just a tiny ghostwitch

The most amazing part is how the water droplet magnifies the Hornet's mouth parts, so you get to see them up-close!!!! It was FASCINATING to witness!

Here's some of my favorite still shots from that video:

I genuinely believe the stringent age-based separation most of us are experiencing is one of the single most destructive forces in our society. you need to interact with people of all ages regularly or you start to get all "think of the children" and "parent's rights" and fucking "11 year olds can't comprehend basic ratios". or, worse and frankly way more common for leftists, "I hate kids they're so annoying" or "kids are fine I just never want to interact with them if I can help it".

They are people. they have complex thoughts and emotions and knowledge. they are aware of the political goings on in the world, and they think deeply and talk frequently about the issues that impact you (often because those issues impact them as well, but often even when they don't!). they share space with you in your communities, locally and online, whether you're aware of them or think of them as part of your communities or not.

you need to talk to them regularly so you can remember that they are people, the ways in which they are people, the kinds of people they are, the needs they have, and how to advocate for them in a society that increasingly flattens them to varying sizes of toddler. or, if nothing else, so you can share your communities with them instead of expecting them to take what they can get and fit themselves in however makes you, personally, most comfortable.

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.