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Apparently, QUANTUM LEAP was a rarity for the first three seasons: it was edited on film and the effects were created optically on film. However, for Seasons 4 - 5, there was a switch to videotape effects and all the effects for the blu-ray version of 4 - 5 are upscaled SD shots.

I think there's been a miscommunication with Mr. Hunt. He says NBCUniversal would never have given Turbine the film for SLIDERS episodes. But SLIDERS' completed episodes do not exist on film. They exist on videotape. Possibly Betacam, U-Matic, DV or some other form of videotape, but tape nonetheless. No scan of videotape is going to be HD. There is no new film scans for SLIDERS because there is no film outside of the raw, unassembled material with no colour processing or effects. NBCUniversal may have given video cassettes to Turbine for a rescan (or yes, Turbine may have paid another company to do it, but Turbine has videotape and film scanning infrastructure and NBCUniversal isn't just going to have a single cassette of their archived shows).

Mr. Hunt seems to be responding with the impression that the completed SLIDERS episodes are stored on film negatives with the need to create release prints and with the master copy remaining under strict storage and preservation. But SLIDERS was made by transferring film to videotape, specifically because videotape was easier and cheaper to edit, duplicate and distribute and store.

It's the only format in which the completed episodes can exist and it would be insane for NBCUniversal to not have multiple copies and lossless duplication for all of their tape-stored shows. The ability for future resale in future formats is a high value proposition, admittedly not for SLIDERS alone, but for the totality of their standard definition catalog of properties.

So, I finished "Luck of the Draw." I'm reviewing all the upscaled blu-ray S1 episodes now and... honestly, I don't like the results at all.

Individual shots when frozen look really nice as still images for screencaps. Clear and smooth. But when in motion, the AI upscale has an odd plastic, plasticine, wax dummy look to everything despite more defined detail. The problem is that AI upscaling depends on grain to rebuild detail. The grain in the S1 episodes, as I said, has been severely filtered out. There's a small amount left that makes AI upscaled close-up shots look good. However, AI upscaled medium and wide shots just look terrible, like paintings where the ink has gone outside the outlines of the figure being drawn.

This was present in my Season 2 - 5 upscales for the wide shots, but for S1 SD blu-ray, it affects everything except close-ups of faces.

I think the videotape scan was best left alone and I've decided to delete my upscales and just go with the blu-ray versions as-is. The SD blu-ray of Season 1 is better than the DVDs and AI is only improving close-up shots of people's faces, the rest isn't working.

Also, I'm not going to upscale any more episodes from the blu-ray. It's clear that for these files, AI upscaling and bicubic scaling will produce the same results. The only reason upscaling was so dramatic with Universal and Mill Creek DVDs is because those DVDs were so badly riddled with compression artifacts and the AI could lift away those artifacts. With these blu-ray discs, there's nothing to lift.

The blu-ray is good. Everyone should buy it!

I've asked if they did a new scan, no response yet, but they may not have an English speaker reading customer messages. However, compression isn't an issue on their discs. They only have four discs because the files are not HD, just 20 percent bigger than SD. And their video scan can't be improved because their files for S2-5 have all the film grain. Once the film grain is present, the smallest aspect of the film image has been captured. There is no further level of detail to be scanned from the tapes.

I tried running some Handbrake sharpening over some of the S1 upscales and... for the closeups, the sharpening did eliminate a lot of fuzziness. However, for the more distant shots, it wasn't effective. Distant shots in AI upscaling tend to have a muddy, watercolour effect. The sharpening made it even worse and it went from tolerable to distracting. It occurred to me that individual scenes could be sharpened separately from the wider angles. It also occurred to me that I should go to bed and be ready for work in the morning and not spend any more time upscaling SLIDERS outside of plug and play solutions that can run while I do my day job.

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Thinking some more about this -- NBCUniversal must have multiple copies of the master tapes and a way to duplicate them losslessly and maintain their originals. I understand that NBCUniversal does not care about SLIDERS, but I'm sure that as a corporation, they care very much about owning their properties and citing the combined value of their properties as part of their total corporate worth.

As an amateur accountant, I would severely reduce the estimated value of the SLIDERS property if NBCUniversal didn't own videotape masters of the completed episodes in their archives. If they don't have the masters, then they don't have the ability to convert the show into future formats for future sales.

I don't know what these future formats or future sales would be -- they're in the future.

But if NBCUniversal doesn't have masters, they have nothing they can mine for future sales; they can only engage in their current sales: bargain basement DVD packagers like Mill Creek, NBCU's in-house streaming service.

I would (as an amateur accountant) reduce SLIDERS' value by 80 per cent if that were the case because NBCUniversal would no longer have the ability to monetize the episodes beyond what they are doing now. Having the masters means SLIDERS has significantly more value than it does if NBCUniversal only has a box of their godawful DVDs.

I think NBCUniversal would keep the video masters. They might not use them, they might not bother to rescan them, they might hold them in utter contempt or bland indifference -- but they're not going to use them for target practice or to prop up uneven tables. Whatever we might think of multinational corporations, they're not going to allow their potential sale value to be diminished by a refusal to store some cassettes.

Anyway. Turbine Media has clearly done a maximum resolution scan of the master tapes for the standard definition blu-ray release. NBCUniversal has the masters.

As for others saying that showrunners shouldn't and wouldn't take direct fan input -- I never think a creator should simply crowdsource where their story is going and what their story is about. However, when resuming control of an existing property with an existing fanbase, I think a creator should be informed by the fans' hopes and wishes if only to use those expectations for drama and interest in their material. Fans want to see Wade Welles again and to know she's okay; Sabrina Lloyd only wants to do guest-appearances and short runs of episodes, so production realities also have to be taken into consideration.

If SLIDERS REVIVED is only going to be 6 - 10 episodes a year, I think Sabrina Lloyd would be open to returning and then Torme would reconsider; he might want to make Wade a regular or he might feel she works best as recurring. He might still reveal that Wade is dead (as Michael Mallory was dead in the Pilot) only to reveal that Wade faked her death (as Torme had intended for Michael Mallory and seeded in the Pilot).

I don't believe that Torme would be uncaring towards what the fans want or be unmoved by being informed that fans want to see Wade and Sabrina Lloyd would be willing to reprise her role. Would he be enslaved to that wish? No, but he would take it into consideration.

If you're not upset, then I look forward to not hearing from you about it again.

Someone asked if Zoe might be in the revival and I had information to offer in response. That is not a distraction. That is not a tangent. Once again, if you think it's off topic to discuss a SLIDERS actor on a SLIDERS board, that's really not my problem.

The term "master tapes" may be an overstated misnomer. I think it unlikely that each video master of each episode of SLIDERS exists solely on a single cassette per episode.

There must be multiple videotape copies of the final edit of each episode. Copies would have been needed for review, for affiliate broadcast, for overseas airings, for advertising to cut ads and create create lower resolution copies to send to press, for archival purposes should production need a clip show.

Are there 100 cassettes for each of SLIDERS 88 broadcast hours? Probably not, but the number has to be more than one even if it's less than 100. Before digital files, there must have been a sufficient number of the cassettes to send to different locations for airing and conversion to alternate standards of broadcast and for NBCUniversal to send copies to companies like Turbine seeking to produce home video products while still having quantities remaining.

I think there would have also been some expectation, perhaps even contractual, that these tapes would be returned to NBCUniversal upon expiry of syndication and affiliate broadcast requirements. Surely the Canadian SPACE channel and Canada's Global TV aren't keeping SLIDERS videocassettes still. These wouldn't be cheap, consumer grade VHS tapes; this would have to be something like Betacam or U-Matic or DV cassettes. NBCUniversal might contractually require Turbine and such to pay penalties in the event that these materials are not returned upon a set deadline.

There may also be, from an accounting standpoint, value in retaining multiple copies of video masters because they can be assigned a dollar amount, that NBCUniversal can use to present the SLIDERS property as one of their many assets that adds to their company being worth a specific amount of money should they be courting investors or seeking to be purchased.

That said, a fan editor whose name I won't give -- he apparently managed to acquire copies of videocassettes of WONDERFALLS, LOIS AND CLARK, XENA, HERCULES and other 90s and early 2000s shows. He spent tens of thousands of dollars buying them. He seemed to have found former staff members at broadcast affiliates and home video distributors and marketing firms that had kept the tapes (so maybe they're not always returned). He scanned these tapes to digital formats and ran them through AI upscaling. He crowdsourced for donations to buy more of these master tapes and, I guess, was issued a cease and desist by various studios because he abruptly shut down his crowdsourcing and went dark.

Now, these were not NBCUniversal productions. But I don't think this hobbyist fan would have been able to get master tapes if the industry standard was to only have masters existing in a quantity of one; there must be more than one. But probably less than 100.

I think that the SD blu-ray has the best possible scan of the master tapes. I just noticed: they aren't actually 640 x 480 pixels, but 20 per cent larger at 768 x 576 pixels.

The blu-ray S1 episodes are not as overcompressed as the Mill Creek/Universal S1 files, so yes, the upscale is a massive improvement on my previous efforts. My S1 upscales before looked poor; they now look very good (but not great). I've actually deleted all my S2 - S5 upscales. The blu-ray has made keeping them unnecessary. I'm just going to keep the upscaled Pilot (no need to run it twice) and the new S1 upscales.

My suggestion for Universal would be to scan the videotapes of S1, upscale it to 720p, then run it through the AI again but not increase the resolution. This would be specifically to have the AI reapply another round of texture-specific sharpening (and it would be another 15 - 20 hours on my hardware.)

It's also possible that I can run the upscaled files through a Handbrake sharpening filter. I can't do it right now, however, because Handbrake uses the graphics card and the GPU is presently occupied with upscaling the rest of Season 1.

Grizzlor, please don't hesitate to piss off. There is no "banter" about Zoe McLellan's situation and nothing inappropriate in the comments made about it. If you find the subject upsetting, that's because it's an upsetting situation, and last I checked, you don't dictate what current events people here discuss or don't discuss.

A poster remarked:

And I responded that Zoe McLellan is not currently acting.

Those are simply the facts. I recognize that they are upsetting facts, but it isn't inappropriate to share information about the accusations that McLellan and her exes have made against each other in public on social media and to media outlets. They publicized that themselves. And we have no way of knowing which accusations are true.

There is nothing inappropriate about a poster wondering if Zoe McLellan would be able to participate in a SLIDERS revival in the SLIDERS revival thread. There is nothing inappropriate about explaining why Zoe McLellan would not be able to participate in a SLIDERS revival in the SLIDERS revival thread.

There is also nothing inappropriate about discussing whether or not Sabrina Lloyd / John Rhys-Davies / Cleavant Derricks / Jerry O'Connell / Will Sasso / Linda Henning / Yee Jee Tso / Jason Gaffney / Background Extra #8 would be able to participate in a SLIDERS revival in the SLIDERS revival thread.

No one is making light of the bizarre and upsetting circumstances surrounding McLellan. All we are doing is hoping that Zoe McLellan is a good person, that the accusations against her aren't true, that her son is safe, that she is safe -- and that she'll find some way back to her life and act again (and be in a SLIDERS revival).

All SLIDERS fans love Zoe McLellan's work and I know that, while we all have different opinions, every SLIDERS fan on Earth just wants Zoe McLellan to be okay. And you have a problem with us discussing a SLIDERS actor on a SLIDERS message board in a SLIDERS thread, then you're free to not engage.

"Summer of Love" is looking well after the upscale, having gone from okay DVD quality off of the blu-ray to being a good DVD. Still nowhere near the splendor of the S2 - S5 episodes, but it's good enough.

It looks as good as my other upscales -- clear and clean (and a bit 'waxy' post-upscale) -- but it does not match the look of the Pilot upscale.

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

In fact, looking at the Pilot and "Summer of Love" on uncompressed blu-ray, it's become clear: the Pilot and "Summer of Love" have very different standards of video quality. The Pilot does not have the soft focus look of "Summer of Love" and subsequent Season 1 episodes. I'm not sure why.

Yes, there's a different cinematographer for the Pilot (Glen Macpherson), but MacPherson still seems to gravitate to low contrast, gray-oriented filming like Peter Woeste. My guess -- and it is just a guess -- is that the Pilot used one particular method for film to videotape transfer -- then the rest of Season 1 used a different method, one that created the blurriness from "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw."

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

I wonder if it was deliberate in that the film to tape process for Season 1 after the Pilot seems to have smoothed out the grain texture of the 35mm film. The Pilot episode had occasional flickers of dust and scratches across the image that makes it so distinctly filmic. "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw" are so smoothed out that it could be deliberate; an effort to present a clean image where all the dust and scratches of film have been almost airbrushed away.

It wouldn't have been particularly noticeable on a cathode ray tube television; in fact, the Pilot and "Summer of Love" didn't look any different to me when I watched it on the SPACE channel in the late-90s aside from the absence of dust and scratches after the Pilot. But in a digital format, the smoothing is deeply destructive because it destroys the film grain that, in high definition, presents fine detail.

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

I guess the Season 2 team went back to a film to tape method that left the grain alone.

In the original upscale I did of "Summer of Love," you couldn't make out anyone's hair: the Professor's beard and the top of Rembrandt's head was just a vague, dark, digital fuzziness. Now the hair is distinct and defined. Everything still has the soft-focus look of all the S1 episodes, but it's still more in-focus and closer to the Pilot episode without being a match for it.

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

I'm starting to wonder if in this world of releasing TV shows from the 1960s - 2000s in new formats, we need some more categories besides SD (standard definition) and HD (high definition).

SD: This is standard definition video and primarily refers to 480i video as found in interlaced DVD releases. Within the SD category would be:

SD-LF: Standard Definition Low Fidelity. This is video like the Mill Creek DVD releases of pretty much anything where adequate video files have been hypercompressed to fit on the smallest and cheapest DVDs to fit entire shows onto a small number of discs to hit an extremely low, direct-to-bargain bin price point. SD-LF video is covered in compression artifacts under which is a blurry image that looks more like a dull approximation of a TV show than the show itself.

SD-MF: Standard Definition Medium Fidelity. This is standard definition 480i video that has been moderately compressed, standard across most DVD releases of the late 90s and early 2000s where the video has been compressed to an extremely middling level of quality. Most DVD box sets of entire seasons had a middling level of video quality because each disc had to hold slightly more than a two hour movie and the files had to be compressed, but were still of sufficient quality to be watchable and even mildly upscalable on an HDTV. GILMORE GIRLS, BUFFY and ANGEL would be considered SD-MF. SLIDERS from Universal would barely make the grade.

SD-HF: Standard Definition High Fidelity is where a DVD only needs to hold 1.5 to 2 hours of video and can therefore have bit rate higher than DVDs needing to hold 4 episodes of a TV show. SD-HF reaches the limit of what video quality a file could hold while still fitting onto a standard definition video medium and being decodable by a DVD player as a DVD. Any single film release on DVD fits into this category.

SD-UF: Standard Definition Ultra Fidelity is where standard definition video files are encoded with a higher file size than what could actually fit onto DVDs or standard definition storage media and beyond what could actually be decoded by a DVD player. While still a standard definition image in terms of resolution, SD-UF video has a level of video quality in sharpness, detail and clarity that exceeds what is possible on a DVD. To qualify as SD-UF, such video must be scalable from 480 pixels high to 1080 pixels high without any perceptible loss of quality when viewed at sofa to TV distance. The only example I've seen of this is, um, the German blu-ray set of SLIDERS.

HD: High definition video, refers to video that is 720 or 1080 pixels high. Within this category is:

HD-A: High Definition Approximate. This is standard definition video that has been upscaled to 720 or 1080 pixels high via machine-learning developed algorithms that are trained to recognize any conceivable form of texture that might appear in a video (grass, skin, clothing, sky, etc.) and remove any blur, distortions or artifacts over these textures that result from compression or scaling the video to a larger size. This is an attempt to make a standard definition video seem closer to high definition through upscaling rather than rescanning the original film elements. The STARGATE SG-1 blu-ray release of Seasons 1 - 7 were produced this way.

HDF-SDFX: High Definition Film and Standard Definition Effects. These are video files where the live action sequences have been rescanned from film for a high definition image. However, any sequences involving special effects applied in post are taken from the standard definition master tapes. The distinction between high definition live action and standard definition may be jarring to some viewers and algorithmically upscaling the effects does not change this categorization. LOIS AND CLARK and BABYLON 5 are HDF-SDFX.

HD-S: High Definition Scan is when a video file is high definition through a high definition scan of the original elements. Examples include the HD versions of DAWSON'S CREEK, QUANTUM LEAP and CHARLIE'S ANGELS.

HD-FXR: High Definition with Effects Reconstruction is when a show is rebuilt from rescanning the original elements, but all the special effects are recreated for high definition as opposed to being retransferred from the original elements. HD-FXR shows include STAR TREK and STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION in which the original film was rescanned to HD, but all the effects were remade and the original effects merely served as reference.

HD-DG: High Definition Digital in which the video is HD because it was shot digitally in the first place. Examples include the post-Season 7 seasons of STARGATE SG-1 and most modern TV shows.

I've played the raw blu-ray video files on my computer and I can assure you that the excellent SD video quality of the Season 2 episodes isn't from my player or TV. Turbine's video quality is just that good. :-)

Why are the blu-ray files so good while the streaming versions are so terrible?
My theory: Turbine Media Group acquired copies of the master tapes from NBCUniversal and created their own digital files from the tapes. I have never seen The Hub's broadcasts, but if the quality was superior to streaming services and the DVDs, they may have done the same.

Bargain Bin Operation: Mill Creek said they didn't have the resources to do their own scans of the master tapes, but Mill Creek is a low budget operation. They cram whatever files they get onto as few discs as possible for the lowest price point possible. As you said, their SLIDERS release was for people who vaguely remembered the show and would pay the discounted $20.

Even Mill Creek's blu-ray releases, described as adequate in various reviews, compress as many episodes onto as few discs as possible (although reviews indicate that the compression isn't too damaging as the HD files have margin for reduction).

A Different League: In contrast, Turbine Media Group is a big budget prestige operation; their website sells blu-rays of classic horror movies from the 1970s to 1990ss in HD and 4K with steelbook packaging, vintage packaging art that's had digital aging effects to create a sense of authenticity.

Rescans and Remasters: Turbine advertises new releases of films where they have done their own 4K transfers and sound remasterings of DRAGONHEART, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, TWISTER, CRASH by David Cronenberg (and with Cronenberg's supervision). Not all of their blu-rays claim to be new transfers, however. It looks like they do remasterings if the files they've received are not up to their standards. Even for the blu-rays where they seem to be using the studio's files, they have Turbine-exclusive commentaries such as with CANDYMAN, THE HILLS HAVE EYES and AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON.

Existing Infrastructure: This tells me that Turbine has a facility for rescanning film negatives and videotapes into high quality digital formats, remastering sound and audio, and recording audio commentaries, and they were able to put SLIDERS master tapes through their in-house processes rather than taking whatever NBCUniversal sent Mill Creek and Netflix. It would definitely have cost Turbine time, but they wouldn't have had to rework their operation or purchase new equipment because they were already using that equipment for their remasters of TWISTER and whatnot.

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Season 1 Restoration
It takes 10 hours to upscale each episode of SLIDERS and that's after taking some time to copy the files to my hard drive and convert them to constant framerate with progressive video. Season 1 on the blu-ray looks like a good DVD transfer: clear but lacking in fine detail and a little fuzzy. That fuzziness is accentuated when stretching the image from 480 pixels to 720p; I think Topaz can likely reduce that. It's going to take me about 3 - 4 days.

The Pilot looked like an okay DVD video. Upscaling made it a very good DVD video. I expect the rest of Season 1 when upscaled will fall in line and look like good DVDs. That's nice, but not at the same level as the Season 2 blu-ray SD episodes which surpass the limits of DVD quality.

An Impromptu Scale
Let's create a scale of HD video quality. We'll put a blank screen at 0 out of 10. And we'll consider, say, a 1080p blu-ray of the latest Marvel movie at 10 out of 10.

Abysmal to Poor: I would put the Mill Creek DVDs at 1 out of 10 which is to say that there is a video image and it qualifies as being more than a blank screen. I would rate the Universal DVDs at 3 out of 10; they're viewable but blurry and covered in compression artifacts.

Middle of the Road: I would rank the Universal DVD version of the Pilot episode and the blu-ray version of Season 1 at 5 out of 10. Not overcompressed, decent enough DVD quality, but still on the blurry side.

Better Than Average: I would put my upscale of the Pilot and Season 2 - 5 episodes at 6 out of 10: serviceable, not distractingly poor, nowhere near a 1080p Marvel movie release, but certainly more good than bad.

Very Good: However, I would put the blu-ray SD release of Seasons 2 - 5 at 7.5 out of 10 in terms of HD presentation. They are still not HD, but the flaws of SD on an HDTV are largely absent and all the merits of sharpness and detail and clarity are strongly in evidence. Put your face up to the screen and you can see it's blurrier than a true HD image and short of the crystaline quality of CAPTAIN MARVEL or a Netflix episode of RIVERDALE -- but who actually watches TV that way?

I can get the other Season 1 episodes to 6 out of 10 with Topaz. However, it's really just for my own personal viewing. Season 1 on the SD blu-ray looks good enough and most people who'd play SLIDERS on blu-ray have a player or TV that can sharpen up the image.

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Future AI Upscaling
Once Season 1 is finished, I'll certainly AI upscale "As Time Goes By" to 4K. However, it could take 24 hours and my expectations are not high.

Topaz upscaling does not actually add detail to the video. Instead, it removes flaws. When you stretch the Universal DVD version of the Pilot or "As Time Goes By" from 640x480 to 1080p on an HDTV, you get an image that is stretched to the point of blurriness and the blocky artifacts of compression are even more present.

Cleanup: Topaz removes these distortions of stretching and compression with clever combinations of increased pixel contrast that's applied specifically to different categories of texture. Topaz's result is still a stretched image, but with all the blur and artifacts alleviated with pixel contrast and deblocking so that it resembles an HD image on an HDTV. However, that high definition look is an illusion; Topaz is not adding any detail, it's just clearing away the obstructions that distract from the detail underneath the stretch and compress.

The fogginess of the S1 episodes even in an uncompressed format is, in its way, a form of compression. It's from crunching down a 35mm film image to a standard definition videotape. And Topaz can alleviate some of the fogginess of the poor quality film-to-tape transfer in S1.

Hitting the Ceiling: In the case of the S2 - S5 blu-ray files: there is no fuzziness. There are no artifacts of compression. I don't think Topaz can do any more cleanup because the image is already clean. It's a standard definition 640x480 image, but the detail and depth contained within those 640x480 pixels are sufficient to scale to an HD screen without blurriness. The SD blu-ray version of "As Time Goes By" has more film graininess than the upscale. Within that SD graininess is texture that shows you pores in the actors' skin and their individual strands of hair.

I don't believe Topaz can improve this image. Topaz tends to smooth out grain in video files when upscaling them, extrapolating and increasing the pixels around the grains to create the illusion of detail, and ultimately producing high resolution video files that lack film grain texture. Topaz would likely, in bringing these files from SD to HD, cover all this detail with a waxy sheen. I suspect that the blu-ray video files, outside of S1 needing a sharpening pass, are best left alone.

My view: S2 - S5 on blu-ray are the best possible digital versions of the standard definition master tapes. They can't be improved by our current level of AI upscaling technology; at this point, the only improvement would be to rescan the original film to 4K and rebuild HD versions of the episodes.

(It'll be good to find out for sure, of course.)

Standard Definition Detail: Also, my upscaled video files, for wider shots, often had a watercolour blurriness because the AI couldn't lock onto any fine detail in order to increase it from 480 pixels to 720p. Examples include Arturo-2 holding his book in "Prince of Wails" with the text being unreadable; the stairs to Quinn's front porch in "Into the Mystic" being a mess of overlapping lines, or the sliders standing at a distance at the end of "Time and Again World". The upscale made these shots look like garbled video data. But in the blu-ray SD version, these shots look deliberately soft focused.

The blu-ray is just better. The DVDs have been garbage; my upscales have been garbage with some polish. Get the blu-ray. :-)

I will try AI upscaling the blu-ray SD version of "As Time Goes By" to 4K. It will take at least a day. But based on what I'm seeing, the results will probably be the same as having Handbrake stretch the image to 4K in 20 - 30 minutes and it will lose image detail and fail to gain anything.

I'm very unclear on what's going on here and McLellan has not spoken to defend herself. A few years ago, McLellan accused her ex of raping her son. The man was arrested and jailed, but due to lack of evidence, he was released. An ex-boyfriend of McLellan's said that he'd spent a lot of time with her and her son and did not believe that the boy had been assaulted (which is ultimately hearsay on both ends at this point), there were claims that McLellan had tried to hire a prison guard to murder her ex while he was in jail (hearsay again) and McLellan's ex petitioned for custody of the child. McLellan vanished, going dark on her social media, going completely off the grid, and she took her son with her. We have no way of knowing which side of this conflict is true and we should all withhold judgement until new information comes to light.

But yes. Holy Hannah in a handbasket. It's messed up. I was thinking of starting a thread, "WTF is Going On With Zoe?" but COVID has really been taking up too much of my brain.

I received the German blu-ray set of SLIDERS this evening. It's region free, plays on my Region 1 blu-ray player. This blu-ray set is the set that Universal and Mill Creek should have released. I am delighted with the video quality. The Season 1 episodes offer a good DVD quality image.

For whatever reason, Universal's DVD release has an excellent scan of the Pilot on DVD with a high bit rate. It's a clear 640x480 image, it looks good when upscaled on an HDTV, it looks amazing when AI upscaled by Topaz to 720p video. However, for the subsequent episodes, Universal overcompressed the digital files so severely that they are fuzzy, blurry, washed out, hazy and Mill Creek's release brought the Pilot episode down to the level of the other 86 episodes and made everything even blurrier.

On the blu-ray release, the pilot and all 86 episodes that follow appear to be at the same level of quality as Universal's DVD release of the Pilot. The files have not been compressed into blurry haziness. I can use Season 1, Episodes 2 - 9 from this blu-ray to get a great 720p upscale. However, that's less necessary because the high DVD level video quality of this blu-ray is so good that even lightly stretching the 640x480 image to 1080p on my HDTV yields very pleasant results. The stretched image doesn't have the crystalline sharpness that AI upscaling would add, but it still looks pretty good and is devoid of the blocky blurriness of the Universal and Mill Creek releases.

I'm not clear if Universal provided high quality digital files to this German blu-ray company, Turbine Medien, or if Turbine got a hold of the master tapes and did their own scans. It's peculiar that the files on this DVD are not the files used for streaming services. This blu-ray uses standard definition video files, but they are well-scanned, high bit-rate standard definition files.

I'm going to upscale Episodes 2 - 9 of Season 1 again and then upscale "As Time Goes By" from Season 2 and see if these SD blu-ray files yield better results than the Universal and Mill Creek DVDs. The Universal DVDs for Seasons 2 - 3 weren't as compressed as Season 1's post-pilot episodes. The Mill Creek versions of Seasons 4 - 5 were compressed but not to the point of eliminating the grain in the 16mm film. It's possible that the upscaled results for post-Season 1 episodes won't be any better even with the less-compressed blu-ray files. But it would be interesting to see.

DOCTOR WHO's showrunner after Chris Chibnall has been announced. It's Russell T. Davies. Again. Davies, having revived DOCTOR WHO in 2005 and done four seasons and a year of specials, will be returning to the show as executive producer. DOCTOR WHO will also no longer be produced entirely in-house at the BBC; Bad Wolf Productions, a Welsh company founded by Davies' former DW partners Julie Gardner and Jane Tranter, will join the BBC in running DOCTOR WHO as a Bad Wolf/BBC co-production.

From a public relations standpoint, Davies draws a lot of media attention and interest, especially since he saved DOCTOR WHO when it had been off the air for almost two decades. The Chibnall era has been horribly reviewed and a critical misfire.

From a creative standpoint, it strikes me as a lateral move from Chibnall. Davies' first season of DOCTOR WHO showed that while he has a lot of passion and love for DOCTOR WHO, he is an extremely weak screenwriter with some truly bizarre tics. Nearly all of Davies' first season scripts have the Doctor standing around incompetently while a guest star sacrifices their life to defeat the villain. Even with Davies writing a more verbally assertive Doctor after the first season, guest stars continued to die while the Doctor stood there ineffectually. Viewers who found Jodie Whittaker passive won't see an improvement of this is retained.

Davies was also a deeply repetitive writer. Every year featured an invasion of Earth with increasing scale and mass casualties with the Doctor 'saving' the day only after Earth had been devastated with another invasion sure to come by the end of the next season. In the end, it was Davies' successor, Steven Moffat, who erased all the invasions from continuity as Earth had become an alien battlefield rather than a relatable version of the viewers' world.

Davies had a peculiar habit of fat shaming in his scripts, constantly calling out people as overweight. Davies had a strange formula of ensuring that the first person the companion talked to would die. Davies created truly horrific fates for guest characters without comment or emotional reaction such as one poor character who was forced to spend eternity as a face with no body on a slab of concrete. I find Davies' writing uncomfortable in how it presents the writer.

Since his departure from DW, Davies has conducted himself with honour and respect. He wrote a novelization of his DOCTOR WHO pilot and made sure to include references to Steven Moffat and Chris Chibnall's writing, a delightful inclusivity. Also, in that pilot episode, Davies killed an entire family (slightly off camera), but in his novelization, Davies rewrote the scene so that the father sacrifices himself to save his wife and children who now survive in this version of the story -- which struck me as Davies regretting his savagery. Also, in a DW anthology, Davies contributed a cartoon in which he undid a brutal character death and revealed that this character (Harriet Jones) had survived after all. He declared in an interview that his story was canon.

When Davies' original lead actor and Doctor, Christopher Eccleston, insulted Davies in the press, Davies took the high road and declared that Eccleston was free to say whatever he liked, but that as Eccleston's (former) showrunner, he had "a duty of care" and would never engage in arguments with him through interviews.

Davies also wrote two volumes of an autobiography, THE WRITER'S TALE, where he confessed that during his time on DOCTOR WHO, he had engaged in rushed hackwork due to deadlines demanding that he put forward scripts that he felt were not ready for filming but could not be revised any further due to time constraints.

From what I can tell, the BBC has struggled to find a post-Steven Moffat showrunner. Chibnall, as Temporal Flux notes, was not selected as much as the only person who didn't refuse the role. I've heard (unsubstantiated rumours) that running DOCTOR WHO is considered the worst job in UK media because the BBC expects the showrunner to write 4 - 6 scripts a year while editing 9 - 12 additional scripts and overseeing all other aspects of production. Most UK shows have smaller episode orders and smaller scales of production so that a showrunner can be that directly hands-on, but DOCTOR WHO is on a much larger scale than a sitcom like NOT GOING OUT.

On American shows with even larger episode counts, showrunners will hire numerous additional writers and space out their own scripts over the course of a year, delegate physical production to subordinates with a massive team of staffers. The BBC has refused to fund DOCTOR WHO to allow the showrunner to hire a sufficient number of co-writers or subordinates and expects one showrunner lead in addition to handling what should really be the work of 5 - 10 people.

This is (supposedly/theoretically) why nobody really wants the job. It looks like Moffat was able to convince the BBC to give him longer breaks between his seasons and longer pauses in the middle of the seasons. This allowed him to recharge, although I think it's fair to say that his first episode as showrunner is certainly not as inventive and passionate as his final script. Thanks to the breaks, Moffat was able to maintain a baseline of quality.

It looks to me like Chibnall has been unable to get more time to write his scripts and has fallen into the same situation Davies confessed to in his autobiography. Chibnall's debut with Jodie Whittaker was a serviceable PREDATOR ripoff. Since then, he's fallen apart badly with scripts that are empty collections of set pieces without sense or characterization and reflect a writer hacking out pages to meet his deadlines.

I can only hope that Bad Wolf Productions taking over management will grant Russell T. Davies time to draft his scripts, resources to hire cowriters and a budget that lets him delegate effectively. With both the BBC and Bad Wolf funding the second Davies-era, it should have a lot more money than before.

Had another idea that I'm trying -- I'm running the Season 2 premiere of ALEX MACK through Topaz, but I'm not increasing the resolution. I'm leaving it at 640 x 480 pixels. I'm just using Topaz to remove the blurry blockiness of the standard definition image. It's possible the image will scale better to an HDTV screen even at this cleaned up 480p level.

It's also possible that Topaz can bring the cleaned up version to 720p better -- although I doubt that will be effective. From what I can tell, the AI requires film grain to extract and expand on detail and Topaz tends to remove grain.

Recently, I took the DAWSON'S CREEK extended series finale DVD and upscaled it to 720p. The entire show was recently re-released on Netflix in high definition with the original film rescanned to 4K. It's a beautiful image, but extremely grainy due to the 16mm film. Also, the high definition release doesn't include the extended series finale, only the televised, shorter version. I upscaled the extended finale DVD and it looks good in AI-rebuilt 720p. However, the 16mm film graininess on the DVD is completely gone after the upscale; the AI requires film grain to work, but it also smooths it out completely in its final result.

I may take another run at SLIDERS' Season 1 episodes after this -- not upscaling, just running Topaz to produce deblocked/cleaned up 480p video files. Unless the blu-ray set shows up before I'm ready.

I could be WRONG about this, but I seriously doubt that a multinational corporation would ever sell one of its own franchises outside of one corporation purchasing another the way Disney bought Marvel and then bought Lucasfilm and then bought FOX and will conceivably someday buy Sony.

Just by owning SLIDERS, NBCUniversal can claim that the franchise is worth 500,000 - 1.5 million and add that to their 'value' should they someday wish to put their corporation up for sale to another corporation. I can't see them selling it piecemeal.

I can see NBCUniversal licensing SLIDERS the way FOX licensed THE X-FILES to the company IDW which enabled IDW to produce a highly successful comic book series (THE X-FILES: SEASON 10, THE X-FILES: SEASON 11, MILLLENNIUM, THE X-FILES: YEAR ZERO, THE X-FILES: ORIGINS) as well as an anthology series and a board game, all of which was tremendously profitable until Chris Carter was able to bring a TV version of Seasons 10 - 11 to broadcast which was so poorly received that it killed the entire IDW tie-in line and the TV show as well.

But, I mean, I could be wrong. :-)

And the Fresh Prince is getting a reboot! It will be Serious.
https://variety.com/2021/tv/news/fresh- … 235052847/

I moved your post to Random Thoughts about TV, Film and Media because I wanted to reply to it.

I think the entire fan preservationist culture is amazing, incredibly cool from both a technological standpoint and a historical standpoint. The wish to take old materials that were not stored and preserved properly and restore them to be presentable on modern audio-visual equipment is incredible. The first time I really encountered this was when Petr Harmácek took laserdiscs of the and blu-rays of original STAR WARS trilogy and began combining them so that the original effects would cover up the Special Edition effects. Over time, people contributed rescans of matte paintings, scans of the theatrical negatives, and now Harmácek has successfully rebuilt the original versions of STAR WARS, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK and RETURN OF THE JEDI and they're in high definition.

There was, awhile ago, a fan editor who had somehow managed to acquire original master tapes of a bunch of shows: XENA, LOIS AND CLARK, WONDERFALLS and he was running through his own personally created upscaling algorithms with multiple passes to create fake-HD versions of all these shows. I sent him a message once and never heard back from him and he later took his site offline, probably because he was soliciting donations in exchange for providing upscaled versions of copyrighted materials. I was sorry not to interact more with him, and I won't name him because he clearly wished to go dark on his project, but it's still interesting.

His process was neat: he'd first acquire the original video masters of shows he liked. He'd convert them to a digital format and save them, not as video files, but as soundtracks and each frame as a PNG file. He'd then run each PNG file -- each frame -- through multiple passes of various upscaling processes to get them to 1080p. Then he'd recombine the frames and soundtracks into an MKV video file. This was, he said on his now offline website, very expensive, and his equipment and acquiring video masters had apparently run to about $60,000 USD, some of which had come from crowdsourcing donations.

I assume Warner Bros. or some other studio went after him. Harmácek hasn't gotten in any legal trouble because he never accepted any money, just materials, assistance, and later, a job in film restoration.

The upscale of BIRDS OF PREY's pilot was pretty impressive. Topaz did a great job of taking an image that was only 380 pixels high and expanding it to 720p and making it HDTV presentable. The second episode, however, is the first one with the opening titles with a replacement theme song and that was a bit troublesome.

BIRDS OF PREY had a neat and somewhat unusual approach: the first 4 - 6 seconds of Aimee Allen's "Revolution" would play for the last 4 - 6 seconds of the teaser -- followed by a bursting transition into the song and the opening titles. DAWSON'S CREEK often had the theme song start in the teaser too. I haven't seen it anywhere else, but I'm sure these aren't the only two shows to do it.

The BIRDS OF PREY DVD release has been clumsily edited to mute the sound on the teaser (to remove the notes of "Revolution") and play the replacement music.

I spent 10 minutes trying to re-edit the sound, and I think if I had more time, I could have probably matched the original episodes, but I had packages to mail, reports to write and carpets to vacuum, so I just re-edited the teasers to end 2 - 3 seconds earlier and fade to black before fading into the credits -- like a more conventional TV show.

A bit of a shame. However, I'm taking a break from upscaling BIRDS OF PREY to upscale another series -- THE SECRET WORLD OF ALEX MACK.

Curiously, this is another DVD release from our old enemies at Mill Creek who released the low bit-rate COMPLETE SLIDERS. Also curiously, the results on this ALEX MACK are looking good so far, much like Seasons 4 - 5 in the MILL CREEK version of SLIDERS. It looks like both ALEX MACK and Seasons 4 - 5 of SLIDERS were filmed on 16mm film which even on compressed DVD is very upscalable.

While I wait for SLIDERS: THE COMPLETE SERIES to arrive from German (!) on standard definition blu-ray (!!?) for another run at AI upscaling Season 1, I'm attempting another upscale on the single season WB series BIRDS OF PREY. Bizarrely, the show was released in non-anamorphic widescreen on DVD. By this, I mean that the show was broadcast in 16:9. However, the DVD releases the episodes in 4:3 -- with the 16:9 image within that 4:3 box. So it's even more low resolution than a normal widescreen DVD should be.

I've used MakeMKV to rip the discs, and used Handbrake to decomb and crop the video to the 16:9 image in the 4:3 box. I wonder what Topaz can make of it.

I'm also taking the opportunity to fix the opening titles. The show originally broadcast with Aimee Allen's "Revolution" for the opening title song, an excellent girl power song matching the show's content in which Ashley Scott as the Huntress beats up criminals with her bare hands every week while Dina Meyer's Barbara guides her from the Clocktower HQ and Rachel Skarsten's Dinah learns from both of them. The DVD replaced "Revolution" with a track that has no identified author or performer that's a little too sweet when "Revolution" was perfect for the angry energy of the Huntress. I'm going to edit "Revolution" back into my upscale.

This one time, I was watching it with my niece, a massive SUPERNATURAL fan:

LAUREN: "So... the girl in the black leather is Batman's daughter and her mother was Catwoman who's dead and the girl with red hair used to be Batgirl but now she's Oracle and the blonde girl is Black Canary's daughter?"

IB: " ... Lauren. The woman in black leather punches villains! Honestly, I think I might be overexplaining it."

LAUREN: "The entire show is overexplained!"

IB: "Ashley Scott. Fists! Villain's faces."

LAUREN: "I am seriously only watching when Rob Benedict is onscreen."

It's news. I don't know if it's great because for all I know, the blu-ray quality is the same as the Universal DVD set and unfit for upscaling.

I don't know what to expect. I've never been able to get a hold of anyone who has both the Universal DVD sets and the blu-ray. I did try upscaling the Mill Creek version of "Summer of Love," however, and the Mill Creek video quality is simply too poor for Topaz to rebuild any of the detail. I am a bit worried that the blu-ray version of the Season 1 episodes will be bad as Universal's DVDs.

THE MATRIX RELOADED is, in terms of incident and set pieces, filled with onscreen activity. However, by the end of RELOADED, the story hasn't made very much progress. It's established early in RELOADED that the machines are advancing on the human city, that the Smith program is still taking over the Matrix -- and by the end, the story is still in pretty much the same place except that Neo is unconscious and the Smith program has made it into the real world.

The revelations about Neo being only the latest iteration of many 'ones' to keep the human race occupied with a token resistance -- it's intriguing, but it doesn't affect the situation as the machines are still advancing on the human city and the Smith program is still taking over the Matrix. I think that's why most people came out of RELOADED feeling no enthusiasm for a third film and that's why REVOLUTIONS made only 58 per cent of RELOADED's ticket sales.

Neo didn't die in REVOLUTIONS. While Smith overrode Neo's in-Matrix code and replaced him, Neo and the Matrix machine core set a trap where Smith overwriting Neo allowed the Matrix machines to send a deletion command through Neo's physical body that would delete the Smith program along with all the viral copies.

The first MATRIX movie establishes that an in-Matrix death will cause the real world body to die as well. ("The body cannot survive without the mind.") The second MATRIX movie has Smith overwrite the Bane character within the Matrix and then occupy his body outside the Matrix. However, it's not specified if Bane's mind remains intact somewhere in the Matrix or in his own body (until Neo was forced to kill him in the real world).

In REVOLUTIONS, Smith's erasure after supposedly erasing Neo would (theoretically) kill Neo's body as well. However, after Smith is deleted, the machines are shown maintaining Neo's body which remains at least physically alive, meaning Neo's mind remains intact once the Smith possession is cleared. This is further underlined when the machines leave Neo 'jacked in' to the Matrix and move his body deeper into the machine city. Neo's is consciousness is left in the (digital) hands of the machines.

My guess would be that, not wanting to spur the creation of another Matrix-manipulator, the machines kept Neo alive but rolled back his memories to the point before the first MATRIX movie, allowing Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo to live the lives they'd have lived had Quinn never created sliding. I mean -- the machines must have reset Neo to live the life he would have lived as "Thomas Anderson" had Morpheus never found him.

Morpheus actually died in THE MATRIX ONLINE. I'm not sure if RESURRECTIONS will take it into account or not; the Wachowskis considered THE MATRIX ONLINE canon at the time, but that time was 2005 - 2009 and nobody can experience it outside of YouTube videos and podcast recollections. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=simXgMvl-bc

While I love spinoff media, even I will concede that it's a bad idea to write a sequel to material that the general audience can't access. Laurence Fishburne claims he isn't in RESURRECTIONS, but perhaps he is and is under a non-disclosure agreement.

Trinity is definitely dead as of REVOLUTIONS.

I wonder if the Morpheus and Trinity in RESURRECTIONS are saved files that were redeployed at different points. Perhaps Morpheus, when held prisoner by the agents in the first MATRIX, had his consciousness copied and saved but his data was impossible to read until the time of RESURRECTIONS when the machines finally developed the means to build an in-Matrix version based on their copy and put it to use for reasons unknown.

Perhaps Morpheus is a copy but not of the machines' making, but a saved version stored in the data banks of the Nebuchadnezzar ship and Trinity is a saved version as well, with the technology to create Matrix versions of them only developed in the present day of RESURRECTIONS. Perhaps an earlier version of Morpheus has been uploaded to the Matrix while a version of the Trinity code has been retroactively added to be chronologically connected to the reset Thomas Anderson code and permitted to age alongside him.

I think the first MATRIX film, in retrospect, has always been a metaphor for transgenderism. I'm not sure what RELOADED is about at all. REVOLUTIONS is a film about free will. I feel both sequels lost the metaphor of the first one, and I hope that RESURRECTIONS will get it back.

I've decided to attempt another upscale from 480p to 720 on the first season of SLIDERS (Episodes 2 - 9). The results of AI upscaling on the Pilot and Seasons 2 - 5 have been pretty good. While Universal and Mill Creek overcompressed the video files to fit more episodes on fewer discs, underneath the blockiness was film grain in which AI video upscaling could read and rebuild detail, so that from Season 2 onward, you could see the texture of the sliders' jackets and a crisp rendering of Rembrandt's hair and the scar on Quinn's face. The pilot was also scanned at a strong bit rate where the subsequent episodes were overcompressed for DVD.

However, Episodes 2 - 9 of Season 1 seem even further compressed than Seasons 2 - 5. Upscaling on these episodes has yielded an image that remains fuzzy and blurry in stark contrast to the strong results of upscaling Seasons 2 - 5. Compare a shot from the Pilot episode (left). This same shot is used in the credits of the remaining Season 1 episodes (shown on the right). You can see that the image quality is severely reduced.

I'm not sure why this over-overcompression is specific to Season 1's episodes after the Pilot. I can only guess that Universal's home video department compressed the Pilot to a reasonable bit rate only to be told that Season 1 would be released on one disc or two single layer discs. Perhaps that's why the remaining Season 1 episodes were encoded to be so small, only for the home video department to decide to release Seasons 1 - 2 together in one set on higher capacity discs, leading to a higher bit rate after Season 1.

I'm told that the German blu-ray release (all 88 episodes in standard definition on blu-ray discs) has the least amount of compression and is a marked improvement on the Universal DVD releases, and I have been able to buy a used copy off eBay. It will take anywhere from 6 - 8 weeks to arrive by post.

I'm hoping that the blu-ray will contain decent standard definition files for Episodes 2 - 9, or at least files good enough for AI upscaling them to bring them to the same level of video quality as the AI upscales on Seasons 2 - 5.

The is an even more painful truth at hand: Disney isn't an awful company as much as it's a corporation and corporations exist to extract wealth and resources with absolutely no regard for those exploited or destroyed in the process. Disney is just like every other corporation.

Disney pays its theme park workers a pittance because the money they withhold goes into bloated executive salaries. Disney reopened its theme parks in the middle of a global pandemic because there was money to be made from the COVID deniers who'd attend. Disney outsources merchandising to sweatshops and slave labour to increase their markup on T-shirts and dolls.

Amazon overworks its warehouse and delivery workers to the point where they're forced to urinate in bottles to meet their packaging and driving quotas. Walmart regularly cuts hours and increases responsibilities while limiting workers to part time status to avoid paying benefits. Uber drivers often live in their cars. These corporations are happy to leave their workforce dependent on the US government providing food stamps and health care.

Disney and its ilk assume that once they've used up their existing workers, turnover will induce the next round of impoverished and desperate people to fill an ever diminishing number of positions until they're all replaced by robots.

I imagine Disney is less than a decade away from licensing actor's faces to graft onto body doubles and to use in perpetuity.

In the BLACK WIDOW case, Disney turned its exploitative attitude on a worker with a high media profile, a popular image, a contract and a legal team.

Disney holds Captain America, Iron Man, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men and heroes who, if they existed in real life, would devote themselves to bringing Disney down.

In terms of a job search -- the best advice from a generalist perspective is to locate specific advice that's relevant to your region from people whose specialty is helping other people find jobs. In my youth, I stumbled around a lot before finding the Quinn Mallorys and Professor Arturos of job searching -- mostly people in the not for profit sector. But there were many wrong turns and blind alleys when looking for them.

After university, I meandered and floundered in the face of job hunting advice from random acquaintances or family members, advice that included writing 5 - 6 page autobiographies for every job application or being told to apply to positions with requirements I didn't meet.

Some of this advice came from people offering anecdotal experiences that weren't as universal as they thought; some came from people whose last attempts to find positions were decades in the past meaning their suggestions were no longer applicable; some came from people more interested in appearing knowledgeable than providing useful knowledge.

Eventually, I realized that none of these people were capable of or interested in helping me. I sought out a temp agency, thinking their purpose was to find people jobs. However, four temp agencies provided no guidance, only phone calls saying a position was available and that I had to consent to have my name put forward followed by a phone call saying someone else had been chosen. I soon realized these agencies only cared about claiming to have available candidates to employers but were not concerned with placing their candidates with employers.

Later, I found a city program that finally helped me unlearn all the bad advice I'd previously received. There was a tax and donation-funded program that offered a one hour workshop on how to write a resume that was tailored to the specific job opening as well as a one hour workshop on how to prepare for job interviews by anticipating all possible questions, preparing responses and rehearsing them in advance. I imagine that today, they would educate participants in how to deal with online application forms.

This served me well for finding some entry level work in a stage theatre and in after school tutoring. Later, I had to find another employment assistance service that was able to review my work experience and education and identify the specific fields that could conceivably hire someone with my abilities and this helped me find a first step towards what would, after many years, lead to a management position.

It was a long and difficult road that, even after these sessions, required extensive effort. When I was unemployed, I was filling out 30 job applications a day, reviewing them one day later before sending them, and working on the next 30 for the day. When I was employed part time but in need of better earnings, I was filling out 10 job applications per weekday and 60 over the weekend. I would get about one response for every 20 applications.

I don't know what services are available to whoever is reading this because this geography will determine what is and isn't available and whether or not it's affordable. The assistance I received came from free services paid for by government grants or fundraising and were specific to my city, and some of them don't even exist any more.

However, the basic principle is the same: if you are experiencing difficulties, you must find expert advice from someone whose specialty is conveying the principles and practices of effective job searches and job applications. This advice may be on a limited basis if you can't afford to pay for it.

You will also need to be able to distinguish between effective and ineffective advice. Effective advice is specific, offering clear steps to well-defined results that are plausible and achievable within the present day and current circumstances. Ineffective advice is based in empty platitudes and anecdotes relevant only to the person sharing them and achievable only within a specific time period that no longer exists (if at all).

It sounds like a third dose would provide some very long lasting protection, but you'd conceivably need one again in 18 - 24 months.

**

Afghanistan is bad, but the current White House administration made a lot of predictions about low casualties and costs that would come with pulling out and those predictions have proven wrong.

**

Wondering how Slider_Quinn21 is faring with the Kleannara KF94s. I wear masks that are almost the same, but yesterday, I was wandering the park with my favourite actress and the air was hot, getting even hotter through my mask, causing my airways to narrow in response.

I ended up having to take off my KF94 equivalent with its dual droplet blocking layers and put on a thinner surgical mask with only one droplet blocking layer. This one, I could breathe through. I might have to wear these until fall weather arrives.

I will get to WHAT IF soon.

**

Clark Gregg was apparently so worried about whether or not AGENTS OF SHIELD is canon that he called Kevin Feige to inquire. Feige replied that Gregg should not doubt the power and importance and influences of the fans, especially the fans of the ABC, Hulu and Netflix shows.

https://comicbook.com/marvel/news/clark … canon-mcu/
https://open.spotify.com/episode/03196snR5x4XdhTOsV6rf8

Joss Whedon killed Coulson in AVENGERS and then wrote the pilot episode of AGENTS OF SHIELD in which Coulson is resurrected. When asked why Coulson wasn't in AGE OF ULTRON, Whedon said he found it too difficult to explain to the casual audience why Coulson was alive again; most of the feature film viewers would not have watched an ABC TV series. That has, fairly or unfairly, kept Coulson out of present day Marvel films and Disney+ shows.

Personally, I think it makes sense that AGENTS OF SHIELD won't be directly acknowledged or contradicted. It was a show about a secret organization engaged in covert operations. Very few people on WANDAVISION or THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER or LOKI should be aware of SHIELD's underground existence or that Coulson lived another five years after his supposed death in AVENGERS before dying again for realzies.