Very saddened to hear of the passing of Jeri Taylor. Jeri was co-showrunner on Jake and the Fatman (with her husband David Moessinger) and brought me onto the show based on a script I'd written for another show. At the time, I had never been on a network series, and 90% --

https://twitter.com/MikeOkuda/status/1849889143289151724

-- of my live-action work was in half hour shows, a very different format. Which is why CBS didn't want me on the show. They didn't think I had the chops for a network series. But Jeri and David fought like hell to get me on that show, and eventually prevailed. Not only --

The stunning thing about the news coverage over the last couple of days is the sheer number of pundits saying we're in "uncharted waters" to have something like this happen during a political campaign, and that's only true if you ignore the fact that it's not. In 1972 -- -- Alabama Governor George Wallace was running for President. Wallace was batshit crazy, a stone racist and segregationist who, per Jimmy Carter, had previously run "one of the most racist campaigns in modern southern political history." This was the same George Wallace --

Variations on this question have been coming up a lot lately, two in the same day (did you guys carpool?) so I’m going to go micro on this for future reference to save writing it again. When casting, you’re looking for someone who is, or can be, the very specific character --

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-- that you, the studio, the network, and the producers have all refined and, ideally, made different from everything else out there. You see person after person, waiting for that one perfect match, the actor who is that character.

Having FINALLY found the actor who can be --

For the last coming-on-three-years I've seen my primary responsibility as publishing and promoting Harlan's work--GREATEST HITS, the first two DANGEROUS VISIONS reprints and the debut of THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS--to the detriment of promoting my own work because I didn't want-- -- to distract by putting too many things out there. So now that all of the editing. So when in doubt, Harlan's work came first, and I snuck in my own where and when I could. But now that copyediting and design on THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS is finished, I wanted to back up --

If I may whisper a word or two into your shell-like ears for a moment…because I’ve been thinking about all this day and my options are to keep chewing on it indefinitely or get it out, so this is me getting it out.

The other day I heard a comment I’ve noted with increasing -- -- frequency, spoken by people to creative folks, “You have to get out of your comfort zone.” It’s become so ubiquitous that it borders on cliché. And yes, I understand the validity of the statement, I’m not here to dispute it or discredit the notion; it has value and purpose --

The job of the writer is to avoid falling into the trap of accepted cliche, one of which is the idea that humans are monolithic and everything changes once and never goes back or alternates from that point. We have streaming audio but also a huge industry for vinyl; by your --

https://twitter.com/InterstellrNews/status/1773233227571810611

-- that should simply not exist. Digital music is great, but we're seeing a rise in digital-to-audio tech because it sounds better. There's the cliche of "computers mean the end of paper!" when more paper than ever moves through my office. A writer's job is to step outside --

Here's what folks need to bear in mind about the reimagining. 1) We have this in process, we don't need to go out and try to drum up interest in something nobody's heard about before. 2) The B5 story was a "documentary" covering 5 years of history, like a real-world doc -- -- covering the 5 years in Germany before WW2. Yes, WW1 happened before, with consequences, and we see the seeds of WW2, *but WW2 is not what the story is about. So things happen that we refer to before and after the 5 year history of B5, but there was never any --

Part of what is problematic to so many writers about the term "filler episodes" is that for some viewers, stories only count when they're sprinting breathless through the events of the story arc, if things aren't directly moving ahead or blowing up, which ignores the reality -- -- that those events have to have meaning to the characters, have to change them and react to them, and we can't see those changes, or understand those reactions, unless we understand the characters. This is the crucial difference between incident and story. Incident is --

Happy B5 Release Day! Let me say again how amazing it's been to see the reactions from those who got The Road Home early. For those of us who worked so hard on this, that's pretty much everything. To which point, I want to especially single out two people who aren't getting -- -- nearly enough accolades for their work: Director Matt Peters, and producer Rick Morales. From the git-go they signed onto what B5 was, and could be again, and were so careful and respectful and determined to get everything right for the fans. If anyone else had been --

Haven't had a chance to give a report on my appearance at SDCC , so in brief: it was pretty amazing. Great responses to the Dark Horse announcement, the Captain America unveiling, and in particular, the screening of The Road Home. The only complication to the latter was that-- -- so many events/screenings had to be canceled due to the SAG strike that a lot of people assumed TRH was also canceled. (There were many tweets to that effect right here in the days leading up to SDCC that further added to the confusion.) Despite this, however, there --

Okay, so I don't have enough background in science of any form, let alone physics, to put forth a credible opinion about anydamnthing, but I did have a thought, and I wanted to pass it along to see if anyone else picks it up. By now it looks solid certain that the -- -- universe wasn't created in a Big Bang, but rather a "Big Crunch" or "Big Bounce" when a prior universe got too crowded and crumbles under its own mass, sparking a *massive* black hole/singularity that crunches everything down, and then rebirths it into the next universe --

Here's a story that may best illustrate why I'm so happy about how the #B5AnimatedMovie came out and what fans have to look forward to. A few weeks ago, I and @boxleitnerbruce met to do an audio commentary for the movie. Bruce had not yet seen the movie, only snippets a few -- -- seconds long during the final voice session to do little fixes. When he sat beside me in the recording studio, and no one was around, he leaned over and said, "How is it, really?" with eyes that, like my own, had seen so much disappointment over the years.

I said, "Bruce --

With word coming Wednesday about the new B5 project, and more announcements soon about comics, audio dramas, the reimagining (post-WGA strike) and more, this seems a good time to remind folks about my Patreon patreon.com/syntheticworlds. Patrons get all the news first as well as -- -- having a front-row seat to those things as they move forward, from hints to concept through art work, excerpts, execution, plus new B5 commentaries, archival photos and all the rest. But most important of all, the reason there is a Patreon page in the first place, is that --

The other day I heard someone qualified to hold the opinion say that as Alzheimer's progresses, the patient first loses their place in time, then space, then as a person/body...and I started to wonder if Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia start to unhook us from -- -- the ability to perceive the world in a way that impinges on quantum physics. We know that our ability to perceive time can be affected by various factors (velocity, neural issues like dyschronometria or even strong emotion). The ways in which time and space are interlinked --

As with pretty much all of our directors on B5, I didn't know Tony Dow very well. Sometimes the show-runner has to be the Enforcer in terms of the look of a show, and being too friendly can make that difficult. But what I knew of Tony was his absolute dedication to his work and-- --the actors. Whenever we had an episode with a lot of characterization that needed the cast to go deep, Tony's phone rang because as an actor himself, he know how to get to those often difficult places. He was charming in a quiet, low-key kind of way, and there he always --

You've used the term "agenda" or "agenda swap" several times here, in a way that precludes someone from changing a character because it simply seems like a good idea. If a particular change is made, then in your lights, it's based on having an AGENDA...are you a telepath to --

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-- know such things? An arbiter of truth to say that any movement made in one given area cannot -- CANNOT -- be because the storyteller thought, entirely his/her own, that it might be fun to explore -- but can ONLY be influenced by an OUTSIDE AGENDA. This is you trying --

A SUPREME COURT WORKSHEET
Since you have chosen to apply the standards of the 18th century for how women were treated to the present moment, I wanted to take this opportunity to bring to your attention other aspects of their lives during this time that could be -- -- useful in your future deliberations. Because surely if the one applies, then the rest must as well.

1) Girls went to boarding schools or poverty schools where they learned how to read and write, music, and how to be “charming,” lessons which taught them to be submissive to--

As noted in my profile, I have a Patreon page (patreon.com/syntheticworlds) because for every writer, even in TV, the work is feast-or-famine: you may make a good living one year then not work at all for the next 2-3. So the page was created initially to provide the stability -- -- needed for me to work on passion projects that I might not have the freedom to tackle otherwise.

Since then it’s grown into something rather remarkable: a community. Rather than just putting up posts for passive consumption, we’ve created a give-and-take environment --

To Merrick Garland...it is said by many and with increasing alarm that the DOJ has no intentions, and has made no steps toward holding Trump and his inner circle accountable for criminal actions they may have committed while in power. The speculation is that you are acting in -- -- the mistaken belief that you are protecting the office of the president, failing to see that the actions of the prior administration did more damage than any attempt to seek justice under the law could incur, especially since giving those involved a pass guarantees that --

Folks who have been following my feed from 2019 know that I was among the first on Twitter to say of Covid, even before it showed up in the US, "This is going to be really really bad." And I got yelled at by doctors and other folks for spreading unwarranted fear, with some -- -- absolutely insisting it would never even come here, or if it did, that we'd have to shut down for maybe two weeks. (Remember that one?) I kept insisting that this would be a very long process and folks needed to get ready. Since then all of those data points have been --

Okay, since so many have inquired (with some taking hostages) here's what I figured out about the Prisoner that was confirmed by one of the key cast members.

1) Yes, it's the same character from Danger Man, but McGoohan didn't want to use that name because it would have meant -- -- legal/contractual entanglements with another individual and he wanted to do this show clean of encumbrance.

2) His superiors asked him to run the Village program, as #1 but when he was read in, was horrified by the idea and said that it was pointless because not everyone can-