It's a hard comparison. They are both very good, in wildly different ways.
B5 is much more character driven and more of a slow burn that sets up a big payoff in the later seasons that has permanent world-changing impact. It was really ahead of its time, closer to something like Game of Thrones than anything else at the time.
TNG feels more static, even the "big events" don't really change the world all that much in the next episode, except Tasha Yar being written out of the show in season 1 causing Worf's head to shrink in season 2 or something I guess. It's a mystery-of-the-week show, you know what you're gonna get and you know it's good. No complaints, but also nothing mind blowing.
TNG, because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives, whereas B5 is really about the past (and present), about politics, recurrence and mysticism. It’s a bit like which do you prefer, science-fiction or fantasy? Much of B5 could have been done in a pure fantasy setting.
To expand on that: B5 is about ethics, and it has a primordial good and evil that are decidedly kept in the mystical realm. It has a supernatural concept of souls, it has messiah-like characters, it seems to believe in a notion of fate. TNG on the other hand is steeped in renaissance enlightenment, it has the spirit that there is no supernatural, and that everything is rationally explainable. It often tackles ethics as well, but I dare say that beyond that it explores a broader territory in philosophical topics than B5. TNG is more down-to-earth, B5 is more vibe-heavy.
B5 in a fantasy setting wouldn't make much sense, the key issue is the namesake.
What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse? Both have been done, but I've never heard of one actually being the centerpiece and the namesake of a series. There's also the issue of "porting" B4 into such a setting.
Having a series of "prototype" worlds or prototype floating islands would likely make the series overly contrived.
>What would be the equivalent of B5 in a fantasy? A floating sky island? A neutral world in a multiverse?
Imagine a typical fantasy setting in which humans live amongst other races - elves, dwarves, goblins and the like (but substitute them for aliens, the archetypes are mostly the same) Humans are still venturing out into the greater world and were nearly being wiped out in a war with the elves (Minbari) when their intitial meeting went poorly. Humans create a city called Babylon where representatives of various races could come together to talk, trade and interact peacefully at the outer boundaries of what humans knew to be "the world," near the countries of wild magic where eldritch and ancient things were known to dwell, which even the older races fear to speak of.
The fourth Babylon vanished without a trace. Humans have barely begun to master even the simplest of magics but this is far beyond their understanding, and the elves, who always seem to know more than they say, say nothing. But, humans being perhaps too stupid or prideful to know when to quit, simply built it again, and tried again.
But there are prophecies of an ancient enemy called The Lords of Shadow which have slumbered deep underground for so long that they have become mere legend to all but the oldest races, if not forgotten altogether. A profane force of the deepest and darkest magics which was beaten back by an alliance of older races and the Lords of Light, the divine high elf mages who still watch over the younger races and regard humans with bemusement.
Or they seem to. It's hard to tell with them. Their faces are always obscured by masks, and everything they say is a riddle.
The prophecies say the time is drawing near for the Lords of Shadow to awaken again, and the dark magic to return... and strangely enough, within this city where humans, elves, dwarves, angels and devils all walk amongst one another, the key to the fate of the world and the coming of the New Age may be this weak, naive, plucky race called humans, whose nature seems to stand between the darkness and the light, and in whom the Elves have taken a particular interest, for reason they refuse to reveal.
It really isn't that difficult. Not every element has to have a precise 1:1 match, so many of the themes and motifs are right out of fantasy. You have an ancient immortal named Lorien, a mysterious broker of dark wishes named Morden who serves the Shadows, a group of elite warriors called Rangers who trained under the Elves (Minbari) and fought in the last great war against Sauron-sorry The Shadows. The Technomages are literal space wizards.
You could do some Norse Mythology thing and say "hyperspace" is a magical form of travel between the "realms" of these various races, and have the story take place when humans have just discovered the magic that allows access to the world tree. Add a Tower of Babel analogy and say the city of Babylon already existed and was already a place where different races commingled because it's where the portal was, making it both an international and interdimensional hub, but one day the old Tower of Babylon (which is where the portal is) just disappeared (probably those damned elves) but they built a new one.
TNG isn't actually about science, though. There is precious little actual science in the series, or even the franchise as a whole. Ironically the most scientifically grounded series is TOS because they didn't have a ton of franchise tropes to lean on and actually hired science fiction writers now and then. I remember one episode where they encountered a (Romulan?) cloaking device for the first time, a major plot point was the 2nd law of thermodynamics and the fact that such a cloak couldn't be perfect - it had to vent energy somewhere, somehow - which is a degree of scientific rigor no subsequent series would even attempt. And then in another episode they fought Space Lincoln so YMMV. By the time you get to TNG any pretense at science is abandoned for "teching the tech" and inverted space wedgies and whatever nonsense Q gets up to.
That said, B5 absolutely does wear its fantasy pretensions on its sleeve, and I think you're correct about the "forward looking" versus "backwards looking" themes. The technomages are wizards with robes and mystical incantations and everything - it's explained away as "technology so advanced it's indistinguishable from magic" but they wouldn't be out of place in any D&D setting. Mystical prophecies, gods, demons, "light vs. dark" motifs, the Minbari being so elf-coded it's ridiculous, the Great Man heroic ideal, sacred tomes, eldritch ruins, crystals crystals crystals. All the trappings are there. Crusade went even further in this regard. The hero ship in Crusade is named the Excalibur ffs.
>>[I prefer] TNG because it’s about the future, about science, rationality, open-mindedness and new perspectives
>TNG isn't actually about science
I agree with your point that
Star Trek is very bad at being scientifically realistic (e.g., in its plots) but Star Trek -- at least TOS and TNG -- was very good at creating positive feelings about scientific and technological progress.
Technological progress is one of the few things that large numbers of people have become so enthusiatic about that it becomes a sort of lens through which they decide the goodness or badness of almost everything that happens. Jesus and dismantling capitalism and other forms of oppression are two other examples.
In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the shows that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology.
(TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent (or rare and unimportant) inside the Federation and that crime and strife between people had mostly been eliminated.)
>In other words, the first two Star Trek shows (i.e., the shows that Roddenberry exerted direct control over) seemed to have been extremely good at attracting people to the technophilic ideology.
That's fair. Tons of scientists and engineers got into their fields because they were inspired by Star Trek.
>TNG is also a potent advertisement for communist ideology: Roddenberry was at the time interested in communism and insisted that money was absent (or rare and unimportant) inside the Federation and that crime and strife between people had mostly been eliminated.
Yes. It isn't that potent, though, because it depends on a post-scarcity economy of free energy, FTL and magic boxes that make anything out of nothing. It also assumes humans will just "evolve beyond" their basic nature, bigotry, vice and desire for hierarchies of power.
But for communism (or weakly, socialism) to work in the real world it has to deal with scarcity and human desire.
I couldn't stand TNG at first, and in fact didn't really watch it until a decade ago. To me the first 2 seasons, and pretty much anything involving the Q character, are unwatchable, but once I learned to skip them the rest became really interesting. For the sake of comparison, I loved the old TOS movies, DS9, and liked Voyager as a purely episodic "watch whenever I catch it" show.
They were, for me at least, too different to compare like that.
TNG was the hopeful future - something an idealist would like to imagine society could achieve.
Babylon 5 was the realistic future - where fascism and racism are issues still prevalent in society, but largely left unaddressed.
If you ask me to pick between them I'd have to go with Babylon 5 but only because of the writing. There were so many times that JMS foreshadowed events literal years in the future on the show and it was such a huge payoff as a fan.
Star Trek just wasn't structured as a show in a way that can compete with that level of world building that was all interwoven in the same kind of way.
TNG, by a country mile. B5 has "writer identifies too much with the main character" written all over it. It's the story of how Our Great Leader does the right thing and saves the world, over and over again.
Babylon 5 was space fantasy in the vein of epic literature, like a Lord of the Rings in space, and influenced modern TV productions like Game of Thrones, whose author says that he was indebted to the former.
Both TNG and B5 have significant cultural value, but for different reasons. More people should watch them.
On average, TNG has better episodes, but it doesn't come close to the multi-season story arc of Babylon 5 and I think the character arcs of Londo and G'Kar are possibly the best of any drama that I've seen.
Also, Babylon 5 later seasons are directly relevant to modern political developments and fascism.
We're all slowly but surely lowering our standards as AI bombards us with low-quality slop. AI doesn't need to get better, we all just need to keep collectively lowering our expectations until they finally meet what AI can currently do, and then pink-slips away.
Exactly. This happens in every aspect of life. Something convenient comes along and people will accommodate it despite it being worse, because people don’t care.
All the damage that Trump caused, as it becomes unavoidably apparent and the propagandists pin it on the next administration. Remember the cries about price inflation during Biden's term, after Trump had turned the money printing press to 11 during Covid? Dumped interest rates, PPP handouts, and even mailing helicopter checks directly to everyone. Then when monetary velocity finally picked back up, the bill came due.
Republicans have been running this sabotage-then-criticize scam for decades now. Trump has just embraced it whole hog during his second term and it's an open question whether Democrats will even be able to stem the hemorrhaging after this one, especially as they're generally not effective at building things and so much has been wholesale destroyed.
I can infer from the neglect that Apple News has been a failure for them and they are keeping it going to avoid consequences for shuttering it. Or if not a failure, it’s not enough of a success to give the product sufficient attention.
"The new CSS env(preferred-text-scale) variable provides a mechanism for authors to respect the user’s text scale setting that they’ve set either in their operating system or web browser settings. Authors can use it to scale the font-size and alter the layout accordingly.
Note: See the env(preferred-text-scale) Explainer [2] for a comparison of the various ways users can scale content and examples of how to use the environment variable.
However, if authors have already used font-relative units like rem and em to conform to the Resize Text guideline, the browser could automatically incorporate the OS-level text scale setting into those font-relative units. This would allow authors to avoid having to determine the precise elements to apply the env() variable to.
We propose a new HTML meta tag that tells the user agent to apply the scaling factor from env(preferred-text-scale) to the entire page. We expect it will become best practice for authors to use this meta tag, just as they would use the viewport meta tag. The environment variable would be reserved for atypical use cases."
There's no need for a text-scale CSS property because font-size already exists. The latter explainer [2] suggests that developers use font-size: calc(100% * env(preferred-text-scale)) to get the desired effect, if they are doing this in CSS rather than with just the meta tag.
Actually I don't think the explainer gets into the full story. The reality is it's not CSS's problem. It's the browsers that have historically made text scaling weird on each platform that they support.
And now just like with the viewport meta tag, we need a meta tag to say, 'Stop doing that please. Make the default font size in my CSS work the way it always should have'.
The other reason why the flag can't be in CSS is because it needs to make em and rem units in media queries get affected by the user's text scale. See the explainer for more info on that.
It won't replace all engineers, but it will replace many. Code is no longer some precious resource. You now turn on the tap and code flows out, and it requires only so many people to turn on a tap.
Yeah man, remember when Biden called people retards and piggy, used his position to make millions off memecoins, draped his mug and name over government institutions, bulldozed half the White House, wanted to take over multiple countries, sicced masked idiots on the poor, pulled out of the WHO, the list goes on.
"I have clear evidence of wrongdoing in one case, and admittedly not very good evidence of wrongdoing in the other... I prefer the former."
Epistemologically insane, and that's not to mention the plainly obvious fact that even if the corruption were equal (which you openly admit actually doesn't comport with visible evidence), doing it visibly is clearly much more harmful to our society.
Taken to the extreme, someone can be the most rotten, corrupt soul on the planet, and so long as they truly keep it to themselves, none of us would even know about it, much less be affected by it.
A tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it is in fact of far less nuisance and risk than a tree that falls on top of a house.
A more important question: How would someone look if they walked around insisting that a tree had recently fallen, but they can't tell you when/where/how because no one was around to hear it?
"But trust me, it was just as big as the one that fell on Bob's house, so I don't even see what anyone is upset about."
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