Personal Status Updates! (Page 9 of 13)

Just to bring the discussion on relating to people over the internet back to SLIDERS...

I spent various periods of January 2015 to December 2016 writing SLIDERS REBORN with three different editors who called me completely insane at different points. I had a fundamentalist view of SLIDERS (that it's all canon, all 88 episodes are best integrated into a grand tapestry of infinite storytelling possibilities) to which they were fundamentally opposed (they advised a straight reboot). The great thing about having had three editors is that I can talk about them bluntly without indicating which of the three to whom I refer.

One editor described my writing as a clumsy and witless collection of empty set pieces unleashing the Season 3 monsters for no good reason whatsoever and when I explained that they served as metaphors for mental illness, he told me I was clearly well-acquainted with the subject matter and remarked that Hong Kong slapstick comedy and superhero movies had melted my ability to tell stories.

One editor kept rewriting my dialogue, feeling that my desire to imply and indicate through context and action was ineffective and didn't communicate emotion well while observing that my scientific exposition was an impenetrable fog. I would read this editor's suggested revisions with horror where my subtext was simply text and I would wonder if I'd spent so long inside my SLIDERS bubble that I had lost the ability to explain anything to anybody.

One editor told me that that my writing was an overstuffed shopping list of story elements that would result in an incomprehensible, unreadable story and characterized my outline as "an unworkable beat sheet of nonsensical stream of consciousness written by a crazy person."

One editor would offer opinions in an oddly deferential manner -- which is to say he would provide a positive opinion, and then when forwarded fan mail with negative criticism from other readers, would promptly reverse his opinion to match the criticism.

I certainly don't excuse myself from all the difficulties here; my outlines were often a list of unstructured ideas and very difficult for any editor to review. However, at various points, I found myself telling each of the three editors that their job was not to take my story and replace it with their own; their job was to share with me how they felt my story could be told effectively and engagingly.

(This was hard for them because my outlines often left it frustratingly unclear what my story even was.)

Anyway. When their ideas added clarity, depth, points of interest and meaning to a celebratory tribute to all five seasons of SLIDERS and created warmth and joy and love and wonder for the characters and their world, I worked them in. When their ideas were caustic or insulting to SLIDERS or diluted the happiness and thrill of having Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo back together, I declined to use them.

When they called my story incomprehensible and told me to just do a continuity reboot and rewrote my dialogue, I set aside my frustration and tried to grapple with what was confusing and find a way to simplify; when they called me and my material crazy, I would ask myself if the plausibility were an issue or if the madness could be communicated within the tone of the writing to enthuse the reader.

I tried to take the very best of what they had to say, not dwell too much on that which was unhelpful or paralyzing, while accepting that sometimes, people aren't always going to communicate with you in the terms you personally would find ideal and if I couldn't deal with that and do my job, SLIDERS REBORN would have sat unfinished on EP.COM forever.

True. But when it comes to the real world and real consequences, with real facts and real details, keeping your head down and letting things roll off your back is less productive.

To be clear, I'm not having a freak-out "Leave Brittany alone!" moment. I'm just burned out, frustrated by the willingness to believe lies because they say what you want, and a complete lack of scale when it comes to disagreeing with people. Suddenly, anyone who didn't vote for Hillary is a KKK member, a rapist, a murderer, a fascist (and most people who use that word don't even know what it means), and whatever other negative words people can think of, and you are completely unworthy of life, much less talking to.

That is not rational thought. It is not productive. It is insane. Balls-out crazy. It's the most intolerant, hateful, ugly people calling other people intolerant, hateful and ugly... And that would just be laughable if it weren't coming from news outlets and other supposedly sane people. This is crap that kids say, it isn't supposed to come from adults!

So yeah, I'm burned out. I'm a facts and details guy who loves discussing and debating with people who don't agree with me, because I'm capable of respecting people who aren't exactly like me. This insanity is, to me, like forcing a germaphobe to lick the floor in a hospital. But I'll get over it. Probably sooner rather than later.

This board isn't really like that though. We discuss differences and debate topics, but usually in a more rational, grown-up way. We may argue, but I genuinely don't think that anyone here wants to resurrect Hitler or rape anyone. I have never gotten the impression that anyone here thinks those things of me.

To use the Star Wars example... It is one thing for fans to debate details of the movie that they all love. I think it is something else for someone to wave off the idea of criticism because they think the movies are perfect and if you disagree with that beliefs, you are an ugly human being who isn't worth talking to.

I think the discussions about comic book movies have especially gotten close to that point. Those discussions sound a lot like political debates at times. Critics will praise the one they want to love, blind to any weaknesses, and they will rip into anything that challenges that beloved franchise in any way.

The reality is, some people like Marvel, some people like DC. Both have made pretty good money. Both have made movies that solidly appeal to their audience. The success of one doesn't really harm the other. There doesn't need to be a winner or a loser, but a lot of people are in a battle mindset. They can't just let people like what they like, they have to make sure that nobody likes the other one.

Like I said, it looks a lot like a political discussion at times, which is odd.

It only works in real life if you're not willfully ignoring facts, just for the sake of continuing to hate someone. In real life, letting fantasy outweigh reality doesn't lead to good things. I do tend to smile and ignore people that I know when they say crazy things, but watching them go insane over something that they're essentially made up in their head is frustrating. An the more frustrating part is that I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I could show them video proof that proves that they are wrong about X, Y or Z, and they would refuse to absorb that information. They would deny it, and then forget that it existed as soon as it wasn't right in front of their face.

It reminds me of the Ben/Glory thing on Buffy, in a way.

Yeah, I get that. Like I said, I'm not having a breakdown or anything. I'm just tiring of specific topics and mindsets. Easily avoided for a little while.

I'd love to see if I could go completely low-tech for a while and swear off of cell phones and laptops entirely, but that isn't realistic while I need to get work done.

Okay, avoiding didn't work. Just can't be done.

I just have to take a deep breath and not let the crazies get to me.

About a year ago...

ME: "I miss posting on Sliders.TV so much! I keep writing up long posts and just saving them in the cloud!"

TRANSMODIAR: "Do you feel better now that you've admitted it?"

ME: "It's been really hard ever since the moderator banned me from Sliders.TV."

TRANSMODIAR: " ................... YOU are the moderator."

ME: "Yeah, I needed a time-out."

**

Two months ago...

ME: "You know, it's hard to keep going with SLIDERS REBORN when the first editor and now the second have told me the exact same thing -- that my story is crazy and unworkable and that I am insane."

TRANSMODIAR: "You'll prove 'em all wrong!"

ME: "But you were the first editor."

TRANSMODIAR: "Yeah! I know!"

ME: "But I can respect that you both gave up on the project because you understandably didn't believe in it."

TRANSMODIAR: "Hey, don't confuse giving up with never starting."

**

Two days ago...

ME: "Hmm. All in all -- between your intolerance for implausibility, Nigel's world-building skills and Slider_Quinn21's typo-spotting and troubleshooting with the prose, you all made the perfect editor."

TRANSMODIAR: "Cool! It's good to know I'm thirty three per cent of a man."

So the touchscreen keyboard on the Surface? It's awful. The spacebar/isn't/wide/enough. I keep hitting the slash key instead. And weirdly, the keyboard + touchpad Touch Cover -- it randomly loses connection with the tablet at times. It occurs to me that in all the time I spent using the iPad, I was never dealing with random, time wasting glitches where software designers and hardware engineers' problems were suddenly my inconvenience.

But the Surface screen is really big. Everything pops! And when the Touch Cover does work, I type a heckuva lot faster than I ever could on an iPad. And the speakers are front facing so the sound is very strong when I'm watching a show. That's importan

The keyboard stopped working again just now. And now I seem to have lost the cursor.

Turns out, not the flu

Yes, but what I have is pneumonia

I've had pneumonia a couple times.  It's awful.  I've been wondering if I should get the pneumonia vaccine since I seem to be susceptible to it.  Although I have no idea what it'd be for since pneumonia is more of a situation than something specific.

I will read the scripts when I can!!! I spend my days either writing or reading! My eyes get tired!

You should make an audiobook or radio show.

Going back to the question of whether the Sliders are superheroes, I recently started reading The Evolution of the Costumed Avenger: The 4,000-Year History of the Superhero by Jess Nevins.  It's a fascinating look into the history and antecedents of the modern comic book hero.  Nevins claims the defining characteristic of a hero to be a selfless mission.  I don't think that describes the Sliders, whose primary mission was always to get home.

I'd like to believe this happened.

With regards to the cast of SLIDERS as superheroes (and without any interest in responding to the person who re-raised the subject):

There are two ways of portraying Quinn, Wade, Rembrandt and Arturo that I like to present in writing them. The first is to present them as idiosyncratic dramedy characters, the cast of a quirky sitcom of life and death situations with highly distinctive voices and some truly crippling character flaws that make them hilarious, capable and intensely troubled -- so Quinn is both a hypercompetent scientist and a troubled shut-in whose only friend is his mother; Wade is a relentlessly practical problem solver who finds it easier to focus on other people's problems while ignoring her own needs; Rembrandt is a highly adept social engineer with a completely delusional self-image (either thinking of himself of a superstar when he's not or an inept civilian when he's not) and the Professor is a man of wisdom and intellect who is deeply insecure about his own competence and scientific skills. And when you play up the first halves of the characters, you can tap into their (somewhat mundane) superpowers, but if you want a more grounded story, you use the second halves.

And this leads into the second way of handling SLIDERS' cast: presenting them as iconic, legendary figures of infinite potential and limitless possibilities propelled by a boundless storytelling engine -- and the neat thing about SLIDERS is that they can be both those iconic characters and the shambling, clumsy human beings we met in the Pilot.

Temporal Flux, years ago, came up with a superhero story where a superhero character used vortex technology in order to lift heavy weights, instantly transport to different positions for combat purposes, to manipulate gravity for transport or propulsion or as a weapon. Sliding does have application as aggressive and defensive weaponry.

And finally, SLIDERS is an innately multi-genre series where you can plug the characters into any kind of story: legal drama, horror, romcom, espionage, space opera, a workplace dramedy, mumblecore, standup comedy -- I'd love a SLIDERS cookbook of recipes from alternate dimensions and a SLIDERS self-help book with chapters alternating between characters writing them. The superhero story is one of many genres the sliders could visit. Any story is conceivably a SLIDERS story.

I cannot in good conscience support the purchase of Samsung's overpriced, overdesigned, overly incendiary products, and I say that as someone who bought the Samsung Galaxy S3 three times. There was a time when to get a decent Android phone, you had to spend $700 - $800 USD; that's simply not the case anymore.

You can get a 1080p, 5.5-inch Android phone with 16 GB of storage, microSD and a clean version of Android in the Motorola G4 for $180 off Amazon. (I'm using one now.) You can get a 5.7 inch LG Stylo 2 Plus or a Sony Xperia XA for $200. You can get a BLU Life One X2 Mini with 64GB of memory and a 5-inch screen for $180.

Once you're at 1080p, you can't really distinguish between that and higher resolutions on a phone sized screen, all these 'budget' phones have the gyroscope and compass sensors, so the only thing you get for all the extra money is Samsung Pay. Is that really worth it?

Well, it's your money. But it does occur to me that this discussion highlights the differences you and I have in approaching hardware. To me, a company sending out a software update that bricks the phone wouldn't be a problem; I'd either reflash a backup or go so far as to reflash the entire ROM. That's not a chore for everyone.

There's stuff I like about Samsung and stuff I don't. I really like their hardware, but I really hate their software. Before I lost my Samsung S5, I wasn't running Samsung's Android; I put Cyanogenmod (now Lineage) on it because I wanted the plain Google experience but mostly because Samsung doesn't let you hide the status bar.

And that's a huge problem on an AMOLED screen because images retained tend to burn in and most Samsung Galaxy phones have ghost images of text, the keyboard and the status bar burnt into the screen after a few months. And the only way around that is to use expanded desktop mode (hiding the status bar) and adjusting the visual settings in a way Samsung's blocked off. It also irritates me that Samsung's method for shifting apps to microSD seems completely broken and outright sabotaged and the only way to get Google's measures for merging a microSD with the internal memory was to replace Touchwiz with a cleaner ROM.

Motorola doesn't actually exist anymore. They were bought by Google who turned it into an outlet for Nexus style phones that were a lot cheaper, then sold to Lenovo who dissolved it while maintaining the Moto brand. Lenovo kept the great prices but stopped doing the regular software updates -- but it doesn't matter to me because I'm not even using their ROM anymore; I've switched to Lineage OS.

The Moto E2 and G4 have yet to receive an update from Marshmallow in my area, but I've already skipped ahead to Android Nougat. So... I guess I deliberately buy phones with lots of custom ROMs and don't depend on the manufacturer for software. I'm less about features and more about how active the device is in the XDA forums.

I want a Galaxy S8+, but I don't have $850 of bonus money to throw around without a care. So... I may have gone about doing something that some people on the internet find distasteful (not porn), but with relatively little time invested, I've solved the money issue.

Now I'm thinking that maybe I should hold off and see what they do with the Note 8. If the S8+ is about as big as a typical Note 8, they can't just slap an S-Pen on it and call it innovation, right? There's a voice in my head that's telling me that they're going to want to do something big and impressive with this thing.

Or I could end up spending several months yelling at my quickly-dwindling S4, only to find out that the Note 8 is just an S8+ with an S-Pen.

I considered one of the payment plans, but they usually go together with a service plan that I'm not interested in. Plus, as you say, there are downsides to spreading that cost out over the course of a year or two. Typically, when I want something, I set that goal and then figure out a way of making it happen without costing me "real" money. (meaning, I find a way of making money specifically for that purpose, so I don't feel bad about spending that money on something that I could probably live without).

This time, right around the time I decided to set the S8+ as my goal (I may end up with the Note or even the S8, but I set the S8+ as my goal), Nintendo announced that they were discontinuing the NES Classic Edition, but would have a few more shipments to various stores until the end of April. So, I did my research and got my hands on several of those (with a little bit of help). Reselling them earns money for a high end new cell phone!

It also earns me the scorn of many people online, but I don't care. If people really wanted these things for retail price, they would get them. I did. But the people complaining didn't want to put in the effort, so they wouldn't have gotten any of them anyway. Now I'm playing personal shopper for people who are willing to pay for my services. Capitalism at work!

I'll have to take a look at the Sony, but when I was looking at phones not too long ago (my brother needed a replacement), I noticed that a lot of those other phones had lower quality screens than I'm used to, and there were some other aspects that I wasn't a fan of with a lot of them. Samsung has their weaknesses too, but their screens are beautiful and crisp, their cameras have given me a lot of really great images (with the right lighting, I've gotten images of my nephews and niece that look like professional portraits).

We'll see. I'm probably still going to wait a little while before buying a phone, unless my S4 gives me no other choice. I swear, it was running incredibly smoothly until it suddenly took a sharp dive in functionality. I'll look at some other options, but I've been happy with Samsung phones for a while now, after some unpleasant experiences with other companies.

What are your thoughts on unlocked vs. carrier phones? I'm liking the idea of no bloatware, and no chance of AT&T bootlocking my phone, like they did with my S4 (which is why I haven't flashed a new ROM), but I've heard that the unlocked phones can take longer to receive updates. I guess that would be where the custom ROMs come in.

I kinda enjoy the thrill of the hunt for these NES Classics

I haven't really had major burn-in issues with my S4. There may be some, I guess, but it's hard to tell, so I don't think it's a major thing for me.

The storage merging issue seems to have a fix!
https://www.instohub.com/tech/how-to-en … y-s8-plus/

That said, my storage space is so low in my S4 that even basic S8 storage will boggle my mind.

I don't know anyone, unfortunately. I hope you can get it figured out though, it does seem strange. I understand the feeling of wanting to fight for your pet (I did for a cat a few years ago). How old is the dog?

I'm sorry to hear this. :-(

Wow, that's awful, so sorry to hear this. I know the feeling of losing a pet. It's just as bad as losing a human in many cases.

Something weird happened today. My Moto G4 started showing ghost images. The status bar and the text messaging app were burned into the screen with phantom images of the keyboard, notification icons and time embedded the background over top of any app. But the burnt in image was from half an hour previous. I restarted the phone twice and it wouldn't go away. And so, as I am wont to do with many things that irk me, I froze it out -- which is to say I put the somewhat hot phone in the freezer and the ghost image was gone a half-hour later.

I think there's a weird glitch where high heat when the phone's under load and at maximum brightness causes images to briefly be retained in the display. I'm going to limit myself to 70 per cent brightness from now on, which is still pretty bright. And at least the 'burn in' isn't permanent like it'd be on a Samsung.

I agree. However, I must confess that I don't even have Netflix on my phone. It's always been a home theatre and tablet app for me and Android tablets aren't very prominent these days.

I almost never use Netflix on the phone. I use it on my tablet most, with occasionally using it on the Apple TV. Phone is too small to commit to watching anything longer than a clip of 10 minutes or less. I've only used it I think twice on my phone (I do t like to kill the battery on the phone too much when I'm out and if I'm not out I use the tablet or Apple TV for tv viewing

And, with that, the Sliders BBoard disappeared. 

But for those of us what lived and died in them furious days, it was like everything we knew was mightily swept away.  And no matter what they did to build the internet up again, for the rest of time, it'd be like no one even knew we was ever here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-8Lu7MRjQs

The last portion of that episode was one of the more interesting conversations I think we've seen on the podcast so far.  Starts at about 1:12:45 mark.  I found it engaging, at least.

I think I am just taking a little break from SLIDERS. I tried to watch the new episodes of DOCTOR WHO recently and didn't finish the new episode with Capaldi and Pearl Mackie. It was good, I just wanted to rest. I think finishing SLIDERS REBORN just left me feeling like I'd done my part for the cause and it was time to retire or at the very least, take a leave of absence.

I lost another dog this weekend. The second since May and third in the last two years. This one, Rocky, was 15 years old, which is amazing for his breed (he was a lab) and he was an overwhelmingly awesome dog. I can't even put it into words right now, but if you've read Freedom/Hate, Ammo was based on Rocky.

This summer has sucked a whole lot.