Comiconference, page 4
on April 15, 2013 at 12:01 amChapter: Comiconference
Location: Comiconference
Aaaaaaand right back into the proto-Shortpacked! stuff. Â Guess what? Â The “Vulcan Vandal” was based on a real guy! Â Take that, real guy! Â If his doppelganger’s portrayal as a self-aggrandizing serial fibber here isn’t enough to make you not like him, perhaps I should add that he kept on getting kicked out of all the MUSHes for propositioning all the other players.
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I’m pretty sure every fandom has a guy like “Vulcan Vandal”.
Why is Billie surprised Howard is at a Sci Fi convention? You think she would know that he would be going to it based on the fact that it is near enough to campus to report on it.
There is a long and complicated answer to your question, which involves the phases of the moon, the alignment of the stars, and whether or not the mall is having a sale at the moment.
The short answer is that Billie is an idiot (but I love her anyway).
I don’t think that that is surprise, rather, it is dread that claws its way from the darkest pit in her soul
Also, I feel it is necessary (it totally isn’t) to re-inform you all that I have never seen anything Star Trek related. Well, until the J. J. Abrams movie came out.
Well, if you get the urge Deep Space Nine is the best written. It’s one long continuous story, the others are more episode of the week with vastly fluctuating quality.
The Next Generation can be good but it’s VERY 80s.
I feel that TNG is a kind of transition piece from the episodic stuff that dominated for decades to the more serialized storytelling that dominated since DS9 and Babylon 5.
It’s funny to me we can use decades to describe media nowadays. Also, what the heck is a MUSH? All I got was something about sharing hallucinations.
Maybe it’s the scientific term for when blowhards hallucinate that people actually care about what they post? Probably not, but it would be funny if it was true.
MUSH (Multi-User Shared Hallucination) was a form of text based multiplayer gaming that was popular back in the dark ages of the internet. Basically a cross between a chat room and an MMO. Since it was text based you could program it to fit almost any genre. MUSH’s were usually pretty open so almost any user could create their own rooms others could explore.
Think a Star Trek themed text-based Second Life and you have the basic idea.
I have no idea why CRtwenty is speaking in the past tense here. MUSHs still exist.
Much in the same way that MySpace still exists. Yes.
Problem is, Trek doesn’t stick with the serialised storytelling. It tries sometimes but then the higher ups say ‘No, be more episodic like TNG.” failing to realise that TNG was popular because it started having ongoing stories and character development.
As someone who didn’t actually see TNG until a few years ago, I think it holds up pretty well after the first two seasons.
Yeah, it’s budget was high enough to be science-fictiony enough to avoid being so obviously outdated, and the writting and acting was usually good enough to still be pretty enjoyable. Not all of it though, some of it was BAD and only become worse over time.
One thing that kept TNG from feeling so dated is that, against all odds for an SF tv show, it predicted touch screen interfaces. People use tablets all the time, both big and small. The LCARS interface isn’t used, but it doesn’t look like something that couldn’t be used, or would never be used.
This is a reply for Uncle Rylon…
I know what you mean to say, but TNG didn’t really ‘predict’ touch screen interfaces. I once went to a facility on a field trip as a kid that had turtles and that had computers WITH touchscreens as interfaces. They had red points of light in the corners and four cardinal directions of the monitor, and essentially they could tell when you tapped the screen and translated that to input. They were normal PCs of the time otherwise other than whatever the hardware and drivers making that possible was.
Good point. I should have said that TNG predicted their ubiquity. As you say, touchscreen interfaces existed prior to TNG, that’s probably why it occurred to the designers to go with it.
But it clearly helps that all the Starfleet personal are using tablet computers for a lot of their tasks.
DS9 was OK but… some parts of the story were just too weird. Voyager was always my favourite (and first Star Trek I ever saw).
Is….
Is that Ninja Rick?
My headcanon has made that Ninja Rick, and now it won’t stop laughing!
He has infinitely too few katanas on him to be Ninja Rick.
He might have then under the table.
It is not.
His brother or cousin? The slightly more grounded rice farmer Bob?
I will admit I’m somewhat surprised he’s not listed somehow in the character tags. With tags like “Pony-tailed girl with glasses who isn’t Billy” and “dorm girl who offers to help” I didn’t think anyone was beneath notice.
It’s so weird / amazing to see these pages without the compression artifacts. Well, I guess I’ve seen them that way in the book… but still! It really stands out. (I guess as opposed to the formerly print exclusive comics, which I’ve never seen in lesser quality.) The first panel here is really what made me notice it.
Makes me excited to get to the older greyscale comics…
So THAT’S the thing that’s been missing. I only noticed it subconsciously.
The first Star Trek was not serialized for a simple reason. Each episode was written by a series of well known science fiction writers, specifically for the show. This practice stopped in the third and last season and the show went downhill from there. The original was meant to explore what the crew found on their voyages of exploration. The only serial type action was when the ship stopped at familiar ports of call to deliver or pick up supplies. The show was a ground breaker in so many ways. It was the first Science Fiction weekly show on TV. It was the first to show an inter-racial kiss, between Capt. Kirk and Uhura. It explored exploitation of resource, and exploitation of sentinent beings. The entire stage crew participated in getting the show in on time. When the show ran out of money for costumes because of the high cost of the transporter and other special effects, the set designer bought curtail backing from a local 5 & 10 cent store. The pastel see thru material was draped on the female cast and held in place with broches bought at the same store. That was for Harlan Ellison’s City in the Clouds. It was one of the Award Winning shows, for content and costuming. No other Trek show came close. Enjoyable maybe, but not the same caliber at all.
Babylon was a laugh. That same well know SciFi writer, Harlan Ellison wrote the original script and when it went live they had rewritten so much of it, that he sued to get his name taken off the show. It really did stink. I recall female fighter pilots being told to design curtains for the ship portholes and let the men handle the fighting….Roflmao.
PS. Google Ellison: he has won so many awards and his writing is so good it is scary. And gross. And it makes you think.
I was gonna be a bit of an ass and type TL;DR, but then I…R it. I’ve heard some stories about the original, like when they all pitched in on curtains? I think for the set display. Still, I always find reading stories of these types of things interesting. One of the reasons I like bloopers too.
Gradients. Gradients? Gradients!
Howard is the kind of fan I absolutely hate. The kind that won’t shut up about being a “True Fan” and how certain version of a series ruined everything.
Sadly every fanbase has a Howard in it.
Even worse, some of those ‘Howards’ have fanbases in them.
I can’t hate him. He’s just so… eager.
A dude that looks like Ninja Rick. Weird.
Oh look, douchebags, that’s funny, right?
And there’s this fandom’s Faz…