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.
The article is so empty beyond meaningless, overawrought metaphors, it doesn’t even indicate whether the author is a wannabe entrepreneur, or an obsessive autodidact, or a tortured artiste, or what.
Ouch! Honestly, I'm probably all those things (and worse). But I found the concept of "metaprojects" helpful for shrinking the footprint of my ambitions. Instead of wanting everything, now I'm happier pursuing fewer things :-) At some point, I'll hopefully learn to let go even more. I hope other folks can learn/resonate from my particular brand of crazy
You neither explain what a metaproject is, nor how it is different from having multiple projects, nor how they overcome the problem of endless backlogs.
As someone who takes on _a lot_ of side projects, I like your idea of a metaproject!
I often wonder what draws me to pick up so many interests and goals. I used to think its leading me towards something but after so many years I have started to wonder if that is really whats going on. Maybe there is something more essential I can tease out of all my side projects that reveals what I am really after..
You are the project, and getting through your idea to something, is about building a better you. Which points back to the beginning:
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Publish that novella, build an OS, converse in Mandarin, release an indie game, publish that other novella, dominate a continent --
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Seem to be a lot of complaints about this post, I'm enjoying it. Interesting flow of thoughts and share similar frustration with all my ideas and trying to channel them, and get to something. If I get to something close to my thoughts that's a huge win for me.
Example: You've been wanting to take cooking classes, but you've also been wanting to join an improv group. If you don't have time/resources for both of these projects, you might choose a "metaproject" like "weekly dinner party with funny friends" -- it doesn't strictly meet the requirements from either project, but might achieve something deeper you're looking for.
I have an impression that’s the only thing it actually does, right there in the last paragraph (but sure, it’s quite vaguely defined just by this single example).
It doesn’t really say much else, though - just a bunch of commonplace realizations that most of ideas never get done, and then some jump to “metaprojects”, possibly to reframe the frustrations so they feel less stressful, but I don’t get that part.
There sadly isn't one. The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable. It's a bit of a dealer's choice at this point if you want "best available quality" or "best available widescreen."
Babylon 5 was filmed at a weird moment where they were prescient about HD TV and the coming widescreen home television boom and planned for/shot for 16:9 releases, but also had to shoot and composite first and foremost for 4:3 to meet TVs where they were. They had even had plans to preserve the special FX masters to make it easier to recomposite the show. WB's Archives team lost those files at some point. (The general story is WB Archives sent a copy of the masters to Vivendi [Sierra, proto-Activision Blizzard] for the eventually cancelled videogame and discovered they sent the original copy by accident only after Vivendi claimed to have wiped their copy out of respect for the contract terms when the game was cancelled.)
So the version here on youtube is a 16:9 widescreen crop of a 4:3 TV crop of the original 16:9 filming? And the remaining CGI are only the 4:3 crop from the lost 16:9 originals? Did I understand corectly?
Then, is there a version somewhere with original uncropped 16:9 live action and 4:3 CGI? I can tolerate side bars. To me, seeing the complete video frame is more important than a consistent frame format.
The original filming was apparently Super 35 [0][1] which is neither 16:9 nor 4:3 but is often cropped to either or both. The show was framed while they were filming it so that they could use the full 16:9 crop (for "cinematic effect"), but the effects were often only composited for the 4:3 crop. (A special few apparently had a chance to be done at the full Super 35 frame, but budget stopped them from doing that with every effects shot.)
So yeah the 16:9 crop we did get in the 90s (on TNT on cable and then on DVD) was cropped further from the 4:3 crop, but it mostly worked because the previous framing for the "full" Super 35 16:9 crop allowed for it.
Reviewing the helpful Wikipedia diagrams, the 4:3 crop actually uses more overall "volume" of the Super 35 frame than the best 16:9 crop, so I think I appreciate the 4:3 version we have a bit better.
> So the version here on youtube is a 16:9 widescreen crop of a 4:3 TV crop of the original 16:9 filming?
Only for the pilot (The Gathering), the rest seem to be from the 4:3 remaster which is probably the best version - so both same as the Blu Ray and streaming versions.
> The 4:3 Blu-Ray remasters are about as good as it gets in visual quality, but there's a "cinematic" feel lost from the 16:9 DVDs, but the quality difference is noticeable and unfavorable.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here. What's wrong with the quality difference?
If I recall correctly, the DVDs are 480p. They were very early DVDs and tried to squeeze a bunch of episodes on each disk plus commentary on every episode.
Take it from someone who saw it when it first aired on standard definition analogue TV: it doesn't really matter all that much. The performance of the actors and the story is what's important!
But that isn't the main issue with Discord, either, despite their attempts to add features like the ICYMI tab. The problem of Discord is more in the social than the media.
I feel like hipster typography is as much an intrinsic part of 2010s design culture as cafes that look like farmhouses, or startups named after common nouns. Saturday Night Live made a sketch about Papyrus nearly ten years ago:
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