Go to Moscow, hang a left. When you hit the North Pole, head south…not, not that south, the other one! The other other one. After a bit, take another left for a couple hours, and you’ll arrive at your destination on the right.

Lol, really? One can’t control the fact that bad things happen. The west isn’t forcing either China or Russia to claim territory that doesn’t belong to them.

However, one can control how one reacts to said events. Help out where we can, and strengthen ourselves for the future.

There’s that whole proverb about crisis=danger+opportunity. The danger is there regardless…if you fail to seize the opportunity presented, well, you are pretty much guaranteed to come out the other side worse off.

Very few people WANT a war in Ukraine. But as China keeps adding dashes to their map, it’s pretty clear there’s a reasonable chance to be an even bigger war around the corner, whether we want it or not.

The Ukraine war woke the west up from its slumber, and it has allowed us to put the old stuff stuff cluttering our closets to good use, as well as test some new weapons concepts, and to get ourselves ready for the bigger conflict on the horizon.

If we are really lucky, China is looking at Ukraine and having second thoughts about kicking the hornets nest at all, saving a lot of lives on both sides.

If we are not that lucky, then Ukraine has allowed us to be much better prepared for the coming conflict.

So am I glad Ukraine happened? Not a bit. Can I see the silver lining thru the clouds? For sure.

Pretty much. China is pretty good at buying friends…when they aren’t busy stealing their stuff..

I don’t get why China allows their fishing fleets to keep shitting on their international reputation. It’s so counterproductive.

I get that Ukraine won’t consider the possibility of ceding any territory, nor should they. They probably don’t like their allies even mentioning it.

But, there’s the separate issue of not being able to join NATO with ongoing territorial disputes. Without much context to go on, I would almost interpret this as something more along the lines of “Ukraine could join NATO tomorrow if the dispute went away (by whatever method)”.

I suppose it’s the natural result of wanting to keep the show on as long as possible, when you’ve only got one good idea for the story arc. You need a lot of filler.

I’d like to see more shows done in the style of Babylon 5, where the creator had the whole 5 years written out from day 1. There was very little in the show that felt like filler or treading water.

Which also may explain why books are being brought to TV more frequently these days. But, TV showrunners have a bad habit of taking a good novel and totally mangling it in the translation to TV, so it’s not a guaranteed win.

It’s mostly decent, some interesting twists, but also plenty of dumb stuff in it too. It’s only 7 episodes, so even if you don’t end up liking it you haven’t wasted much time!

The Empire focused half of the show that was mostly made up specifically for the show is EXCELLENT tho, and really worth watching.

They should have just stuck with that and called the show Empire IMHO. Would have been an instant classic.

Frankly, you’ll enjoy Foundaton more if you don’t read the books first. Otherwise, you’ll be sitting there shaking you head wondering why they continuously mangle the core concept of the books so badly, despite characters occasionally directly stating how it works (only for the same episode otherwise showing utter disregard for said statement)

Show was killed way to soon. It was pretty solid!

Season 1 was definitely the highlight of the show. But the later seasons were still pretty entertaining.

Dunno if Lexx is really worth it tbh. The original movies were worth watching just because it was so weird and different.

But if you were on the fence after those, well it doesn’t really change. Just season after season of the same sort of plots…if you like that, it’s great. If you don’t, it’s gonna get old really fast.

I rewatched all of Andromeda recently, and after a season and a half is was mostly awful, but it was occasionally entertaining.

I rewatched the first Lexx movie, remembered why I never finished the show the first time around, and moved on to something else.

Andromeda had such promise for a low budget SciFi show. The writing started out pretty good…then purple went gold and the writing IMMEDIATELY went to shit, no slow downward slide or anything. It was like a totally different show midway thru season 2, have never seen anything like it before or since.

Heck yeah, watched all of those, they were so fun. Cleopatra 2525 is one I had almost forgotten about, thanks for reminding me!

I feel like this would have been more true had it been posted 20-30 years ago. But while there’s some sociopathic types in books today, it’s a relatively small portion of the total.

I’d be curious to see what books in particular you have in mind, maybe from those published in the last month or so. I suspect what you really mean isn’t sociopath, but non traditional-heroic-archetypes. Which I would agree with, protagonists these days tend to be more humanistic rather than god-like.

Honestly, mostly a non issue, if the email didn’t contain any sensitive info.

Your email address isn’t secret, and will be scraped up by spammers sooner or later anyway. Security by obscurity is basically no security at all.

If you missed SG1, I am guessing you missed Farscape too. It really makes aliens actually Alien, it’s universe is so weird and fantastic. And the characters and their interactions are great.

Definitely worth adding to the list.

It’s really an entirely different animal than either of them, but ranks right up there with them in terms of quality.

SG1 is a 50/50 serious/fun ratio, with long running plot threads mixed in with adventure- of-the-week episodes. It’s a bunch of friends saving the galaxy and having fun doing it. It’s got a real sense of Earth’s slow progression from the mostly forgotten backwater homeworld of humanity all the way to being a major power in two galaxies.

B5 is like a 90% serious novel about war and politics.

BSG is 100% grim, and it becomes really obvious in later seasons that while the Cylons might’ve had a plan, the writers sure as shit didn’t know what it was supposed to be. This unfortunately makes it overall the weakest of the three IMHO.