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This material was from Transmodiar at EarthPrime.com.

During the Mill Creek DVD release announcement, Transmodiar kindly gave me his EP.COM interview notes from the 2009 interview, as Torme had promised a new script for a future DVD release. I called and emailed Torme's agent in an admittedly perfunctory attempt to pursue "The Long Slide Home" and sent them the interview notes to prove that EP.COM had genuinely had been in contact with Torme and we were following up as opposed to reaching out unsolicited. We never got a response, and it was around this time that Torme had cancer, so it was likely a bad period for him.

Looking at those 2009 notes now, there are some references to some other unproduced projects: A Barney and Betty Hill abduction film, and a series about some kids who find a crashed UFO that had various potential titles (THE TIME TRIAL OF HORROR, TIME TRIAL or ORB). Torme said he was also working on an AVATAR TV show, presumably a tie-in to the James Cameron feature film.

Torme was interacting with Transmodiar over Facebook. They started talking in June 2009, and Transmodiar posted the interview in July 2009. Torme was keen to work with EP.COM on a SLIDERS fanfic project after the interview, talking about a promotional push as Tracy worked on the fanfic... but then Torme abruptly stopped responding from the end of July to September 2009. He wrote back once in October 2009 and once more in April 2010, each time explaining that he had been unable to spend more time on Facebook. He may have had some health issues that he wasn't divulging, but he was also definitely busy with paid work that he had to prioritize over fan fiction.

Anyway, the unproduced non-SLIDERS projects. (Note: I've added punctuation and capitalization to these quotes for readability.)

And on SLIDERS:

On DVDs:

On "The Long Slide Home":

Setting aside "The Long Slide Home":

There was another message in April 2010 where Torme said he had again been way too busy for Facebook. It would appear that Torme deleted his Facebook account some time after that.

On reading the messages: Torme seemed to really enjoy interacting with Transmodiar. Transmodiar treated Torme with great respect and appreciation and was the perfect representation of how a fan should treat a creator: Transmodiar's messages conveyed interest in Torme's current work as well as past projects. When Torme raised a boundary (such as declining to provide the "Heat of the Moment" screenplay for reasons unstated and offering only a summary), Transmodiar did not press him for it or ask for an explanation. When Torme became less responsive, Transmodiar handled it appropriately, sending Torme seasonal greetings and never pressuring Torme. So why did Torme cut things off?

I have to think that Torme wasn't well and needed to take a step back, not only from fan interaction, but social media. And I guess he didn't want to tell fans that he was sick, and had been chronically ill for awhile.

I would also speculate: Torme had offered EP.COM something that he later realized he couldn't give. He was in poor health. What energy he had ultimately had to go to paid scripts, not fanfic. He couldn't deliver on "The Long Slide Home". He may have retreated to avoid making another promise that he could not keep.

I'm sad that Torme and Transmodiar didn't keep interacting. They had a great rapport and Torme's PDF screenplay would have been wonderful. I'm sad it didn't work out. But it's still amazing that Transmodiar got so much out terrific insight and perspective to share with the fans out of a month's worth of Facebook messages.

In Cult Times #31, April 1998, contributor David Bassom interviewed Torme. Torme said he was developing a sci-fi series called HIGHER POWER, a horror show called THE SHADOWMAN and also referred to KUNG POW (not sure if KUNG PAO was the actual title or a working title): https://earthprime.com/articles/slide-away/

There is one SLIDERS fan fiction and a hypothetical episode of SLIDERS that Torme wanted to do but didn't.

In 2009, Torme was in touch with EP.COM's webmaster via Facebook. Torme expressed astonishment that someone would build a and maintain fan site after "the V8 they made of my tomato". An interview came out of these Facebook conversations.

And in addition to the interview, the "Heat of the Moment" outline, and sharing what Bill Dial had told him about plans for Season 5 when Jerry was expected for 4 - 6 episodes, Torme also wanted to write fanfic which he planned to send to EP.COM and Dimensions of Continuity. Torme's wish was to write a SLIDERS story set shortly after "The Guardian" which would ignore every episode afterwards, and present a series finale story for SLIDERS. "The officially unofficial series finale." He imagined that the PDF could be included on a future DVD release.

It was called "The Long Slide Home". He only provided maybe 1/5 of the storyline to EP.COM: the timer is starting to malfunction. Slide windows are getting shorter and shorter and the vortex duration is shortening as well, meaning at some point, the sliders will have to stop sliding because the vortex won't cohere. The sliders encounter a woman named Stephanie, a double of a woman Quinn knew back on his home Earth (his neighbour on whom he had a crush). They sit down to a meal with Stephanie and her husband. This was the prelude to a story that Torme said would ask: what if the sliders found the way home -- but one of them didn't make it, and the sliders had to decide whether they would stay home or give it up to retrieve the friend they'd lost?

Then Torme fell out of touch with EP.COM and never wrote back or finished the story. I think he had some health issues and just had to step back.

However, this story reminded me of what Torme had told me in an AOL Instant Messenger chat in 2000. He told me that he had very deliberately kept his mind open to plenty of possibilities for a SLIDERS series finale, but one option that he had in mind: the sliders' timer would start to fail, meaning the end of their journey was at hand, likely to leave them stranded on a parallel Earth. Quinn and Arturo would attempt a desperate gambit: they would rig the timer to send them backwards on their path through the interdimension.

They would revisit every previous Earth they'd seen, hoping to reach home at the end of it. They would encounter the outcome and results of every world in which they'd gotten involved; sometimes, things were better and sometimes, things were much worse. The story would allow Torme to address every open storyline he wanted to deal with whether in-depth or in passing. The ending would have Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo make it home -- but Quinn would be stranded somewhere. The homecoming sliders would ultimately choose to retrieve Quinn, but in doing so would lose the way home and be lost in the multiverse again, albeit with a working timer. Torme wanted the sliders to declare, upon losing their way back, that they belonged with each other, and so long as they were together, they were home.

Torme left it open as to whether or not another way home would present itself or if they would indeed remain lost; he said there were some decisions that should be made in the course of writing the full story and not when imagining the general plot idea. Torme didn't provide me with a title for this story idea.

I asked him: if he had one more episode of the sliders, would this "long slide home", as it were, be the story he would tell? He said he would probably prefer to do a different story, one he'd come up with as a Season 4 premiere: Quinn wakes up to discover it's 1994. Home is exactly as it was: sliding doesn't exist, Wade is at Doppler Computers, Rembrandt is working on his musical comeback, the Professor is teaching -- and Quinn is the only one who remembers sliding. Quinn tries to prove that sliding is real to his friends, and his search for answers reveals to them all: the entire scenario is a Kromagg simulation. The sliders escape and slide off to new adventures.

Torme didn't give me a title for this one either (or an explanation for why the Kromaggs would make the sliders think they were home, which is fine; that really wasn't the point). In the 2009 messages with EP.COM, Torme also presented this Season 4 premiere idea in the course of his interview, and the potential titles were "Temporary Slide Effects" or simply "Slide Effects".

Of course, you might consider both "The Long Slide Home" and "Slide Effects" to be on the same level Torme wishing he could do an episode where racial bias favours black people over white people or an episode about Arturo's son -- hypothetical imaginings and not actual projects. :-)

Awhile ago, Temporal Flux recommended this 2020 series called ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST, a musical series set in San Francisco featuring one of my favourite actresses, the assertive and sardonic Jane Levy. I watched the first episode and... refused to watch more. Mainly because it was such a lavishly shot, high budget series that I did not want to watch it on my little 10.4 inch Samsung Galaxy Tab A7 tablet at the time, the screen on which I was watching most TV shows. Something as elaborate and visually sumptuous as ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST needed to be watched on a full-size television.

I'm trying to find some time to watch it now, over two years since it was cancelled on a cliffhanger and resolved in a movie length special.

I have the exact same feeling about Season 3 of SUPERMAN AND LOIS. I have not seen it yet because it deserves to be watched on a bigger screen. My 55 inch TV isn't even that big my modern standards, and my Android TV box can't even muster 4K and is at 1080p... but I still think it's better suited to high intensity visual storytelling than a tablet.

I tend to watch things on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 FE 12.4 inch Android tablet now. I don't always have the time or inclination to plant myself in front of the living room TV. And tablet is good enough for my low key sitcoms and setbound space shows and simple DC Universe Original Animated Features, but Jane Levy in San Francisco and Superman deserve scale.

Brad, I'm very sorry that the death of Tracy Torme has impacted you in this way.

Something I heard Jerry O'Connell say has been resonating in my head lately, something Jerry said as I watched Jerry die. Jerry was playing Clark Kent in THE DEATH OF SUPERMAN animated feature.

His last scene in the movie is when he's lying in a heap of rubble, his body shattered and broken by the impact of striking a seemingly invincible monster and putting a stop to it. Clark is dying. He's dying unmarried and childless; he's dying before his parents do; he's dying as a barely-lower-middle class practitioner of the dying media form of journalism; he's dying having never had a full and unguarded conversation with the love of his life, Lois Lane, about who he really is.

The only thing Clark ever accomplished in his life was in his role as a glorified animal rescuer and his volunteering has been his doom. Clark looks up at Lois, and he hears Lois (the voice of Rebecca Romijn, Jerry's wife), telling him that she is okay. And Jerry delivers his final line of the movie in a croaking, tired gasp of resigned serenity. The voice of Jerry O'Connell says:

I'm not going to lie to you the way SLIDERS lied to you when Professor Arturo died. Professor Arturo did not live a full and complete life nor did he accomplish all of the things or even more than half of everything he wanted to with his life, and to claim the Professor died as "the greatest adventurer of all time" was a lie. Tracy Torme did not live a full and complete life either.

Torme's life was defined by truncation, abbreviation, disappointment and frustration. He never told all the stories he wanted to tell or even half of the stories he wanted to tell. He never redefined his chosen medium, television, in the way he hoped to achieve. He never lived up to the level of accomplishment that his mentor, Gene Roddenberry, laid out for Torme to follow.

He never produced 100 episodes of SLIDERS. He never filmed "Slide Effects". He never finished "The Long Slide Home". He never got paid for I AM LEGEND. He never got to bring John Rhys-Davies back and reveal which Professor slid; he never got to have the sliders defeat the Kromaggs or find their way back home. He never got to film DARK CITY or KUNG PAO or shepherd CARNIVALE to a series finale. He never unravelled the mystery of UFOs. Instead, his career saw a quiet decline due to illness and exhaustion and a desire for seclusion.

But that's his career. What of his life?

From what I can tell, Torme did not live a fully blessed life, given his health struggles. He had prostate cancer years ago and at one point could not even rise from a chair. He had heart surgery. Illnesses drained him and even upon 'recovery', he was weary. And yet, Torme's life was clearly filled with blessings.

It's clear from the Pilot episode of SLIDERS and from Torme's politics: America was good to Torme. Torme's writing depicts the American dollar as the most powerful and meaningful force on Earth: a construction worker can acquire it and has the right to earn it simply by getting hurt; a smart woman like Wade Welles can turn down a large amount of it with the certainty that she can earn five to ten times more shortly; Quinn Mallory doesn't need it because the castoffs and discards Americans leave behind as they move onto new toys are sufficient for him to attempt anti-gravity; and for Rembrandt and Arturo, the American dollar is so potent that Rembrandt gets arrested for having it and Arturo is welcomed into a revolution for sharing it.

Torme didn't have a great life, but he had a good life, and Torme credited America with giving him a good life, one that a lot of people don't have.

Torme knew love and family and warmth and connection, describing himself as the neutral ground between warring factions of relatives in their conflicts over pandemic protocols. Torme knew stability and comfort: he was able to invite a homeless person to move in with him for the pandemic. Torme clearly had excellent health insurance because in America, prostate cancer and heart surgery are costly. Torme was clearly comfortable on a financial level: he likely earned well from both his teleplay and producer credits on STAR TREK and the residuals. Torme's father was estimated to be worth $91 million when he died and Torme, one of five children, would have inherited a good sum.

Torme clearly had time and money to do what he pleased because he pitched a hard-sell revival of SLIDERS rather than an easy reboot for an easy payday and spent his life rescuing animals with his wife rather than selling cop and lawyer shows to pad his bottom line.

Torme lived a better life than many. He lived a better life than, say, David Peckinpah, a broken soul who spent the last 12 years of his life grieving for his dead son by poisoning himself with cocaine and heroin and dying alone and an embarrassment to his profession and his family. Torme died knowing that his wife and family and fans loved him. Torme did not die alone or empty and broken, but with love and gratitude in his heart.

How many of us have a message board devoted to our creations? How many of us wrote even one episode of STAR TREK and saw it filmed and aired? How many of us wrote even one episode of SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE? How many of us have ever sold a show and seen it air? How many animals have we saved? My count is at one.

Torme's life was probably closer to our experience of it than other Hollywood movers and shakers; he died having accomplished a few of the things he wanted, but certainly less than he'd hoped for and far less than he'd wished for. That could describe most of us.

Torme did not live a full and fulfilled life. But he did live a good life with blessings that too many people don't have and achievements that most people can't claim.

I watched JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. TEEN TITANS... and I was struck by how even the least heroic Titans in this 2016 animated feature were more heroic than the live action team in TITANS.

The plot of JLVTT is that 14 year old Damian, a reckless loose canon of a superhero, the current Robin and the son of Batman, is sent to spend time with the Teen Titans to learn how to work with others. Damian is an arrogant loudmouth who needs to prove himself better than everyone else on the team and assumes he can't be beaten even when he can; he's not a hero as much as a braggart who needs to prove himself the equal of his heroic father; he cares more about being superior than being a hero.

At the midpoint, the Teen Titan named Raven is attacked by her father's demons. Damian barely knows Raven and has treated her with contempt; he instantly rises to the challenge of defending her against a demon army, against the Justice League when they come to take custody of her, and even the Justice League when they are possessed by demonic forces. The rest of the Titans find Damian obnoxious and arrogant and frightening and immediately rally behind Damian as he defends their friend.

It occurred to me when watching it that Damian is a borderline sociopathic bully who only doesn't qualify as a bully because he barely acknowledges his peers, and yet, he's more heroic than the entire live action cast of TITANS put together. On TITANS, Dick Grayson was keen to leave Raven to her troubles. In the second season, Rose Wilson approached the Titans for help as she was being hunted by Deathstroke; the 'team' immediately began debating how to abandon Rose and declaring how they didn't consider her their problem. In contrast, JUSTICE LEAGUE VS. TEEN TITANS doesn't seem to have any trouble making Damian a hero and Damian is hilariously loathsome.

JLVTT is a passably mediocre movie. It's written by Bryan Q. Miller of SMALLVILLE fame (who also wrote the Season 11 comics for SMALLVILLE). The script is solid, but executed in a visually undistinguished way. There's a sequence where Damian and Beast Boy compete in playing the game Dance Dance Revolution.

As someone with little enthusiasm for dance, I can say right away that the characters of Damian and Beast Boy would each demonstrate a different dance language: Damian would be all precision and endurance and technically proficient but stiffly militaristic because he's afraid of losing his dignity; Beast Boy would be expressive and chameleonic and joyful and with no concern for how he appears to others when dancing. However, the movie just shows completely generic dancing for both characters because DC Universe Original Animated Features don't have the budget for anything more complex.

And yet, the visual lack of merits aside, the Teen Titans of this exercise in pedestrian production have the benefit of actually being heroic, which is something a lot of grimdark DC productions can't seem to pull off consistently.

I was recently watching the 2021 movie SHIVA BABY, which is a pretty funny comedy of awkwardness. There is a plot point that involves the main character misplacing her smartphone which someone else finds and accesses. The smartphone has no password protection, no fingerprint scan, and not so much as a PIN or pattern lock. Anyone can pick it up and read everything on it in order to forward the plot.

This reminds me of a TV show that I follow, YOU, about a twisted stalker and his deranged campaigns of intrusion and depravity. The first season in 2018 has him obsessing over a female target and infiltrating her life by stealing her phone and accessing her personal information. This is possible because the phone has no password protection, no fingerprint scan, and not so much as a PIN or pattern lock.

I simply cannot imagine this. My first cell phone was a talk and text device, the very cool Samsung SPH-A500 which flipped open to review the screen and keypad and had a silver, rounded, sleek design, and I didn't lock it because I only used it for calls. I didn't start texting until I bought the Samsung Link phone in 2009 which was a cheap imitation of the Blackberry Bold 9000, and I still didn't lock this phone either because I texted so little.

However, my first truly smartphone-esque device was an iPod Touch in 2009 that had access to my email, and this I locked with a PIN. My first Android smartphone was the Nexus S in 2011 with access to all of my instant messages and emails and chats, which I also locked with a PIN. My Samsung Galaxy S3 in 2013 was also PIN-locked, but eventually got upgraded to pattern unlock. I remember getting my Samsung Galaxy S7 in 2019 and being delighted by the center button being a fingerprint sensor for unlocking the phone.

I have serious trouble believing that anybody would ever have a pocketable device with personal email and messages and fail to lock it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh my. That is dire.

Yes. I will be more careful.

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

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

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

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

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

Another thought:

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

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

Another thought on Kelsey Grammer and Frasier:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On voices...

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

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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