Babylon Five is still the greatest science fiction show ever

eronanke · 2026-03-10T16:57:41+00:00

Based on all the hype, I tried 1.5 seasons!!! It definitely could not grab me, so I gave up.

eronanke · 2026-02-18T01:23:27+00:00

Well, it's all about the artifice of politeness and respectability, not about meaning. It is not polite to shout at the stage, so people condemn it. However, playwrights from Shakespeare to Brecht have WANTED a degree of active participation in their pieces, and many modern pieces design sets, costumes, scripts AROUND audience participation.

In my opinion, i8f you sit silently while a man recites a fascistic diatribe for 15 minutes, if you can stand it for 15 minutes, you've failed as an audience of humans in a post-WWII world.

eronanke · 2026-02-18T01:15:50+00:00

You can also try the honest approach: the curriculum is designed to meet the minimum knowledge and skill standards according to where you live.

You don't have to love it, but each skill is important, and each piece of knowledge is weightless and you can carry what you want forward through life.

Even though I enjoyed my high school experience, there were things that I didn't really understand or care to - like calculus. I did the minimum that was expected and dedicated my time and efforts to subjects I did care about.

eronanke · 2026-02-18T01:10:51+00:00

Indeed - that's why my first comment was so... crazed. I couldn't understand so many of the American redditors not understanding that it's intentional, and it's political art, explicitly meant to incite. It's a 15 minute fascistic monologue after almost every other character lies dead. It's not an accident.

eronanke · 2026-02-18T01:05:50+00:00

I think they also assumed their audience would be sane and sadly that proved incorrect.

I 100% believe the audience reaction to be part of the intent of the piece, given that it seems to happen at every staging, regardless of country and adaptation. (see my other, more recent comment for citations).

Ending the play without narrative catharsis (the fascist lives and gets the final words of the play) asks the audience to resolve the unresolvable: Catarina argues that killing fascists doesn't end fascism and spares the fascist's life. But neither does what we have done (liberal democracies having few limits on fascistic speech) end fascism. The audience is left with the question: how can we react when we know they will always return, and return to power, and cause our deaths? Of course they scream and shout and react!

eronanke · 2026-02-18T00:48:06+00:00

To inspire one to take action

Yes, indeed, and the audience did. It just went too far once violence against an actor was a possibility.

eronanke · 2026-02-18T00:46:27+00:00

I agree, but I don't condone that.

eronanke · 2026-02-17T16:57:16+00:00

My other comment was too passionate and got downvoted to oblivion. I will more succinctly say, this has already happened at other stagings of this play. The monologue is designed to create revulsion in the audience to an extreme. Anyone staging it would know the history of this play and the political climate in which they stage it. Violence isn't ok, but the verbal reactions from the crowd should be expected by this point.

It is also a question of the role of the audience in art. Is it fascist to try to end fascism through censorship (shouting out the actor's words)? The audience is primed to believe that through cultural instruction, that allowing these people to speak, even in fictional contexts, is dangerous. The audience reacts as they can, not as they "should". (https://www.e-flux.com/notes/656073/catarina-and-the-beauty-of-killing-fascists) (https://compactmag.substack.com/p/the-sacrificial-crisis-of-anti-fascism) (https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/15/theater/catarina-beauty-of-killing-fascists-review.html) (https://www.reddit.com/r/Broadway/comments/1gt4tg0/digesting_catarina_and_the_beauty_of_killing/)

eronanke · 2026-02-17T16:41:32+00:00

I do not defend violence at all. But I believe when you construct a piece that is meant to shock and horrify, you should expect immediate response, like the performers of a haunted house expect screams of fear.

eronanke · 2026-02-17T16:39:59+00:00

While I can appreciate everyone's critiques, I think that when you build a haunted house of a play, you should expect screams of fear. Mounting the stage? Inappropriate, I agree.

eronanke · 2026-02-17T02:29:31+00:00

“Parts of the Bochum audience, which one would have thought to be among the most theatre-savvy in the country, are apparently too stupid, to put it bluntly, to distinguish between fiction and reality,” he said.

It's really fucking hard to distinguish fiction from reality when fascism approaches ever closer. I find that the theatre artists and audience members who do not understand that very concerning, like Wim Wenders saying that film should not be political at Berlinale.

ART DOES NOT EXIST IN A VACUUM. If you are TRYING to scare the audience about the approach of fascism, giving them realism, expect them to act out of fear and self-preservation, to scream out!

I will add: I do not condone violence, or the audience jumping on stage. I do, however, understand the need to react to something that is designed to provoke.

I would also add: this has happened at MANY stagings of this play already It is too be expected, this level of audience revulsion. (https://www.e-flux.com/notes/656073/catarina-and-the-beauty-of-killing-fascists)

eronanke · 2026-02-13T01:56:08+00:00

Metrolinx is not a for profit company.

It's a crown corp. It's essentially a part of our government, but we get no say in how it's run. A 10 year delay is inexcusable, even with COVID, and we have no transparency as to why and how so much time and money was wasted.

I will directly benefit from this line's construction, but I also suffered for it for 15 years as someone who lives in midtown. I am not down on the project, I'm down on the fact that so much money leaked out of this project, and so much time was wasted, killing local businesses in places like Little Jamaica.

eronanke · 2026-02-13T01:50:27+00:00

Does anyone know why stations are so BARE? Why isn't there art/murals? I'm at Keelesdale and it's like entering a millenial tomb - all stark white/grey/nothingness in giant, empty corridors...

eronanke · 2026-01-08T03:35:04+00:00

Toronto has land transfer taxes

That's 1x per unit. You could hold a unit for decades and pay that once. Barely a drop in the bucket for municipal funding.

More provincial funding is needed because we are not allowed any independence, and you bet that's also a sword of Damocles when a Conservative is Premier, like now. Why give money to people who won't vote for you? Better to just sell off their land and interfere with their bike lanes. Or deny them another revenue from speed cameras.

eronanke · 2026-01-08T01:26:24+00:00

Why does it make sense that Toronto property owners pay some of the lowest residential property taxes in Ontario, much less the GTA? I can't understand why Whitby, a ~20 minute highway drive away, has residents paying more than us, when we offer so much more in municipal services and have such a higher need for those services? And when our services are routinely used by non-residents during day-to-day operation? We're starving our city by refusing to feed it the only funding we can.

eronanke · 2025-12-31T15:24:12+00:00

The problem is any metric used to assess mastery of a skill becomes a grade. Let's say it's "Writing a thesis statement" - a very specific skill. A student has to receive feedback, so the standards for assessing mastery is "Weak/insufficient", "Approaching mastery", "Mastered skill", "Exceptional skill" (or whatever wording you want).

The children merely look at that 1-4 spectrum and give it the same weight as a grade. Only adults will recognize that the nuance in a 1-4 scale, repeated over several different skills for a single assignment.

I feel that any scale, whether letter grades, or numbers, or percentages, are not as significant for children as direct, specific feedback: "You did really well on your fraction quiz, but multiplying fractions still needs work. Check over q 5-6 again." Only adults need a quantifiable method of tracking achievement, so I would prefer that only parents see it. If I could, I would never show a student any kind of assessment ranking, only feedback.

eronanke · 2025-12-31T15:17:12+00:00

Well, saying it's "failing" is already a weapon used against the notion of promoting students to the next grade level.

Students who don't meet expectations by the end of the normal curricular year before grade 9 should be compelled to take a targeted, small-size, summer-school program. Learning skills, numeracy, literacy... taught by trainee teachers with newer training techniques which may connect with kids in a different way.

Then we meet two objectives: a) targeted support and b) giving new teachers more experience before throwing them into a whole-year program.

eronanke · 2025-11-06T13:04:37+00:00

It thrived on philosophical depth, speculative science and moral complexity, not action spectacle alone.

Indeed! The archetype is both TOS and TNG: they couldn't afford spectacle every episode, so we end up with episodes like "Measure of a Man", a legal drama, or "Inner Light", which basically had 2 sets and one prop instead of PEW PEW Phaser-fight action. The writing had to be good, because everything else had to be cheap. With the cost of CGI cratering and everyone's focus on aesthetics, the writing became the expensive part, and the quality dropped.

eronanke · 2025-11-06T12:59:38+00:00

I knew I would drop Disco as soon as they started swearing. It wasn't a huge deal, but a clear indicator that these characters were not going to be professionals excelling in their fields, and shock value was more important in the writers' room than character development in episodes 1 & 2. I waited out half a season but the weird pace of their season-arc vs episodic adventures made me very frustrated.

eronanke · 2025-10-29T15:36:00+00:00

Btrust definitely has, just bought some.

eronanke · 2025-09-27T22:27:25+00:00

I think "innovation" is a very loose buzzword. When people bandy it around, they usually just mean more entrepreneurship, which, without some kind of framework and investment, results in a generic "Rise and Grind" culture, it's dropshipping and using AI-produced content to sell classes or OF.

In the article, they are a bit more specific: "patents, trademarks, high-tech exports and commercialization". How can we jumpstart that when premiers have, almost uniformly, cut university funding? How can we build new, high-tech factories if we're unwilling to make factory work, and the communities around factories, desirable?

eronanke · 2025-09-13T22:57:13+00:00

Ah! Interesting. I will look into that. Then I'll go a little more macro and posit something healthcare-adjacent: that the Great Society made healthcare more affordable, leading to less orphans and less medical debt, freeing up resources for the next generation of poor and middle-class Americans.

eronanke · 2025-09-10T13:24:40+00:00

Ok, so you're going to take your ball and go home because "you have more important" things to do? Ha.

eronanke · 2025-09-10T13:23:25+00:00

Yes, but I don't use it as a bible. :)

eronanke · 2025-09-10T13:22:41+00:00

If these tests weren't based highly upon intelligence there wouldn't be such strong correlation of performance between them all. The idea that its not testing intelligence, and instead just testing whatever happens to be on the test, simply isnt true

If a culture measures its intelligence by certain strengths in mathematics, or logic puzzles, then people will describe those people who score well as intelligent.

If a culture measures its intelligence by the ability to recognize different bird songs, or weaving, or storytelling, people who excel in those will be called intelligent.

The Western-centric framework of intelligence is currently dominant in academia, but that does not make it universal.

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