Midnight Indigo

part 3

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

Richard Serra – 8 Drawings: Weights and Measures, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, NY, September 23 – October 14, 1989 [Saint-Martin Bookshop, Bruxelles-Brussel. © Richard Serra]

1. Do not do age verification.

Oh no I dropped my link, what a horrible thing! Sure hope this doesn't get reblogged until it reaches users from the UK and Brazil!

It is, by any metric, a small country masquerading as a city.

It governs more lives and more wealth than most nations. If democratic socialism — housing reform, public banking, equitable taxation — functions here, it obliterates the myth that such governance can’t work at scale. The fear isn’t ideological. It’s empirical. Because if Mamdani can keep the lights on, reduce homelessness, and maintain economic growth without catering to Wall Street, then the capitalist gospel collapses under its own dead weight.

What terrifies the establishment isn’t failure. It’s feasibility.

If it works in New York, there’s no reason it can’t work in Nebraska. If it works in Queens, it can work in Kansas City. And once proof exists, belief becomes irrelevant. The ship of democracy, fully refitted, will keep sailing — and no one can claim it isn’t American."

frogs! thanks to tumblr's own @markscherz and others, we keep finding new frog species!

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.