- Oct 6, 2021
- 2 min read

So Captain Kirk is going into actual space... What a time to be alive.

My latest render… background painted by me in photoshop, ship from vanishingpoint.biz, postwork in photoshop.

I remember my dad absolutely loving Star Trek. I grew up hating it. This was back when television was so analog you had a small handful of channels and if there was breaking news or the President wanted to address the nation you literally had no other options. My brother and I were the remote control and if you wanted your brother to leave your channel the hell alone you simply pulled the knob off the tv set. (didn't work since a pair of pliers also worked)

Captain Kirk, Spock, Scotty, Lieutenant Uhura, et al were a staple in our house. I grew up during the syndication so it always seemed to be on. When the first movie came out in 1979 we, of course, saw it in the theater. I barely paid attention and in fact the most remarkable thing about seeing that movie for me was the horrific previews for The Shining. Omg... that was nightmare inducing and disturbing.

Dad loved Scifi though and when Star Wars came out and he wanted to see it we balked. Omg! Not another space movie! We wanted a Disney movie! (Ironic, eh?)

Fast forward a bit and it turned out Dad wasn't quite so wrong. Star Trek was f'ing fantastic! Lieutenant Uhura was a role model, Captain Kirk was... well.... Kirk and I began to realize that when your genre is scifi there is literally no limit to what stories you can tell. Hell, you can defy the laws of gravity if your story calls for it! How cool is that?

Reality has made leaps and bounds since the 70's. I remember doing the math on how old I would be if I made it to the year 2000. I was too young to see the USA set foot on the moon first, I watched the Challenger disaster in high school, and I've seen and heard the landscape of Mars from the Mars Rover. I've watched the photos of our universe get better with technology to the point where it almost feels like you're out there. And now... my artwork is dominated by scifi. (look at my gallery) My favorite fandom is Joe Mallozzi's Stargate Atlantis My writing attempts are Stargate Atlantis fan fiction. I absolutely love science fiction. Who knew?

So yeah, the man... the show that was the beginning of my love of scifi... going into actual space is pretty amazing. I plan to make sure my dad (who is the same age as William Shatner) is watching. (psst.... don't wear the red shirt Bill!)

"You know the greatest danger facing us is ourselves, an irrational fear of the unknown. But there's no such thing as the unknown — only things temporarily hidden, temporarily not understood." - Captain James T. Kirk