in my opinion whereas when it does go international it is weak.... Preachy.

Good aspects are Impersonating Political Representatives who are blatant characatures of the Worst of the Big Parties aspects yet still managing to sneak into Party Functions and events while being accepted as if normal which says something about how many people within said parties match said Characatures. Also good is how they dohighlight new Legislation re Employment that had been stealthily entered into Law and drawing attention to it. Disabled People being targeted by Govt Initiatives in a almost Criminal manner and Digging up Financial records that prove misuse of Public Money etc

The Left Wing in the UK is pretty much a dead beast but a lot of US People strangely (to me at least) think there is a strong Left here.
You hear a lot of Social Justice Crusaders trying to drown out everyone else trying to claim the Mantle of the Left but it does not fit them and switches many People off.

There used to be a 90's comedy called Drop the Dead Donkey which embraced a view of the World from different types of Journalists perspectives, it was good but rather dated now. It came out around the same time as the Original British Version of House of Cards too but was rather more Earthy and Raucous in tone.

There is a Show called Charlie Brookers Weekly Wipe which very sarcastically mocks the growing Celebrity Culture and plague of Reality TV with associated dumbing down of News Casting, Programming range etc but not much more than that. It's not Terrible but has a very narrow focus.

There is a new Sci Fi in the UK called Humans airing on Channel 4 if you want to check that out?
It's very much a Five minutes into the Future deal but it focuses less on the Tech and more on the Social consequences like Family Life, Relationships, Employment, Alienationation etc.

It too suffers from Evil Corp Syndrome but at least their motivations are not hyped up too much, protect the profit margin and avoid a scandal.
A rare thing though is that some in story implications may have the Corp aiming to protect People.... Via enlightened self interest of course but still.... Better than usual.... Slightly. wink

Alternatively last year or the year before there was a Show called Utopia that played with the Evil Corp angle in a Tongue in Cheek maximum Ham manner which was nice as they embraced the Trope you have issues with in such a way that it was deliberately over the top. The Conspiracy Theory stuff met with the same treatment in a So Bad it's Good way.

One of the main cast from Utopia is in Humans too.
There was a Series 2 of Utopia I think but I missed it. S1 I would reccomend though.

Another Pseudo Sci Fi was domething called Black Mirror which funnily enough was written by the earlier mentioned Charlie Brooker. Very Dark/Grim but ok I suppose. Only saw Two episodes... No Three sorry but it was unique at the time.
There is a Cruelty in his work I am not fond of but it does I grudgingly admit have a purpose in his themes as opposed to being slapped on by a Network Exec trying to be edgy.

Small doses of Charlie Brooker are Key I guess as too much is Not so Good.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

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Not had much sleep so pretty garbled writing on my part. Sorry.

Another reason I hated Torchwood is it obviated UNIT rather heavily. Not a Retcon persay but definately diminished and made it irrelevant.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

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I'm still alive smile

Steve's Parallel World (Earth62)
http://www.earth62.net/sliders.html

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The Left Wing in the UK is pretty much a dead beast but a lot of US People strangely (to me at least) think there is a strong Left here.
You hear a lot of Social Justice Crusaders trying to drown out everyone else trying to claim the Mantle of the Left but it does not fit them and switches many People off.

That's interesting. A lot of what we get comes from the media (much like what most people know about American culture), so it is a very skewed perspective. Sadly, this results in a lot of Americans thinking that people in the UK are on the extreme left, and also more civilized and classy, and look at us as unwashed peasants, so the easily manipulated amongst us try to distance themselves from their American culture. Some even claim that America has no culture, which boggles the mind... Sorry. I'm drifting toward a rant here.

But yeah, it's media manipulation. They present a picture that isn't necessarily true in an effort to sway the way people think. It happens with news reports and political issues as well. I've been carefully watching the way that news reports skew stories over the past few years, since it plays into a novel series that I've been working on. The subtle word play and the things that they don't tell you about a story can cause all sorts of chaos. And then people refuse to accept the truth when you introduce it, because they didn't see it on the news.

I could get into some of those stories, but I'm sure it's far less interesting if you haven't been buried in it for years.

I imagine that a lot of what you see about us isn't the whole truth either. The media sucks. smile

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vortex62 wrote:

I'm still alive smile


We need a "like" button here, for the situations where I can't think of a full response, but feel like I should acknowledge people.

I acknowledge you!

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vortex62 wrote:

I'm still alive smile

Woo hoo!

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Haha thanks DMD.

Steve's Parallel World (Earth62)
http://www.earth62.net/sliders.html

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Great to hear from you tex!

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Grizzlor wrote:

Great to hear from you tex!

Thanks Grizz I lurk alot. My site is totally closed for updates now and i got rid of that java menu crap, but it will remain up as long as I have the funds to do so. smile

Steve's Parallel World (Earth62)
http://www.earth62.net/sliders.html

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I thought I had my T100TA in perfect condition now that Google Chrome is working -- but then dust started getting inside the monitor. That's right. Dust. This 10.1-inch laptop is so badly designed that DUST GETS UNDER THE GLASS. And the warranty has expired.

So, I'm going to sell this laptop off and buy a new one. God damn it. I have to wonder if my mistake has always been to go for low-cost, low-weight laptops, and this T100TA clearly had a lot of corners cut to make its low price point.
I'm prepared to spend more money on an ultrabook, but I find myself wondering if that's necessary. I always picked out laptops with the thought of carrying them around all day. But the truth is that with a smartphone and a tablet, a laptop can stay at home and I've never gotten much work down away from home on a laptop anyway. What work I did get done could have been achieved with a Bluetooth keyboard and Google Docs on the tablet or phone.

It looks like 15.6-inch-screen machines are the way to go now that mobility is less of a concern. Gosh. I wonder if they still have DVD drives in them.

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A few years ago, I finally decided to just save some money and buy the laptop that I actually wanted, rather than what was cheapest. The cheap ones are usually outdated when you get them, and the materials aren't great. So I went to Dell's website and chose every feature. It is a 17 inch laptop that isn't easy to haul around away from home, but it is still running strong and I feel no need to get a new one. My only real issue is that the internal TV tuner stopped working for some reason. I might replace it, but I am not in a great hurry.

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I'm kind of tempted by this $700 ultrabook, the ASUS UX305 -- but I am also tempted by the new version of the T100TAM -- a 10.1-inch 32GB netbook going for $200! Same specs as this much-loathed T100TA -- but the new one has much improved build quality! It's made of aluminium! And a 128GB microSD card can easily make up for the low-storage!

But I can't help but see what you mean when you say that buying cheap only sees you spending more money to replace the cheap and ultimately unsatisfying item you chose for its low cost.

Lifehacker says that when you are torn between two options, choose neither. Or maybe choose the cheap one and try it for 10 days and then return it if it's crap.

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The $200 laptop was a final sale product, meaning no exchanges or refunds. While it came with an excellent manufacturer's accidental damage protection plan, I decided not to get it. I recently experienced a tech horror show with my Samsung Tab S 8.4 having a loose screen. I was able to exchange it again and again until deciding it was badly designed and getting a refund to spend on something else instead. I will never buy a computer I can't return within a trial period if it happens to be badly designed and manufactured. I think I'll save up for the Ultrabook and get by on my desktop for now.

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And now, for another installment of whiny first-world problems.

I thought I'd try to make a go of it with my current hardware before buying a new laptop. Maybe see if I even really need one. My desktop is actually a 2009 laptop plugged into a monitor, keyboard and speakers. I haven't used it much for the last couple years because I was splitting my work between the tablet and mini-laptop (an 11.6 inch laptop, later replaced by the 10.1-incher that I ended up selling off). Today, I found the desktop a bit isolating and wanted to move around the apartment a bit, so I pulled the laptop loose from its makeshift dock and made it my new work machine.

And, well -- it's kind of lousy. I remember the HP DM3 being an aluminium marvel back in 2009 with a delightfully bright screen and eight hours of battery life. I guess LCD technology has improved a lot since 2009, because my crappy little 10.1 laptop had solid black levels and rich colours while this 13.3 HP DM3 laptop has washed out colours and the colour black is represented as a vague gray. The viewing angles on this thing are extremely limited. Netflix looks weird. And all the text on the screen looks so jagged and pixelated and ugly. I guess you don't notice such things until you've had better.

But that's fine! It's a work machine! As long as black text on white backgrounds stays readable, it's not a problem. Except -- my God, this machine is *noisy*. I guess in 2009, fan noise was part of the laptop landscape and when converted to a desktop, the actual laptop was under the desk and the noise was distant. But here I am, trying to write and the grinding, buzzing, noisy fan is a huge distraction. And the heat! The palmrest of this thing feels like a mini-space heater! The base of the laptop, resting on my calves/ankles, is like an electric blanket. And the spinning hard drive is so noisy! The awful T100, for all its faults, was silent; the spinning hard drive in the keyboard dock made no noise and the rest of the T100 had no moving parts and it never got hot.

The battery seems to last about 40 minutes.

I dunno. It's not great, but I am honestly asking myself if I really need better. I mean, the iPad mini screen looks great and I can use that for web browsing. I have a proper HDTV for movies and TV. I only need a laptop for typing long documents; this thing doesn't need to be a mobile multimedia machine. The T100 got on my last nerve after dust started getting under the glass and I sold it off in a fit of pique yesterday. The HP DM3 has yet to aggravate me to that degree. With a tablet and a home theatre PC in the living room, does a work machine need to any more than adequate? Dunno.

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I wondered if a low-contrast, low-colour, low-resolution screen was really an impediment to getting work done. The answer is, apparently, yes. I gave up and put the laptop back in its desktop dock and then switched to my iPad with a stand and Bluetooth keyboard.

The screen definitely encouraged me to produce more pages, but I found it really slow -- keystrokes would be missed or repeated, the keyboard would periodically lose touch with the tablet and I would get really annoyed. Then I wondered if a better Bluetooth keyboard would work better as I noticed the same keys (G, comma, B, E) kept getting needed repeated keystrokes to make it to the screen.

I bought a more expensive Bluetooth keyboard and the results are good. The multitasking is a little cumbersome and I can't compare two files side by side on the tablet, but I can use my phone. I'm finding that I'm producing a lot of pages on the tablet but go back to the desktop to do all the formatting. That's fine.

So. I guess this is my new laptop!

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Met a Girl Yesterday who literally took my breath away and made my heart jump.
Never been "In Love" before... Is this what it is like?

I met her again tonight and I'm ridiculously happy and can't seem to stop thinking about her.
I don't even usually find Blondes attractive. So weird!

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

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Congrats man!  Hope it works out for you!

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Very cool. Congrats!

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80 (edited by Slider_Quinn21 2015-08-29 14:16:28)

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So I saw American Ultra today.  Max Landis wrote it (and as I've said before, I'm a fan of his).  It was a fun movie - characters seemed real and 3-dimensional, there was action and heart, and it was just a fun ride.  Had the feel of another Eisenberg movie - Zombieland - and I think it *should* have that same level of success.  But it hasn't - there were five people in the theater I saw it in (granted, it was 1pm on a Saturday).  Landis went on a rant saying that the movie was beat by a few movies, all of which were sequels or remakes.  Claims that it's this kind of stuff that makes Hollywood pump out more unoriginal films.  Went on another rant the other day about the dangers of sites like Rotten Tomatoes.  American Ultra is currently at 47% there.

Anyone seen it?  If not, were you interested?  A lot of times, issues where good movies get bad results are due to marketing.  But I feel like the movie was marketed pretty well - I thought it would be a bit more druggie but it wasn't.  They're stoners but it's not necessarily their entire characters.  The whole cast is good and recognizable.

I thought it was well done, all around.  If it seems like your kind of thing, go support it.  I'm sure every dollar helps.

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Gosh. I think this is the first time we've had a romance post. Tell us how it's going!

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ireactions wrote:

Gosh. I think this is the first time we've had a romance post. Tell us how it's going!

Well that's depressing.



About American Ultra, I saw commercials, but it didn't look very original or exciting to me. I don't know if that is bad marketing or what. It just looked like a movie that I've seen before.
I don't think that Landis is the guy who should be bashing remakes and sequels, since he has shown great enthusiasm for those movies. In general, I hate those types of rants. Remakes and sequels are as old as the performing arts. They have never stopped people from creating great original work, and they aren't stopping it now. If a movie fails, the blame isn't on the movies that didn't fail. It is on the writing, or the directing, or the marketing... If I don't want to see their movie, it isn't because of another movie that came out two months earlier.

Maybe it's time to have filmmakers cut together a trailer for their films, so they can pitch us the actual story that the marketing department usually doesn't care about. At the very least, post these creator trailers online.

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Well, I mean there have been examples of movies that are clearly not what the trailer said they were.  Click looked like a dumb Adam Sandler movie about a guy who gets a magic remote and does a bunch of sophomoric stuff.  What it actually ended up being was a Capra-esque film about a guy dealing with his own mortality.

American Ultra was painted as a stoner who is a CIA asset.  It's got action and comedy.  And that's basically what it was.  But it was also fun in a way that only Jurassic World was really able to capture.  It wasn't crazy original, but it was apparently based on a real-life CIA abandoned project so that was kinda cool.  Something like Bourne meets Half Baked.

Landis wrote a Frankenstein movie that's coming out soon.  He's doing a remake for television.  He's writing a Superman comic and pitched for a Fantastic Four movie.  I don't necessarily think his comments were hypocritical, but he's had criticisms about the way movies are sold in general.  And I think his concern is that it'll be harder for original ideas to get created if original ideas aren't profitable. I don't think he wants sequels/remakes to go away - just that he doesn't want original ideas to go away.

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The studios will always want the biggest title that they can get, with the most profit that they can get. They are businesses that need to make money, and for every one of these soulless remakes that makes a billion dollars profit, they can afford to lose money on ten original ideas that won't.

The world of movie making is separating. You no longer need ten million dollars and studio backing in order to produce a good movie. All you need is a good DSLR, some lenses, some lights, some good audio equipment and some talent, and your movie could look and sound like a solid studio-produced "art" film. I see a lot of people who are upset about the state of movies today, but the truth is that more movies are being made today, and more movies are being made by true artists today, than ever before. The people who are concerned with the state of the industry are simply looking at the wrong industry.

On another note, I just don't get the appeal of stoner movies. I guess the point is that you usually need to be high in order to really appreciate them, so I wouldn't. But... how do they get money to produce those movies? I tried watching "Wet Hot American Summer" and wound up turning it off (which I don't do often) because it was complete nonsense. Real comedy still requires intelligence and skill, so this definitely wasn't that.

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Well that's the other thing that might've hurt it.  The main character is a stoner, but it's not really the point of the movie.  It's more of a "this guy is a stoner who works at a convenience store - how can he be Jason Bourne" more than anything.  He's high a lot and talks about getting high when he's trying to understand what's going on, but the movie moves beyond it at some point.  It isn't played for laughs like in Harold and Kumar, and after the movie gets going, you see that it's more medication than anything else.

Because I'm the same way.  I don't do drugs and don't really think they're all that funny.

And I guess that's an issue with marketing it - the stoner aspect is there, but it's not the whole story.

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I wonder what the trailer for the movie would look like if it had been made by the writer or director. All of the imagery for the film's promotion revolves around smoke. If that wasn't at the center of the film, the marketing definitely killed the movie.

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Yeah, I mean I don't really remember any Harold/Kumar-type jokes.  That definitely couldn't contributed to the downfall if people were expecting that.

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I'm probably not going to see AMERICAN ULTRA in theatres. Nothing against the movie -- I just don't really go out to the cinema anymore. With Netflix and Amazon Prime and Google Play and iTunes, I just don't really feel that going out to the movies is a great use of time or money. I mean, paying $14 - $20 to watch one movie? And adjusting my schedule to see the movie instead of playing the movie for myself when I'm good and ready to see it?

I meant to see ANT MAN and TERMINATOR GENISYS and FANTASTIC FOUR and INSIDE OUT and INSURGENT and that recent HUNGER GAMES movie -- but I just never got around to it. When I was in the mood to see any of them, it wasn't playing and it seemed silly to go down to the theatre when I could watch anything else on my TV or computer or tablet. Or read my Kindle books.

Sometimes, however, Laurie wants to go out to a movie. We saw AGE OF ULTRON together, but she protested when I threw pennies at people who were texting.

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Yeah, I just like Landis and wanted to support his movie.  He had this ramble the other day about Nightwing that I really liked.  Not so much about the rambling itself but just the happiness in his face as he talks about it.  He LOVES this stuff.  LOVES story.  LOVES these characters.  They're real to him, and he's fascinated.  Something about that is really cool in a childlike innocence way.

(Also I love Nightwing.  In my opinion, he's the only comic book character who's ever been allowed to grow for some reason, and that's awesome to me).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCBMGKc78qI

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Might be seeing her again today.
She is Flat (Apartment) hunting so been unable touch base til now.
She is Really Tall! She sits down and her knees are practically by her chin, Average Chairs just fail, which makes me smile and gets me amused yet irritated looks from her.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

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Just an update on SLIDERS REBORN -- I got stuck when I hit some problems with the ending. Very simply -- I neglected to write a full beat sheet with a brief summary of each scene. Instead, I just wrote a general overview without too much detail.

Converting the general outline was pretty effective for writing Part 1. With Part 2, I hit some serious plot issues that only became apparent when writing the individual scenes. And I got lost.

A couple weeks ago, I was angsting about the situation with Matt and from our discussions emerged a solution. I proceeded to rewrite the ending in the form of a scene-by-scene outline and the solution proved effective, but it took the whole weekend. I set aside time this past weekend, intending to finish the script. What I found was that I couldn't finish it yet -- the ending works, but the preceding scenes no longer match the ending. So I had to go back and convert the written-script into a scene-by-scene outline, this time with the correct clues and exposition that set up the ending.

In retrospect, this is the sort of thing that happens when someone who has not written many screenplays and never taken a screenwriting class attempts something complicated involving a mystery with a revelation. I neglected to convert my general overview to a scene-by-scene outline. This wasn't a problem for Part 1, which was mostly conversations, but it was a problem with Part 2, where the clues and setup were not sufficiently seeded and the payoff didn't make sense -- which I would have spotted if I'd written a proper beat sheet.

Anyway. I've got a proper beat sheet now and I think I will have it done within this week. I just don't know if Nigel will have time to review the script in time for the deadline. I've learned my lesson -- I'm going to do a proper beat sheet for Part 3 as well.

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In other news, I've discovered a really great web browser -- Pale Moon. It's a variant on Firefox. I really like Firefox for all the great extensions and the way you can customize it. But Firefox has become a bloated mess of a browser. And even on i7 processors and 8GB of RAM, it's prone to delayed starts and regular freezing up compared to Chrome's instantaneous response. I recently discovered Pale Moon, which is a build of Firefox that's extremely stripped down and lightweight. It has all the features of Firefox, but none of the absurd demands on the CPU and processor. The main subtraction is compatibility with older-generation processors and operating systems. I've been settling for Chrome because Chrome is fast, but I think I might switch to Pale Moon.

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What you went through is part of the reason why I wanted to write my entire six book series in its entirety before releasing the first book. I would hate to have three books published before realizing that I forgot to set up a crucial plot point. It's an editing nightmare, but still the best way to go about it, I think.

The moments of crisis happen to all writers. At least you found a way out of it. Congrats on that.

I'm not a big fan of anything Mozilla related these days. I'm not sure that I could bring myself to use any variant of their browser.


The new TV season starts tonight! Gotham and Minority Report. Should be interesting. I've been surviving on a diet of Sons of Anarchy and Longmire on Netflix, and neither one of them is particularly great. It'll be nice to get some normal TV back.

Life is finally starting to settle down a bit. I haven't been posting much because things have been so crazy, but aside from some filming days coming up, I should be planted at the computer for a while. I'm sure that I'll be trying to avoid work most of the time, so I might be posting more. smile

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I have been leaving writing for the weekend. I'm tired after work and just want to curl up with my comic books. But I really have to get going on REBORN. I tried to write today, but I was quite weary -- so I just put myself on autopilot and wrote about 1/5 of the Quinn and Arturo scenes. I mean, they practically write themselves. Every two lines, however, I have to hit Wikipedia to look at the pages on quantum mechanics. I think Informant suggested doing this once; focusing on the scenes that were the most fun to write and doing the rest later.

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It's a method that works better sometimes than others. I think that the scenes that we have playing over and over again in our heads are the landmarks (usually, it's the intro, some fun middle stuff and then the end) so we just have to fill out the stuff that links all of those moments together and makes sense of the mess. Writing them first can help lock things in place, but for me it's difficult to work that way a lot of the time. If I write all of the scenes that my brain is going nuts over, I'm not sure how motivated I will be to write the rest. So writing scenes in order for me makes those big scenes like a reward for my work. smile

It's nuts. Writing is nuts. Nothing works the same way twice. It can be maddening. Good luck!

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What's your beef with Firefox?

My issue is simply that it's gotten bloated and slow -- but I still like it in theory. And with all the extraneous features stripped out.

I have now completed 1/4 of the Quinn-Arturo scenes.

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My thing with Firefox is purely political. I don't like how they do business, so I won't do business with them. Probably nothing that most people would care about. 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.

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Been watching "The Last Man on Earth" but for some reason the last 2 episodes of S1 were not on this week.

I like it.... But in a guilty pleasure kind of way.

Only other thing I'm watching is Californication. Not seen it before so curious if it lives up to the hype.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

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Informant wrote:

My thing with Firefox is purely political. I don't like how they do business, so I won't do business with them. Probably nothing that most people would care about. smile

I do.  Could you tell me more?

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Basically, there was a CEO that was run out of the company based on the fact that he opposed gay marriage on his own time. Huge stink and he "resigned" because of it. I didn't like the way the whole thing went down, so I decided to drop that company from any of my future downloads... which wasn't hard because most of their stuff sucks anyway.

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Re: Personal Status Updates!

Okay. At the rate I'm going with the second SLIDERS REBORN script -- writing a scene or two on weekdays, writing large chunks on weekends -- it will be done by next week Sunday.

I was going to send Nigel Mitchell the script -- but I think that might be waiting too long. Part 2 was supposed to come out in June and I think I've integrated Nigel's input regarding the outline as best I can. One of his remarks was that while he could provide me with bits and pieces to add to the story, he was reluctant to suggest specific changes as the story was intricate and he found that pulling on one thread would unravel the whole thing.

I think, for September 30, I will post the first 15 pages of the script just to indicate that it's well on its way to completion despite the laboured development process. I'll have the first draft done by October 3 and I'll give myself a week to go through each page and punch it up, and then post the Part 2 script and the Part 2B novella (already written) on October 10.

Part 3 -- I think I'll reschedule that for a January 2016 release date, in light of all the issues I had writing Part 2.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

You sound like me.

I wanted to release book 1 in my series last November. I want to release them every four months, so I need to make sure that the ball is rolling really well before I publish anything. So November came and went. Then March. Then July. Now I'm thinking maybe March 2016... maybe.

I want to bang my head against a wall at this point. That said, I am putting what I hope are finishing touches on book 1 while I wait for editing feedback on books 2 and 3. Hopefully I will be able to start round 1 rewrites on book 4 soon. Book 5 will get difficult, because it was supposed to be a five book series, but book five turned into two books, so now I need to make sure that they both stand on their own. They should, but I might have to reorganize some things.


Please kill me.


But not really, because if I die before finishing this, I might kill myself.

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Re: Personal Status Updates!

Yes, this I understand.

I'm not sorry for releasing Part 1 when I did. March 22, 2015 was too important a date to miss. However, completing the script for Part 1 a mere three weeks after the outline gave me a false sense of confidence. Part 1 was not terribly plot-driven and there were far fewer clues and setups than were needed for the payoff of Part 2. With Part 2, seemed fine in a general outline (or possible to rationalize) became illogical, nonsensical and incomprehensible when typing out actual scenes with events and dialogue. But it has gotten a bit ridiculous that a June 2015 script is coming out in October.

I wrote a scene today where Rembrandt encounters a double of Maggie who is a secret-agent-action-girl. Well. I think at 48, I have to call Maggie an action-woman. The plot and pacing required that Rembrandt convince this stranger that he is her ally and can be trusted. The means by which I had him do so is questionable in the extreme, but damn it, this had to move along.

I genuinely do not know if it's true to Rembrandt to have him declare that of all the sliders, Maggie is the one he knew best. Or if it's true to say that he knows her so well he can convince any Maggie-double that he's a friend. And also to say that Maggie gave him (off-camera) combat lessons during their two and a half years together. (But surely she would have?) But I think when writing tie-in fiction, you have to take some chances like these in extrapolating this way.

Something I really enjoy about fanfic -- many people have told me about the importance of not being self-indulgent in your fiction. Killing your darlings. Doing what serves the story as opposed to your personal fetishes and obsessions. But fanfic is a place where you can do all that. I was listening to the SLIDERS Rewatch podcast where Tom and Cory were joking about the Elston Diggs character of Season 3, laughing about how this silly character pops up in scripts and spouts expository dialogue to the sliders without any provocation, inexplicably telling strangers about his world and society like he assumes they're interdimensional visitors and need to be informed of what for Diggs would be common knowledge.

And when a scene required a receptionist, I could not resist making that receptionist Elston Diggs while presenting his bizarre expository dialogue as an indication of a compulsive mental disorder.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I posted the first 17 pages of the script on EarthPrime.com. I figured it was time.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I'll try and read it later this week ireactions.

New TV Show on Saturday called Ringer. Have any of you seen it?

Been reading a really good Original Story on Fictionpress.
It is called Mother of Learning. It's really good.
Here is a Link:

https://m.fictionpress.com/s/2961893/1/

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Okay. SLIDERS REBORN Part 2 is in good shape. I have only the final action sequence left to write. And I need to insert some extra jokes into the earlier pages.

There was a lengthy sequence in Part 2 where something Informant said back on the old-Bboard that stood out to me:

Informant wrote:

I think Quinn would be disillusioned and depressed. Science failed him. His own intelligence failed him. He lost his mother and his home. And no matter how hard he tried to make other worlds like Earth Prime, it never worked. He was a fool to even believe that his Earth was right and all of the others were wrong. And now he wouldn't even recognize home if he saw it.
Today's Quinn wouldn't care about going home. He might care about his friends, if they were still around, but not much else. You'd think that there would be freedom in letting go of home, but there wasn't. It will always be an unanswered question and he will never truly belong anywhere.

And I firmly disagreed in my responses -- but then I wrote a script that pretty much agrees with Informant! Eeeeek!

ARTURO
Mr. Brown, although violence is rarely an ideal solution, perhaps our situation calls for you to have your weapon ready.

REMBRANDT
Got it, Professor -- no wait, I don't got it! Where's my gun?

WADE
I swiped it at the coffee shop. The ammo's in their garbage, the gun's down a sewer. Laurel was way too interested in --

LAUREL
You gotta be kidding me! We're walking into the unknown and you took our only weapon?

WADE
We don't need guns! We have two geniuses, a soul singer that superspies consider one of their own and a whiny teenager. We can't be stopped.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Okay. Part 2's script is complete. But pretty rough. There were lots of sections where I just wrote __________ and focused entirely on writing dialogue. But it's now a process of reviewing and refining what's been written over the next few days. The actual writing is done, so I'd say we're on track. :-)

I just fed the raw text file into Final Draft and with the formatting, it comes out to 130 pages. I'm astonished. I thought this was going to be a much longer and crazier length.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

So much better than when you expect it to be long and it comes out at 50 pages. smile



omnimercurial, is that the Ringer that stars Sarah Michelle Gellar? It was on the CW a few years back, but canceled after one season.

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 read that RINGER ended on a totally unsatisfying note -- I'm hesitant to get involved in shows that ended on cliffhangers.

**

I honestly had no idea how long "Revelation" (2) was going to be. I wrote chunks of it on my laptop, but then my laptop became so unacceptably awful that I was compelled to sell it. I then wrote long chunks of it on my iPad. I wrote a bunch of scenes in Google Docs which inserted unnecessary line breaks between every paragraph. I switched to writing in the iOS Pages app which produced corrupted Microsoft Word files. I finally shifted to using Microsoft Word in iOS. But it became clear that I was going to need to do this on a Windows machine because I needed the plot outline next to the script. (Yes, I bought a new laptop after all. Damn.)

Nigel was actually of the opinion that the outline was WAY TOO LONG for one installment. But. I think Nigel was thinking as a novelist (which he is) instead of as a screenwriter. Screenwriting is about the edited highlights.

I also had to really up the font size to size 30 or so so that I wouldn't be squinting at my tablet. And sometimes, I wrote on my home theatre PC with the screen at a healthy distance on the other side of the room, meaning the font must also be large. So I was looking at a 340-page document in the end with no sense of what Final Draft would do with the format and the word-wrapping.

I think it might end up being 150 pages or so because there's a lot of description to add.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Yep it's the SMG Ringer. Sarah Michelle not Sub Machine Gun. smile

Saw the first two eps yesterday. It was good... So far anyway.

The news of a Single Season and a potentially poor ending has me a little worried though I must admit.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Ringer was a fun show. It was over the top in a lot of ways, but it was interesting to watch.

Honestly though, I don't really remember the ending. smile

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Re: Personal Status Updates!

So, we're coming up on flu season. Anyone have measures of avoiding getting sick? I've turned to constant handwashing and using alcohol-based sanitizers as often as possible. I've also started taking a combination of herbal supplements and vitamins and minerals, specifically ginseng, vitamin C and zinc. And I'm trying something preventative as well -- I felt slightly feverish and some throat irritation starting yesterday morning, so I'm going to stay home from work and spend the day gargling salt water, drinking fluids, and see if I can beat this before it starts and turns into some ghastly 2-week experience.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Flu Jabs from Dr seem on the Cards for me but we all know the new strains outpace the Vaccines.

Oh the "Fun" of a for Profit Medical System and Pharmaceutical Industry eh?

Phage Therapy is the Answer to Antibiotic Resistance and Obsolescence but it is only an effective System of Treatment on a Large Scale.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Nah. Nothing ever stops me from getting sick, I I just try to get rid of it as fast as possible once I do get sick. :-)

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!

Lots and Lots and Lots of Fluids.

That helps.... A bit.

"It's only a matter of time. Were I in your shoes, I would spend my last earthly hours enjoying the world. Of course, if you wish, you can spend them fighting for a lost cause.... But you know that you've lost." -Kane-

Re: Personal Status Updates!

I am once again behind in posting thoughts on TV shows. Arrow, Supernatural and The Flash premiered. I should get around to posting thoughts on them at some point.

On another note, the delay was caused by the fact that I spent most of last week in the 1960's, working on a miniseries for Hulu, based on the Stephen King novel "11.22.63". It was trippy. Such an awesome experience.

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!

That sounds like a lot of fun! How was the food?

**

I keep underestimating how long it takes to write something. I finished the first draft of SLIDERS REBORN: "Revelation" last week. But it was a draft where at times, just to get to the next scene, I would write in ______________. Any place where I struggled to describe something, or needed to do research, or required photo reference, I would write in ____________ just to keep moving. I didn't think it would take more than a day to fill in the blanks -- it ended up taking three.

There were also issues that I spotted in the course of writing. In one scene, someone gets tied to a chair. But then I realized this raised a question: where had the rope come from? It became necessary to go back and find somewhere to introduce the rope and then come up with a line of dialogue to explain what it was doing in the scene.

Another difficulty I had was locations. In another thread, Temporal Flux and Matt commented on the location shooting in San Francisco for the Pilot episode, and another poster remarked that no other city has roads like San Francisco's. And as a result, I found myself peering through street-level photos of San Francisco and reviewing a real estate map in an effort to add some sense of the city to the story or at least start with something real and then adapt it into a fictional approximation.

This experience has really been an education in project management for fiction.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

Your experience with writing those scripts is why I've always thought that fanfic is a good way for writers to get started. You learn a lot just writing it, and more when you get feedback.


The food was good, but there were a lot of people, so I didn't always get in line early enough to get the good stuff.

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 would say my biggest mistake with REBORN was not talking about the plot issues I was having, instead trying to find some technobabble to resolve the issue and only digging myself into a deeper and deeper hole until Matt took away my shovel and threw me a rope ladder.

I would say the most ridiculous and stupid part of REBORN is, well -- the graphics. I mean, creating images of four actors standing next to each other would just be a half-day photoshoot for a real TV production. For SLIDERS, we have to cheat with putting Jerry's 2015 face on his 1995 costume and compositing photos of Jerry, John, Sabrina and Cleavant next to each other. And I did a pretty decent job at first with 100x100 pixel images, but then Matt upped the 'featured image' resolution to 800x300 pixels for the Earth Prime redesign. I actually found some pretty recent photos of Jerry, Cleavant, John and Sabrina, but so far, my efforts to put them in the same image together have been pretty hideous. I'm hoping to get it right for the final chapter.

Re: Personal Status Updates!

*closes eyes*

I can't seem to stop editing the "Revelation" script and uploading new versions. I keep spotting typos. Just now, I noticed that I forgot to introduce a character's first name -- only gave his last -- so when the sliders later address this character by his first name, it's completely baffling. I don't know how I would ever be able to release a printed book.