Star Trek

[Valka]

Okay, I just read the article... and I have to say as well that I agree with some but not with all.

After the TOS/TAS series, I enjoy Voyager the most. I love Tom Paris, the Doctor, and Seven of Nine.

Somebody once said that one measure of how good a TV show is, is how much fanfic gets written about it.

Fanfiction.net alone has over 8000 Star Trek: Voyager stories, and many of those are multi-chapter novels. I've been following and reading the stories written by a British university student whose pen name is "scifiromance" and she achieved the impossible several years ago: She found a way to write stories about Chakotay and Seven as a dating couple, a married couple, and as parents... and make them interesting. She even dealt with the old question of "what happened to the Borg baby".

Another series of stories I enjoy is written by a TrekBBS member who goes by the name of AlphaFlyer. She's Canadian, and writes some really good post-Endgame stories about the future careers of Tom, Harry, Janeway, Seven, and crosses over with TNG (as in Harry serves on Riker's ship for awhile - once Riker finally gets his own ship) and DS9 (Joseph Sisko's restaurant makes an appearance), and the nasty Admiral Alanna Nechayev (Picard's old nemesis on the Admiralty) is also a recurring character. This series of stories is a really good blend of Voyager and TNG, with the feel of TOS. Tom Paris is out there fighting Orions, Andorians, and in some cases being very Kirklike as he puts his street smarts and bluffing skills to work to get his ship and crew out of danger.

[Buster's Uncle]

I think I posted these long enough ago that the attachments broke when a lot of the olds one did, so what the heck.

[Buster's Uncle]

...I made "A literary debate", and that's me flashing Vulcan gang signs - out of frame, I'm pushing the capture button on my webcam with my toe.  Y'all may post to laugh at my jokes and praise me now...


Once I'd figured out sizing and orientation of pasting Spud in -not easy; not easy at all, with the hat and the lighting effects on the bill-  the challenge was the steering wheel.  It moves relative to his face as everything is tugged on.  I had to paste the back of the cap on his head, and paste that back, matching position in each frame and erasing the pixels that would have covered the steering wheel before I dropped the paste in, 17 times.  I shaved off superfluous empty background border around the edges, and ran an optimization of the file, also minimizing colors in the .gif palette, w/o discernible quality loss, before I saved.  The file should be smaller now, and therefore that much less of a burden on sites where it's used.  (It was 35K before, and 9k savings matters.)

Spud is so cool.  He just don't give an intercourse about nothin'...

[Mart]

Somebody once said that one measure of how good a TV show is, is how much fanfic gets written about it.

Fanfiction.net alone has over 8000 Star Trek: Voyager stories, and many of those are multi-chapter novels. ...

I remember, sometime around season 4 or 5? of ST:VOY, I found a forum, that had something like a storytelling fanfic/rpg. So forum members were assuming positions on a starship, that had the mission to contact USS Voyager, possibly bring it back. The idea was to write interesting story with a feel of a role-playing game. I almost signed for it, but then it did not work, since I had to attend my RL things.
I cannot find it now, don't remember the ship's name, the one they were serving on.
Some difficulty was, that till season 7, Voyager had no or little contact with alpha sector. The story was always in "danger" of some next episode spoiling it.

[Buster's Uncle]

...Mylochka and I were somewhat heavily involved in a ST club in California back in the caveman days of snailmail before and slightly after TNG came out.  There was a general newsletter, and a shipboard one where everyone assumed a crew character and wrote -I guess, memos- and there was no attempt at making it go anywhere like a story (and thus, comedy, comedy, comedy) - so, it was much like a forum where everyone's put on a fake persona, only you put a lot more into crafting a post, because it was gonna take a month.

I was writing both our characters -she was an obvious Sgt. Benjamin rip-off who took over the shuttlebay for a split-level condo and threw a never-ending party.  That one really caught on with everyone.  I came in later as a hard-boiled reporter covering the starship Tradition, and ST fandom being unlike most a traditionally a reverse-sausage party the ladies of the crew I had molestering me in my reports received it rather enthusiastically.

Good times, good times.  Too bad about TNG coming along and gutting fandom.

[Valka]

...I made "A literary debate", and that's me flashing Vulcan gang signs - out of frame, I'm pushing the capture button on my webcam with my toe.  Y'all may post to laugh at my jokes and praise me now...


Once I'd figured out sizing and orientation of pasting Spud in -not easy; not easy at all, with the hat and the lighting effects on the bill-  the challenge was the steering wheel.  It moves relative to his face as everything is tugged on.  I had to paste the back of the cap on his head, and paste that back, matching position in each frame and erasing the pixels that would have covered the steering wheel before I dropped the paste in, 17 times.  I shaved off superfluous empty background border around the edges, and ran an optimization of the file, also minimizing colors in the .gif palette, w/o discernible quality loss, before I saved.  The file should be smaller now, and therefore that much less of a burden on sites where it's used.  (It was 35K before, and 9k savings matters.)

Spud is so cool.  He just don't give an intercourse about nothin'...

That is terrific!

This whole thing with Spud is that he was the first avatar I had at CFC that was actually worthy of being called an avatar.

Somewhere waaay down in one of the old DYOS stuff, there's a picture CivGeneral did of Spud - as a kind of "thank you" to me for whatever reason... friendship, helping the DYOS guys find a home on that site, etc. So Spud has been immortalized in a webcomic.

I just wish the old smileygenerator forum hadn't crashed and burned. There was a massive server failure, and while some of the smiley sets and generators still work, the forum itself is gone, along with a few hundred of my PM messages, tens of thousands of miscellaneous smileys, and a ton of great posts from a lot of people...

Anyway, I think there are 2 or 3 complete Spud sets around somewhere - I'll try to find them. One set is a Couch Potato, with Spud sitting on a couch, watching TV. There was a time when another member of that forum made a "Mrs. Spud" and three spudlets (apparently Spud's children were born underground, but they were still pretty cute - not sure if I managed to save that image).

But I always imagined him as an adventurous bachelor, not really the type to settle down and get married. At least not yet.

I tried incorporating him into my RPG at Dragonloft forum, crashing the Christmas/New Years party one year. The problem was, nobody else there had any idea what kind of character he was, so a motorcycle-riding potato didn't really mesh well with the usual storyline.

[Valka]

...Mylochka and I were somewhat heavily involved in a ST club in California back in the caveman days of snailmail before and slightly after TNG came out.  There was a general newsletter, and a shipboard one where everyone assumed a crew character and wrote -I guess, memos- and there was no attempt at making it go anywhere like a story (and thus, comedy, comedy, comedy) - so, it was much like a forum where everyone's put on a fake persona, only you put a lot more into crafting a post, because it was gonna take a month.

I was writing both our characters -she was an obvious Sgt. Benjamin rip-off who took over the shuttlebay for a split-level condo and threw a never-ending party.  That one really caught on with everyone.  I came in later as a hard-boiled reporter covering the starship Tradition, and ST fandom being unlike most a traditionally a reverse-sausage party the ladies of the crew I had molestering me in my reports received it rather enthusiastically.

Good times, good times.  Too bad about TNG coming along and gutting fandom.

Well, the beauty of fandom is that if there's something you don't like, you can always write satire about it. A RL friend and I collaborated on a TNG crossover parody, and we were merciless in mocking the characters. The starship Surprise!'s captain was Captain Jacquard, and his 3rd Officer (aka Number 3) was Commander Bill Biker (don't ask what happened to Numbers 1 and 2; it was kinda messy...). We renamed everybody with puns or parodies of their TNG names (some names better than others). Data became Info, Deanna Troi became Hellana of Troy, and Beverly and Wesley Crusher became Beverly and Eastley Smasher. We made this a first-season parody, so Security was run by Lieutenant Wharf after the untimely death of Yasha Tar. I don't actually remember offhand how we renamed Geordi - he was an awfully forgettable character in the first season. But one thing I insisted on was dragging Star Trek into the modern era, and they were going metric. So Miles O'Brien became Kilometres O'Brien.

This was back in the late '80s, and unfortunately I don't have copies of most of the issues of our club newsletter (Thataway!). But this parody was a regular part of it, and so were Letters Home (the crew writes home to their families), and profiles of the crew personas our members adopted (as with a lot of Star Trek groups, we were organized like a ship). Some of us had more than one persona, which is how I ended up simultaneously playing a human A&A officer and a Horta geologist (note to self: do not eat the decorative rocks on the grounds at Starfleet Academy, as the humans tend to get upset about that...).

[Buster's Uncle]

There was a half-horta on the Tradition.  -Transporter accident.

[Geo]

So Miles O'Brien became Kilometres O'Brien.

 
Wasn't fair. You're Canadian.

[Buster's Uncle]

Having to be Canadian IS unfair, now that you mention it...

[Valka]

So Miles O'Brien became Kilometres O'Brien.

 
Wasn't fair. You're Canadian.

I just got really annoyed by how Rosalind Chao (Keiko) kept pronouncing "Miles."

"MY-YULZ!" she'd screech or whine... there was just one episode she was ever in that I liked - the DS9 one where she went up against Wynn over the Bajoran equivalent of teaching Genesis in school.

Having to be Canadian IS unfair, now that you mention it...

Well, at times it's damned annoying when Disney won't let me watch General Hospital on YouTube and people keep talking about all this extra content that's available for Big Brother that I can't access (Canadians are not allowed to watch CBS.com).

[Geo]

What's to miss on CBS?

[Buster's Uncle]

Big Brother - she done told you that.

[Geo]

Sneak TV - she done told you that.

Corrected that for ya.

[Valka]

No, I "done" specified CBS. I watch their three main reality shows - Survivor, Amazing Race, and Big Brother. I can find snippets of extra material on YouTube sometimes, but the feeds are not available to Canadians.

I'm surprised they let us vote for the next Survivor cast. Must've been the extra click revenues they wanted... /grumpy cynicism