Tag: Babylon 5

The Babylon Project Was Our Last, Best Hope for Peace. It Failed.

Not being a Christian, in my world the Holy Trinity looks something like this,

1. The Prisoner

2. Buffy: The Vampire Slayer

3. Bablyon 5, the Third Season

I spent about a month and a half watching the 3rd season of B5 over and over on DVD. It got so bad at one point that I was simply sitting and forcing my DVD player to loop those first two lines of the opening credits of Season 3 over and over. Today all I have to do is a start in with the first few words to guarantee a withering look from my wife.

Anyway, something those three series have in common is there aren’t any good videogames for them (yes, I played the B:TVS console games, and no I wasn’t impressed).

But some serious B5 fanboys have put together a freeware B5 game, Babylon 5: I’ve Found Her, that absolutely rocks. This is a space combat simulator that does an excellent job of capturing the look and feel of B5-style space combat (which, like the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, actually pretended to use real physics instead of going all “Top Gun” in space).

Sometimes, Metafilter Really Frightens Me

No, it’s not as scary as Slashdot, but sometimes Metafilter posters come close. For example, check out this recent thread started by someone who had apparently never heard the saying “Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom” before hearing it on a “Babylon 5” episode — and was subsequently astonished to hear a recent speech George W. Bush in which the president apparently repeated dialogue from a B5 episode.

I think that’s clueless with a capital C.

But Slashdot really took the cake with the hilarious responses to the thread, Writers Who Will Stand the Test of Time?. I like lousy genre fiction as much as the next geek, but come on — 50 years from now, nobody’s going to give a rats ass about Roger Zelazny or Robert Jordan (well, maybe Jordan will have an audience as he continues to promise to bring his Wheel of Time storyline to a close).

I guess this wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t know half a dozen very intelligent people who restrict their reading lists to a combination of comic books and genre novels. Sure I’m looking forward to the Lord of the Rings film, but you know Dante Alighieri wrote a fantastic trilogy that runs rings around Tolkein.