brain on fire

A £100m superyacht believed to be owned by Vladimir Putin is fleeing Europe to avoid Ukrainian drone attacks.

The 82m Graceful is traversing the coast of Norway on course to reach the northern Russian port of Murmansk in the coming days, according to maritime intelligence data and satellite imagery analysed by The Telegraph.

It is sailing under the escort of two Russian naval vessels and under the watchful eye of Nato.

The yacht has been pictured sailing with anti-drone nets covering its deck.

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I love rolled hem feet, but only if I want a narrow hem, and I'm not going to freak out if it's imperfect. I made a petticoat that had so so many yards of hem, and the rolled foot really saved me.

You feed the fabric with the raw edge facing up into the loop, but you need to get the correct amount. Too little, and you get a turned hem. Too much, and you get a mashed mess that's mostly a rolled hem. Starting the hem at the very end is finicky, so if you're ok with cleaning it up by hand afterwards, it's easier to start an inch or so in.

Honestly, practicing will make the biggest difference. I have 2 sizes, and the finest one only works on thin fabric. Stuff that's too flimsy like some silk will collapse if you go too fast, by which I mean the fabric won't stay in the proper part of the foot. Thicker fabric needs a wider foot. I'm betting it won't work on knits.

One of the reasons I have such a persistent chip on my shoulder about Babylon 5 has very little to do with fandom tribalism and everything to do with how hard the television industry worked to kneecap it before it ever had a fair shot.

This was not a case of two similar shows accidentally arriving at the same time. This was a deliberate and coordinated attempt by Paramount to undermine a competing series that dared to exist outside their control.

J. Michael Straczynski pitched Babylon 5 to Paramount first. They sat on the series bible and the pilot script for over a year before finally passing. Only after the show was sold elsewhere did Paramount suddenly announce Deep Space Nine in the trades. Not only that, they rushed production so DS9 would hit the airwaves first, ensuring that Babylon 5 would look like a cheap knockoff to anyone paying half attention.

That was just the opening move.

Paramount then used its weight to pressure local stations not to carry Babylon 5. This was not competition. This was strongarming. In the syndicated television landscape of the 1990s, that kind of pressure could absolutely determine whether a show lived or died. Paramount knew that. They used it.

And this is not paranoia or JMS reading intent into coincidences after the fact. Walter Koenig had lunch with a Paramount executive long before either show aired. That executive openly described the strategy. Koenig relayed that conversation to Straczynski. Later, there was a lawsuit that was quietly settled out of court. Corporations do not settle lawsuits like that unless there is something they do not want examined in daylight. What often gets left out of this conversation is that this was not a case of two creative teams independently arriving at similar ideas. Paramount had access to the Babylon 5 series bible and pilot script. They did not just know the premise. They knew the structure, the ambitions, and the long term storytelling plan. So when elements that Babylon 5 was built around later surfaced in Deep Space Nine, it is not unreasonable to question how those ideas migrated. No one is claiming DS9 copied Babylon 5 wholesale. But it is impossible to ignore that one studio had early access to another creator’s roadmap, and that access came before DS9 was fully defined as a series.

You do not have to hate Deep Space Nine to acknowledge this history. I do not hate DS9. I like DS9. But pretending these shows were born into equal circumstances is historically dishonest.

What really gets under my skin is that Babylon 5 was not just another space show. It was doing something genuinely new. At a time when The Next Generation trained audiences to expect a reset button, where no matter what happened you knew the characters and their relationships would snap back into place by the end of the episode, Babylon 5 refused that safety net. It told a long form serialized story with planned arcs from beginning to end. Consequences actually mattered. Characters evolved and sometimes broke. Friends could become enemies and stay that way. Characters could die and stay dead. Moral ambiguity did not resolve itself neatly in the final act, and nothing was guaranteed to return to normal just because the credits rolled. It was not comfort television, where part of the appeal of The Next Generation was spending an hour with familiar characters and knowing everything would be basically fine when you left them.

It challenged the narrative space that Star Trek and Star Wars had dominated for decades. And instead of allowing that challenge to stand on its own merits, the established powers tried to crush it before audiences could make up their own minds.

So yes, when people casually dismiss Babylon 5 as a ripoff, or refuse to engage with it at all, or act as though it only exists in the shadow of Star Trek, it makes me angry. Not because I need my favorite show to be validated, but because the history is being rewritten to favor the winner with the bigger marketing budget and the louder megaphone.

Babylon 5 survived sabotage. It survived network indifference. It survived budget constraints that would have killed a lesser show. And it still changed television.

For example a bluebird is a bird that is blue. A birdblue would I suppose be a blue that is bird but it certainly doesn’t mean the same thing as bluebird whatever it is.

An airplane is a plane that is in the air. A planeair just isn’t anything. Maybe it would be the air inside of a plane.

Or perhaps it would be plane air with a space in it. Because we kind of just make compound words all the time like Germans do but sometimes we put a space in there. Where you put the space kind of doesn’t stop it from being a compound word.

Recovery is boring. And I can't do proper photography. So I have put together a wireless setup to capture various birds while I am resting in bed. I have a security camera that alerts me to motion and I can trigger my camera with a little remote control.

These are the fruits of my project so far.

The organizers almost certainly really did intend that anyone of any age was welcome to participate in the activities. The problem, I have found, seems to come in 2 parts: the audience's socio-cultural expectations and how they respond to peer pressure (real or imagined), and the likelihood of who shows up at certain kinds of events depending on the regional demographics and how the event is advertised.

My rambling below the cut: