A good book makes everything better...

"You're safe. I healed you."

A comforting voice. Bouba looked. A skinny witch, all angles, smiled at her.

"Kiki?"

"Long time no see. When did you get so hard?"

It looks like just pinpricks of lights flicking off and on. It's some of the hundreds to thousands of fireflies in my yard, after years of fostering their environment.

It's come a long way since I moved in. It used to be that I could stand in the yard during firefly season and count 30+ seconds before seeing a flash. It's still not at the level I remember seeing in local areas a couple decades ago, when fields would practically glow with how many fireflies lit the air above them. But it's not nothing. And maybe my yard doesn't make a huge difference on its own, but when you multiply it by hundreds, by thousands, by millions... it adds up.

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.

Henry the Fifth

- ALWAYS encourage others to do their best.

- NEVER talk about people behind their back.

Antony and Cleopatra

- ALWAYS check your produce for pests. [They liked this one so much made a rap about it.]

- NEVER count your chickens before they hatch.

Hamlet

- ALWAYS act decisively

- NEVER tell your girlfriend to go to a convent and become a nun [Oh boy they REALLY liked this one]

Romeo and Juliet

- ALWAYS collect all the important information before making an important decision

- NEVER bite your thumb at us, sir. [They enacted this scene in the original language a lot, except they swapped every “sir” for “bro.”]

The Merchant of Venice

- ALWAYS pay your debts.

- NEVER judge based on appearances, because “all that glisters is not gold.”

The Tempest

- ALWAYS try to forgive others.

- NEVER be a colonizer. [Yes, a middle schooler said this]

Midsummer Night’s Dream

- ALWAYS stay on forest trails

- NEVER fall in love with an ass. [They were excited about this one for obvious reasons.]

Twelfth Night

- ALWAYS stay in touch with those important to us

- NEVER read other people’s mail

Macbeth

- ALWAYS wash your hands. [One of the girls performed Lady Macbeth’s entire Out Damn Spot monologue at the end of the semester]

The gray fox is the only canid in North America that climbs trees. It goes up a trunk to eat fruit from the branches, comes back down, and plants the next generation of that tree in its scat.

No other fox, coyote, wolf, or wild dog on the continent can do what the gray fox does with a vertical surface. It has semi-retractable claws, the only canid with this feature, and forearms that rotate in a way no other dog relative's do, allowing it to grip bark and push itself up a trunk the way a cat does. Gray foxes have been documented climbing more than sixty feet into a tree canopy to den, to escape coyotes, or to reach fruit that no other ground-level carnivore can access. They will sleep in a tree hollow, raise pups in a cavity forty feet off the ground, and jump between branches in pursuit of squirrels.

The fruit eating is where the biology turns unexpected. The U.S. Forest Service fire effects database lists persimmon, black cherry, blackberry, manzanita berries, juniper cones, cascara berries, and California fan palm fruit in the Sonoran Desert as confirmed gray fox foods. In some seasons and some habitats, gray foxes eat more fruit than meat. They are functionally frugivorous, a word that describes animals whose diet centers on fruit, and which nobody associates with a member of the dog family.

A 2020 study published in Ecology and Evolution examined gray fox scat in a temperate forest in Mexico's Sierra Fría and found that 93 percent of gray fox scats contained seeds. The average was 185 seeds per scat, mostly manzanita and juniper. The gray fox dispersed far more seeds per scat than the coyote, the ringtail, or the bobcat, all of which share the same landscape and eat some of the same fruit. The study tested the seeds for viability and germination after gut passage. Seeds that had passed through a gray fox germinated as well as or better than seeds that had not. The digestive process scarified the seed coat just enough to promote sprouting without destroying the embryo. The fox eats the fruit, walks a mile through the forest, defecates, and leaves behind a packet of viable seeds in a mound of nitrogen-rich fertilizer, deposited in a location away from the parent tree where competition for light and water is lower.

This is not an accident. The relationship between carnivores and the plants they disperse is an active area of research, and the gray fox is emerging as one of the most effective mammalian seed dispersers in North American temperate and arid forests. A study on the Edwards Plateau in Texas found gray foxes and other carnivores dispersing Texas persimmon and Ashe juniper seeds in large numbers, with few seeds destroyed by digestion. The pattern holds across the species' range: the fox eats fruit when it is available, sometimes preferentially, and deposits viable seeds miles from the source.

The gray fox has lived in North America for roughly 3.6 million years, making it one of the oldest surviving canid lineages on the continent. It predates the red fox, the coyote, and the wolf. Its tree-climbing ability and its fruit-heavy diet may be remnants of an older ecological niche, one that existed before the larger, faster, ground-running canids evolved and pushed it into the margins. Today it lives in brushy woodland, rocky hill country, and forest edges from southern Canada to Venezuela, and it is still the only dog in the hemisphere that goes up a tree to pick its dinner and comes back down carrying the seeds of the next forest in its gut.

Source: U.S. Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System / Ecology and Evolution (2020) / Edwards Plateau seed dispersal study / Smithsonian National Zoo / Animal Diversity Web.

Also, Mr. Aldrin had an active military career before his astronaut days and i'd say he hasn't forgotten how to throw a damn good punch -- just look at his wide stance

10/10 well-deserved punch

additional info

at the time, Aldrin was 72 years old, 6 foot 2 inches, and 250 pounds. Sibel (the man he punched) was 37 years old

Sibel has made multiple "documentaries" about the moon landing being fake and has repeatedly harassed the astronauts involved, in this instance getting Aldrin to agree to the above meeting by pretending to be doing an interview on space for a Japanese children's television show

Buzz Aldrin's step-daughter was present, and in addition to being poked repeatedly and aggressively with a bible (Sibrel wanted him to swear on a bible that he went to the moon) Aldrin felt the man following them into the hotel refusing to leave them alone might pose a threat to her

New design alert: meet Tyvar Kell "Himbo For Hire".

This one is an inside joke requested by my friend, author Seanan McGuire, whose favorite character to write is a big-hearted, big-muscled elf hero who isn't always the sharpest weapon in the armory!

It's a two-color design in silver and leafy green on soft black cotton, available as a classic unisex tee, women's fitted tee, or racerback tank, small through 6X depending on style.

If you know, you know. And if you don't yet, now's a great time to find out!