But hey, it's not all bad. We might be the last generation in living memory, for a while at least, who could ever say "you had to be there" and mean it.
And for all it pangs our hearts to see our ephemera tend to dust, we also I think are, of any human generation to date, probably best able to hope that the things we really love from our time will be preserved. (I hope that's a distinction we don't end up holding on to...)
In just the last little while I've been getting to see that peculiarly ingenuous sort of joy again, as someone half my age discovers a show I first binged 25 years ago from a friend's handmade VHS dubs.
That's a show that makes a habit of trying to tell the audience things they'll hope never to forget. It does so wonderfully. It's a story I cherish, and if someone half my age will perforce love it at least somewhat differently from how I do - so what? That the story remain loved is enough.
I dunno if any of that's any use to you, but share it in the hope it'll do you the same small good it did me, thinking on this of a quiet evening.
> We might be the last generation in living memory, for a while at least, who could ever say "you had to be there" and mean it.
Can you explain what causes you to say that we will be the last generation to say this? Not rhetorical, although this caused me to question it because I think that this is probably a constant wrt generations passing onto the next and unlikely to change.
He means after the advent of the phone camera. Practically anything anywhere is available to view on video or image of some kind. Used to be reserved for important planned events.
We now face a kind of reverse problem though where we're drowning in so much content that some interesting things can be missed or lost.
It's a sf TV show from the mid-90s made on a smallish budget even in its day; it needs a certain way of seeing to be read well in 2024. But it's also a show that broke a lot of ground for televisual science fiction, and it has been a small touchstone for many creators and showrunners working now. (If you do watch the show, expect to catch some references from the other side! B5 fans do love in-jokes, it seems sometimes even when writing their own scripts...)
That makes it an ur-text. What makes it a text worth visiting in 2024 is the marvelous character drama on which the entire epic space-opera story is built. Watching spaceships quickly palls, though those here are extremely impressive for their day. Watching people grow and change and learn and err and suffer and find joy, in a universe where drearily comprehensible manmade horrors and covert acts of grace live cheek by jowl with wonders and terrors beyond imagination, though - that never gets old, and I don't know many better places to do so than here.
But hey, it's not all bad. We might be the last generation in living memory, for a while at least, who could ever say "you had to be there" and mean it.
And for all it pangs our hearts to see our ephemera tend to dust, we also I think are, of any human generation to date, probably best able to hope that the things we really love from our time will be preserved. (I hope that's a distinction we don't end up holding on to...)
In just the last little while I've been getting to see that peculiarly ingenuous sort of joy again, as someone half my age discovers a show I first binged 25 years ago from a friend's handmade VHS dubs.
That's a show that makes a habit of trying to tell the audience things they'll hope never to forget. It does so wonderfully. It's a story I cherish, and if someone half my age will perforce love it at least somewhat differently from how I do - so what? That the story remain loved is enough.
I dunno if any of that's any use to you, but share it in the hope it'll do you the same small good it did me, thinking on this of a quiet evening.