Subject: Recreational Trekkieism Date: Sun, 9 Jul 2000 19:28:13 -0700 From: Wayne Poe Newsgroups: alt.startrek.vs.starwars What is Recreational Trekkieism? Essentially, the term is used to describe any one of a number of activities where a non-Trekkie (or person not involved with a particular sect of Trekkieism) indulges or immerses themselves in activities, literature, and media of a given sect of Trekkieism which they perceive as strange, bizarre, or off-beat, for the sole purpose of having fun at the expense of that sect of Trekkieism. What kinds of activities does Recreational Trekkieism Involve? Here is a brief list and description of known forms of recreational Trekkieism: Making fun of Street Trekkies This activity involves confronting street-Trekkies and Roddenberry prosthelitizers on the street, and heckling them publicly, playing strange head-games with them, or otherwise making them look stupid. Not an activity for everyone, it takes a special kind of person to be effective at this. It can get hairy, as some street Trekkies (or their supporters) often react violently to the heckler. You need to have a quick wit, and come up with an appropriate come-back for every possible line. For example, if a street Trekkie says something like "Spock rose from the dead...", you can snap back "What?! You mean Spock was a ZOMBIE?" Pledge-and-run Often poor at handling the large sums of money they receive every week, many conventions literally GIVE AWAY thousands of dollars worth of merchandise to their supporters, for pledges of certain specified amounts of money. Most of the free gifts include books, videotapes, audio tapes, catalogs, jewelry, coffee mugs, autographed photos of Star Trek stars, records, CDs, and other high-quality CRAP. Unknown to most people, a PLEDGE for money is not binding. You can pledge thousands of dollars and never pay one penny of it, legally, because it's largely seen as a donation; they are not "selling" you merchandise, they are offering you FREE GIFTS for a DONATION. Many practitioners of Pledge-and-run use fake names and multiple addresses to avoid being singled out and written off of mailing lists. Subsequently, many conventions have tried to keep stricter control over their free merchandise, using computers to track addresses, cities, and such. However, despite the high tech monitoring, you can still pull off a great deal if you have enough conventions targetted. Crank Calls When listening to Trekkie talk shows on the Radio or TV, many practitioners of Recreational Trekkieism often find themselves calling up the show and playing a joke character on the air. On a live program, this can be especially amusing. A favorite talk show was "Talk Trek". People have called in pretending to be "Saved" by Trek on the air, sobbing, crying, and whining. The host, two fugly, bovine women, were suckers for emotional basket-cases. Even Howard Stern's loyal crank-callers have gotten onto Trekkie TV talk shows, asking what at first appear to be Trekkie questions, then, once the Duras sisters get going, they ask "How does that relate to the fact that Roddenberry is shit compared to Howard Stern?" Mailing List mania You can get on the mailing lists of bizarre Trekkie organizations, such as the the Trekkie Identity conventions, or even the Klimgon Language Institute - all of whom claim to be good ol' boys who love Tuvok, but like Spock better. This is a fun way of "getting to know your enemy", so to speak, and you can expect some pretty wacky literature even from seemingly benign Trekkies. You can send away for catalogs from places like the home of those horrid little Trekkie comic books, or Pocket Books (they'll publish anything that's Trekkie), and get your name and address on about 15 or so mailing lists. Be warned -- USE A FAKE NAME and a PO Box. Not doing so can get you investigated by the FBI. I prefer to use the name "Ensign Dick Taiter", or "Ensign Richard Head" (Dick Head). Visiting Conventions Yep, this is where the fun begins. You can play "Trekkie for a day", by going to the weirdest conventions you can find. Klingons, 600 pound Will Rikers with women's makeup, or just any convention that has a screaming lunatic reputation. Just wear whatever they wear so nobody will ask too many questions (you don't want to be "discovered" -- you want to blend in...aw what the heck, maybe you *DO* want to be noticed. Wear a starfleet uniform, and act Satanic if questioned...whatever turns you on. JUST DON'T DRINK THE KOOL-AID!!!! If you want to be scared to death for fun, check out conventions that involve people speaking Klingon. These conventions have some of the scariest, most retarded people in them. Yes -- it's another episode of "America's Creepiest people"! Infiltrating Trekkie Activist Groups This is really fun if you manage to pull it off for a long time. Many college campuses have a branch of "Campus Trekkies" or a similar group, which actively presents talks on warp speed, ultra-left wing politics, anti-Star Wars demonstrations, and so on. Getting involved with the more fanatical groups is tougher, as you have to be a good, consistsnt actor to keep their suspicion away from you -- the anti-Star Wars groups tend to be a bit paranoid. You can get up-to-date info on their latest events -- find out when they're protesting so you can invite friends, or maybe even rat on them to the cops if they're doing something that would get them arrested. Altering and redistributing Roddenberry Tracts You walk down the street in a big city, and a smiling zombie hands you a Roddenberry tract, which essentially tells you to "Worship Spock or DIE!" Many recreational Trekkies like to collect these tracts, and alter the pictures on them to poke fun at them, and the people who hand them out. You can do a little desktop publishing (or if you're not a computer-head, you can do the old "cut and paste"), change the pictures around, add a few cartoons of slam-dancers stage-diving at Spock's death, putting a picture of Darth Vader over people, or just altering the text. Renting Star Trek Videos Some of the worst documentaries, the most warped children's programming, and the most hideous propaganda comes from Trekkies. Go to your average Trekkie bookstore, and rent Trek videos where all of the "good guys" in each story are white, blue-eyed aryan archetypes, and every villain has very stereotypical, pronounced jewish features -- in other words, the villains are so stereotypical, that after watching the Star Trek series, then looking at Nazi-era anti-jewish propaganda posters and cartoons, you can see incredible similarities to the style. It's border-line antisemetic at the least. Trekkie Drama and scifi? You bet! Check out the movie video series include the titles "Insurrection" and "The Search For Spock". These are both Trekkie "Scifi" movies. If you thought Ed Wood movies were bad, these are so bad that Ed Wood looks like Stephen Spielberg by comparison. You can occaisionally see TV conventions hocking these videos for donations, proclaiming their "excellent acting, brilliant special effects, gripping and compelling drama, and moving musical scores." The back of the boxes for both of these videos proclaims that they won film awards because of their excellence. What's the reality? The acting is preachy and pathetic, more like people reading cue cards than acting. Trekkie video is generally pathetic at best, and they have to have their own special awards, because their stuff is so substandard, that it would never win any awards in the real world. Most of the Trekkie bookstores’ video sections contain extremely sappy and childish stuff at best. The only high quality productions on Trekkie video appear to be their "MTV" style music videos. Hosing on net-Trekkies Well, anyone who has the ability to read this most likely is already familiar with BBS's, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. But just in case this is a printout handed to some computer novice, I'll explain. There are Bulletin board services for computers that have Trekkie message bases on them. The Internet, a world-wide computer network that you can tap into with a computer, has thousands of newsgroups where Trekkies and others meet all the time, to discuss Trekkieism, Tech Manual study, but most of all, to plan the infiltration of non-Trekkie newsgroups and "get the word of Roddenberry spread around the net". Groups for exclusively non-Trekkie people get bombarded with Spock-grams, Trek-o-grams, and what we, on the net, like to call "Spammers" and "Trollers". A Spammer is a person who sends junk mail to every newsgroup they can find, even if the content of the junk-mail is inappropriate. A Troller is a person who deliberately goes into a newsgroup that is diametrically opposed to his views, and leaves "flames", or nastygrams -- to be more specific, a Trekkie will send a message to a Star Wars newsgroup saying "You queers and faggots all are going to die of AIDS, and then you will rot in Stova 'Kor!". There are certain trollers who actually PRETEND to be Warsies, just for kicks, and they make up messages, or even play a character for a while. Hosing on net-Trekkies involves many such activities, as described above. However, there is a breed of Warsies on the net known as the "Lump Club", who are not trollers or spammers, but who keep to their newsgroup and wait for Trekkies to come in and start shooting off their mouths. Then the fun begins. Using a combination of rational logic, science, and a special mixture of sarcasm and cynnicism, The Lump Club will not only teach the Trekkie a lesson, but will do so in a rather cruel, unforgiving way -- which can be awfully fun! Going into Trekkie newsgroups and having discussions on science can be pretty fun, especially for those well-read intellectuals who want to make their opponents look really dumb. Occaisionally, you'll meet up with some really hideous, drooling born-again sucker-for-Roddenberry, who will spew out a bunch of inane crapola at you. Conclusions That, in a nutshell, is what Recreational Trekkieism is all about. Just remember that the key to proper practice should be to ask yourself "Am I having fun yet?" Recreational Trekkieism is supposed to be fun -- a hoot, a laugh, shits-n-giggles. If you go beyond having fun, then it becomes more than recreational Trekkieism -- it becomes Counter Evangelism, which means you are trying to do serious damage to the effectiveness of Trekkies in spreading their word. I may have missed some activities in this article. If you have any suggestions for adding to this list, please EMAIL me, and I'll add it to the FAQ. I hope this leads newcomers to a wonderful world of kookiness, whereby they, too, can drain the coffers of the evil Trekkie world Empires, both on TV, and otherwise, while having fun doing it! Trekkieism is an evil mindset to have, and it causes too many people to miss out on all of the fun they could be having!