Star Trek 50th Anniversary

It's Star Trek's 50th anniversary today!

Star Trek was one of my favourite shows and big interests when I was growing up.  I even painted a huge control board, based on information from the Next Generation Technical Manual, so that I could pretend to be controlling the Enterprise (Enterprise-D for those fellow fans, TNG was always my favourite)

Ooh, there's a Deep Space 9 technical manual...

I don't know why I liked Star Trek so much, but the characters were cool (there was even an android on the bridge!), the ship did all kinds of great stuff, and the special effects looked amazing (at the time, anyway).

Anyway, I had an idea a little while back to start a series of videos looking at some of my favourite games (mainly computer but maybe a couple of tabletop or mobile games also), and it seems to make perfect sense to start it off today with a look at Star Trek: Birth of the Federation. Enjoy :)

Leonard Nimoy

I wasn't planning to blog right now.

As I type this, it's just gone 3am, a time that I think can be safely categorised as "the middle of the night".  Why am I up now?  Well, I went to bed at 7pm feeling really tired, and I guess 7 hours must have been enough sleep, so I got up about an hour ago and thought that I might catch up on some work while the house is quiet.

Then I found out that Leonard Nimoy has passed away.

Star Trek was a significant part of my life when growing up.  Wednesday nights at 6pm was when we'd sit down to watch Star Trek on BBC2, and I used to record the shows on a tape recorder so that I could listen again (we didn't have a video recorder at the time).  I also remember running up a fairly decent phone bill over several months talking to a similar aged kid who was also into Star Trek, as down the phone we'd pretend to command a starship.  Because, let's be honest, we all want to command a starship.  Flying through space, in charge of hundreds of people and a piece of technology that can, apart from other things like fly from planet to planet and blow up asteroids, materialise as many pies, chocolate cakes and cans of beer as you want, rocks.

And Spock was always awesome.  Regardless of what problem was facing the crew, he'd have some fantastic Vulcan solution to it, whether it was logically working out the solution to a problem, spotting a tiny detail about something from looking through his scope on the science station, or just being able to knock someone out with a nerve pinch, you know that you'd always want him on your team.

I'm fortunate enough to own a copy of his second autobiography, I Am Spock, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, and learning about the man that created the character.  Everything I've read and heard about him seemed to point at one thing - he was a great man.

Even his last tweet was brilliant.

A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP
— Leonard Nimoy (@TheRealNimoy) February 23, 2015

Thank you.

By Beth Madison (_DSC5611-1 crp) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Wil Wheaton has written a brilliant post about Leonard Nimoy which I'd recommend is well worth a read.

How is Wil Wheaton 40?!?

Been watching a lot of the Guild this evening, so far I'm into season Three and I just spotted in the credits a certain Mr Wil Wheaton.  Now I've never really noticed Wil in anything since Star Trek; TNG many many years ago (Wednesday nights at 6pm on BBC2 when I was about ten - joy!  We didn't have a video recorder though so bizarrely I used to tape record the show, so I could listen to it and imagine what happened!) but this is more down to my lack of facial recognition capability than Wil's lack of talent.

Visiting his blog (http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/) has brought me up to date on his work - note he's been wearing a beard from time to time, again how am I supposed to recognise people when they change their appearance?  When the Data guy did stuff without painting his skin gold it took me ages to spot him too.

He's forty - oh my god, because I still think of him as Wesley Crusher I imagine him being 15 or so - and actually pretty cool.  One to follow on Twitter, I think.

The other noteworthy thing for today is when I went to the local Sainsburys store to get some bits for dinner, I was searching for cottage cheese (which took ages because I wasn't wearing my glasses) and the shop assistant next to me starting kicking off about liver, and how it looks disgusting.  He then apologised for being random!  Bless the guy, I wish my mind worked quicker (one reason I'm not a stand up comic - if I got heckled it'd be two days later when I thought of a good comeback) because I should have told him that random is good.  Damn, we're on this planet for a short time, and if you feel an urge to be random then be random.  Random's what I love about i-series and I wish I could get some more randomness.

Ciao.