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Babylon 5 contains one of the best sf tv shows ever. Unfortunately to fully manifest it would require editing it to 3 old-fashioned seasons or 5 modern ones, and a bit of reshooting or cgi work. The broadcast result doesn’t match its ambitious plans. And darn I hate saying so.

Just wait till my meds get low again! And in case I’ve never shared it:

Only partly. Let’s make some distinctions here….

Companies selling to actually existing audiences who’ve proved willing to spend money on their products and who play them happily, enthusing online and off, also demonstrated their creative bankruptcy and, inevitably, their impending literal bankruptcy, too. Free markets are useless if they...

The first few paragraphs of this Thomas Ligotti story, where the narrator characterizes his experience of the world up through his reaction to the shop across the street, are something I think of when forums fatigue me, and I’m delighted to share them (and the rest of the story, too).

Well, poop. I’ve been enjoying participating again, but family situations round 2 beckon, and also my vascular system is being stupid again. So I will be back posting…when I can. In the meantime, please be good. Failing that, please be interesting. :)

Surely there’s traffic that needs playing in near you? :) Soooo true. A lot of people never think much about why they’re writing. Is the goal to just feel good about what I write? Then I can let it all hang out. I was reading Dickens, Twain, Vance, and Lovecraft before I discovered D&D; I know...

Buckminster Fuller got there first, in 1954. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_map

Names just don’t signify that way to me. But I recognize that they do to others, across a whole spectrum of intensity. Thanks - that’s a help to me in interpreting others’ reactions.

Hmm. Okay, I’ll buy that. It’s like Jim is insightful.

The one time I saw an isometric map be actively helpful and useful was the first Death Dealer module. The PCs are in charge of a fighting retreat, and seeing the elevations of each part of this path down from an overrun fortress to the surrounding plain was a big deal. Opportunities for ambushes...

Are we supposed to find that shocking or something? Businesses change. Founders move on. Places retain their name but change ownership. Businesses shut down and someone else moves into the location. Properties get sold and the physical structure is torn down and replaced by something else. And...

Yes, he did, but they’d tried selecting lots of other lyrics and other phrases without satisfactory results. So the point is that it was the right phrase. Sometimes titles come very easily - Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, The Wall, and The Division Bell all did. Others don’t.

Finished: The Trial, by Franz Kafka. Reread, but in the Breon Mitchell, which I haven’t read before. It’s awesome, with a lot of nuances that do more justice to Kafka’s prose. This is really hard, because he made intensely nuanced use of German. This is the one to read, if you ever get the...

Gareth Hanrahan’s two fantasy trilogies are both excellent. I think they’re both complete on Audible but am too lazy to go check. They’ve got the great recent Moorcock omnibus run, starting with Elric of Melnibone from 2022. They’ve got all three volumes of Aliette de Bodard’s marvelous...

One more Pink Floyd tidbit. The album released as A Momentary Lapse of Reason went untitled until practically the last minute. The band and production crew tried out a lot of possibilities, but none seemed to do the job. Finally David Gilmour went to one of his long-time friends and offered him...

Poul Anderson was such a good writer. There’s a direct line between my reading him and majoring in history. From “Ivory, and Apes, and Peacocks”, one of the Time Patrol stories:

Also, I learned the reason some of the sax solos on The Wall and subsequent albums sound like they wandered in from a Supertramp album (not a complaint) is they did, borrowing Supertramp’s sax player between and then after their albums. I really enjoy books of the song by song format, with full...