This is a post celebrating 50 years of Star Trek

Here’s to Gene Roddenberry and his Wagon Train to the Stars idea. Here’s to NBC for giving him a second chance at a pilot, a rarity. Here’s to Captain Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Sulu, Chekov, and of course Uhura. Here’s to Paramount for giving the Original Series crew 6 movies.

Here’s to Gene again for launching the Next Generation. Here’s to seven years and four movies of Captain Picard, Riker, Data, Worf, La Forge, Troi and Crusher.

Here’s to Rick Berman and Michael Piller for branching out with Deep Space Nine. Here’s to seven years of Captain Sisco, Dax, Kira, O’Brien, Bashir, Odo, and Quark. (And Worf again.)

Here’s to Berman and Piller and Jeri Taylor for creating Voyager. Here’s to the crew’s seven year odyssey home, to Captain Janeway, the first female captain on TV, and Chakotay, Tuvok, Paris, Torres, Kim, the Doctor and Seven of Nine. (And Kes for their first three years.)

Here’s to Berman and Brannon Braga for showing us what came before Kirk’s time with Enterprise. Here’s to Captain Archer,T’Pol, Trip, Reed, Phlox, Sato and Mayweather.

And here’s to J.J. Abrams for wanting to direct the Kelvin timeline. Here’s to Roberto Orci and Damon Lindelof for bridging the gap between timelines with Spock Prime. Here’s to Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban, Anton Yelchin, John Cho and Zoe Saldana for inhabiting such iconic characters and making them your own over three movies. Here’s to Simon Pegg and Doug Jung and Justin Lin for Star Trek Beyond. Here’s to a Star Trek universe with LGBT onscreen representation!

And here’s to Bryan Fuller and the Discovery crew, whoever you are! I can’t wait to meet you.

Thank you for 50 years of exploration and stories. Thank you for inspiring a fandom and so many to pursue science as their career. Here’s to the next 50 years.  Live Long and Prosper.

Tenth Anniversary of Doctor Who

Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Doctor Who returning to TV after a 15 year hiatus. I shared my thoughts on the Ninth Doctor along with a couple Geekette bloggers.

The Daily Geekette

“Rose,” the first episode of the show produced by Russell T Davies and starring Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper, premiered ten years ago today, on March 26th 2005.

The hype machine for the return of Doctor Who after its long hiatus was in full swing, with BBC viewers getting tastes of Doctor Who during 30 second promos.

Many of the Geekettes are fans of Doctor Who so we decided to share our thoughts on the Tenth Anniversary of nuWho.

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Sandboxes Aren’t Just for Kids — Writing as Pure Creation

When we were kids, there was the sandbox, filled with toys and friends. We’d build things, destroy things, and then start all over. It didn’t matter how small it was, or how quickly we could dig to the bottom of the box. We had total power over the sand.

Then, when we reached our 20s, we played computer games, and that sandbox we had as little kids showed up again, this time complete with a monitor and a mouse. It didn’t matter if we weren’t running the fastest machine out there because, once we put the disc of The Sims or Roller Coaster Tycoon into the CD-ROM drive, we were kings once again. We had total control and could create anything we wanted. A roller coaster that crashed every time? Why not? Two neighbors who hate each other at first and then fall in love and raise a family? All in the span of an hour? Sure.

But those sandboxes have limits and rules. You need a computer to play the game, or the box in which to actually put the sand.

When we put words on paper or, in the modern world, on a screen, the power comes rushing back. But there are no strings attached this time, no rules to play by, and no objective to beat. We just have pure creation.

At first, there is only darkness. But with four words, “let there be light,” we can see each other. Do you see what I did there? I wrote some words and changed the environment.

Writing is creation and change wrapped up in one simple action. By putting words down, an environment is changed. An environment that can be visited again and again both by writer and reader. Our imaginations are linked by the cyclical act of writing and reading. I can envision something and write it down, and you can see it.

Writing is the ultimate sandbox. We carry over what we learned from our previous sandboxes. Instead of Sims to play god with, we create fleshed-out characters with lives of their own. Instead of sandcastles, we build stories. And while we still can find a certain satisfaction in destroying a story, we know it’s more enjoyable to share it with others.

But we’re not kids anymore, and real life doesn’t have the same rules computer games did. Just because we write something doesn’t mean we get paid in points or dollars. All that freedom and expression isn’t guaranteed to put food on the table.

I got the chance to major in writing. But I found that, after four years of writing classes, I began to lose sight of the sandbox. Each semester, I had to adjust to a new professor with different rules of what was acceptable and what was not. Some assignments were pretty open-ended, while others were quite exact. Sometimes, writing for a grade wasn’t fun.

Luckily, I discovered National Novel Writing Month.

“NaNoWriMo,” as insiders call it, has as its main goal pure creation. Participants are tasked with writing 50,000 words in 30 days. It doesn’t matter how bad those words are because, by December 1, there are 50,000 more words than there were on November 1. This is a competition, but you’re not up against the other writers. You’re up against yourself for bragging rights. Can you silence your inner editor long enough to reach the goal?

November 2011 was exhilarating. I created with total freedom, something I hadn’t felt in a long time. I mostly wrote by the seat of my pants. There wasn’t any outlining beforehand. I just set off with an idea and started writing. I was creating again, and this time I didn’t have to cater to professors or assignments. Finally, I was writing something that was wholly my own.

I found my sandbox again. And I’m never losing sight of it this time.

–My contribution to Before You Quit Writing Read This!, a collaboration by The Literati Writers and available on Amazon right now.

From a Nerd to a Geek and Why It Shouldn’t Matter to Anyone Else

Labels are lame. We get caught up over what label applies to what or who, and end up missing the person, the main point.

I’m not going to sit here and spell out the differences as it applies to everyone, because the internet has been debating the issue of Geek vs Nerd for a long time already.

BUT I spent the long weekend at Arisia, a local SciFi/Fantasy convention and the last panel I went to on Monday was “Letting Your Geek Flag Fly” all about being “out” in the real world as a geek.

I realized that in high school I pretty much was a Nerd. School was top priority and while I had a few after school activities I never did any after school sports. Instead I’d hang out in the library and try to knock off a subject of homework before it closed at 4. (If you had to lug those heavy textbooks home every day, you’d do the same!)

Things started to shift when I was in college and two things happened: I joined Twitter, and discovered Star Trek Voyager on youtube. (Star Trek TNG had been part of my early childhood, but I hadn’t watched Voyager.) I fell head first into the fandom thanks to an online message board, and even tried my hand at writing some fanfiction.

You could say I was hooked, in more ways than one. I decided to get a blog on wordpress and then tumblr as well. It was on Tumblr that I discovered Doctor Who and very quickly became obsessed all over. I met people through twitter and tumblr who share the same interests as me. I was able to “come out” as a geek. And it wasn’t a huge shift in my identity at all, I was just finally embracing what was inside of me all along. The only thing that changed were the posters I put up in my dorm room every September.

Geek is mainstream now. Huffington Post reports on Doctor Who. The Nerdist has a TV show on BBC America.  Fantasy football unites the jocks and the numbers geeks.

Perhaps that is one of the reasons why the label itself doesn’t matter as much anymore – because so many other people are a geek in some shape or form. Social Media has connected us in more ways than we could fathom and everyone’s geek is showing.

What do you think?

Yes I have a Kindle but…

While the traditional vs E-Book debate wages on and at times turns to a heated war, I tend to stay out of it and just keep reading.

Same goes for Amazon vs Bookstores in general. While I lamented the loss of Borders (Over a year and I still miss the School Street Store!) I just switched over to Barnes and Noble, even becoming a member. I have bought books through Amazon as well, especially certain Star Trek books that are easier to order online instead of walking into a store that may or may not have them.

However I’m not firmly in one camp or the other. I do enjoy just browsing in a store, even if I already have a book in my bag I’m currently reading. (There’s been a couple times where I actually still bought something) Weirdly enough I find myself turned off by those second hand booksellers because of their lack of organization. What most find cozy and imitate, I find overwhelming.

I am relatively new to the world of Kindle. I have used the iOS app on a small screen before, but I didn’t get the real deal until March of 2012 or so. My mother won a Kindle Fire in a charity raffle and gifted her old Kindle Keyboard to me. Around the same time I had bought and started reading The Company of the Dead by David Kowalski, a heavy alt history novel coming in at a whopping 750 pages. It was a great premise but at times a bit of a slog, and commuting to work with a 750 page book wasn’t fun. So I actually bought the kindle version as well and finished reading it digitally. Once I switched I definitely started to enjoy the story more as I didn’t have to worry about the heavy book. I could actually read on the bus.

Using the Kindle full time never really took off for me, probably because I believe it’s beginning to show its age. I noticed that sometimes when I am trying to highlight a long passage or something that stretched onto the next page, I will have to wait for the cursor to catch up. A few times the Kindle has frozen and I have had to restart it. Lately I will leave it hibernating for several days and discover that the battery has emptied and I must charge it to use it. Perhaps I should get in to the habit of turning it completely off before I leave it.

But if the old Kindle breaks, it’s not the end of the world, especially since most of my small digital bookcase is on Amazon’s “cloud” already.  And actually that helps me as I will send samples of books to try to my iPad app instead of my Kindle.

For Christmas I took a trip out to Chicago to visit my Grandparents and brought with me The Night Circus which I was in the middle of, plus my Kindle, iPad and another book. I ended up just finishing The Night Circus and then using the Kindle app to finish the revised edition of So You Want To Be A Wizard  by  Diane Duane. I left the Kindle itself in my luggage the whole trip.

There are so many different ways to read these days. All that’s missing for me is to get into audible books as well. I just don’t know when I’d have time for that! Happy reading!

To FB or not to FB?

That is the question.

So everyone’s favorite social media site went public today. Meaning they’re offering stock at $38 a share. But thanks to some market mumbo jumbo that I don’t quite understand, casual people like you or I can’t buy the stock yet. (I have picked up some market knowledge from working for four months at a financial news site but clearly not as much as I hoped. Such is the plight of a (digital) paper pusher.)

For the past week, the news sites I follow at work have barely mentioned anything else besides FACEBOOK! What will it be priced? Is it a good investment? What’s the best strategy? And so on. In all the chatter however, I noticed that the people dominating the conversation are hard core investors who most likely to busy trading to be spending a lot of time on the site.

How’s that for irony? The people who know the site best are being left out of the conversation. There are really no social media experts chiming it. It’s all about money now.

For some reason this really irks me. Perhaps because I’ve been on the site for so long. Back when it was Boston area colleges and invite only. I got in as soon as they opened it up to high-schoolers,  back when your network actually meant something.

Or more likely I’m making a big deal out of nothing and I’m just sick of how saturated the news is with basically the same story over and over. I can’t wait for Monday to roll around in the hopes that $FB will be old news. I don’t even care if it does well or not. I just want the media bonanza to be over.

Blogger’s Block

I have so many unfinished drafts it’s not even funny anymore. I keep starting posts and then either outright ignoring them, or forgetting about them. And then when I rediscover them, I ask myself should I even bother posting this? It’s not even timely anymore. 

I keep meaning to fall into a more regular posting schedule. But it’s like I really don’t have anything to say. Well that’s not true, I have things to say, but not enough to actually finish a post and hit publish.

Who am I blogging for? Myself or others? Do I care enough about this blog right now to maintain it? Probably not. But there’s a tiny voice nagging me to keep this space updated, because it’s literally my best foot forward on the internet. There’s a reason why this and my twitter are linked and I put mastery of both wordpress and twitter on my resume. I want to be a professional writer. I really should have a professional looking blog on the internet.  Now that I have a salary, I should look into buying a domain to host this so I can put it on my resume and stuff.

So yeah that’s what has been going through my head the last couple weeks every time I come onto wordpress. It’s mostly a guilty feeling for not having any quality posts lined up.

Maybe I should take a page out of Charlie McDonnell’s book and force myself to post at least once a day for a week and see what happens. Let’s try to resurrect this page.

Blog Stats- Or How Wide is the World Wide Web?

Apparently it’s really wide. I took a look at my country stats and was shocked to discover I had three visitors from as far as Bangladesh on my blog yesterday. Made me smile just thinking about it: half a world away people are landing on my blog…

Blog Visitors For May 3, 2012

Most likely it’s because of my post on the Munich U-Bahn system, which is still the most popular post on my blog. Whenever people do a google image search related to German/Munich Subway Map or something similar my image comes up and they find my blog that way. (It’s not really my image, I got it the same way they are finding my blog!)

My Love/Hate Relationship with Fanfiction.

There’s no denying that fanfiction is legit anymore. Not when respected news magazines like Time write a piece covering the world of Harry Potter fanfiction. However this is 2012, when fandoms are much more present and mainstream.

But back in say 2004? It wasn’t nearly as legit. Sure it had come a long way since the fanzines and the first Kirk/Spock stories that Trekkies wrote and traded with like minded fans of Star Trek. But for the most part it setayed on ff.net and other archives. You had to know what you were looking for in order to find it.

In high school, I ran with a circle of friends who were very big into manga, anime and Japanese culture in general. I mean big.They started the anime club and always were reading manga magazines, like Shoen Jump. I wasn’t into it. So when they started writing their own stories based on the anime and manga series they were following I missed the boat.

When I first discovered fanfiction (through them) I have to admit my reaction was highbrow. I didn’t see the point. Why write with characters that already existed when you could create your own? It was ninth grade, and I was busy trying to take a story I had started a year early and turning into a school assignment. I had other things to do than craft my stories around other people’s characters.

Despite my friends’ – for lack of a better word- fanatism, I never did drink the same kool-aid. However I eventually came around on the idea of fanfcition. And my friends, who were busy writing their stories, did become better writers. As a group they created a blog to post their favorite fics to read.

Before I graduated from high school, I did briefly try to get into fanfiction, through the Harry Potter fandom. What interested me was taking the plot of the story (say Goblet of Fire for example) and imagining what would have happened if the plot went left instead of right. (What would changed during Order of the Phoenix if Cedric didn’t die, but only Harry could see him?) Unfortunately those musings were never flushed out into a story.

Fast forward to the moment in college where I rediscovered my Star Trek roots and fell in love with Voyager. I had finally found my fandom. Thanks to an online forum I became obsessed with fanfiction. Particularly of the Janeway/Chakotay variety. (There’s this huge subsection of those who write fanction called ‘shippers’ who write about characters in a relationship, either canon or otherwise)  Despite having no on-screen confirmation of this relationship, we were all convinced that the Captain and her First Officer were destined to be.

I lurked in the community, devouring other people’s works and making a few friends in the process before I finally worked up the courage to write my own fanfiction. I’ve only written a few pieces, one of which I posted on my blog over two years ago.

For now though, I seem to be off fanfiction again.  A year ago, before I graduated from Hofstra, I discovered Doctor Who through tumblr and while I still consider myself a Trekkie, I’m also now a Whovian. I found some well written Doctor Who fanfiction to continue the trend. But I stopped short of becoming obsessed with it, mainly because like the Voyager fanfiction I had found a few years earlier, a majority of it is focused on the relationships that seem to never get as much attention as the plots onscreen. Which is fine, but I’m not really into that right now. I’m much more interesting in examining either alternate possibilities, or what happens off screen.

Who knows? You might see some more fanficition here. But if you do, I’ll make sure to warn you.

~

Bonus Links – click if you’re feeling adventurous and don’t mind bad writing

My Voyager Fanficition collection

Pre-College Original Fiction, including that story I wrote for 9th grade.

 

What I used to do before I had a real blog

I used to have a LJ.

I say used to, because the last time I updated it was back in college, maybe freshman year. Hang on let me go check.

Ah, well it seems the last time I posted was in February of 2011, but it was cross posted from another failed journal hosted on Dreamwidth. (And it was promoting something here so it’s an example of BLOG-ception)

When I signed up for LiveJournal, I was not quite 16. I hadn’t been able to maintain a real journal or diary despite trying a few times. I thought if it was on the computer, I’d be more willing to write in it. (The definition of a millennial, wouldn’t you say?) LiveJournal had three privacy settings: Public, Friends Only, and Private. For the most part, mine was Friends Only and all of my friends were ones I knew in real life from my school.

I did write regularly through much of high school. (I started back in tenth grade) I had an “audience” so it wasn’t purely just for me. At times, I did censor myself. Which, in the long run, was a good thing because it prepared me for the “next generation” where I have this blog and twitter. There’s no sense barring my deep dark secrets for the internet to see. But there’s also no point in having a blog that lacks “personality.”

One final note: I went back and made my entire Livejournal public after I moved on from using it. But as a result of not deleting the “blog” I still get email notifications of spam which is quite annoying, especially since a majority of them are in RUSSIAN.