To The Future
With the publication of my essay on Ill Wind Part 4 and my Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Reading Guide (which just went up earlier today here, in case you missed it), Vaka Rangi has officially left the TNG/DS9 period.
I said it before (in the Species essay), but this means my positionality is gone from Star Trek more or less for good. And I’ll be honest, when I was first planning Vaka Rangi in 2013, my initial plans for the project were *limited* to this 1987-1994 (and a bit after) period. I had no intention of covering the Original Series, the Animated Series, the movies, Voyager, the Dominion War or anything else. That I’ve managed to stretch the project out for this long still quite frankly amazes me. The fact of the matter is I really don’t have many more places to go with Star Trek. With Ill Wind, I’ve basically said all I wanted to say. I did what I set out to do.
I do have some stuff to say about Enterprise and I’m working on the early stages of a rough outline of an angle for the Voyager and Dominion Wars years that will lead into that (and in fact a portion of the book I’m currently editing was intended to set that up)…But it’s far from ready, and I’m far from confidant I’ve got a strong enough handle on the material and how I want to convey it such that the final product would be anything resembling coherent or erudite. Vaka Rangi from here on out would basically be an entirely different project from what it was up to today, so I need time to work out how to manage that transition in a vaguely elegant way.
Ill Wind may not be the last thing I ever write about Star Trek, but it will probably be the last for a *very* long time.
I’m deep into the planning and pre-production process of my next large-scale blog project that will succeed Vaka Rangi, and trust me, it’s every bit as overreaching and overambitious as this has been. I’m really excited to start work on this, such that it’s distracting me from day-to-day work, and I can’t wait to share it all with you. The problem is…I have to wait, and so will you, because I have to physically *go* somewhere to do fieldwork for this, and I won’t be able to do that until April 2018. So the project has to wait for at least another 11-12 months.
Permanent Saturday will continue, and so will Hyrule Haeresis (but there’s only three more entries of that left, so I’m pacing them out), and in the meantime, I still have a YouTube channel about video games, and I’m going to use this time to focus on building and nurturing that. My first two videos are on Spelunx and the Caves of Mr. Seudo by Cyan Worlds, and a commentary track on the same. Not *every* video is going to be an hour and a half long (I actually want to shoot for about 30 minutes an episode), but as there’s not much to Spelunx when compared to modern games I figured I’d show everything in one go.
Tomorrow night, probably around 7 or 8 PM EDT (though there will be a notification on YouTube when we go live), I’ll be doing a livestream on the channel with Ben Knaak on Elder Kings, a fanmade modification of Crusader Kings II that turns the setting into Tamriel from The Elder Scrolls. Ben and I have podcasted about The Elder Scrolls two times before, so, if you have time and are interested, you may want to give those a re-listen. After that, I’ve got a bunch more cool stuff planned for the channel, including the start of an analytical project that will probably take almost as long for me to set up as Vaka Rangi.
Speaking of video games…It’s E3 season again. I know I said I wasn’t going to be doing any more game journalism stuff after the disasterous Nintendo Switch reveal, but…Well, I’ve had a bit of a turnaround on the console (though I’m not sold yet), if for no other reason than I turned out to be completely wrong about its sales prospects (though the GameCube did really well at launch and the WIi didn’t, so, remember, anything can happen). I guess I’m just poor. Regardless, I’m curious to see what Bethesda Softworks and Koei-Tecmo are doing next, and if Square-Enix will continue to do dumb shit that screws over everyone who comes in contact with them. So expect one or two E3 essays from me, but ONLY on Bethesda and Nintendo.
And on top of that, I’m still writing books. I’m currently editing and revising Vaka Rangi Volume 2, which I plan to have out this September. Volume 3 is pegged for a 2018 release. I also have a whole other book I need to somehow work in writing, editing and publishing somewhere in there too, and I’m still not sure how or what I’m doing with that (it’s not part of the VR series, but it’s tangentially related to it). I’ll clarify things a bit in September, but for now, I’ll say Vaka Rangi has been consolidated from six books down to three, with a potential fourth to be determined at a later date.
Also some minor housecleaning. I became aware awhile back that, due to Dropbox basically deciding to be obnoxious, a few *very* old Vaka Rangi essays have been rendered inaccessible. This was because for a few select stories, I decided to be weird and use a format other than a blog editor: Namely, Twine and the .pdf format. I’d hosted them through Dropbox, but my account got made private because of reasons and I no longer have the software or the computer it was on anyway. I sort of ignored the problem up ’till now, but I couldn’t after today because my Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode guide links to “Symbiosis”, which was a part of my second “Temporal Incursion” Twine game.
I’ve reuploaded the affected files to a public folder on Google Drive (that would be the TOS Temporal Incursion Twine game, the “Memory of Past Tribbles” script fic and the TNG Temporal Incursion Twine game) and redirected the links on the Eruditorum Press versions of those posts to their new locations. I didn’t do that on the original posts on my old blog because…Well, because I assume you’re all following me over here now. I mean, if you’re not…I appreciate the loyalty, but sometimes we just have to move on.
Google Drive is weird about the HTML the Twine games are saved in and wants to open them with its in-built text editor, so you may have to download the files and manually open them in your browser to get the intended effect, though that *should* still work. And hey, if worst comes to worst, well…The first Temporal Incursion game and “The Memory of Past Tribbles” are both in Vaka Rangi Volume 1. And TNG Season 1 will come in due time. Those versions are way better anyway.
That’s about all for now. I do also still have a Patreon-It’s mostly for the YouTube channel, but it helps me out big time other places too, especially when it comes to stuff like this next blog project. Making it be everything I’d love for it to be is going to require a *ton* of logistical planning and resources. Thanks again for all your continued support-It means a lot to me, and I hope to see you on the other side.
Luca
June 7, 2017 @ 8:49 pm
Why are you only making 3 more of Hyrule Haeresis? I mean, I don’t know if you would gain anything by covering all of them, but you’ve done that so far. What’s your criteria going forward?
John G. Wood
June 8, 2017 @ 7:40 am
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, this is pretty much where Star Trek and I parted company too – I watched DS9 some way into the Dominion War, gradually losing interest until I just kind of drifted off and didn’t even notice when I stopped watching. I made myself watch the first couple of episodes of Voyager and caught the odd later one here or there but never got into it, and I’ve never seen any Enterprise at all.
On the other hand, that’s precisely why I was looking forward to your coverage of this period. Up until now it’s been kind of nostalgic – in many cases I’d only seen the episodes once, and my reaction has varied from a simple “I don’t remember that” or “oh yeah, that was a fun one, wasn’t it?” to delight at a different perspective on a beloved classic/hated pile of trash. But for the future I was looking to you as a guide on the journey. I see your previous post as a fun game, like the Futurama-inspired TOS list; a similar one covering later stories would be something I could actually follow.
Still, I have been enjoying Permanent Saturday, and I wish you all the best in your future endeavours, whatever they may be!