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.

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.

These are real RPGs, not the computerized abominations that try and fail to approximate them.

Oh, sorry, did any of your pearls fall? Thanks for your precious “engagement”.

I guess it’s scary for some people to participate in even a conversation about something new with an open mind without being condescending.

Irony, thy name is … well, just check the user name. It’s all you need.

Play is not accessible to me; that’s not an avenue I can travel down. I basically have to pirate as a try-before-I-buy thing.

And I don’t buy e-books for reading. (I’ll by them for reference works, game rules, etc. but not reading books.) I buy books. It’s a quirk of mine.

For when it’s happening at your table, sometimes I think you just have to shut down the game if the players are unengaged and dicking around, falling asleep, etc.

For stopping this happening? Nothing. People are stupid. (All of us.) For some that expression of stupidity comes in the form of reading one word in a text and assuming the rest without bothering to read further. You can’t fight that.

Hmmm… Closest to but not over a target number would be entertaining, yes.

Being able to build up hands would be a plus, maybe through some kind of rummy-style mechanism where you can pick up others’ discards, etc.

Suits having areas of coverage: hearts are for physical well-being, for example, or clubs for violence, or whatever. You get the value of the card only in the area of coverage, otherwise you get a reduced value (say 1) for each card no matter what the value.

Going back to the rummy-style hand-building, combos of cards have special effects. Triples/quadruples. Runs (both in-suit or out-of-suit).

Maybe some assistance mechanism where physical cards are swapped/gifted/whatever.

And we all know the first thing writers are taught is “bore the audience to death in the beginning of your story because they’ll stick around for the possibility of things finally picking up”.

No, wait.

They’re taught the exact opposite. They’re taught to hook the audience early to induce the interest that keeps people going over the slow parts because they’re already invested.

A TV show has 3, sometimes 4, episodes to hook me. If I’m not hooked, I’m out. A book has 50 pages to hook me. If I’m not hooked, I’m out. Life’s too short to slog through boring crap on the off chance it gets better. Because it rarely does.

I don’t mind people going on and on and on. (I mean I loved Mervyn Peake!) What I hate about Stephenson is how he:

1. Can’t write people. At all. His “characters” are “concepts with a name attached”. Ugh.
2. He often goes on and on and on about stuff he’s absolutely wrong about at a fundamental level. (Like his bizarre take on Chinese culture in that one with the nanotech; I’ve forgotten the title. The Diamond Age?)

One or the other above I can cope with. Both together made me cringe every time I set eye on a page.

That is … almost the very definition of “alien”. As in:

unlike one’s own; strange; not belonging to one:

OK, so more like me and Neal Stephenson.

The Chinese series is in post-production Hell. It has not yet been released to my knowledge.