As I near completion of my Ph.D. program, I’m actually not very busy at the moment, except in the ways I keep myself busy: following the news intensively as I have done now for several years, the occasional blog post, and catching up on a lot of Star Trek fan videos. The latter are attempts of variable quality to create new episodes that can be watched, almost always on YouTube. Some of them have dreadful scripts; one has actually pretty good scripts, but only two voices—both male—to play both male and female characters in an animated series; some hearken to the original series; others place themselves in the universe of Star Trek: Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or Voyager; some place themselves in the earlier universe of Enterprise or even before. Some represent considerable investments: The producers—all volunteers—have built their own sets. Others re-use backgrounds from the official productions with CGI. Some are animated, occasionally with video game software. The video game animations are stilted and entirely unrealistic, often ruining what is for me an intensely visual experience. One series stopped doing video productions and picked up with audio-only—the loss of the visual here was, for me, too great a loss. Read more →