short takes

[cellio]

I thought the model was: air fills with moisture (humidity), it rains, humidity goes down. We seem to be skipping this last step. Someone isn't following the protocol! :-)

Remember when syndicated comic strips had to be drawn 4-6 weeks ahead because of distribution issues and stuff? This week Foxtrot did the blackout. Times have changed.

Dani and I have been watching two sets of DVDs, West Wing and B5. We've been alternating, pairwise. It's a little odd sometimes to flip back and forth between the two -- Bartlet's political intrigues interspersed with Londo's and Sheridan's. We're averaging about one viewing session a week, occasionally two, so this isn't high-speed or anything. By the way, Amazon says West Wing (first season) is coming out for region 1 later this year. I thought that wasn't supposed to happen for several more years.

The crystalized ginger that the Pepperers' Guild (SCA merchant) carries is much tastier than the stuff you can get in the Chinese section of the regular grocery store. This Pennsic I bought enough that they gave me an unopened package of what they order, rather than the weighed-to-order bags like most of the stuff I got. The only identifying information on the package is "Frontier Co-Op". I don't know who they are or where they are, but they do good ginger.

I wish LJ would give me a way of imposing my style settings on the individual-entry pages of journals I read, so I wouldn't be hosed by small fonts when trying to read through an lj-cut or read comments on others' entries. Several of my friends have switched to a style that uses, by default, a font I can't read without twiddling my browser. (The ones I've mentioned it to so far have been very kind about fixing it.) But if I twiddle my browser to make journals using that style readable, everything else I read is too big. (There is life beyond LJ, shocking as that may sound. :-) )

Given that there will always be badly-designed web pages out there, I suppose what I really want is a single-keystroke command in my browser that will bump the font up to the next size for just the page I'm looking at.

Along with the rest of the universe, I've been getting lots of bounce messages for spam I never sent (thank you SoBig). I wonder whether any of the sites that do spam filtering for their customers are running the same filters on their outgoing postmaster mail before sending it. The scary possibility is that they are. What a mess.

Comments

[cellio]

I started watching B5 sometime during the second season, when a friend said "forget what you thought of the pilot; watch this" and handed me a tape. I back-filled the first season later. While the first season did have some good moments, I do wonder if I would have kept watching if I'd started there.

I thought the third season was pretty good (as I recall; hven't gotten there yet with the DVDs). The fourth is good too. The fifth suffers from the network having jerked JMS around enough on whether there would be a fifth season that he didn't leave enough loose ends going forward.

[jducoeur]

IMO, the problem with the fifth season isn't so much that he didn't leave enough loose ends, as which ones he had. Basically, since he wasn't sure whether he was getting more than season 4, he burned through all the really good plots in 4, so season 5 is essentially the leftovers. It's interesting, but far less compelling.

But yes -- season 3 is anything but slow and boring. It's really the season where everything was hitting on all cylinders. Season 4 is a bit rushed -- fun, but almost a rollercoaster ride, it's so brisk. The end of season 4 is really the end of the story; season 5 is essentially the beginning of the next story, with everything left in an intentional disarray. It's almost painfully realistic in the way things are left only semi-resolved at the end...

[cellio]

IMO, the problem with the fifth season isn't so much that he didn't leave enough loose ends, as which ones he had.

True. It's a pity that he didn't introduce a good, compelling new plot to fill more of the space. (I do not consider the Byran plot to be either good or compelling.) The stuff with Lennier was interesting, but there needed to be more like that. Mind, I'll still watch season 5, and buy it when it comes out on DVD, but it's for die-hards.