"First post: A history of online public messaging"

"From BBS to Facebook, here's how messaging platforms have changed over the years."

For me, my first exposure to Internet"online public messaging" was dialing into some local BBSs and playing games like Legend of the Red Dragon and TradeWars. This lasted for about a year or two before I got access to actual, bona fide Internet, via a local(-ish) dial-up service called NetMCR, which later got bought by a slightly bigger company called Nuvox or something. The switch to Nuvox happened shortly before I moved to Redmond, WA in 2004 and got broadband Internet via Comcast, at which point my NetMCR/Nuvox account was killed.

The big thing for me during the NetMCR years was mostly Usenet, alt.fan.sailor-moon, and the OtakuWars! stuff. And my first ever website from around that era is, amazingly, still in existence, at least partially... which reminded me that ICQ and AIM were things that existed... and, holy shit, Suburban Senshi still exists, too, though not via the dead link on my old ass-website... *backs away, slowly, with hands raised in a placating manner*

After that... well, I started my LiveJournal blog (not linking to actual LiveJournal there) in 2005, and it's mostly been that kind of thing ever since, with failed dalliances with shit like Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr and such (some of which lasted longer than others).

Anyway, fast forward to today:

Watch on YouTube

Oh, and I guess I watch a lot of shit on Youtube these days, too.

"Out Of Pocket Star Trek Episodes | Castle Super Beast 266 Clip"

Watch on YouTube

I was going to save all of the "undead Pat returns to Montreal from the west coast of Canada and visits Woolie at Woolie's streaming set up for a while" arc and post the clips all at once, but this is good enough to have its own post.

*puts on Trekker/Trekkie hat (because I don't give a shit about the supposed distinction between "Trekker" and "Trekkie")*

Well ackchyually, Pat, we didn't watch "like 200 episodes where people go faster than warp 10." Because warp 10 was the hardline "you cannot go this fast" limit for all of The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager up to that point, and also after that point (outside of the occasional wonky shit such as this, which almost always involved godlike entities like Q or The Traveler or the Caretaker doing godlike entity shit). There were a rare few cases in The Original Series where something went faster than, like, warp 8 or so, and even those cases were seen as extraordinary. The only times I recall them explicitly going above warp 10 like it was a normal, everyday thing were in a couple episodes of The Animated Series, and some of the non-canon novels (and, I guess, the non-canon future of "All Good Things...", though that, again, involved Q). The showrunners for TNG and beyond decided to retcon the fact that you could exceed warp 10 in those earlier shows and explained it as a "recalibration of the warp scale" to account for the fact that "faster than warp 10" was seen in TOS and TAS, making it so they didn't really go faster in the earlier stuff than the speed that was recalibrated to be "warp 10." Hell, in Peter David's novel Vendetta (written years before "Threshold", before even Voyager itself [or Deep Space Nine, for that matter] existed) which was basically a (completely awesome) "what if the Doomsday Machine fought the Borg" work of official fanfiction on David's part (did I mention it was completely awesome?), he explores what happens if one were to reach warp 10, and it's pretty interesting. (Hint: it's not "you 'evolve' into salamanders.")

The above, specifically, is a textbook example of Pat's Stand, Crazy Talk, activating.

Beyond that, though, Pat's completely right in that Star Trek: Voyager mostly sucked asshole (though "Phage" is still my least favorite episode, more so than even "Threshold"). Even Enterprise was better, for the most part. And yeah, all that shit about Chakotay and the fake Native American consultant was absolutely true, unfortunately.

Oh, and that thing Pat talks about where the original Harry Kim died and was replaced by another version of himself... yeah, that happened. But then, Kim is not even the first to whom such a thing happened. Just a year before, on Deep Space Nine, the original Miles O'Brien was similarly killed and replaced by a temporal clone.

The planet of angry black people was, sadly, a thing in Next Gen, true enough. That was the super racist first season episode of Next Gen. There was a super sexist first season episode of Next Gen as well. And the Irish sex ghost thing was real, too. And the Worf spits acid thing was real, too.

And yeah... when they mentioned Quantum Leap and immediately went nuts laughing, I knew exactly what they were talking about. That wasn't too great, either.

And I remember at least the first season or so of Sliders. Or, at least, I remember that Sliders was a thing that existed. The only thing I actually remember from Sliders is that they jumped to a world that was almost like their original world, except that (among other things that were revealed later) green lights meant stop and red lights meant go.