Sliders.tv → Posts by ireactions
To be fair, those shows/movies were big hits and had massive audiences. :-)
I'd love for Torme's revival to happen, but I honestly can't find fault with anybody who thinks a clean reboot would be better. And while I have a lot of problems with NBCU, I wouldn't take issue with them deciding that Tracy Torme's idea is crazy and they are going to hire the Wachowski sisters to reboot the series and cast Allisyn Ashley Arm (Heather from AP BIO) as Quinn Mallory.
Well, reading the Wikipedia summary was an unpleasant experience, but it's clearly a story that's meant to be unpleasant. Ultimately, we live in the world of DON'T LOOK UP and we can watch that movie any time we read a newspaper which I do every morning and evening. I have an annual subscription to The Toronto Star, so I have to read it or it's like burning money.
My preference for a movie on such subject matter would be the film TOMORROWLAND, but that's because my preference is to look for something with hope. That said, TOMORROWLAND is only a movie and despite having a character who is relentlessly determined to do SOMETHING about the problems of the world, the movie doesn't (and can't) offer a solution to climate change and world hunger. All it can do is ask people to serve their best impulses and not their worst.
Movies and TV are great for normalizing sexual and gender identities and condemning transphobia and climate change denial, but actually offering a solution to defeating greenhouse gas emissions may be asking them to punch above their weight. It's entertainment.
A pondering.
I find that there are certain factions of SLIDERS fandom that are incredibly contemptuous towards SLIDERS and its hypothetical future because their fondness for SLIDERS never equals their priority to be 'cool.' This is something Temporal Flux has described as fandom always gravitating to "shiny objects" and "beautiful people" rather than insight and information. Such fans -- and they are fans and delightful people -- are more interested in cultivating their 'cool' image in relation to SLIDERS than they are in SLIDERS itself. They define that 'cool' in relation to SLIDERS by declaring that SLIDERS was always worthless trash, they express how they are unaffected by SLIDERS, unimpressed by SLIDERS, unmoved by SLIDERS, and view SLIDERS something to mock and disdain.
Here's the thing: being a fan of SLIDERS isn't 'cool'. (I'm stealing this from my political frenemy, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, a liberal in name only.) Being a fan of anything isn't 'cool'.
'Cool' is being indifferent, uninterested, unaffected by external forces like the SLIDERS TV show. 'Cool' is being dismissive and disdainful. Being a fan of anything isn't 'cool'.
Being a fan of SLIDERS is to be sincerely and earnestly engaged with the format of 1990s television and with the specific brand identity of SLIDERS: the characters, the actors, the production model, the behind the scenes circumstances, and being intrigued and interested in how those concepts, characters, actors and production goals might be translated to the modern day.
Being a fan of SLIDERS is to contemplate and dream of what this show would be if it came back today and to know that the odds are not great, but to still find that potential worthy of discussion and consideration. It is a choice to be emotionally invested, to express love and admiration for the sliders, the timer, the vortex, the costumes, the scripts, the world-building -- and some people don't operate on that wavelength. Being a fan of anything isn't 'cool', it's joyful.
Joyful fans are not concerned with "shiny objects," "beautiful people" or being 'cool.' Joyful fans aren't concerned with their image. Such fans approach SLIDERS with a fondness for SLIDERS episodes and love for the sliders.
Look at Grizzlor's photos when he's with Kari Wuhrer or Cleavant Derricks. Is Grizzlor preening for the camera? Anticipating getting to brag? No. He is thrilled and happy to meet these people and to take a brief moment to thank them for how they touched his life. That's a joyful fan.
Yeah, that third dose of Moderna is really hitting my brain right now.
Well, I've read the (negative) reviews and the Wikipedia summary and it seems like a pretty good movie to me, but I would never watch it. I'm sure it's great, it's just that if I want to see people being self-destructive and incompetent, I'll just read the newspaper. I turn to entertainment for what is somewhat inflammatorily described as "competence porn." I want fantasies of people being good at things, sometimes at the expense of their needs in other areas.
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I got my third dose. Pfizer not available to my age bracket, only Moderna. Canada currently has lots of Moderna and not as much Pfizer.
Spoilers. (Actual spoilers for MATRIX RESURRECTIONS this time.)
The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus is a fictionalized version of the original character. While Neo's memories were suppressed, the Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris) allowed those memories to manifest as dreams, nightmares and fantasies that Neo would eventually present to the world in the form of a video game. The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus is the code from that video game having received self-awareness and now attempting to serve purpose of the original Morpheus. The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus is Neo's portrayal of Morpheus, but not an exact copy. Liam Neeson's performance in SCHINDLER'S LIST was a dramatic approxmation of Oskar Schindler, but the two men looked nothing alike.
There is a similar situation with Agent Smith. Originally, Hugo Weaving was supposed to play Agent Smith again in RESURRECTIONS, but the scheduling didn't work out and Lana Wachowski was forced to recast the role with Jonathan Groff. Groff is completely capable of imitating Hugo Weaving and imitates Weaving's voice for a few lines, but then stops doing it. The reason: this version of Agent Smith was reprogrammed to be Neo's employer, Neo's somewhat antagonistic partner, so the Analyst made this version of Smith more casually informal, more personable -- but Groff has flashes of Hugo Weaving's relentless, machinelike hatred and loathing, but it's now blended with a superficially pleasant but innately disdainful contempt for human beings. Groff does a nice job of showing that the original Smith is still in there but with the Analyst's amused humour in the mix.
The truce in REVOLUTIONS was that any redpills who wanted to be freed would be freed; any bluepills who wanted to stay would be kept as power sources. The machines would no longer stop Zion's soldiers from liberating humans from Matrix pods, but any humans who chose to stay in the Matrix would remain. This mass exodus led to the machines losing a large portion of their human batteries. The machines began a civil war with each other, fighting each other for the human batteries that remained. The machine civil war reached Zion, except this time, there were machines that sided with the humans and helped them.
The war ended when the machines dispensed with the Architect's version of the Matrix where humans were leaving. The machines transitioned into the Analyst's version of the Matrix where the Analyst made humans want to stay and reject being awakened. The Analyst created a computer dreamworld where humans became emotionally invested in the quests and goals he would create for them. In Neo's case, his quest was to find Trinity, an unconscious desire that manifested through his Matrix video game. In Trinity's case, she was maneuvered into being invested in her illusory husband and children. With intense emotionality applied to all humans in this version of the Matrix, the Analyst maximized the power output of the human brain (the science here is absurd, of course, because in real life, humans don't really generate that much electricity).
After the war, the machines and humans built the city of IO together. It's unclear if Zion was destroyed or if IO is actually Zion, but renamed after the rebuilding to reflect the machine-human coalition. After all, Starling City became Star City on ARROW.
The reason I am very happy with RESURRECTIONS: it is a response to how the iconography of THE MATRIX has been co-opted by the fascist, alt-right, transphobic, misogynistic, white supremacist segment of our society. On this very Bboard (or some incarnation of it), our old friend Kyle encouraged everyone to view a documentary called THE RED PILL which declared that feminism was trying to put white men and white men's rights into a coma. The red pill has become a symbol for adopting a hatred of women and people of colour and vaccinations -- and calling that hatred a form of self-actualization or empowerment (and maybe it is, but only if you're a privileged white man) and declaring that the world is simply divided into normal and abnormal, red or blue.
This clearly enraged the Wachowskis. The egotistical billionaire Elon Musk who built his wealth on gross exploitation of labourers tweeted, "Take the red pill," referring to -- I dunno what, but Ivanka Trump responded, "Already taken." Lilly Wachowski (who sat RESURRECTIONS out) responded, "Fuck both of you."
RESURRECTIONS is a direct effort to repair the damage done by other hands who've taken THE MATRIX's imagery for their own use. With Lana Wachowski's sequel, 'Thomas Anderson' is working on a game called BINARY that's overbudget and a time sink of nothing. Bugs (the wonderful Jessica Henwick) declares that the red pill/blue pill binary is absurd and that the choice between either is an illusion; the red pill was only ever a symbolic representation someone choosing their own identity. The idea that Neo is innately gifted to be the One in the Matrix is debunked; Neo's ability to manipulate the Matrix code is shown to be a peculiarity in how his brain interprets Matrix code that can only truly be exploited with Trinity's presence and Trinity has the same neural aptitude and can have the same powers so long as Neo and Trinity have the capacity to share them. The division between Neo and Trinity is removed.
In addition, the division between machines and humans is removed; machines can manifest in the real world and some like humans and want to create with them. The RESURRECTIONS Morpheus at one point asks Neo if he wants to stay imprisoned or escape and save Trinity, and remarks, "That's not really a choice." RESURRECTIONS is caustic and irritated with those who have co-opted the imagery of the original movie as the Analyst comments that people believe some truly crazy garbage. RESURRECTIONS has Trinity awaken from the Matrix without even taking a red pill; she makes the choice in who she really is. The red pill never truly mattered as much as the choices and identities around it. The red pill was never about becoming one or the other; it was about engaging with reality and pursuing your own answers in your own way as opposed to signing up for one belief system over another.
In terms of storylines -- yes, I'd agree that RESURRECTIONS has left us closer to the ending of the 1999 MATRIX with Neo and Trinity soaring into the skies with a plan to open everyone's eyes to a world without the control of the machines, but with some progression in showing the IO city where humans and machines are now partners and friends. However, it's not really intended as the start to a new story. Lana Wachowski has said that she views this as a single, standalone entry. The film is presented as an epilogue that provides a happy ending for Trinity and Neo who are restored and re-engaged, and I think this was perhaps preferable to REVOLUTIONS having Trinity dead and Neo probably dead / fate unknown.
I think it'd be great to get everyone back, but you only need Quinn.
I'd agree with that.
The thing about a film like THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS: everyone who would go to a movie theatre or pull up a streaming service knows who Neo and Trinity are. While Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are as significant to *me* as Neo and Trinity and Captain Kirk and Sherlock Holmes, that's not the case for the average TV viewer.
I can't help but wonder if these difficulties would make a clean reboot preferable to what Torme seems to want which sounds a bit like HALLOWEEN doing a requel that ignores all sequels but the first. In Torme's case, he would probably consider everything after "The Guardian" to be the unwanted sequels.
I'd agree with Grizzlor that unless Torme is being guarded, he does not see John Rhys-Davies being a series regular in his revival and he doesn't expect Sabrina Lloyd to be involved, although I'm sure he would find a way to get them in if they were available, and that's assuming there even is a SLIDERS revival or that NBCUniversal wouldn't just hire someone other than Tracy Torme to produce a SLIDERS reboot. They can do that. If Lana Wachowski hadn't been inspired to make THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS, Warner Bros. would have hired someone else to make a new MATRIX movie.
THE MATRIX: Spoiler warning but no actual spoilers.
I really enjoyed THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS features the resurrection of Neo and Trinity. I will say, however -- while the explanation for Neo's return is fine since he never actually died onscreen, the explanation for Trinity being alive is nonsensical and effectively non-existent. It is Trinity in the movie. It is not a clone, a digital approximation, a backup file, a simulation based on Neo's memories or an impersonator. It is the same character we met in 1999 played by the same actress who portrayed her in 1999.
I can't spoil how she comes back to life because the movie doesn't actually explain how Trinity survived the events of THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS in which she was impaled in an aircraft crash, her internal organs punctured and pulped on impact. THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS provides an explanation for Neo's restoration and puzzlingly declares that Trinity received the same as Neo.
And yet... it doesn't matter in the slightest. Having Trinity back is far more important than offering a cast-iron reason for how she came back. Trinity is one of the greatest fictional characters of science fiction history and one of the greatest representations of female empowerment. Carrie Anne Moss has a gift for playing women who are intensely powerful but emotionally available; Trinity can beat you into the ground and she has a boyfriend and it's not you, but she would be your friend and ally. And RESURRECTIONS does a great job of bringing all that back and showing that our world is better with Trinity resurrected.
Every time someone says they got a booster, I feel a great sense of relief.
My reading indicates that for reasons scientists don't fully understand yet, alternating between Pfizer and Moderna has provided a higher number of antibodies than matching vaccines. I encourage mixing. I've had two doses of Moderna and I'm expecting a third, but I'd be happy to get Pfizer on Wednesday.
On average, early reports indicate that Pfizer and Moderna give you about 75 percent protection against getting sick at all, but after 10 weeks, that drops to anywhere from 30 - 45 per cent. Omicron has unfortunately rewritten the rulebook; earlier, Grizzlor shared a doctor's expectation that a third dose could be the last vaccination needed, but that was only for Alpha to Delta, not for Omicron. However, even if the 10 week wane is true, the booster would still protect you from getting seriously sick, from having to go to the ICU, from being put on a ventilator, and from dying of COVID.
No vaccine could have ever granted permanent immunization. Even if Delta had been the last variant, a third dose would not have prevented people from getting sick from Delta; a third dose would prevent people from dying of Delta.
Vaccines aren't cures as much as teachers; they teach your body how to create the antibodies against a specific virus; they teach your body to cure itself. Anyone who calls vaccination useless because it doesn't prevent infection is either ignorant or lying. Vaccines don't stop you from getting infected; they stop you from getting so sick that you die. This is the case with all vaccines whether it's tetanus, measles, flu, polio, hepatitis or COVID-19.
People in the first 10 weeks of their third dose could still get infected by Omicron; they just have a 70 - 75 per cent chance of never developing a fever or a cough. Michael Rosenbaum caught Delta after two doses of an mRNA vaccine and lost two weeks of his life to fever and exhaustion -- which is significantly better than losing his whole life.
I salute Slider_Quinn21 for doing his duty and protecting his family, his friends, his neighbours and his country.
Just finished watching THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS. Temporal Flux has been very keen on GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE, but THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is a film that really made me long for SLIDERS as I watched it.
I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say that THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is the story of picking up on Neo and Trinity, decades after Neo was presumably eviscerated on a digital level and Trinity was impaled and died on camera.
I'm sure it's not a spoiler to say that THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS is the story of Neo and Trinity finding a way back from death, finding a way back to each other, and rediscovering their mission and purpose once again.
I know that Torme wants to see SLIDERS revived like AFTERLIFE with the original sliders passing the timer onto the children, but for me, I would prefer something more like RESURRECTIONS which assures us that everyone who missed Neo and Trinity and kept them close to their hearts were right to do so; that Neo and Trinity have been with us all along; that Neo and Trinity will always come back to us.
But a SLIDERS revival would probably be more of an AFTERLIFE situation. I'm not that crazy.
I'm surprised that a KN95 makes you sweat and makes your nose run!
I have experienced that in winter with an ASTM3 mask where the water-resistant outer layer was wrapped around the mask and on the inside too. When exhaling air and water vapour in cold temperatures, droplets would form on the inside of the mask that I would end up breathing in and sneezing out. I've switched to KF94s that are more like Slider_Quinn21's Kleannara's with a quilted cotton layer that doesn't have as much condensation.
I generally don't recommend KN95s because there is no review standard or oversight; anyone can make a KN95 and call it a KN95 even if the filtration may be significantly less than 95 per cent. I do have some KN95s where I've bought a box of 10 and checked to make sure it actually has two interior layers of electrostatic filtering. But there's a lot of garbage KN95s on the market that only filter about 20 - 50 per cent, some below standard ones that only filter 70 - 90 per cent -- all generally due to poor manufacturing with the interior layers being either stretched to breaking or missing those layers entirely. KF94s, however, are subject to strict government standards before export.
One of the issues with double-masking: it can be harder to breathe. That said, it works for a lot of people. The surgical mask has electrostatic filtering; the cloth mask applies a firmer seal at the sides to prevent gaps. It's not something I like, though. I prefer to have one good mask rather than two poor ones.
Earlier today, I had the chance to book a private movie theatre and watch a single feature film all alone. I had a choice. A choice that would define my future and determine the path forward for the remainder of my existence. I could choose to watch either LICORICE PIZZA or SPIDER-MAN: NO WAY HOME.
I chose to watch LICORICE PIZZA and I now brace myself for your wrath.
I wore an N95 mask today for six hours. I have to tell you, these things hurt due to the clamp-like seal and the overhead bands (as opposed to earloops). They really hurt. A lot. I'm not sure the average person could tolerate wearing one for long; if people are going to consistently wear masks, they have to be as comfortable as a KN95 or a KF94.
Third dose for Wednesday for me!
Thank you, pilight! I am so happy to see you punch a massive hole in the criticism of reviving SLIDERS with Jerry in a lead role.
As for pitching stuff to Netflix about remastering, I'm in favour of it so long as I don't have to do any unpaid work for it! :-D
I'm a member of the American Underground.
I don't know what this means, you're being unclear.
When it comes to pandemic information, we should endeavour to be clear. At two doses of vaccination, you have 33 per cent protection from being infected by Omicron exposure and about 70 per cent protection from hospitalization and death. At three doses, you have 75 per cent protection from being infected by Omicron exposure and about 90 per cent protection from hospitalization and death.
People who are unvaccinated and unmasked have no protection. They infect others with COVID-19. They themselves will become infected with Omicron and require hospitalization. The mass numbers of unvaccinated hospitalizations slows health care systems to the point where they have to cancel routine and emergency surgeries; instead of treating patients with cancer or hurt by assaults and car accidents and chronic conditions, nurses and doctors are tied up treating people who won't get vaccinated and won't wear masks.
People who refuse vaccinations and refuse to mask are stealing health care from people with blood vessel disorders, with diabetes, with heart conditions, with genetic disorders.
And I'm getting my booster December 26!
I'm getting my booster a couple days after SQ21.
May I ask: how is vaccine booking in the States? In my province, it's ridiculous; the system can't handle all the people logging on at the same time and puts everyone in a waiting room and when you get into the system at last, the appointments can be as late as February or March. I had time to stay in the system and keep rebooking my appointment to earlier and earlier dates as new appointments were added to the calendar over the course of a couple hours, going from January 25 to January 6 to January 4 to December 29, but not everyone can do this. Not everyone has time to sit for this long in front of a computer, booking, cancelling and rebooking, especially if that person works in construction or retail or food.
It's really bad. Surely the best bet would have been pre-registration and wait-listing followed by a randomized system within specific demographics (age, chronic conditions, frontline and health workers) sending out notifications that the person would have 24 hours to accept or reject an appointment. The average pharmacy can do this, but they don't have the staff for mass vaccinations. The province has the staff but can't seem to get the digital infrastructure together despite having had over 10 months to prepare.
The season 2 finale of the SAVED BY THE BELL has flashbacks to the 90s show (of which I saw very, very, very little), and the footage has been filtered to look like low-grade VHS that looks... strangely like a Universal DVD of a Season 1 episode of SLIDERS.
Can y'all recommend me a laptop for my wife and I? It doesn't need to be anything fancy - all we'll use it for is standard web browsing, storing family photos, and using Microsoft Office. No gaming, no streaming, nothing else.
My wife would prefer it not be a Mac, mostly because it's harder to use Excel on a Mac with the keyboard shortcuts being different.
I know nothing of computers - both our laptops are both old, and we just want a sensible replacement? Something that will do what we need and not need to be replaced every couple years (mostly, for me at least, because I feel like it's a pain in the ass to move things over).
Is anyone as invested as I am (which is a lot) in which laptop Slider_Quinn21 ended up getting?
Annie's credentials -- they are roulettewheel on this forum and they wrote the Think of a Roulette blog and covered every episode of SLIDERS and all the comics -- are irrelevant as to whether or not their opinion is worth considering.
Annie's opinion is valid and their criticisms are very reasonable: Jerry O'Connell is old. Tracy Torme may be seriously out of touch with TV. Tracy Torme may be seriously out of touch with present day concerns of identity and culture and economy.
Tracy Torme may be seriously out of touch with reality to think that NBCUniversal would ever revive SLIDERS with the original cast instead of, say, doing what they did with MACGYVER and rebooting it with new actors playing the original character(s).
Annie Fish could be completely and totally right. However, writing is not like selling IKEA shelves. Torme is so rich that he invites homeless people to live with him. Torme is so rich that heart surgery and prostate cancer didn't put him out on the street when most people with that sort of medical cataclysm in America end up renting cardboard boxes for shelter.
Torme comes to SLIDERS now from a place of passion, not avarice. The only SLIDERS writing Torme wants to do is the writing in which he will invest his heart and soul into and the only writing for SLIDERS he wants to do is a vision of SLIDERS with Quinn Mallory played by Jerry O'Connell, Wade Welles played by Sabrina Lloyd, Rembrandt Brown played by Cleavant Derricks, and Professor Arturo played by John Rhys-Davies (and additional new characters should the originals prove difficult to book).
There is no point in Torme pitching a SLIDERS continuity reboot with recast versions of the originals if that isn't what makes Torme passionate. If that's the only revival that NBCUniversal would ever want to do, then that revival can come after Torme dies or is abducted by aliens.
Tracy Torme deserves the chance to fail. It is Torme's right to pitch the revival he wants to pitch because SLIDERS is his show. If I decide to paint my house glow in the dark green before putting it on the market, that's my right too.
If Torme's revival bid proves unmarketable and unapprovable, so be it. It was the revival he wanted to make. We can criticize the creative and marketing merits of this approach and we can review the unlikely successes and likely failures of his efforts. We can talk about what we'd like Torme to do with SLIDERS. But it's never going to be up to us to say what Torme should or shouldn't do with SLIDERS. Tracy Torme is SLIDERS.
(I would also argue that Temporal Flux is SLIDERS, but that's a different thread.)
I applaud Annie Fish for raising all of these extremely self-evident and likely problems with what Torme is trying to sell, but doing so in a way that in no way invalidates Torme's right to do as he sees fit with his show and in no way denigrates the fans' longings to see SLIDERS and be reunited with the sliders.
And Annie is right about those podcasters, they are abominations of broken humanity.
Excerpts from Slater's therapy sessions:
And at a certain age, it becomes too late to reinvent yourself so yeah, I'll admit it, I'm really concerned about the Undertaker now that he's retired from wrestling.My life's been pretty normal.
My dad threatened to blow up my friend with a live grenade, but it was the 90s. Although he threatened to do it last year to a PostMates guy he thought had eaten one of his fries.
My mom wasn't around much in high school. Like, I know I had a mom, she was mentioned once. I think I had a mom?
My best friend was a chameleon named Artie.
I don't have any stressors. I go to school, hit the gym, go to the Bayside School Career Fair where all my really successful friends will make me feel like a failure, watch TV, do a Sukodu -- YEAH, I know, I heard it.
All my friends have these big jobs.
Back in high school, everything was a competition. Zack was all: bet I can date that girl. Bet I can win Miss Bayside. Bet I can date your sister Jaybee -- who I also never saw and no one ever talked about it!
I bet Quinn's psychotherapy sessions would have him describe how weird it was that he was nearsighted in the pilot but had no vision problems for the rest of the series.
I too have some hope that a robust third dose rollout will blunt (but not stop) the wave.
N95s are excellent masks and you can't go wrong with them. However, layered electrostatic filtering is not exclusive to N95 masks; it's a public domain technology. ASTM Level 3 masks and KF94 masks have the same efficacy; what makes a N95 the best is the tight, clamp-like seal it exerts on the face. KN95 masks (mostly duckbill style) and KF94 masks (mostly boat-shaped) have a similar 360 seal without the harsh tightness -- unlike surgical masks which can leave gaps around the nose and at the cheeks. Currently, KF94 is best of them all because KN95s are not sufficiently reviewed and tested before export whereas KF94s are monitored and surveilled by the South Korean government.
Slider_Quinn21 and my mother both have Kleannara KF94 masks. The best mask for me is either an ASTM Level 3 mask with a boat shape or a KF94 mask with a duckbill shape; those clamp best to my face. The Kleannara KF94 is the only mask that fits my mothercorrectly; I had a bunch of N95s, but they were too tight; I tried KN95s on her and they left too many gaps on her nose.
Annie Fish re-reviewed "The Guardian" and says that there is absolutely no way Torme's revival could possibly happen because Hollywood would never cast Jerry O'Connell to be a leading man in a major network show at his age and that Torme's revival vision is garbage and that Torme's declaration that a SLIDERS revival won't be "woke" shows how out of touch and delusional Torme is and that Torme's meeting with NBCUniversal ending on a suggestion that they meet again at a later date is a polite rejection of Torme and Torme's show and Torme's attitude and Torme's value system and also that the podcasts in which Torme has guested on are disgustingly toxic in their toxic masculinity.
https://annieannieannie.medium.com/remn … 02fe7e5295
I do find the podcasters ghastly and my frustration with them has been thoroughly documented.
I would say that to Tracy Torme, the word "woke" is synonymous with "politically correct" which, in 90s TV screenwriting parlance, meant writing all characters as Caucasian regardless of ethnicity or culture. Torme would not do this; whether advisable or inadvisable, he wrote black characters based on the black people he knew and grew up with. All the black people in "Summer of Love" and "The King is Back" draw on actual people in Torme's life and Torme's obvious fondness for them. (Torme's writing of black characters could still be, very fairly, considered racist caricature. However, they are caricatures of people Torme knew and clearly loved.)
Also, when looking for a podcast willing to host a 90s screenwriter of a little-viewed show, beggars might not be able to be choosers.
I would also say that SLIDERS is Tracy Torme's creation. Robert K. Weiss, while a genius, jumped ship early on. We can debate the merits and failings of Tracy Torme endlessly because he has many. But fairly or unfairly, SLIDERS is Tracy Torme's show. If Tracy Torme wants to pitch a revival of SLIDERS headlined by Jerry O'Connell and if Torme wants to bring back whichever original cast members want to return and if Torme wants to do the GHOSTBUSTERS: AFTERLIFE equivalent of SLIDERS, then it's his right to do so and I wish him well and hope he succeeds.
And if Torme's bid to revive SLIDERS fails -- if "let's talk later" from NBCU was really "go away and never come back" -- then at least he failed trying to revive the version of the show that he wanted to do and believed in rather than trying to revive whatever he thought would sell. At least, in his failure to bring back SLIDERS, he conveyed that the only SLIDERS he wants to bring back is the version with *the* sliders, the characters of Quinn Mallory, Wade Welles, Rembrandt Brown and Professor Arturo as played by Jerry O'Connell, Sabrina Lloyd, Cleavant Derricks and John Rhys-Davies (pending their respective availabilities, anyway).
At least he will have failed while being loyal to his characters and his fans rather than being loyal to his wallet -- like, say, the creator of MACGYVER who watered down his premise to re-sell it again to NBC. Someone who isn't Tracy Torme can do that reboot later. (Sabrina Carpenter for Quinn Mallory!)
That said, Annie Fish has every right to criticize Torme's hypothetical revival and call it doomed and find it wanting and find Torme a moral disaster of a human being and I'm not even sure Annie Fish is even wrong. Annie's criticisms are fair, reasoned and reasonable because Annie is fair, reasoned and reasonable.
Detelecine does not seem to fully convert the interlaced DVD video files to a progressive video file. I noticed: for the opening credits and shots with bright flashes, scan lines flash across the screen. If deinterlacing is enabled in the video player (hardware or software), these lines will not appear, but it's dependent on the individual software or hardware. I didn't even notice the lines until I was seeing the frame by frame upscale of "Summer of Love" in Topaz.
Also, if I take the detelecined file and deinterlace it fully in Handbrake, all the aliasing issues that detelecine removed are suddenly all back in full force. It seems best to leave the files detelecined for now.
I'll also do another 1080p AI upscale of the Pilot now that it's been detelecined.
I've been testing the detelecined and upscaled episodes on my Android TV. The free Android TV version of VLC can deinterlace the file just fine and there are no scanlines. The paid MX Player app in its default settings, however, does not deinterlace the file properly and scanlines flash across the screen for scene transitions and bright flashes. The codec has to be set to enable deinterlacing.
I don't know if I can consider this problem 'solved' or not, but it will remain as it is at least for now.
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I really don't know about using DeepFake and clips and digital approximations with autotune to tell 'new' stories... one might be better off just hiring actors.
That said, one project that has really intrigued me from STAR TREK is John Byrne's NEW VISIONS comic book series where writer-artist Byrne made 26 issues of photo comics where he took old stills from the 60s TV show and used Photoshop and 3D modelling to create new comic book stories from altered screenshots. I haven't read it yet, though.
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There are certainly 'director's cut' type changes I'd love to make to Season 1 to SLIDERS if I understood the technology or had the material.
I'd want to alter the photo of Quinn and his family in Season 1 and replace Jerry O'Connell with Phillip Van Dyke (young Quinn in "The Guardian").
I'd want to add visible water vapour on the breath of all the sliders on Ice World.
I'd want to re-edit that missing scene from "Summer of Love" back into the episode where Quinn and Arturo explain to Rembrandt that the timer is now a countdown device.
I'd want to amend "The King is Back" with DeepFake to replace Clinton's face with Cleavant.
And if there were some way to make "The Guardian" colour corrected to look more like Vancouver and to digitally replace all the sliders' clothes and hair with the Vancouver wardrobe, that'd be great too, but that's impossible.
**
I have upscaled pretty much all of Season 1 now except for "Luck of the Draw" which should be done this evening. I'll be ripping short clips from all nine episodes to show us. However, it will take awhile because the extracts need to use an encoder that has its tuning set to preserve the grain texture and that encoder can only use the CPU, so what would normally take 2 - 4 minutes now takes anywhere from 30 - 60 minutes.
Happily, full episodes are only about 2.75 - 3GB each as opposed to the 7 - 8GB of earlier efforts without codec grain tuning.
I'm glad to hear this.
After my first dose, I had blurry vision for four days. After my second dose, I was exhausted and picked a weird fight with my sister over her supposedly turning off the air conditioning only to, upon further contemplation, realize that I had a fever and the air conditioning was fine.
My favourite actress, after getting her second dose, had a high fever, partial paralysis and severe mouth sores for about a week and a half. She has a blood vessel disorder that the increased immune response set off. She recovered fully after about two weeks, but she is now a target for every anti-vaxxer and anti-masker out there trying to get a conventionally attractive actress who was in a Hot Pocket commercial to be the spokesperson for their diseased and suicidal campaigns and now she's had to change her number.
We were going to go to this cocktail bar for lunch on Sunday (all restaurants in our town require proof of full vaccination before entry), but now we're just going to eat on her balcony and wait until we both get our third dose boosters before going out for meals again.
Ah good. I just drove my mother to her third dose. And appointments for my age bracket open on Monday.
Upscaling is going really well, but CPU tuning for grain is very slow. :-)
I realized last night: I have upscaled "Summer of Love" like 28 times at this point. I have rewatched the final scenes of this episode so many times. I have rewatched Quinn hearing Rembrandt singing and running down to the street to catch him and watched the shot of Jerry O'Connell and Cleavant Derricks hugging each other followed by Arturo diving into the car at least 500 times in my life. I have watched Wade's scene addressing the hippies and punching Arturo at least 600 times in my life. I would not have gone to this much effort and repetition to upscale this episode -- or any other episode of any TV show -- if not for these friendships. I wouldn't spend this much time upscaling "New Gods for Old" or "The Return of Maggie Beckett" despite their excellence; I also wouldn't have kept trying with THE DEAD ZONE had it proven as difficult as SLIDERS.
Anyway. With SLIDERS: we had to make our own behind the scenes tell-all (Temporal Flux), our own episode guides (The Expert), our own tie-in novels (Nigel Mitchell, Mike Truman, Tucker, Jules Reynolds and so many other fine writers), our own 20th anniversary special, our own DVD cases and now, it seems our own HD upscaling process because Universal could not interlace a videotape properly.
(I've been updating the first post of this thread with the AI upscaling process for anyone who wants to upscale SLIDERS themselves.)
I will catch up with Armageddon tomorrow.
**
With TITANS -- I just don't think the concept works unless they are actually the TEEN Titans. Maybe you could have Nightwing be an adult and everyone else is a teen.
And with trying to adapt BATMAN: UNDER THE RED HOOD but find some reason for Batman to not be in BATMAN: UNDER THE RED HOOD and slot Dick Grayson into Batman's role -- I just can't wrap my head around why someone would do something so counterintuitive and convoluted and pointless. Dick Grayson needs to be featured in stories designed to explore Dick Grayson, not stories that were written for Bruce Wayne. The Scarecrow is Bruce's villain. Jason Todd is Bruce's former sidekick. The Red Hood is Bruce's anti-hero antagonist. Dick Grayson has his own villains and his own stories and any story where Dick has to deal with baggage left behind by Bruce is a story that actually requires the ability to show the Batsuit and Bruce Wayne wearing it, something TITANS cannot seem to do.
**
There is this one Dick Grayson versus Jason Todd story that I really, really like, but nobody else does. It's called BATMAN: BATTLE FOR THE COWL #1-3, written and illustrated by Tony Daniel. After the events of FINAL CRISIS, Batman is believed dead. Gotham City goes insane as Black Mask, the Penguin and every supervillain with a gimmick starts gunning to be the biggest crime boss in town. Nightwing is reeling from Bruce's death and when asked if he'll assume the mantle, he refuses. No one could ever replace Bruce.
Tim Drake (Robin) and Nightwing start investigating who the worst threat is in Gotham's criminals gone mad -- only to find that a new player is simply shooting them to death. A savage thug wearing Batman's costume and wielding two automatic pistols bursts onto the scene. "I am Batman," says the newcomer and Robin and Nightwing immediately recognize him. It's Jason Todd. Dick refuses to put on the Batsuit and Tim, outraged, puts it on and confronts Jason.
Jason is deranged, savage, almost feral -- shattered with grief at Bruce's death and enraged that Bruce's non-lethal tactics left the city in this state should Batman ever die. Jason almost kills Tim and starts gunning for Dick. Dick pursues Jason and manages to box him in; Jason says that Dick knows Dick is no match for Jason; that's why Dick never even tried to be Batman. Everyone knows that Dick doesn't have what it takes to succeed Bruce or clean up his mess. Only Jason Todd does. It's what Bruce would want.
Dick plays Jason a video recording. It's a message that Bruce recorded to be played for Jason in the event of Bruce's death. Bruce, in the video, apologizes to Jason. He says he never realized or understood how broken Jason was until after Jason's 'death,' that Jason never the gifts needed for a superhero, only the rage needed for a fighter. Bruce says it is his fault that Jason is the way he is; Bruce says that this message being played means that he died. His dying wish would be for Jason to go to Dick, Alfred, Tim and let them help him; get him into psychiatric care, heal his fractured mind --
Jason flies into a rage that his mentor didn't see him as a contender to the mantle but a charity case. His fight with Dick sees him plunge off a train, refusing Dick's outstretched hand. Jason falls into the Gotham Bay, supposedly dead (haha, yeah right) and Nightwing watches Jason disappear, thinking of all the turning points in Jason's life and Dick's, how Jason could have reached out to any one of them and changed his path. But maybe, Dick thinks, there are times when he's seen his path in front of him and realized it has always been where he's going -- like now, where every battle and test has made Dick realize the truth of he who is and who he must become. He is Batman.
Absolutely nobody who has ever written or commented on BATTLE FOR THE COWL seems to like it, calling it total filler between FINAL CRISIS and the relaunched BATMAN AND ROBIN where Dick Grayson is Batman and Damian Wayne is Robin. Every reviewer has remarked that the comics could have simply gone straight from FINAL CRISIS to Dick Grayson's BATMAN AND ROBIN without any explanation; that it was perfectly self-evident that Dick would be the new Batman. Reviewers also remarked that BATTLE FOR THE COWL has Dick repeatedly refuse to be Batman only to fail to save Jason and then inexplicably put on the Batman costume in issue 3 for no stated reason.
I love it.
BATMAN #687 is "Battle for the Cowl: A Battle Within" by Judd Winick. In this issue, set after BATTLE FOR THE COWL #3, the criminals of Gotham keep getting defeated by non-lethal weaponry fired from the Batmobile, but the driver never shows himself. It's revealed that Dick is driving the Batmobile but still in his Nightwing costume. We flash to Bruce's private funeral with the Justice League present and Dick giving a eulogy, declaring that Batman lives. Batman's legend doesn't end. Batman will continue.
We see Dick Grayson in the Batcave, unable to adapt to the workspace, to Bruce's tools, Bruce's space, Bruce's world. And unwilling to wear the costume. Alfred asks Dick why he won't put on the uniform. Dick says he doesn't think he can be Bruce. "Then what the hell are you doing here?" Alfred asks.
Dick and Alfred decide to set up a new Batcave under the offices of the Wayne Foundation in the heart of Gotham City. "This will be me," says Dick. Dick says that he won't try to be Bruce; he will be his own version of Batman, he will make the mask his own in his way and with his own methods. Alfred promises that he won't do it alone and that nothing would make Damian happier. The issue ends with the Scarecrow mounting a gas attack on Gotham City only for Dick to show up to stop him, finally in the Batman costume. I loved this issue too. Reviewers found it repetitive with BATTLE FOR THE COWL having covered the same ground.
Winick wrote another four issues of BATMAN after this: "Long Shadows" in which Two Face notices that 'Batman' has been caught on camera. Bounding through the air acrobatically instead of carrying heavy loads of muscle on his frame. And smiling. Two Face hires a teleporting wizard (ah, comics) to track the location that the original Batman considers home -- to the Batcave under Wayne Manor (without knowing where he actually is). Dick (as Batman) goes to investigate and is savagely beaten by Two Face, with Two Face screaming that Dick is an impostor.
Batman doesn't smile. Batman doesn't do circus style flips. "Batman's gone!" Two Face shrieks. "So who the hell are you!?" Two Face demands to know where the real Batman is -- dead? Insane? Injured? But Dick manages to outmaneuver Two Face, get the drop on him, incapacitate him and Dick declares, "I'm not like you, Harvey. I'm not split down the middle like your coin. I can *change*." Two Face, beaten and about to fall unconscious, mutters, "It is you" before passing out.
Reviewers also really hated this storyline for being trite and simplistic. I adore it.
Of course, none of these are TITANS stories and all of them actually need to actually show Batman.
Personally, I think the entire TITANS concept is unworkable - at least for me. The entire cast was assembled by grabbing a bunch of available copyrights, not by identifying characters who fit together well.
Teen Heroes: The TEEN TITANS comic book made sense: it was about the adventures of teen sidekicks. It's about what Robin, Kid-Flash and Aqualad got up to when Batman, The Flash and Aquaman weren't around. It made sense to, over time, add newer or more recent incarnations of sidekick characters: Wonder Girl (whose continuity is odd), Speedy (Roy Harper, Green Arrow's sidekick), Beast Boy (from Doom Patrol) -- and to add a few teen characters who didn't have a parent book of their own (Starfire and Cyborg) so that the TEEN TITANS book would have control of a few cast members.
Adult Titans? However, by the late 90s, the characters outside the control of the TEEN TITANS banner were no longer teens. The BATMAN office had changed Dick into an adult. The FLASH office had changed Kid Flash into the Flash. The WONDER WOMAN office had made Wonder Girl into an adult Donna Tory. The GREEN ARROW office had changed Speedy into the adult Arsenal. The AQUAMAN office had changed Aqualad into the adult Tempest. There were five different editorial teams handing the Batman, Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Aquaman characters and fairly or unfairly, these teams weren't concerned with the TEEN TITANS brand.
Indistinct Titans: The TEEN TITANS office tried to deal with this by changing the title to TITANS which became a title about former teen superheroes who were still superheroes but no longer teens and and were now a team defined by how they all used to be teenagers and were now adults -- which is not a particularly unique trait. The concept was confused and confusing. There was nothing that made the TITANS distinct from any other assembly of adult superheroes. TITANS became the title aimed at people who used to buy TEEN TITANS.
Young Justice: DC later introduced the YOUNG JUSTICE concept which was a support group of sidekick characters Robin (Tim Drake), Impulse (Bart Allen), Superboy (Connor Kent), Wonder Girl (Cassandra Sandsmark) and some original characters who weren't controlled by a parent book (Arrowette, L'il Lobo, Empress) etc.. YOUNG JUSTICE was more TEEN TITANS than TITANS had been for years.
Teen Titans and Titans: Eventually, DC had a TEEN TITANS book with most of the YOUNG JUSTICE lineup and retired the YOUNG JUSTICE brand, and had a separate TITANS book for the former-teen-now-adult team and presented the adult TITANS as a sort of eternal college reunion. In recent years, the YOUNG JUSTICE branding has made a comeback with Tim, Bart, Connor, Cassie and others while TEEN TITANS has Robin (Damian Wayne), Kid-Flash (Wallace West, the cousin of Wally), Aqualad (Jackson Hyde), Beast Boy, Starfire and Raven.
It can be mentally draining to keep all of this comic book stuff straight.
A Suggestion: In my view, if DC must publish a TITANS book staring the adult Titans, their best best is to make it a second NIGHTWING title, NIGHTWING AND THE TITANS, where Dick has lots of adventures with superpowered characters and as a counterpoint to the primary NIGHTWING title where he's a street level superhero. The series would be about how Nightwing knows everyone in the DC Universe. TITANS would become NIGHTWING TEAM-UP.
Getting back to TV:
Unheroic Superheroes: TITANS is a deeply confused show. It is a show about a team of former teen superheroes who are deeply traumatized by their past and moving on from their careers as superheroes by... forming a superhero team. (!?!?) It's about a superhero team who repeatedly encounter troubled young women being hunted by dark forces and heroically... plan to abandon them and only fail to do so due to unexpected circumstances. (?!?!) The show is largely focused these so-called superheroes fighting grudge matches in fight scenes during which they wear superhero costumes. (Season 3 seems to recognize this and have more heroics.)
A Mismatched Cast: The characters include a clone of Superman, an alien princess with superpowers escaping her people, a child of some primordial force of evil from the dawn of time, a troubled police detective who used to be a superhero, and a superhero couple who are looking to stop superheroing. Three seasons in and I'm not sure why these characters are in the same show or on the same team; why is Detective Dick Grayson the right character to help Raven and her dark magic powers? Why is a metahuman changeling in the same show as an alien princess? Why are characters who aren't enriched by their proximity put into the same series?
The explanation is that TITANS is a dumping ground for copyrights that the studio doesn't believe can sustain a show independently.
Separate Shows in One: Starfire should be in her own STARFIRE show, but I guess Berlanti and Warner Bros. and HBO Max don't think that show would have an audience. Superboy should be a guest-star in SUPERMAN AND LOIS, but he's not needed because Clark has two actual children for Superboy stories. Dick Grayson should should be in his own NIGHTWING show, but the studio and streamer would prefer to bundle all these copyrights under the TITANS banner.
Crippled: UNDER THE RED HOOD is a Batman story, not a TITANS story, and trying to tell it on TITANS is like trying to sail across the Atlantic with a Jeep. TITANS simply doesn't have the right tools to tell that story. TITANS clearly does not have the Batman license, only Bruce Wayne. It's absurd for TITANS to claim that Iain Glen and Curran Walters were running around Gotham City fighting crime during the first two seasons of TITANS when TITANS can never, ever, ever show Batman and Robin together.
Nightwing's Show: For the most part, TITANS has tried to be a NIGHTWING show and then added all these subplots that feel like discards from the hypothetical SUPERBOY and STARFIRE TV shows and the actual SUPERMAN AND LOIS TV show. There is absolutely no sense of what the Titans represent as a team. The Justice League is an assembly of analogues to mythological figures. The Avengers are deeply dysfunctional human beings who are also demi-gods. The Fantastic Four are a science fiction family. The Sliders are misfits lost in the multiverse.
No Team: The Titans are... a gang of miserable, unhappy, self-destructive, unheroic people who don't get along and constantly betray each other and inexplicably insist on living together while loathing their superhero careers while nonsensically insisting on wearing superhero costumes to fight people they don't like (while rarely fighting crime).
Dick Grayson: I think they should have just done a NIGHTWING show, had Dick fighting crime alone in the first season and possibly without the fantasy elements. I don't know if Dick is a character who really benefits from fighting eldritch gods or dating alien princesses (although he has). I know for sure that he doesn't benefit from being put into stories that were ultimately meant for Bruce Wayne.
Indistinct: I don't know what TITANS is. I don't think TITANS knows what it is. I would have preferred either having a NIGHTWING show or a TEEN TITANS show that actually featured teen characters.
In other news, Berlanti Productions continues its quest to do Batman shows despite not having any access to the Batman license, now launching a SON OF BATMAN series called GOTHAM KNIGHTS.
https://www.cbr.com/gotham-knights-tv-s … er-the-cw/
I assume that we'll soon get AUNT HARRIET: A LIFE IN CRIME ALLEY. And then ACE, a series focused on the Bat-Hound. Then HAROLD: BAT MECHANIC. Then DORMBAT, a series about Bruce Wayne's college roommate. Followed by GLASSWINGS, about the window washers who clean all of Wayne's skyscrapers.
Some odd stuffs in recent upscaling adventures.
Detelecine does not seem to fully convert the interlaced DVD video files to a progressive video file. I noticed: for the opening credits and shots with bright flashes, scan lines flash across the screen. If deinterlacing is enabled in the video player (hardware or software), these lines will not appear, but it's dependent on the individual software or hardware. I didn't even notice the lines until I was seeing the frame by frame upscale of "Summer of Love" in Topaz.
Also, if I take the detelecined file and deinterlace it fully in Handbrake, all the aliasing issues that detelecine removed are suddenly all back in full force. It seems best to leave the files detelecined for now.
I used Topaz to denoise "Summer of Love" and leave it at 480p. Then I ran it through Topaz again to bring it to 1080p and... it was bad. There were a lot of weird upscaling artifacts from having run the upscale twice. It looked like a CG approximation of an oil painting with a strange stained glass effect on the faces. I didn't like it. But I had Topaz upscale a few frames to 1080p using the deblur preset, then the denoise preset -- and it really did not look good. Even with grain, everything looked overly waxy and like a painting. "Prince of Wails" also looked just as bad.
However, I really liked the look of "Summer of Love" at 480p but with Topaz deblurring it and adding some film grain to the image. I've decided to go back to an older plan: use Topaz to deblur all the Universal files but keeping it at 480p, then using Lanczos to scale the deblurred 480p file to 1080p. I'll then try that on "Prince of Wails" too and if the result is better than the Turbine upscale, I'll do it for the rest of the Universal Season 1 episodes.
I'll also do another 1080p AI upscale of the Pilot now that it's been detelecined.
Oh geez, I'm so sorry. I thought you'd finished the season and dropped two spoilers on you
Oh, don't worry about it. I've decided that I will never again be upset if someone accidentally spoils a story for me. Stories should be written to be effective whether spoiled or not. Also, I wasn't really that invested in TITANS. I was just half-watching it while doing data entry work. It's not a big deal.
There is no real explanation for why Bruce went from not wanting Jason to be Robin to actively searching for a new Robin within a day of Jason's death, and I think we just have to take it as Bruce being really upset over Jason's death and trying to keep going in the only way he knew how. And that's fine. However...
TITANS: Season 3 is an adaptation of A DEATH IN THE FAMILY (Jason Todd's death in 1988) and the 2005 comic book storyline UNDER THE RED HOOD. Neither are particularly effective as a season of TITANS. Both are Batman stories. TITANS isn't allowed to use Batman. As a result, Dick Grayson seems to take over all the functions that should really be Batman's.
Batman should be the one trying to figure out why Jason was suddenly so interested in chemistry and neurological effects. Batman should be the one to realize that Jason had been compromised by the Scarecrow. Batman should be the one setting a trap for the Red Hood. Batman is the one who actually has a relationship with Jason Todd and the Scarecrow. Instead, TITANS has Bruce being completely oblivious to Jason selling him out to the Scarecrow. It's rather insulting to Batman, a character defined by absurd hypercompetence. But Batman has to be written as incompetent so that he never has to appear on camera in costume.
TITANS also nonsensically has these supposed superheroes -- and Batman -- letting Jason Todd go free after he murdered numerous innocent people. In the UNDER THE RED HOOD storyline and Jason Todd's subsequent adventures, Jason was not a villain as much as an anti-hero. Jason took over Gotham's drug trade, but specifically to control it, executing any drug dealer who sold drugs to children or operated near any schools. Jason was not targeting innocent victims, only violent criminals. He was a lethal vigilante, but he was not a danger to anyone who wasn't a violent criminal. Jason believed that he could be a better crimefighter than Batman this way and effectively became a rival to Batman and Dick -- as opposed to an enemy.
But TITANS' Red Hood, however, is effectively a serial killer who is allowed to go free. TITANS also seems to forget that Dick Grayson broke out of jail last season and is a convicted felon (who somehow ended up sentenced within days of his crime) and is a wanted fugitive, so this is something of a recurring problem for this show.
Anyway. I'm sure lots of people enjoy TITANS. It's an exercise in dour grimdark misery with people who are considered above the bounds of common human morality because they are elite and powerful. There's a market for a brutalist, somewhat amoral approach to superheroes.
It's just not really what I'd like from a TV show about Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne -- but that's fine too. My vision of Bruce Wayne is Christian Bale's relentlessly positive lunatic from the Nolan movies or the operatic protector of the night from the 90s animated series and Grant Morrison's Renaissance Man vision in the BATMAN INC comic and Paul Dini's brilliant detective in DETECTIVE COMICS. My vision of Dick Grayson is the joyfully upbeat (and somewhat bland) hero of Chuck Dixon's NIGHTWING (and Peter Tomasi also did a great job of writing him in NIGHTWING too!).
TITANS' vision of Bruce and Dick in no way diminishes or damages my preferred renditions of these characters. But... I will go watch STARGIRL Season 2 now. STARGIRL Season 1 was what I wanted out of a superhero show and I'm sure Season 2 will be very good also.
Nothing broke, but there was a period where newer versions of Topaz, Handbrake and AVIDemux weren't working or if they were working, they weren't making use of the graphics processing unit. After some experimentation, I've come to realize that the "Studio" drivers tend to work better with these programs than the "Gaming" versions.
The nVidia H.265 video codecs may also make it easier to extract video samples at smaller file sizes with higher video quality that's superior to the H.264 codec I've been using up to this point.
Part of my initial reluctance: it was taking anywhere from 1 - 2 hours to CPU encode the files with increased saturation; the GPU codec kept crashing and the queue would get stuck.
A new GPU update has reduced it to 10 - 15 minutes each and I've just put them all in the queue.
Sorry I haven't been posting samples. I am currently running a graphics card update and with that comes a new version of Handbrake and I think the update should allow some improved codecs and GPU processing options.
For some reason, "Summer of Love" is the worst looking episode of Season 1 on all sets. It's downright foggy on Turbine and not very sharp on Universal, like a copy of a copy. For this one, I've increased the saturation by about 30 per cent via AVIDemux. I'm currently using Topaz to denoise it at 480p, then I'll Topaz deblur it and increase the resolution to 1080p like it's a Turbine episode file.
I'm not sure the other detelecined Universal episodes would need this two-pass approach; I'm also not sure if they would necessarily be any better than the Turbine episodes after a deblurring. And I don't think "Summer of Love" will tell me; I'll need to try upscaling the Universal version of "Prince of Wails" to know if the rest are worth doing.
Also, after some consideration, I've decided that I will increase the colour saturation of the Universal files between 15 - 25 per cent for each episode (and I was increasing the colour saturation of the Turbine episodes by about 20 - 40 per cent per episode for the desaturated ones). Might as well make it look closer to Season 2 but not going as far as Season 3.
Well, I read the instructions on the back of this box of Rice-A-Roni and thought it seemed hopeless, so I put it in an Instant Pot along with the seasoning, some sliced up lamb chops and some frozen broccoli and cauliflower. Then I browned it lightly with some butter before pressure cooking it for five minutes.
I have to say, this is pretty good. The lamb has a gamey aroma that fits the chicken broth seasoning perfectly and blends in wonderfully with the rice. This is, was, and ever shall be the official meal of SLIDERS.
In all seriousness, Rice-A-Roni and lamb chops is such an individual, peculiar and specific choice that it must hold some special significance to Tracy Torme. The box even says it is "A San Francisco Treat." Hopefully, SLIDERS will be revived and we will all learn the reason why.
Rice-A-Roni and lamb chops is also going to be my last carbohydrate heavy meal for awhile.
I can report now: after detelecine, "The Weaker Sex," "The King is Back" and "Luck of the Draw" now also have the jagged edges smoothed out. There was really only one scene in "The Weaker Sex" that had aliasing: when Rembrandt meets the lady in the car, the lines of her car were very flickery and jagged. This has been toned down to a mild level of flicker. There were a couple shots in "The King is Back" with jagged edges (after Arturo is crowdsurfing, a shot of Arturo with some window shutters behind him). These have been completely smoothed.
"Luck of the Draw" is also cleaned up very well. The original Universal DVD episode was a mess from start to finish with all the produce signs flickering and jagged; detelecine has taken away almost all of the aliasing throughout the episode now.
I don't think, even after detelecine, however, that Topaz can upscale these via grain-to-pixel processing. They're still too blurry. But perhaps they can have Topaz denoise them (to remove the compression artifacts) and then deblur them. I don't know if I'll do them all, but I definitely want to run Universal's "Summer of Love" through this process and also do a new 1080p upscale of the Pilot now that it's been detelecined.
New report on anti-aliasing for the Universal discs. The aliasing problem is solved.
Handbrake by default has deinterlacing enabled on its presets, but I disabled it and switched on detelecine all by itself and am getting much-improved results for the problem episodes of the Universal set.
The Universal version of "Prince of Wails" has that scene of the sliders encountering Hurley and the soldiers in Oakland; it has always been a mess of jagged edges; detelecine reduced that to being mildly artifacted with faint flicker.
I also ran 30 seconds of Universal's "Fever" through detelecine only -- specifically, 30 seconds in the drugstore with all the aliasing on the shelves. Those jagged edges were smoothed out and reduced to a slight flicker.
I ran a scene from Universal's "Eggheads" through detelecine; specifically, the scene of Arturo meeting his wife. The house has always been horribly distorted and the cars were riddled with jagged edges. Those have been smoothed out too to a mild flicker.
Detelecine was able to completely almost totally remove the jagged edges from the Universal version of the Pilot and there's only a faint flicker where those used to be.
The Universal version of "Last Days" had a lot of aliasing in the opening shots; the Turbine version of "Last Days" had a faint flicker. Detelecine didn't do anything to amend the Turbine version of "Last Days," but for the Universal version, the aliasing was reduced to being about the same as Turbine's.
I'll report back later about "The King is Back" and "Luck of the Draw."
What is Quinn Mallory's favourite food? "I made your favourite," says Amanda Mallory in the pilot. In the script, Quinn anxiously asks his mother what his favourite food is and she assures him that it's Rice-A-Roni and lamb chops as usual. Like Computer Boy, this piece of world-building was cut from the aired episode and the world is poorer for its absence. In fact, I believe that in omitting the reference to Rice-A-Roni and lamb chops, SLIDERS unfortunately missed an opportunity to hearten a troubled nation, to mend our wounded souls and, more critically and vitally -- to reignite our lost cultural interest in solving problems.
Rice-A-Roni was first created in 1958 by an Italian family who attempted adding dry chicken soup mix to rice and macaroni. Rice-A-Roni is a boxed food mix of rice and seasonings, prepared by browning the contents in butter before simmering the concoction with water for further absorbsion.
In addition, as befitting a meal adored by genius intellect Quinn Mallory, Rice-A-Roni is without question one of the most difficult boxed dinner kits to prepare correctly and effectively. Without precise temperature control, the mixture will burn when simmering. Without maintaining proper steaming level, the rice will not absorb sufficient water and be hard and inedible. The rice must also be allowed to stand for water to evapourate from the mixture.
Rice-A-Roni is possibly the most difficult dilemma ever faced by our Mr. Mallory. It is a dish that requires dedication and commitment. It must be cooked with precise timing and tremendous patience; each step of cooking the Rice-A-Roni must be followed to the letter. Rice-A-Roni requires an understanding of fluid dynamics, evapouration, condensation, boiling points and an intensive level of mathematical calculation for volume and time.
Had the Pilot made it clear that Rice-A-Roni (with lamb chops) is Quinn Mallory's favourite food, SLIDERS would have established a brand identity for itself based on the values of intricate calculation and a commitment to follow instructions fully and accurately. SLIDERS and Rice-A-Roni would have become an advertising force to be reckoned with, inspiring a generation of middle aged viewers and youthful students to dedicate themselves to timekeeping, non-proportionate ratios in water-to-rice volumes and weights, the study of hydrology, and a full understanding of physics and thermodynamics needed for the realization of the potentiality of perfection within each and every box of Rice-A-Roni.
In the event of a SLIDERS revival, all of us must band together. We must implore Tracy Torme to realize the scale, value and impact he could have effected had he recognized that his true work was never about SLIDERS or the sliders. Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt, Arturo, the timer, the vortex, the adventure -- they were all a path and platform for Torme's true purpose and the real value proposition behind SLIDERS; the value of Rice-A-Roni and the inherent power of Rice-A-Roni to galvanize society and create a generation of culinary artists, physicists, mathematicians, engineers and people who want dinner ready in 15 - 20 minutes.
The stove is set. The box is ready to be opened. Let us open our hearts and stomachs to Rice-A-Roni and the wonders it will bring.
TLDR: Rice-A-Roni is really hard to make. Like, really, really hard. Even Quinn probably screwed it up now and then.
Minor update:
With Universal's "Prince of Wails," Handbrake's detelecine was able to remove about half of the jagged edges from the soldiers in Oakland scene. Topaz' "Artemis Alias and Moire" preset was able to reduce it some more; the jagged edges are at about 20 per cent of what they were in the raw DVD file. It's still a lot of work to leave the problem only 4/5 solved, and I'm sure there must be some better method out there of fixing a file with incorrect field arrangements.
Something for a future upscaler to deal with. I don't mind experimenting with isolated shots out of interest, but I'm not going to be dedicating any CPU cycles to fixing entire episodes.
Detelecine didn't even slightly reduce the (minor) jagged edges in the Universal version of "The Weaker Sex" in the scene with that lady picking Rembrandt up; the lines are as jagged and flickery as before. Detelecine also couldn't deflicker the Turbine version of "Last Days"' teaser or the flickering door frame after Arturo's crowdsurfing in "The King is Back."
I'm now surprised that detelecine was able to totally de-alias the Turbine version of the pilot and mostly de-alias the Universal pilot file.
I edited my post as some of my Handbrake samples finished. Detelecine can reduce 'normal' levels of aliasing, but it can't fix video files like the five Universal episodes where the fields are mis-arranged.
**
My guess is that ghostly blurring is due to different deinterlacing techniques in different players. My blu-ray player deinterlaces the Turbine files well, as do my codecs for Handbrake. But not everyone has had the same experience; over at Doom9, those experienced video encoders insist that there are no interlacing issues with the NTSC DVDs and it's the PAL blu-ray that's a mess of misarranged fields.
I don't think that you can sync up a 24 FPS video file with a 29 FPS video file. Even when I play the NTSC and PAL files side by side for comparison, they quickly go out of sync because of the frame rate difference.
**
I think my final upscale will likely use the Universal versions of Pilot and the Turbine versions of "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw." I am not sure about "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" yet; the Turbine versions of those two are in the queue.
I want to try using Topaz to denoise the Universal version of "Summer of Love" while leaving it at 480p, then drag the denoised file into Topaz again for a deblurring upscale to 1080p. If the results are good, then the Universal versions of "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" would benefit from the same.
Some findings:
"Summer of Love" from Turbine is still in progress, but I'm looking at the frames as they upscale and they do not look good after the deblur. It is the fuzziest episode in the Turbine set. I wonder if I might go to the MP4 file I have of the Universal version and use Topaz 2021's noise-removal preset to take off the compression artifacts -- while leaving it at 480p. Then run Topaz' deblurring function to bring it to 1080p. Topaz 2021 separating the tools instead of just having them all combined into a few presets may offer some paths forward here.
In terms of aliasing: I've been reviewing the raw Universal files of the episodes that are not suffering from misaligned fields throughout most of the episode. The Universal version of the pilot has some aliasing. There are some jagged edges in Quinn's car when he stops his car by the park, flickeringly jagged lines when Quinn runs past the homeless Communist, jagged lines across Arturo's classroom seats. I'd consider this normal for a DVD; you're always going to have at least a little. It's only annoying when it's in any and every shot with straight lines for entire episodes like Universal's "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw."
However, the Turbine version of the pilot, while blurrier, has significantly less of this flicker and jaggedness in the park scene and almost none in Arturo's classroom.
While mostly fine, Universal's "The Weaker Sex" had some flickering jagged edges in the scene with Rembrandt singing and a lady stopping her car to talk to him; those are not present in the Turbine version. Universal's version of "The King is Back" is also pretty alias-free except in one notable scene: after Arturo's crowdsurfing incident, the Motel 12 doorframe is very jagged and flickery. Again, I would consider all this acceptable for an interlaced DVD, especially in how occasional it is. However, the Turbine versions of "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" don't have these issues.
I wonder if a part of it is that the Turbine versions are at 24 frames per second instead of 29, and fewer frames means less opportunity for field issues in interlaced video, but I think Turbine must have done processing cleanup here because it's unlikely Universal did a better job on the PAL masters than they did on the NTSC files.
**
Handbrake has a function called "Detelecine" which is supposed to address flicker caused when film has been converted to videotape (like with SLIDERS). I'd previously just been deinterlacing when when converting the DVD files from interlaced into a progressive (which makes it easier to upscale because the AI only has to improve image quality instead of merging two separate video fields).
Detelecine is a lot slower than just simple deinterlacing; a 3 - 5 minute deinterlace job becomes 10 - 20 minutes with detelecine. After running both the Turbine and Universal versions of the Pilot through detelecine: the Turbine version had no flicker or jagged edges and the Pilot's aliasing was about 80 per cent gone.
The Universal version of the Pilot is a sharper file, so that's probably the one to stick with for upscaling.
Out of morbid interest, I ran the detelecine function on the Universal version of "Prince of Wails" -- just the scene where the sliders in Oakland encounter Hurley's soldiers. Detelecine could only reduce the jagged edges in the cars by about half -- it's still really distracting, and it throws off the upscaling process. Detelecine still needs the file to be in a correctly interlaced format.
**
Out of professional interest, I ran the interlaced version of Turbine's "Fever" through Topaz' built in deinterlacer. Topaz could not properly deinterlace this file; the shot of the opening scene where the camera pans across the flags were filled with horizontal lines.
It's odd: the Turbine episodes are blurrier than the Universal episodes, but with the 2021 Topaz toolkit, Turbine is working out better than Universal.
I couldn't figure out what to do with the Universal Season 1 episodes after the Pilot. Even with the new Topaz tools, every attempt to deblur the Season 1 Universal files created either a smudged 1080p watercolour painting or oversharpened, deformed artifacts across the video image -- or improved the image so little that non-AI scaling was faster and better.
Even the Universal version of "Summer of Love," which didn't have the interlacing issues, came out of Topaz 2021 badly: it's really smudged, like a bad painting. It's like the compression and the lack of film grain just confuses the algorithm and when an episode like "Prince of Wails" has interlacing problems on top of that, Topaz is just lost.
My successes with upscaling DUE SOUTH and THE DEAD ZONE from compressed DVDs made me think that Topaz could lift off video compression and reveal what was underneath. But I suspect this isn't quite true: while Topaz can remove compression, it is dependent on film grain to reconstruct what is under that compression. When there is compression but no grain, Topaz can't rebuild the image correctly, so removing the compression artifacts off the Universal files only makes them worse.
In contrast, the Turbine versions of Season 1 only have one problem for Topaz to address. The Turbine episodes are blurry and Topaz needs to deblur them (and upping the saturation a bit in AVIDemux before the uspcale is good too). There isn't any compression noise to lift off, so Topaz doesn't need to rebuild the image using film grain; it just needs to review the pixels of this blurry image and increase the pixel contrast within the boundaries of each part of the image.
I'm not in favour of noise or grain as an aesthetic, but it has its uses. Generally, I don't see the grain and don't want to see grain; at living room distance, grain should just seem like detail.
In the case of Season 1 episodes, the PAL master even after deblurring is still a little blurry, and noise brings it closer to the original film look. In the case of Season 2, the SD masters are extremely grainy and while I like it, I'm also very pleased with how Topaz converted that grain into pixels for a crisp HD rendition for "As Time Goes By" and other episodes. If I could get Season 1 to look like a Topaz-processed episode of Season 2, I would, but the tools aren't there (yet? ever?).
I am less pleased with the STARGATE SG-1 DVDs which have had the noise blurred out through filters that also blurred out the image under that noise.
However, there are times when I find graininess really unwelcome and distracting. The TV show CHUCK was shot on grainy 16mm film and somewhat overcompressed even on its blu-ray releases, leading to a lot of compression noise in addition to the original film grain that can be really inappropriate. CHUCK has some scenes in the white, blank room of the Intersect computer in the pilot and series finale, and that room should look pristine. Instead, it's riddled with static dots. I also found the graininess of Sabrina Lloyd's UNIVERSAL SIGNS rather unpleasant and ran it through a 28 hour Topaz grain-to-pixel process so that all the grain would be resolved into detail.
DAWSON'S CREEK in HD looks really grainy to me; I think the 4K scan was a bit much for 16mm film.
With Season 1 of SLIDERS, it's blurriness or graininess, so I've chosen graininess.
Well, if Crane had access to the Oracle surveillance, he could have blackmailed or otherwise corrupted every police officer, offering them incentives or threatening them into compliance.
Spoilers for TITANS
Well, it turns out there is a bit more to Bruce's story. I watched a bit more last night and episode 5 of Season 3 reveals that Bruce told Jason he didn't want him to be Robin any more and that Jason didn't need to be Robin to be Bruce Wayne's son, Bruce Wayne's family and a part of Bruce Wayne's heart. Which makes it unclear: if Bruce valued Jason more than he valued Robin -- why was Bruce instantly recruiting new Robins the second Jason was buried? Saying "I can't do this alone" and asking Dick, "Do you want to be Robin again?" like an addict desperate for his next fix?
TITANS has often played the game of misrepresenting Batman and Bruce Wayne and then removing their deliberate misrepresentation later. Season 1 presents Batman as a demonic, terrifying force; it's dismissed as a dream and when Bruce shows up in person in Season 2, he's presented as Season 3 Professor Arturo. He's Temporal Flux. He's comforting, knowledgeable, pleasant presence who encourages people do their best. He's Dad.
Season 3 implies that Bruce didn't care about Jason beyond Jason being Robin; then Episode 5 shows that Bruce loved Jason, not Robin.
I assume that there will be an explanation and, of course, I should have realized that DC was never going to stand behind any portrayal of Bruce as a junkie in this fashion, even in an HBO Max TV show where Bruce is just an occasional guest star.
Thank you very much to Jim_Hall and Slidecage for always being such a good friend to SLIDERS and Slideheads everywhere.
Always grateful.
For me, my low hanging target for the Season 1 Turbine upscales is to get them to look like the Season 2 Turbine files -- grainy and filmic. I think it's achievable to get a below average HD file that looks like an above average SD file.
Also, if I change my mind later, the grain can easily be removed: it only takes 2 - 4 minutes to re-encode the file in Handbrake with a GPU-augmented codec that deletes the data layer with the grain. Better to have it and not want it than to want it and not have it.
Here's the opening of "Fever." One of the things I have always admired about Jerry O'Connell as an actor: he is very good at fake eating. In both "Prince of Wails" and "Fever," he fake eats very convincingly even though, intellectually, I know he's not eating anything. Check out his fake eating in "Fever" in this upscaled sample here:
https://mega.nz/file/m94kQahB#vvrU5ndfc … PQ9BQGZ2ZE
American democracy is in crisis. And Democrats are sleeping through it.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics … en-america
And Slider_Quinn21 wonders how we went from RETURN OF THE JEDI defeating the Empire to THE FORCE AWAKENS opening with the First Order in charge and the Rebels on the run just as they were before. He's absolutely right to note that the storytelling skipped several steps, but I imagine it happened just like this.
Spoilers for Armageddon Part 4:
While I enjoyed the episode, I have to say -- I don't really understand why Eobard Thawne needed to (a) get STAR Labs shut down (b) kill Joe (c) impersonate Barry and go on a rampage (d) trick Barry into getting rid of most of his speed. I mean, his end-goal was to go back in time and remove Barry from the timeline and take over Barry's life from birth to death -- so why did he need to do all this other stuff in a timeline he was removing?
I don't get it and I'm sure someone can explain it to me, but I was at a loss. That said, I enjoyed the episode a lot and really liked Barry turning Damien Darkh from an enemy into an ally. It was great to see Tom Cavanagh back. Great performance. Great scripting of the individual scenes. I just didn't get the underlying story. It didn't make logical sense to me. It made emotional sense, though -- that the Reverse Flash's greatest ambition was always to become the Flash.
**
I am really late to TITANS in Season 3. I watched the first episode of Season 3 and... I mean, it's a good script, but I am really opposed to what this story and series is doing. First is that the death of Jason Todd, Robin, and the way Batman handles it afterwards -- that should really be a Batman-centric story; instead, TITANS has to awkwardly showing Batman in the costume because their license only allows Bruce Wayne, so Dick Grayson ends up having to carry the bulk of the story in this episode.
The second issue I have with TITANS' premiere is portraying Bruce Wayne as a sick old man who needs to recruit teenaged girls and boys to join him in his need for violent retribution on criminals. His pathetic, needy whisper to Dick Grayson, saying, "You want to be Robin again?" -- it's clear this version of Bruce Wayne is a junkie; his drug of choice is (usually non-lethal) physical assault, only acceptable because he assaults murderers.
I think that this is a story that would be fine to do with the Midnighter, a Batman analogue from the Wildstorm comics. Or with Moon Knight, a Marvel character whose creators were inspired by Batman. Or other street level characters. You can do this story with the Punisher. The Fixer. Night Thrasher. The Black Fox. Shadowhawk. The Shadow. Nighthawk. Kick-Ass. But I don't feel that it is right to do this story with Bruce Wayne or with Batman.
While Batman has been wonderfully versatile, I really feel that Batman is a children's character and ultimately, he should be a life-affirming, comforting hero. He should assure us that our grief and loss will not define us; that instead, we will be defined by how we survive our hardships. To present Bruce Wayne a sick, needy addict is, to me, wrong. And it's part of why, for me, TITANS is just wrong. I am not saying you can't tell a superhero story like this -- I just don't feel that these stories should be told with Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson.
To me, having Bruce Wayne exposed as a junkie who walks out on Gotham City is like having Professor Arturo getting shot and blown up after getting his brain sucked out, or having Quinn abandon Wade and his mother to Kromagg imprisonment and torment.
(Bruce killing the Joker, to me, is not unjustifiable.)
To be fair, there may be more to this story, but it's clear to me that TITANS is trying to remove Bruce Wayne from the series and avoid showing Batman because they don't have the license for it.
Also to be fair, I love BATWOMAN and BATWOMAN implies that Bruce Wayne walked out on Gotham, but BATWOMAN has also implied that Bruce didn't abandon Gotham as much as he's been unable to return.
Okay, Handbrake has a (very slow, CPU-only) process for 'tuning' a video to maintain the grain.
"Prince of Wails." The sliders meet Hurley! Again! This is Turbine, upscaled via Topaz Artemis High Quality (deblur) with film grain added after the upscale.
https://mega.nz/file/L5JigBLI#M6ZAtduC_ … Lp6S0d4CUY
One of the most unfortunate tragedies of the pandemic -- THE CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA ended on an unintended soft-cliffhanger. Season 4 ended with Sabrina dead. It was a conclusive ending that closed on her reunited with her true love in the afterlife. But it wasn't meant to be the ending; it was originally a cliffhanger where Sabrina's family were going to venture to the underworld to resurrect her. However, due to the pandemic, Netflix told the creators that they did not feel it was affordable to film a fifth season. They asked that the season finale be re-edited into a series finale by removing the scene where Sabrina's friends and loved ones were going to go find her.
In the new season of RIVERDALE, Sabrina shows up. She is played by the same actress, Kiernan Shipka. She is older than she was when she died onscreen. "There is no death for witches," Sabrina says. "Only transformation. I mean -- I died and came back." Sabrina doesn't get into the details.
... Oh, Quinn. Wade. Rembrandt. Arturo.
Please come back soon.
Sorry your zombie show is in that strange state of being neither living or dead in holding your interest, becoming something you tolerate without any consistent enjoyment.
I like to think that I only watch the shows that inspire me and that I think are really, really, really good. However, I keep watching THE FLASH to keep track of the ARROWVERSE. And I watched all of 13 REASONS WHY even though it ran out of story by the third season. And I kept watching THE DEAD ZONE even though I could tell it was going nowhere. And I watched the revival seasons of THE X-FILES. I guess, even though I wasn't happy with these shows, I felt I'd be even less happy not knowing what was happening in them.
I did quit SMALLVILLE in Season 2, however, because I knew that nothing mattered; Clark was going to trounce a villain every week and forget any lessons learned by next week. I quit LOST which I fear will offend you. It wasn't on purpose; I got to Season 4 (I think) and then got busy and then it had been too long to resume where I'd left off, but I didn't have the time or inclination to start over again.
One show that quit me before I quit watching was ELEMENTARY. The showrunner anticipated that the sixth season finale would be the series finale and scripted it as a conclusion. But then the show unexpectedly got a seventh season. I decided not to watch it; Season 6 felt like the end.
There is also a slight subcategory: shows I stopped watching because I didn't want them to end. I loved BIG BANG THEORY and was sad to see it ending, and by never watching the final season, it never ended for me. I also never watched the series finale of PERSON OF INTEREST or WYNONNA EARP for exactly the same reasons -- although I will probably take some time to rewatch both from pilot to finale at some point.
I am adding grain via Topaz. I feel that grain adds some weight and body to the image and fills in some of the missing detail. I think the objective here is no longer grain-to-pixel sharpening, but deblurring the PAL video master.
However...
I just reviewed the new "Prince of Wails" 1080p upscale and it looks good -- but still a little 'bare.' I'm running it again now but increasing the grain by another 10 per cent. I would like to show you a sample, except I'm running into that problem I had earlier: when I extract a file via Handbrake, I find that the H.264 codec, even at the highest file size, filters out the Topaz-added grain texture! Even when the full episode is 5.8GB and the extracted five minute sample is 3.6GB, it doesn't look any different from what I posted last night.
I ran a short upscaling test on a segment of Turbine's "Prince of Wails" (Artemis High Quality, deblur, 1080p output) and I have to say, I think we're getting somewhere at last with these Season 1 episodes.
Sample video: https://mega.nz/file/O9YzHC7a#nX7JrcQHk … 79AO6_sFXo
Instead of trying re-render the image with absent film grain, Topaz's deblur seems to selectively increase pixel contrast to reduce blurriness while blending the pixels in smoothly to avoid blockiness. Looking at the results up close, there is some of that watercolour effect in the wides, but watching it at living room distance, it isn't really a big deal.
I am going to increase the amount of film grain by 25 per cent, however, just to fill in a bit of the absent detail and this time, I'm running the whole episode which will take 10 hours.
My relationship with Turbine is already proving healthy and rewarding.
Well, you could just get the Mill Creek complete set for Season 5. For upscaling purposes, it makes little difference.
Also, as you are working on the Universal discs, I can tell you: I was able to mostly fix the aliasing issue in Universal's "Prince of Wails" with a field-swap deinterlacer in AVIDemux.
In the Universal disc, the scene of the sliders encountering Hurley and the soldiers in Oakland was riddled with jagged edges on the humvee and the car. After using Kernel Deint and setting it to reverse the field order, the lines of the humvee and car were smoother, but there were still artifacts within the smoothed out lines and image flickering across them.
That said, I am only an amateur and some more experienced encoder enthusiasts say that the NTSC version is fine and it's the Turbine / PAL video files that are mis-aligned. https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=1869424
I can only speak to my own particular hardware and software: I've run every Season 1 - 2 episode of SLIDERS through the GPU-augmented Handbrake's decomb filter using both Turbine and Universal. For me, only Universal's "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw" have the mis-arranged fields after Handbrake's deinterlacing. The other Universal episodes were mostly fine, the Turbine episodes converted to progressive video via Handbrake really well.
Certainly, there is *some* aliasing in the Turbine versions, but any video that was ever interlaced will have some. "Last Days" opens with a shot of a still street; in the Universal version, the straight lines are pixelated and blocky and flickering. In the Turbine version, those lines are smooth -- but there is a little flicker. To me, that's normal.
My guess would be that Turbine has a field-swap deinterlacer for files that haven't been encoded correctly.
If someone else wants to experiment with deinterlacing field swappers, they might find the right one for the five alias-troubled Universal episodes. However, I won't keep using the Universal DVDs for anything. I've realized that my relationship NBCUniversal has become abusive.
I am a devoted fan of SLIDERS as a television series and intellectual property, but I'm not going to devote myself to unpaid servitude for a multi-billion dollar global conglomerate that has the ability to deinterlace their own videotapes.
It's one thing to upscale a standard definition video product to HD as a fan; that's having purchased a product and looking at improving the playback options. It's also fine for me to write fan fiction; that's imagining what SLIDERS could be and typing it up.
But it is grossly inappropriate for me, a hobbyist fan, to provide free labour to a wealthy corporation just because I care about an intellectual property that happens to exist on one of their ledgers. I won't call five NBCUniversal employees to raise and repair the video quality issues. That's ridiculous. It is not my job to fix a standard definition video product that Universal sold to me broken.
NBCUniversal owns SLIDERS, but SLIDERS is not NBCUniversal.
In contrast, my relationship with Turbine is appropriate for a content distributor and a fan. I wanted SLIDERS in standard definition. They sold it to me. Their version of SLIDERS is encoded correctly and the episodes are in order and there is no damage from compression.
Any effort to bring Turbine's content to HD is to build upon the solid foundation of their diligence, not to correct incompetence in their product. Their version of Season 1 was not upscalable using the 2020 version of Topaz, but the 2021 edition is yielding some interesting results.
"Prince of Wails" from Turbine looks really nice after Topaz has deblurred it and added some film grain texture while keeping the file at 480p. Before Topaz, the Turbine file was about 25 per cent blurrier than the Universal version. After Turbine, I'd say it's about 5 per cent blurrier. I did do some work before Topaz, increasing the saturation levels a bit. I'm now putting this file through Topaz again to be deblurred and upscaled to 1080p. It might be as much a disaster as my previous upscales of this file, but it'd be nice to know what can and can't be done.
I don't know what they would or wouldn't do. If you want to contact them and copy-paste relevant sections from my posts for your own messages, you could do that. In my case, while I enjoy dragging and dropping video files into Topaz for various tests, I don't think it's my job to be running NBCUniversal's home video department unpaid.
I will put my leisure energy towards video materials produced by Turbine as Turbine actually put some effort into their work.
Topaz has had some software updates and while I couldn't run it before because the program kept crashing, the new version stabilized. There is now a wider variety of presets. Where originally, there were just presets for compression-removal and sharpening, there are now additional presets for smoothing out interlaced video (unfortunately useless on the mis-encoded five episodes of Season 1 and not effective on the rest because the sound is out of sync), for toning down aliasing (also ineffective for our problems) -- and there's also one that's focused on trying to deblur video.
Deblurring is where Turbine's S1 episodes would benefit most. "Summer of Love" may be beyond repair on Turbine. But I've run "Prince of Wails" through Topaz's Artemis - Remove Blurriness preset twice now, the first time on Low Quality Video while leaving it at 480p. The final file looked as sharp as the Universal version, but with a slightly 'painted' look to the wide shots due to the lack of grain in the source file.
I ran it again last night, but this time set to High Quality Video which doesn't try to add as many extra pixels based on grain to pixel rebuilding and it came out looking like a very nice 480p version of "Prince of Wails" where all the hair and faces were defined and wide shots looked appropriately distanced but not distorted. Turbine's blurry soft focus look is gone thanks to Topaz adding pixel contrast to all the edges, but the image still lacks fine detail or texture. When scaled to 1080p bicubically (through live playback), it looks like adequately upscaled videotape (and without the weird Universal distortions).
I am going to try two more experiments with "Prince of Wails": I am running the 480p cleanup again for AI deblurring, but this time, I'm using this new setting in Topaz that adds film grain. I think a small amount laid over the AI deblurred image might fill in some of that absent texture and make it look less like videotape and more like film-on-videotape.
I am then going to run the same preset but scale it to 1080p. I am extremely doubtful it will be any different from the last time I used AI upscaling to bring this same file to 1080p, but I'd at least like to see how it turns out with this new deblurring preset.
Regardless of which preset I end up using, all the Turbine S1 non-pilot episodes aside from "Last Days" will need to be run through AVIDemux to increase the saturation by about 15 - 20 per cent.
NBCUniversal seems to have little to no interest in home video releases of their older content. Their home media site advertises box sets of late 2000s and 2010s shows, but for shows before that, there's not much beyond MIAMI VICE, SEINFELD and WILL AND GRACE. But for blu-ray releases of THE ROCKFORD FILES, KNIGHT RIDER, QUANTUM LEAP, I DREAM OF JEANNIE, EUREKA, the NBCU home video department has just kicked it over to Mill Creek.
As for contacting NBCUniversal -- I think I've spent enough time working on their products long after they released and abandoned them.
is this the Turbine German version?
https://www.amazon.com/Sliders-Die-komp … amp;sr=8-4
That's the one!
Big companies. They don't care the way fans do.
I guess depends on the units they think they can move. Paramount felt STAR TREK would sell huge numbers in blu-ray and put a lot of money into remastering it. They felt the same way about STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION and promptly lost a lot of money on remastering it and decided not to do a remaster of DEEP SPACE NINE or VOYAGER. Visual Entertainment Inc. expected moderate sales on STARGATE SG1 and put a very moderate amount of money into upscaling the SD versions of Seasons 1 - 7 to something that vaguely approximates a high definition video.
Universal... did not think the sales on SLIDERS DVDs would be great, but they had the IP on their shelf, had some shelf space to fill, had a gap in their home video release schedule and hacked something out in the most half-assed fashion possible.
I once had a neat conversation with a Turbine rep. I said that I really appreciated the thought and effort they put into their blu-ray set: the packaging, the well-presented versions of the PAL masters, the episodes being in the right order, the menus, the pilot commentary whereas Universal couldn't even run some anti-aliasing and Mill Creek couldn't be bothered to use a few extra discs.
Turbine replied to say that they appreciated getting a message that recognized their focus on high premium, high quality products. Yes, they could put in less effort and probably get away with it, but what was the point of doing anything unless it could be done with care and love and quality?
I have had quite enough of those clowns at Universal who have been wasting my time and CPU and GPU cycles since 2004. Universal, you are no longer wanted. You are no longer needed. You have been replaced. You will not be missed. Turbine, let's upscale "Last Days."
I'm sorry to hear about your PAL capable player, RussianCabbie.
QuinnSlidr -- I've generally found that the episodes from "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw" are not AI upscalable due to having been transferred to low-res analog videotape that has lost all the film grain needed for an AI re-rendering. But I'll be curious to know if you get different results. The other issue is, of course, the aliasing issues on five episodes of Season 1.
I looked into the aliasing issue some more when I probably could've been eating lunch and...
Wide Shot Woes and Jagged Edges: A lot of the AI sharpened wide shots from specific Season 1 episodes of the Universal DVD looked bad after AI upscaling, even when the AI was just to deblock, deartifact, and leave the 480 image at 480. There was a weird broken stained glass effect across those shots. This was particularly present in "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw." These are the episodes with severe aliasing issues which lead to flickering, jagged edges on straight lines that I think confuse the AI in what pixels to add even for simple cleanup (and it was already confused by the lack of film grain). These jagged edges are in the raw DVD files.
A Normal Amount: "Summer of Love" and "The King is Back" don't have this problem. There are a couple shots in "The Weaker Sex" where aliasing is present (the scene when a woman stops her car in front of Rembrandt when he's singing on the street) -- and it isn't severe and at a fairly normal level for DVD, an interlaced medium. But it is really bad on the other five episodes.
Odd and Even Fields: SLIDERS was shot on film but transferred to videotape, an interlaced format where the video signal contains two fields (even and odd) for rendering the image. Most interlaced video will suffer from at least a little aliasing (like in "The Weaker Sex"), but when these two fields aren't aligned correctly, it will be glaring and distracting.
How Did This Happen? It looks like when Universal made the DVDs in 2004, the process for identifying odd and even fields from analog videotape for digital file conversion was limited. Rather than convert each videotape twice and choose the file that turned out correctly, Universal chose randomly, got it right three times out of eight (four out of nine if you count the pilot), and didn't bother to re-encode for the five that they got wrong.
Our Mill Creek Enemies: The Mill Creek DVDs have the same aliasing issues on the same scenes.
Our German Allies: Turbine, while using poorer quality PAL masters, doesn't have aliasing issues on their SD blu-ray. They may have received videotapes and transferred the fields correctly through 2016 technology or trial and error. (I mean, you only have to do it twice to get it right.) They may have received PAL digital files that didn't have the field errors (although given Universal's ineptitude, it seems unlikely). They may have received digital files with field errors but corrected them. They don't remember if they received digital files or videotapes.
Can this be fixed? I can't seem to do it easily. Handbrake has a "Chroma Smooth" function for this sort of distortion, but it blurs the whole image and those jagged, flickering lines still remain. Topaz has a few "anti-aliasing" presets, but it can't seem to smooth out the issue either; it's meant for reducing low levels of aliasing correctly encoded interlaced video, not video that's swapped the odd and even fields. There are a number of deinterlacing filters I could try and Turbine probably has the right software for it.
CPU Without GPU: AVIDemux has a bunch of options for deinterlacing and swapping the fields, but AVIDemux doesn't use my graphics processing card, instead using only the CPU. CPU-only video processing is very slow, so for me, trying different deinterlacing processes to find the right one would take hours for each one just to complete a five minute clip -- and I refuse to this any more.
Resignation: I refuse to spend any more time trying to clean up the hackwork done by Universal's home video department which they refused to perform properly even with simple trial and error back in 2004. Which they refused to correct even when they had years before sending the files to Mill Creek and Hulu and Peacock and Netflix. I am done trying to upscale the Universal DVD files. Universal is incompetent. It's not my job to fix their work. I will never put another disc from the Dual Dimension set into one of of my drives again.
Turbine: I put the Turbine version of "Prince of Wails" through Topaz this morning. No upscaling to a higher resolution, just trying to AI sharpen away the blurriness. It just finished and it looks to be on the same level of sharpness as the Universal version of this episode -- not terrific, but not downright fuzzy. It's good enough to scale via Lanczos to 1080p and it doesn't have Universal's field errors. I'm going to run the sharpening on all the Turbine versions of the non-Pilot Season 1 episodes and upscale them to 1080p via Lanczos.
Curiosity: "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw" will definitely be replaced with the Turbine-based upscales. "Summer of Love" off the Turbine version is really blurry and discoloured, but it'd still be worth it to see the results. "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" might be best as the versions sourced from Universal, but it'd be nice to complete the set with them.
Good bye, Universal's Dual Dimension set -- and good riddance. (The Pilot, "Summer of Love," "The Weaker Sex" and "The King is Back" looked good, though.)
I'm always surprised by the sound of Kari's voice when I haven't heard it for awhile. It's higher-pitched than I remember. I don't think poorly of her post-Season 3 acting, but she'll never be a favourite for me. Certainly, she never turned up on camera drunk like, say, Jerry O'Connell.
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It's strange: for Universal DVDs and the Turbine SD blu-ray release, the video quality across the individual non-Pilot episodes of Season 1 are not consistent.
Universal DVD:
On the DVD (which uses the NTSC masters): some episodes have serious aliasing issues where lines that should be straight and smooth are instead jagged and pixelated, and when the camera moves, those jagged lines become further pixelated (the term is moiré pattern). The episodes that suffer from this: "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw."
"Prince of Wails" is glaring when the sliders encounter the army in Oakland: the humvee and the car suffer severely from jagged lines. "Fever"'s scenes in the drugstore are really pixelated with the racks of herbal medicine. "Last Days"' opening shot of the quiet residential streets are distorted. "Eggheads" looks especially bad with the scene where Arturo meets his wife. "Luck of the Draw"'s fashion display looks hideous.
I'm not sure why these five specific episodes have these aliasing issues more severely than the other three non-pilot episodes on the Universal DVD. It may be a DVD authoring issue where the interlaced format for those four episodes had the incorrect settings for encoding the video with odd and even fields, a mistake that the Turbine release didn't repeat.
Turbine SD blu-ray:
These jagged edges in the NTSC DVDs aren't in the PAL-sourced SD blu-ray from Germany, although these versions of the episodes are blurrier. But "Summer of Love" is strange: it is so much blurrier than the other seven non-pilot episodes and severely desaturated, missing almost half the colour from the NTSC DVD version. This is odd because the other non-pilot Turbine episodes of Season 1 are not as blurry or colour-drained as "Summer of Love."
Episodes 103 - 108 Turbine episodes of Season 1 ("Prince of Wails" to "The King is Back") are suffering only from about a 10 - 15 per cent loss of colour and about a 15 - 20 per cent loss of contrast. "Luck of the Draw" from this set isn't missing any of the colour compared to the Universal DVD, although it has the same lack of contrast as the previous episodes. And 103 - 109 are all, compared to the Universal DVD, missing about 20 - 25 per cent of the Universal DVD's sharpness (which wasn't that sharp to begin with).
I'm guessing that the NTSC analog videotapes were duplicated to PAL and stretched, and analog copying creates a faded second generation copy; "Summer of Love"'s PAL master may have been made from a copy of a copy of the NTSC tape.
I'm now wondering if Turbine's versions of "Prince of Wails," "Fever," "Last Days," "Eggheads" and "Luck of the Draw" might be a better bet for low-gain upscaling. The AI could try to sharpen the SD files to be closer to the Universal DVD version while still leaving it at 480p to avoid all the AI distortions, and then Avidemux could use bicubic or Lanczos scaling to bring it to 1080p while also moderately increasing the colour and contrast.
Handbrake used to be fine for DVD ripping, but recent updates seemed to remove the decoder. I've switched to MakeMKV.
https://makemkv.com/
However, Handbrake is still important. You see, MakeMKV does not deinterlace video and the DVDs are all interlaced (even and odd fields to form the whole picture). If you don't deinterlace the video, your video files will have horizontal lines flashing across the screen. You must use Handbrake (or some other software) to "decomb" the video and convert the video to a progressive format so that your upscale won't have the lines.
I was trying to reduce video file sizes to get some more files stored on my 2TB drive and delay needing to upgrade to a 4TB. It didn't work out.
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One of the previous experiments was to run the 480p DVD file through Topaz Artemis HQ but leave it at 480p, but having used Artemis HQ to deblock and denoise the file, taking out all the compression. And then using Lanczos scaling to raise the 480p file to 1080p. The results were really inconsistent: medium and wide shots looked okay/good enough, but wide shots were jarringly blurry or otherwise distorted in a way that was way too distracting.
I tried scaling the Topaz 480p version to 1080p with bicubic scaling instead. The wide shots were more pixelated and less jarringly mismatched, but still mismatched. And overall, this upscaled version looked like mildly improved low resolution analog videotape.
I settled on just using Lanczos on the DVD files. It was a forgiving way to raise the DVD image to 1080p. While the closeups and mediums were fuzzier and noisier than the Topaz upscales, they were *consistently* fuzzy and noisy across all shots. And the noise at least filled in some of that lack of detail. This version with all the noise looked like film with film grain -- albeit film diminished by being downscaled to low resolution analog videotape, but still film.
Some people might prefer the Topaz enhanced 480p version, of course.
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I re-ripped the Universal DVD files and deinterlaced them at the highest bitrate. Ran "Luck of the Draw" through Topaz to 720p and there sadly wasn't any improvement that I could see. There wasn't much improvement for the Lanczos only version either -- maybe there was bit more texture, but that's probably because there is more noise. It's a lateral move at best.
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