The Blacklist Declassified

🔴 Scribblings and Scuttlebutt Sep 2017 – Dec 2018

 
Link: http://wp.me/pDKwi-5Gh
 
This is where I post my thoughts and reblog stuff from other sites I find interesting or topical, mostly topics from Twitter, Tumblr and blogs. This is probably the closest thing on this blog to a “blog.” I also post notes on things not working or behind. Increasingly, that’s been mostly what it is. Lightly edited. Reverse chronological. Comments are open.
– LizzieB90


Go To: ⭕ Earlier Volumes “Scribblings & Scuttlebutt”:

Jan-Aug 2017: http://wp.me/pDKwi-3S9
Jul-Dec 2016: http://wp.me/pDKwi-3di
Apr-Jun 2016: http://wp.me/pDKwi-2I3
Jan-Mar 2016: http://wp.me/pDKwi-2hK
Oct-Dec 2015: http://wp.me/pDKwi-1Hz
Jul-Sep 2015: http://wp.me/pDKwi-1gs
Mar-Jun 2015: http://wp.me/pDKwi-Vd

 
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6/21/2018

Just a question …

🐣 Here’s a question. Red told Liz her father was a “career criminal” (in the pilot). How could the long-dead Raymond Reddington in the suitcase have been this person? Asking for a friend. #TheBlacklist @NBCBlacklist @BlacklistRoom
⇈ ⇊
🐣⚡️ “Who Is Raymond Reddington?”
“Here’s a question … ” ~ Your Answers So Far … https://twitter.com/i/moments/1009879060200255490

If you have thoughts, you can add to the Moment by tagging me on Twitter at @BlacklistDCd and I’ll add them. ♡ ི•̮͡• ᤢ ྀ ♡

 
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6/1/2018

Schedule

Now that the “Unanswered Questions” for Season 5 is done, I will be scouring this site during the break doing updates, checking all the links, etc. This will be noticeable primarily in pages like “Black Sites” and the “Search (with Lists)” page.

But first, I have to finish the Storybook for Season 5, in particular, the last three episodes. The Storybook as also the source of the Tweetstorms I do for each episode which are the basis for the Twitter Moments files. I like Twitter Moments because the photos are kept at higher resolution than they are kept in this blog. (Thank you, Twitter!)

I’ll let you know when I’ll be doing the Tweetstorm by announcing here and on Twitter a few days ahead. I also plan to do a countdown before the new season starts.

I’ll have make some changes for Season 6. They are planning to air all 22 episodes with no breaks. I have relied on the breaks heavily to catch up on the Storybook etc. I am thinking of just embedding maybe 50 photos in the individual scripts. I just can’t do the 200 or so photos I currently am doing and keep all the other stuff updated. Not enough time and too much stress.

I’ll continue checking for new articles and news on a semi-weekly and post those and be on Twitter indulging my sweet-tooth for new Spadee pics and gifs. Num. Follow me on Twitter @BlacklistDCd.

Happy Summer! ♡♤♡

 
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5/24/2018

Improvements

Over the summer, I’ll be making some changes, starting with some ways to improve response times. For starters, you should see the home page (“Clues”) should load faster. I offloaded the Gallery photos to a separate file. The volume of them was slogging it down.

There may also be some glitches. (Sorry)

Like my Mom, I always get migraines when the pressure is off(!) I’ve been fighting this one ever since I got the Unanswered Questions done yesterday morning. Arrrrgh!

 
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5/14/2018

We have a Sixth Season‼️

Well, so The Blacklist “lives to die another day.” After Saturday’s Tweetstorm, I basically slept all day Sunday. I will get a few photos ready to post Wednesday, just a few, but for the final stretch, I’ll be focusing on the last script and the Unanswered Questions list which I hope will be done by May 23 (Wednesday) at the latest, with most other work pushed off until June.

Then I have lots of work for the summer that I’ll keep you apprised of, once I have something of a schedule. The Blacklist may be off-air until January but Blacklistdom – and Spader-love – live on.

 
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5/14/2018

Email to Troy Heinritz of TheBlacklistExposed: Podcast “Play Button”

I did finally figure out how to put a play button for your podcasts in each script using the YouTube link (check out the script for Devlin, under the header photo). You suggested this at one point (though I hadn’t realized you were also on YouTube at the time).

I just wanted to double-check. Your advertisers would not see your ads this way, of course.

Also, if you happen to keep a list of all the YouTube links, that would save me hours.

I am actually glad Season 6 show doesn’t air until January. I never seem to have time to do all I want. In particular, I really want to do individual scripts for Season 1. I didn’t watch the first year in real time and the scripts I have posted are very poorly edited, as I’m sure you’ve realized if you’ve ever turned to them.

We organized a total Tweetstorm on Saturday. Wow! I tried to roust the international viewership especially. 45% of the hits on my blog are non-US. The Blacklist is so much more than US L+SD. Most importantly, it’s grand television. I just hope and pray that in the end Jon Bokenkamp gets to achieve his grand vision – and that it’s awesome.

 
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// 5/1/2018

Schedule

My daughter is graduating from college in May, so we have a busy schedule. I realized I’m going to be running behind. I promise I will always have the scripts and Easy-Search scripts ready ASAP, but for the Storybook, it will be tough. Then it occurred to me if I start at the end and work backwards, I’ll at least have the *best* pics to post on Wednesdays, then I will finish the Storybook and Twitter Moments off over the break. I’ll work out a schedule for posting over the summer and keep you informed.

I’m 95% sure there will be a Season 6. They have revealed only two [oops, sorry ➔ four] of the top 10 Blacklisters.

 
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4/20/2018

Production and Photo Info and Stats

For each episode, I spend about 20 hours working on the script (including the full script, Easy-Search version, Storybook version and Brief (the blurb at beginning of each episode), plus indexing and lookups (navigation). I use a WordPress Theme called “Redoable Lite” and program in HTML. The features in the right hand column are “Widgets” provided by WordPress.

In addition, I spend about 40 hours editing and arranging photos for the Storybook and Twitter slideshow (“Moments”). I do 800 to 1000 screenshots for each episode. I used the downloaded version of the episode I buy from Amazon Prime. Of these, I select and edit about 400. The apps I use are native iOS/iPad Photos for light and color adjustments (almost 100%); Snapseed (almost 100%) for spot highlighting, color enhancement, sharpening and effects; Pixelmator, mostly for editing out credits (1-2%); Photowall HD (<1%) for collages and other combining; and Photoshop Fix for smoothing, highlighting, fixing/adding color, sharpening and effects (95%✛). Rarely, I use Afterlight to tone adjustments. (For photos up to spring of 2016, I used Big Blue Clip instead of Photoshop Fix).

I end up with about 400 decent photos. Of these, about 250 become part the slideshow I do on Twitter. These become part of the Twitter ‘Tweetstorm’ I do, prior to airing the next episode (assuming I get it done in time). Subsequent, these become a Twitter “Moment.” About 100 of these are used to illustrate the Storybook version of the episode. About 5-8 individual photos are added to the Galleries in the right hand column for each episode.

Of course, I am not paid for this work. I pay $300 a year for a “Business License” to WordPress. The link to The Blacklist Exposed and to the book are not ads but we’re done as favors to people who asked.

 
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4/1/2018

Happy Easter/Passover

All caught up on the Storybook and Songs! I almost have the photos ready for episodes 5:14 through 5:16, which I’ll be tweeting out on April 2-4, starting around 1:00pm Central/Chicago Time. I love working on these photos. It’s a challenge since virtually all are under-exposed in the screenshots. I run each pic through at least three apps and sometimes four or five trying to get them just right. I like having the extra time during breaks and may fall behind again trying to keep up week to week …

As usual, I’ll be working on a list of Unanswered Questions if the show gets a sixth season and will be setting up a post where you can add suggestions. Since the folks at Blacklist Exposed are in touch with the show runners, I’m going to see if they can make sure the list gets to them. Daniel Knauf and Dave Metzger who I’ve relied on in the past seem no longer to be working on the show.

Happy Blacklisting!

 
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3/22/2018

Musing …

I’ve tried to avoid projecting where the plot is going, but JB’s and JE’s saying there will be a huge cliffhanger at the end of S5 is keeping me up at night. It most likely has to do with the skeleton. The obvious thing would be that it’s Katarina, but wouldn’t that be too obvious? My wild guess is that it’s Raymond Reddington; Liz is the daughter of KR and RR but Red killed them both in retaliation for one or both of them killing his family on “that night” that Diane Fowler referred to, which may be the same as the tale of “Bloody Christmas” Red told to Madeline Pratt. Maybe Ian Garvey was one of the men involved in the investigation of that multiple homicide or maybe one of the guys in the house the night of the fire. Red has never himself said to Liz or anyone else that she is his daughter. Cooper got RR’s blood for DNA analysis from an old shirt from evidence, not from our Red.

Then what would explain Red’s attachment to Liz? I don’t know, but maybe a hint is his monologue at the end of the “Tom Keen” episode, when he talks about becoming a benefactor, as Liz has become for the Harbormaster’s daughter. Plus, he may have transferred feelings he had for his own daughter to her. Kind of “weak tea,” I know, but it could set up a whole new ballgame for a Season 6 ~ with Liz turning on Red to avenge her parent(s) murder.

Or maybe the skeleton is just Katarina’s, per the “K” on the tree and because Mr Kaplan said “Sorry, Katarina” when she dug up the suitcase.
 
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3/16/2018
Awesome

#TheBlacklist is taking three weeks off, just when I need it! My daughter is coming home from college for a week. She graduates from St Olaf in May. My youngest son is doing better on his new meds. He’s eating again and is smiling now and then. His supervisor at work was his supervisor during one of his internships at Mayo and has been very understanding. A great bonus about Mayo Clinic is they really believe in “health care.” They recently built a whole new psych building named after the last nun to run St Marys, Sister Generose.

There’s a theory called the “Geek Syndrome” that credits the uptick in autism spectrum disorders with IT types marrying one another. An article in WIRED a few years ago even said that NE Rochester has a high level of autism due to the IBM facility there (where I worked for a year as a consultant before joining Mayo).

I hope to catch up on photo editing during this break and should be ready to post the photos for episodes 14, 15 and 16 on April 2, 3 and 4. Then there will be six episodes left for the season.
 
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3/3/2018

Personal Update

We’ve seen this coming for some time. My youngest son has been hospitalized with mental illness. Preliminary diagnosis is general psychosis. I myself am bipolar II, the non-psychotic type, which means I have been able to function well, but it meant I was diagnosed late. Watching my children grow has been a waiting game. My son was a straight A student who was named the outstanding IT student when he graduated a year ago. He served two internships at Mayo Clinic before being hired there full-time after graduation. He had starring roles in the local reperatory theatre. About six months ago, he joined a non-denominational fundamentalist church and has become “hyper-religious.” I’ve been encouraging him to reconnect with a psychiatrist he saw in high school for OCD but he felt God was the answer he needed, not “science.” Then a couple weeks ago, he started fasting. He started going outside (in Minnesota in the winter!) to pray because Jesus had. I told him Jesus lived in a warm Mediterranean climate and besides Jesus suffered for us; we didn’t have to do everything he had. He stopped even confiding in people in his church, preferring to only rely on reading the Bible. But he told me he had an appointment for his annual physical at Mayo. They became concerned, clearly, and admitted him directly. He is on halperidol. That was Friday. They say he could be for a week. So, that’s where we’re at.

This should not affect my ability to produce the weekly Blacklist scripts, Easy-Scripts etc. But it will affect the speed of photo editing, the Twitter “slideshows,” Storybook etc. I’m just going to work on those as I can and try to take things as they come. Things could be much worse. My Mom and the second of our two dogs have died in the last year – But my oldest son is home from Iraq. My youngest son is alive; he’s not on opioids. My youngest (my daughter) is on track to graduate from St Olaf in May. So … count your blessings. Life is an adventure.

 
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2/5/2018

The Blacklist Exposed, a production of Golden Spiral Media, has asked to be a partner site to this site. They produce an hour-long weekly podcast about each episode. You will find a link to the site in the right hand column. I’ve found it easiest to follow that link to start a podcast then open this site under a new tab or window. There are likely other ways to do this but I confess I’m actually about as technologically sophisticated as Red Reddington (not very). They regularly feature interviews with the producers and stars. Hey, Troy!
 
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1/26/2018

Twitter Moments linked

I have linked together the Twitter Moments for Season 5 so the last Tweet at the end of Part A of a given episode is a link to Part B, etc. This is because there is a limit of 100 Tweets per Moment.

 
🔆 This❗️⋙ Partnership with “The Blacklist Exposed”

The Blacklist Exposed has asked me be a partner site and post a player for their podcasts on my site in exchange for their posting a link to my site. So I’ve set this up on a preliminary basis in the right sidebar. Clicking on the link will take you to their website where the podcasts for all the episodes are listed. Wow!

As it’s set up now, if I try to back-button back to this site, it turns off the podcast, but if I go to my site under a separate tab, the podcast keeps playing.

The podcast for Episode 💯 (5:11 Abraham Stern) has an interview with Jon Bokenkamp. Cool!

 
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1/13/2018

Gallery Photos in Sidebar

Hopefully you haven’t noticed(!) but the Gallery photos in the sidebar no longer refresh with a different sort order for every new page selected or page refresh. Actually, first the photos all totally disappeared which sent me into a panic. With help from the “Happiness Engineers” (srsly, that’s what they’re called!) at WordPress, I was able to get the list of photo ids from their backup and repost them, but the order is fixed. They recommended I no longer update them using the “Widget” (srsly, that’s what it’s called!) but do it manually with a text block. I don’t consider this a satisfactory solution, but I don’t have time to deal with it until the Olympics break. I can think of ways to occasionally randomize the order manually using Excel but it does seem they should get their Widget to work properly (without my manually reloading all the photos using the Widget). They said I have a lot of photos. So? It doesn’t excuse that their software is buggy. So, I will address this during the break.

Twitter Moments

I really like the idea of Twitter “Moments” – sets of Tweets that I have used to collect the episode photos I send out on Wednesday afternoons. Unfortunately, they work better on Chrome than Google, which gives an “inaccessible” message especially for the bitly link but also sometimes for the unshortened link. You can access the Moments photos directly by going to my Twitter Home Page and selecting “Moments.” The Counter inexplicably says I have zero Moments, but if you select “Moments”, they are all there (bug!)

I like Moments because Twitter doesn’t lose photos so I view it as my backup and because Twitter stores the photos in high resolution (not the case with the same photos on WordPress. But the glitches in Moments keep it from being widely accessed by you guys.

Personally, when I want to view my photos from an episode, my favorite way remains the “Episode in Tweets” at the end of each script. The links come up very fast and the photos come up in full screen (or full window) mode.

 
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12/29/2017

Two hospitalizations kept me from finishing Ian Garvey in time to do the countdown before the Winter Premiere. I am scrambling to finish Ian Garvey by Wednesday.

However, the slide sets for episodes 5:2 through 5:7 are available as Twitter “Moments,” listed here. So that is an alternative way to view the exact same set of photos with captions. Twitter limits the number of Tweets in a collection to 100 which is why there are multiple collections per episode. Just use your “Back” button to move to the next set.

(I figured out a better way to link the sets together just using Twitter but haven’t had time to set it up yet.)

I didn’t finish episode 5:1 Smokey Putnam yet (I had to take time off to redecorate our family room), but hope to get back to it during the Olympics break (if there is one) or during the spring hiatus.

The slidesets in Twitter Moments are a superset of those in the Storybook. The Twitter version of the photos are higher resolution than in the Storybook. The higher res reveals a lot of messiness from before I discovered Photoshop Fix (prior to midway through S4). Sorry.

I do enjoy posting the photos. It’s a lot of work – “work” as in “labor of love.” I miss the Twitter feedback from all my Blacklist friends, especially.

 
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11/26/2017

I’ll be working on the Storybook for Ian Garvey for the next week or so. Not only was this my favorite episode of the series to date (in fact, of any series), it is polled so far at 9.5 on IMDb, making it the highest rated episode of the series. See News About The Blacklist.

So I am including more of the script in the Storybook for this episode, lyrics of both songs and a music button for Disturbed’s haunting rendition of The Sound of Silence.

5:8 Ian Garvey is the 97th episode of the series. The cast and crew have already celebrated the landmark 100th episode (making it available for syndication – and also because IT’S FREAKING 💯 EPISODES‼️) The producers have promised a great Episode 100, which will be S5:11 and will air on Wednesday 1/17/2018 in the US.

From TVLine: TVLine Items: Nathan Lane on Blacklist, Emmy Rossum Is Angelyne and More http://bit.ly/2hu9a7b
// 11/13/2017

A very special guest is stopping by The Blacklist‘s 100th episode.

Nathan Lane (The People v O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story) will appear in the milestone installment as criminal Abraham Stern, who manipulates the desperate into committing illegal and immoral acts so that he can claim his birthright fortune.

 
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11/21/2017

Wow. What a fall finale – I’m still recovering and I’m sure I’m not alone. Honestly, I will miss Tom. It’s been awesome seeing these younger actors developing and their characters’ backstories being filled in. I think this series is getting better and better. I was put off by the cartoon-like bad guys in Season 1. Now, they (many of them anyway) are more nuanced and relatable.

5:8 Ian Garvey was the best episode I have ever seen – of any (recent) series, ever. I know I’m just one person, but I’m comparing it to Downton, Game of Thrones, House of Cards, Mad Men, Homeland etc.

If you notice the writing and producer credits, they improving there too. Jonathan Shapiro and Lukas Reiter worked with Spader on The Practice and Boston Legal. I notice Daniel Knauf is no longer co-exec producer. I don’t follow such things all that closely, but I hope if they jettisoned him it was related to his plagiarizing a segment from The Wonder Years for his Marvin Gerard script. Yes, he gave us “Cape May,” but I’m still waiting to see where all that goes. The producers are promising a Cape May-like episode to start off the series again in January. That being the case, I hope it’s Red’s dream sequence, not Liz, which I don’t think would carry viewer interest.

Did I say I LOVE this show, gut-wrenching though it often is. I just pray to the showrunner gods ➔ don’t make Liz evil or have her decide Red is “the devil.” That would be so – uh, “Season 2.”

Side note: This is weird but Red says Dembe wants to save his soul. Yet, Dembe prayers to Allah. (Hisham Tawfiq is actually Muslim.) Wouldn’t that be a weird ending to this as a redemption story? Nah – Ain’t happening. The advertisers would never allow it.
 
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11/4/2017

I changed how I do the “blurbs” at the beginning of each episode. I changed them to “briefs” trying to reflect the morning briefs given at a police station – focusing on where things are at with the main storyline (the serial vs procedural plot line). I don’t like spoilers or even to know what the next procedural (episodic) story is about, but I thought it would be most useful for an archival site like this, to remind people of where things were at in the overall story arc at the beginning of each episode.

 
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10/15/2017

iOS 11 has been a disaster for me. It has clobbered my photos twice – erased them from my iPad and then reloaded them – not in the order I have put them in in my folders, but in the order in which I took the screenshots. They have fixed a problem that set all the number of folders in the files to “0” – which meant no other app could access them (like Twitter). I had to restore from a two week old backup to an old iPad to get my episode files back in the right order; but that iPad is useless now for anything else.

Then there’s Pages the (SUPPORTED) word processor I use. It will take a file & somehow corrupt it, making it impossible to access. In fact, it says it “doesn’t exist.” It did this to a 500 page file of all the political tweets I’ve sent since the first of the year. Thankfully, I had emailed a copy of it to myself for some totally unrelated reason a few days before, so I only lost a few days. I would have been beside myself if I had lost that.

Then it did it to my file for tweeting out episode photos for last week – eraseing about six hours of work. It’s a miracle I had that ready in time.

So I bitch to @AppleSupport, the only way I know to reach actual developers vs some contractor in Indonesia.

These kinds of errors in a widely released operating system are inexcusable. And Apple never EVER admits they have a problem. They do fix them – eventually. But there’s no guarantee the fixes will work retroactively. Power of (near) monopoly. Unlike most people, I don’t also own a Mac (gone to college wth one kid or another) which can provide backup. And yet they will pester and pester you to upgrade and not allow you to go back to a prior version.

End of rant.

 
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10/9/2017

About “What Is The Cabal?”

It continues to surprise me how popular “What Is The Cabal?” is, seeing as it was written about three years ago. I keep thinking I should update it. But I’m not sure I’d change much, especially not how it ends with a discussion about climate change and whether we are up to confronting it.

I guess the one thing I’d clarify is that I think the so-called “deep state” is not a malevolent thing. It is a conservative force in government, experts and civil servants who basically keep the ship of state steady despite whatever administration is in power.

I have worked with these people as a member of various healthcare/government standards groups and healthcare IT committees. I’ve collaborated at times, fought them at times.

I have more problems with some of the external consulting groups brought in by the administrations. There is too much cronyism there for sure, vested interests, money influence and at times, just plain stupidity.

I see the career civil servants more as a stabilizing force, mostly good, hard-working people devoted to serving the public. They could often earn more in the private sector.

 
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10/9/2017

Music

I think I’m just going to update the music collections during the hiatuses (hiati?). It’s weirdly stressful to do because it’s complicated and best done it batches. YouTube (or WordPress) places limits I don’t understand on the number of videos I can collect in a post and I can’t pre-determine how many episodes will be in a post because I don’t know how many songs will be in an episode. Not knowing this screws up the titles and indexing and it’s well – aaaargh!

The songs will still be in the full scripts, though I have noticed that after the tweet links are added, the videos at the end of the script no longer embed though the song buttons in the text still work. Since the tweet links don’t get added until a week after the episode shows (when most of the hits to the scripts occur) I assume this is not too big of a problem since the videos will eventually show up in the song files.

The first two episodes contained more than ten songs! I just include the ones with lyrics that appear in the script. I love the music. It’s one of the really cool things about the show. Dave Porter, the music director, does a really great job.

 
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10/8/2017
There’s this: [ ‼️ Possible Spoiler ‼️ ]

BuildSeriesNYC: James Spader Stops By To Discuss “The Blacklist”http://aol.it/2ys1Lf3 39mins

 
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10/4/2017

I’m sorry I didn’t get the Storybook and Twitter photos of the episode done on time for episode 5:1. We’re remodeling our family room and I had to pitch in.

P.S. I did get about 2/3 of 5:1 done and will complete during the hiatus and include it in the Countdown at the end of December.

 
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9/28/2017

Both Amazon Prime and Springfield came through, so we’re in business!

 
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9/25/2017

Pre-Season 5 Update

What a summer! I am so glad it’s over. My Mom died (she’d been ill for a while). Then the second of our two dogs died. I miss them both so much. And my Mom. My oldest son is in Iraq serving as a helicopter paramedic and my daughter is in Shanghai studying. I’m aching with concern and loss.

I spent July struggling with a software issue on my favorite photo editing app, Photoshop Fix. And politics! Like many others, I guess, I have “outrage fatigue.” I am glad to put politics on the back burner, but it did mean I got a late start in getting this blog prepared for Season 5. I’m in the final stretch now, still unsure if I will make it. Expect a few glitches …

I’m hoping Springfield will continue providing the screen caps that I reverse engineer the scripts from. ForeverDreaming stopped doing them after The Apothecary, so there went my backup. Without the screen caps, doing the scripts manually is a labor-intensive and error-prone undertaking.

Further, I am not sure Amazon Prime will have the series this year. I get the screenshots from the downloaded episodes. They don’t have anything up for Season 5, not even promos. Same with Vudu, the only other source I know work for screenshots. So I guess I won’t know until Wednesday night.

Fingers crossed …

 
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