Umm… it stands for “Nuclear Command Cruiser”. Yeah.

Back when I did a lot of Trek roleplay with the Starfleet crowd, we established space fighter squadrons on our ships, and decided eventually that we needed flight jackets. So we all bought dark-colored jackets in various materials and put Trek emblems on them in configurations that looked more-or-less authentic. Mine’s always been black denim, though it’s gone through different versions as the jackets each wore out. This one has a Next Gen combadge, a USS Yeager patch on one shoulder, a UFP emblem on the other, and a “Team Banzai” graphic on the back. (Why not mix my fictions?)

I’ve worn it a lot, in weather suitable for a light jacket and in practically any social situation that doesn’t require formal wear. I wore it to my Decipher interview, figuring it might help get me a job at a game company that made Star Trek cards. (Seemed to work…) Wearing it always felt like a bit of passive geek defiance: a declaration that yes, I was weird, but not unapproachably so.

Well, I wore it around during the unseasonably warm weekend, and if I needed further evidence that I live in a different world than I did in 1982, I got it. Twice, random strangers highly complimented my ‘flight’ jacket, both times following up with a brief conversation about the latest movie. I’m just not used to this. Eyerolls and smart remarks were once par for the course, but “wasn’t Uhura hot?” is a comment I’m not used to from the gentleman at the auto shop.

Whatever we old-schoolers might have to say about the recent film, it looks like interest in the franchise is back. Combine this with Obama’s public use of the Vulcan hand salute, and I’d say that the 21st century’s brought a different world for Trek geeks. I approve.

If you liked it, then you should have rolled Need on it.

Yep, I’m posting a lot of videos and a lot of MMO-related stuff right now. That’s in part because I’m too overwhelmed with life at the moment (sometimes positively, sometimes not) to be very deep.

So: if you’re familiar with the politics of loot distribution in high-level World of Warcraft raiding, you might find this as funny as I did. Otherwise, probably not.

Level 80

Level 80

Mirandala hit the level cap. I barely know what to do with her now, she didn’t manage that at 60 in original WoW or at 70 in Burning Crusade.

Also, she made a pair of X-Ray Specs: a gadget which, from her perspective, strips all the other player characters in the game down to their underwear. But what else would you expect from me?

Arrgh, we are warriors, arrgh, so there, arrgh, I mean it, arrgh

So, here’s a trailer for the Star Trek MMO coming early next year (y’know, if there aren’t any delays, which never happen to MMO releases anyway, right?) Windows-only at this point, so we Mac folks will have to either dual-boot or forget it and just keep giving our money to Blizzard, who’s been happy to take it for years.

I know that lots of the audience for multiplayer online games want to be the badass characters, so we get the Klingon trailer first. But as usual since TNG, the Klingon narrator sounds less like a proud warrior and more like someone compensating for erectile dysfunction. “Hi. My name’s K’Bob, and I’ve had this terrible inferiority complex since the Dominion War…”

Interesting, by the way, that in a setting placed decades after “Voyager”, the Federation’s still using Constitution-class ships (ones that look like Shatner-Kirk’s Enterprise). When your ship design’s still in use 200 years after the first launch, I’d say you’ve earned your contractor fees.