Peregrinus

I am a second-generation Trekkie (my parents were part of the original letter-writing campaign in college), and at least fourth-generation geek (although we called geeks other things, and 'geek' meant something very different). I always liked TOS when it was on in re-runs while I was growing up, fell off the cliff of Trekkie-dom at about 12 and went after all the technical aspects with all the abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery. Uniforms, history, starships, science, organizational structure, writing, and on and on.

I've approached it all with the soul of an engineer -- deconstructing things, learning the intentions of the original makers and then what resulted from the game of Telephone/Whispers that producing a television show or movie requires. I try to work from first sources whenever possible, and massage what followed as minimally as possible to make the most consistent scaffold of a fictional universe I can on which to hang the stories.

I was on rec.arts.startrek.tech back in the day, transitioned over to the Flare sci-fi forums, was part of the self-proclaimed Advanced Starship Design Bureau, contributed to Bernd Schneider's and Patrick Kovacs' sites, and like to think I was on at least friendly-acquaintance terms with folks like Timo Saloniemi, Rick Sternbach, David Stipe, Mojo Libowitz, Shane Johnson, Andy Probert, Peter David, Aron Eisenberg, and a bunch of other people in Trek circles I've come to respect over the years.

I say all this because many on here will have no idea who I am. My Trek fandom faltered with the end of Voyager. I haven't been too keen on the TNG films, expecially because TPTB decided the Enterprise-D just had to go, and Nemesis was the worst of the lot. I struggled through Enterprise, despite the fact it was trying to be two disparate things at once, and ended up doing neither well. Trek09 was anti-Trek and made it much harder, for me, to be a fan and remember what I loved about Trek back in the day. So I haven't been around in online Trek settings for well over a decade -- which is an eternity in internet years.