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I contacted them about missing Doctor Who episodes once. The episodes did eventually show up. I also contacted them about missing on-screen text on X-Files episodes, and that was fixed too.

But I suspect that Universal holds some episodes of their TV shows, to make people want the DVDs. Quantum Leap also has episodes missing from Netflix.

What you went through is part of the reason why I wanted to write my entire six book series in its entirety before releasing the first book. I would hate to have three books published before realizing that I forgot to set up a crucial plot point. It's an editing nightmare, but still the best way to go about it, I think.

The moments of crisis happen to all writers. At least you found a way out of it. Congrats on that.

I'm not a big fan of anything Mozilla related these days. I'm not sure that I could bring myself to use any variant of their browser.

The new TV season starts tonight! Gotham and Minority Report. Should be interesting. I've been surviving on a diet of Sons of Anarchy and Longmire on Netflix, and neither one of them is particularly great. It'll be nice to get some normal TV back.

Life is finally starting to settle down a bit. I haven't been posting much because things have been so crazy, but aside from some filming days coming up, I should be planted at the computer for a while. I'm sure that I'll be trying to avoid work most of the time, so I might be posting more.

That could work. However, I hope that the movies focus more on telling good stories with strong character arcs rather than take the Marvel route of "More action! Bigger explosions!"

I'd be cool with some of these movies simply not being big enough to call in the whole League. There are cool villains who aren't going to try to blow up a city.

I wonder if we will see Detective Chimp...

That could work, but it is a house of cards, similar to what Marvel is doing. If all of the movies are too closely connected to each other, you run the risk of not allowing those movies to be great on their own, and for them all to become useless if the group movie isn't absolutely flawless. I'd prefer to see the individual movies stand on their own, without putting too much thought into the JL movies. Tiny hints would be one thing, but what Marvel did was far too much and destroyed a lot of movies. Captain America's first movie is a waste of time. The Thor movies... just aren't very good. The Iron Man movies got weaker and weaker as the MCU grew bigger and bigger. And the Avengers simply wasn't worth the effort. It should have been a fun little thing that they did after they finished some of the other movies, not the centerpiece of the entire cinematic universe.

It looks like DC isn't putting too much pressure on the Justice League movie at the moment, which is good. Rather than finding a need to scale back the individual movies, it will be about them finding a reason to bring all of the characters together in that movie. That could work. I just don't want to see the JL movie casting too big a shadow over the individual movies.

The studios will always want the biggest title that they can get, with the most profit that they can get. They are businesses that need to make money, and for every one of these soulless remakes that makes a billion dollars profit, they can afford to lose money on ten original ideas that won't.

The world of movie making is separating. You no longer need ten million dollars and studio backing in order to produce a good movie. All you need is a good DSLR, some lenses, some lights, some good audio equipment and some talent, and your movie could look and sound like a solid studio-produced "art" film. I see a lot of people who are upset about the state of movies today, but the truth is that more movies are being made today, and more movies are being made by true artists today, than ever before. The people who are concerned with the state of the industry are simply looking at the wrong industry.

On another note, I just don't get the appeal of stoner movies. I guess the point is that you usually need to be high in order to really appreciate them, so I wouldn't. But... how do they get money to produce those movies? I tried watching "Wet Hot American Summer" and wound up turning it off (which I don't do often) because it was complete nonsense. Real comedy still requires intelligence and skill, so this definitely wasn't that.

Very cool. Congrats!

I think "Man of Steel" kinda covered the issue of Clark's disguise. In that movie, it was kind of an open secret. In Smallville's, people seemed to know who he was, but most people didn't really share that information or do much with it. They didn't forget everything that happened around him as a kid. It was just Clark for them. And it didn't take Lois long to figure it out, but again, it became a situation where knowing Clark outweighed knowing Clark's secret. People protected him, though it was less overt than some of the Spider-Man movies.

I wonder what happens when he is famous as both Clark and Superman. Maybe Zatanna or someone can put a spell on his glasses.

That would be so much cooler than Agents of SHIELD.

Fair points. I did find those movies enjoyable. I thought they were fun... Not great movies by any means, but fun to watch. And they annoy me less than most of the Marvel movies just because nobody is acting as though they are better than they are.

Plus, I like Emma Stone. I'm not sure that I've watched any of her other movies, but I like her.

I was fine with the last FF attempt as well. They were no worse than any of the XMen movies and they could have easily blended those worlds.

This new movie was destined to fail. They probably only made it for the sake of keeping the rights away from Disney, and those making the movie never tried to appeal to the audience. The comic fans, as far as I've seen, were never behind this movie. The complaints over casting have been played off as racist in the press, but it is a legitimate complaint. They chose one of the two characters who were biologically related, thus altering that character on a very basic level.

The same thing is happening with Wally West. People want to see their beloved, iconic character. When you fundamentally change that character and turn them I to something new, you are essentially killing off the beloved icon without care and slapping their name on someone new.
I am not as upset about a black Wally West on the TV show as I am with what happened in the comics, but I do understand where fans are coming from.

With Fantastic 4, it was a sign that the people making it weren't doing it for the fans. The push back by the fans wasn't met with any care or concern, it was met with accusation. This movie was never going to succeed, because the studio was at war with the people that they wanted money from.

Based on the pictures I've seen, the movie looks pretty horrible anyway. So I don't think that they ever wanted to or expected to break the box office. It had to be about the rights.

It all depends on how it's played. I agree that a lot of the Marvel stuff doesn't make sense. The only one that felt natural was Daredevil, and that's because it was such a different story that it actually felt weird when they did try to make it seem like a part of the bigger MCU.

But DC is doing something different. We haven't seen how that will work yet, so I don't know. They're doing the big group movies before they go back and do more Superman solo films or Batman solo films, but Batman is appearing in Suicide Squad. Whatever they do, they just need to make it right for the movie that we're watching. BvS started out as a Superman sequel and wound up being something else entirely. We'll see how that works.

There still shouldn't be a Flash movie. Sorry.

And for what it's worth Affleck is 42. Jared Leto is 43. Margot Robbie is much younger, but she was never really presented as being Batman's age. I am still not a huge fan of Affleck's. He is really good at that one facial expression, and he writes and directs movies that allow him to use the crap out of that one facial expression. But Batman/Bruce will require him to dig a little deeper. There are layers there that I'm not convinced he can pull off.

There are all sorts of rumors about who Jena Malone is playing in BvS. It started off with people thinking that she would be playing Carrie Kelly, the Robin in The Dark Knight Returns. Then time passed and people started turning theories toward Barbara Gordon, either as Batgirl or Oracle. If this is true, it opens up the Batman family for his movies. That would be an interesting way to go, because we never get to see the Batman family done right. There is just never enough time to get there. If they assume that we know how Bruce becomes Batman and Dick becomes Robin and Barbara becomes Batgirl, they can move on to Jason Todd or Tim Drake. That opens up a lot of stories that were never explored on film before.

And of course, I'm still holding out hope for a movie set in the future with Terry McGinnis.

I always figured that it was a way to try to get us to buy the DVD sets even though the series is streaming online.

But music makes sense too.

That's interesting. A lot of what we get comes from the media (much like what most people know about American culture), so it is a very skewed perspective. Sadly, this results in a lot of Americans thinking that people in the UK are on the extreme left, and also more civilized and classy, and look at us as unwashed peasants, so the easily manipulated amongst us try to distance themselves from their American culture. Some even claim that America has no culture, which boggles the mind... Sorry. I'm drifting toward a rant here.

But yeah, it's media manipulation. They present a picture that isn't necessarily true in an effort to sway the way people think. It happens with news reports and political issues as well. I've been carefully watching the way that news reports skew stories over the past few years, since it plays into a novel series that I've been working on. The subtle word play and the things that they don't tell you about a story can cause all sorts of chaos. And then people refuse to accept the truth when you introduce it, because they didn't see it on the news.

I could get into some of those stories, but I'm sure it's far less interesting if you haven't been buried in it for years.

I imagine that a lot of what you see about us isn't the whole truth either. The media sucks.

Tried the site's recommendation for a Torchwood episode. Still sucked. I am moving on.

I think I just need a better show to watch when I'm bored... Hmm...

It is so bad! I don't think that the later seasons could be good enough to make up for it. I never do this but... Should I maybe skip ahead?

I don't get how you recover from making one of your main characters into a rapist in episode 1. And they played it for laughs!

To me, Gotham feels almost like a live action version of the Batman Animated Series. It is more serious and darker than the cartoon, of course, but it feels like the same place in a lot of ways.

For the record, I still watch Agents of SHIELD. I just think that it is a poorly made series. Especially when you look at what Arrow and The Flash have done with TV budgets. Agent Carter had the benefit of being set in the past, so the lower quality production actually felt like the "past" that we're all familiar with, which is pretty much the lower quality productions of the past.

When Veronica Mars began, I admit that I was seeing some Chloe similarities. But the thing about that show is that so much energy came from the people making the show. So many of them loved the show and cared about it, from the actors all the way back to set designers. Ryan Hansen was an extra (I think... he might have been a day player) who was given one line in one episode. From that one line he built the character of Dick Casablancas who was so popular that Ryan recently had his own tie-in series on the CW's website (I think it is about Ryan trying to get a Dick series made).
Yes, Allison is a great actress. Yes, she was the shining star of Smallville. But could she carry a series like Veronica Mars, which would rely so much on her actually loving the character and the work? I don't know. Would she actually love it based on the material, or would the grind of playing one character every day for nine months out of the year wear on her the way Smallville wore on her? TV work isn't for everyone. If Allison is more of the type of actress who loves to jump around from character to character and travel and live a gypsy life, working on any TV series is going to feel oppressive to her in the long run.

Lana and Lex were given more screen time on Smallville, but I dare say that Chloe was to Smallville what Deep Space Nine was to the Star Trek franchise. She was the rogue element who people loved but who flew under the radar enough to get away with stuff that other characters couldn't. She had much smoother character development than most of the characters. She was allowed to have a personality. She was allowed to be natural, more than any other character on the series. Of all of the people on Smallville, I would think that she would be the most fulfilled at the end, because her character had one arc (more or less) and wasn't constantly being retooled for the sake of false drama. Imagine how much more lovable Lana could have been if she were treated the way Chloe was.

I'm not saying anything bad about Allison. I just think that any long term TV work might not be her thing.

On another note, I've been kinda bored at night lately, so I have tried out Torchwood while I wait for new Dr. Who episodes to show up on Netflix. People seem to love Torchwood, but it is a horribly made series. I don't get why anyone likes it! Everything from the writing to the production quality is just bad.

That is a tricky situation that Allison was in. I can see how she would easily get frustrated, but it is a shame because this genre of television allowed her possibilities that aren't open to people who are starring on normal procedurals or medical dramas. Despite being underused and misused, Chloe was an incredibly popular character. She probably could have used that to build a fanbase that would have kept her in work for decades, and it would have also made the experience more fun for her. Interacting with fans would have been a big part of that, but she could have also created projects of her own or taken part in other projects that would put that Smallville fanbase to good use. Felicia Day may not be my favorite person on Supernatural, but her early appearances on Buffy (in a group that was largely hated by the fans) opened doors for her that led to work on other Joss Whedon shows, and shows like Supernatural and Eureka. But she built that momentum by creating her own content online and interacting with fans, mostly about stuff that she already loved.

If Felicia could do that, Allison could have done it much more easily. The problem is, I'm not sure that Allison really fits into the geek community or knows how to take advantage of it. What I've seen of her blogs, etc. shows her to be more of a... I don't know how to put it... wine drinking, poetry reading, yoga taking type of person. More Downton Abbey, less Dr. Who.

The job on Smallville would have been a huge opportunity for anyone in the proper mindset. Zachary Levi built Chuck into Nerd HQ. Stephen Amell uses Facebook and Twitter to interact with fans, building his CW success into a mainstream media-friendly platform for building not only his acting career, but his wine company and his charitable efforts. And yes, these were the leads of their shows, but it isn't about that. It's about how they built a relationship with their fans. Allison had millions of fans, but never turned them into millions of followers.

People with bit parts on shows like Star Trek, Arrow, The Flash, Supernatural, etc. can make a living and travel the world simply doing conventions. But they also end up working together on each other's projects, big and small.

Yes, the Smallville writers failed her and her character for many years. But that would have given her more free time than any other person on the show.

I don't know. You can tell when a show's cast actually wants to be there and when they don't. There is something special that happens on screen when the actors are excited to be there, or grateful for the opportunity. It creates a connection between them and the audience. We're all part of the same team. Jensen and Jared. The casts of Arrow and The Flash... With Smallville, it did seem like the show was swimming against the tide a lot of the time. I get why she was frustrated and why it wasn't a fun experience. It's just a shame.

Yeah. It would surprise a lot of people to find out that many actors get into acting as a way of getting out of their she'll a bit. People also confuse introvertedness with shyness, but they are pretty different.

In fact, one reason why I don't go to conventions is because I am kinda introverted and dislike the big crowds. Acting is a totally different feeling.

The question I have is how much he will Will Smith-ize the role. Will he just make it the same character that he always plays?

It seems like Harley is being played up. That is good. She is probably the biggest name (character wise) in the movie. I am curious to see how they play her. In the trailer, she seemed crazy, but not bonkers. And they need to remember that she isn't normal crazy. She kinda chose to go crazy. She is really smart. She could totally play with the minds of the other characters.

By brother and his wife have Samsung tablets and pretty much every cell phone in my family is Samsung and I've never hear of any of those glass and creaking issues (though battery issues seem to come and go). That is weird.

Probably, which is sad.

I doubt that it will be. With a show like this, they would announce the last season in May, if not earlier. The writers would have to plan for it. They would make a big deal out of the last Supernatural ComicCon panel. It would be an event, not just a cancelation.

The show still gets good ratings. If this season really is a return to the feel of season 1, it could even help the show go on for longer.

It's already better than most of the Marvel movies!

I like the look of the movie. I like that it seems to be plot-driven. I can see how it started out as a MoS sequel and grew into something else. I think that Wonder Woman looks great, which is surprising, since nobody ever makes that stupid character look good.
So far, I like what I'm seeing.

That said, it could go wrong pretty easily. These movies tend to add politician characters who ruin the movies by being insulting. Usually, it's liberal writers who want an evil totalitarian political character and they make that character and eeeeeevil conservative, even though the whole idea of a big government politician who wants to control everyone goes against most conservative ideals.
But the bottom line is really about lazy writers who don't put thought into their evil political characters. They are offensive because the writer is stupid and never takes advantage of legitimate politics. (disclaimer: I am not saying that I am above this)

The question is, can this movie avoid cartoonish politics and make the back and forth between sides into a legitimate argument? Or will it be extremist ideals written by a lopsided writer?

In terms of conflict, it looks cool. All of the pieces are in place. But the political aspects could easily turn this movie sour very quickly.

But besides that, it looks like a good followup to MoS, and a good way to introduce the larger DC universe... even if the idea of a new Barry Allen right now is beyond stupid. Not to mention the fact that a large chunk of the Suicide Squad is already recurring on Arrow. I still don't get why they expect me to pay to see what I'm already watching for free.

Okay! Finally have some time, so I'm going to see how many of these posts I can knock out...

A lot of people are complaining about the season, because the CW advertised it as the season of the "Dean-mon". Those people should know by now that commercials mean nothing. A season of demon Dean would be stupid, because you'd have to kill him in the end, and keep him dead. After a year of him slaughtering people on camera, you can't just snap him back to normal.

For what it was, I liked it. I thought for a while that they were setting the Stynes up to be the villains of next season, and I was really psyched about that, because it was a more human-based story. But setting them up and then having Dean wipe them out was pretty awesome. The thing was, I didn't see it as Dean going very dark. He wasn't evil. He wasn't demonic. He was just a really pissed off Dean with a little bit of extra juice.

If you ask me, Sam was turning more and more dark as the season went on, doing more questionable things than Dean was. So when we left it with Dean possibly killing Sam and then leaving this planet, I was thinking that it might actually happen for a second or two.

But backing up... Charlie.

Yes, I am thrilled that she is dead. I didn't like her. Her death was really weird for me though, because they totally Jenny Calendar-ed her off the show. Even as she heard somone knock at the door and they cut to commercial, i was like "Are they Jenny Calender-ing her?" The setup was pretty much the same, with her trying to crack the code that would let them perform the spell to restore Dean, and then when she dies, it was left out there for them to find. (at least floppy discs are out of style these days or it would have been an exact match).

Plus, we had the witch turned into a rodent... They were riffing on Buffy a lot this year.

Pretty much anything with Crowley in his lair is a waste of time and should be cut from the show. I hope that Castiel really does kill him. I am just ready for him to be gone. He is not a good villain. The king of Hell shouldn't be comic relief.

Okay, back to the finale...

Killing Death is weird. How does that even take? How do people die at that point? And was it really necessary?

Releasing the Darkness is interesting, but I'm not sure what to make of it yet. If it goes the way of the Leviathan, it will suck. They were a big, huge evil force that the writers threw out there and had no idea what to do with it, so they wound up wasting an entire season on crap. However, if they thought this through, it could be a really solid way of bringing some serious new darkness to the series, which has been lacking since the angels and demons started dragging their feet around. I guess we'll see.

Carver has an interesting arc working here. It reminds me of the first five seasons. While Gamble was going from year to year with no longterm plan, Carver came in with many seasons in mind, so I'm curious to see where he is going with it.

As it is, I can see the series' final season using Sam and Dean themselves as the monsters that need to be hunted. Not being turned into something new and weird, but just going down the path they put themselves on already, making all of these decisions that keep bringing evil, death and chaos into the world. I could see them being hunted, possibly even by people that we know and love from the past. Would it be cool to see John, Ellen, Jo, Rufus and Bobby hunting Sam and Dean as the series comes to an end? And for us to question which side we're on?

Or maybe it will go in an entirely different direction. But seriously, at some point, we have to acknowledge that most of the super big evil that people keep dying from on this show has been directly caused by the Winchesters making rather selfish decisions.

That sucks. The last time I was there, a lot of the older homes that I loved to see when I was growing up were being torn down and replaced by new monstrocities (my grandparents' house included). The last thing that place needed was more help tearing down the history.

I forgot half of my post... It's been a long day

My watch is geared toward fitness mainly. It does have other functions though. I can control media playback from it, or answer calls. It is mostly useful for answering calls when I have a headset or in the car, but I can also activate the speakerphone, so I can answer calls if the phone is across the room and I can't get to it. There are other apps, I'm sure, but it is still new to me.

When I got my S4, I was checking out the fitness app. Just to get through the setup process and look around, I answered questions with random answers. So when it asked my goal for steps taken per day, I chose 10,000.
Flash forward to years and my watch communicates with my phone. My goal is now set at 10,000 and I see how many steps I've taken every time I look at the time. I couldn't turn in for the night without winning the challenge. Lowering the number felt like cheating at a game.

This could be trouble.

Sounds like it all worked out. Nice!
When my stuff breaks, I usually just give it to my brother and he fixes it. It's hand, and way cheaper than warranties.

The contradictions that I'm thinking about in my book involve the prologue. Some like it, but suggested some changes. Some disliked it because it is more about the world that I'm establishing than any of the characters that play into the rest of the story, so it feels detatched to them. In my head, it serves a purpose, bridging our world to the world that I'm setting my story in. But I will kick around some ideas for how I might change it and if any of them sound better than what I have, I will change it. If not, I will probably just leave it.

Okay, new tech report. My brother (the one mentioned above) sometimes buys things that are damged or not working on Ebay, fixes them and resells them for profit. One of the places that he buys stuff from sometimes has smart watches. So he ended up buying me a Galaxy Gear Fit for pretty cheap. It has a little bit of scratching on it, but I don't care. It works fine and it's pretty cool. The only downside being that it might make me want to obsessively walk around.

How many have I met in person? None. But many of us have been around various boards together for 15 or 20 years, so there is some history. Outside of the board, there is also email, Facebook and stuff like that. I know some better than others.