Waiting on the legislation demanding that every underwear must have these "safety" features and then someone will insert a meter to those and start taxing us for every single puff.
Countries struggle to keep drugs, immigrants or straight up vape shops away. If we fail to keep our most basic laws enforced, how do you imagine stuff like this working. Cheap sarcasm like this has no place on HN.
.NET does have flags to include the necessary dependencies with the executable these days so you can just run the .exe and don't need to install .net on the host machine. Granted that does increase the size of the app (not to mention adding shitton of dll's if you don't build as single executable) but this at least is a solved problem.
They do now, after .net core and several other iterations. You'll also be shipping a huge executable compared to a clr linked .net app (which can be surprisingly small).
Those who come to this magnificent piece of Sci-Fi for the first time, a word of advice: Pay attention. There are things set in motion in season 1 that are resolved multiple seasons later and there's a lot of foreshadowing (pun very much intended) both subtle and overt.
His treatments were only partially successful. He reappeared in a cameo appearance early in season two ("The Coming of Shadows") and returned in season three for a two-part episode ("War Without End") which closed his character's story arc. At that time, Straczynski promised O'Hare to keep his condition secret "to my grave". O'Hare told him to instead "keep the secret to my grave", arguing that fans deserved to eventually learn the real reason for his departure, and that his experience could raise awareness and understanding for people with mental illness. He made no further appearances on Babylon 5 but continued to support the show and appeared at conventions and signing events until his retirement from public appearances in 2000.
On September 28, 2012, Straczynski posted that O'Hare had had a heart attack in New York City five days earlier and had remained in a coma until his death that day.[48] Eight months later, Straczynski revealed the circumstances of O'Hare's departure from Babylon 5 at a presentation about the series at the Phoenix Comicon.
Being a B5 fan, I found it heart-breaking to see Jeff Conaway on the reality show Celebrity Rehab a decade later. (the fact that there even existed a TV show called "Celebrity Rehab" ...)
Too many others of the main cast had died relatively young, of "natural causes" though. Richard Biggs, Mira Furlan and Stephen Furst stand out.
They are actors, young people paid to display exaggerated emotion while living in a world that values youth and appearance over everything. Then we ask them to constantly adopt new characters and shower them with on-again off-again false praise based on whether or not they are working on a given day. Frankly, i am impressed that any of them manage to walk away without profound mental health issues.
> Frankly, i am impressed that any of them manage to walk away without profound mental health issues.
My impression is that there's not much causation from being an actor to mental fragility. It's the other way around; the pool of people who make good actors is already prone to mental fragility before they become actors.
You should delete the spoilers. O'Hare's personal history is important, but the part of the comment about his chronological appearances in the show is not.
Eh, being mentally prepared for his sudden departure in Season 2 is not the worst thing. This isn't something he writers intended as a plot twist after all.
Talking about a show that aired 30 years ago isn't "spoilers". Anyone who wanted to not be spoiled has had plenty of time to go rectify that situation by now.
At some point there needs to be a statute of limitations on this stuff. In general I find spoiler fanatics kind of silly anyways: if I don't want something spoiled I don't read online discourse about that thing. It's my responsibility. But whatever.
But let's suppose I *did* care about spoilers. I shouldn't be expecting everyone to walk on eggshells when they're discussing Gunsmoke or Happy Days.
I just found the acting in the first season really, "soap opera" like. I'm not sure how to describe it better. It's still one of my all time favorite shows.
I wish they'd do a corrected bluray release with even a bit more effort... when they did the upscaling for HD release on HBO Max, they messed up a couple episodes.
Maybe AI upscale to 4k, with training data for newer ship models, actor photos, etc then reducing back to 1080p for a final BluRay set. Probably enough people that would do this as a passion project if the studio would let them.
> I just found the acting in the first season really, "soap opera" like. I'm not sure how to describe it better.
When I first started watching, season 1 with its gratuitous 90s CGI, the dramatic musical cues, and Michael O'Hares rather stiff, wooden demeanor reminded me a lot of those live action cut scenes that some early CD-ROM games had. I remember thinking at first, that this is probably the kind of thing the local basement theater troupe would pull off if they were suddenly told to make a TV show.
> It's still one of my all time favorite shows.
Fully agree. If you haven't seen it yet, I'd highly recommend as well.
It’s partly that JMS favoured stage actors. Partly that he grabbed a number of his favourite actors from “Murder She Wrote”. Honestly brilliant, taking a couple of murderers of the week and giving them lead roles in a show.
There's more to this line of thought. The pilot movie isn't space opera so much as it is a murder mystery in space, and it's not the only episode like that. The security chief, Garibaldi, is a hard-bitten alcoholic detective from film noir (and there are plenty of film-noir-like visual elements: fans, shadows, run-down industrial sectors unimaginable in Star Trek), and he plays a much larger role solving crimes than do his counterparts in other science fiction shows. The writing style, a long arc that drops clues up front to pay off in revelations down the line, also leans heavily on mystery writing.
I think weird acting styles can be part of the joy of watching older media. Seems like films mostly switched over to "modern" acting in the 70s (?) and TV had a lot more variety in style (and quality lol) way up into the "modern era".
I'm not gonna say "it's not worse it's just different", coz TBH... It's worse lol. If modern acting was a rare minority style of practice I would seek it out voraciously. But, for the variety I do think it's fun to watch old stuff too!
I was hesitant to make any concrete claims in my comment since I don't know much about it but I _think_ this is basically about The Method i.e. Method Acting.
From what I understand, although people still talk about it as if it's a specialised or niche thing, it's actually basically just how acting is done nowadays (at least for films and in the west).
Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.
> Season one it was a traditional adventure of the week style show that was popular at the time and before. because having a multi season story arc was unheard of and still more or less is today so the first season was traditional TV and only when mildly successful did it have the ability to spread its wings. and it did so so well that it forced other shows like DS9 to also have seasonal story arcs.
Unfortunately incorrect! JMS had the entire plot and "bible" written out start to finish before the show was produced, and the show was approved based on that bible. It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start. There were even built-in "escape hatches" planned for if actors had to drop out (which happened to Michael O'Hare, unfortunately)
The first season is definitely the most conventional (for the time) and I think that reflects in some of JMS's statements saying the show was still getting onto its feet through the first season. Having the serialized story was very unfamiliar territory for Hollywood television back then, they were learning on their feet.
If I recall correctly JMS wrote basically every episode after season 1, where as season 1 had a few guest writers. The guest written episodes did not do well, including episode 14 which is probably the worst episode in the entire series.
Agreed! In fact it is kindof annoying. Every set of orderable elements has a worst element, therefore every show has some bad episodes. You want to tell new viewers to just skip those episodes if they want, but it’s practically impossible with B5. If you skip TKO because part of it is cliche then you also miss the essential key to understanding Ivanova.
Tangent, but a cartoon I immensely enjoyed as a young kid popped up recently on my YouTube feed - Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. That day I learned JMS wrote the story and it too featured an overarching story that backed the otherwise “episode of the week” format.
> It had all the room it planned for and needed at the start.
Almost. Come S4 they got concerned the show would be canceled before finishing the story, so they dropped all the secondary plots from S4 and S5 and compressed the main plots from S4 and S5 into just S4. Then they got renewed and quickly wrote a new S4 finale using S5 budget, postponed the series finale a year to S5, and reworked all the dropped secondary plots into S5.
Personally I think this worked really well, made S4 much more fast-paced and S5 feels more like a "the world keeps turning" extended epilogue.
Can't say I agree - to me S4 felt quite rushed and seemed to be missing a lot more than just secondary plot developments. They go from "unstoppable enemy with the Vorlons being the only real hope" to "telepaths go brrr, also Vorlons are dicks now" in basically no time and then also jam in the battle for earth in the same season which felt really jarring. Then S5 feels like it's setting up the next big plot (the remaining shadow allies and specifically their hold over the centauri) only for that to end on a cliff hanger where nothing gets resolved even in the finale set in the far future.
It's really unfortunate that so many bad things happened to this show since it being still great overall despite them suggests it could have been one of a kind if things had gone better.
I heard the original story with O'Hare was for Babylon 5 to blow up after an alien attack and for the Babylon 4 to be sent forward from the past to replace it. We saw hints for that in two different premonitions in season 1. That's a pretty big departure from the story we actually got.
From what I've read, DS9 was heavily based on the Babylon 5 Bible which was pitched by JMS to Paramount years before. You might charitably say DS9 was the Guix to the Nix of Babylon 5: Same core ideas mapped onto different story universes. The earlier B5 Bible apparently even had a changeling security officer which evolved into the "changeling net" plot shown in the pilot episode.
Which is unfortunate as the writers can't seem to resist constantly making even bigger threats/drama with these longer story arcs messing up whole character arcs to just so they can shock the audience with big things happening. Limitations breed creativity and the limitation of having everything mostly go back to normal at the end of the episode is really underappreciated here.
If you watch the popular streaming services on a Linux PC then you'll be lucky to get more than 720p and some only seem to provide SD anyway - even for content from the HD era. This despite obviously having access to more detailed versions that they'll serve you for the same money if you watch on one of their preferred platforms.
IME this becomes quite jarring if you're watching on a modern high-res screen - even something like a quarter-sized browser window or PIP on a 4K monitor - with other much sharper content visible nearby. If you're watching either full-screen or in a smaller window but without other more detailed visuals around it then personally I find it less jarring and I can still become immersed if the material itself is good. It's still noticeable if you're used to watching HD or 4K content on other devices but I'd rather watch something good in SD than not watch it. The same goes for old shows that were only made in SD originally.
I am using a projector. Definitely not as sharp as a 4K and higher TV but it makes for a huge screen since I am covering almost all the wall. I find the result smooth and enjoyable regardless of the input resolution.
In other words, immersion seems to be more important than precision/resolution.
If you are watching in in a window / PIP then clearly you don't actually care that much about the looks since you are not even devoting your full attention to them.
While I agree, there's plenty of people who refuse to watch anything that's not sharp. I think there's room for both to exist, just clearly labeled as "original" and "AI Upscaled to 4K"
Just wait, they'll soon demand that their favorite soap operas be AI-restarted to generate slop streams indefinitely, and will throw their hard-sat-on-a-sofa UBI credits at that.
- Hey, have you watched that Game of Thrones S1723E1122?
- Nope, I'm not paying until they upscale it to 64K!
Rescanning the film is quite different from upscaling. Film is a lot of tiny silver grains embedded in a transparent plastic medium. Each tiny grain is photosensitive. Once you get through the whole process of exposure, developing, fixing, etc, etc then each grain of silver becomes a tiny dot of light on a projection screen. Not a rectangle or a square, but an irregular blob of colored light amongst a sea of irregular blobs of colored light. When we scan the film to make a digital video we sample those blobs and turn them into rectangular pixels, losing some of the information that was present in the film. Upscaling the video doesn’t recreate the lost information, but rescanning the film at a higher resolution can absolutely capture more of the information from the film.
Honestly if it were some with live models even at SD it wouldn't be so bad... I just find it's from a time that's kind of painful to watch... Much like Transformers: Beast Wars.
I enjoy the story, but the FX are IMO literally worse than pre-60s serial Sci-fi content. The blurry, low res CGI just detracts from the show today. I'm not asking for a reboot or change of the material marathon... Just the special effects and CGI to what it should have been at the time.
It's great how many of those little important things there are and foreshadowing ... and yet a great deal of surprises, sub plots, a characters go in some surprising directions.
I believe B5 was the first sci-fi show to do this kind of multi-season story arc. For all the poor acting and filler episodes, it is still hugely influential.
Kind of. What is an interesting topic of debate is that B5 aired at the same time with Deep Space 9 (pilots were released a month apart). DS9 switched out the "adventure of the week" formula from Star Trek for a long form storytelling and it is fought over to this day if one copied from another.
B5 is known for the fact JMS had a full five year arch planned from the start (due to O'Hare's unfortunate state of mind he was forced to pivot with Boxleitner as well as season 4-5 got gutted for other reasons) but I can't recall if DS9 had similar aspirations from the get go or if they eased into it as the story progressed. For comparison: was the Dominion War in the cards all the way from episode 1 or did it come into play later?
For some reason, I didn't watch DS9 at the time, though I've watched all the other Treks and am a big fan - must have been shown at the wrong time for me or something. However, DS9 only had the dominion arc in the last three seasons, so I'm definitely in the B5 was first camp.
What I find fascinating is that JMS wrote in all kinds of escape hatches for if major characters left and of course, there's the time travelling shenanigans that are shown in season 1, but not resolved to much later which show just how planned out it was. Of course his 5 season arc was tied up in 4 seasons when the studios threatened to cancel the 5th season, and then when they changed their mind, it led to a somewhat tacked on season 5 as the main story had been resolved.
It seems like a common factor of having a static space stations that lends itself well to story arcs. The other Treks were based on exploration, so they make sense to reset each episode as they travel to a new region.
> It seems like a common factor of having a static space stations that lends itself well to story arcs. The other Treks were based on exploration, so they make sense to reset each episode as they travel to a new region.
I think it's more a industry trends thing - Voyager also had longer story arcs as did many other sci-fi series released after B5.
The big appeal for me was that Tauri didn't ship an entire Chrome browser to make it work. It never even occurred to me to gauge the webview used in such detail.
> On Linux, Tauri not only ships its own webview, it's also an old and fundamentally broken webview
I'd love to hear some details on this. What is Tauri shipping now and what should it ship instead?
I agree, that's the biggest appeal. But on Linux, there isn't really a "system webview", so they use webkit2gtk. Most systems happen to have this installed as a dependency for something else, so it's a reasonable choice.
The thing is, that library is based on an ancient version of webkit, which is slow and lacks some modern web features. There are some open issues about it and the response is "yea, we know, we're doing the best with what we have", which is fairly reasonable.
A secodary complicating factor is that the main "universal binary" for Linux is AppImage, which by design requires you to ship all the dependencies. So you end up with the eorst of both worlds: you're still shipping an entire webview with every app, just like Electron, while unlike Electron, which is based on recent Chromium, the webview is based on outdated Webkit.
There have been some attempts to bundle CEF (basically Chromium) instead of Webkit and there is also a testing branch that uses Servo, but those only solve the second issue.
Ideally, the Linux ecosystem would standardise on a webview implementation and Tauri could link to that, just like they link to Webkit on macOS and Edgeium on Windows. It could be based on Blink (Chromium) or Gecko (Firefox) or even better, it could be just a standard interface and the use could pick their implementation. But since the Tauri folks would be the first and for a while only people using it, they'd probably have to do most of the work themselves.
Might help to have a companion app that uses the same embedded webview that is nearly indispensable at least for gui distros... something akin to MS Compiled Help (CHM) ... which I always thought was a pretty great idea.
I mean... it'd be a trip down the MS route, but maybe working with the Cosmic devs on this one... getting a baseline webview in place at the core, tooling support for help, email, etc. Getting Cosmic, Gnome and KDE all on board would be a massive boost and cover most users.
Risky business, creating TV shows out of incomplete book series and Cosmere has several. Granted, technically each of those series are standalone and some like Mistborn are timejumped in such a way that each trilogy can be seen as it's own entity so unlike GOT Sanderson and Apple has more wiggle room.
Also, Sanderson is pretty much the exact opposite of GRRM in terms of quantity of writing so odds are good even Stormlight is finished by the time Apple even gets to the first book.
Cosmere isn't an incomplete book series. It's a "universe" created by Sanderson where all of his novels live. Many of which are already completed series or stand-alone novels. It's like saying Stephen King hasn't finished his "series" since shit keeps happening in Derry Maine.
