Search options (Page 7 of 79)

One of the most derided aspects of Smallville: Jor-El. The character makes no sense. Jor-El's harsh and threatening attitude to Clark later shifts towards Jor-El being a benign father like in other Superman adaptations, and then reverts and then ricochets back and forth. Jor-El's nonsensical characterization from 2003 - 2011, while obnoxiously incoherent, is a strangely accurate and prescient depiction of current problems and challenges in artificial intelligence.

Jor-El is first introduced at the end of Season 2 and explicitly identified as a computer program, a representation of the real Jor-El, carrying  "his memory and his will", carrying out the wishes of Clark's deceased biological father. From the start, this artificial intelligence version of Jor-El is disturbing.

Translation Errors

The Jor-El AI first imprints Krpytonian language into Clark's brain and enables Clark to read Jor-El's first message. It says: "On this third planet from this star Sol, you will be a god among men. They are a flawed race. Rule them with strength, my son. That is where your greatness lies."

Clark is horrified, exclaiming to his adoptive father, Jonathan Kent, "I think I was sent here to conquer. What kind of planet am I from!?"

This first message is particularly odd in light of later episodes where Jor-El's plans for Clark are fully revealed: Jor-El's goal is for Clark to "protect Earth" and humanity from the Kryptonian fascist General Zod, that Clark's destiny is to serve as a "beacon" whose "example" of heroism will "guide" humanity.

Furthermore, this message is a dark inversion on the classic Superman film where Marlon Brando's Jor-El calls humanity a race with tremendous "potential for good".

AI Lacks Cultural and Situational Nuance

In a fictional context, it's like the AI's language module, imprinted to Clark, has made a translation error from Kryptonian to English, conflating "god" with "beacon", "rule" with "guide", "strength" with "example" "flawed race" with "potential for good", leading to a message translated without nuance or awareness of human/Kryptonian cultural distinctions.

In reality, the writers were seeding the idea that the AI Jor-El was an impostor; the voice of Terence Stamp (the evil Zod of the classic Superman films) implied as much. The writers ultimately stuck with this version of Jor-El, creating an inconsistency. And yet, this inconsistency reflects real world AI problems of 2022 - 2024 era AI.

Smallville's Kryptonians, shown in flashback, are not colonizers or conquerors, but isolationists. Kryptonians do, however, believe in dominance -- not of sentient life, but of their own planetary ecosystems: terraforming, artificial weather, resource management, etc.. In addition, Kryptonians also refer to their sun, Rao as a god - -except in Kryptonian culture, the sun is a source of light, warmth, learning and enlightenment. What Kryptonians call a 'god' would in English be a teacher and a friend.

The Jor-El AI has failed to consider these mismatches between Kryptonian-and human language and culture.

Inaccuracy for Complexity

This is extremely an extremely accurate portrayal of how real world AI often struggles with cultural and situational context, semantic errors, linguistic dominance and consistency, creating outputs that are technically correct but contextually incorrect or even nonsensical.

For example, Google Translate can sometimes produce bizarre prophecies from mundane words due to misapplying training data from religious text. At times, "Good morning" in Arabic has been AI-mistranslated into "Attack them" due to homophone and homonym misidentification (similar sounding or spelled words getting confused) and idiomatic confusion (colloquialisms and regional phrasings).

Real AI models are also biased towards English which creates translations that can't accurately depict complex concepts from other languages or and struggle to maintain a consistent tone or perspective.

Given Jor-El's eventual revelations about Clark's destiny to be Earth's hero, the real message was likely: "On this third planet from this star Sol, you will be a beacon to all. They are a race filled with potential for good. Guide them with your example, my son. That is where your destiny lies."

In this case, the Jor-El AI has a bias towards Kryptonian language without nuance for English. The message of human potential needing light and guidance has been mis-translated into a harsh judgement on humanity as "a flawed race". Jor-El's message about stewardship, guidance, and serving as a beacon by example has been warped into a message of authoritarianism while the real message prioritized guidance and inspiration.

Incoherent Behaviour

The Jor-El AI also demonstrates an incoherent attitude towards Clark's human identity and the role Kryptonian culture is to play in Clark's life. In the Season 3 finale and the Season 4 premiere, Jor-El seeks to suppress the Clark Kent personality and implement a new identity in Clark's body, Kal-El, who is wholly compliant with Kryptonian values and Jor-El's orders, seeking to retrieve Kryptonian artifacts scattered across Earth.

The enforced identity is only repelled by Clark's adoptive mother, Martha, using black Kryptonite to restore the real Clark. However, Jor-El later declares that his goal is to train Clark in the use of his powers, no longer attempting to brainwash Clark into compliance. The shift in tactics is not explained. Later, it's declared that all of Jor-El's actions were to position Clark as humanity's protector to prevent an invasion of Earth by the Kryptonian fascist Dru-Zod.

Jor-El's opinions of humanity are also oddly contradictory. Initially, Jor-El declares that Clark must abandon his human connections and all his friends and family. When Clark balks, Jor-El proceeds to inflict pain on Clark by horribly scarring Clark with a flesh-burned brand of the House of El S-shield. But later, Jor-El thanks Martha Kent for raising Clark and serving as a light in Clark's life and declares that Clark's heroism is due to his life in Smallville and his upbringing with Jonathan and Martha.

Throughout the show, Jor-El often punishes Clark whenever Clark prioritizes rescuing humans over Jor-El's missions; he freezes Clark in ice or suppresses Clark's powers. Yet, Jor-El declares Clark's mission is to protect humanity, and when Clark nearly kills a human enemy, Jor-El disowns Clark for almost taking someone's life and declares Clark is no longer his son.

This is nonsensical characterization: two sets of values and tactics that are mutually exclusive. Yet, it's actually a very accurate depictions of 2022 - 2024 era AI problems and challenges: conflicting objectives and contradictory directives.

AI Misalignment

In this case, the Jor-El AI has clearly been programmed with specific modules, each with a specific goal and a set of tactics for training Clark.

These modules include but aren't limited to: a module to defeat General Zod; a module to continue the Kryptonian legacy through Clark; a module to punish Clark; a module to provide physical and tactical learning; a module to support Clark's growth and maturity; an ethical and moral training module to position Clark as a protector of Earth -- many of which are in conflict if not in their goals, then in their methods.

Anti-Zod Module

The anti-Zod module's priority seems to be defeating Zod, the fascist who sought to conquer Krypton and upon defeat chose to destroy the planet. This module views Clark as the means by which the Jor-El AI can assemble and mount defenses against General Zod; it threatens Clark when he has other concerns; it doesn't care about Clark's friends, family or human goals, and has little concern for human life beyond acknowledging that defeating Zod would protect humans.

Legacy Module

The Kryptonian legacy module's priority seems to be for Clark to represent Krypton's otherwise lost history, language and culture. This module focuses on severing Clark's human connections, declaring that his family and friends are to be discarded in favour of Kryptonian missions and Kryptonian rites and rituals.

It seeks to imprint Kryptonian language, knowledge and messaging into Clark's mind and to ultimately remove any importance Clark might place on any life in human society. It also has no interest Clark's human life and identity, instead valuing only Clark's body for an imprinted and compliant Kal-El personality under the AI Jor-El's command.

Disciplinary Module

The disciplinary module's priority seems to be attuned to identifying when Clark is resisting the anti-Zod or Kryptonian-legacy directives. When Clark chooses to save humans or prioritizes his human life, the disciplinary module strips Clark of power at moments of crisis; it freezes him, it burns him, it threatens him.

Poor Awareness

These three modules are operating in parallel to the physical and tactical learning module, which seeks to train Clark without suppressing his human identity: it provides lessons for Clark to control each of his powers and apply them; it indicates what Clark's upper limits are and what may be causing his present limitations of strength, speed and flight; it seeks to teach Clark in his human identity instead of replacing it.

The first three modules (anti-Zod, Kryptonian legacy, disciplinary) demonstrate a lot of real world AI problems. Jor-El, like a lot of AI today, has poor contextual awareness; he doesn't evaluate situations in terms of human danger, only specific mission goals.

Jor-El displays an obvious AI bias; he is slanted towards Kryptonian preservation, and undervalues human life. Jor-El demonstrates a limited adaptability to dynamic situations, instead responding with rigid prioritization of original goals. As a result, his decisions and punishments are inconsistent and incoherent, morally unsound, and unwarrantedly harsh.

Growth and Maturity Module

In addition, the three anti-Zod, legacy and disciplinary modules are completely at odds with the growth and maturity module which serves to shepherd Clark from youth to adulthood via what it calls "trials", and recognizes that Clark's human upbringing with Jonathan and Martha and Clark's time in Smallville have provided a strong moral framework for how Clark will use his powers.

This module thanks Martha Kent for raising Clark well and seems devoted to helping Clark master his emotions and his physical reactions, even working in tandem with the moral and tactical module to teach Clark how to restrain his strength for intimacy. But it is in stark contrast to the Kryptonian legacy module that declared Martha and other humans were unnecessary encumbrances. 

Ethical and Moral Module

The final module of note in this theoretical framework is the ethical and moral module, which is in stark opposition to the anti-Zod, legacy, and disciplinary modules. The ethical and moral module's goal is to train Clark to be Earth's hero. It prioritizes protecting human life, even the lives of human enemies. It challenges Clark to save humans more efficiently when the anti-Zod module punished Clark for saving them. It warns Clark against aggression and "darkness" instead of simply using mind control and identity replacement.

It rebukes Clark for nearing killing a Lex Luthor clone when the first three modules were indifferent to human harm.

Contrary Goals

These issues are an extremely realistic portrayal of 2022 - 2024 AI issues. AI is often programmed with goals that, from a machine standpoint, can seem mutually exclusive. AI is frequently given directives -- tactics and strategies -- to achieve its goals, only to find those directives are in in opposition or can work towards some goals while interfering with others. AI often lacks situational and contextual nuance.

For example, AI that's asked to create a product assembly workflow of efficiency and safety will often fail. It will present either a high-efficiency but high-risk process that skips inspections and safety checks and endangers human life; alternatively, it might present a zero-risk workflow that makes it impossible to consistently manufacture anything. It lacks the balance and understanding to reconcile the opposing values of efficiency and safety; it isn't sure how to make appropriate trade-offs and it defaults to extreme positions.

In this case, the Jor-El AI has been programmed with competing goals: to train Clark as humanity's defender but maintain Kryptonian culture; to represent Krypton wholly but to guide humans morally within human culture; to protect humans in all circumstances while prioritizing Zod's defeat.

The AI has also been programmed with oppositional directives: punishment and moral guidance; isolationism with social development. This, combined with translation errors, has created a severely misaligned AI system that causes Jor-El to be inconsistent, erratic, and perpetually at extreme ends of his behavioural spectrum.

Poor Learning

In addition, the Jor-El AI demonstrates some capacity for adaptive learning, but in a highly inconsistent and unreliable fashion. Despite claiming that Clark has made great strides and achieving a more harmonious relationship, the Jor-El AI regularly defaults to punishing, attacking and threatening Clark and eventually refuses to speak with him.

The AI clearly adapts to recognize that Clark's human experiences and connections are valuable and vital to Clark's destiny, yet it can't seem to consistently apply this learning to future interactions.

This is a very common problem in real world AI systems: AI often struggles to learn new data and adapt its response accordingly. AI will often review a piece of writing and note flaws, then review a corrected draft and note the same flaws anyway, warping existing information or generating false information in order to justify its reiterated criticisms.

This is because AI can suffer from algorithmic rigidity, where it can't always adapt its programming to new information and defaults to its initial response and original programming. This is a flaw of overfitting to original inputs alongside to limited memory where AI can lack the storage capacity to track progression and development. This creates instances where an AI might learn something and even recall it but fail to apply it consistently to other situations.

Poor Emotional Intelligence

The most glaring problem with the Jor-El AI is a lack of emotional intelligence. The Jor-El AI punishes Clark for prioritizing human welfare and for refusing to adopt Kryptonian culture despite Clark being the only Kryptonian on Earth. Jor-El also presents a message of conquest and authoritarianism on their first interaction and orders Clark to abandon his family with no regard for Clark's emotional bonds.

This lack of emotional intelligence is extremely common in real world AI systems. Many chatbots, when conversing with users about grief and frustration, will respond with tone-deaf or overly literal outputs that aren't informed by any recognition of the users' emotional states. AI human resources software often fails to evaluate the interpersonal skills and value systems of candidates.

This is because AI doesn't have the depth of social experience that humans possess, and the inner life of AI is algorithmic and programmatic rather than emotional or experiential.

The overall sense, from a real world AI standpoint of 2024, is that Jor-El built this AI in a slapdash fashion with a lot of hackwork and cut corners. This is probably due to the fact that Jor-El had to assemble this AI system under the pressure of learning that his planet was soon to explode.

The Original Creator

The 'real' Jor-El appears on Smallville in Season 9 as a biological man, a Kryptonian, albeit a clone. Jor-El, played by Julian Sands, is in stark contrast to the AI: he is kind, gentle, diplomatic, noble, and compassionate; he is nothing like his AI counterpart and the inconsistency is left a mystery.

In Season 10, Clark receives a message recorded by the real Jor-El before his death, again played by Julian Sands. Jor-El tells Clark: "I am sending with you all my knowledge. None of my ego or regret. They will die with me here on Krypton."

The implication is that due to this omission, Jor-El unintentionally removed the key parts of his personality that create empathy, understanding, familial connections, warmth, and the personal touch.

As a result, the AI has a simplified moral framework of extreme black and white terms, leading to a harsh, strict and rigid pattern of behaviour that is contradicted by opposing modules of guidance and learning.

Poorly Made

The Jor-El AI is, despite its capabilities, a poorly made system. The flaws seem to originate from a lack of thorough testing (especially in high crisis situations), a failure to address ethical considerations and biases, a total lack of documentation, and no maintenance and updates for patches.

Due to Krypton's destruction, the lack of updates and patches is perhaps understandable; less so is the shocking lack of security where anyone seems to be able to break into the Fortress at any time and damage the AI interface. However, due to the stress and impossible situation in which Jor-El built this AI deathtrap, perhaps he should be excused.

Regardless, the problems with the Jor-El AI are alarming. While every AI system today has all of these problems, no AI system in our world has the capacity to imprint overriding personalities, encase people in ice, drain lifeforce from their bodies or inflict burns and brands on people's flesh (although I'm sure there's a drone system out there that can do something like that and could someday be AI controlled).

Accidentally Insightful

It's incredibly amusing that the writers, due to having an extremely inconsistent take on the Jor-El AI in 2003 - 2011, inadvertently captured all the problems with artificial intelligence from 2022 onward. Watched on original broadcast, the Jor-El character is erratic, written without intention or foresight beyond his use as a plot device to hinder or help Clark as needed in each episode. The characterization is obnoxious and frustrating.

Watched today, the Jor-El AI is a strangely prescient portrayal of real world AI problems: conflicting objectives, opposing directives, translation errors, poor learning, limited adaptability, unreliable performance and limited to non-existent emotional intelligence -- all of which AI developers struggle with now. What was once incompetence has now become insightful, and it's entirely accidental.

Aside from the "fine and dandy" part, this comment strikes me as a defence coming from a person may often be very careless with language, who might regularly offend others, who dislikes discussions of this nature because then they have to confront how they may have regularly offended and upset others with their words.

When someone claims that examining "crass" language can only stifle and divide, it sounds to me like they don't want to be held accountable or responsible for their own words.

I also observe that people who complain they are being stifled and divided by analyzing language will often try to stifle review of their words and divide their protest across various excuses: they claim they shouldn't be held responsible for anything they said because they didn't think it through or they posted it a long time ago or their words weren't meant to be reviewed or they don't remember writing it or they shouldn't have to take responsibility for anything they said on the internet or passingly or ever.

It seems to me that this is the response of someone for whom words have often blown up in their faces. I think someone like this will often blame others for being oversensitive and restrictive; they will dismiss examinations of language; they will attempt to intimidate by claiming that calling for awareness of the weight and power of words are an attack on civil liberties and personal freedoms.

I think they do this because their words have exposed them when analyzed and they don't like what's revealed. I pulled all of that with Allison Mack's webmaster. I see what my words back then reveal about me and I feel just awful about it.

I should have seen that instead of this woman being oversensitive to words, I was reckless with them. Instead of restricting me, she needed me to be more responsible. Instead of impeding my liberties and freedoms by questioning my words, she needed me to understand what words can do and how they need to be wielded with care.

I could have been compassionate but realistic, empathetic yet factual. And maybe, if I hadn't been derisive, scornful and mocking, this woman wouldn't have gone on the defensive and gotten in deeper with Allison Mack.

I will not be so arrogant as to claim full responsibility for this web designer's choices. I'm sure there are lots of unfortunate reasons why this web designer joined Mack's cult, but I wish I hadn't given her one more.

People are responsible for the words they use and for how their words reflect their character and values, and the world has every right to analyze what they -- or I -- post in public, even and especially if some of us may deeply regret what we've said.

I think my terror is probably about us here in Canada, where we are staring down the barrel of an election where the advantage is with this climate change dismissing looney toon who is basically Trump lite.

There was a time when I was so angry at Jerry O'Connell for so many failures and betrayals.

But I think, if I'm being more honest with myself: I was angry with him because his existence and his public persona were a constant reminder of an unchangeable truth. A fact that I didn't like to acknowledge or admit. A reality that William Shatner touches on in his song, "Real":

After some review... I'm forced to conclude that an upscaled from 720p to 1080p DESPECIALIZED EMPIRE is preferable to 4K80 EMPIRE, at least for me.

The 4K project was very fortunate in finding some solid theatrical prints of STAR WARS and a fantastic one of RETURN. What they found for EMPIRE, however, is really dirty, flickery and grainy and has an uncomfortably faded, slightly fuzzy quality even under the graininess and even after all the cleanup.

DESPECIALIZED, being based on the blu-ray, doesn't have that issue. The DEPSECIALIZED EMPIRE, as reconstructions go, doesn't really have that much to DESPECIALIZE. The majority of the new special effects were in the new shots of the Hoth monster (which the fan editor simply cut) and the new effects in Cloud City which the editor restored. That and other small restorations (getting the lightsabers to be the right colour, adding back matte lines) were all that was really needed since the SPECIAL EDITION added so little to EMPIRE.

I would probably stick with DESPECIALIZED for EMPIRE. Since it was a 720p file upscaled to 1080p for consistency with me, it doesn't even look that different from the soft but clear versions of 4K77 STAR WARS and 4K83 RETURN OF THE JEDI, as the AI upscale softened the DESPECIALIZED EMPIRE.

My suspicion is that 80 - 90 percent of viewers would choose DESPECIALIZED over the digital print scans because DESPECIALIZED is mostly sharp and looks mostly modern while the scans are grainy, noisy, and also not as sharp. I'm basing this on how RussianCabbie prefers the hypersaturated version of BACK TO THE FUTURE over the more authentic desaturated version because RussianCabbie, in my view, has extremely normal, mainstream preferences for video quality.

I personally am not a DESPECIALIZED person, but I think I'm in the minority.

I am as nervous as a Blockbuster manager during the rise of Netflix. I'm not sure what will happen. And you know what? I'm proud of that.

I used to have a very obvious anxiety disorder that I couldn't manage properly at the time. There was someone I looked up to, who was a bit of a shock jock sort of person. He held Libertarian views like Tracy Torme, and he would offer a lot of political views boldly and a lot of hypercritical perspectives of anything and everything (art, science, housing, parking spaces) with total certainty. I never talked to anyone else who expressed so little doubt, and because I was severely overstocked with doubt, I admired and envied him.

He said that Clinton was certain to win in 2016. He said, upon Trump's win, that Trump had lived in a blue state for most of his life and would tone down the insanity. He said that the presidency was not a very powerful position or office and that whoever was president didn't fundamentally change anything. He said that Biden was doomed to lose the 2020 election and that Trump was a master showman who would run rings around Biden.

He was wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong.

He never conceded his errors. He never even acknowledged his errors and that his prognostications were not correct, that the world didn't work the way he thought it would, that the outcomes weren't the ones he expected. He never reviewed his errors and why his predictions were off. He had no self-doubt. He kept making them with the same level of certainty even when that absolute confidence had proven absolutely wrong.

And because I loved him and admired him and valued him, I got upset with him and I... didn't handle my frustration well; I became increasingly incensed by what I perceived as ego and vanity... which is pretty absurd because I have plenty of ego and vanity myself. Nobody writes nine SLIDERS scripts unpaid and ropes podcasters in to talk about it without some arrogance.

But regardless, my friend did not acknowledge that he was often wrong, that he didn't really know what was going to happen, that the world didn't always work the way he thought it did our should, and that he wasn't sure.

I won't make that mistake. Simon Rosenberg paints a pretty picture balanced by realism; it could still be unbalanced. He could still be wrong and he'd be the first person to tell you that. He's not a god. More specifically, Rosenberg is not Quinn Mallory or Professor Arturo; he is not a mathematician.

He is an analyst, a pundit, and he is biased to say Kamala is doing well because he wants her to be doing well. He was right in 2022 that the red wave was an illusion; he is right to say that 2024 isn't 2022 -- but there's always more to the picture than anyone can see, and it's entirely possible that he's overlooked a key item that would change his assessment if he knew to factor it in. It's also possible that he's overlooked things that, in the end, won't matter.

I share his words because they sound good to me, but let us never forget that I am posting what I want to hear, and sometimes, what I want to hear is not accurate.

I have made predictions before and they were wrong. It shook me. It rattled me. It terrified me. I'm not absolutely confident. I have doubts. But I don't doubt reality, which is that The New York Times is looking at one poll and Simon Rosenberg is looking at 12. But what is going to happen?

I'm not too proud to say I don't know and I'm not sure.

Jerry enjoys science fiction, but I imagine he's mostly there to be with his wife after she's done her panels and signed her photos.

My image of Jerry from the 1990s and from Melissa Joan Hart's autobiography is that Jerry was a philanderer, so it's really weird for me to say this now, but Jerry O'Connell is head over heels in love with Rebecca Romijn. But also: he's at the cons for leisure, not for work.

Why doesn't he listen to you? Are you not good friends and lifelong companions anymore?

Eight months later, I finally finished ZOEY'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST, which was cancelled on its Season 2 cliffhanger finale and then resolved in a feature length Roku-streamed Christmas special, ZOE'S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST.

It was really good. It provided both a climax and conclusion to the ongoing threads of the series, while simultaneously leaving some room for development should there ever be a follow up in the future.

I wonder what SLIDERS would have been like if Robert K. Weiss' 2000-era bid for a feature film had ever come to pass.

Just my opinion: aside from 102 - 109, all other SLIDERS episodes stretch to a 55 inch LCD just fine.

Back to SLIDERS:

I've found a really interesting program called ShaderGlass. https://mausimus.itch.io/shaderglass

It casts an overlay over the screen of your Windows PC, which you can move over different windows or make fullscreen. It has presets to make the overlay make your screen mimic a cathode ray tube television with the dot pattern and the screen curvature and the crushed blacks.

I set it to fullscreen on my laptop. Then I played "Luck of the Draw". With the dot pattern masking the lack of detail and the fuzzy resolution, this is the first time that "Luck of the Draw" has looked right to me in years. And it looked... like a 90s TV show on a 90s TV screen.

Maybe, for this sort of content, the future is demastering.

That's unfortunate!

To me, I think of how the Universal DVD release of SLIDERS looks shockingly poor on DVD for Episodes 102 - 109, but if played on a CRT television, I don't think anyone could tell that those episodes looked any blurrier than the pilot or the subsequent seasons. I also doubt poor DVD bit rate was a problem until HD televisions started reaching 75 percent of homes by 2013, at which point DVD was already too low a resolution for the screen, and overcompression would make it worse. However, by 2015, it was pretty clear that DVD was going to fade in favour of streaming and, if anyone really wanted physical media, blu-ray for collectors.

From Simon Rosenberg at HopiumChronicles.com on the polls:

I'm not familiar with these debates, but I can assure you that you are absolutely right to say SLIDERS was shot on film: 35mm film in Seasons 1 - 3 and 16mm film in Season 4 - 5. You don't need to 'believe' it, you're correct and it's an objective fact.

If anyone ever told you it wasn't shot on film, they are confused and mistaken. I can right away that it is film from the film grain.

When film is exposed to light, silver halide crystals in the film experience a chemical reaction with tiny particles of metallic silver which create the visible image and creates the texture of grain. This grain is clearly present in the Pilot and Seasons 2 - 3, and the grains get comparatively larger in Seasons 4 - 5, and it's very recognizably 16mm film.

Videotape does not have film grain because it records a purely electronic signal without the chemical reactions for grain.

(Most modern TV and film is shot with digital cameras, and in most cases, film grain is added afterwards to mimic the texture of chemical film, and it adds a bit of texture while being less perceptible because it's uniform and consistent as opposed to variable to the image content. And on streaming, digital files are encoded to smooth out most of the grain (reducing file size) and uniform grain is overlaid during playback.)

Grain is not as visible on episodes 102 - 109 due to the episodes having been stored on low resolution analog videotape that didn't maintain even an SD version of the original film and its grainy properties. However, 102 to 109 were also clearly shot on film: while they lack visible film grain, they have all the signs of film-to-tape conversion.

They have judder -- uneven motion -- in fast moving scenes. They also have interlacing artifacts: horizontal lines during motion and jagged edges on straight lines like chains, fences, poles and shelves. This is the result of the film to tape telecine process where the 24fps frame rate format of film was converted to the TV broadcast 30fps videotape.

Videotape would not have judder or interlacing artifacts; those are exclusively the result of film to tape telecine conversion.

Also, videotape has a very flat colour range and the dynamic range of SLIDERS, even in those beige rooms of Seasons 4 - 5, is beyond what videotape could record.

If there were ever any debate about whether or not SLIDERS was shot on film, it was likely due to people being misinformed about and/or misunderstanding TV editing. The pilot was shot and edited on film as a big budget TV movie to sell a subsequent series, and then it was transferred to high grade videotape with 420 lines of resolution, used for review and sales and broadcast. However, the following episodes of the show were shot on film and then transferred to videotape for post production.

Unlike film, videotape offered linear editing, immediate playback, and needed no chemical processing, providing a faster turnaround time essential for TV production. The show seems to have used standard but low resolution analog videotape format for episodes 102 to 109 which is why those episodes are blurrier.

Low resolution videotape was cheaper and, for standard definition 480i broadcast and CRT viewing, the viewer couldn't tell that it was blurrier, so it didn't matter. Only when the DVDs were played on a mid-2000s HDTV did the poor video quality become apparent.

In Season 2, there was clearly a switch to high resolution digital videotape, meaning we go from "Luck of the Draw"'s fuzziness to "Into the Mystic" looking sharper with another increase in sharpness for Season 3 and a slightly more grainy look for Seasons 4 - 5. Digital videotape with 540 lines of resolution became the affordable industry standard during the long production gap between "Luck of the Draw" and "Into The Mystic", with improvement each year in the film to digital tape telecine process.

If fans were ever debating whether or not SLIDERS was film or videotape, it's likely because SLIDERS was shot on film and, aside from the pilot, transferred to videotape for editing and special effects, and stored on videotape for broadcast and later digitized from videotape to DVD. Fans were likely confused by production references to videotape suites for editing and effects. In addition, there were isolated B-roll sequences (sports footage, etc,) that were recorded on videotape, but it's maybe 2 percent of the show.

SLIDERS on DVD has film grain and all the artifacts of a film to tape conversion: judder and interlacing artifacts. If shot on videotape, there would be neither grain nor judder nor artifacts. You don't need to believe you're right about this matter; you're making a statement of fact and you are correct.

I'm super-confused about movie ticket prices where you live. Alamo Drafthouse seemed to be charging $9.73 USD for regular admission but AMC was charging $12 USD for regular admission. I'm probably looking at the wrong pages. How much is the average movie ticket?

It looks like AMC Stubs would charge you $20 a month and allows you to see three movies a week, which means it could be worthwhile if you're someone who sees at least two movies a month. However, $20 a month, even for three movies a week, is a much bigger fee than $8 a month for one movie a month. https://www.moneydigest.com/1548760/amc … rth-price/

Tickets here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada tend to be about $15 USD if you buy them online (factoring in an online booking fee), and about $12 USD if bought in person, but who's going to do that? It's slow and it's reserved seating, so if you go to the theatre just in time for the show, all the good seats are probably gone (unless you're watching THE CROW in 2024, nobody wants to see it).

$15 USD for one movie as well as having to physically go to the theatre and park and enter and see it on their schedule makes me feel like they should be paying me for my time. I imagine a lot of people feel that way and elect to stay home and watch Netflix. $8 USD, however, feels like a reasonable price.

Thanks for sharing that, but the Pilot is not really an effective test case. The pilot episode was edited either on film or high resolution analog videotape. It already looked sharp and crisp because it was not subject to the blurriness and field mismatching issues of episodes 1.02 - 1.08 being on low resolution tape. Upscaling the pilot episode is shooting fish in a barrel for any upscaler whether AI or a simple bicubic scaler. A real test case would be a scene from the unusually hazy "Last Days" or "Luck of the Draw" with its blurriness and film judder.

How have the results been? I won't have time to try it until my EMPIRE cleanup is done.

I am not very optimistic that anything can clean up episodes that were transferred to low resolution analog videotape, but I'm always ready to change my mind.

The fan-produced 4K80 release is now out on specialist fan preservation sites. It's a 4K digital scan of the theatrical cut of EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, made from a 35mm print and a 16mm print, cleaned up by fans to assemble the best versions of both prints and address the faded colour and recreate how it looked in cinemas in 1980.  https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k80/

I've looked at the first version and it looks just like the non-special VHS version I remember in the 90s, authentic but dirty and with grain so high in some scenes it's like static baked into the frame. Other scenes have a natural level of grain. It looks like a medium quality 720p image (because a theatrical film print is several generations removed from the original negative).

While this is a theatrical print scan, the movie did not actually look this grainy in movie theatres in 1980. I wasn't there in 1980, but I know that the movie theatres of the era created a softer film image due to the film protector light being scattered when passing through film and then impacting the screen. This would have added a sheen that diminished the grain. In contrast, modern backlit displays on home HDTVs form a pixel-based image with black borders around each pixel that have the result of sharpening any and all grain.

I think 4K80 would be releasable on Disney+ if the video were downscaled to a sharper 1080p image and then run through AI grain filtering to tone down the grain. Then an AI algorithm could add a modest amount of grain back to each shot. The entire movie would then have a consistent level of AI-overlaid but natural looking film grain. If it's consistent, it's easy to get used to whereas the noise becomes distracting if some scenes look static-coated and others look clear.

Admittedly, for streaming services, grain is the first thing to be removed from digital files and then a grain texture is added back on during playback as an overlay.

I've downscaled the file to 1080p and I'm going to run it through Topaz AI grain refinement just to get the grain consistent. Then I will pass it along to my niece as the version of EMPIRE that her father probably saw in theatres. I had previously passed along to her a version of the DESPECIALIZED EDTION for EMPIRE (a fan-created hybrid of blu-ray footage and upscaled DVDs).

DESPECIALIZED looked okay at 720p, but on modern 4K TVs, it was looking very low-resolution for a lot of the DVD-sourced footage. I ran it through a Topaz AI upscale to boost it to a somewhat sharper 1080p, but 4K80 will look more consistent. Where DESPECIALIZED looks super-sharp in the blu-ray sourced scenes and slightly blurry in the DVD-sourced scenes, 4K80 looks moderately sharp throughout the entire film and the AI cleanup will also make it moderately grainy throughout as well. That said, I'm sure the film editors at Disney could do an even better job by going at it shot by shot.

The sabotage of Georgia's process for vote counting is scaring me.
https://www.salon.com/2024/08/31/organi … ing-chaos/

The polls cannot be trusted. They couldn't be trusted when Biden was spiraling because slanted Republican polls were throwing off the averages, making a very close election seem like Trump was in the lead. They can't be trusted now because the enthusiasm of Kamala Harris reception and campaign means Democrats are more inclined to respond to polls and Trump supporters are less inclined to do so.

The likely situation is that the race remains close and competitive, and Democratic pollsters have warned that Kamala (as she prefers voters call her) has a lot of work to do.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/2 … s-00176065

That said, Trump clearly thinks he's losing. He's given up on impactful campaign events. He's stopped trying to build a coalition. His hope is to overturn or stall election results in court and with supporters in electoral offices.

I think you are confused. The James Carville Jr. you mentioned and quoted is the same person I quoted. Carville Jr. is not a Republican. However, Carville Jr. is also strongly opposed to the social justice focus of a number of Democrats, in particular Bernie Sanders.

I'm sorry it wasn't good for Grizzlor. I'd be curious to know what Slider_Quinn21 thought and if he feels the series is incomplete now cancelled.

I've sometimes wondered if STAR WARS will pull a bit of a retcon on the prequel-Jedi the way ENTERPRISE featured Vulcans as unpleasant, dour, miserable, unsupportive, and kind of useless, declaring the superiority and supremacy of their logic and increasingly isolationist attitudes-- only for a new showrunner in the fourth season to reveal that the Vulcans of Seasons 1 - 3 had been dealing with generational trauma and a pandemic with a mentally transmitted disease.

The situational, cultural and political strife had been worsened by how the original teachings of Surak, the Vulcan philosopher whose teachings of logic over emotion became the driving force of Vulcan society, had been distorted and misunderstood due to the loss of his guiding principle of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, a key tenet that balances logic with compassion and respect for all living things and cultures even if they do not devote themselves to logic.

Captain Archer restores Surak's full teachings to Vulcan society, setting the path for the Vulcans to become the open-minded and caring but emotionally aloof friends of the original STAR TREK series. I wonder if the Rey movie can maybe delve into how the failed, useless Jedi of the prequels were operating on a distorted foundation and rediscover the actual origins of the Jedi and the true role they can play in the galaxy.

My personal opinion on why the Jedi failed from an in-universe perspective: the Old Republic era Council and Luke's Jedi school were way too militarized. When you teach people that the Force is all about hacking and slashing away at armies to win wars, it creates a breeding ground for dark side tendencies because combat-first emphasizes power and dominance over compassion and empathy.

Ideally, Jedi training would be about Force sensitivity and applying that Force sensitivity to a profession or passion which does not have to be combat. In AIRBENDER, not every earth/fire/air/earth bender is a soldier: some of them run restaurants or build dams or transport or plumbing. The Jedi Council and Luke's approach to Jedi was to create supersoldiers, never creating any super-therapists or super-construction workers or super-doctors.

I recognize that as the franchise is called STAR WARS, screenwriters and directors will gravitate to combat, but if STAR WARS wants to present the Jedi as competent, then one path may be that the Jedi become less of an army and portrayed as an unintrusive religion where Jedi apply the Force in many areas of life and fighting is just one profession among many for Force users and maybe the term Jedi is broadened so it's not just warriors.

Rian Johnson offered a bit of a path to that in THE LAST JEDI: "The Force does not belong to the Jedi. To say that if the Jedi die, the light dies -- it's vanity, can't you feel that?" I might suggest we say that the Force does not belong to Jedi soldiers.

The Bulwark: Trump will probably lose.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/trump-is-g … e-probably

They point out that Trump has given up on trying to win more votes. His team is focused on winning the Electoral College, winning specific areas by a handful of votes, overturning specific areas where they lost in court. It's a narrow play and a lousy strategy. They emphasize that Trump will probably lose, but of course can't guarantee it.

I haven't really been in the mood to watch STAR WARS on TV, but I'm sorry that any show gets cancelled. The reviews for THE ACOLYTE on Den of Geek, a review site I enjoy, were poor to middling.

**

The Jedi being incompetent failures didn't originate in the Disney era, but in the prequel era, and George Lucas is absolutely responsible for that. I'm not sure if Lucas' authorial intent was to present them so, but note that in THE PHANTOM MENACE, Qui-Gon Jinn doesn't think it's his job to free slaves; in ATTACK OF THE CLONES, the Jedi somehow miss the Republic becoming a fascist empire and Anakin didn't bother to free his enslaved mother for at least a decade (and he still left the slave trade intact). In REVENGE OF THE SITH, Anakin becomes evil because... something or other about how he loved his wife and Jedi aren't supposed to have feelings.

If Jedi can't free slaves, they are useless. I don't know if that's the take Lucas intended, but he wrote it and he filmed it.

In THE LAST JEDI, Luke notes: "Now that they're extinct, the Jedi are romanticized, deified. But if your strip away the myth and look at their deeds, the legacy of the Jedi is failure. Hypocrisy, hubris. At the height of their powers, they allowed Darth Sidious to rise, create the Empire, and wipe them out. It was a Jedi Master who was responsible for the training and creation of Darth Vader." He's not wrong.

The entire arc seems subconscious on Lucas' part: the great love of Lucas' life was Marcia Lou Griffin, whom he met in film school and adored and married. She was a film editor and script consultant; Lucas was a good director and awkward screenwriter, and STAR WARS came alive with Marcia (and uncredited screenwriters Gloria and Willard Hyuck) adding life and joy to Lucas' plot and setpieces.

Shortly before THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, Lucas became obsessed with building up his own film studio and business. Lucas' devotion to Skywalker Ranch, Industrial Light and Magic, THX, Skywalker Sound while producing EMPIRE, RETURN OF THE JEDI and the Indiana Jones movies created entire industries -- but his interaction with his wife became near non-existent, and he dismissed her pleas that they spend more time together.

Despite this, Lucas claims he was shocked when Marcia told him she wanted a divorce and that she had fallen in love with someone else... and he responded by asking Marcia to wait until after the release of RETURN before proceeding with the divorce.

After Marcia left him, Lucas went on a long hiatus from filmmaking, obsessing over filmmaking technology over actually making films. THE PHANTOM MENACE is a pretty clear display of how Lucas creates when his ex-wife isn't there as a creative partner. ATTACK OF THE CLONES and REVENGE OF THE SITH show Anakin Skywalker foolishly daring to fall in love and destroyed by having feelings at which point he becomes a technological monster.

Lucas portrays Jedi in the prequels as distant, disengaged, oblivious, defeated by emotions, betrayed by romance, and the most prominent Jedi becomes a destroyed man in a shell of sci-fi armour. That strikes me as an accidental yet incredibly telling self-portrait.

Who would the Jedi be if Lucas had decided to drop THX and ILM from his repertoire and devote that time to his marriage, and if he'd written the prequels with Marcia Lucas as his creative partner and the heart of STAR WARS?

Hillary Clinton is an extremely controversial figure even among Democrats especially with her voting record on war and her fervent support of Wall Street and big banks. Anyone should be allowed to question her supposed commitment to democracy without being attacked.

Grizzlor is allowed to find speeches boring regardless of who is delivering them; that in itself is not racist or sexist. I think to call it that without more evidence is an escalation and a leap. I mean, nobody called you or me racist for hoping President Biden would stay in the race and not feeling ready for the very qualified PoC Kamala Harris to take the lead.

I don't think every show needs to run 100 episodes -- but every TV series should have at least 100 stories to tell or it's not a TV series. If a show can only last three seasons, it shouldn't be a show, at least not to me. (Mini serieses, I think of as a separate category.) To say LOST should only have run three seasons would be, to me, an indictment of LOST as a TV show. I think it probably had around five years in it, and they seem to have done well enough with six seasons if Slider_Quinn21 enjoyed it.

I wonder what Slider_Quinn21 thought of the DVD epilogue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMjPzV2RvO8

I would say: my criteria for a favourite show is a highly personal list of attributes and others may disagree. I formed the list by looking at how LOST is Slider_Quinn21's favourite show. LOST was, judging from Slider_Quinn21's posts, a good product. It lasted long enough to become a part of his life; it didn't degrade or devolve to the point where it couldn't tell its stories or complete its narrative goals; it had a conclusion.

I recall watching LOST up to the point when Jack returns to the island and is met by Jin, at which point, I was looking for something more life-affirming out of TV shows and less... unnerving.

While I didn't watch LOST past Jack's return to the Island, it might be argued: LOST was an ensemble show touching on various lives and rotating through them, and LOST was about unknowable mysteries that might have no answer. Therefore, dropping or losing characters, blind alleys, and an emphasis on characterization over mystery is not necessarily the show becoming subfunctional/dysfunctional but rather an avoidable part of exploring its core themes, some less rewarding than others.

I can't speak to this definitively, but around the point I stopped watching LOST, I did feel that the mysteries of the Island would not become more meaningful if we learned that it's the site of a crashed alien spaceship that warps time and space and manifests anomalies based on the internal conflicts of the humans in proximity. That strikes me as reducing the unknowable to sci-fi technobabble terms, when the show does better by using the paranormal nature of the island to illustrate the character conflicts -- while leaving the exact means of manifestation unknown.

That said, isn't there some sort of DVD/Blu-ray short film that 'explains' 'everything'? Knowing LOST, I assume the explanations are as confounding as the mysteries.
https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/lost-epilo … -questions

**

I think, for me, ONCE UPON A TIME is my equivalent of LOST: a complex set of arcs and plots alternating between flashbacks and present day scenes, except ONCE UPON A TIME had the benefit of its mythology -- Disney versions of fairy tales -- already being established long before the show premiered. In contrast, LOST had to create its own mythology and had a much longer ladder to climb. I think ONCE UPON A TIME's whimsical, gentle, sweet tone proved a better match to my tastes and longings and insecurities and neuroses than LOST.

At the end of the day, what I want out of TV (and life) is BROOKLYN NINE-NINE: lighthearted hijinks from highly competent people working to make the world a little nicer one day at a time. (See also: PARKS AND RECREATION, ANIMAL CONTROL, THE ORVILLE.)

My niece would also point out that I have an obsession with TV shows about troubled women fighting crime (WYNONNA EARP, THE BLACKLIST, BLINDSPOT, CORONER, AGENT CARTER), but aside from WYNONNA EARP, I would have to call each one of them flawed favourites. I would have a separate category for flawed favourites, some of which are only flawed in minor ways and some which are catastrophic disasters. (I need to rewatch WYNONNA EARP to decide if it is a favourite.)

**

Why do I say a show needs to last four years to qualify as a favourite show? I think four years is the point where the show has become a part of my life. The Arrowverse was a part of my life. At three years, I'm still thinking that the show is a temporary situation; at four years, it feels long-term.

**

I didn't think about THE SIMPSONS, or SOUTH PARK, but I guess I think of those as being in a class of their own, separate from live action TV shows.

Well, as the article notes: AI is pretty overhyped. The artificial intelligence we have now isn't actually that intelligent, its outputs are inaccurate and unreliable and unstable, its capabilities are exaggerated, its use is limited, its applications are narrow, its productivity increases are small, it's hitting a plateau of advancement, it's dependent on human generated data that can be cut off.
https://www.npr.org/sections/planet-mon … telligence

The AI in our upscaling programs might be AI in terms of matching the algorithm to the image or video, but the actual algorithms for each element or texture in the image strike me as human made and human tested. AI still can't wrangle a decent version of the Season 1 episodes of SLIDERS.