I read it ages ago when it first came out in paperback (which means, sadly,without the music).

I really enjoyed it, but it was very slow reading.

I think that entire documentary could be summarized as “Drugs. Lots of drugs. Lots of drugs in lots of varieties.”

Babylon 5 is a weird show for me. When it was first running, I religiously watched it. If I couldn’t watch it live, I got upset and went around my circle of friends to see who’d recorded it so I could watch it as quickly as possible. Up to Season 4 I was gripped. (Season 5 was “meh” because of production shenanigans.)

Years later I watched them on DVD and … the magic was gone. Watching one episode after another, without separating them by a week, just took the shine off of it. I didn’t even finish watching the episodes on DVD; I think I made it to mid season 3 (and the amount I watched slid down and down up to that) before not bothering to continue. I eventually gave them all to a friend of mine and never watched the show again.

I can’t think of a single show I’ve ever watched that had that weird impact on me: first loved, second bored. Usually shows I loved I keep loving, shows I was bored by remained boring, and very occasionally a show I thought was boring the first time got more interesting on second viewing. But B5? It’s the only one that goes this way.

A Windows IRC client … to access Lemmy?

That would be a high technical bar to entry!

Having lived through the “Eternal September” beginnings, I’m sorry but you’ve got very strongly rose-tinted glasses on.

(Ref)USENET was a cesspool on the order of any modern *chan board or their ilk both before and after the Eternal September. Having a high technical bar to entry just meant most participants were obsessive lunatics with poor socialization (instead of merely half).

It was quoted just a bit above you, dude:

7.0: The website and the agreement will be governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the Republic of Finland Suomen.

I get that all the time. It amused me greatly until the day I found out I can turn off the Fantasy Internet Points entirely. Now I have no idea if my votes are up or down or sideways.

And I don’t care.

Now that one does look interesting. I’ll have to wait for it to show up on my usual sites though: it’s not the kind of movie that will wind up in theatres here.

Except that the age of the mid-budget, self-contained movie is dead. Indies are getting squeezed by this Big Tent nonsense BADLY.

Got a link?

Easy for me to say “no”, though, which is what I did ages ago. Maybe someday the public will get as bored as I got with seeing the same thing over and over again and will kill this franchise nonsense.

I’m tired of all these big tent “franchises” entirely.

Hey, filmmakers, authors, television producers, etc.: MAKE SOMETHING NEW FFS!

I think you’re missing a few key points:

1. It’s a COMEDIC series, not a serious drama. It’s Adams taking potshots at things that struck him as funny or upset him. Like the whole “shoe event horizon” thing was an eloquent rant about how he couldn’t find shoes that fit one day. (No, really!) The fact that it blew up into this massive thing was an accident, not a design, and he didn’t set out to write a Serious SF Series™.

2. The “Britishness” of the relationships is part of that comedy. He’s making fun of Brits’ “reserve”.

3. The Fenchurch thing never really fit into the vibe, and given the series’ entire schtick of random things occurring out of nowhere and then vanishing into nowhere (like the guy whose every incarnation was killed by Arthur Dent), it’s on-point for her to just vanish into nothingness. (And as for his reaction, consult point 2.)

TL;DR Summary

This is a comedic series best viewed as a collection of incoherent, inconsistent vignettes with an underlying theme (kind of like the more serious The Martian Chronicles of Ray Bradbury), not as a serious space drama spread out over books.

OK, let me unpack a few things here.

1. It is emphatically not racist to criticize a government’s actions.
2. It is emphatically racist, however, to assume every (perceived) citizen of a government’s nation is uncritically accepting of their government.

And here’s where it gets messy.

The China Watchers™ crowd always says they “hate the government, not the citizens”. (The fact that this echoes extremist Christian bigotry with “hate the sin, not the sinner” whenever they go on rampages against every social group they disapprove of is a feature, not a bug. They know their audience well.)

Yet…

Ask anybody with a (perceived) Chinese name how often they have been called upon by China Watchers™ to personally account for the Chinese government’s actions. You will likely get a shock by how often these people who “hate the government, not the citizens” take perceived citizens to task for their government’s actions (while at the same time, in a stunning display of utter hypocrisy, refuse to take responsibility for their own governments’ actions despite (technically) having a say in who that government is (which Chinese citizens don’t have).

Chinese citizens. People of other nationalities resident in China. People with (perceived) Chinese names or looks. These all get hounded by the “hate the government, not the citizens” crowd with a zeal that puts the “not the citizens” part of things in the firm category of “blatant lie”.

And that is just flat-out racism.

So while yes, technically, people criticizing the Chinese government aren’t being racist (and holy fucking SHIT are there good reasons to criticize them!), the reality is that most of the people doing so are hiding behind that technicality and are being racist as all fuck, so often, in fact, that it’s my default assumption unless I see evidence to the contrary.

You don’t like that default? Well, here’s a bit of sage advice I got from an activist friend of mine in the late '80s: “Rein in your crazies or you’ll be mistaken for them.”

I’m at work. I can’t watch video at the moment.

But I can make some guesses.

“Random stranger with a camera crew walks up to a citizen of an authoritarian state and asks ‘do you know what happened today?’.”

Fuck yeah I’m going to turn away and walk off. Hell I’d be tempted to do it in Canada! (Not a fan of most Canadian media.)

… how could the Chinese government enforce this vast national amnesia of a major, recent event in their country’s history, one in which the government sent troops to slaughter perhaps 2,600 peaceful protesters?

In the very first paragraph Vox gets it wrong.

Not a surprise.

Here’s a little hint: look up Columbia University’s Columbia Journalism Review and see if you can tell why I’m laughing at Vox right now.

If you can’t work out the difference between “lived in China for 23 years” and “is Chinese” then there’s no help for you.

Of course you couldn’t read a statement that baldly said the PRC’s government wasn’t a good one, so there’s that for you as well.

Oh, this is going to be juicy!

Tell me what you think happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989. I’ll wait with the reams and reams and reams of corrections on standby. (Hint: There’s a very good chance that literally everything you “know” about Tiananmen Square is wrong. Just as a taste of what’s to come if you take the bait: “tank man” wasn’t run over by a tank. No matter what you think you know.)

Well given that the idiot thinks I’m a) Chinese and b) in favour of the Chinese government, you’re absolutely right: nothing got through.

And if the CCP is good, why does it conduct genocide in Uyghurstan?

Dude. I literally said the fucking opposite. Read what’s in front of you, not what the voices in your head are telling you is there. I’ll leave finding this as an exercise for the student: see if you can find where I said the exact fucking opposite of this. Then come back and talk like an adult instead of a tantrum-throwing toddler.

I’ve lived through protests at scales China hasn’t seen since Tiananmen, which your government still covers up.

The Canadian government covers up Tiananmen? That’s news to me. I’m going to need some citations here.

… instead of assuming anyone who disagrees with you is immediately wrong.

Given that you couldn’t read very plain statements that are directly the opposite of what you said, and that you made idiotic assumptions on top of that, I’m going to go with “yeah, dumb fuck is wrong” until you show some basic reading ability and stop stupid assumptions.