That's what's taught in a lot of linguistics and language classes now: rules of spelling and grammar are power games designed to perpetuate one culture while repressing others, rather than tools for clarifying thought. It's fallout from the postmodern search for power dynamics in all things.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
The hardcore anti-prescriptivism among linguists does drive me a bit nuts as well.
Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas. They're not just arbitrary rivers of sound changes that people cannot control. English is still full of Inkwell terms, for example. And in my own lifetime I have seen a lot of linguistic changes basically proscribed that everyone falls into line with (a less controversial/political one: no one in NZ called association football "football" at the turn of the century. We all called it "soccer". Then the sporting bodies and media changed what they called it and everyone around me changed it too. "football" used to unambiguously mean "rugby football").
> Languages can and do alter because of peoples prescriptivist ideas.
You are right, but that comes also from a descriptivist perspective. And a linguist would study what sort of prescriptions stick and what sort don't.
When linguists say they aren't prescriptivists, they don't say prescriptivism doesn't work, they just say their job is not about deciding whether to say football or soccer.
Right I am probably being sloppy with my terminology. It's more notions that there is no such thing as "good grammar" is just tiresome. We can argue the rules are somewhat arbitrary, but that does not change how people might perceive you.
I don't mean to sound like the old fart that I am, but you keep describing games in terms of "junk" and "as good as [junk]": maybe instead of giving a bundle of ad-free junk, none of which actually captures his attention and all of which amounts to "doomscrolling," you might consider finding something that does get his attention and occupies it more usefully.
Swift Playgrounds was (is?) ad-free and teaches programming. There are music studio apps that let him compose his own music. Plenty of apps let kids create things actively instead of just playing games. There are also all sorts of non-electronic activities that could occupy his time more fruitfully, but I'll skip over that.
There's more to this line of thought. The pilot movie isn't space opera so much as it is a murder mystery in space, and it's not the only episode like that. The security chief, Garibaldi, is a hard-bitten alcoholic detective from film noir (and there are plenty of film-noir-like visual elements: fans, shadows, run-down industrial sectors unimaginable in Star Trek), and he plays a much larger role solving crimes than do his counterparts in other science fiction shows. The writing style, a long arc that drops clues up front to pay off in revelations down the line, also leans heavily on mystery writing.
Having been alive at the time, I can tell you that the effects were amazing then. B5 was one of the first shows to use computer graphics and partially-virtual sets. It wasn't limited by the number of times you could re-composite a handful of models together, so it showed whole armadas of ships. Windows didn't open onto a black felt field of stars but a green screen that allowed ships to pull up right outside the window.
The effects don't hold up to what has followed in the past quarter century, and they weren't preserved in a good resolution, so they'll never look very good on a high-resolution monitor instead of an old CRT. But, at the time, they were amazing.
I always felt that Ron Thornton and his team at Foundation Imaging were sadly underrated and overlooked in computer graphics history.
B5's SFX had a dynamism and color that was unmatched at the time. I recently rewatched the series, and the later seasons still hold up just fine, graphics-wise (created by a different company, but reusing Foundation Imaging's original assets and esthetic).
And I love how the Star Fury's design was so carefully thought out - even NASA took an interest.
I was an adult at the time. I remember my reactions to the effects, at the time. Most CGI at the time was not good, and Babylon 5 was nowhere near on a par with Terminator 2, say, which had a much bigger budget.
It is extremely difficult for me to believe that someone watching Babylon 5 as it aired on a typical sized CRT television thought the effects looked "cheap". Hokey? Okay, maybe, that's subjective enough to be non-debatable. But "cheap" in the context of a television show? The shots were so much more dense and dynamic than what Star Trek was doing at the time, which is the obvious comparison.
It's the season one acting that I find the biggest barrier to entry. It settles in by the end mostly, and the acting markedly improves from Season 2 onward though it always retains some of that campy scifi feel.
The costuming and sets and CGI are impressive, but the lighting is unnecessarily murky and the dark industrial tunnels aesthetic makes me think of Red Dwarf, which I can’t imagine was a very lavish production.
The earlier Red Dwarf episodes were filmed in the BBC cafeteria and other similar locations. The difference is that Red Dwarf was supposed to look grimy. They were on a mining ship with few luxuries. Red Dwarf was more in the territory of Dark Star, and played into that. (Early Red Dwarf tended to use physical models and costumes for a lot of effects. CGI has never been especially great on RD.)
I did watch Babylon 5 when it first came out in the UK. Deep Space 9 definitely had better looking effects, but I preferred B5 to DS9 on the basis of other factors.
I think B5 has a variety of environments, and some of them are quite nice, and I like the moody bustling alien cantina type spaces. But they also have too many dark industrial passages, which doesn’t always fit the scenes and come off rather cheap.
In the space of fifteen years we went from Battlestar Galactica, which used those same shots of Cylon ships swerving and getting blown up over and over and over; to Star Trek: The Next Generation, which used models for the ships and was therefore extremely limited in the scale and maneuvers they could portray; to Babylon V which used digital effects, allowing them a freedom of scale, angle, motion, and number of ships that nothing had managed before -- at the cost of being on the cutting edge of computer graphics, leading to a shininess, over-sharpness, and other telltale computer artifacts.
You can say they were too early, but not that they didn't lean in on technology and use it to their best advantage. It had weaknesses, but also strengths.
They were pretty good for the budget. (As someone else noted at least a lot were done on Amigas.) I really liked Babylon 5 at the time but there's a lot about it you need to overlook. I recommended it to someone and they told me it was the worst recommendation I ever gave them.
The acting was a mixed bag from very good to pretty wooden. And the whole will it get renewed or won't it situation led to non-optimal organization of the last couple of seasons.
Star Trek looked much better. They couldn’t do the numbers that B5 could do, at least not until the later parts of DS9. But what they were able to show actually looked realistic. B5’s effects were very, very clearly done on consumer-level computers. They were quite good considering, but didn’t look real. Star Trek was doing things with large physical models and it showed. Ships and stations looked like real objects (since they were!) rather than the smooth curves of everything in B5.
As a young SF devourer at the time, the cheap effects were a major turnoff and one reason I never got into B5.
Star Trek at the time had better effects (including DS9, even though I prefer B5!).
The trick with effects is to make whatever you have look good. There are a few ways of doing that. 2001's effects are genius and still look pretty good nearly sixty years later. They look better than 2010's from the 1980s. In fact, I'm even impressed with Forbidden Planet — yes, there are a lot of painted backgrounds but it does very well with what it has.
> Three U.S. military officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said U.S. Customs and Border Protection had been using the technology without issues before Tuesday's shutdown and expressed confusion as to why the shutdown was deemed necessary. [0]
It was definitely the army [1] who fired the laser causing the shutdown of El Paso airport, but the army doesn't seem to understand the alarm on the part of the FAA, because DHS (Border Protection) has been using it for some time now without the same alarm from the FAA. Someone at the FAA reacted differently to this army firing than they had to previous DHS firings.
My microwave mainboard failed because I changed the range light bulb without unplugging the whole microwave first, which I would not have thought necessary. It seems that, without unplugging the whole microwave, the act of changing a light bulb will cause catastrophic voltage to delicate parts. Turns out to be a common thing with this brand.
I ended up replacing the mainboard with a part from no apparent manufacturer with new features (the blue LEDs dim after inactivity so as not to illuminate the whole room at night) and no connection for the thermistor. Works like a charm. It feels very much like the original manufacturer wanted the board to fail and be replaced, while some random Chinese circuit-board maker sold me a better quality board.
I never sent root over telnet, but I spent too much vacation time browsing the web via lynx on my school AIX account from a library near my parents' home, because it had a telnet client in addition to the card catalogue program on the otherwise locked down desktop. It was just a more innocent time: you didn't assume your traffic was being logged six ways to Sunday. With telnet access to my AIX account, I could do all the internet things, like mail (pine) and the web (lynx) and irc, from a convenient command line anywhere in the world.
A coworker made a sort of cartoon, pompous jerk says "Who dares disturb the ineffable blah blah blah"
Cleaning lady: "Sorry I had no idea you wasn't effable, I'll come back later"
that is to say since effable as a slang term for some someone that one might like to have sex with exists, it is a reasonable pun to make with ineffable as being, well, not effable. However one should probably be able to realize the ineffable in question is not a pun on the slang term and figure things out. Somewhat embarrassing really.
on edit: added in disturb, must have missed it because very tired.
Another meaning the word "effable" acquired in the last couple decades is a spelled out form of "f-able", as in fuckable. OP must've been unaware of the word's prior existence.
You'd have to deliberately misunderstand it, clearly if that's the first thing that pops up into your head when you read about someone putting together a memorial show for their mom that isn't the appropriate reading.
I'd suggest that radical left-wing elements indigenous to Italy, such as those behind the Turin protests that left 100 police officers wounded a few days ago, are a perfectly plausible candidate; not every attack comes from without. There was another protest against the Olympics in Milan itself last night by left-wing elements who believe the games are economically and socially unsustainable [0]
Unfortunately with stuff like this, nation states will use groups like that as proxies.
Lots of governments.
For example, there's some other news at the moment that the USA is financing pro-MAGA groups across Europe, which I mention more because of Jan 6 happened at all than due to any specific evidence that the US government has knowingly given state support for terrorists.
A friend recently brought up Orwell's essay on "Politics and the English Language" [0] and the Merriam Webster's Word Matters Podcast episode on it [1]. She had "read" without understanding the former and had listened with credulity to the latter. The podcast savages Orwell for not understanding "how language in general and English in particular actually works" and for his "absolutism" but especially for violating all of his precepts in his essay. Had either my friend or the podcasters bothered to read the essay carefully, they would have found that Orwell explains that he did so deliberately. When I asked my friend to summarize Orwell's essay and distill it to a single thesis, she replied that he was simply prescriptivist and wanted to tell people what to do. That's what the podcast got out of it too. For example, from the podcast:
> A big part of the conversations that we've all had with members of the public or strangers, people who correspond with a dictionary in one way or another, is some kind of membership of a club. "You care about language in the way that I do." There is absolutely a huge moral component that is imposed upon that. We always are judging others by their use of language. We are always judged by our use of language, by the way we spell, by the way we pronounce words. That's just a simple human fact. It's easier for us as professionals to separate that from culture.
The last sentence reminds me of a feedback loop: the "professionals" claim power based on the fact that they see the exercise of power in language rather than on how to use language for communicating clearly. This is how we get to a point where good grammar is a tool for "looking professional" rather than speaking and writing clearly.
I walked my friend back through the actual essay and asked her what Orwell wanted from each point, and she realized that it was, in fact, clarity, not power. Orwell wanted to challenge his readers to think about what they wanted to say before saying it, so that they could say what they meant rather than repeating what they heard commonly said (a note could be made here about large language models and probability).
[0] https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/word-matters-podcast/episode...
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