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Looking at the Pilot episode -- the transfer is good. It's just that with all the subsequent episodes, the bit rate for them is significantly lower than the Pilot.

I think Universal probably has a decent transfer already of the master tapes -- they just put the Pilot at maximum quality, using up the majority of the space on the first DVD, and then proceeded to use a lower bit rate for the rest of the episodes on that disc and the rest of the box sets.

Looking at the Pilot and only the Pilot, anyone with a home computer could run the aspect ratio conversion and the upscale. The first thing to do is run a non-linear stretch on the image, stretching the sides and zooming in slightly to change 4:3 to 16:9. The next thing to do is to boost the resolution to 720p (not 1080p, let's not go nuts). To cover some of the degradation, a low level of noise should be added and the contrast reduced. The end result would be a good upscaled DVD with the high capacity of a blu-ray allowing the episodes to fit on the discs.

It's not hard. It's plug and play. It's worth doing. I'm just waiting for some contact info to come in and I'll get in touch. And plead. And beg. And cajole. And urge.

*sigh* I'll contact them.

Well, if Mill Creek could do their own transfer of the masters, we'd get somewhere. That said, many small video publishing outfits do not have the equipment or resources to do this. They might be able to make it a condition of licensing SLIDERS from Universal.

A few days ago:

MATT: "Did you read Informant's new book?"
ME: "It's not out until April 19. I just got the preorder. If he's anything like me, he's rewriting every line of dialogue before release."
MATT: "I would think he'd have to lock his galley for publication. This close to date it's a bad idea to tweak things for so many reasons."
ME: "I seriously doubt it's that difficult to upload a new ePub file."
MATT: "If you're editing your book days before publication, your edits could create problems in the manuscript where information is no longer continuous."
ME: "I'm sure you can tighten up description and polish dialogue without causing a domino effect."
MATT: "Don't be so sure! All it takes is one typo and there is NO dystopian future!"
ME: "The first version of 'Revelation' I uploaded had the wrong number of doomsday clocks in it. And omitted a vital clue to set up the identity of the doomsday clock mastermind. And mis-spelled Hillary Clinton."
MATT: "You're also not selling your story."
ME: "My burden is much greater than Informant's! I'm not doing some piddling spec script or some irrelevant Marvel mini series, Matthew. This is the twentieth anniversary special of SLIDERS. This actually matters."
MATT: "You know, he'd probably send you a promo copy at this point."
ME: "No, no. He's a working class author, he needs every sale."
MATT: "You could read it in advance! You've already paid for it."

And now here we are.

Did you try any of the space-clearing measures I tried above?

**

Oh for God's sake. PM me a file, I'll review your book.

I've reviewed the Hillary E-mail stuff to the best of my ability -- I don't believe there is any route towards indictment or prosecution because it would be incredibly convoluted and difficult to present anything she's done with regards to the E-mails as a violation of criminal statutes relating to classified information, especially if the information was only made classified in retrospect. Not saying Hillary Clinton can't be taken down, but this doesn't look like the route to doing it.

Mitt Romney's speech in Utah was an earnest, heartfelt, avuncular, funny, well-worded and warm performance -- a stark contrast to the misfiring, malfunctioning cardboard robot who ran in the last election. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2iefXdC794I

It's a weird time when John Oliver and Mitt Romney are of largely the same mind.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ

Well. Let this be a small drop of solace in your life.

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Sick at home today. Started reading the X-FILES anthology, TRUST NO ONE, from IDW. At one point, I got really confused by a story set in 2015 where Mulder and Scully are employed at the FBI, investigating X-Files and sharing a bed. What!?!?

Then I realized that this story set in the comic book version of Season 10. Somehow, I'd forgotten all about it. I wonder if this alternate continuity will be maintained; there's a relaunch of the X-FILES comics in April.

I always figured that's what they'd do. I always saw Colonization going down one of two ways -- Mulder confronting an alien in human form, declaring that this is the moment they stop Colonization. Only for the alien to say that Colonization has been cancelled -- that the humans have messed up the Earth so much nobody wants any part of it and that the galaxy at large considers Earth a no-fly zone.

The other option I imagined was Mulder and Scully gathering an army of werewolves, ghosts, poltergeists, parasites, demons, witches, vampires, etc., and the supernatural creatures teaming up to fight the aliens.

Samsung has never been an innovator, just a trend chaser. But, like me, they occasionally manage to combine their borrowed pieces into something decent. I like their hardware. I think their Android builds are awful, but their devices are so popular that the bootloaders get unlocked and Cyanogenmod is ready for them within weeks. The metal and glass obsession is Samsung chasing the iPhone and I can't exactly blame them. Their dominance of high-end, big screen phones ended once the iPhone 6 came out and the S6 losing the expandable memory and waterproofing also saw the line lose any positive difference from the iPhone. Ultimately, metal and glass are easily scratched, dented, cracked and shattered and by the time you've shielded your device from these risks, they're not thin and the materials are covered. So why bother?

However, the low-end of the market comes with some issues. I have to withdraw my claim that 8GB phones are a good buy so long as you can put in a microSD card. I discovered that some recently updated apps don't work well with Link2SD anymore -- the APK, LIB and DEX files can still be transferred. However, when I tried to shift all my Kindle ebooks and my Instapaper articles in Data-External folders to the microSD as well, Kindle and Instapaper were unable to load the books and articles. If Link2SD can't be used to handle an app's external data, then it's the 4 - 5 GB of usable space won't be adequate.

I've found some ways to work around this issue; I just ran all my Kindle books through a Calibre DRM stripper, converted the files to ePub and put them on my microSD. And I'm granting Instapaper 500MB of internal storage. However, I no longer think Link2SD is a solid solution to avoiding memory shortages on 8GB phones. Stick to 16GB phones.

My phone still has 3.43GB of space left which is sufficient for running Android, but I'll periodically need to clear out the internal storage so that temporary files have space to breathe, something I didn't need to do with a 16GB phone.

I confess to a certain distaste towards Ben Affleck as Batman -- because, like Slider_Quinn21, I really hate old people. No, not really. It's just -- I think that only certain types of people should play superheroes. Ben Affleck has a *lot* of skeletons in his closet and it's the sort of thing that really distracts from just seeing a character -- I don't want to look at Bruce Wayne and see a gambling philanderer who passes out in casinos, I don't want to look at Captain America and see a jailbait chasing cokehead. That said, it's not terribly fair in that everyone has lives and dark sides and I find myself giving Robert Downey Jr. and Christian Bale a free pass because their various mental shortcomings are in keeping with the characters they play. For superheroes -- I prefer Tom Welling types, people with extremely low key personal lives that don't get in the way of seeing their character and only their character.

A friend of mine went to high school with Erik Knudsen (Alec from CONTINUUM) and was at a loss to describe anything significant about him whatsoever; he was polite and reportedly liked to sit quietly thinking.

For an older Batman -- I think I would choose someone like Adrian Paul (who is 56). I know nothing about him and never will. :-)

I don't get the obsession with metal and glass either -- in that all my phones go into cases with screen protectors, so all that gets covered up anyway.

In the past, I would buy new phones, but they weren't newly released phones. They were flagship phones from several generations previous, usually being sold at a huge discount because the sellers wanted to clear their warehouses for the latest model. Now, I'm buying budget models. But if you're happy with your S4, just replace the battery now and then. (Buy Anker!) I'd still be using my Samsung S3 if it were water resistant.

The market's really changed; you can get a great phone for less than $200; a 24-month payment plan, that's $8.30 a month. If you need a new phone -- honestly, the specifications have plateaued; phones as powerful as the S4 are mid-range/budget now, and yet, the demands of Android have hardly gone up at all. Heck, I'm seeing unlocked S4s on Amazon for $214!

My ideal phone would have been the waterproof Samsung S5 (16GB, 5-inch 1080p screen, microSD slot, removable battery, 2GB of RAM). But I just didn't think it was worth $400 when $160 still bought me waterproofing and a microSD slot and I could live with 720p. I can get around 8GB's limitations with a microSD. The slower processor and 1GB of RAM are an issue -- multitasking's a little choppy if apps are updating in the background, so I just make sure that only happens while I sleep. You don't need to spend top dollar on a decent phone if you're willing to be selective in what features are essential and engage in some workarounds.

I got used to the back, home and recents buttons on my Samsung S3. It feels weird to have the Moto G 2015's 5-inch screen but with a chunk of that screen taken up by onscreen buttons and the status bar. I used the GravityBox Xposed module to shrink the buttons a bit, but I couldn't get used to it. So I installed this app that lets me remap the volume buttons on the phone. I've set it so that a long-press on the volume-down button serves as the home button, long-press on volume-up serves as the back button and a swipe to the left brights out the recent apps.

It's good!

This has been another post in irrelevance from me.

This is a great story. As always, you are a great writer. But I don't feel it's the story Carter needed to tell. In 2016, Carter needed to (finally) tell the god-damn Colonization story, pay off 23 years of build-up and resolve it. That said, the world at large seemed to hate "My Struggle II," so you could be onto something.

In my view, THE X-FILES had been building to a global catastrophe. Seasons 3 - 5 and the movie make it clear that the endgame is "Colonization." The original inhabitant of this planet, the black oil, parasitically infected alien visitors and formed a symbiote race that was driven off the Earth by the ice age. They intended to return and use the evolving human race as incubators to propagate their species. The Syndicate attempted to work with the aliens to secure their own survival and were killed, replaced by alien-created supersoldiers infiltrating every level of government to keep Colonization on track for December 22, 2012.

Carter, after a 14 year hiatus, needed to step back and find a way to make Colonization a story that would work in a TV episode on a TV budget. He chose a grand retcon; Colonization was a hoax. There was no alien conspiracy. Instead, it was a conspiracy of men using alien technology scavenged from a post-WWII crash, secretly manipulating and intimidating society for their own purposes.

As a student (as opposed to a fan) of THE X-FILES, I don't think these two mythologies can fit without declaring numerous scenes and episodes to have been staged if not wholly ignored. Nevertheless, this shift doesn't do away with the need for a payoff. The Syndicate/the conspiracy of men was building to some endgame -- Colonization. It's just that Colonization isn't an alien invasion, it's something else.

So, after "My Struggle," Carter still had to provide a Colonization-like scenario of global proportions. A Colonization that reflects real-world problems: militarization, establishment falsehoods, biological threats. Preferably something that could be rendered in THE X-FILES criminal procedural format.

The scenario Carter chose was a crisis of immune system failure across the globe, which is a pretty relevant concern given the numerous reports of antibiotic resistant superbugs developing due to overuse of antibiotic medication in livestock and humans. The onscreen events of "My Struggle II" are a parallel to widespread antibiotic failure and superbug infection and present Colonization as a physiological alien invasion rather than a military one -- and therefore, Colonization now works within the criminal procedural format.

In this context, Carter is able to have Scully confront and defeat Colonization -- creating a cure using her DNA and, by implication, the DNA of the chosen survivors all over the world. Scully took on the invasion and she won.

So, as of "My Struggle II," the alien invasion has been recontextualized into a conspiracy that Mulder and Scully could conceivably fight, and Scully has beaten it. Any future X-FILES is now free of the mythology and they can focus on the monsters of the week.

Just my take, of course. :-)

I preferred Temporal Flux's idea that Zoom was Barry Allen from the 1990s TV series -- with the casting even making sense; of course an older Barry Allen looks like our Barry's father.

Sorry for the silence on the actual podcasts themselves, I've been a bit burnt out after compiling all the trivia. I agreed with Cory and Tom on pretty much everything in this season, especially Maggie forgetting how to fight in "A Current Affair" and the pathetic mini-scoop in "Please Press One." However, I strongly disagreed with them regarding "The Return of Maggie Beckett" and the original draft of "Requiem."

The Return of Maggie Beckett
I don't think the scenes of Maggie and the General are padding at all -- they show two people with a pre-existing relationship, a relationship they are trying to insist they don't have, only to fall back into that. The General wants to be an interrogator, not a father. Maggie wants to be a prisoner, not a daughter. But they keep relating to each other as they know each other. Why doesn't Maggie just say she's from a parallel universe? Because she is insanely and horrifically overwrought at how the legend of Margaret Allison Beckett highlights the General as a loving and devoted father when she damn well knows he was nothing of the kind -- she's angry and enraged and she is engaging with the history of this Maggie Beckett to demand answers.

While I despise Bill Dial and Keith Damron's repetitive filler, that is because all it does is repeat the same information for no reason. With "The Return of Maggie Beckett," it's about creating an uncomfortable space with two people who both know each other extremely well and don't know each other at all, and the irony is that this would be true even if Maggie were talking to her actual father.

The fact that Tom has seen lots of hardass generals in other TV shows is -- honestly, I can't even see that as a legitimate criticism. A hardass general was precisely what this story needed for Maggie; there is no drama if the General is a perfect father figure. That's just personal taste. Of course, that's the Rewatch Podcast, and naturally, one expects their tastes to permeate the podcast, but I don't see that as a fair critique of a story.

Regardless, it's kind of cool that Tom and Cory are looking at the episode through this lens of whether there is padding, because it's a lens I gave them, along with the question of whether or not characters get introduced by name. I certainly can't tell them not to apply it as they see fit. :-)

Requiem
As for the original script for "Requiem," first, I think we have to give Michael Reaves a pass on the general storyline (Wade is now a rape victim turned into a computer) and on points of continuity like Diana knowing the ins and outs of Kromagg computers. He was a freelance writer! He assumed there'd be a few previous Kromagg episodes (as opposed to one) and naturally, that sort of thing would be adjusted as rewrites took place. That said, he does make one massive error in his script; he has Rembrandt claim that Colin, Quinn and Maggie rescued him in "Genesis." The pointless DNA scan Tom notes is also an error, but not one that condemns the script.

I do not believe there is such a thing as a bad storyline. It's all about execution -- and Mr. Reaves' execution is superb, heartfelt and emotional. The basic idea -- Wade is now a computer -- has been met with universal contempt from SLIDERS fans, but I think Reaves takes his marching orders and pulls them off magnificently.

We begin with a brilliant teaser -- shifting from an idyllic world to a horrific battlefield where Rembrandt has a vision of Wade Welles. Trauma upon trauma and then a desperate plea from Wade -- and the fans -- find her. Find her before it's too late. It's ridiculous that this becomes a priority in Season 5, Episode 11 when it hasn't for the last THIRTY TWO episodes, but that's not Reaves' fault, and he has Michael note how the task of finding Wade is as impossible as ever with "a gazillion Earths" out there.

Then we get to a Kromagg prison camp and Rembrandt is forced to confront both his trauma and ours -- losing Wade, feeling helpless, seeing Wade treated as less than worthless and taken away. The grief and anger is palpable, re-triggered by the setting and then Wade's voice suggests some potential salvation -- only for the sliders to see a massive fleet of Kromagg ships. Wade's voice guides them through the facility, but she's a ghostly voice, a distant figure -- just out of reach to us -- and then we finally get to her.

We find "a glowing translucent container. In this high-tech sarcophagus, bathed in nutrient fluid, comatose and intubated, is the body of Wade Wells. Electrodes snake from her shaved head to monitoring apparatus." Wade has been mutilated, stripped bare, reduced to a biological component in the Kromagg war machine. The alien invasion has twisted our show -- and Wade -- into this abomination.

Rembrandt's horror and grief are agonizingly scripted -- the helplessness, the fury. It's an awful decision from the producers, but Reaves sells the maddening rage, letting Rembrandt express the fans' anger towards the situation  -- and then Wade's fate seems dwarfed by the larger scale of the Kromagg fleet about to conquer Kromagg Prime and then the multiverse. Wade's body, her personality, her spirit -- all of it's been erased by this awful beyond awful Kromagg invasion plot.

And then Rembrandt gets her back. His love for her reaches Wade inside her pod and she reawakens. She overrides the Kromagg's control of their fleet. The Kromaggs reduced her to a cog in a spaceship, but the sliders' love for each other has trumped that. From trauma and horror has come transformation as Rembrandt and Wade's love for each other allows her to become an inviolable force that can save everyone.

Wade releases Rembrandt from his grief and loss, telling him the Kromaggs killed her a long time ago, giving him and us closure -- and then she destroys the Kromagg fleet and herself. Wade saved us all -- and now she's gone forever. And Rembrandt stands on a roof, looking down at the people walking about, none of them knowing that they owe their lives to Wade Kathleen Welles. Reaves has no choice but to make Wade into this, but he gives her an ending and he offers the fans and Rembrandt a small measure of peace.

And Michael urges Rembrandt to believe in the multiverse, in infinite possibilities, that he and Wade are linked and some version of Wade out there may exist and he will see her again someday.

The aired version of "Requiem" makes cursory, fumbling, muddled attempts to present any of the above. Had Reaves' script been executed properly -- I can't imagine any SLIDERS fan being happy with it in that only the return of the original cast would have made them happy. But it would have been a moving, emotional and forceful episode and a tribute to Wade and the sliders.

There are certain levels of unreality I am prepared to accept with television, such as Barry Allen recovering from a lengthy coma and immediately resuming work as a forensic scientist in a crime lab he and only he seems to use when in Real Life, any court case with Barry's work would see his mental stability and competence questioned. With the driving, I imagined that it was actually a slow and gradual process of weaving in and out between cars, with us seeing only the edited highlights to indicate Scully's frantic state of mind where what took hours seems to happen in seconds.

With the looter -- I loved it. This is the end of the world. The foretold apocalypse. The destruction of the human race teased since 1993 and made explicit in the Season 2 finale (Colonization) followed by the feature film's description of impending doom. Teasing madness, terror, insanity -- and in the middle of it is a stalwart woman calmly intoning that we just need to go to the hospital. We just need to behave thoughtfully. Rationally. Scientifically. Open-mindedly. And we'll survive.

The threat of Colonization has always been *impossible* to square with the criminal procedural format of THE X-FILES; in "My Struggle II," the battle to save mankind is revealed as being nothing like INDEPENDENCE DAY (the poster of which Mulder peed on in the first movie). Instead, the battle to save mankind is a hospital scene like so many other hospital scenes -- the threat, having been recontextualized as part of the conspiracy of men using alien technology, finally functions in this world.

The world is ending. All that desperation and fear, all that panic. "Stop! Stop it, please! Everybody, get to the hospital! Get to the hospital, help is on its way." The end of the world isn't unknowable, beyond our power -- it's simply a problem and one that we can solve. And then at the end, even with everything laid out and revealed (albeit through some retcons and ignoring huge portions of the past and implications rather than exposition), THE X-FILES ends on a moment that shows there will always be something unknown.

Yeah! I really liked it! And I was kind of glad to see it while I'm working on the final phase of SLIDERS REBORN. It's been super-instructive.

The new podcast is up! When doing the graphics for EP.COM, I couldn't bear to use any screencaps from "Requiem" or "Map of the Mind," so I used something else.

Behind the Scenes Information Courtesy of Temporal Flux

Requiem Trivia
•   The following information is from Temporal Flux of DoC and also Michael Reaves, writer of this episode.
•   For much of Season 4, Marc Scott Zicree had pleaded for the chance to write Sabrina Lloyd out properly -- either through learning she'd escaped the Kromagg rape camp offscreen or having Sabrina Lloyd guest-star.
•   This, along with other arguments, eventually had David Peckinpah and Bill Dial engineer Zicree being ousted from the show.
•   However, given fan enquiries, Dial decided to resolve the Wade plot. He expected it to be done with a guest-star claiming they'd met Wade and she was alive and well.
•   Writer Michael Reaves, a freelancer, pitched a story for Season 5: Rembrandt becomes telepathically entangled with a woman from another dimension.
•   Dial and Damron decided to have Reaves adapt this plot to resolve Wade's arc by revealing that Wade had been surgically mutilated and turned into a computer. Reaves wrote the script and made the best he could of it.
•   Quite inexplicably, Bill Dial had this script altered from Wade definitively dying to Wade being somehow still alive.
•   Reaves said that Dial attributed this instruction as coming from the Sci-Fi Channel.
•   That cannot be true: the Sci-Fi Channel was completely hands off for SLIDERS in Season 5, much to Dial's fury.
•   The directive could only have come from Dial and Damron.
•   Reaves felt this was pointless: everyone except Robert Floyd knew Season 5 was the end.
•   Dial and Damron declined to allocate the budget necessary for the script -- the cryogenic pods holding Wade's body, the fleet of Kromagg manta ships -- and hacked up the script in their usual fashion.
•   Anything expensive or complicated to film was cut.
•   The remnants were stretched out to fill the space.
•   Then they contacted Sabrina Lloyd's agent and requested that Sabrina return to play a rape victim turned mutilated corpse who'd been stuffed into a computer.
•   ....................................................
•   Sabrina, after SLIDERS, had found an excellent role on an ABC sitcom written by Aaron Sorkin.
•   Sabrina had heard about Wade's fate in "Genesis" and been repulsed.
•   She had not ruled out doing guest-appearances until she'd heard about "Genesis."
•   Shortly afterwards, she declared she would never return to the series.
•   On an interesting note -- at this point, Kari Wuhrer had paid Sabrina a visit some time during the filming of Season 5.
•   Kari apologized to Sabrina for verbally abusing her and explained herself: Sabrina had been seen as an actress, Kari as a blow-up doll.
•   Kari had been jealous and was now very ashamed and regretful.
•   Sabrina had accepted Kari's apology.
•   However, Sabrina would not accept this role in "Requiem" for less than $40,000 -- Cleavant Derricks' salary per episode.
•   This is functionally a refusal from Sabrina, declaring that she would only return to this series if paid as the lead actor.
•   Production refused to pay her rate and were prepared to go ahead with the script using a body double and a soundalike.
•   Cleavant contacted Sabrina Lloyd and pleaded for her to do the voiceover.
•   Sabrina consented to do one day of audio recording.
•   The episode was filmed.
•   Shortly after this episode aired, Michael Reaves visited the SLIDERS message board to offer a public apology to the fans for this monstrosity.
•   This episode was so bad that Matt Hutaff, when reviewing it, was compelled to redesign EarthPrime.com to allow for a new rating lower than F.
•   Matt, in his analysis, is exasperated by the behaviour of the timer: "Invasion" establishes that the timer can only open an exit gateway on the world where it opened an entry gateway.
•   Yet, "Requiem" has the sliders back in the garden world at the start of this episode -- a world that the timer had exited from and never re-entered.
•   As a result, the sliders should be stranded, yet this does not appear to be the case.
•   Cleavant Derricks fucking hates this episode and you can tell.

Map of the Mind Trivia
•   Information from this is from The Expert, Keith Damron and Robert Masello.
•   This is another story pitched and bought from writer Robert Masello ("The Great Work").
•   This story was also highlighted by the fans of an example of "Season 5 Sabotage," their term for great ideas that would be rendered in inefficient and counter-intuitive scripting.
•   Robert Masello sold the story of a world where artists and creators of fiction are considered to be insane and institutionalized as delusional liars.
•   His plot had two of the sliders (Rembrandt and one of the others, unclear who) stuck in the asylum while the other two tried to break them out.
•   (Robert Masello doesn't remember much about this script aside from knowing it was wholly rewritten.)
•   Rembrandt was to be imprisoned due to this world having outlawed music.
•   The story was rewritten entirely by Keith Damron.
•   There was originally greater emphasis on the guest-stars, the inhabitants of the asylum.
•   Keith Damron removed the majority of this material.
•   Originally, there were no science fiction technology elements, just a situation in this asylum setting.
•   Keith Damron decided to rewrite the script to feature high tech neural remapping in which artists and creative people are lobotomized.
•   He also decided that Mallory and Diana would be in the asylum instead of Rembrandt.
•   To further extend this rewrite, and due to the rewritten plot running short, Damron introduced the idea that Diana being remapped would grant her telekinetic powers.
•   The plot of Diana developing telekinetic powers was added to the story at a late stage due to the script running short due to Damron having removed the scenes focusing on guest-stars.
•   Further evidence of the script running short is Rembrandt telling Diana about how they repaired her mind, which was seen onscreen mere minutes previous.
•   Robert Floyd expressed tremendous exasperation with these script pages being so repetitive.
•   Bill Dial told Floyd that these scripts were due to freelance writers not being up to standard.
•   Floyd offered the view that Dial was so under the gun to produce the show that he couldn't do the rewrites. This can't be correct; this is script editor Damron's script from Masello's story.
•   I believe Floyd was fooled.
•   Dial had a reputation for being an angry, vindictive man towards writers who gave him trouble (Marc Scott Zicree), but he either treated actors differently or he just really liked Robert Floyd.
•   I think Dial liked Floyd so much that he told Floyd whatever it took to make it feel like Dial agreed with him but was powerless to do anything about it.
•   The truth is, Dial preferred computer games over working on scripts.
•   On a more uplifting note -- six years after "Map of the Mind" aired, a DOCTOR WHO novel was released. THE STEALER OF DREAMS, by Steve Lyons.
•   In this story, the sliders -- I'm sorry, I mean the Doctor and friends -- land on a world where fiction is illegal.
•   In this tale, Quinn and Arturo investigate the police officers cracking down on illegal fiction creators, Wade falls in with a fiction-creating rebel and then Wade starts to go insane and become incapable of separating fact and fantasy and believing sliding to be a delusion, while Rembrandt is institutionalized for being an artist.
•   No, sorry -- I meant the Doctor investigates the police, Rose falls in with a rebel and starts to go insane and Captain Jack is institutionalized.
•   Rembrandt/Captain Jack discover that the mental institution is filled with insane, delusional people who can't tell fact from fiction, while outside, Rose/Wade is beginning to suffer the same as she explores a world without imagination, without creativity, devoid of hope and dreams.
•   The sliders -- no, the Doctor and friends -- sorry, sorry -- discover that there are pollutants causing mass hallucinations and psychotic outbursts which led to the criminalization of fiction.
•   Quinn and Arturo -- I mean, the Doctor -- devise a cure and expose the police management as all suffering from hallucinatory psychosis and in need of treatment.
•   A few months later, the gang revisit this world to find that the population is healing and beginning to write and draw and create again.
•   I read this novel and wept for SLIDERS.

I have nothing of value to suggest regarding your Kindle Scout campaign other than to reiterate my eagerness to buy and read this book and any other books you release in the future.

Moving apps to the SD card using Android's Move to SD Card function -- I would stop doing that. I find that just breaks the apps; I would uninstall all those and reinstall them. There are more effective app-to-external methods that I'll share below.

Regarding the S4 -- there are things you can do with various free apps. The first step you should probably take is to root the phone and open the doors to a wider range of memory management tactics. The S4 can be rooted just by downloading and running a couple apps on the phone that you can download here: http://gs4.wonderhowto.com/how-to/root- … k-0155622/

You have never expressed any dislike towards Touchwiz, so I advise you stick with it. Yes, my S3 on Cyanogenmod had 12.5GB compared to the S4 Touchwiz ROM having 8.82GB of space on its first boot, but the 3GB or so isn't a long-term solution to your issues.

To start, you can try the CCleaner app which detects empty folders, allows you to clear app caches and you can go on a mass deleting spree.

Another useful app is Greenify, which aggressively hibernates apps and is even more effective on rooted phones. I never use it for apps with notifications I want, but I don't need a dictionary app or a web browser running in the background. It improves performance a lot on my admittedly low-end phone.

I've never found apps moved to the SD card to work via Android's built-in solutions -- in fact, I find it breaks the apps entirely, preventing use and updates. However, Link2SD is effective.

If you root your phone and create a second primary partition on a microSD card, you can use Link2SD to shift any user-installed apps to this partition and leave the internal memory free for running the OS and the system apps. 

I find that you can move the APK, DEX and LIB files, but moving the internal data breaks almost all apps. You can also shift stored files with Link2SD, meaning that all your Kindle ebooks and such would be shifted to the microSD as well. I'm using Link2SD on my Moto G. Only 725MB of apps are on the internal storage; the other 4GB is on the microSD.

Also, rooting would allow you to use the Trimmer app, which activates the TRIM function in flash memory to fully remove deleted files that may be slowing down read/write function. All of the above would generally alleviate any phone's troubles by freeing up space and redistributing RAM and CPU resources to foreground apps.

Everyone uses their phones differently. It's hard for me to say what's slowing your phone down, but in terms of freeing up memory, any phone with a microSD slot has some options. The S4 is easily rooted at this point, which would open a lot of doors for redistributing storage.

ME: "So, this script from your writing partner that you're reviewing -- are there dinosaurs and vampires and zombies and toy-sized cars with laser cannons?"
MATT: "Yep!"
ME: "I must tear up my outline of the Battle of San Francisco, then. Damn."
MATT: "Your own fault! You shouldn't have given me that glorious idea. I shared it -- and he used it."
ME: "Does his script have an evil double screaming, 'You only control a vortex -- I AM THE VORTEX!!!'?"
MATT: "I think the real question is -- does yours?!"
ME: "Yes."
MATT: "Jesus. You really put your poor readers through the gauntlet, don't you?"
ME: "I get it. You're not a superhero guy! You're also not insane."
MATT: "Haha! I like superheroes when the conceit of the story is one of superheroes. It's when you start grafting fantastical elements onto an otherwise grounded story that I drift off. SLIDERS started as four misfits with a bit of tech that takes them to parallel universes."
ME: "All superheroes started out as misfits with a bit of tech. You just described every superhero."
MATT: "It just seems ridiculous to go to extremes when you can tell a cool story that's just a twist on the original."
ME: "The original had such trauma and horror and madness and savagery. And the monsters. The way they lost their friends one by one, the way they all died -- the only way I can embrace it is to see all that as their superhero origin story. Or at least that's what I tell myself at night so that the sliders don't have to be dead."
MATT: "So why isn't Remmy a superhero?
ME: "He is! They all are. Or they will be, by the time I'm done."
MATT: "Rembrandt! Hahaha!"
ME: "That said, it's possible you and I are thinking of different things when we say superhero. To me, the definitive superhero is Tom Welling in Seasons 8 - 10 of SMALLVILLE, where every episode had some intense CG effects with lots of slow motion and frozen landscapes where Clark is using superspeed to pull people out of burning buildings or defuse bombs or evacuate locations or yank individuals from cars about to crash. And that's the sort of thing I see the sliders doing when I say I see them as superheroes. They SAVE people."
MATT: "I just see SLIDERS as a sci-fi drama about ordinary people to behave in an ordinary fashion. It's a perfect conceit. These four people have no control over where they travel. Only that they travel through different versions of their hometown. Then it became a 400 mile radius, which makes them unable to form a benchmark against their own reality. Then it allowed them to control their destination, which takes away from the splendor of the unknown. Then they were fighting a shapeshifting cartoon villain. After experiencing living flames, dragons, shapeshifters, midget magic, regular magic, triple earths, mechanical earths, youth-giving worm shit, etc.. It became ridiculous. I like a grounded concept. SLIDERS abandoned that. And thus, it because dumb."
ME: "I think maintaining the grounding is very important for an ongoing series. And for continued development of the series. But for the end -- The End -- I think that's the time to go nuts. For the series finale, I want them to have full control of their tech and I want them at their highest point at the top of their game."
MATT: "Is this thing going to end like how BATTLESTAR GALACTICA ended? With Ronald Moore inserting himself into the narrative like a loon and walking away?"
ME: "I already wrote the ending. Click here to see it."
MATT: (reading the three pages or so of script) "Missing an Oxford comma in the first line. No capitalization of "Sliders" on the second line."
ME: "I never capitalize 'sliders' when referring to the characters. You've noticed that already; you changed it in all of my reviews. I also don't use Oxford commas."
MATT: "Wrong and wrong. Double wrong!"
ME: "Hmmm?"
MATT: (finishing his reading) "Those are wrong opinions. And you capitalize The Sliders at the end, anyway. YOU BREAK YOUR OWN RULE."
ME: "Well, I capitalize it for the final page -- but only because it's been earned. There are plenty of sliders at the end. Everyone in the city is a slider. But Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo -- they aren't just any sliders, they are The Sliders."
MATT: "This is a very good ending."
ME: "Then let it be known: the only part of SLIDERS REBORN that Matt liked was The Ending. Because it was OVER!"

Aside from episodes written by Marc Scott Zicree and Chris Black in Seasons 4 - 5, any behind the scenes implications are unintentional. Intangirble's remarks about Quinn are a welcome relief after years of "Quinn Mallory was never worth your time" and "Quinn Mallory is a bad person" and "Quinn clearly went insane."

It's interesting to look at SLIDERS' sister series, THE X-FILES, which occasionally jumped into the metatextual in Seasons 2 - 4, a little more often in Seasons 5, delivered a Season 6 & 7 full of comedy episodes, and had two comedy episodes across two years for Seasons 8 - 9. The comedy episodes were often metatextual, pointing out certain absurdities in THE X-FILES format such as Mulder and Scully having no personal lives and never solving any cases.

These funny episodes were often entirely unlike the serious show surrounding them; the reason was that show creator Chris Carter had a certain hands-off approach to editing his writers; he liked to let them develop their own versions of the characters and the show each week while still keeping his own in the mix.

This is an approach that might have served SLIDERS well where, a few times a season, there'd be a more deconstructive approach to the series. SLIDERS did this by accident and in a slapdash and self-imploding fashion; THE X-FILES did this purposefully and in a self-exploring manner.

[Self indulgent, semi-delusional rambling continues.]

It's also interesting to compare how SLIDERS and THE X-FILES both ended with a massive back catalog of unresolved plots revolving around an alien invasion plot that any in-continuity revival would need to address before getting on with the business of SLIDERS and X-FILES stories. Both shows returned, SLIDERS in 2015 and THE X-FILES in 2016. Both shows chose a very metatextually literate way of moving away from the mistakes of the past.

THE X-FILES returns with what is essentially Season 23 with Seasons 10 - 22 having taken place offscreen aside from a brief return for Season 15. The alien invasion teased for Seasons 1 - 9 and set for Season 19 apparently never took place. There was no invasion, and believer Fox Mulder concedes that his life has become "a punchline" and later receiving confirmation: the alien invasion conspiracy was, is and ever shall be a massive hoax. Later episodes have Mulder dis-spirited but then realizing that even without aliens, there's plenty of monsters of the week to investigate.

NEW MEXICO MEDICINE MAN: "You were never even close! Warring aliens lighting each other on fire and other such nonsense!" MULDER: "I was being cleverly manipulated." | MULDER: "A decade of my life in this office -- I was being led through a dark alley to a dead end, just as they planned." | MULDER: "Scully -- back in the day -- is today."

SLIDERS REBORN, aside from 2-minute webisode, is essentially Season 20 of the series and declares that all the resurrections and returns happened during the untelevised timegap of Seasons 6 - 19. When the alien invasion is brought up, the sliders rememeber it, but the world at large has no recollection of it at all. It was dealt with offscreen, it doesn't matter, what matters is that Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo are back. Little metatextual exchanges take place.

REMBRANDT: "When exactly did we become friends, Q-Ball? Was it when you left my car in an iceberg?! Was it when you sent me to an alien battlefield and told me I was home!? Was it when you left me sliding alone for a year!? You never even taught me how to recharge the timer!" (Wade and Arturo cast furious looks at Quinn, Quinn throws his hands in the air helplessly.)

Ultimately, both shows declare that the alien invasion plots that took a stranglehold on them in their latter years are not really what they're about and use metatextual writing to create a self-aware anti-climax. They proceed to declare that the best way to pay tribute to the past while moving forward is to focus on the characters, revealing who they are and what they're doing today.

And a brand new note on my smartphone history: I have bricked my Moto G 2015. Android enthusiast does not mean Android expert.

Marshmallow has this neat function of merging the microSD storage with the internal memory storage. I activated the merging. Later, I found that Google Play had updated some apps I preferred unaltered, so I went into recovery, wiped the OS, reflashed the ROM -- or didn't, in that the recovery could no longer install ROMs because it couldn't access the merged memory partition in order to flash the ZIP files. So now the phone has no operating system and no immediately obvious way to install one.

It's a puzzler! :-D

The Moto G 2015 camera. The reviews really didn't do this camera justice -- it is the poorest excuse for an imaging device ever sold in a smartphone. Holy crap. I don't know why Motorola set its denoise filters so high, but every single image from every single camera app has about as much detail as a watercolour painting seen through a blur filter. The denoise effect is clearly built right into the camera firmware. It is so awful that XDA developers came up with a modded version of the built-in camera app that lets you turn off this less than useless and utterly pointless noise reduction algorithm and finally get a decent photo.

I suppose it's not as bad as Samsung making it necessary to install Cyanogenmod on the S3 just to get a decent anything.

Well, I'll certainly review your book when it comes out.

**

It's true. My history with smartphones is terrible.

Nexus 4: Cost $0 on a two-year contract. Left it on the roof of my car and lost somewhere on the freeway. Replaced with:

Samsung Galaxy S3 (1): Sold a PlayStation I wasn't using to justify buying this one. Dropped it in water in the bathtub, ruined the sound board. Sold for spare parts (the screen was still good), using the money to buy --

Alcatel Idol One Touch Mini: 4GB of internal memory and a single-core processor proved inadequate for Google Maps navigation, so I sold it along with a first-gen iPad, using that to buy --

Samsung Galaxy S3 (2): I slipped on ice and fell, landed on the phone inside my pocket and the screen cracked. I paid for a screen replacement and got a shoulder-strap holster with a magnetic clasp. A year later, the magnet failed and the phone fell out and hit the pavement, cracking screen again. This time, I sold the phone for spare parts (everything but the screen) again.

Samsung Galaxy S3 (3): With the contract on the Nexus 4 expired, I bought a $0 Samsung S3. At this point, tempered glass screen protectors had become prominent and affordable. Aside from water, the S3 suffered the same drops and falls and impacts as before, but the tempered glass and gel case held and the phone stayed good as new. However, after surviving a liquid spill, I decided to start looking at waterproof options. There were some open box Moto G 2015s on sale for $160 and my pristine S3 easily fetched $200.

Moto G 3rd Gen: I think I've got the hang of this now. Tempered glass and gel case for drops and falls, and a waterproof backing to protect from water. This one will last.

The best that can be said of the past disasters, however -- I've really only ever paid money for *one* smartphone; ever since then, I've been trading things in to get new phones. And both my $0 phones were genuinely $0; the monthly rate I signed up for was the same as for a bring-your-own-device plan, either due to clerical error or a desperate need to clear out unsold S3 phones.

Are the sliders icons of science fiction? To the world at large, no. But that doesn't mean they aren't or can't be iconic. As a quartet, the sliders are larger than life figures who embody an idealized vision of human potential and represent the belief that ideas and ingenuity can solve any problem. Within Seasons 1 - 2, nearly every dilemma is resolved by cleverness, improvisation and the ability to put concepts into practice.

The claim that icons need "a clearly defined ethos" or a "prime directive" or "some other thing that defines their objectives" is little more than exclusionary, claiming what an icon isn't without any idea of what it is. Icons are not made by ticking off checkboxes.

An icon defines a genre, format or form of storytelling, becoming immortalized in memory and identified with that genre. Indiana Jones is an icon of adventure stories because the character is supremely well-suited to the genre in imagery and application. Luke Skywalker is an icon of space opera, Sherlock Holmes is an icon of detective fiction, etc..

The sliders are in some ways genre defiant in that they can fit into any kind of story, any format, any genre. They can be the stars of the story or they can die in the first shot. They can be supporting players, the protagonists, the villains, the establishment or the rebels.

I would say that the sliders are somewhat paradoxical in that they are icons of the science fiction anthology format -- a format that usually doesn't have regular characters. The icons of this genre, before SLIDERS, were Rod Serling's narrator in THE TWILIGHT ZONE and the Control Voice of THE OUTER LIMITS. However, the SLIDERS storytelling engine allows for the show to have the same range as an anthology and the characters are ideally suited to being plugged into any kind of story.

You have scientific brilliance with Quinn and Arturo and interpersonal brilliance with Wade and Rembrandt. You have age and wisdom in Rembrandt and Arturo and youth and innocence in Quinn and Wade. You have cynical conservatism in Arturo and counter-cultural revolution in Rembrandt; you have daring and bravado in Quinn matched with compassion and empathy in Wade. There's no limit in how you use them; if you can't use the main version of the characters, you just use doubles that week.

The other part of the SLIDERS iconography is that the characters *look* memorable; they are costumed and coiffed in ways that make them distinct and recognizable in any lighting and angle. You have the flannel and jeans and hair of Quinn Mallory, the eccentric dressiness of Wade, the stout and broad figure of Arturo and the lean and ostentatiously clothed Rembrandt with his absurd suits.

As a quartet, they stand out in silhouette. The image of the four sliders in shadow running towards us is one of the most vivid TV images of the 1990s and completely in tune with the sliders: distant, aloof figures on the edge of infinity, but when we get closer, we see that they are complex and conflicting human beings.

Also, all four have highly distinctive speech patterns thanks to both the Season 1 - 2 writers and the actors who played them; as a pastiche writer, I found that all four voices lent themselves beautifully to prose-approximations of the onscreen characters.

Mulder and Scully, despite the simplistic definition of being the believer and the skeptic, are just as muddy and contradictory as the sliders; "The Truth is Out There" and "Trust No One" are rarely accurate to the show from which they originate. They don't have distinctive costumes. They don't have a prime directive they haven't violated or an objective they haven't failed at or undermined. Mulder and Scully are the sliders' contemporaries -- Jerry O'Connell and David Duchovny played basketball together in Vancouver. Yet, Mulder and Scully are icons while the sliders are barely remembered. Why?

Very simply, THE X-FILES was successful. It was well-marketed, had high viewing figures, was strongly merchandised, and managed to make it seven seasons before it starting losing original cast members. It had a strong following of both diehards and casual viewers. As a result, Mulder and Scully are the definitive supernatural-procedural characters and achieved pop cultural iconography and immortality.

In contrast, SLIDERS made it all of one season split across two years with a massive hiatus after the first nine episodes followed by three seasons that are impossible to reconcile with the Pilot episode. The show failed to embed itself in the popular consciousness because it was frequently incoherent and often unwatchably poor. But the characters in the first twenty-two episodes transcend all that.

They're icons to me. To me, Quinn Mallory is one of the greatest fictional characters ever created and he stands next to Batman, Spock, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. House. I accept that they're not icons to the public, but aside from popularity, they fulfill the basic requirement: they define a genre and format (sci-fi anthology) and are ideally suited to that genre and format. And I don't think anyone should be declaring that iconography is off limits to the sliders just because they themselves don't see it.

I spent a few happy months with the Moto E LTE. It’s pretty amazing how this $100 phone was completely capable for all my smartphone needs – responsive Android performance, all-day battery life, a sub-HD screen good enough ebooks, great Google Maps experience – all the stuff that usually comes at 3 – 4 times the price. Only 5GB of memory left after Android, however, but a microSD could handle 3/4 of the app storage and all the media storage. It's not a phone for gamers. It was good enough for me until I was defeated by the camera.

Occasionally, at work, I need to photograph displays and the Moto E LTE’s camera produced images too fuzzy, grainy and imprecise to be any use. There’s no flash. So I had to go back to my Samsung S3 superphone (which my niece declined). The cheap end of the smartphone market has mostly caught up to the S3 (aside from the flash), but it was nice to have a phone so inexpensive to replace that it wasn’t unnerving when it suffered drops and falls.

Well. I’m sure my mother will lose the smartphone I bought her any day now, so it’s good to have this waiting in the wings.

I have total confidence that CIVIL WAR will be good. Joe and Anthony Russo did an amazing job on all their COMMUNITY movies and WINTER SOLDIER.

Just want to put TF's post somewhere suited for us to keep talking about it!