My so-called journal

Been thinking about the 90's scifi TV show "Sliders" lately, because it was most likely what first introduced me to the idea of the multiverse, and traveling it. First two seasons were pretty good, and then the quality took a sharp nose dive. Three of the main cast eventually left, the guy who invented the sliding technology got merged with someone else to explain why he was recast. Oh, and the final season ended on a cliffhanger.

I don't recall what channel it was on that I was able to watch it, but I must have stopped watching it somewhere in seasons 1 or 2, because there are some things that happened that I don't remember seeing, like when they introduced a recurring villain species of alternate humans, the kromaggs. Everything I've heard and read and seen about the kromaggs makes me think they were a good idea, even if a lot of people were upset by it. But yeah, you can only do "new world of the week" format for so long before it gets stale. Introducing a species of highly technologically advanced alternate humans that are going around to other Earths and conquering, destroying, or raiding them for supplies is a great way to add stakes. And the kromaggs looked pretty interesting, very visually distinct. I feel bad I never got to see that arc when the series was airing.

This made me think of a few things. First, I think I might have enough material about my Ravenstone series' multiverse to make a show with a similar premise, especially with a bit of writing help. Especially since that multiverse contains entities that control the fates of trillions of universes, entities like the deadly Nightmare, or like The Director, who doesn't destroy; they take people's free will from them and turns them into Heroes or Villains for their melodramatic stories, the kind of story changing over the centuries. Their current obsession is "steampunk in outer space." And then there are weird and creepy locations like Twilight or Stillness. There's universes where the form of Christianity that swept the world was very different from Catholicism. Worlds where Christianity / monotheism never arose. Worlds with entirely different magic systems from the main Neighborhood of universes the series takes place in (like the area of The Director, for one example). And because of "trailing universes" and "timeskip universes," a series set in that multiverse can even do something resembling time travel, without the same consequences. If you go to a world where it's still 1950 and you kill your parents before they can meet, that doesn't affect you at all because those aren't your parents, those are multiverse doubles of your parents. Most you can do is make a new universe where you don't exist.

Then, too, another thing I thought of is someone could adapt the "Long Earth" series by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter into a TV series. It would be great, as it has a multiverse to explore, but the twist is that the multiverse is mostly empty of sapient life, apart from a few "joker" worlds like our earth, and some species from the homo genus that started Stepping long ago and evolved to adapt to wandering the long Earth.

The best part about adapting "The Long Earth" to TV would be that the book series is complete, you don't need to worry about coming up with new stories, just adapt the books' stories to television. You might have to do a little padding here and there to stretch it out, but there's obvious angles to do that from, including history and current politics. I'm thinking one book per season, so we mainly focus in season one on switching between the arcs of the settlers' journeys, and Lobsang and his friends exploring the high megas. Maybe throw in a few small foreshadowing bits for future arcs like the Next. Then book two becomes season two, and so on.

I guess the main issue would be getting the rights to do that. But I think it would be a great series. There's only so many books, so it's not like the series could easily overstay its welcome, as long as you actually stop the series at the last book and don't go trying to pull a "Supernatural" or "The Simpsons" by letting it live beyond the time it should have died.

The ads on the various games on my phone have gotten unbearable. I was fine with them when it was just the tiny X you had to hit. Now what I end up having to do is pressing a link reading "Google Play store" and then I have to hit the back button at the exact right amount of time after clicking that for it to go back into the app, and if I'm lucky, it will then bring up the X to click. More often than not, though, what it does instead is restart the fucking app! Which means restarting the level I was on if I'm especially unlucky, or if I'm just mildly unlucky, any reward that I might have gotten for watching the ad is just fucking gone.

I need to find out if there's an app I can install on my phone that will kill all of the ads or at least put them back to the way they were when it was just pressing the X. Because before this change, I could put up with the ads pretty much indefinitely. But now it's to the point where I get maybe a half hour of play time in before I just fucking give up in frustration.

I went somewhere on the 4th that I've been meaning to go to for a long time: Multnomah Falls. Of course, I then got sick two days later and because of that, being tired when I got home, and ADHD, I am only just now getting around to posting here about it.

I took a bunch of photos while I was there. It's not a place I can go often, because there's a special bus that has a stop there, and it costs $10 to get there, and another $10 to get back into the Portland metro area. Though there are other interesting-looking hiking places to go further on that route, and it'd be the same $20 round trip.

I had this planned route where I was gonna go to the top of the falls and then continue on to this other waterfall. But I failed to take into account the elevation. GaiaGPS told me what the elevation was, and I just ignored it. I got only a fourth of the way through the planned route before I got too scared and went back. I mean, it was a steep climb, but I've done steeper, and this path was paved so it was a lot easier than it would've been if it had just been gravel or dirt. But past a certain point, they stopped having safety railings, and the potential fall kept getting more and more gnarly looking. Then I turned a corner, found the worst offender, saw the path was getting pretty crumbly looking, and went from "I can do this" to "NOPE" in 0.4 seconds, and immediately turned around and went back. The bridge was scary, as it's narrow and full of people, and made of stone or concrete, not sure which. And I had to go over it twice. I only managed it by reminding myself that the thing was built in 1901 or something like that, and it was still pretty good looking. No obvious problems or repairs, that sort of thing. Oh, and staring straight ahead and dissociating from the knowledge that I was inches from falling to my death.

Apart from pictures, I have a couple souvenirs I bought at the gift shop. One of those safety whistle things, where if you get lost you can call for help with it. It's on my keychain. And also I got a hoodie with the words "Multnomah Falls" on the front, for $20. Which is a pretty cheap price for a hoodie. My other hoodie, with an image of Medusa on it, was like $35 or $40 from Amazon, a year or two ago.

Among the photos are a few screenshots of the GaiaGPS app. Two of them show the track of where I went at Multnomah Falls, and the third has my stats for that hike. And then there's a couple selfies. The rest are mostly photos of the falls, the surrounding mountains, and a few other interesting bits. One of them is a photo of the inside of the bus. But here's the basic stats for that hike:

Ascent 203(-228) ft
Average speed 1.1 MPH
Average moving speed 1.4 MPH
Max speed 3.4 MPH
Distance 0.94 miles
Max elevation 291 feet
Min elevation 60 feet
Moving time: 40:02

Because I had chickened out so early, and because of how long I had spent at the bottom and at the gift shop before heading up there, I missed the next bus and had to wait two hours for the next one back. Which I spent mostly being bored and listening to music, because by then I was too tired to try even part of the trail again, and the only other trail I could find in the area was also steep and annoying, so I gave up on that one pretty quickly.

Have the photos (in basically the order they were taken):

( Photos under the cut. They are clickable thumbnails. )