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I know, intellectually, that Kara's geeky, awkward nervousness is a performance. It's not Melissa's real voice, posture, bearing or facial expressions -- but to me, it doesn't come off as a performance, it's just Kara's natural behaviour. When she's in costume, she's still Kara -- she's just a version of Kara who isn't struggling with her interpersonal dilemmas, and the interactions she has with others are largely restricted to their grateful praise or homicidal malevolence. Which is why, whenever that persona drops, I'm really disturbed. But I take it you don't like Melissa's performance at all?

*shudders*

Red!Kara terrified me. I cowered under my blanket when she swaggered into the nightclub and nearly crushed Jimmy's hand. It just freaked me out. A lot. I watched AMERICAN HORROR STORY without flinching, but this was just disturbing.

Tom and Cory had some interesting thoughts on the Kromagg in "Slide Effects," remarking that they preferred the unknowable Kromaggs of "Invasion" to the space Nazis of Season 4. They talked about how the Kromaggs in Season 4 lacked the creepy, malevolent anonymity of the "Invasion" Kromaggs and how they also disliked the shapeshifting, although it could simply be a Kromagg application of telepathy. Tom was a little unsure of what to make of the shapeshifting in "Slide Effects." I think it's safe to say that with most of the script set in a dreamscape, most of the shapeshifting is telepathic.

When the sliders come out of the dreamscape, however, the Kromagg keeps shapeshifting in reality -- turning into Mallory, Maggie, Diana and Colin and repeating lines from their episodes. While I totally agree with Tom and Cory that the shapeshifting is an awkward and silly superpower, it was necessary to visually indicate that the Kromagg is trapped in the hell he made.

But I guess we could say that the Kromagg was unconsciously projecting his telepathic form into the sliders' minds even though they'd stepped out of his simulation?

To be fair to Season 4, I think we have to assume that the Kromaggs have individuality. They're not all one hive mind, at least not as far as Tracy Torme is concerned -- he had Kromagg women looting human stores in "Invasion" in a deleted scene. But then we have to wonder how universal the contempt for humans is among the Kromaggs -- they can't all be monsters, can they? To assume an entire race is of one identical personality is absurd. Not every Kromagg can or should be the same (unless you want to think that they're all telepathically linked and replicate the same mind across each body?). The Kromagg of "Slide Effects" is described as an "Invasion" Kromagg.

However, I cannot claim to have any great insights into the Kromaggs. The Kromagg of "Slide Effects" has pretty much nothing to do with Tracy Torme's vision of the Kromaggs and the Dynasty and is not even meant to be a reaction to the Season 4 Kromaggs.

The Kromagg of "Slide Effects" simply represents David Peckinpah: an angry person dispatched to a job he didn't want (overseeing the sliders/SLIDERS), getting trapped in the job due to a telepathic misfire/contractual obligation) and lashing out in rage at Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo / Sabrina and John. The Kromagg never speaks -- simply because I had been watching SPIDER-MAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES that week and was really taken with how the shapeshifting Chameleon would always shift into a different character to deliver any dialogue and had never spoke in his own form.

I honestly wonder how much Torme could have maintained the anonymity of the Kromaggs had they returned on his terms.

ME: "There is a series of 22 fan written LOIS AND CLARK novellas that make up the fifth season of the show as it was cancelled in year four for three different reasons." http://www.lcfanfic.com/thm-tufs.htm "I wonder if we can get Tom and Cory to review them."

MATT: "What three reasons? And I doubt they'll commit to reviewing fanfic like that."

ME: "Based on what?"

MATT: "Based on them wanting to review television, not fanfic."

ME: "It was well received."

MATT: "Then YOU review it."

ME: "I'm not even sure I'll survive this Rewatch. And what do you mean, what were the reasons? You said you read that retrospective I linked to."

MATT: "I did. It all sounded like it was cancelled because ABC/Disney was over the series. Eisner wanted his dumb World of Disney back on the air so he could replace Walt in the hearts and minds of America. The easiest reason is that Teri Hatcher cut her hair. That is an unimpeachable reason."

ME: "Wonderful World was Reason 1. Reason 2 was ABC's continued retooling of the series causing the ratings to slide bit by bit -- they fired the showrunner of Season 1 and mandated an action-oriented approach that the budget couldn't handle and also outlandish supervillains that could not be rendered properly on a TV scale at that era, meaning all the villains were campy, silly, embarrassing and alienating while gobbling up screentime that would have been devoted to the two stars -- and when you're selling your show on Teri Hatcher and Dean Cain and they're in it half as much as they used to be, the audience loses interest. The point where the ratings were totally destroyed, however -- was the wedding episode where ABC, at the last second, declared that Lois and Clark were not to be married after all and that something had to stop the wedding -- so Lois gets kidnapped and gets amnesia and is replaced by a frog-eating clone. This story arc lasted eight episodes and it drove viewers away in droves."

MATT: "Hahaahahahah! Yes. But that was season THREE."

ME: "By Season 4, the ratings were pretty much dead and despite a Season 5 renewal having been issued -- ABC, having destroyed the show, now stopped advertising it and re-negotiated to get out of doing Season 5. They were still unable to get out of it entirely -- until Teri Hatcher, after Season 4, got pregnant and her doctor said her pregnancy was not stable and she could not work and Season 5's start date would have to be delayed by months. ABC and Disney took that news and collectively declared that the show was done."

MATT: "Stupid babies ruin EVERYTHING!"

ME: "So there were lots of reasons."

MATT: "HAIR CUT."

ME: "Given how god-awful Season 4 was, I was pretty relieved when the show was cancelled and excited about SMALLVILLE -- But SMALLVILLE was even worse than LOIS & CLARK."

MATT: "Oh yeah?

ME: "SMALLVILLE is one of the worst shows ever made -- although it improved significantly with Seasons 8 - 9 only to weirdly implode on itself with the last half of Season 10.

MATT: "Hahahahahaha!  Ten seasons! You really commit to shitty television!"

ME: "Anyway! This Unaired Fifth Season -- it's really good! So well written! I think, because they had 12 writers on it -- and 1- 2 would go over all the drafts and revise them. I'm sure Tom and Cory could read them all and talk about them in their podcast. Surely they don't want to end on a down note!!!!!"

MATT: "Blecgh!"

ME: "What is the reason for your distaste NOW!?"

MATT: "It's a lot easier to read your one script than 22 novellas."

ME: "At one point, Tom said he assumes each REBORN script is 46 pages."

MATT: "I know. I laughed."

ME: "It's currently 285 pages. But it's 285 pages of Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo bickering. That's what the fans want, Matt!
Nobody really cares about the parallel worlds. It's all about these four messed up people and their weird friendship together. And their desperate efforts to graduate from community college!"

MATT: "Two HUNDRED AND EIGHTY FIVE pages??? Jesus!!"

It's available streaming on Amazon. http://www.amazon.com/Pilot/dp/B003VLU1 … +and+clark And you can get the whole DVD set off Amazon for about $60 whether it's as separate seasons or all four in one set. You can buy all four seasons digitally for $60 as well.

Rewatched the Pilot today -- it is so frustrating to see how well-done, well-considered, well-cast and well-written the Pilot is compared to where LOIS & CLARK ended up. Shows like SMALLVILLE and HEROES made so many stupid mistakes -- overly powerful heroes, a reluctance to show superheroes onscreen in live action, struggling to find stories each week -- but LOIS & CLARK had prepared for all these challenges.

It was focused on LOIS and CLARK and Superman only made cameo appearances. The Daily Planet was a limitless source of stories that would put Lois and Clark in different situations. The dilemmas revolved around Clark getting caught in bad situations where using his powers would expose his identity or endanger others. The world around Lois and Clark was grounded and realistic with only Superman as a fantasy element. Deborah Joy Levine, the Season 1 showrunner, had completely worked out how the series could function week to week.

And then, piece by piece, all the strengths of the Pilot and Season 1 were gradually dismantled. Instead of using the Daily Planet to come up with stories, the new showrunners came up with ridiculous supervillains that were unthreatening figures of comedy. Instead of focusing on Clark's difficulties, the showrunners focused on Superman-heavy stories that could not be rendered convincingly due to the budget. The world around Lois and Clark became exaggerated, silly and absurd and Superman faded into the background despite appearing more. Lois became a hysterical figure of lunacy rather than the tough, capable journalist and investigator. All due to the network's continued attempts to force LOIS & CLARK into being a superhero show and a sitcom rather than a dramedy about journalists, one of whom happened to be Superman. God damn it.

SMALLVILLE is weird to me. The majority of its episodes are quite awful, in my opinion, but the first season is full of potential and the eighth and ninth season are superb. The tenth season is good but then falls apart in the final run of episodes. The Season 11 comic books are also good but, again, fall apart near the end.

SMALLVILLE, for Seasons 1 - 7, suffered from when it was made and who was making it. After BATMAN & ROBIN, there was a great distaste for superheroes in live action, so SMALLVILLE was made with an aversion to superhero imagery or storytelling despite being a SUPERMAN TV series. Due to all the self-imposed limitations, the series got locked into a very tight and restrictive formula; monsters of the week who would be dealt with in repetitive scenes of Clark throwing them thirty feet, and an incredibly monotonous seven years of Clark and Lana circling around each other.

The show seemed incapable of moving past these two areas for Seasons 1 - 7, and the main problem was the showrunners. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar were buddy cop screenwriters who wanted to do BRUCE WAYNE: THE SERIES only to settle for the Superman rights. They threw the Pilot together haphazardly, sold it as a series -- and promptly ran out of ideas.

As showrunners, they spent most of their time writing screenplays for other movies, barely paying attention to SMALLVILLE and dictating a rigid and unchanging status quo so that they could periodically write or direct an episode without needing to deal with what the other writers had conceived. Often, other writers would come up with ideas, see them approved only for Gough and Millar to abruptly backtrack. They were also based largely in LA, rarely being on the scene in Vancouver to see what was being filmed or performed, and were blind to things like the lack of romantic chemistry between Clark and Lana. They threw out dictates like making Lionel Luthor a regular cast member even though the writers didn't know what to do with him. When they felt that plotting arcs for Clark Kent's college years was too troublesome, they ordered that Clark become a college dropout.

Also, the repetitive writing created numerous problems (characters seeing Clark use his powers, a small town population that should have been traumatized by 3 - 4 murders a week) that weren't addressed.

Season 1 saw numerous writers struggling with these limitations and then quitting en masse to less aggravating TV shows because Gough and Millar would remove running plots and refuse to let Clark be vulnerable in any way to the Kryptonite mutants. The Season 1 staff went onto HOUSE, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, HEROES, DEXTER and EVERWOOD -- all because they were sick of Gough and Millar.

Gough and Millar quit after Season 7 (having had enough producer credits on enough episodes for syndication royalties). The remaining writers all received promotions and asked Tom Welling to work with them. Season 8 - 10 saw a massive upswing in quality and consistency: Clark donned a prototype Superman costume and started working in Metropolis and the show became the superhero show it had been ashamed to be previously. The Clark/Lana romance was replaced with the far more endearing Clark/Lois dynamic. The show, previously clumsy and repetitive white person angst, shifted into a larger than life superhero fantasy.

But mis-steps were made. Season 8 built up a fight with Doomsday that the majority of fans and reviewers declared anti-climactic due to its brevity. Season 9 had Clark using heat vision to destroy two buildings that would have otherwise given Kryptonian conquerers superpowers, but the imagery was upsetting to the fans. Season 10 collapsed upon itself when the great threat of Darkseid and his minions were vanquished by Clark flying through Darkseid and his telekinetic and indestructible henchmen being killed by arrows they had so casually stopped in mid-air in previous episodes. The finale was an incoherent mess.

Season 11 was a series of comics written by one of the staff writers, Bryan Q. Miller. It was good to start, distinguishing itself from the mainstream Superman comics by emphasizing that Superman was actually a team effort in SMALLVILLE. Unfortunately, halfway into it, the weekly schedule of the comic had artists rushing through their work. As a result, the likenesses of the actors were lost; the SMALLVILLE cast, once rendered with loving attention to the actors' faces, now looked generic and like they could be in any Superman comic. A lot of the appeal of the comic was lost and the series ended on a decent but ultimately un-SMALLVILLE-esque storyline -- the writing was always great, but if Clark and Chloe don't look like Tom Welling and Allison Mack, the comic has no reason to exist.

SMALLVILLE, to me, was, an interesting failure. And yet -- you don't get to the magnificent ARROW and FLASH and SUPERGIRL shows and the Marvel Cinematic Universe without SMALLVILLE. But it was made at a time when superheroes in live action were out of style. It was created by writers who didn't understand superheroes or television. And that always crippled it.

Well, I have been forced to abandon my Nexus S. Don't get me wrong, it was a nice phone back in 2010 when I was using it for phone calls and texting via SMS, Hangouts and Facebook and for E-mail. But. It can't run Google Maps properly. The app freezes or crashes. The budget priced Moto E 2nd Gen I got my mother can run Google Maps easily on 1GB of RAM and a cheap processor, but the single-core Nexus S and its 500MB of RAM just can't make it work. I'll keep it on hand as a backup phone, but I've come to depend on Google Maps for navigation in the car so it wouldn't be a long-term backup.

Hey, who's the voice of Wade?

**

It was very touching for "Slide Effects" to be treated as a *real* episode of SLIDERS. Matt and I recently had a conversation where I chastised him for his 2009 Tracy Torme interview announcing a SLIDERS project that never took place. Matt replied that "Slide Effects" was, albeit unintentionally, the SLIDERS project because without the interview, "Slide Effects" wouldn't have been written and that whether by design or accident, "Slide Effects" is the series finale of SLIDERS.

**

I was particularly struck by the music Tom and Cory used during their dramatic readings -- it really captured the eerie sense of unreality behind the scenes.

**

I totally agree with Cory that the Professor's first scene in the story is very forced and unnatural. Of all the random people with whom Quinn could get in a car accident, it happens to be the Professor? How the hell does that happen? It happens, as Tom observes, because Torme said this was to be a one-episode story and I limited myself to 46-pages (46 minutes). Tom wonders where the commercials would go. I have no idea whatsoever. I needed the Professor back as soon as possible and I felt he should be yelling.

**

The idea that Rembrandt told Quinn there was a steakhouse he had planned to eat at after the game is indeed, as Cory states, a retcon never once established on the show. Whaddya gonna do, right? I figure you can justify it  by adding in other details that were established onscreen.

**

Cory, quite reasonably, describes the explanation for Seasons 3 - 5 as "cumbersome." The idea that Seasons 3 - 5 are the amalgamated experiences of 37 Quinn-doubles combined and streamed into Quinn's head as a telepathic simulation to torment him, resulting from a completely DIFFERENT simulation meant to be a simulation of Earth Prime -- Tom struggles to wrap his mouth around that explanation and audibly loses steam halfway in.

Oddly, Torme's explanation is very simple -- the Earth Prime situation is revealed to be a Kromagg trick along with Seasons 3 - 5. Yet, the details visibly strain to justify why the Kromaggs would do any of this. Torme didn't come up with a motive.

I settled on, "The illusion of Earth Prime is meant to psychologically motivate them to find home -- but we got Seasons 3 - 5 because there was a GLITCH."  Still, it's hard to explain why the Kromagg felt the need to deliberately subject Quinn to Seasons 3 - 5 outside the plot requiring that he do so and a vague sense of sadism.

Then comes the need to declare that Seasons 3 - 5 happened, just to a *different* set of Quinns -- and the result is the Kromagg going Full Diggs to lay out the Earth Prime simulation, the glitch, and me trying to liven it up by having the Kromagg take on the forms of different Season 3 - 5 characters. So what we have here is a situation where the general overview appears acceptable -- Seasons 3 - 5 were a Kromagg trick -- but when we get into the details, it becomes quite convoluted.

I imagine Torme would have side-stepped all that simply by focusing on the Earth Prime situation and barely referring to the episodes after his departure, making the confrontation more about the Kromaggs tempting the sliders with a permanent illusion of home because even if they got home for real, the Kromaggs would destroy it. But that just wasn't where my interest was -- I wanted to do Forrest Gump style scenes of the original sliders inserted into "Mother and Child" and directly repudiate The Scene. As a result, "Slide Effects" took a turn into metatextual fan writing.

**

Tom and Cory note that the Care Bears style conclusion seems similar to "The Dream Masters" -- which is hilarious, because I have never seen it. I've also never seen "Electric Twister Acid Test" or "Easy Slider" and no force on Earth can make me watch them. The only reason I noticed the similarities myself is because screencaps were present in Ian McDuffie's episode blog.

**

Cory said he was confused by where the room was that the sliders wake up in -- it's meant to be just a cave, which I thought I established with the Kromagg referring to "an underground chamber," but I guess an extra INT. CAVE would have helped.

I appreciated the boys reacting to the final scene and the shock. I just did that because I didn't want it to be a uniformly happy ending -- it needed a touch of darkness so that Seasons 3 - 5 have some emotional impact.

I think the reason "Slide Effects" manages to transcend its issues, however, is because, as Cory and Tom note, it is focused entirely on Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo. Splitting the Quinns, Kromagg Prime, sticking Colin -- all that's labelled as the concerns of different sets of sliders. Torme's plot was splendid and it's a shame it wasn't the premiere for the Sci-Fi Channel years. I was very pleased that Cory noted that the happiest ending for SLIDERS is one where they're having wonderful adventures together.

**

I look forward to the boys getting into SLIDERS REBORN when it's done. REBORN has an alternate explanation for the sliders' resurrections and I suspect it's just as cumbersome, but it served my ends. "Slide Effects" is a vision of SLIDERS being filmed in 2000; REBORN is a vision of SLIDERS being filmed in 2015 with the conceit that SLIDERS was an X-FILES-level hit that just never got revived until last year.

**

There was some other behind the scenes stuff, but I think I shall post that when Cory and Tom start the LOIS & CLARK rewatch. And I shall be following along and responding to every single episode and watching two episodes with them every week! I have no behind the scenes info on LOIS & CLARK (unless you want scandalous rumours about Dean Cain's lovelife), but I love superheroes and will be thrilled to revisit the 90s with our podcasters.

Recovering from illness this past week. I'll read and review your book this Thursday/Friday.

Laurie recently got a superphone and returned my Nexus S to me. It's a 2010 Android phone, designed by Google, running Android 4.4.4. I decided to set it up as a backup phone and I noticed something weird; the partition is split between data (where the OS and all the apps are installed) and storage (where I can store files). This is an outdated partition scheme; modern Android has the OS on a system partition, but apps and files share the storage partition. Which makes me wonder -- could your S4 be operating on a similar partitioning scheme where your apps are simply being moved to a different partition on the internal memory instead of the external storage?

(Probably not, but I wanted to ask.)

The Nexus S and its single core processor and 500MB of RAM are woefully inadequate for multitasking and it slows to a crawl when downloading apps -- but once everything's installed, it gets the job done. The Nexus S ROM is shockingly small; there's 12GB of free space even with a full complement of apps. But the lack of external memory support prevents it from being something I'd use long-term and I suspect it would choke on Google Maps. But I might use it when I travel and want to use a phone I'm willing to lose.

And here we are again, standing at the edge of infinity, looking into the darkest abyss. A place where there is no mercy, no escape, no hope and no way out -- but for some reason, there are rock star vampires and amusement parks that feed on negative emotions and toy cars with laser cannons. A place where even Marc Scott Zicree lost the will to go on after "The Chasm." Truly, this is the darkest timeline.

I can't remember if LOIS & CLARK got this bad. Let's find out! :-D

There would be precedent in the previous series if GIRL MEETS WORLD presented Riley and Maya as a gay couple.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jmgmYdHLxI

Is the Lucas/Maya/Riley triangle really a problem for them? Couldn't they just have a threeway?

I watch most of my 4:3 DVDs in 16:9 with non-linear stretching using Cyberlink PowerDVD. I think you would be very impressed by the conversion. There is no distortion. The cropping is slight and barely noticeable. The result is an image that fills the screen without much, if any, loss of picture and the shot composition is actually enhanced because there is no distracting pillarboxing.

You can upscale and smart-stretch even without having shot it in 16:9.

Hey, RussianCabbie, check your E-mail. There is one key contact for a blu-ray release that we need YOUR help on! :-D

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. :-)