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2020-11-24 14:52:29

Billie in 11x02, "Form and Void":
You and Dean dying and coming back again and again -- the old Death thought it was funny, but now there is one hard fast rule in this universe: what lives, dies. So the next time you or your brother bite it, well, you're not going to heaven or hell. One of us -- and Lord, I hope it's me -- we're going to make a 'mistake' and toss you out into the Empty. And nothing comes back from that.

I don't recall Billy giving a number of deaths.

As for "The Heroes' Journey," I genuinely don't think the authorial intent was to say that Sam and Dean were talentless and inept and only ever propped up by Chuck. It's simply that they were given the means to bypass things that Kevin, Charlie, Bobby, Rufus, John and Mary had to deal with.

Sam and Dean's sudden inability to pick a lock is often cited as an example of the brothers being incompetent without Chuck stacking the deck in their favour. But, in my view, it's actually a subtle DOCTOR WHO reference to how after many seasons of the Doctor being stalled and delayed by locked doors, the writers introduced the sonic screwdriver and spared the audience the tedium. (Any show that names a character "Amy Pond" has some WHO fans on staff.)

Chuck clearly didn't find it entertaining to watch Sam and Dean delayed by locks, so he gave them a sonic screwdriver -- lockpicking -- but once he lost interest in them, it became something they had to deal with.

Also, "Heroes Journey" has Chuck deciding that anything that can possibly go wrong for Sam and Dean will finally go wrong. No one would miraculously manifest cavities within weeks, so Chuck was now stacking the deck against them -- and any lockpick artist will be defeated by a lock at some point.

It's also a bit comforting, in some ways.

Dean in "The Real Ghostbusters":
I think that the Dean and Sam story sucks. It is not fun. It is not entertaining. It is a river of crap that would send most people howling to the nut house. So you listen to me. Their pain is not for your amusement. I mean do you think they enjoy being treated like... like circus freaks?

While Dean's life has been horrific, he has also enjoyed a life without worrying about bills, cavities, colds or car trouble except for a brief two week period. He may have been cursed by God, but he was also blessed in many ways.

2020-11-24 12:36:22

I assume that even a retired Sam would train new hunters, give advice, set up waystations and teams, collate new data on monsters, maintain a weekly email newsletter, let people know about exciting sales of wolfsbane and dead man's blood, etc..

**

I can understand the irritation that after 15 seasons of battling werewolves, vampires, poltergeists, serial killers, Satan, archangels, Leviathans, mutated angels, Robert Singer, the King of Hell, the Men of Letters, God's disgruntled sister, the FBI, God himself and dental cavities, it's frustrating for Dean to be taken out by a vampire and a nail. But to me, that just captures how death sucks whether it's some self-sacrificing explosion or a small scuffle. Death is never happy in real life, and SUPERNATURAL was quite true to life in that respect.

In addition, Dean has died 112 times: 106 freak accidents in "Mystery Spot," a car accident, dragged to hell, shot to death, becoming Death and self-induced death to talk to Death (twice). The only death that the show hadn't done at this point was something small and low-key. As for whether or not Dean had to die -- I think that it was a dramatic necessity because the show had repeatedly resurrected Dean (and Sam). But this was to be the series finale, and rather than leave fans wondering how Sam and Dean would come back for some hypothetical Season 16, they showed Dean die and in the afterlife to make it clear that this was the end.

There's also the fact that SUPERNATURAL has had a decidedly unromantic view of death, often at its own cost and to the outrage of fans, specifically with Kevin Tran and Charlie -- but I'm not sure SUPERNATURAL was wrong to kill those characters the way it did. There was a strange sense of consequence to Kevin's death. He was only ever expected to be a guest star, but Osric Chau won over the fans and the cast and crew, so they kept him on -- but the character was in a difficult position. His mother was kidnapped. His girlfriend was murdered. He couldn't protect them.

Kevin was not a fighter, and while the show could have had him training with Sam and Dean and present him as combat capable, there came a point of no return where Kevin had spent so long as a non-combatant that it was too late to overturn it. Kevin was a scholarly student hiding in the bunker, incapable of defending himself against monsters like Sam and Dean -- so his eventual death at the hands of any threat that could gain access to the bunker was inevitable.

The show refused to excuse itself or Kevin from this painful but inescapable path of cause and effect, only giving Kevin the slight comfort that in death, he could bid farewell to his mother before Chuck sent him to heaven -- except it turned out Chuck sent him to hell to keep him in circulation for future episodes of his favourite show. (Presumably, Jack sent Kevin to the rebuilt heaven afterwards.)

And with Charlie, we had a somewhat inverted version of Kevin that came to the same unfortunate conclusion. Charlie rose to the challenges of becoming a hunter: she became combat ready, she drew upon her past skills to defend herself in her new life, she proved able to disguise herself, she was fit for life as a wanderer and researcher and fighter. But the life of a hunter is constant, endless, repeated exposure to deadly situations with enemies who are stronger than any human. Hunters survive based on knowledge of monster's weaknesses, partnerships, teams, preparations -- but those can fail and in the end, Charlie was trapped in a room with a monster too strong for her to beat and she died.

This was incredibly offensive to many fans. Felicia Day was offended. The cast were offended; when Season 10 showrunner Jeremy Carver was asked to explain this at a convention, the cast and crew around Carver took a step back from the microphones; they would not defend him or side with him. Carver said that it was where the story took him and ultimately, Charlie's death was upsetting and hurtful because death is upsetting and hurtful and most hunters die horribly.

The fan protest is that Sam and Dean have repeatedly been spared death and that surely a beloved character played by a beloved actress had earned the same privileges as the straight white men who lead the show; that surely a lesbian and a female hunter and a beloved role model to young girls and LGBTQ viewers should be excused from the likely outcome of a dangerous life, and that refusing to give some of Sam and Dean's privilege to Charlie and Felicia Day proved ghastly and horrific.

And I can see that -- except the show seems to have addressed that with Season 14 - 15, noting that Sam and Dean were spared because Chuck spared them. Because they were his "favourite show." Season 15 in "The Heroes Journey" further notes that Sam and Dean have been granted many special exemptions by being the leads of Chuck's favourite show that other characters like Bobby, Garth, Kevin and Charlie don't receive. Sam and Dean have exemptions from death, credit limits, parking tickets, the common cold, car battery failures, dental decay, indigestion and food allergies.

It's also fair for fans to feel sad that many guest-stars and recurring characters never got an on camera resolution. This was an unfortunate effect of the pandemic making it impossible to bring back many guest stars for the finale. I am sad that we never saw Jack face off against Harper Sayles the necromancer again. But -- the unfortunate truth is that any show that makes it five years (never mind 15) is going to have unresolved arcs because TV is perpetually hit by actor unavailability or sudden changes in the rush to crank out 20 - 25 episodes a year. No series escapes this.

From a creative standpoint, SUPERNATURAL absolutely grasped that it needed to give its guest-stars more screentime and development, especially its female characters. Over several seasons, the show built a cast of recurring female guest stars in Jody Mills, Donna Hanscum, Alex and Claire and then built momentum to launch a spinoff in WAYWARD SISTERS, a place where they could finally offer their female players the same advantages as Sam and Dean. The spinoff wasn't picked up due to (a) Kathryn Newton's success in BLOCKERS and DETECTIVE PIKACHU making her more expensive and (b) the CW having a lot of other shows that year that wouldn't come with the Kathryn Newton pricetag. The SUPERNATURAL creators had absolutely no control over that; they saw their own flaws with women, they attempted to balance it out, but their measure was rejected by the network.

Also, SUPERNATURAL addressed the Charlie issue by bringing in an alternate universe version of Charlie which proved satisfactory. This would suggest to me that the issue was not killing off Charlie, but rather killing off Felicia Day, and since Felicia Day returned to the show, SUPERNATURAL's point with Charlie's death has a clearer validity: hunters lead dangerous lives and will likely die during a hunt, their deaths will be violent, and death is always upsetting. And ultimately, once Chuck was no longer forcing Sam and Dean to be the star of his favourite show, Dean was treated in the same way as Charlie: he lived a life of constant kill or be killed situations and he was killed. His number came up.

Could Jack have saved Dean? Of course. But Jack freed Dean (and Sam), liberating them from the endless cycle of death and resurrection and being at the center of Chuck's favourite show. To resurrect Dean again would have been to steal his freedom instead of granting him peace.

I think it's fine to dislike it. But it was a perfectly valid writing choice and there weren't that many options that hadn't been explored after 326 episodes.

2020-11-23 17:08:24

Michigan's results are certified.

Do Americans really want to go through this every time they have an election? Where after the results are in, they have to argue whether or not the results are to be accepted because the losing party doesn't like losing?

2020-11-23 15:00:28

According to an interview with Andrew Dabb and Jensen Ackles, the finale's story was largely the same -- but anything involving large numbers of extras or returning guest stars was cut. There was an intended montage of guest-stars, so I assume that we would have seen Charlie, Donna, the alternate Bobby and others restored to reality in 15x19 and that we would have seen Eileen and Sam raising their son in 15x20.

I did read that Ackles wasn't happy with the ending, but he didn't specify what he wasn't happy with and he also said that Kripke assured him that Dabb's ending was the right one and he accepted it.

I remarked to my niece that to see Felicia Day die once is tragic; to see her die in the same show twice suggests that Chuck's rather sadistic. It's a shame production didn't film everyone being reinstated to reality at the same time as they filmed the erasures.

I also think that Castiel was supposed to be present. He's mentioned as working with Jack, but he's not onscreen and I have no idea why; I read that Misha Collins was quarantining in Vancouver, but that could have been a mistaken report. It's possible that with all the risks, production elected to not bring back an actor for whom they'd filmed a death scene before the shutdown.

From a storytelling stance, though, the finale was supposed to show Sam and Dean without Chuck's ongoing interference and from that perspective, it makes sense to show the brothers without Jack, without angels, and without anything other than Eric Kripke's original intention of SUPERNATURAL as a series about two brothers hunting American urban legends and the result that would come if Chuck hadn't been artificially extending the series for 10 seasons after the Lucifer/Michael battle was concluded.

The implication of the montage is that Sam continued to hunt as he responded to a call for help. It's the last image we have of Sam engaged with his career as a hunter. There is no later image to suggest that he walked away from the profession. At the same time, if any fans prefer to think that Sam retired, there is an open space for fans to think that.

It's the same logic by which I'd say that the woman standing at a distance behind Sam is Eileen; the last explicit update we ever got on Sam's romantic life had him dating Eileen, so any woman Sam subsequently marries is likely Eileen -- although if fans want to slot in any love interests that Sam met over the last 15 seasons who weren't killed off, there is again space to do that.

A lot of fans are upset that the finale was not explicit that Eileen was Sam's wife, something that could have been achieved through Sam engaging in sign language to the woman in the background or showing the actress in photographs. But... I really, really did not like it when the show tried to summon the presence of Kathryn Newton as Claire by having Claire text Jody from offscreen or having Jody say that Claire was in Yosemite. It was clumsy and artless. They might as well have had Kim Rhodes turn to the camera and say, "We couldn't get Kathryn because she's busy filming THE SOCIETY and also, ever since DETECTIVE PIKACHU and BLOCKERS, she's gotten really expensive."

I concede that I don't have an alternative to that. The show needed to address Kaia's fate and Claire's situation even if Claire wouldn't appear on camera. But I appreciated how the finale did not try to hammer Eileen into the episode without having Shoshannah Stern to swing the hammer. As Informant would say, you have to know when to hold them and when to fold them, and the finale accepted that it didn't have Stern and didn't have Eileen -- but it made some space so that if you wanted it to be Eileen, then it was Eileen, and if you wanted it to be Dr. Cara Roberts / Lana / Lori / Sparrow Jennings / Velma from SCOOBY DOO or someone else, it could be.

2020-11-22 08:26:29

I watched episodes 19 and 20 last night and I thought both were really good. Episode 19 was an effective season finale. Sam, Dean and Jack wandering through an empty world was an eerie and pandemic possible-method of finishing filming on the season and Rob Benedict's depiction of a villainous 'God' has never been better with Benedict's warmth, charm and sincerity revealed as a falsely-affable shell on top of a demented, indifferent and sadistically amused entity. The sheer pettiness of Chuck disappearing a dog simply to needle Dean was painful. And the repeated shots of Chuck striking down Sam and Dean only for them to keep getting back up was powerful. And Chuck's fate to live out a normal human life was highly effective and fitting.

The only part that didn't work for me -- the boys' somehow expecting Michael's betrayal was odd, as was Michael's betrayal in general. The alternate universe version had proven vengeful and determined to kill Chuck; this Michael being loyal to Chuck regardless of Chuck's betrayals was peculiar. There was also something arbitrary about it to me; Michael could have just as easily warned Chuck of the false spell knowingly to lure him out. But it went by so fast that it didn't seem to matter.

It was a very interesting choice to wrap up all of the Season 15 plots in Episode 19 as much as possible and leave the slate clear for one last episode. There were some unfortunate setbacks that couldn't be resolved: despite a presumed offscreen restoration, we will never see Donna or Charlie or Eileen reinstated to reality onscreen. It sounds like the intention to bring those performers back was there, but once the pandemic hit, it became impossible to afford the cost of flying everyone to fly to Vancouver and housing them in quarantine for two weeks if they'd only be on set for a day to film their shots.

Episode 20 was an interesting depiction of what Sam and Dean's lives would be if Chuck were not constantly engineering apocalyptic situations every year that put them at the center of everything. They would fight monsters of the week. They would have pie. They would save people. They would age. And they would die either in one of their monster hunts or from old age.

The episode is somewhat marred by showing Sam's marriage but not whom he married; on a second viewing and on pause, the woman standing out of focus at a distance looks like Jared Padalecki's wife Genevieve. In the fictional reality of the show, the woman is clearly meant to be a restored Eileen, but it looks like it was simply impossible to afford the cost of having Shoshannah Stern flown in, put up in a hotel for 14 days and then on set for that shot. But it seems unlikely that Sam's wife is anybody else after this past season where the show resurrected Eileen from the dead, had Sam go out on a date with her offscreen, and had him texting her urgently two weeks previous. It looks like, because they couldn't get the actress, they didn't want to insist that it was her and draw attention to her absence, so there's no photograph of Stern to be seen; they decided to film it ambiguously rather than try to summon the presence of a performer who couldn't be there and let the audience summon her instead.

The pandemic also seemed to force a number of unfortunate but unavoidable concessions; there is decidedly less physical contact between the brothers, Jack and Bobby than one would expect. No hugs. A very minimal amount of touching, some of it engineered through clever editing and what may or may not be frame manipulation. These disappointments will be immortalized. SUPERNATURAL survived for 15 years on the same economics as SMALLVILLE and those god-awful horror movies that Rewatch Podcast is perpetually reviewing; it didn't make big money, but it also didn't cost big money, so it was also earning reliably. It's unlikely the resources will be there to film a few shots of Shoshannah Stern or Briana Buckmaster or Felicia Day to integrate into 19 and 20 for a future release. This is what it is.

I assume that if there were a Season 16, the child versions of Sam and Dean would appear in the present day, age into the present day Jared and Jensen through some magical MacGuffin. And I do expect a SUPERNATURAL Season 16 comic book at some point. But I think this is the end as a TV show: the spinoffs never came together, the lead actors are very, very tired and they have been working on the show a decade after they thought it would end. Season 5 would have been a great ending, but Season 15 was a good ending.

2020-11-20 20:40:32

Finished STARGIRL. It was good, but the lavish fight choreography and extensive computer generated effects and single-shot action moments are so very, very expensive for a show that's moving to the CW. I can only think that they'll cut costs by (a) limiting the use of the STRIPE robot (b) moving to a slightly diminished level of action with shorter CG shots and (c) losing all the expensive licensed music.

I liked how the Injustice Society didn't see themselves as villains; in Icicle's mind, they face injustices and view mass murder as an acceptable means of correcting society's disregard for environmental catastrophe, prejudice and inequality, but his grief over his wife has warped his noble intentions into a vendetta of hatred and total disregard for the lives he thinks he's saving.

There's an odd emphasis on how killing is 'wrong' with Hourman chastised for planning to kill Solomon Grundy by Wildcat who then kills Brainwave while conceding it was a moral failure. In reality, superheroes refuse to kill villains because superheroes are published over multiple decades and killing off recurring supervillains means cutting off avenues of storytelling that might be needed again at some point.

There is nothing wrong with killing a wild, homicidal monster like Solomon Grundy who has murdered multiple innocent parties. There was also no real alternative to stopping a telepathic and telekinetic supervillain like Brainwave other than killing him and his twistedly impersonating the son he killed shows him to be an unrepentant murderer. It's ironic that his sadistic wish to toy with Yolanda by mimicking his dead son is what allowed Yolanda to get close enough to slash his throat. As Professor Arturo would say, Brainwave is a genocidal maniac, not a social worker.

Stargirl telling Pat that she is his daughter was quite beautiful.

I worried about Stargirl destroying the satellite which might have fallen on innocent people.

The closing scene of Stargirl and Pat flying through the sky is lovely and joyful and everything I want out of a superhero show and I was also happy to watch it on a giant IMAX sized screen (sort of) via the magic of an Oculus Go virtual reality headset.

2020-11-20 12:42:06

I'm looking forward to watching it tomorrow.

2020-11-20 12:19:13

I don't understand TITANS. I understand the kind of story it's trying to tell, I just can't figure out what it's trying to say or why it would say it with these characters. TITANS is a brutalist portrayal of superheroes as troubled warriors. But I don't understand why these characters are put to that purpose -- although a lot of the confusion is also in the original source material.

There is no real reason why street level crimefighters like Robin and Hawk and Dove are in the same show as an alien princess like Starfire, a child of supernatural horror like Raven, an X-Men type character like Beast Boy and a Wonder Woman supporting character like Donna Troy, and TITANS doesn't make a particularly clear case for this odd mashup. The original comic book didn't make a particularly clear case for this either; it was simply a place to gather some underused copyrights (Robin, Kid Flash, Wonder Girl) with some additions (Beast Boy, Cyborg, Starfire) and see if readers would go for it (and they did, for a time).

It's also unclear why a show about a teen superhero team features the characters long after the team disbanded with none of the characters being teens and nobody being particularly heroic. Jason Todd is simply interested in beating people up. Dick Grayson abandons Raven. Hawk and Dove are 'heroes' looking to acquire money to retire and not be heroes anymore. All the Titans are keen to abandon Rose to Deathstroke. The majority of the characters are not teens, many aren't super, and none are heroes.

Setting that side, TITANS is about the psychological and physical wear and tear and toll of this difficult profession, and on that level, it succeeds -- I just don't understand what this show is trying to say about it. But it is moody, compelling, atmospheric and grimly ridiculous from the characters being ridiculously calm about bodyswapping and aliens and primordial forces of evil and Dick Grayson running around town after breaking out of jail like his being a convicted felon and fugitive is about as serious a charge as an overdue library book. TITANS is a successful show, although I couldn't tell you what it's successfully accomplished.

2020-11-17 12:42:26

I think that the success of the Lego really speaks to how social media functions. As much as I love novellas like Nigel Mitchell's X-FILES crossover with SLIDERS and scripts like SLIDERS DECLASSIFIED, the internet operates best in a visual medium and Lego is so immediate, versatile and instantly appreciable. The graphics are so memorable and charming, the intricate and painstaking effort is clear and it has clearly struck a note with the actors as well as the fans. Congratulations!

2020-11-16 14:25:03

I'm distantly interested in JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE SNYDER CUT. I love watching different versions of the same story and seeing how the editing can present different things differently. I'm happy that the DCEU will get a four hour finale. I'm pleased that someone I care about will get something that he wanted badly and that is harmless in its existence. I'm moderately intrigued by Zack Snyder's horror-driven version of superheroes and would like to see it concluded. And I'm glad that he's getting to do it.

I'm more invested in STARGIRL and THE FLASH and LEGENDS and SUPERGIRL, of course. And I need to get into BLACK LIGHTNING. I'm not really a very big fan of horror. Despite all I've written about THE X-FILES, I don't really like it; I just learn from it. And that's how I feel about Zack Snyder movies. I'm sure there's an audience for it.

2020-11-15 10:31:36

My God, not only does this nightmare seem to never end, it keeps starting sooner than we ever noticed.

An essay on how Trump voters feel ignored by Democrats. Pretty much what TF said but much more long-winded.
https://www.salon.com/2020/11/15/unders … -it-right/

2020-11-15 10:26:15

WOW! John Rhys-Davies wants a set of the Lego figurines. Jerry O'Connell thinks it's cool! Congratulations!

I once sent Jerry a message asking him if he wanted to rewrite any of Quinn's dialogue in SLIDERS REBORN and asked if he'd be willing to do it sober and engaged and if he could keep his brother out of it. Never heard back. Can't imagine why.

2020-11-14 20:16:31

As always, I really like the Lego which is incredibly charming, idiosyncratic and appealing. The sliders on the the staircases is a gorgeously eerie visual. The sliders standing in the temple is a beautifully alien environment rendered perfectly in this medium. The Reticulans are alarming and frightening. And the feast at the end is very cute with all the sliders enjoying their lavish sweets.

But the story. Oh, the story. This has nothing to do with Cez's work at all, but ARMADA just does not work for me and does not capture the appeal of the series which was not about these bizarre sci-fi aliens -- but about the sliders exploring the social and cultural differences of a history not their own. ARMADA doesn't attempt to do that at all. Now, to be fair, social commentary and grounded environments have not been at the core of some of the best SLIDERS stories. "Double Cross" had plenty of sci-fi setpieces and car chases with only the barest of references to environmental crisis. "Murder Most Foul" was a Victorian crime drama that didn't comment much on the genre or a world so devoted to entertainment. "World Killer" was about the sliding technology, not the social commentary.

But "Invasion," a story that emphasized the sci-fi aliens, deliberately kept the Kromaggs at a distance, largely only perceived from the sliders' limited, human perspective. ARMADA doesn't do that; the sliders regard inhuman, otherworldly threats with confidence and aplomb and are never truly challenged or outmatched. This is again representative of how Acclaim rushed the SLIDERS comics into production, didn't give their creators time to engage with the series to appreciate its visual tone or performances or writing style -- and the result is a superhero comic book and an odd fit for the SLIDERS.

I suppose I am as guilty of this as anybody, but I would argue that for all the sci-fi excesses, SLIDERS REBORN is fundamentally about Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo, asking who they became after they got home, what they did between 2000 and 2015, and what sliding would be like for them if it were their profession and career. I feel I earned the superhero craziness that ends REBORN and built to it gradually whereas ARMADA starts with the superhero style and it is jarring and rings false to me. We all have very different perceptions of SLIDERS; I think that SLIDERS is about the sliders. Temporal Flux would argue, quite correctly, that SLIDERS is about a gently satirical tone that predicts the future and depicts it in an alternate present and justifies it with an alternate past and makes amusing comments about our society and culture but through inversion rather than forceful judgement. Other fans would argue that SLIDERS is about strong world building and asking what might have been if history had gone a different path; some fans declare that it is futile to define a SLIDERS story because you can go anywhere in imagination.

But ARMADA does not feel like SLIDERS to me; it doesn't have a strong depiction of the sliders, it doesn't have a believably human perspective on the sci-fi lunacy, it doesn't even have anything important to say. It's a superhero comic book writer and artist handed the SLIDERS license, a few VHS cassettes of the episodes, some headshots of the actors, and a tight deadline by which they must hack out some scripts and pages.

None of which has anything to do with the Lego which is lovely. :-)

2020-11-13 22:20:52

About the STARGIRL budget -- the effects and fight scenes are definitely more lavish than on THE FLASH. However, I have to admit, I didn't really notice the budget cut from SUPERGIRL moving to the CW. Slider_Quinn21 said some of the makeup effects on Metallo were poor. I wasn't really looking. I don't doubt that the reduced budget does show, but I wasn't trying to see it, so I didn't.

I don't know how STARGIRL will handle it. Showrunner Geoff Johns says that the most expensive part, the startup costs of developing the STRIPE robot and the cosmic staff effects have already been paid for. But maybe, as with SUPERGIRL, I won't see what I'm not looking for.

2020-11-13 17:37:05

JUSTICE LEAGUE in the Snyder Cut edition will apparently have a whopping, massive amount of newly filmed footage not produced during the original shoot. There will be extensive new material shot with the actors this past year. There will be four whole minutes. :-)

Snyder's interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsY_bdXTmJ8

2020-11-13 17:17:48

His niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist who psychoanalyzed him in her book TOO MUCH AND NEVER ENOUGH, says that he's so terrified of losing (again) that he wouldn't run in 2024. Plus, I'm sure he'll be in jail or hiding in a non-extradition country by then.

I sure hope no self-published authors who work as extras in Austin, Texas sell their homes and all worldly possessions to pay Trump's campaign bills! Haha!

**

In other news, the Supreme Court looks likely to spare Obamacare and John Roberts is god-damn sick of hearing about it and people trying to force him to kill something that just cannot be killed and which is not his job to kill.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/politics … index.html

Brett Kavanaugh also seems eager to move on with his life and accept that Obamacare is in it.

https://news.yahoo.com/brett-kavanaugh- … 05716.html

2020-11-13 17:12:16

You know, that episode of TITANS aired over a year ago! I think you can relax about spoilers. Haha!

It's odd: there may be a TV Tropes page somewhere about a ridiculously speedy trial, but all I see is the vague umbrella of "Hollywood Law" and "Artistic License - Law." https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ … LicenseLaw

The entry remarks that "Real litigation or prosecution takes months, not minutes, and almost none of it happens in court. Watching lawyers read mountains of documents and write briefs doesn't make for an enjoyable show, so creators modify the process to be entertaining to the audience. This causes the legal procedures portrayed in fiction to have little to no correlation with how the process would go down in Real Life."

I do recall a Season 1 episode of BONES, a forensic procedural where the leading lady crime scientist has to go to court to present her evidence and we're informed that it happens all the time, but this is the first time it's shown on camera and the trial felt like it was within days of the initial investigation. Generally, cop shows like BROOKLYN NINE NINE seem comfortable doing a time skip from investigation to trial if the trial is relevant or showing the investigation as a flashback before showing the trial in the present.

How ridiculously fast were Oliver and Barry's murder/conspiracy/vigilantism trials on THE FLASH and ARROW?

However... I don't feel that any version of the DC Universe with superhero teams like the Titans and presumably the Justice League and the rest is going to be quite like 'our' world. In a reality where all paranormal and science fiction concepts like demons, aliens, time travelers, mutants, poltergeists and such are real, the legal system must have heightened capacity to deal with all the complexities and must have hastened its methods for processing more 'mundane' crimes that don't involve devil robots and Earth-invading starfish and yellow fear monsters and fifth dimensional imps.

2020-11-13 10:15:10

I think the more Trump focuses on his pointless lawsuits, the less time he has for governing and screwing up America.

That said, he is also laying the groundwork for a future authoritarian dictator to use the same playbook to steal an election but with more competence than Trump possesses.

2020-11-13 10:05:10

There was one thing that threw me off in the first episode of STARGIRL -- I thought it was an odd comedy choice for the dying Starman to tell Pat Dugan that someone would have to carry on the legacy of the JSA's heroism and then immediately declare, "Not you," as though Pat, a bold, valiant, self-sacrificing, caring friend who could build giant battle robots out of old car parts was somehow not up to the task of being a superhero.

Pat is not particularly more flawed than the average person on the show and is prepared to crash his own car to protect Courtney's secret identity and embrace the indignity of being a disrespected stepfather because he understands that the girl has been in a permanent state of grief. I don't know why Starman thought so poorly of his supposed friend or why he worked with someone he regarded so badly.

But first episodes are where the writers and actors are still working out how to combine their talents. Maybe Pat was supposed to be grossly incompetent only for Luke Wilson's performance to steer the character differently.

2020-11-11 17:38:19

I'm glad Slider_Quinn21 isn't worried about Trump flipping the results of the election because that frees ME up to worry.

2020-11-11 17:15:49

Posted this last year about TITANS (spoilers) and Iain Glen (spoilers).

ireactions wrote:

TITANS has featured Bruce Wayne as played by Iain Glen in the second season. TITANS in Season 2 has not been allowed to show Batman (and was only permitted to show him played by a nearly off-camera stunt double in the costume Season 1). Therefore, Glen appears only as Bruce Wayne and never in the costume. It's interesting: Iain Glen is 58 years old and renowned for playing men with astonishing fighting abilities especially on GAME OF THRONES, but he has a certain rigidity in his movements. He has a receding hairline.
Most incarnations of Bruce Wayne, even in old age, look more like Liam Neeson and Tom Cruise in their late 50s; when Glen showed up onscreen in TITANS, I thought he was playing Alfred. His barely suppressed Scottish accent under a weak American one was bizarre. When sitting down on a sofa, he noticably braced himself against the armrest. He looked infirm and weak and his voice was awkward; I couldn't imagine this slow-moving, gentle man as Batman.
The Batman that Dick imagined in the TITANS Season 1 finale was a demonic force who moved like a cracked whip whereas Glen seemed to regard sitting down as something he has to do carefully or he could miss the cushions and end up on the floor. The thing is, however, while Glen bracing himself against an armrest plays onscreen looks like physical weakness, it's in fact a mannerism in how he seats and orients his body. It does not reflect the extremely able-bodied and athletic man that Glen actually is.
Glen appears in a subsequent episode as a hallucinatory Bruce Wayne, and this time, his accent is much improved, but he's playing a sardonic, comedically mocking figure who voices Dick's insecurities. He doesn't seem like Batman. Later in the season, however, Dick hallucinates Bruce again and imagines Bruce beating him up -- and suddenly, Glen displays a stunning physical prowess. He dodges Dick's blows with instantaneous speed. He throws single punches that knock Dick and the camera to the ground. He counters attacks with a controlled ferocity.
Naturally, there's a bit of trick editing here to speed up Glen's motions and accentuate the force of his attacks. But it's up to Glen to sell it and he sells it.
Suddenly, the slightly unconvincing American accent doesn't matter. Glen's aged face and fading hair don't matter. Glen's physicality takes on a predatory, otherwordly presence and he conveys a cool self-assurance so as to be above Dick Grayson's neuroses and anxieities. Iain Glen suddenly doesn't need the costume and or the Batman-jawline of Christian Bale or the voice of Kevin Conroy. The awkwardness of his earlier appearances is cast aside. Glen is unmistakably Batman. It works.
Still, I'd be interested to see Slider_Quinn21's take on it.

2020-11-10 17:43:07

If we don't believe in inherent goodness, then we also don't need to believe in inherent evil. The truth is that people have the capacity for both and most will choose themselves. Sometimes, they will do so in a nearsighted, short-term sense that benefits them in immediacy but is catastrophic longterm. Sometimes, they will choose themselves by seeing that what benefits everyone is in their favour as well.

**

I sense that Slider_Quinn21 is frightened and afraid that Trump will sue his way into a second term. He cannot. Even if he overturned a state or two, it wouldn't get him to 270 votes. Even if he got currently uncounted mall-in ballots tossed, he wouldn't get more electoral votes than Biden. Republican run state legislatures have decided that they don't believe in alternate electors against the results of an election. The Department of Justice's call to investigate voter fraud specifies that the fraud must be significant enough to have actually altered results, and none of Trump's accusations in court would qualify. They're all small, petty, nuisance lawsuits and small, petty paperwork to briefly placate a small, petty man.

There is a danger that Biden will be treated by a not-small portion of the electorate as illegitimate because their cult leader said so. There is a danger that future elections will be contested in court by a more competent authoritarian who can tell the difference between a hotel and a landscaping company. But Trump has lost and clearly cannot process it and Republicans, not wanting to alienate Trump's voters, are humouring him even when these efforts will change nothing. Joe Biden is president-elect. No amount of whining, recounting and legal wrangling will change it.

I'd worry about Georgia runoffs. I'd worry about Biden being unable to pass any worthwhile legislation if Mitch McConnell holds the Senate. I'd worry about anti-vaxxers. I'd worry about Trumpism. I'd worry about how Trump will use his last days, although if he's distracted by pointless lawsuits, all the better. But Trump is done. And if he wants to run in 2024, he may have to do it from a jail cell as he is soon to lose his immunity to prosecution for financial crimes, tax fraud, assault; he is most definitely facing another bankruptcy; and there may be a case to charge him with negligent homicide.

2020-11-10 11:51:10

Rob, you don't need to read Informant's Twitter. I don't need to read Informant's Twitter. I kept reading it because I care about him. I rant about him because I am hurt by him. But the only way anyone can hurt me with typing is because I have given them permission to hurt me.

I would never have expected him to become what he has; I'd expect him to be more concerned with being a loyal American than being a loyal conservative. But I am going to stop reading his social media. And I am going to stop talking about him as well. The election is over. And the pointless lawsuits from Trump are a waste of time and only to draw funds to pay off his campaign debts. I am still angry at anyone who voted for Trump, effectively voting to not have voting anymore. But I agree with Joe Biden that it is time to set that aside and focus on rebuilding our extremely broken world.

Nothing Informant says on Twitter takes away from all the wonderful things he did for SLIDERS and fans of SLIDERS. No vote Informant casts changes the fact that he was our friend: he worked on the SLIDERS REDUX with us, he gifted us with his companionship and perspective and friendship during FRINGE and the X-FILES revival and the Arrowverse and the DC Extended Universe. He stuck with SLIDERS long after most people had sensibly found another show and fandom. Fandom brought out the very best parts of Informant: his most generous, his most open-hearted and we were very fortunate to have the time we did with him.

I often think that writing fiction and caring about fiction will reveal who we really are; the unfortunate fact is that some writers will produce material that reveals a great compassion and love for humanity, but ultimately choose to live life as their most caustic, abrasive, antagonistic selves when they could be better than that.

I don't pray much, but when COVID hit the states, I knew before even reading Informant's Twitter that he would not wear a mask and I prayed for him and begged God to spare Informant when Informant wouldn't spare himself. I will pray for him again. Not for who he is now, but who he was when we knew him, who he chose to be for the bulk of his time with us. And I will pray that he finds his way back to that. The election is over, Donald Trump is done, Informant was our friend, he will always be our friend.

2020-11-09 16:41:06

Time has a list: https://time.com/5908505/trump-lawsuits-biden-wins/

Slate says that Trump's lawsuits are silly, sad and totally pointless, likely just being filed because it allows Trump's staff to do some busy work to assuage the boss' demands while waiting out the last 10 weeks of the Trump administration. I hear the last days of the Hitler household were much like this.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 … y-sad.html

I hope the Secret Service ends up dragging Trump out from under the Resolute Desk on live TV.

2020-11-09 12:58:47

ireactions wrote:

My God! I just saw that footage of Biden supporters not distancing and sharing drink containers. I'm horrified. I understand euphoria, but that's just suicidal and deranged. I've written a message to Biden pleading for him to tell his constituents to stay apart and I guess we'll see if he's still doing whatever I ask him to do in my mail.

My iron grip on Joe Biden's decision-making remains intact, mostly because I write him letters begging him to do what he was going to do anyway.

Joe Biden wrote:

As I’ve said throughout this campaign, I will be a president for every American. This election is over. It’s time to put aside the partisanship and the rhetoric that designed to demonize one another. It’s time to end the politicization of basic responsible public health steps like mask wearing and social distancing.
We have to come together to heal the soul of this country so that we can effectively address this crisis, as one country, where hardworking Americans have each other’s backs. And where we’re united in our shared goal, defeating this virus.
As we work toward a safe and effective vaccine, we know that the single most effective thing we can do to stop the spread of COVID is wear a mask.
The head of the CDC warned this fall, that for the foreseeable future, a mask remains the most potent weapon against the virus. Today’s news does not change that urgent reality. I won’t be president until January 20, but my message today is to everyone, is this:
It doesn’t matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day. It doesn’t matter your party, your point of view -- we can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just wear a mask for the next few months. Not Democrat or Republican lives. American lives.
Maybe we’d save a life of a person who stocks the shelf at your local grocery store. Maybe saves the life of a member of your place of worship. Maybe saves the lives of one of your children’s teachers. Maybe saves your life.
So please, I implore you, wear a mask, do it for yourself, do it for your neighbor. A mask is not a political statement, but it is a good way to start pulling the country together. I want to be very clear, the goal of mask wearing is not to make your life less comfortable or take something away from you.
It’s to give something back to all of us, a normal life. The goal is to get back to normal as fast as possible and masks are critical in doing that. It won’t be forever, but that’s how we’ll get our nation back, back up to speed economically. So we can go back to celebrating birthdays and holidays together. So we can attend sporting events together. So we can get back to the lives and connections we shared before the pandemic.
It doesn’t matter whether or not we always agree with one another. It doesn’t matter who you voted for.
We are Americans and our country is under threat. We’re now called to do the same thing that generations of proud Americans have done when faced with a crisis throughout our history. Rise above our differences to defend the strength and the vitality of our nation. That’s the character of patriots. That’s the character of America.
We have to do this together.
Wearing a mask seems like a small act. Maybe you think your individual choice won’t make any difference. Throughout our history, throughout the history of our nation, we’ve seen over and over how small acts add up to enormous achievements. It’s the weight of many small acts together that bend the arc of history.
I know there’s nothing that the American people can’t accomplish when we work together, as one people, with one mission. We can get this virus under control, I promise you. We can rebuild our economy back better than it was before. We can address race based disparities that damage our country. It’s in our power.
So let’s wear a mask. Let’s get to work.
Thank you. May God bless you. And for all those who have lost somebody, our heart goes out to you. We know what it’s like. Our heart goes out to you. May God protect our healthcare workers and all Americans. Thank you.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/jo … wear-masks

2020-11-08 16:57:31

That's pretty great! Maybe Lady Brick would make him a set. It's amazing when actors get involved and interested in fan fiction and media tie-in material. David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson did some promotion for the now non-canon X-FILES comics and Mark Hamill recorded a commercial for the STAR WARS novel VECTOR PRIME and William Shatner wrote 10 STAR TREK novels, but this is a special moment for the virtual Season 6.

I once wrote a SLIDERS script for an actor. I'd been writing SLIDERS REBORN focused mostly on the original quartet. But as Maggie and Diana entered the story, I felt bad about omitting Mallory, especially after doing an EarthPrime.com interview with the actor, Robert Floyd. Finally, I forced myself to write Part 5 of REBORN, "Revolution," in which Quinn hallucinates Mallory. I sent it to Floyd and he thanked me and said he'd let me know what he thought. He didn't -- probably because he hasn't seen that much SLIDERS and didn't really understand it. Cory of the REWATCH PODCAST when reviewing SLIDERS REBORN in a podcast remarked that Cory himself had watched every episode of SLIDERS and Cory could barely understand what was going on.

I think it's just splendid that John likes the Lego.

2020-11-08 11:20:51

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

And since we gave everyone the right to vote, they get to make their own decisions.

True. But when someone acts to take away other people's votes, they no longer have the right have their decisions go unremarked upon.

As a rule, I don't criticize people for how they chose to participate in a (somewhat) fair and (nominally) free election. People have the right to go unjudged as good or bad for how they voted so that everyone can feel free to vote. And candidates must earn votes. Temporal Flux said he was probably going to write in his father's name because TF believes in term limits. Joe Biden has been in government since 1973. If Biden didn't convince TF to waive that stipulation, then Biden didn't earn his vote. Transmodiar said that Biden didn't reflect his values; if Biden couldn't make a case for Transmodiar to feel otherwise, then Biden didn't earn Transmodiar's vote either and Transmodiar was right to write in Andrew Yang.

And I totally understand why people voted for Trump in 2016. Government had ignored their desperation and suffering; Hillary Clinton was a Wall Street creature; Slider_Quinn21 and Informant were both appalled by her which is bipartisanship at is clearest -- I see why people who felt abandoned by government voted for Trump four years ago and wouldn't judge anyone for it.

However, anyone who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 voted in favour of not having a fair and free election but instead in support of a lifetime appointment for their cult leader. Trump voters supported a deranged authoritarian who declared for months that any votes for other candidates were illegal. Trump voters supported the view that any votes that weren't for Trump should not be counted. And Trump voters now are demanding that the election results be overturned.

Trump voters have lost the right to go uncriticized for how they voted in a (supposedly) equal election because they attacked the voting rights of others and 'voted' to not have an election at all.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

Just like people can put aside JK Rowling's issues and still like Harry Potter.

I will never put another penny in Rowling's pocket. But I still have her books on my shelf. And Harry Potter has simply left his creator behind at this point; he's so entrenched in the cultural consciousness that Rowling's existence has become irrelevant to Harry's place in the hearts and minds of his fans. Fans of Harry Potter (and I am one) need no longer be fans of JK Rowling. To quote a great American quoting a Frenchman, "Death of the author, good sir!" At some point, we separate the art from the artist -- not to justify supporting them, but to appreciate what we got out of them before even if we won't be going back to that well for anything new.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

If Trump fully supported BLM and was doing work on police reform and knelt during the national anthem at the Super Bowl alongside black players. If everything about Trump was the same, but his politics were flipped....would everything else be flipped? Would liberals swallow their opinions of Trump and vote for him because the ends justify the means?

All those ends are achieved through means that require seeing government as public service.

When Trump had clearly won the election in 2016, Obama contacted Hillary Clinton. "You need to concede," he told her. He didn't encourage her to falsely claim fraud and file lawsuits or declare a victory she hadn't won. When Trump was declared president-elect, the Obama administration committed fully to the transition, providing all documents and details and opening themselves ully to the incoming team.

Obama encouraged Trump to keep Obamacare but change the name to take credit for it. The Obama administration also provided a pandemic playbook and training for a viral contagion. Obama and Hillary claim they both offered to give Trump any advice and while it's fair to question the sincerity of that, the Obama administration's determined handover to the Trump administration indicates it was at least genuine from Obama.

Biden will not be getting that graciousness from the Trump team because Trump doesn't consider the presidency a public office, but a personal one for his own benefit. For attention and acclaim and notoriety and to prop up his failing businesses.

Biden may have to have the Secret Service drag Trump out of the Oval Office by his hair.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I'm also horrified by the celebrations. It's great that people are happy, but in two weeks, it'll be Thanksgiving. Then Christmas. It's still flu season. We need to be much smarter than this.

The celebrations show that stupidity and denial is not unique to Biden or Trump voters. There are plenty of fine morons on both sides.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

I don't think Americans are evil. I agree with TF - I think most people don't think about politics that much. I think some think about it too much, and I think those people need to ease up. And I think Twitter becomes a furnace for these kinds of people. But I see the same kind of things happen with sports on twitter so I don't necessarily think it's only politics. When you isolate yourself with people who think like you, it's easy to think everyone thinks like you.

I am going to defer to your judgement and TF's on this one. I'm shaky and unsure -- but at the end of the day, even if I have lost (some) trust in Americans, I haven't lost any trust in any of you.

2020-11-07 23:25:30

I'm not an anti-masker. Masks are important. I wear masks. I get angry when others don't. A few days ago, an unmasked man got into the elevator in my building and pressed the button for the eighth floor. Furious, I got off the elevator at the ground floor and then pressed the buttons for floors 2 - 7 before I left to be annoying and slow him down.

That said, I feel that these blue disposable surgical masks might be borderline useless. They are fine for containing droplets in the wearer and lowering the risk of them infecting others. But I doubt they protect the wearer. These masks sit rather loosely. They don't seal the area around the nose and mouth. The material is quite thin meaning they tear easily or dissolve if dampened and I suspect that droplets would pass through and get from the outside in. And I can easily rip just from taking them off.

I have a box of these by the door to my apartment as a backup to my backup, but I don't use them.

For reasons I never got to the bottom of, I found a small supply of N95 masks in my storage space. These rounded, thick masks are made of one for polypropylene plastic polymer with an electrostatic charge that can supposedly catch and filter out 95 per cent of airborne particles larger than 0.3 microns. They have a metal band that bends over the nose for the right fit. They also have double straps of yellow elastic form an extremely tight seal around the nose and mouth -- but they are so tight that the pressure to the back of my head from the elastics is actually quite painful.

The mask I prefer to use is a KN95 mask of the same material, but with a triangular design and earloops to make it seal firmly but not uncomfortably. The KN95 mask is a bit fragile, however, in that a few times, the earloop has torn off the mask itself. In addition, these masks are difficult to wash: laundering or spraying them with disinfectant will destroy the electrostatic charge. The solution is to let the mask sit unused for 72 hours after a wearing; I've been wearing one a day and putting it in a sealed plastic box for the three days before putting it back in the rotation. The material's thick enough for multiple wearings.

And the mask I have as a backup is a cloth mask. It seems like a small step up from a disposable surgical mask, made of cloth rather than the almost tissue like surgical mask material. But it concerns me that there is no metal band or elastic to form a firm seal over the nose and mouth. There's a slight gap and I have doubts about how much protection such a mask can offer. The advantage of this mask is that, unlike a disposable or a KN95, it can be washed in a laundry machine or sprayed with disinfectant and not lose what ever (scant) protective qualities it has.

These ones aren't ideal, but I keep two on hand by my front door, one in my shoulder bag and one in my car as they can be disinfected and reused quickly if I'm short on KN95s. I've also used double-sided tape to attach thin activated carbon filters to the interiors of these masks to add a little more protection -- and I've been adding them to my KN95s as well (because why not).

Anyway. I wouldn't go out without wearing one of these masks; I wouldn't go to a Biden celebration party in the streets even if I wore one of these masks, and I certainly wouldn't drink from any bottles being passed around.

2020-11-07 23:03:35

My God! I just saw that footage of Biden supporters not distancing and sharing drink containers. I'm horrified. I understand euphoria, but that's just suicidal and deranged. I've written a message to Biden pleading for him to tell his constituents to stay apart and I guess we'll see if he's still doing whatever I ask him to do in my mail.

It's not really up to Biden if he'll be able to live up to his campaign promises. It depends on winning the Senate and it looks like the Democrats' last chance for it this cycle is with the runoffs in Georgia. If Democrats fail to win the Senate, I imagine that President Biden will be a genial figurehead of photo ops and speeches who addresses the working class but will ultimately be unable to pass any legislation to help them.

2020-11-07 17:05:05

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

Look, it's terribly embarrassing. It's all terribly embarrassing. And disappointing. Extremely disappointing. And angering.

What are you referring to specifically? Are you alright? I know we've had some spats because I was immature and psychologically unbalanced. Those were my fault. Entirely my fault. Not yours. And in the mental clarity I have acquired after quite a bit of psychotherapy, I know that you're a very fine person and you have no more to be embarrassed by than any other average person on this Earth.

**

Informant is StarletteNovel on Twitter. I blocked him awhile ago, but I periodically check what he's been posting -- if only because my dear friend Rob lives in his town and if Informant becomes dangerous, I shall call the police.

**

My guess is that Trump, despite knowing he's lost, will make noise about legal challenges to raise money from his cult of suckers -- but the bulk of whatever he raises will go to his hairstylist and paying off the debt his campaign incurred.

**

I have generally believed that the majority of people are not malevolent. People aren't against you as much as they're for themselves. But over 70 million voters pledged their support to a madman who ignored a national pandemic. That isn't acting for themselves. That's suicide and condemning their countrymen to death. Voters against both candidates could have at least written in someone else's name and met the minimum level of decency that way. Four years ago, Quinn Mallory encouraged Slider_Quinn21 to vote for Joe the Tiger Guy and SQ21 said he found it oddly convincing. http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=4343#p4343

RussianCabbie? Slider_Quinn21? Temporal Flux? Transmodiar? Grizzlor's weighed in, but I have to ask still.
http://sliders.tv/bboard/viewtopic.php?pid=10683#p10683

Are Americans... evil?

2020-11-07 13:58:33

I hope Americans aren't bad people.

But looking at Informant, he's currently screeching that the media calling the election for Biden is illegitimate and too early, although he had no issue with Trump calling the election for himself. Informant is whining that the election is being stolen when his party made gains in the House, has the state houses for gerrymandering, and currently holds the Senate which means his problem isn't that conservatism lost (because it hasn't) -- he's mad that his cult leader's claims are being ignored and dismissed as the empty delusions of a soon-to-be disempowered madman and no one should ever be allowed to ignore Informant's cult leader.

And there are (apparently) at least 70 million people just like Informant.

2020-11-07 11:55:55

I have to ask Temporal Flux, Slider_Quinn21, Grizzlor, pilight and Transmodiar -- are Americans bad people?

47.7 per cent of voters (at present) saw four years of global discord, mental illness, racism, white supremacism and then months of a crashed economy and federal ineptitude in the face of a national crisis -- and they voted for another four years of the same. I said that the majority of Americans were good, strong, capable people who wouldn't vote for a failure and a lunatic who was out to kill them. This majority might not vote for Biden, but it would not vote for Trump. This majority turns out to have only a 2.3 per cent edge on Trump's cultists.

Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States. But he may not have the Senate majority he needs to enact any meaningful legislation on climate change, the pandemic, the economy or to rebalance the Supreme Court. In addition, the losses that Democrats took in the House mean that they are shut out of redistricting: the gerrymandering to Republican advantage will get even worse.

Assuming the worst for the moment, that the two Senate runoffs in Georgia will not be won by Democrats, this means that the trade progressives made in supporting Joe Biden's centricism in exchange for majoritarian political power has not paid off. The point of choosing Biden was the belief that he could be mostly tolerated by progressives and conservatives: Republicans appalled by Trump could live with Biden, progressives could see Biden as a transition to Andrew Yang, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. This coalition would acquire enough votes to win the White House and the Senate, make gains in the House and get Democrats into state houses to stop and reverse Republican gerrymandering. This was James Carville Jr.'s argument for Biden, that Sanders and other progressives would never win the Senate and never have the power to turn their talking points into actual legislation.

Well, the Democratic Party under Joe Biden has not won the Senate by a landslide and will be hit by worse gerrymandering. Carville Jr.'s concept of a broad coalition to acquire political power has not acquired it. Which means this bargain of centricism over progressivism for power was a failure and if the Democrats win a Senate majority through the Georgian runoffs in January, it's not due to broad range of voters large enough to win when united as as Democrats. It's going to have been procedural intricacy that Georgia requires runoffs if no candidate for Senate wins a minimum 50 per cent of the vote.

This is the point at which we have to ask if Transmodiar was right. That Biden and Biden's vision of Democrats is so indistinct and watered down with centrist Republicanism that it doesn't speak to Democrats, doesn't inspire voters, doesn't bring turnout. That the Democrat's candidate needed to be someone with new and inspiring ideas and a real change, someone who wanted Medicare for All, who would randomly hand people a thousand bucks a month just to see what it would do to the economy. Someone like Andrew Yang who would theoretically get that progressive turnout.

Except turnout we have right now is at over 145 million votes and counting and 47.7 per cent of it -- almost half -- is for Trump. What portion of Trump's 70 million voters would have voted for Bernie Sanders or Andrew Yang or Elizabeth Warren?

There has been a long argument that Republicans have triumphed through minority rule; that they represent a very small number of people and that America has gradually been moving towards progressive Democrats, that Texas is well on its way to becoming a blue state, that Americans see that Republicans are a broken cult of personality with no ability to govern and that it's simply a matter of getting a sufficient turnout for Democratic and left-leaning voters against a system that makes their votes count for less than Republican votes. But at 47.7 per cent of voters voting for Donald Trump, the Republicans' minority is at a slim 2.3 per cent. What progressive candidate would ever win over such voters? America is proving to be a far more conservative, repressive and suicidal population than I had hoped.

Smart and forward thinking people like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Andrew Yang are the future of the Democratic Party -- but with 70 million Trump voters, I don't know how much of a future they would have, especially when the supposed majoritarian centrism of Biden only has 0.6 per cent votes over everyone else running for president or being written in.

Maybe it's time to go back to the drawing board except with Georgia's runoffs, Democrats don't have much time.

2020-11-06 18:26:37

Watched the first six episodes of STARGIRL. Wow! What a fun show. Thanks to Slider_Quinn21 for reminding me that it existed.

I've never really understood the appeal of the Justice Society of America, a group of barely published superheroes from WWII who were quickly eclipsed by the Justice League -- but STARGIRL manages to distill the appeal pretty effectively by revealing that the JSA is a multigenerational family of older veterans and young new heroes awkwardly co-existing. There is a wonderfully frank presentation of Courtney Whitmore as Stargirl: she's sullen, rude, self-centered, impulsive. She's also driven, inspired, daring, and has an instinctive sense of right and wrong.

It's interesting that the character is based on showrunner Geoff John's sister who died in a plane crash when she was 18 and this is Johns' portrait of his deceased sibling's persona and spirit. There is a wonderful sense of these awkward young people acquiring the mantles of dead and retired heroes and staggering in the footsteps of their predecessors.

The effects and location filming are impressive for a show that is supposedly to be moving to the CW for Season 2. The villains are creepy in how they've assimilated into civilian life but with their cruelty and sadism and pettiness in full force. There is a gleeful joy in superheroes in STARGIRL that I never felt when reading the first few issues of the 90s JSA comic book, although I confess that I never got to the Geoff Johns issues (he only started on the comic after the first story-arc).

It's funny how SMALLVILLE was always so embarrassed to really show superheroes, having all their superhero characters where street clothes with the same colours as the actual costumes. Then Geoff Johns wrote "Legion," "Society" and "Absolute Justice," all three of which declared that SMALLVILLE was a superhero universe and had a future and a past that had contained superheroes, and the show began to feel comfortable with costumes and superhero personas. Now Johns' joy in superheroes is mainstream and he's doing a show where all of his joy in superhero legacies and superhero families is presented in full force.

2020-11-06 10:58:05

Hmmm. I like the Lego illustrations which are vastly superior to the comic book.

ARMADA is an odd choice to position after "Slide Effects." I think that after "Slide Effects," the best follow-up would be something that declares the series is back to basics. Something more traditional, something closer to a Season 1 story. A parallel world with an alternate history. The sliders stumbling into danger and misunderstanding. A story without the overt science fiction technology and fantasy horror elements of Seasons 3 - 5. If you were to use the comics, I would have advised NARCOTICA.

ARMADA is just too... I don't agree with the idea that any story is out of bounds for SLIDERS. But I'm not sure that after dispensing with the Kromaggs in "Slide Effects," it's anything but repetitive to bring in the Zercurvians. And in the original comic version of ARMADA was sadly produced by a superhero writer and a superhero artist who stuck to their superhero style for SLIDERS. Neither them were overly familiar with the show, neither of them grasped the grounded indie-movie look of the series, and the results are bizarre. DG Chichester and Dick Giordano are great creators, but it's pretty obvious that they didn't have any time to properly review the show before they started scripting and drawing pages.

I think that if you want to apply superhero storytelling to the SLIDERS (and I do), the sliders themselves need to be recognizably the actors in scripting and nuance and their surroundings need to be less heightened and more atmospheric. And the humour needs to have a certain knowing self-awareness which ARMADA doesn't have. ARMADA doesn't grasp how insane it is.

I have always wanted to see the Professor zipline from one building to the next using his suit jacket, but I would want to see it with something of the terror John Rhys-Davies presented when bungee jumping in "The Guardian." A SLIDERS comic book in the 90s would have been better off looking less like an issue of AVENGERS and more like an issue of SANDMAN with eerie art from Chris Bachalo and pensive writing from the likes of Neil Gaiman.

The Lego representation captures the lunacy I'd be hoping for, a cheerful absurdity that seems absent in the largely unaware comic book.

2020-11-06 10:09:23

Yes, those conspiratorial Democrats rigged the election to not win in a landslide and not win in the Senate. The mythology of THE X-FILES looks airtight compared to this one.

2020-11-05 21:15:37

It's still too early for an amateur like me to offer an opinion, but Trump is only a symptom of a larger problem and we still don't have a clear sense of how that problem can be addressed.

It isn't really up to Joe Biden how forward and progressive his presidency will be. The president in 2020 must have a Senate majority to govern effectively. Without the Senate or an effective bipartisan relationship with the Senate, the president is simply a figurehead and will accomplish about as much as Queen Elizabeth II.

2020-11-05 12:38:47

It doesn't make sense (for me) to comment on results we don't entirely have yet. However, Slider_Quinn21 made a prediction about Trump:

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

People see Trump as this dictator figure who will pull off a suppression campaign with military precision. But look at his presidency and tell me where he's shown any ability to pull that off. He had a chance to do it in 2018 as a trial run, and the Republicans lost big. His government, despite having control of the House and Senate for the first two years of his presidency, passed nothing. He didn't repeal or replace Obamacare. He didn't build a beautiful wall and Mexico didn't pay for it. And even though it would've benefited him in every way to deal with the pandemic effectively, he botched that too.
Even when you look at his criminal enterprises, he's inefficient and sloppy. He didn't win on Russia and Ukraine because the Democrats couldn't prove it - he won on technicalities. He's winning on tax returns because of technicalities.
Trump doesn't know what he's doing and the people around him don't know what they're doing. Trump might actively want to send the military to polling places, but he's just as likely to send them to the wrong polling locations or the wrong states entirely. Nothing he's done so far has indicated that anyone in his administration is capable of pulling off a successful voter suppression organization, especially if he's lost support from the party. And with the electoral map looking the way it is, he'll need to pull off something that he's just not capable of pulling off in my opinion.

This has proven entirely correct. Trump is calling for ballots to no longer be counted... just because. There's no legal basis for that and it isn't working. He's declaring the election a fraud before the count is complete and the results are clear; this too has no legal traction. He attempted to claim victory in Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Michigan and was reminded that campaigns don't reveal state victories. He says he'll go to the Supreme Court; there is no case before the Supreme Court to stop counting votes and no legal grounds to do so. His comments, made publicly, will undermine any potential lawsuit he engages in to contest the results because they're not based on evidence; he just doesn't like losing.

Why can't Trump seem to steal this election? It's because even though his employees want to steal it, he keeps interfering and leading the charge and his arguments, methods and measures are simply to shriek that any vote that isn't for Donald Trump is a fraudulent ballot because he doesn't like them. He is self-destructing.

2020-11-04 17:41:00

I've always admired how you watch FOX and CNN.

I don't really have much to say. We don't have full results yet. Once we have them, we'll know how right or wrong we all were, whether or not we trusted the right experts, and whether or not any of us knew what the hell we were talking about. But I am guardedly optimistic about some areas and very concerned about others. The blue shift is real. But there are red mirages that turn out to be red certainties.

2020-11-04 15:34:13

As of 3 PM, Biden had an over 90,000 vote lead but with about 600,000 left to count. It was definitely called too early.

2020-11-04 14:19:57

You said earlier that Biden's digital campaigning efforts were not working, that the Republicans were outpacing him with in-person door knocking and voter registration. It looks like you were right with regards to Florida, an assessment I feel comfortable making as the votes there are fully counted.

What should the Biden campaign have done during a time of pandemic? (I genuinely don't know. I'm not a campaign manager.)

2020-11-04 14:03:53

I forgot to mention: I also like pilight as a person.

2020-11-04 13:46:26

I dunno what's going to happen. I'm not sure what we're looking at yet with all the mail in votes still being counted. I'm not willing to venture an opinion. I'm not a pollster (although I get the sense that even pollsters may not be considered very good at their jobs these days). I'm not a politician. I barely passed political science in college.

So, I am simply going to say that Americans are good people. They are strong, confident, bold, determined, stalwart and clever. I take all sorts of shots at Informant, but I'd never claim he wasn't powerful, certain, daring (in his way), forceful, resilient and smart. Temporal Flux, Transmodiar, Slider_Quinn21, Grizzlor and others are a credit to their nation. I trust you and your countrymen to find you way forward sooner or later. Hopefully not too much later.

2020-11-04 11:21:09

All my favourite liberal propaganda websites are upset, hurt, shocked, traumatized and worse. They didn't get their landslide. They didn't even get a clear win. But they're looking at mostly Election Night numbers, counts of in-person votes where mail-in ballots had yet to be totaled. Some mail-in ballots still have days to arrive.

I just don't think it makes sense at this point to say whether or not the polls were wrong, whether or not Trumpism has won over men of colour -- I think we'd better see all the results first. We are not looking at the full picture right now. We're looking at red mirages that may or may not be red certainties; we are looking at blue shifts that may or may not fully shift.

It's possible that the full results will have Slider_Quinn21 moving to Canada to be my new roommate; it's possible it'll be not terrible but not great; it's possible that Democrats will have a close victory with some options to expand in the Senate with a Georgia runoff -- but it's now an Election Week (at minimum). But I will see if I can find Slider_Quinn21 an air mattress just in case.

2020-11-04 09:17:08

I agree that public polling needs to stop. But I'm not sure how wrong the polls were/are -- yet. Polls are always wrong to a degree. They're guestimates.

In November 2018, the expected blue wave seemed to have dissipated by November 6 on the night of midterm elections. Except after a few weeks of mail-in ballots revealed many defeats to be victories and victories to be defeats. The expected blue shift of mail-in votes may make no difference. Or it may make all the difference. But we still need to wait. This was never going to be an Election Day unless Biden won Florida. It was going to be at least an Election Week. Possibly an Election Month. And Senate control could go to a January runoff. It's not over yet.

2020-11-03 21:57:10

So, let's talk turkey (again). My obsession with roasting turkeys comes from my favourite actress whom I'll persist in calling Felicia Day (it's not Felicia Day).

I've always hated turkey. It's cardboard protein. And when Felicia invited me to her annual turkey roast off competition, I was not keen. But my friend was in a competition. She asked me for my support. I never refuse to give that. I showed up, brought desserts, expected dinner by 7 PM and planned to head home by 10 PM as it was a work night.

We hit 8 PM and the turkeys still weren't ready, I let everyone at the gathering know that I would be leaving in two hours, but that it wasn't because I was bored or didn't like them -- they were all so nice to me and friendly -- but it was a work night. Felicia apologized to me, saying the turkey wouldn't be ready by the time I left. And I left the dinner party without dinner.

It was okay. I understood completely. I had observed that Felicia's competition had started late. Because she got out of work later than expected. It was clear to me from observing her efforts: turkeys were too damn big to be cooked inside a couple hours; that she had to repeatedly baste it every 20 minutes. Which loses heat from the oven. I could see that increasing the heat wouldn't cook the bird faster; it would simply burn and dry it when it needed to be cooked moderately and evenly.

When Felicia had time to speak to me, she explained the intricacies of defrosting a 20 pound turkey safely without killing anyone who ate it, the importance of adding moisture back into it as it cooked over the course of 6 - 8 hours, the desperate call for water-heavy vegetables, the critical need to have the turkey elevated -- I could see her struggling to get dinner together before I left; I could see her failing. I assured her that I understood.

And the evening wasn't wasted; I learned a lot from watching her roast a turkey and explain the process to me. I'm glad I was there. My niece is glad I was there; she thought my first Christmas turkey ever last year, inspired by Felicia, was splendid. My sisters are glad I was there; they said this year's Thanksgiving bird was perfectly cooked, moist and even throughout. No, I didn't get to enjoy any dinner at Felicia's turkey dinner competition. But it wasn't for lack of trying and there is no one I won't excuse from their failures if they tried.

Every year, I roast three turkeys, one for Thanksgiving, one for Christmas, one just because. It takes a week of preparation and I have to station myself by the oven from morning to evening to baste while referring back to the mental notes I made watching Felicia roast her bird (which are actual notes now as I wrote it all down the next morning). I make turkey to remind myself that trying counts.

2020-11-03 16:31:56

Transmodiar recently did something for me that I really appreciated.

My favourite actress... has not always been my favourite actress. It's a title, not a person; different people have held it. Before the incumbent, there was someone else. A friend who was also my favourite actress. I'll call her... Emma Stone. (She's not Emma Stone.) Emma Stone lived about an hour and a half away from my city. I'd regularly drive to visit her to have dinner and spend the evening talking about the art of acting, which, as a socially awkward man, I really benefit from hearing about. Then I'd come home.

Emma Stone was one of my favourite people and I was very proud of and grateful for our friendship and I lived for when I got to see her. In 2019, she had to cancel a lot of our evenings due to some family obligations and work emergencies, but it was alright -- she was going to be in my city that summer to perform her show. Also, she'd said I could build her website for her new show and I was excited to get a new portfolio piece (although I was going to ask her boyfriend, a brilliant graphic designer, to make the posters and animations).

I knew would see her soon enough. I looked forward to it. And I accepted her cancellations because I knew I'd see her when she was in town. I didn't see her when she was in town; she told me she'd make plans with me, texted me when she got into town to say we'd make plans, then promptly ignored every message I sent asking her when was free.

I didn't think anything of it; she was busy, we had two weeks. But when she had four days left before she left town, I asked her to please pick a time. She picked one. Then she withdrew it, saying she was busy. She said maybe it would be easier to do a group hang on the Friday before she left town. I said that'd be fine, where and when? She promptly did not answer.

I got a message from her on her second-last day in town. It was a list of the plays she planned to see before she flew out. She said I could see them with her. I reviewed the list and determined that if I went to any of them, it would be only for the dubious privilege of sitting next to her in the dark in silence; she would be moving to the next venue so urgently that we'd never have any conversation. I said no. I think this was the exact moment when I realized this friendship was over.

But I did review her schedule and arrange for us to 'accidentally' run into each other shortly before she left town. She asked me if I was enjoying the festival. I ignored the question and told her that I'd let her know when her website was ready. Then I got the hell out of there.

Emma Stone sent me a message saying she was sorry, that she'd been distracted during her time in town, that her brain had been such a mess she could not plan anything. She said it was hard because she was in town to work and her boyfriend and cousin had been staying with her in her rented accommodation during the festival and they had all wanted time with her. She said that she knew it felt like our friendship no longer mattered to her and she promised it wasn't true.

I told her it was fine. But it wasn't fine.

She told me she would like to make plans when she was back from her tour and I said that would be fine too. But it wasn't fine. I knew even as I said things were fine that I could never sign up again for another two weeks of wondering why I wasn't worth a half-hour or a text to let me know it wasn't happening. Wondering why a supposed friend thought it was alright to have me wait for her right up to the day after she left town.

I built the site for her new play and began reviewing candidates for a new favourite actress. Because while I strike out regularly and hilariously on romantic dates, I do really well with platonic female friendship. Women have always treated me as one of the girls. (This is also part of why I strike out so often on dates.) If I needed a female friend to hang out with me to talk about acting and Emma Stone couldn't be counted on to show, well, there were plenty of people who'd be up for taking her spot, and they'd put in the minimum effort to keep it. There would be at least thirty or forty applicants.

(Alright, FINE. There were three.)

I identified someone suitably chatty, eccentric and talented. I will refer to her as Felicia Day. (It's not Felicia Day.) I asked her if she would like to be my sexlessly platonic friend with whom I'd have long dinners to talk about the art of acting before going home (separately).

I said I also really liked how she would let me know when she was busy fundraising or rehearsing or needed time with her boyfriend and wouldn't be available for anywhere from 3 - 90 days, how she sometimes asked me for help with projects and would be silent and unconversational but also clear that it was a work request and not a social call but that there would be a social activity within 5 - 25 business days. I said I saw our relationship being that of adoptive sisters like Kara and Alex Danvers on SUPERGIRL.

"That would really work for me," said Felicia.

I sent Emma Stone her website credentials, hosting and back-end passwords and a lengthy instruction manual so that I would never have to work with her to make any updates or changes to her website afterwards when she finished the play it was to promote and might want to change it to promote another. I directed her to change the passwords and assured her she could do all the updates alone. I'd felt indebted to her even after everything; I told myself that my debt was settled.

Emma Stone texted me to say she'd be in town for another theatre festival and would I like to make plans to see her? I wrote back Jesus no, that I wasn't putting myself through another round of waiting for someone who wasn't coming, that I'd chosen somebody else to be my platonic favourite actress friend, and that I was sure she'd be fine without my friendship seeing as she was obviously in demand and had her boyfriend and her family and plenty of important friends who were apparently worth her time and that she would clearly thrive with or without me in her life and also that the hosting on her website was paid up for the next two years.

Emma Stone sent me a response. A text message. It was very long. I did not read it. I was afraid to. Perhaps her text would be aggressive and cruel (although I've never known her to be), perhaps it would be gentle and kind -- but I knew it wouldn't make me feel better and I declined to look at it except on occasion with my glasses off. I'd then close the text without reading it and every time I did that, it felt like savagery, like violence, like slamming a fist into someone's face.

I kept thinking I'd read it when I wasn't busy, when I had time to be hurt and paralyzed -- but I finally realized that there was never going to be a good time for that kind of grief.

Finally, I told Transmodiar everything. I told him of how this was weighing on me still. Making me sad over a year after the original incident. I told him that the unread text message was haunting me. I felt like I had to read it eventually, but I would never want to. And I asked him to give me permission to delete the text unread, to never look at it, and to let it take up no more of my life or the flash memory on my phone.

Transmodiar wrote:

I give you permission.
It's been months of radio silence on both your parts. No point in ripping the scab off the wound if you don't intend to revisit the situation. You've got a new friend. Invest that time and energy on them.
I know how it goes, but when you get to my age you just accept that people flow in and out of your life, and there's no use investing anxiety and concern on people who aren't around any more.

I deleted the message. Along with all of Emma Stone's previous messages. Because Transmodiar said I could. He gave me permission to let go of all the exhaustion and loss and frustration and dented self-worth and anxious confusion and seething exasperation. He reminded me that I had places to be, people who were waiting on me, obligations to uphold and a lot reasons to put all this in the ground, leave it behind and move forward.

Transmodiar wrote:

You'll get shit done -- and you also have a bunch of weird friends in your weird orbit. You're a weird guy with weird friends and it's wonderful -- you're going to be fine.

Thank you.

2020-11-03 10:20:26

I think Democrats learned a lot from 2016 -- they didn't learn what Transmodiar wanted, but it seems to me that they learned what you wanted them to learn.

Slider_Quinn21 wrote:

The Democrats took lower class white people for granted. They assumed that, since they're in a similar situation to minorities, they'd always be a reliable part of their base. And since it was more "cool" to campaign to minorities, to women, and to Hollywood elites, the Democrats essentially ignored the lower income white people in the Rust belt. And Hillary lost all those states.

They went with a candidate who, as Nate Silver puts it, speaks to lower class white people AND minorities and Hollywood elites and he in turn chose a vice president candidate who appeals to law enforcement and women. They went with a candidate who declares that addressing climate change IS the path to economic recovery, good union jobs, prosperity and redemption of both the American spirit and the planet. A candidate who tells the police that they are fundamentally good people and that he will need good police officers to help stop this horror of white cops shooting black men for no reason whatsoever.

Does he actually believe that most cops are fundamentally good? I dunno, but if I needed cops to help me with anything, telling them they all suck wouldn't get me very far with them. Good politicians tell people that they are better than they actually are to inspire them to be better today than they were yesterday.

Nate Silver wrote:

Biden is about persuasion and the median voter. The median Democratic voter liked Medicare-for-all but liked the public option a little bit more and felt like it seemed a little safer electorally. For better or worse, Joe Biden’s pitch has come true: The reason he is way ahead in these polls is not because Democratic turnout is particularly high relative to GOP turnout — it’s because he’s winning independents by 15 points and moderates by 30 points. He’s winning back a fair number of Obama-Trump voters and keeping a fair number of Romney-Clinton voters. The story the polls are telling is that Biden is persuading the median voter not to back Donald Trump.
Biden is a throwback politician in so many ways. He’s also a throwback in the sense he’s very coalitional. He’s not a very ideological guy. He gets branded as a moderate, which I think also reflects the bias that if you’re an older white man you can have the same policy positions but will be branded as much less radical than a young Latina might. But still, he’s able to perfectly calibrate himself to what the median Democratic voter wants, and is good about listening to different coalitions within the party. That’s why he’s been successful over a long time. He’s very transactional and good at listening to different demands from different party constituencies.

**

Election results aren't going to be available right away tonight. We'll likely only have a good idea of who is winning without knowing who won. Five Thirty Eight breaks down what we'll know and when we'll know it here:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bo … -they-get/

I don't know what's going to happen. I know what is likely to happen.

Anyway. Once again, from the unpublished MARVEL COMICS #1000:

Captain America wrote:

I’m asked how it’s possible to love a country that’s deeply flawed.
It’s hard sometimes. The system isn’t just. We’ve treated some of our own abominably.
Worse, we’ve perpetuated the myth that any American can become anything, can achieve anything, through sheer force of will. And that’s not always true. This isn’t the land of opportunity for everyone. The American ideals aren’t always shared fairly.
Yet without them, we have nothing.
With nothing, cynicism becomes reality. With nothing, for the privileged and the disenfranchised both, our way of life ceases to exist. We must always remember that America, as imperfect as it is, has something. It has ideals that give it structure.
When the structure works, we get schools. We get roads and hospitals. We get a social safety net. More importantly, when we have structure, we have a foundation upon which to rebuild the American Dream — that equal opportunity can be available to absolutely everyone.
America’s systems are flawed, but they’re our only mechanism with which to remedy inequality on a meaningful scale. Yes, it’s hard and bloody work. But history has shown us that we can, bit by bit, right that system when enough of us get angry. When enough of us take to the streets and force those in power to listen. When enough of us call for revolution and say, “Injustice will not stand.”
That’s what you can love about America.

2020-11-02 21:47:50

So, I guess there could be a hypothetical Ayer cut of SUICIDE SQUAD that is very different from the extended version already on DVD.

https://www.cbr.com/suicide-squad-bvs-d … avid-ayer/

2020-11-02 17:00:17

I don't have an opinion on your vote. I do have an opinion on the opinion that "nothing fundamentally changes" under President Donald Trump. I respect your view that Biden is a poor and uninspired choice; I reject the view from four years ago that Trump's ineptitude would reveal America's failings and therefore be the best thing for the country.

And in the face of Trump facilitating 220,000 deaths, pandemic denial, white nationalist militias, neo-Nazi insurgences and suppression of mail-in voting, I reject it again as an opinion that could only ever come from someone who isn't being targeted for harassment and assault by this presidency.

It is a rejection of the opinion, of course. Not the person.

**

Republicans tried to have 127,000 votes in Texas thrown out on account that they consider drive-thru voting illegal because it's in a tent instead of a building. They got the case to a deranged federal judge, Andrew Hanen, with a history of partisan craziness and legal rulings made up of movie quotes like he's, I dunno, posting on SLIDERS.tv or something. My expectation was that Hanen would have the 127,000 votes invalidated. My expectation was wrong, he ruled that the votes were valid.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/02/politics … index.html

"When you balance the harms you've got to weigh in favor of that -- in counting the votes," Hanen declared. Ultimately, the claim that drive-thru voting was illegal wasn't something Hanen thought he could get away with despite his obvious desire to do so. In a second term of Donald Trump, people like Hanen with power and the master they support will be emboldened; they will no longer hesitate to suppress votes even on such absurd terms.

As a great patriot once said, the line must be drawn here. This far. No farther. I'm not even an American and I can see the ripple effects hitting me and mine. It's time for Donald Trump to go.

**

And now regarding an opinion I don't respect at all:

I wasn't in SLIDERS fandom much from 2000 - 2010. But. I did note something very interesting about Informant's attitude to Chuck: he was a big fan of the Chuck character in Seasons 4, 5 and 10 where the character was in disguise or offscreen except for brief cameos and it was up to the audience to decide what to make of the character who was supposedly God himself.

Then Chuck returned in full force for Season 11 in "Don't Call Me Shurley," an episode where Chuck is presented as depressed, irritated by humanity, inclined to let all existence be extinguished by his sister, disdainful of Sam for saving Dean from his demonic existence and therefore freeing Amara, annoyed by the constant need to restore Castiel and profoundly indifferent to the well being of humans, angels, arcangels, demons and whatnot -- aside from being a 'fan' of their adventures, Rowena in particular.

Informant declared that he loved this episode and loved how Chuck was pretending to be disenchanted and distant from humanity to motivate the characters.

Now, there's nothing wrong with having a head canon, but this is most definitely not the story onscreen; Chuck abandoning humanity until Metatron changes his mind is never at any point in the episode shown to be anything other than genuine.

But Informant insisted that his interpretation was correct even when there was absolutely no onscreen evidence to indicate this was intended by the writers. Why is that?

The answer: Informant has a specific view of God and he requires that Chuck reflect that view. If Chuck doesn't reflect that view, Informant will say he does anyway or throw a tantrum -- like he did when Season 14 revealed that not only had Chuck been uncaring to human suffering, he had been actively creating it for the Winchesters because they were his "favourite show" until they refused to kill Jack (a threat to Chuck's existence) at which point Chuck decided to end reality.

Informant (on his own space, not here) screeched that this depiction of God was a betrayal of 10 years of characterization. And back in the old Bboard, he was constantly ranting about people not being religious themselves and therefore "blasphemous."

Not to get into the religious points, but the fictional character of Chuck has always been presented unflatteringly and with suspicion. As Chuck, he is suicidal, drunk, unreliable and more interested in money than saving the world. In Season 6, Castiel calls upon him for advice and guidance and is ignored. When Chuck revealed his true nature and approached the Winchesters in Season 11, he was regarded with mistrust for his absence, for his deliberately putting the brothers in the line of fire, and Season 14 decided to confirm that the Winchester's doubts had been correct.

In addition, Chuck is not God. Chuck is the originator of the fictional reality of SUPERNATURAL who has been worshipped as God -- but there is a clear distinction between the religious God and the character of Chuck who lays claim to that title but hardly lives up to it.

Informant is ultimately a zealot. There is only one acceptable presentation of Chuck; his own. There is only one acceptable version of Superman; his own.

And Informant takes the view that his personal tastes are the default when they're in the minority; that's why he's so enraptured by Donald Trump and Trumpism, a way for minority rule to continue insisting that it's the default.

That's why he lies that people don't need to distance and wear masks and lies that infanticide is legal in Virginia and lies that BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN was a smash hit. He's not stupid. He knows it's not true. He just wants to insist that his minority views are more than his own and objectively indisputable. In contrast, I've never felt that I believed much of anything that wasn't to be disputed, amended, updated, I'm aware that my opinions exist in a minority and I don't feel threatened by that. I hated AVENGERS. So did Informant. Most people liked it. As Transmodiar would say, "I am not the final arbiter of taste." We can agree to disagree and respect respective choices. But Informant? Informant got angry and had a meltdown over people preferring a CAPTAIN AMERICA movie to BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title).

Informant is actively resentful of his minority views and rains judgement down upon any who trigger him by making him in any way aware of his minority position, whether that's in being a Trump voter or a fan of BATMAN VS. SUPERMAN: DAWN OF JUSTICE (actual title). And these days, his output is simply a relentless stream of attacks and insults towards anyone expressing progressivism of any kind; he hates transgender kids, he loves white people who shoot black people, he hates Alyssa Milano, he loves James O'Keefe.

I turned the other cheek towards him plenty and tried to see him off with pride, but now he supports the terrorist movement of Men's Rights Activists. And he's become a bioterrorist in his refusal to wear a mask.

It's time to face facts: Informant hates America.

**

I don't know where or when Informant took this turn. I don't know where he lost his way. I'm sure it's my fault. Probably should have put more effort into setting up that field trip with him and Slider_Quinn21 to go to the Alamo Drafthouse for dinner. And I don't think someone loses their way by disagreeing with me; I think it's when they are no longer able to process the fact that individual views are the views of individuals and are out to mock, sabotage and hurt anyone with a mind of their own.

And Transmodiar is absolutely right to say that I'm projecting into him. It's not fact. It is theory. My theory. Which could be wrong. And Transmodiar says it's wrong and Transmodiar knows himself better than I do, so take his word for it. But don't think like him. And don't think like me. Think like you.

I am certain that Informant hates America. And I am certain that Transmodiar loves America, loves his country, loves his people -- and he and I simply have strong ideas of how America should move forward and those ideas are colliding with each other, much in the same way our strong ideas of how SLIDERS should be presented in 2015 collided with each other. Transmodiar wanted SLIDERS to be rebooted and I wanted the sliders to be reborn. Neither of us were keen on the other person's ideas. But we still love and respect the person who originated the ideas.

**

LAUREN: "How d'you think the election will go?"

IB: "Probably fine."

LAUREN: "That's that you said about Season 4 of SLIDERS!"

Ib stares at his niece grimly.

LAUREN: "You told me to always say that to you every time you say that something will be fine."

IB: "It'll probably be fine."

2020-11-01 22:19:29

Well, he's a hypocrite, but he's also a coward. He never wants to get too far outside the mainstream. He'd probably watch from a safe distance with with long range binoculars and then throw in 50 cents to a Kickstarter to raise money for the pickup truck drivers' legal fees and call them patriots but make sure to stay far away. It's the same way he'd never march with neo-Nazis, but he'd insist that they were doing God's work. People marching for Black Lives Matter and women's rights, however, those people are monsters because Informant doesn't like black people unless they're getting gunned down and anyone who spreads Men's Rights Activists dogma is clearly afraid of girls. LOL not kidding.

Hopefully, he'll find himself even more disemboldened from his not particularly bold position after this election once he realizes that he's not going to be going mainstream.

2020-11-01 15:02:47

Wow! This is really haunting and eerie and really captures the psychically aggressive tone of the original "Slide Effects" script. The Kromaggs were severely demystified in Season 4. I personally don't have a great take on the Kromaggs, but I decided that in my "Slide Effects" script, the Kromagg would never speak on its own and only deliver dialogue in the guise of the additional Season 3 - 5 sliders of Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory. On some level, this was, I confess, a gesture of disdain towards them. Those character were unwanted intruders, uninvited guests into my living room. In addition, the Kromagg was a representation of David Peckinpah, someone given an assignment he didn't care about and who resented the people who came with that assignment.

And yet, it didn't come off that way to most readers. All the feedback I got expressed appreciation that the faces of Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory were present in a story about going back to basics with Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. One piece of fan mail that I got remarked that they preferred my take to any hypothetical "Slide Effects" fully scripted by Torme because Torme would most definitely not have included Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory (or even been familiar with those characters). And this is something I tried to get into with SLIDERS REBORN where I accepted Maggie, Colin, Diana and Mallory as important and wrote them as beloved characters that everyone would be happy to see even if Colin is an artificial intelligence with Charlie O'Connell's voice and Mallory is only in a lengthy dream sequence.

Back to "Slide Effects" -- the script is effectively declaring that he is haunted trauma and that the most traumatic events in his life were the death of Professor Arturo, the rape and mutilation of Wade Welles and that horrific Scene from "Mother and Child" and the scene of the Kromagg morphing into different personas has the Kromagg sadistically inflicting all of that on the original sliders. And I find this Lego construct really captures that cruelty that the sliders ultimately overcome.

2020-10-31 18:16:22

Does anyone wonder if Informant is one of the people Trump gathered in Omaha, Nebraska for a rally and then abandoned to freeze to death in the cold?

Thousands of people parked their cars in parking lots and boarded campaign-rented buses that took them to Eppley Airfield in freezing weather. After Trump's event, the President left -- and thousands of people found themselves standing four miles from their cars with the buses that delivered them to the airfield not returning to retrieve them. At least 30 people were hospitalized with hypothermia.

And, let's face it, Informant could be lying in the ground turning blue from cold and his last words would be croaking out his support for Donald Trump.

*shudders*

2020-10-31 17:47:13

I can't speak to the series finale specifically, but I've read that due to COVID-19, it became unfeasible to have all the guest-stars they wanted because they would have had to cover the cost of having every performer quarantine for two weeks for a brief cameo. But they must have been able to get some, because some special guest-stars were sighted and on call sheets. Just not all the ones you expect. It's really sad. BLINDSPOT, which had its series finale earlier this year, had a guest-star from nearly every previous episode for the last installment and there's always a joyful sense of closure to seeing familiar faces back for a series finale.

I hope they get Jody and Donna. It looks like they couldn't get Kathryn Newton.

**

I'm sure absolutely nobody cares about my WAYWARD SISTERS fan fiction which is aimed at an audience of one, so I'm going to make it a post-script. I'm trying to write three scripts, 46 pages each (to be plausible teleplays and they need to be done in time for Christmas). The conceit I've concocted is that after WAYWARD SISTERS wasn't picked up, the CW purchased two extra episodes of SUPERNATURAL for Season 14 and one extra episode for Season 15 -- but these would be episodes with the WAYWARD SISTERS cast, and I want them to slot into the existing continuity of the series like a media tie-in novel. I'm writing these for my niece who loves SUPERNATURAL, loved the idea of WAYWARD SISTERS and I'm assuming she is a bit sad that Claire and Kaia (whom she heatedly shipped) will never have an onscreen reunion. I'm writing these for her as a Christmas gift.

1 - Hunter's Rage (14.3b)
Reeling from the disaster in the Bad Place, Claire dives into hunting with reckless abandon, taking risk after risk and dangling herself as bait for any monster she can find. Avoiding Jody and Donna and her extended family, Claire soon finds herself into a trap with no backup, no rescue and no way out. This story is set before the events of Season 14, Episode 3 ("The Rage") and would fill in the gap where Claire went from not knowing Kaia too well and feeling guilty about her death to considering Kaia her "first love," as Jody puts it in "The Scar." It's a really interesting writing challenge and I have an idea for how to give Claire that journey inside a TV episode.

2 - Hunter's Reckoning (15.11b)
Claire's search for Kaia's killer hits a dead end in Yosemite, but during a stop for gas, food and water, Claire comes across a peculiar town where everyone has lost the ability to die. This story is set before the events of "Galaxy Brain" (in which Kaia came back to life) and features the return of Harper Sayles, the necromancer with the zombie boyfriend from Season 14 because I like the actress, Maddie Phillips, who was just awesome in TEENAGE BOUNTY HUNTERS which has sadly been cancelled. I don't believe SPN was able to get Maddie Phillips back to play Harper again even though her character is supposed to be hunting Jack.

3 - Hunter's Reunion (15.12b)
En route to Sioux Falls, Jody, Kaia and Claire are interrupted by a storm and take shelter in an abandoned campground with a terrible secret beneath the earth. (I don't really know what this one's about plotwise, but I there's so much interesting characterization to mine: Claire has all these romantic feelings to Kaia whereas Kaia has probably given Claire no thought in the two years Kaia spent roughing it; Claire has all these fantasies about Kaia that will be confronted with actual reality; I'm also going to have to write a lesbian sex scene for my niece to read, but for it to be plausible, it can't venture outside the limits of what the CW would be willing to air and I've also never written a sex scene before.)

2020-10-30 21:09:52

Transmodiar wrote:

Trump is a boob but he's a showman - and he will run circles around Biden. You think Crooked Hillary was bad? Wait 'til the Trump campaign latches on to the Anita Hill testimony, Biden's plagiarism during his first presidential campaign, his appreciation for Strom Thurmond's support, lies about apartheid-era visits to Nelson Mandela in South Africa, lies about marching for desegregation. Not that he'll even have to - the stuff with his kid in Ukraine, or his absolute inability to say anything that makes sense during televised interviews is right at their fingertips.
I don't even like Trump. But I know Biden doesn't have the stamina or eloquence to duke it out with the president. And, in seven months, people could see Trump as the savior who kept America together during a massive pandemic. Don't assume anything.

Seven months later and the only thing Trump has run rings around is the hospital where was being treated for COViD-19 because he wouldn't wear a mask.

It's worth looking at why. Where has Trump's edge gone? Trump made Hillary Clinton look corrupt, made Ted Cruz an incoherent liar, made Marco Rubio childlike -- but Trump was terrified of Biden, got himself impeached trying to dig up dirt on him, was reduced to trying to shout him down during the first debate and cowered from the second and staggered mutedly into the third. Why couldn't our showman Trump seem to land a single punch?

Molly Jong-Fast says it's because people now know that Trump projects.

Molly Jong-Fast wrote:

For instance, everything Trump accuses Biden of doing, he does himself, only worse. So when Trump World tried to shop the idea that Biden was creepy with women, all it really did was remind people that Trump has more than two dozen sexual assault allegations on his rap sheet.
When Trump World pushed the idea that Hunter Biden was somehow corrupt, you couldn’t help but think about Jivanka and DJTJ and all the ways the Trump family has been siphoning cash out of the public coffers.
Trump World tried painting Joe as doddering and old at the same time that the president was rambling through daily press conferences and struggling to walk down a ramp.
This is the problem with projection: Once people get wise to the pathology, then every boomerang you throw at your opponent comes back and pops you in the nose.
Donald Trump is no longer an outsider promising to blow things up.
Because of Trump’s administration, the United States has endured (so far) the equivalent death toll of 47 September 11’s. The unemployment rate is double digits, and many of us cannot safely leave our homes. Weirdly enough, people now seem to view “blowing it all up” as more bug than feature. Go figure.
https://thebulwark.com/why-cant-trump-land-a-punch/

Molly Jong-Fast has also noted that Donald Trump Jr. projects. Just like his father.

Molly Jong-Fast wrote:

The president’s bleary-eyed namesake failson is obsessed with Hunter Biden, and as the campaign session from hell continues that obsession seems more and more Freudian. It happened on Glenn Beck’s radio show the day after the debate, where Junior claimed that “crackhead Hunter has now a tie, a direct tie to Vladimir Putin.”
And the Putin smear was a true “no puppet” moment coming from the Trump kid who infamously met with Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016, but was later found by Bob Mueller to be too stupid to have colluded, which some might say is the very definition of white male privilege. It all got me thinking about why Junior just can’t stop talking about Hunter.
During the debates, Trump senior attacked the president’s surviving son: “Hunter got thrown out of the military; he was thrown out, dishonorably discharged for cocaine use.” Of course this wasn’t totally true. Hunter was discharged but it was not under the category of dishonorable.
“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” Biden responded. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it. And I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”
There are countless stories of Trump Senior degrading and humiliating Trump Junior, including telling him once, according to Sam Nunberg in Julia Ioffe’s piece in GQ, “Don, you can finally do something for me—you can go hunting.” And that’s not to mention the famous story of Senior not wanting to share his name with Junior because of the worry that he might be a loser.
Junior is furious. Junior is fragile. Junior is triggered. I happen to think that the phrase “I’m proud of my son” said to the audience with such intensity and conviction might be why Trump Junior hates Hunter Biden so much.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/donald-ju … nd-telling

2020-10-30 19:07:12

Isn't supporting another four years of President Donald Trump even if you don't support him an inclination to stick to the status quo of President Donald Trump? Are you sure you're as much as an iconoclast as you think?

You have the luxury of saying another four years of President Trump will be fine. You weren't in any way affected by the first four years of President Trump.

So the upshot of this would once again be: congratulations on being white, moderately affluent, and knowing you'll still retain your advantages and immunity under the status quo of a second term of President Trump. It's easy for you again to declare another four years of Trump will be a life lesson and a godsend like you did four years ago. After all, you're not the one who's going to take it in the neck for this tutorial in failing democracy.

You're not overly impacted by the absence of a national or federally supported testing plan; you're not affected by hospital supplies of PPE being seized; you don't suffer from ventilators being withheld; you won't be hunted by militias encouraged by the president to hunt black men in the streets; you won't be beaten by racists who think President Trump means they've gone mainstream. If you shot someone black, Trumpists would take up a collection to pay your legal bills. Informant would chip in!

And if Trump wins, you get another round of the civics lesson you thought so highly of the first time. I see why Trump is not to your disadvantage. Well done, you.

But regardless, a fair and free election isn't fair and free if you're chastised for voting fairly and freely, so I don't see what anyone could possibly have to say about you writing in a name on your ballot.

**

Regarding the blue wall, here's Nate Silver on why 2020 won't be 2016:

Nate Silver wrote:

Polls often miss an election by 2 or 3 or 4 points, which is what happened in 2016. Ahead of an election, people need to be prepared for the fact that having a 2- or 3- or 4-point lead — which is what Clinton had in the key states — is not going to hold up anywhere close to 100 percent of the time. You might win 70 percent the time, like in the FiveThirtyEight forecast.
That said, there are a couple of things that are identifiable. One is that a bulk of the undecided voters in three key states — Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania — went toward Trump. If those undecided voters had split 50-50, Clinton would have won nationally by 5 or 6 points.
Trump can still win. In 2016, our final forecast said Trump had a 29 percent chance, and that came through; right now we give him a 12 percent chance to win in November. That’s not trivial, but it is a different landscape.
One difference is that there are fewer undecided voters this year. In 2016, there were about 13 or 14 percent undecided plus third party; it’s around 6 percent this year. That’s a pretty big difference. So that first mechanism that I described that helped Trump is probably not going to be a factor. Trump could win every undecided voter in these polls and he would still narrowly lose the Electoral College.
Biden’s lead is also a little bit larger. After the [FBI Director James] Comey letter, Clinton’s lead went down to 3 or 4 points in national polls and 2 or 3 points in the average tipping point state. Biden is ahead by more like 5 points in the average tipping point state.
We can definitely find cases in the past where there was a 5-point polling error in key states — that’s why Trump can win. But a 2016 error would not be quite enough: If the polls missed by exactly the same margin, exactly the same states, then instead of losing those three key Rust Belt states by 1 point, Biden would win them by 1 or 2 points. He might also hold on in Arizona, where the polls were fine in 2016. So it would be a close call, but one that wound up electing Biden in the end, pending court disputes, etc.
n the primary, you had a fairly explicit contrast between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. Bernie’s pitch explicitly was: We are going to win this with a high turnout of younger people and people of color. We’re the biggest coalition. So we’re going to win and we’re going to win the White House that way, too. Turnout, turnout, turnout.
Whereas Biden is about persuasion and the median voter. The median Democratic voter liked Medicare-for-all but liked the public option a little bit more and felt like it seemed a little safer electorally. For better or worse, Joe Biden’s pitch has come true: The reason he is way ahead in these polls is not because Democratic turnout is particularly high relative to GOP turnout — it’s because he’s winning independents by 15 points and moderates by 30 points. He’s winning back a fair number of Obama-Trump voters and keeping a fair number of Romney-Clinton voters. The story the polls are telling is that Biden is persuading the median voter not to back Donald Trump.
Biden is a throwback politician in so many ways. He’s also a throwback in the sense he’s very coalitional. He’s not a very ideological guy. He gets branded as a moderate, which I think also reflects the bias that if you’re an older white man you can have the same policy positions but will be branded as much less radical than a young Latina might. But still, he’s able to perfectly calibrate himself to what the median Democratic voter wants, and is good about listening to different coalitions within the party. That’s why he’s been successful over a long time. He’s very transactional and good at listening to different demands from different party constituencies.
https://www.vox.com/21538214/nate-silve … on-podcast

I too am ready for this to be done. I only have enough CAPTAIN AMERICA comic books from which I can paraphrase speeches to about November 7.

2020-10-30 18:54:53

I upgraded my laptop today. Like Transmodiar's life, it started out in good shape already when it came home from the store with an Intel i7 processor, a dedicated graphics card, 4GB of RAM, and a 1TB spinning hard drive. Now it has 32GB of RAM, a 256GB NVMe solid state drive and a 1TB SATA solid state drive. It is the most powerful computer I've ever held. It can conquer any adversary, triumph over any computing challenge. And now that this gaming laptop is operating at maximum capacity, I shall devote its powers to its most taxing obstacle course yet. I'm going to write three WAYWARD SISTERS screenplays for my niece as a Christmas present!

2020-10-29 18:18:21

Ah, would that we could all be so uninvested in this situation that we'll just throw some snide remarks around and call it a day.

Politico has an interesting article about potential shy Trump voters.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ … 016-433619

I think it is nonsense. Five Thirty Eight notes that Trump performed better than expected, but only within the margin of error. You never know which direction the error is in.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/tr … e-of-them/

Trump's path to victory, such as it exists, would be if the polls are slightly off in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, and Iowa with Trump being a little ahead rather than slightly behind, but he'd also need Pennsylvania to get an Electoral College win. The odds of this? 11 out of 100. The chance of rolling a one on a six sided die. The chance of it raining in Los Angeles. Likely? No. It's not likely. Possible? Yes. It is possible.

And I am afraid. Anyone who isn't afraid of another four years of President Trump is either deranged or living a life of at least moderate privilege. But a great patriot once declared that the antidote to fear is action. Because evil triumphs when we allow it to paralyze us. But to respond by doing something, however small, is to defy the despair turns reason into panic and advance into retreat. Give one person the conviction that their small actions matter and that one person can win a battle. Give that same person an army with that same conviction united into a greater whole and they can win a war.

I post links to iwillvote.com into random corners of the internet. These are dark and desperate times.

2020-10-29 16:33:27

I've been playing around at 270towin.com and as far as I can tell, your math works out.

2020-10-29 08:49:19

Also, for those who think nothing fundamentally changed in going from Obama to Trump -- ah, to have the moral certainty that comes from being privileged, middle class, Caucasian, heterosexual and male.

What I take from that is that it is awesome to have:

Good and supportive parents
A stable upbringing
An ethnicity that doesn't engender discrimination
A sexuality that draws no attention
A middle class economic status that means you can get laid off and bounce back
A financial situation where you can total your car and take the economic hit
A level of employment where you can lose your computer and instantly replace it with one that came free in a work contest
A job that you can do from home

All that creates the opportunity to build a life where it doesn't matter to you who is President. And to be clear: Transmodiar earned these things. Temporal Flux has said that Transmodiar was handed everything in life. That's not true; Transmodiar was handed a strong starting point. He had to scrabble and scrape to keep it. He had to strain and strive to build on it. Transmodiar was given a good chance. He worked hard to make it a great success.

Transmodiar has a fundamental aplomb and certainty, a committed work ethic, a drive to succeed because he knows that there is nothing he cannot do; there are just things he has not learned how to do yet. This is inherent to his nature, but he was also blessed with the opportunity for his nature to be made manifest. To build a life where he is someone for whom "nothing fundamentally changes" if it's President Trump instead of President Obama or President Biden.

Too many Americans never get that opportunity and have it actively taken away from them. Too many Americans work twice as hard to get half as much if not less. And most Americans do not live lives where "nothing fundamentally changes" under a second term of President Trump.

2020-10-28 17:39:29

You've read Part 1 and Part 4 and the last two pages of Part 6. You've had to go through pretty much every scene of Parts 2 - 3 with me. You outlined the first draft of Part 5. If I write Part 7 of SLIDERS REBORN ("Redemption," Rembrandt vs. Rickman), Transmodiar will inevitably have to go through every single plot point and page with me over Google Hangouts. He'll say he won't do it. He'll quit. But Transmodiar always comes back to SLIDERS REBORN. He does say otherwise, and we'll have to agree to disagree on that.

**

I'm not going to defend the Clintons or the Bushes, but I will note that Obama was always slightly short of Senators in Congress to engage in his promised legislation due to Al Franken being delayed in confirmation for seven months and Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy being taken out of commission -- which opened the door to relentless Republican obstruction to any and all progressive policies making it impossible to get anything passed for wealth redistribution, single payer insurance, financial reform or even a sensibly sized stimulus package for the recession. The use of drones was bad, but it's only gotten worse under Trump. And I think we'll have to agree to disagree here as well.

**

I don't believe Obama would have refused to engage the Defense Production Act to produce personal protective equipment or held superspreader events or claimed the virus was going away at 200,000 deaths or withheld ventilators or called for militias to overthrow lockdowns or confiscated masks and ventilators from hospitals or called for testing to be slowed down or denied there was any community transmission happening or encouraged people to inject bleach. We'll have to agree to disagree.

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