I still miss my old iRiver with Rockbox… definitely been thinking about getting a proper PMP again.

I got to see the Alan Parsons Project live about a year ago! It was a great show but Alan Parsons is definitely showing his age. It was an anniversary tour for “Eye in the Sky” delayed a couple years by COVID. I guess I feel bad that I’m hoping he lives long enough to get to a Stereotomy anniversary…

I’m lucky enough to have a Kobol Helios64, but unfortunately the small company that made these shut down. It’s fine for the time being but I’m going to have to pay attention to the NAS market to be ready to replace it one day… my main goal is low power, so I’m not sure if it’s worth it to go to a more commercial option like Synology or if I should be building something.

As appliance NAS tend to be, the actual SBC in the Helios64 is pretty slow so I minimize what I run on it. It does have Plex server, but most everything else runs on another ARM machine that mounts from it by SMB.

“Tales of Mystery and Imagination,” by the Alan Parsons Project, is a near-perfect concept album in my mind. It’s cross-genre while still feeling being interconnected.

I also love John Mellencamp’s “Mr. Happy Go Lucky.” To my frustration, though, the version of it on the streaming services I know of is missing the interstitial tracks on the CD. I think that actually takes a lot away from it as they had provided transitions that made it feel more like a complete work.

“Glaciers,” Blue Sky Black Death, follows the annoying trend of titling tracks with roman numerals but feels like an hour-long DJ set that flows very naturally. A very different album with a similar trait in my mind is F#A#Infinity, Godspeed(!) You(!) Black Emperor(!).

A more ambient choice, Jon Hopkins “Immunity.” “Psychic” from Darkside (Nicolaas Jaar with Dave Harrington) also comes to mind.

I’m having trouble thinking of really new examples right now… I kind of feel like the album has faded out as an art form and a lot more releases today seem more like just grab-bags of tracks, probably because of the streaming delivery model. There’s definitely some counterexamples out there, though.

Although I oppose corporate sponsorship, I would encourage you to strongly consider incorporating (probably as a nonprofit incorporation, options vary by state) as you scale upwards. This offers legal protection not only to the operators of the service but also to the users, since it allows for appropriate controls on governance and finances. Unincorporated community services that take donations are, unfortunately, notorious for corruption and self-dealing since there are few legal and organizational measures in place to prevent it.

Beehaw would most likely not qualify for federal tax exemption (but you could get an attorney’s opinion). In a way that’s a good thing, as the typical cost of getting an IRS letter of status runs over $1k while the typical cost of incorporating a nonprofit in most states is around $100. This is all US-centric of course, in other countries I have no idea!

Definitely. There’s the old line about being indistinguishable from magic, and I think it very much applies here. Fly-by-wire and algorithmic control of aircraft allows for some incredible feats of aerobatics that are hard for humans to imagine performing. We knew this I think over a decade ago now with MIT’s demonstrations of quadcopters performing sweet tricks, but for various reasons (that, personal opinion here, come down mostly to the near complete capture of military R&D by a small group of defense contractors with little motivation to perform actual R&D) we haven’t really tried that hard to apply this sort of technology to military aircraft. Some of the UAP documents from ODNI have, in my reading, supported this type of hypothesis. The key phrase “unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities” in one ODNI report sounds to me like ODNI thinks they’re seeing behavior that is inconsistent with our current aerospace technology but not inconsistent with physics—in other words, someone knows how to do things that we don’t. It could be aliens, but…

If we assume that these orbs and other military UAP reports reflect genuine flying objects (and on the balance of the evidence I think they do), my money would be on China or Russia having invested a lot of time and effort into computational control of unmanned aircraft, probably integrating hypersonic aerodynamic research we know both countries have been performing (and have almost certainly surpassed the US on). The result, I think it’s pretty reasonable to imagine, could be compact unmanned aircraft capable of some really extreme maneuvers. There are plenty of open questions with this theory, like power sources, but I feel like it’s in the right balance of pushing the bounds of the possible without requiring off-planet intervention. Remember that the US fielded both low-radar-profile aircraft and extremely high altitude aircraft with a great deal of secrecy. These would have been quite UFO-like to the Soviet Union, but had perfectly rational explanations… just explanations that involved at least a decade of advanced R&D performed in secret.

More to the point, though, I think we have to be really careful with this “extreme flight characteristics means aliens” line of thinking. It’s exactly what got us into the situation where claims of UAPs were viewed with such skepticism that they were suppressed within the military. We have to admit aliens as a possibility, but China is a whole lot closer, and we know that she has a sophisticated and well-supplied military R&D program. Decades of research ought to have gotten them something, and it would probably look pretty weird to those of us not in the loop.

My husband swore by B5 and had a hard time convincing me, especially since the CGI effects have not aged well and in general the sets, costume, etc. feel cheap. He was right, though: I really enjoyed it, although I think it took a season or so to really get into it. The writing is surprisingly good, especially later on, and it has complex alien characters in a way that a lot of scifi series struggle with.

There’s a widespread belief that Deep Space Nine is a knockoff of Babylon 5. B5 was apparently pitched to Paramount before they started work on DS9, but they turned it down. So it’s certainly possible that DS9 is at least inspired by B5, although I think people with more inside knowledge tend to doubt that it’s directly ripped off from the B5 pitch as others claim. It’s clear though that there is a deep similarity between B5 and DS9, and considering B5 aired later it’s natural that people feel the need to defend B5 on this point — it’s not a cheap ripoff of DS9, if anything, DS9 is an expensive ripoff of B5!

All that is background for me saying that I think B5 is a better DS9 than DS9 is, but DS9 might be a better show. What I mean by that is that the original concept that DS9 and B5 share, that of a multi-cultural space station resolving diplomatic disputes at the edge of human territory, is much better done in B5 than DS9 where it’s almost secondary to DS9 as a military outpost in the Dominion war. That said, DS9 had a bigger budget, better effects, and in my opinion better actors, so it’s easier to get into than B5. It just looks better.

Another interesting thing about B5 is that its creator, J. Michael Straczinsky (think I spelled that right?) was Terminally Online in a very early age of Online. He had a reputation for getting into dumb but heated arguments with fans on Usenet, which is pretty funny to think about now. This was a particularly big deal when the lead of the show had to be abruptly changed between seasons 1 and 2. Years after it became public that this was because of the original lead actor developing some serious mental health problems, but JMS understandably didn’t want to talk about that in public and so the abrupt and unexplained replacement lead to a lot of flamewarring (mostly under the presumption the original lead had been fired) that gave the show sort of a bad reputation among some.

I’d totally recommend that you watch B5, just be prepared for a rough given the much poorer production quality. It does get better over time, and most significantly the acting gets a lot better over time as cheesy stereotypes evolve into more complete characters. Of course pretty much every show goes through that evolution but it’s especially important with B5 where Londo starts out as an annoying guy with annoying hair. He remains as such through the rest of the series, but also gains other traits to the extent that he’s one of the more relatable characters.

There’s also a really funny left turn that happens in the last season - the last season is good! but there was some weirdness that happened where the last season was bought after the writers had already wrapped up the show (they thought they wouldn’t get another one), so they had to swap around episodes and come up with a whole new arc for the last season. The result is actually some of the best episodes of the series since they end up with sort of “free time” episodes to dig into aspects of the world that you don’t get much other detail on. The original finale of the series got moved into the actual last season, so the finale of the second to last is an episode they kind of shoved in at the last moment that is, admittedly, half clip-show but also explores the world of B5 in a really interesting way that we probably wouldn’t have gotten if the writers room didn’t have to scramble to produce something that was both fast to shoot and a satisfying season end.

Oh, and I didn’t even really address your actual question, I just rambled about television scifi for a long time like I’m prone to do. I think you’d like B5: it does have a definite aspect of moral parable to it, but it’s a more complex and nuanced one than most TV shows of the '90s. I think that’s part of the reason it didn’t get the kind of big-budget production that Star Trek did. It’s not set in a post-scarcity, largely post-politics utopia like Star Trek. The world of B5 is very political, and there aren’t really any “good guys.” Humans (from the central government charmingly called EARTH DOME) are just as much a part of the problem as everyone else, and I think the show does a much better than average job of representing different interests that have to come to compromises to get along, and the real political and cultural results of scifi concepts like telepathy. It’s not all happy endings!

I have sort of a particular skeptical opinion on recent UFO disclosures. I’ve published it here:

• https://computer.rip/2023-02-14-something-up-there-pt-I.html
• https://computer.rip/2023-02-17-something-up-there-pt-II.html

It’s important to understand that we managed to get into a situation where the military performed essentially no collection or analysis of reports of unusual aircraft for nearly 40 years. I don’t think we should be too surprised by a significant revelation about advanced technology possessed by foreign governments after this period of time. At the same time, it remains very possible that these reports are mistaken. I expect that recent investment in UAS-detection technology will lead to a lot more empirical evidence in these kinds of situations, and then we’ll have a lot more to go on.