Re: TrekUnited-Who did/didn't get there money back? Am I al
HRHTheKING said:
We were right indeed. I'm glad you finally see it that way. Your "ambassadors" were a disaster. Poor old "Vulcan3324" had the misfortune of being the official "liason" to StarTrek.COM.
In fact, for a short time there, IIRC, there were -several- liaisons to StarTrek.com (it was labelled a "problem site") because of serious organizational problems, and then Tim's wife showed up and announced her opposition to any such position at all, then proceeded to make all sorts of inflammatory commentary that did no help to anyone.
Sigh. Yeah. In the words of the TF2 Heavy, "So! Much! Blood!"
It was a mass delusion though. That was the problem.
True. I suppose I'm saying that there can be some value in a mass delusion. Good things did come out of TU: I made some friends there, some of whom I still run into at random in other venues today. A few of us went on into fan productions of various sorts. And the volume of fanfic coming from people once attached to TU is truly enormous. We all shared a hope. It proved to be a false hope, and that was hard on everyone, but it still brought a lot of people together.
Paramount told Brazeal that no money would be accepted in March of 2005. Instead of announcing this fact to the TU faithful, Brazeal buried it in a web-chat. It seems odd that TU, a group who were more than happy to make "major announcements" at the drop of a hat, for some reason kept this pretty important information buried on a thread with a low-key remark by the TU owner.
Really? I don't remember this allegation--later shown to be true--showing up until Michael Hinman's articles of early April 2005, a couple of weeks before the announcement that we were done. You may be right; goodness knows the Exec Staff was secretive enough.
Larry Craig was a Senator, was he not?
I was under the impression it was Mark Foley who actually supported ENT and TU publically.
You're exactly correct. I got my sex-offending Congresspersons confused.
That chance was probably never there at all, but that doesn't change the feeling we had at TU in those days, which was that we were fans and that, together, we could do anything.
That's where the isolation became a problem.
Yep. Right alongside that feeling of empowerment was the companion feeling of fanaticism. We were not a healthy organization.
When "Al Vinci" came along, there was hysteria on TU. Thread after thread passed based on this alleged person. I would say most of the active membership of TU were taken in by it.
Oh, I was, too. At the time, there seemed like no good reason not to believe in Vinci--Tim was so vague with the details that it took several weeks for anyone to discover beyond any reasonable doubt that Al Vinci was a fiction. And by the time those two weeks were past, the campaign was over.
Speaking of frauds perpetrated by TU: I never mentioned this because Tim Brazeal personally wrote to me to ask me not to, but I did some WHOIS tracing while I was on my "Waiting Prophet" streak, and I discovered that the domain MannyCoto.com (which no longer exists) was actually owned by Trek United. Tim claimed that Coto didn't want to reveal his close links with TU yet, but, given how suspicious I have been of TU, it seems to me very likely that the Manny Coto user who frequently visited TU was in fact a pure fabrication.
There. Got that into the public after a few years.
I don't think TU was ever more than a simple message board with members who had delusions of their own importance. The clearest sign of that came when your leaders began dishing out "titles" for themselves and their cronies. The most absurd being your PR woman, who's posts were hilarious pieces of unintentional comedy.
Hey, you're talking to the Trek United Midwest Regional Activities Coordinator! :P
As I said above, it was, to some degree (and that degree is probably in the 99-100% range), a delusion that we would ever get Enterprise back. So I agree. But it is a fact that, though who knows whether we can trust the TU money counter, we have testimony from dozens of Trekkies who gave thousands of dollars in the faint hopes of saving their show. That's not a delusion; it's an affirmation of how much we love our show. To be around people who shared such passion for
Star Trek for eight weeks or so was a gift and an experience I will never regret--despite everything.
The S6 had no "star" members. No leaders, no organisation, no "Media Staff".
We were just Star Trek fans with opinions. That's all.
When I think of the SS, the first name that comes into my head is
HRHTheKing. You were strident, deeply sarcastic, and everywhere at once, so, in my mind, you were the most important member. That's all I meant by what I said.
(The second name that always pops into my head was that friend of yours... what's his name? Had the same sense of sarcasm, and now I can't think of his name.)
