Still, if you’re putting it out there that there is no decision in life that you might have made differently, that there were no moments where you might have done something different in retrospect… well, as I said, I don’t believe you.

Certainly the more than 60 year stream of accidents and encounter and sheer lucky breaks that have added up to what is, in the rear view mirror is, to my so-called life is chock full of points where I likely made the wrong choice.  Or, perhaps worse, where I am not sure what might have happened if I had made a different choice.  There are a myriad of inflection points in every lifetime where a seeming simple choice made differently could have sent you down a completely different path.

My brain likes to revisit those when I am awake at 3am.  That is the witching hour for regrets and self-recriminations.

But maybe I am being too pedantic.  Never go full pedant.

While there are choices I would make differently with the help of hindsight, it is perhaps the general outcome that people are on about.  In the end I’ve made it this far and am happy, healthy, and reasonably content in life.  I don’t wake up every morning ruing the day I made some ill-advised choice that ruined my life.

Perhaps that is “no regrets” enough… though that drunk person loudly declaring it still gets on my nerves.  And don’t get me started on Marc Andreeseon.

All of which is just some noisy groundwork to bring me around to today’s topic, part of the blog 20th anniversary week, which is regrets.

20 Years… see what happens when you let me use Canva?

Overall I have no regrets.  I haven’t woken up 20 years down the line and felt this experiment has all been a waste of time.  I mean, if has been, it has certainly been no greater waste of time than most hobbies.  Would the world have been better off had I watched sports or read a few more books or joined a bowling league or became obsessed with creating model train layouts that fit in a suitcase?  Likely not.  Hobbies fill the time, and in the end time washes us all away.

But were there choices I might have made differently given the reflection of time.  Let’s take a walk down that list.

The Name

The name of this blog pains me 20 years in.

We need a name that’s witty at first, but that seems less funny each time you hear it

-Seymour Skinner, The Simpsons, Homer’s Barbershop Quartet episode

This one comes up every year, and each year I get more strident about it.  Also, that quote comes to mind every time.  The name/title of this blog, which is still as of this date “The Ancient Gaming Noob,” is one of those things that seemed funny at the time, but in hindsight I am kind of lost as to why it was funny.

There are multiple problems with the name that irk me.  So let me go through some rules for blog naming I have formulated over the last 20 years.

Don’t start your blog name with “the,” and probably avoid “a” and “an” as well, though the latter two at least have an alphabetical advantage.

Avoid a blog title that implies a moniker for you.  People ignore my nom d’plume and refer to me as “the noob”… or they used to.  Almost nobody references me 20 years down the road, and the few that do tend to refer to me as Wilhelm or TAGN… though the latter, while preferable, is still not my name.  I recall a few instances when somebody attempted to use “noob” in the title as a pejorative… to which I tend to respond, if at all, that it is in there for a reason.

Being bad at video games is something of my brand as well.

I am also going to suggest you select a name that is a bit more on point.  Wilhelm’s MMORPG Explorations might have been a better choice for me.  Or Wilhelm’s Online Life, since it isn’t all about MMORPGs here, and hasn’t been for quite some time.  Or any one of a million variations on the theme.  I could create a blog naming Mad Libs.  Virtual Wilhelm, Wilhelm in The Matrix, Wilhelm and the Ono-Sendai Experience, Wilhelm’s Digital Existence, This Digital Life, and so on and so forth.  I don’t even need to resort to AI for that shit.  I could keep going and going.  I took a whole course back in college about brainstorming and other methodologies for idea generation.  My instructor would be depressed my meager efforts I am sure.

I also remain a bit exasperated with the idea that I felt I was old enough to be “ancient” back in 2006.  As one might paraphrase, “I’m 41, I’m not old.”  But that is the perspective from 20 years down the line.  Also, there was a bit of the “I’m going to write about games old enough to have that moniker,” which did come to pass.  So I guess I’ll concede the point… also, I kind of grew into the term.  I am now old.

However, given all that time, I have never seriously considered actually changing the name.  To a certain extent it does have an “its so dumb it kind of sticks with you” aspect to it.

Also I do like the acronym TAGN.  The one rebranding I have considered is just making all the header art say “TAGN” rather than the name of the blog.

And I can’t think of anything worse after two decades than changing one’s URL, so even if I did change the name I’d need to keep the acronym and I have yet to come up with an acceptable replacement.  My brain gets stuck on Trans-Apline Gaming News or something like that and is unable to proceed.

If I have a regret but I am not going to do anything to change it, is it really a regret?

The Hosting Choice

In the end, there isn’t anything completely intolerable about WordPress.com.  I am still here after 20 years.  That says something.

It is more the series of annoying changes over the years as whoever is in charge at Automattic Inc. keeps chasing trends in an attempt to keep the line going up.  The company fosters a culture of “new is obviously better” and trying to explain to them that you just want something like the blog you’ve had for the last two decades is like trying to explain calculus to a dog.

They are completely incapable of understanding a world where you do not want to upend your online existence every two years with a new way to drive featured content that is written, approved, and illustrated by AI.

Seriously, you can pay for a hosting plan to have a blog that practically writes itself.

So I spend time kvetching about their dumb changes in the month in review post on a regular basis.  I rather suspect they hate me… specifically me… because I open up a forum post every time they break some old feature I use with their new stuff because the idea of testing something before pushing to production is a completely foreign concept to them.

As with the blog name, the obvious question is “Why don’t I leave?”

And the obvious answer is “leave for where?”  Is there some place better?  And changing URLs and feeds and whatever after 20 years feels like a good way to lose the small readership I have acquired.  I think Google sends me traffic mostly out of habit.

In the end, the regret is that, when I had the choice back in 2006, that I didn’t just set up shop over at Blogger.  I’d have a blog layout like Bhagpuss or Noizy Gamer, with over active side bar content and a my posts in the center and Google would have mostly left me alone for the last two decades, making incremental updates at longer intervals and I would have little to complain about.

But that is a counter factual I cannot really test.  I might have been annoyed about any number of other things over there.  The grass might merely be a different shade of off-brown.  But I wouldn’t have some twenty something trying to tell me that uses AI to write for him that really, blocks are how REAL writers work.

Again, I won’t be changing anything… except my blog theme at some point when WP.com finally breaks support for it… but I do wonder what that different path might have looked like.

Not Starting Sooner

I bring this one up a lot too.

If I had started two years earlier, if I had gotten the bug and kicked off in August of 2004, I would have possibly had a whole series of post with contemporary accounts of the launch of EverQuest II.

That, of course, is the key to this whole site; having accounts written in the moment.  Recalling things five or ten years later is cool and all that, but your brain edits, your memories distort, your view softens, and you end up with a compromised recollection that is driven as much by you biases as your actual recollection.  I tell myself I had a lot of fun in early EQII, but it would have been nice to have the notes.

Though why stop there?  Technically Blogger has been around since 1999.  It landed in August of that year, which is a little too late to for early EverQuest, but there was still a lot of stuff I might have written about.  I could have had a rich commentary about the revival of TorilMUD in 2003 or things about Diablo II or Age of Empires II: Age of Kings.

Wouldn’t that have been grand?

Of course, this presupposes the idea that I would have wanted to blog back then, that I was ready and able, or that I would have written things of value.  Would 2002 me have diligently recorded my travels in TorilMUD?  Would 2004 me have noted down any valuable insights into post-cataclysm Norrath?  It is hard to say.

Again, a counter factual that one cannot test.  Also, there is the next topic.

Not Having a Plan

So, given the above regret of not starting earlier, I am going to complicate that by acknowledging that I launched into writing the blog when I did just because I felt like it at the moment, that it seemed like a cool idea, and so off I went.

My first post back in 2006 has the sketch of a plan, a list of things I might like to write about.  But that wasn’t an actual plan.  I had no idea what I would really end up writing about, what would seem worthwhile at the time and have value in retrospect.

I had no format in mind, no cadence of posts planned, no structure on which to build a journey of nearly 8,000 blog posts.  I was just winging it.  And it shows in the early posts.

Yes, some things started to gel fairly early.  The WoW instance group formed in that very first month and writing about our adventures became a staple of the blog then and there.  But how to write about even that was something which evolved over time.

I don’t think I had a real plan… well, I am not sure I have one now.  One might suggest I have less of a plan and more of a habit.  But a structure didn’t really form until maybe 2009 at the earliest.  And even then things were often chaotic until at least 2012.

Then I go read something from 2015 or 2018 and I wonder when did I get going.  When did I settle down and have a regular routine?  At what point was this blog something of intention and not just spasmodic response and “hey, let me tell you about what I just did in a game?” sort of things.

Do I even have a plan today?

Maybe not.  But I am better at recording things that I think I’ll find have some value a year or five years down the line.  Still, I kind of wish I knew what I was about on all of this.  But maybe having a plan is overrated

Things Not Written

My drafts folder can get pretty deep at times.  Right now it holds just shy of 200 potential posts.  It is about time to go prune it back again.  While there are a half dozen items in there that I will eventually publish, and maybe a dozen more I might revive, the rest are likely never going to happen.

That post about Star Trek Online going free to play isn’t ever going live.  I have a couple hundred words invested in a 2013 post about finally finishing the Wheel of Time series.  Spoiler: Matrim Cauthon is the only character that was at all interesting to me in the end.

I have a quote of the day swiped from a blog that was a repost of something from a forum that I wanted to run with.

No one will be able to see where WoW is a great game and *why* it fixed so much of the stupidity deep-rooted in the mmorpg genre.

That was in 2014 and I have forgotten what I was even going to say. (Though you can read the source here still.)

There are also a dozen or more starts at posts about EVE Online, some of which were picked up in other posts.  Others just went nowhere and were abandoned.

I mostly delete these after too much time goes by, though I clearly hang on to some of them.

So there is one from 2009 with the title Colonel Paddlehopper to the Rescue! which was post I started about playing Toontown Online with my daughter.  The body of the post is blank.  I write the title to remind myself to do the post, then never did it.

I don’t think I played more than four hours of the game, tops and, as such, I remember very little of it.  I didn’t attach any screen shots.  There is just an empty text field where I should have put some notes.

That is the one I regret not finishing.  That post and a few others like it that really depended on knowledge I had in the moment, knowledge which slipped away as the draft lingered and aged, waiting for me to return.  What was I going to say?  What did we do on that day back in 2009 that I set out to write about?

Tags and Categories

After 20 years I am mildly dissatisfied with my organizational scheme for posts.

In hindsight, I might have made categories related to specific genres of games, things like MMORPGs and Survival Co-Op, or First Person Shooter, or whatever, then left all the game names as tags.

Then again, that would have required me to have a solid and developed structure early on in the life of the blog… that elusive plan… and 2006 me probably would have just filed everything under MMO or some such and have ended up here wishing I had categorized by game title instead.

The annoying bit is mostly that WP.com has both tags and categories.  If I had gone with Blogger as a platform it would have been just tags and that would have been at least one step back from the problem.

The Interaction between Blogging and Gaming… and Life

Now we’re past the tangible and deep into ideas about paths not taken.  We’re also somewhat past regrets as well I suppose, but we’ll get to that further down the page.

I have posted in the past about the tension between blogging about video games and just playing video games.  Do I play to blog or blog to play?

I have no doubt that the path of my gaming would have been different over the last 20 years had I not been blogging about it.  Potshot will occasionally comment about something being good for a blog post and the need to keep the blog fed.

The influence of the interaction has been real.  I have, at various times, not played a game because I wasn’t ready to write about it, because I had too many other things going on related to the blog to introduce a new element.

But more so are the titles that I have played due to the blog.  I strongly suspect that I would not have gone in on Warhammer Online had it not been a blogging things.  I am absolutely sure I wouldn’t be playing the comically unfinished Stars Reach in early access had I not started writing about Raph Koster and Playable Worlds since before the game was announced.

Things like that gain momentum, get a life of their own as you follow them in your writing, keen to fill in the next stage of the story.

I am also pretty sure I wouldn’t have played EVE Online for most of the last 20 years had I not been blogging about it, and especially null sec, where I have felt the need to keep updating the ongoing story of that drama.

Then there is WoW and the instance group.  Does that even happen if the blog isn’t a thing?  I can’t even remember the details now of how Potshot and I ended up getting that going.  There are some long lost email messages somewhere that set this up.  I mention the interaction somewhat obliquely in an early post on the site, but what really happened?

And does the group keep going if I am not driving the weekly dungeon content posting?  Do we go play the other titles we do?  Are we playing Valheim or Palia or Planet Crafter if there is no blog?

Are Potshot and I even in regular contact here in 2026 if the blog doesn’t happen and the instance group fails to become a thing?  Do I even have my current job, the referral for which came though Bung in our group?

There is a whole chain of events, of coincidences and near run connections, that weave in and out of not just my gaming life, but my real life here.  It is almost a bit eerie.

Am I even me if there was no blog started?  What path do I take if not this one?  Do I become some shitposter on Reddit or angry guy on Massively OP or somebody who keeps their Facebook feed loaded with whatever it is I end up doing?  Do I still play video games, or do I not even care?  Am I happier?  Lonelier?  Or just different?

Summary of Regrets

Does any of that even qualify as regrets?  Does exploring the path not taking and wondering where it might have led without any real plan qualify if you’re still reasonably happy with how things ended up?  Has this post just been an elaborate, verbose version of that “No Ragrets” tattoo?

I don’t even want to think about it.

20 Years… see what happens when you let me use Canva?

Unlike most collector’s edition, this one won’t run you $100.  It is free, though it might be deemed too expensive by some even at that price.

I have the usual summary post slated when the day lands.  But I thought I might use this week to reflect on blogging and what has happened here over the last two decades.  Or such was my plan.  I originally had six posts sketched out, then five… and then I could only really breath life into three.  So much for the plan.

Anyway, strap in for an abbreviated sort of self-aggrandizing snooze-fest that is only really possible when an old guy celebrates being bad at something for a really long time.  Like, nearly a third of my life that is.  But hold your applause and congratulations for Saturday, the day of real celebration.  Who knows, I might not even make it that far at my age.

The first post I have slated for the week is a review of games I have written about.  This idea started with a post by Tipa over at Chasing Dings, where she listed out all the MMOs she had played.  That flirts with definitional issues and what is an MMO anyway, so I decided to avoid that… though I’ll probably return to it some other day… and just zero in on a list I could more easily define; the game I have written about.

And then I decided I didn’t want to write about every title I ever mentioned… there are some Zynga crap titles I mentioned once or twice that I could not possibly generate the interest to say more about… so I decided to cut that down to the top 20.

Twenty Games for Twenty Years.  There seemed to be a symmetry in that alongside it indulging my laziness.

The Categories vs Tags and Post Counts

Most of the titles on this list have categories of their own, selectable on the side-bar from the Categories drop down menu.  Why some but not all?

If I give a title its own category on the blog, that means I feel I am committing to it.  I want that game to appear in the categories menu on the side bar for easy access to the many posts I expected to write about it.  Tags I generally reserve for games I don’t think I’ll write about much as well as things like expansion names, game locations, characters and NPCs, and in the case of EVE Online, star systems, fleet commanders, doctrines, battle names, war names, and organizational names.

If I play enough of a game I will elevate it to a category.  If I end up not writing much about a game it might get demoted to a tag, though that function does not work reliably on WP.com, so some demotions never went through.  Elite Dangerous, for example, has all of four posts here.  Oh well.

Anyway, I am going to link to the category or tag URL for each game, in case you feel the need to infinite scroll your way through to verify my count or something.

As for the count of posts… well, not every one is a post solely about a specific title.  For example, I wrote about multiboxing a bit back, and while I was mostly focused on EVE Online, EverQuest and WoW were both used as examples, so they got marked as well.

And then there are the month in review posts, all 240 of them, where I write a brief summary of games I played that month, which then get marked and included in the count, even if the post was mostly about other things.  EVE Online was probably the biggest beneficiary on that front, with more than 200 such inclusions.

The Top Twenty

1 – EVE Online – 2,507 posts

EVE Online holds the distinction of not only having the most posts written here (as well as another 2,800+ posts at my other blog), but it is the title I have been most committed to over the last two decades.  I took a few breaks during the first five years I played, but have been on board with it since the Crucible expansion back in 2011.

I have spent time covering wars in null sec, expansions and updates, events and plans, the monthly economic report, CSM elections, as well as the often bizarro world beliefs held by the execs who dictate how the game should evolve.

2 – WoW & WoW Classic – 1,803 posts and 496 posts posts respectively

What can I say?  Azeroth abides.  While it was an early front runner for most posts, EVE Online passed it during one of the several breaks our group have took from the game.  It is also the game I have likely played the most with people I know IRL.  WoW Classic’s arrival in 2019 managed to get the group back together for another run at vanilla Azeroth.  And, as happened the first time around, we fell off at Cataclysm.  Seems to say something.

I usually tagged the expansion I was playing in posts, and the top five expansion tags are:

1. Wrath of the Lich King – 91 posts
2. Cataclysm – 86 posts
3. Warlords of Draenor – 66 posts
4. WoW Legion – 47 posts
5. Mists of Pandaria – 40 posts

The Burning Crusade got screwed on that list because I seem to have used different tags at various time, The Burning Crusade, Burning Crusade, and Burning Crusade Classic as well as just Outland occasionally.  They add up to about 70 posts… I might have missed a tag… so still behind Cataclysm.  Why would I write so much about Cataclysm?

3 – EverQuest II – 822 posts

Unlike the previous two titles, I played EQII at launch.  As I will get to in a later post, had I started blogging two years earlier I would have had a crazy number of posts about the game as its first year was… if not great… something to talk about.  Still, nostalgia and revisits to the title kept it near the top of games I have written about.

The game was seeing a bit of a revival around when the blog started, with the Echoes of Faydwer expansion signalling SOE’s desire to maybe play the nostalgia card.  I have been back a few times over the last 20 years, though I haven’t logged in for a few years at this point.  But I keep covering it, and it gets an expansion every year that is usually worth a post or three.

4 – EverQuest – 741 posts

100% nostalgia driven.  I played EQ at launch as well and who knows what this blog would look like had I started writing about it back in 1999.  Instead, aside from the run with Potshot on the Fippy Darkpaw server back in 2010 or so, my time and writing has mostly been thoughts about the game without actually playing it in any serious way.  I did do a tour of early zones for the 25th anniversary and I have poked my nose in for a couple of special servers, but EverQuest Legends, which I had decided is just a flavor of the main game so lives under the category, is the first time in a long time where I have actually put some effort into playing.

My coverage has mostly been about news, expansions, and special rules servers over the years.

In an odd twist, The Serpent’s Spine expansion, which came out not long after the blog launched, and which sought to redo the leveling experience into a more quest driven venture (totally not copying WoW which totally didn’t copy EQ) will be the focal point of a special rules server this year.

5 – Lord of the Rings Online – 561 posts

Another title I played at launch… hell, one of the few I played in beta.  It will turn 20 itself come next April, so also a title that has been around completely during the span of the blog.  One of my early posts explored the idea of how one could even tell the story through a shared world MMORPG.  The instance group took a few swings at the game and I have come back and played it multiple times.  I even made it to Mordor.

It helps both that the game is a unique look at the world of Middle-earth, unlike any other we’re likely to see again in my lifetime, and that I have a lifetime subscription.  I bought in back at launch in what was likely the best economic deal ever for an MMORPG on my part.

As such, for actual time played it is probably in the top three, after EVE and WoW.  The game is still a bit of a kludge and SSG doesn’t have the staff to maintain it properly, but it carries on and I keep an eye on it even when I am not playing.

Interlude – The Dividing Line

The top five were pretty obvious.  I could have probably guessed that list without looking, possibly even in the correct order.  If you have been reading the blog for more than a couple of years, you probably would have had a solid guess for the top five as well.

After that… we kind of get into the weird zone.  There are some easy guesses in the 6-20 range for sure, but also a few “Did I really write that much about a title I barely played?” entries as well.

6 – Pokemon and Pokemon Go – 262 posts and 208 posts respectively

Starting off in the weird zone is the Pokemon category, which isn’t a game but… what… 20 or so games.  It is a true “category” unlike the above, with specific titles specified in tags.  The top tage is Pokemon SoulSilver, which has 40 posts associated with it, followed by HeartGold with 37.

There is some overlap.  Early on I was using a Pokemon Go tag and putting it under the Pokemon category.  Then I had two categories and was using both.  So there are probably a dozen or so fewer posts that the two combined categories might imply.

Still, in the end, I wrote about Pokemon because we played a lot of Pokemon.  My daughter and I started off on the DS Lite with Diamond and Silver and played through to the Switch era.  We bot got Switch Lite units and played a few of the titles in that era as well.

7 – Rift – 164 posts

Now we’re into the “did I really write that many posts?” zone.  I mean, I played me some Rift, that is for sure.  Enough to get one character of each of the four archetypes to level cap before the first expansion.  And then came the first expansion and the upending of the design philosophy that made the base game great and I did not play much more after that.

But I kept covering it I guess, writing about later expansions, business issues, and the eventual acquisition of the assets of Trion by Gamigo, which has kept Rift going ever since.

8 – Diablo III – 148 posts

Again, that many posts?  Sure, there was a lot of pre-amble; posts about announcements for the then upcoming game around things like art style and the always online nature or the title and the lack of LAN play support.  And then the game came out and it had problems, largely driven by the desire to make the auction house a thing, but was fine.  Then there was the big expansion which fixed itemization and remove the auction house.  I played it some more after that.  But there wasn’t all that much to write about, was there?

9 – Minecraft – 145 posts

A very solid and completely valid entry on the list.  For a stretch between the middle of 2015 and 2019 I played a lot of Minecraft.  I setup a server that I ended up sharing with maybe 20 friends and acquaintances over its lifetime.  It was a good time.  We have tried to go back again and start over a couple of times, often when new features have been announced, but I always get a strong “been there, done that” vibe once the initial excitement wears off and the interest of the group quickly flags.

It doesn’t help that it is more sandbox than game.  I have felt, since early on, that there was a missing element in that you could build, say, a castle… and then what?  It looks cool, and that can be enough, but there is no “use” for it really.

Stopped covering it when Microsoft merged Mojang accounts into their account system and screwed up the process for me, so if I wanted to play again I’d have to buy another copy of the game… maybe… because my MSFT account was screwed up by the whole thing as well.

In short: Screw Microsoft.

10 – Vanguard: Saga of Heroes – 137 posts

That is a lot of posts for a title I never really played.  I tried.  A few times.  In beta.  At launch. After it went to SOE and had sat for a bit.  Once it went free to play.  One final time when it was on the chopping block.  And it never grabbed me.  But the drama around it… well, it was a tale of its own.  It is an object lesson in the need to do the fundamentals well, you need to make the most basic game play loops enjoyable, because if you can’t do that then your special sauce features won’t matter.

11 – Valheim – 125 posts

Here we are with a title I have both legit played and written about.  I grabbed it when it hit early access back in February 2021, saw its potential, and the group ran with it for a few months.  I have been back since then, for four play through runs.  I am not in love with the Mistlands and the Ashlands, and will probably not love the Deep North when it lands in two days.  But I will probably have a solo go at it again once it settles down because it is a good game and really set a standard for the booming co-op survival base building genre.

12 – Warhammer Online – 96 posts

Remember how excited we all were for Warhammer Online?  People were really hyped up and came to yell at you in your comments if you were anything but completely enthusiastic about the game.  I had people angry at me for pointing out that the key in manual did not actually open the quest log as advertised.  I was right and I will die on that hill.

This did not open the quest log

WAR was going to kill WoW as Mark Jacobs ushered in a new era of PvP and PvE with a host of revolutionary ideas.  They knew the genre better than anybody and nobody could teach them a damn thing.  Bears bears bears!

As I mentioned above, core gameplay loop must be fun or your special sauce won’t matter.  Also, most of the special sauce was kind of mid.  Public quests were fine, but not a revolution and WAR proved once again that being first doesn’t buy you much if other people implement your idea better.  The Tome of Knowledge was just garbage, an attempt to force disparate data into a single format.

So people ran battlegrounds for a couple months because the quest path was such a slow grind by comparison.  There were a few weekends of fun open world battles.  And then everybody pissed off back to WoW or something else and the writing was on the wall.  At GDC 2007 Mark Jacobs predicted disaster for companies throwing money at things trying to take on WoW, and he was right.

If you played back then and you’re thinking “Well, it wasn’t that bad. I remember liking quite a bit of it.” that is your brain tricking you by editing out the bad parts.  This happens to me all the time.  Still, if you have to prove it for yourself, you can over at Return of Reckoning.

Some people felt maybe Mark Jacobs had learned from the experience and placed their hope in Camelot Unchained.  But no.  Dark Age of Camelot was his peak and you can still go play it via Broadsword.

At least it was determined that MMOs are, in fact, a niche genre.

13 – World of Tanks – 96 posts

I have played quite bit of World of Tanks.  I even made some YouTube videos about it back during my very brief run at that sort of thing.  I’m not quite sure how I ended up with nearly 100 posts about the game, but there we are.

14 – Star Wars: The Old Republic – 90 posts

The silliest thing about this is that I pre-ordered it, then cancelled it… but since I had made an account during beta I somehow got to keep the pre-order items.

Played in beta, didn’t like it, cancelled my pre-order, then mostly covered the EA hubris as they also predicted WoW killer numbers and set benchmarks for failure that would come back to haunt them.  Some companies will make their own drama.  And then, after launch, EA stopped reporting on the game in their quarterly reports because it “wasn’t interesting” or some such lie.  The whole thing was a drama machine, not helped by the fact that its launch required that Star Wars Galaxies be shut down.

The game wasn’t for me.  It was too story heavy and I am not a fan of the BioWare thing of putting words in your character’s mouth.  Also, I am not a fan of shooting mobs 17 times with a blaster at point blank range to kill them.  That felt dumb in SWG and it felts dumb in SWTOR.

The game, however, has carried on and found success as a free to play title.  Selling hotbars and other UI elements irked some people, but you have to make some money.

I did go back to try it again briefly at one point… but that didn’t last long, so I am surprised again that I managed 90 posts around the game.

15 – Diablo II – 89 posts

I feel like I should do two more posts just to get this past SWTOR.  An influential title that lived on long past Blizz’s official support for it.  The Diablo Battle Chest was still a top seller now and then for years after the Lords of Destruction expansion came out.  It was revived and brought into the current era with Diablo II Resurrected, a model for such remasters/remakes.  This fits on the list.

16 – TorilMUD – 82 posts

A very influential MUD during the 90s, arguably the inspiration that spawned EverQuest as Brad “Aradune” McQuaid played it at the same time I did, so we may have raided together.  Last pwiped or restarted back in 2003, it runs on to this day.

I wrote a whole series of memory posts about various aspects and locations in the game.

Not a lot of posts given how much time I have logged on the various iterations of the game… my main has over 100 days played, and I have a dozen alts… but kind of a lot for a title I haven’t played really at all since 2004.

17 – Star Trek Online – 79 posts

This was one of the titles I wrote a bit about during the first month of the blog.  When it ended up launching I was all in and jumped on board with a lifetime subscription.  If my LOTRO lifetime subscription was my best economic deal for an MMORPG, this was arguably my worst.

I really wanted to like it, but it did not click with me at all, being poor at a bunch of things and not very good at any one thing.  It has been traded around like a mediocre relief pitcher for years now, I think my most surprising moment was when it went free to play and I couldn’t imagine how that hadn’t already happened.  Rarely mentioned now, but for a while I covered it.  One of the titles demoted from Category to Tag.

17 – Guild Wars 2 – 61 posts

A lot of posts for a game that has honestly never clicked for me.  I think my main insight was to predict that, despite Anet’s statements, that they would end up shipping regular expansions because that would bring the money NCsoft demanded of them.   I have taken four runs at the game, and even after that it still feels like a game I should like.  I just don’t like it when I get there.

18 – No Man’s Sky – 60 posts

A bit of a late bloomer around here.  While it launched in 2016 and I have owned a copy since 2017, I didn’t really get into it until a few years ago.  An interesting space title that keeps expanding, at times it pushes on the barrier between online games and MMORPGs.

19 – Stars Reach – 57 posts

A lot of posts for a game that isn’t done… and might never get there.  But it also got attention here when it was announced and the design goals were being posted.  It also got a few posts backfilled because I categorized some of the early Playable Worlds posts as Stars Reach because that is where we ended up.

20 – Enshrouded – 55 posts

The follow on for our group to play after Valheim, an excellent co-op survival crafter that we ran through in early access.  However, the hand crafted world, while excellent, did somewhat limit replayability.

Honorable Mentions

I am running out of steam and my descriptions are not getting any more interesting as we get further down the list.  I could have probably stopped at 10… but, you know, 20 years is the theme here.  And it might be worthwhile to just list out who didn’t quite make the cut.

So here are the next twenty(-one) on the list.  Make of these what you will.

• EverQuest Next – 49 posts
• New World – 49 posts
• Dungeons & Dragons Online – 46 posts
• StarCraft II – 43 posts
• Project: Gorgon – 40 posts
• Civilization V – 39 posts
• Camelot Unchained – 38 posts
• Need for Speed World – 37 posts
• Zwift – 36 posts
• Shroud of the Avatar – 35 posts
• Pirates of the Burning Sea – 32 posts
• DC Universe Online – 31 posts
• Star Wars Galaxies – 29 posts
• PlanetSide 2 – 29 posts
• Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen – 29 posts
• RimWorld – 27 posts
• Fortnite – 26 posts
• Runes of Magic – 25 posts
• Ultima Online – 24 posts
• Diablo IV/Diablo Immortal (tie) – 23 posts

This is all against a total of just shy of 8,000 posts on the site, so no one title dominates.  EVE Online rings in at being part of 31% of the posts on the site. (I did resist the temptation to categorize/tag this post with all the titles mentioned.  There is such a thing as too much recursion.)

And, again, these posts are not mutually exclusive.  Most of those StarCraft II posts are probably part of BlizzCon prediction or review posts, where I covered and tagged most of the Blizzard titles.

There is also the fact that some of these numbers are going to continue to grow.  I don’t think I am at my last EVE, WoW, or EQ post yet.

Others I may be done with… or maybe might have one more post in me.  If Rift or Runes of Magic or SWTOR closes down, I’ll probably write that post.  But I cannot forsee me writing anything about them otherwise.

There it is, one view of the history of the blog.

Certainly A Planet Crafter

It makes a bit of sense when you learn that Aqualis is, as the name implies, a water planet with islands.  And, once the theme was set, further islands were christened with with names from the region until you might think you were in the Strait of Malacca as you navigated our expanding archipelago. (Sans gulags, unless you have a particularly dim view of our base.)

That is how we ended up with Krakatoa being somewhat to the west southwest of Java, mostly due to me naming things before remembering which direction is on the right side of the map.  That Krakatoa decided to erupt a few days after I used the name was something of an odd coincidence.  (The name of the post is a reference to a film about another eruption.)

But I am way ahead of myself here.  When we last left off Potshot and I had only just landed on the planet Aqualis, having opted to travel with only some food, water, and a bit of backup oxygen.  Thus modestly provisioned, we did touch down on a sandy beach on a desert island that would have seemed so sparse of resources that the crew and passengers of the SS Minnow might have decided to just swim for it rather than spend their time figuring out how to power a radio with coconuts.

Aqualis Beach… it is all beach

Well, soon to be Sumatra wasn’t entirely bereft of resources.  You can see in the distant background the sand littered with the usual mineral bounty that we found initially on the first planet, Prime, when we started out journey.  Iron, titanium, silicon, magnesium, cobalt, and silicon were all to hand in a modestly generous way, scattered about the sands for us to pick up at our leisure.

A new mineral was available to us as well… phosphorous… which had no immediate use.

Also scattered about the island, and the three other islands that seemed to make up the geography of Aqualis, were clams.

Some clams by the beach

These bivalve filter feeds seem to have the most curious of diets as opening them up yielded all sorts of things, like uranium rods, seed packets, various quartz, fuses, and like rare materials that don’t just show up in the starter zone of the first island.

Later I did a bit of inventory in my head and figured, all told, the initial clam yield lined up with the ingredients necessary to build an extraction launch platform and an interplanetary rocket.

The devs were keen not to leave the foolishly intrepid stranded on the beach.

We did not build that structure.  Instead we started in on building out a base of operations.

The clams could also be deconstructed, yielding another piece of an otherwise growing pile of as yet to be useful phosphorus and a much more useful piece of super alloy.

In exploring the near but not too near other islands it became apparent that the draw distance and the rather flat ocean that made up most of the terrain was going to make having a beacon at our base handy.

While Potshot laid down the 3×3 buildings that would make up the base, putting the second floor on at a jaunty offset, I took our ONE piece of aluminum and put up a beacon.  Since I built the beacon I got to name it, which is when I went with Sumatra as a name.  From little things.

Welcome to Sumatra base

Not very much later we discovered that the map module on our suits worked, that we didn’t actually have to put up new satellites for that.  Somehow the ones on Prime counted.

At that point there was a very serious discussion about taking down the beacon to reclaim our one piece of aluminum because, while we had lots of basic minerals and a selection of rare ones, not to mention an over abundance of super alloy nuggets and a few rods, aluminum clearly going to be our gating mineral right away.  We needed some for so many things.

But we also needed ice.  We needed ice for the initial vegetubes to generate oxygen.  There were a lot of minerals laying about, but no ice.

Potshot, remembering the old saw about running the sausage factory backwards to make pigs, managed to pull together the pieces to make the basic recycler.

This device takes anything you put into it and returns the pieces used to make it.  In the case of our bottles of water… we had brought quite a bit only to find ourselves on a water planet in fully upgraded suits that included a water filtration system, so water was not going to be a survival problem.. it would turn them into ice.

As Potshot noted, the international scientific community has a warrant out for anybody using these machines, given how readily they violate the laws of thermodynamics.

(Though, if they really want to go after violators, the whole planet… or is it a moon… of Aqualis should be on the list.  Liquid water and sandy beaches on a planet with no atmosphere?  Pull the other one!)

Having done that and built a couple of the oxygen producing vegetubes in order to get terraforming under way, we were still stuck on finding aluminum when I suggested we recycle one of the super alloy rods.  They are made with eight super alloy nuggets and a piece of aluminum.  And, it worked.  Now we had a couple of pieces of aluminum and an ever growing supply of super alloy nuggets.  We could barely store them all.

Then, about an hour later, after griping about still being shy of the aluminum we needed the whole time, I suddenly asked if we couldn’t recycle the super alloy nuggets.

Potshot immediately rejected this, forgetting that we spent some time back on Prime making them, the ingredients being one of each of the basic minerals and one piece of aluminum.

About two minutes later we had all the aluminum we needed and a pile of other resources as well thanks to the magic recycler… and we still had an abundance of super alloy nuggets.

At that point we were off to the races and started getting some stuff built.  The terraforming was starting and there was soon some moss on the rocks.

Sumatra base getting going

As we learned back on the previous planet, you can start seeding trees and grass and flowers and insects and fish long before the atmosphere can possibly support them.  Again, liquid water on a planet with no atmosphere… not to mention the temperature.  This place, best case, should have been more like Callisto than Catalina Island during the off season.

We were still resource constrained.  We had looted all the clams, picked over the satellite wreck, and cleared the beaches of useful items, and had an ample supply of super alloy to recycle, that did not provide everything.  In particularly short supply was sulfur, a key ingredient in explosives and fertilizer.  We started looking farther afield, but we had covered most everything.  Even the shallows around the four islands were bare and the occasional asteroid strike wasn’t bringing much relief.

Each location so far had a mechanic for introducing new resources or access to additional resources, often related terraforming progress.  On prime a sufficient rise in the temperature would melt ice that blocked access to other areas.  On Selenea temperature and oxygen level unlocked access to the various terraforming structures.

On Aqualis your terraforming progress… makes new islands appear.  Seriously, they rise right up out of the water and there they are.

A new island appears

Each of the new islands has more clams to find, a specific resource to harvest, and the usual crashed satellite to loot.

Usually contains the best loot

The first island was named “Austerity,” no doubt a reflection on the current state of supply.  But as we progressed more rose up out of the water and we got back on theme with Java, Timor-Leste, and Borneo (with a second base at one end named Brunei).

I was there when Borneo emerged from the water.

Borneo arises

And it just kept going.

Borneo fully erect… or something

Borneo brought with it sulfur, so we broke that bottle neck at last.  But there is always something else standing in the way.

For us T2 fertilizer, necessary for most advanced plant/oxygen structures, was in short supply.  Its creation requires squash, and while we had found seeds for beans, eggplant, and mushrooms to use in our food growers, squash seeds had yet to be found and they are a key ingredient in the process.

Potshot had read somewhere that, using the magic recycler, one might get squash seeds by recycling rare larva.  We had a few, so I gave it a try and… no luck initially.  But rare larva did yield T2 fertilizer on each pass.  Then, through experimentation, I figured out that recycling a butterfly larva could get you a rare larva, and we had a ton of butterfly larvae sitting around, so our T2 fertilizer problems were, if not solved, then at least mitigated.

The lesson in all of this was that because we landed knowing all the recipes for the all the upgrades, most of the challenge was finding resources.  There was an exploration aspect to the planet.  New islands rose up out of the water and there were things to find.  But most of it was figuring out how to get a specific resource and, if we couldn’t, just doing without.

Once you’ve explored… and Potshot built a long staircase to get to that upper portion of the island we named Borneo above, so there was some work involved… it came down to figuring out ways to speed up terraforming.

We built a site to launch satellites and then eventually bit the bullet and built a trade rocket platform and a trade shuttle platform.

Looking at Cape Dead Kennedys from Mission Control

The former let us buy some missing pieces we couldn’t build.  We had a decent balance of trade tokens as the automated systems we left behind kept just sending off materials and collecting tokens.  The latter let us grab items that were stored in our bases on Prime and Selenea, including some items that only appear on those locations.

The locations available in the game

Humble and Toxicity are the two DLC planets you can buy, while Skeo is a new planet available to everybody who owns the game, which was launched last week.  We’ll likely be headed there next.

Anyway, we’ll get to that.

The point is that eventually you get to where you either watch the numbers tick up to terraformed or you figure out ways to make them go faster.  Launching satellites that boost progress is the go-to on the faster front.  That also includes some comedy if you go up the gantry with supplies for two rockets and do a dual launch to watch the rockets spin out of control.

That does not look good Dr. Von Braun…

I managed to get a launch where the rockets passed by the gantry and I was able to hop on and ride one of them briefly, thinking about Slim Pickens in Dr. Strangelove as I did so.

But eventually you run short on resources to launch satellites.  You can engage in base building and decorating.  Potshot built us a nice little observation deck on top of our base.

Up on top of the base

As with No Man’s Sky, you can never take off your space suit, even when the planet has been terraformed.  So I am not sure how comfortable I really am on the couch.  But it probably helps to sit down now and then.

Also, as we have an atmosphere now and a day/night cycle you do get the occasional glorious sunset over the base.

Sunset on Aqualis

Now, as I write this, we’re in the final stretch for Aqualis.  It will be fully terraformed before this post goes live.  Our plan is to take the travel rocket to Skeo next, the newly added planet.  We’ll just need to figure out what to bring along for the trip.  Snacks and drinks and some extra oxygen no doubt.  And maybe some selenium and phosphorus, which are minerals exclusive to Selenia and Aqualis, just to have a bit on hand.

New Eden Me

But EVE Online is a game of numbers.  Well, any MMORPG is really a game of numbers.  People like to say that EVE Online is “spreadsheets in space,” but if you scratch at the surface a bit you’ll find that World of Warcraft is really just “spreadsheets with orcs” or whatever.

I mock Wall Street for this, but the driving factor for most MMORPGs is making the numbers get bigger, which is essentially making the line go up.

I was originally going to try and pull in all of my combined characters, of which I currently have eight over three accounts, but that… became work.  And the numbers felt less meaningful.  Also, I do most everything on my main, who is the one who turned 20, so this is just a snapshot of him.

ISK – Money Makes New Eden Go Around

I do not really keep close track of ISK so long as I have more than enough for my immediate needs.  But I have also been in a big sell-off of excess stuff in my hangar for the last 6-8 weeks, so I am at something of a peak.  So the game reports this as the total ISK value of my account.

Wilhelm ISK balances

That totals up to 102 billion ISK combined, but the asset value estimate of 57 billion is somewhat dubious.  The game’s asset valuation can be skewed dramatically by low volume items.  So while the PLEX conversion to 7.5 billion ISK is likely correct, I wouldn’t borrow against the combined assets estimated value.

Which leaves me with 37.4 billion ISK in my wallet, which is the most ISK I have ever had at one time.  I could probably buy and fit a supercarrier if I skimmed some loose ISK from my alts.  But then I would just have another capital ship I almost never fly.

Still, I feel like that total at least keeps me from being in the category of the “space poor.”

Not being space poor however does not qualify me as a tycoon or some sort of space business mogul.  This is far more a matter of just hanging around for 20 years and the natural accumulation of stuff that goes with it.  I can (barely) remember hitting one billion ISK for the first time back in September of 2008.

One billion ISK

Look at that old UI!  After mission running and mining and manufacturing and research, I ended up hitting that number through playing the market, finding things in demand and selling them back at Jita or Amarr… or at storyline mission hubs in the case of kernite.

Basically I do not enjoy grinding for currency in any MMORPG.  While I can go through fits of things like ratting, and I can make close to a billion ISK a month doing simple PI on my main and an alt, I fall off that wagon pretty quickly when I am not feeling engaged.

This is encouraged by the null sec line member lifestyle, where I have to buy doctrine ships but if I lose them on a sponsored op I get reimbursement for the loss.  It isn’t always 100% of the loss, but it is usually enough that any minor economic activity on my part will make up the difference.  I am a slacker because my situation allows it.

In short, the question probably shouldn’t be how do I have 37 billion ISK in my wallet after 20 years.  It should be why do I only have that much?  Seriously, it wouldn’t have taken much more effort to have double that.  But effort… I am in short supply on that front.

Skill Points

EVE Online does not have levels, it has skill points.  Skill points are… not a currency, but something you accrue that you can apply to skills which enable you to use different ships, modules, and other things.

This was a lot more simple before skill injectors, when skill points were just earned as time passed.  Since skill injectors CCP/Fenris has gotten more and more “generous” with skill points.  I used to mark time in 10 million skill point increments, which used to take 7-8 months to achieve.  Now it is closer to every 5 months, even when I spend some time training alts.

So that timeline looks like this.

• Start Playing EVE Online – August 2006
• Ten million – November 2007
• Twenty million – June 2008
• Thirty million – January 2009
• Forty million – August 2009
• Fifty million – March 2010
• Sixty million – November 2010
• Seventy million – August 2011
• Eighty million – June 2012
• Ninety million – December 2012
• One Hundred million – rolled right past with the battle cruiser split
• One Hundred and Ten million – September 2013
• One Hundred and Twenty million – April 2014
• One Hundred and Thirty million – October 2014
• One Hundred and Forty million – May 2015
• One Hundred and Fifty million – December 2015
• One Hundred and Sixty million – July 2016
• One Hundred and Seventy million – January 2017
• One Hundred and Eighty million – August 2017
• One Hundred and Ninety million – February 2018
• Two Hundred million – August 2018
• Two Hundred and Ten million – November 2019
• Two Hundred and Twenty million – September 2020
• Two Hundred and Thirty million – January 2021
• Two Hundred and Forty million – April 2022
• Two Hundred and Fifty million – September 2022
• Two Hundred and Sixty million – February 2023
• Two Hundred and Seventy million – September 2024
• Two Hundred and Eighty million – August 2025
• Two Hundred and Ninety million – January 2026
• Three Hundred million – May 2026

As I write this I am just past 309.4 million skill points, so expect another post on that soon enough.  Probably before the end of the month.

Kill Mails

EVE Online is a PvP game, so while how many Guristas NPCs you kill might be a mildly interesting tally, the real dick measuring comes with how many other players you’ve helped blow up.  Their ships, their capsules, their structures, their customs offices… whatever you can get in range and lock up to shoot.

On that front I am a mediocre player.  As I write this I am ranked in 8,368th place for all time kills, and that is more due to longevity than any killer instinct.  The lesson in all of this is that if you hang around long enough you’ll settle in with your peers.

I also want to clarify the terminology.  I will use “kills” as a shorthand here, but what I really mean is “included on a kill mail.”  For me, at least 90% of the time, that means I was in a fleet, somebody broadcasted a target, and I and other fleet members locked them up and shot them until they exploded. (And the other 10% is mostly me being in a fleet and locking up and shooting something that was not yet broadcasted as a target, because I am not even that good at following instructions.)  So a big number does not indicate any PvP prowess beyond the ability to follow instructions.

Finally, these numbers all are based on my profile on zKillboard.  That brings with it some limitations.  First, due to API changes there are no kills recorded before 2008.  That doesn’t matter so much for me, but still.  Also, it is not a perfect record.  A certain percentage of kills never get recorded for multiple reasons.  There are at least three Keepstar kills I should have been on that did not generate a kill mail.  So there are no perfect counts available to me.

All that said, here are my basic stats.

That puts the average kill I am on at somewhere around 2.2 billion ISK in value and my average loss at 78.4 million ISK in value.

That feels like a lot per kill, but then again I was on more than a few expensive structure kills and at least 15 titan kills.

Breaking all my kills out by year… and zKill actually breaks them out by month if you’re into it… my totals look like this.

Wilhelm Arcturus – Kills/Losses by year

The peaks correspond to significant wars, which were:

Winter War – Where I showed up in null sec.  That involved chasing all Raiden and White Noise allies out of the north, including evicting Northern Alliance from Tribute.  The CFC was victorious on all fronts, TEST ends up moving into Fountain.

Fountain War – The invasion of the Fountain region to remove TEST.  The Imperium was victorious, with TEST driven from its home.

Casino War – Everybody (financed by RMT casino ISK) versus the Imperium, driving us from the north to reform in Delve.  Casinos were only banned after we lost.  Soon thereafter TEST was driven from its new home in Tribute.

World War Bee – (Beeitnam for hardcore Goons, World War Bee 2 for apostates) Everybody versus the Imperium again, led by TEST.  Dumb CCP economic changes during the war killed all momentum, leading to a months long siege of 1DQ1-A where PAPI wouldn’t step up and actually attack.  Somehow the whole thing ended once more with the Imperium victorious and TEST being driven from its home.

Clearing of the Drone Regions – Pandemic Horde was discovered to be a house of cards as its leadership abandoned allies and line members alike.  Region was cleared by the Imperium and declared a “no bloc” zone.  Also, in a side conflict, TEST was once again driven from its home.

So the pattern is that I play a lot during wars and that TEST has gotten a lot of practice with evacuation.

Following that up, my top ten months for kills and losses.

When measured by ISK, November 2025 tops the chart, putting me at 1.3 trillion ISK in kill mails, which were largely structures destroyed during the clearing of the Drone Regions.  That was followed by April 2012, at 1.07 trillion ISK, though I am not even sure what we killed.  There were some NCDot supers and the first Burn Jita.  There was something big in there.

The data at zKillboard includes some more analysis these days.  It plots where my kills took place by type of space.  These are combined kill and loss stats.

I spend most of my time shooting things in null sec.  I am not sure where “other” is, but it could quite possibly be Pochven.

Then there is what I shoot by general classification.

Somewhat amusing that POS modules make up almost 10% given how long it has been since the humble POS was central to null sec.

Then, of course, there is when I am on and shooting things.

I actually live in USA West, but spend most of my time flying with people on the US east coast and the Euros.  I have also occasionally alarm clocked for Chinese timezone ops.

Carrying on with the geography of New Eden, these are the top 20 systems for me when it comes to kill mails.

Saranen was the focal point of much of the Casino War, and a good time.  We only had to undock from the Quafe Company Warehouse station to find content waiting for us.

A lot of those locations are from World War Bee.  O-PNSN in Fountain was a location where I flew a burst jamming interceptor during a Keepstar defense.   The burst jammer is an AOE module that breaks target locks for all ships within its radius (unless you save versus jams I think) and which gets you on their kill mail if they die.  I probably did all 230 in a single fight.  That was some serious killboard padding.

Otherwise, I seem to have spread out my kills.  They aren’t all in a few places.

As for the ships flown for my kills, here are the top 20.

When people get on Reddit and demand logi be on kill mails (which is never going to happen, never never never, so get it out of your heads) I am always tempted to comment that I seem to get on kill mails when I fly logi.  Look at that, 5 logi hulls in my top 20.  I am a bad logi pilot, carrying combat drones.  The Imperium eventually relented and officially condoned logi carrying combat drones… because we were doing it anyway.

Otherwise, those are all ships that were fleet doctrines at one time or another.  Ishtars were probably just a Reavers thing, and Drakes haven’t been a mainline doctrine for a dozen years.  But each had their moment.

The site also keeps track of what hull class you help kill and lose.

You can pick out a few POS modules in my top 20, but the top five represent the core of null sec fleet doctrines for the last fifteen years.  Battlecruisers, HACs, cruisers, battleships, and logi.  When fleets clash those hull types generally represent most of the ships present, so it is no surprise that they top the list.

So What?

That was a whole bunch of numbers that do not add up to much really.

The whole post was more of a time stamp, a note as to where I stood at the 20 year mark, a measure of progress… or lack thereof… over the two decades.

True to form, I have all of these numbers in a spreadsheet should I require them again for later reference.

Star Trek – The Original Series

I was about one and a half at the time, so missed the premier.  But that was probably okay.

In addition to being too young to appreciate the series, the state of television at the time was… somewhat primitive.  I mean, check out this little toy television that sat in our family room opposite the couch until I was maybe four years old.  I think it was made out of LEGO bricks or Lincoln Logs.

60s television technology

That picture, taken with one of the ubiquitous Kodak Instamatic 100 series cameras that were literally everywhere at the time (my first half dozen cameras were Instamatics that I scrounged out of junk drawers or from boxes in various garages or barns) that used the 126 film cartridge system that was basically squared off 35mm, was probably snapped in early/mid 1967 based on objects in the frame and my size.  I was tall for my age.

That is maybe a 13 inch diagonal screen… a BLACK AND WHITE screen, because we didn’t get a color television in our house until 1970… in a wooden console that my father would occasionally have to take apart to remove a burned out tube.  At the time every grocery store had a kiosk that included a tube tester and replacement tubes for sale, so you could take the likely suspect down to the store, test it, then buy the replacement.

That happened maybe twice when I was a kid, but I remember doing tagging along with my dad as we drove over to the Manor Market, in the same strip mall as Billy Wilson’s Liquors, which he told me was owned by the former 49ers wide receiver, though I have no way to verify that at this time.  But he made sure to buy beer there during the football season.

Anyway, the point was that at the time the television viewing experience in our house was not optimal.  Sitting here in 2026 with a 46″ LCD TV in our family room, which feels kind of small, the idea of sitting across the room watching a tiny black and white screen feels little better than watching radio.  Somehow we managed… and the low quality of the viewing options is probably why I spent so much time outside playing.  The screen had yet to attain the power to hold me.

However, color TV was the coming thing and, in part because it was filmed in color when a lot of shows were still black and white… why bother with color when most of your audience doesn’t have a color TV… Star Trek lived on after its cancellation at the end of its third season in syndication.

And that is where I saw Star Trek.  It was never a show that I watched in prime time at a weekly release cadence.  It was always something that was on almost daily… or even multiple times a day as Santa Clara Valley had its own TV stations while also being able to get the San Francisco and Oakland stations via the antenna that jutted up from our roof, the same way one was present on nearly every single house in the valley, a situation that at one point attracted a plague of six foot metal munching mice… though I might not be remembering that entirely accurately.

Six foot metal munching mice in action on roof tops

Being in syndication and being rather unlike anything else on the air, it proved to be a reliable draw.  More than reliable.  A whole ecosystem grew up around this cancelled show that makes the Firefly revivalist seem like a few random weirdos… which kind of fits.  The show wasn’t bad, but it dying before it could jump the shark is what keeps it alive.  It died young so we never got to see fat Mal go full lost cause on us.

There were conventions and books about the series and novels set in the Trek universe… I read so many bad Trek novels, many of which seemed to be vehicles to get Spock to show emotion… and video games and board games and that great FASA role playing game and paraphernalia.  It was everywhere.

Star Trek in vt52… first computer game I ever played

We would “play” Star Trek at recess… an early “spot the nerds” moment… taking over the baseball diamond at the back corner of the field with the pitcher’s mount being the captain’s chair and home plate being the navigation station, with the backstop itself representing the view screen at the front of the bridge.  We would parrot things we had seen on the show, assemble away teams that clearly had no interest in the prime directive as every adventure ended up in some sort of shoot out.

Eventually Paramount realized they were sitting on a gold mine and started winding up the machine.  We got an animated series, all of which is canon.  Then a motion picture, about which I have written. (I wrote posts about all the movies back in 2022.)

Then a few more movies came out, enough to establish the “even numbers good, odd numbers bad” pattern of quality.  Finally, another series arrived.  Then another.  Then another.  And some more movies, of which Galaxy Quest was no doubt the best.  Then some more video games, of which maybe three were any good. (Original Starfleet Command is my pick.  Can I get that on GoG.com?)  And then even more movies, but in an alternate timeline where somehow Chris Pine was William Shatner and lens flare was the primary means of communicating that it was the future.

And yes, if you’re reading this you probably know all of that.  Star Trek, like the race of men in Middle-earth, is ubiquitous yet always failing to live up to its potential.

But it persists.  There are new shows.  There will probably be new movies.  I would not bet against the whole thing getting another cinematic reboot in my lifetime.  There is no IP that Hollywood won’t milk dry.

Still, nothing in my heart feels quite like the original series and that time during the 70s when people would devour any crumb around the series, where we all saw the same blooper reels at every convention, and when you could spot your fellow Trekkies by doing the “live long and prosper” sign with your hand.  If they had developed the muscles to do the sign without the need to arrange their fingers with their other hand, they were in the club.

As I noted in my post about the bicentennial back in July, it was a time of tumult and people were looking for things that would give them hope about the future.

Of course, this reverie has made me feel nostalgic for the “good old days” and I will probably propose to my wife that our next viewing festival should be an attempt to watch the original series… in order of release.  In syndication there was an almost RNG aspect to what you might see on any given day.  I have no idea how they play out as they originally aired.

We’ll see if that comes to pass.  Maybe I will even write about it.

Related:

• Jan 2023 – Reflecting on Star Trek as a Film Series
• Feb 2015 – The Influence of Star Trek
• May 2013 – The First Computer Game I Ever Played