Riker's already been a son of a bitch, why not a whose-your-daddy of I honestly didn't know where this sentence was going when I started typing it and that hasn't change OH LOOK THAT DOG HAS A PUFFY TAIL

#83 – Maybe I’m Just Like My Father

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The perception that Worf is humorless is unfounded. You just have to appreciate alliteration and coy references to Klingon family politics.

I’m setting up something a bit more complicated with Worf and the whole arc of things that happened in TNG after this strip takes place and thus didn’t necessarily actually happen and etc. etc. and we’ll get to that next week, but, I have to admit a little bit of process here: I had gotten it into my head somehow that Duras’ sisters were, in fact, his daughters. And so Worf’s second-to-last panel of dialogue here got rewritten hastily this morning as I went to post this and then popped over to Memory Alpha to check on some little detail of the House of Duras, and I was mortified to find that I was just totally wrong-wrong-wrong about that bit and suddenly Worf’s bit of poesy didn’t mean exactly what I’d intended it to mean.

But it gave Worf a chance to be slightly more dorky about the whole thing so in the end no damage done.

No strip Friday May 17th

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Sorry, folks, it’s not happening today. I’ve got a couple things in the hopper but the part of my brain responsible for turning ideas into an actual comic strip has gone on strike for the morning.

As a consolation prize, you could go read through thsi delightful Metafilter thread about Star Trek, in which people spend a little time arguing about why Matthew Yglesias’ rankings of each Star Trek series and of various characters therein is either Totally On The Money or The Craziest Bullshit Ever, before moving on to just sort of bullshit with each other about every goddam thing.

For those of you who aren’t that familiar with Metafilter already, note that I go by “cortex” over there.

I Got Them DDoS Blues

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Larp Trek’s web host got nailed rather thoroughly to the wall today by a DDoS attack on some sort of WordPress vulnerability — whether or not it was even hitting this site directly or hammering on something else on the shared server, I don’t really know — and so you may have noticed a basically non-responsive site (or some nasty 500 service errors) if you visited during typical enjoying-the-webcomic-on-update-day hours. Sorry about that!

Things seem to be back now, so, yes. Enough of that!

For the folks conversant in unix, you may be amused to hear that the load average being reported by top during the attack was in four digits all afternoon. Peak value I saw was 2390, though the hourly average was riding right around 1700 for the bulk of the day. So that was pretty neat.

The Way Riker Sits

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The entire internet appears to have noticed this great little supercut expose of Riker’s occasional crotch-over-the-top approach to sitting. Someone should really do a thorough video essay on his various postures and leans and such. But, yes:

Alright, Frakes, we get it.

One Eighth Gates Blog

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Gates McFadden has a tumblr. On this she posts posed pictures of a 1/8 scale (give or take, but the rhyme is good) Dr. Beverly Crusher action figure grappling with post-Star Trek emotional baggage and the challenges of being a tiny action figure.

It is weird and wonderful and I don’t know, just go there.

Sketchin’ Keiko and Picard

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I was playing around with some charcoals last night and did up a little sketch of a couple familiar panels: what I think of as the Picard Being Optimistically Diplomatic, and what I think of as Keiko Being All “Miles Please“.

keiko-really

picard-talking

Maybe I’ll try and do some more of these! But I’m not sure if the charcoal thing is totally doing it for me, we’ll see. I’d say it’d be fun to do an entire hand-drawn strip of the comic but at the rate these went that’d be like twelve hours of work so maybe not so much.

If you want to keep an eye out for drawin’ stuff in general beyond just the explicitly Trek-related stuff I’ve posted here so far, keep an eye on my main blog at joshmillard.com.

I love search engine referrer strings.

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A thing that some folks know but not everyone does: generally speaking, when you go to a search engine, type something in, get some results, and click on one of those results, whoever runs that website can parse their web server logs to see what you were searching for that led you there. This is handy if you are a like search-engine-optimizing duder, or if you are like me and just easily entertained.

So, for example, someone just got here by searching for the phrase “how many riker centric episodes are there?”

Larp Trek is now apparently the top hit for that phrase (or rather that unquoted string of words). I find that quietly delightful. Though to be fair, I find a lot of things quietly delightful.

The answer, of course, is “not enough”, and in the future maybe such queries will land on this post rather than just the (auto-generated by WordPress) Riker character page and so helpfully provide actual content to the wayward searcher.

Other things people have gotten here by searching for include, for just a sampler:

- larp trek (well done!)
- larptrek (also jolly good!)
- larping (I apologize for almost certainly letting you down!)
- star trek webcomic larp (good enough!)
- larp treck (ahem!)
- geordiriker (slash fic?)
- how to stop hitting yourself (this just got a bit dark)
- 17 idiomatic expressions (this just got a little Buzzfeed)
- big book anal (this just got a lot Riker)
- counselor troi in her underwear (oh come on)
- dog fugue womens (I don’t even)
- i love brent spiners nose (don’t we all)
- is picard the superego (subject of future newspost)
- picard zip your bag (uh)
- riker erotica (but you repeat yourself)

And so on. Every day is an adventure.

Buster Bluth, Temporal Agent

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Thought for the day: Star Trek: Enterprise gets a bit better when you intentionally mistake Matt Winston’s Temporal Agent Daniels character for Tony Hale’s Buster Bluth from Arrested Development.

buster bluth time cop

Okay? Okay. I kept hoping that Daniels would show up in the next episode of Enterprise with a hook for a hand and explain it away as an injury sustained on a Time Ship when e.g. the plasma conduits exploded due to a loose seal.

(Maybe “Buster Bluth” was sent back in time to make sure the Bluth family didn’t disrupt the timeline? The question of who his real father is becomes all the more complicated. And throw’s Buster’s behavior into question. Somebody get Tommy Westphall on the phone!)

John Leavitt takes on Riker

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Look at this fine fella!

john-leavitt-riker

It’s an original drawing from one of all our favorite Riker panels, by my internet friend and fellow creative person John Leavitt, who, among his many other fine attributes, responds to non-sequitur demands to “draw a Riker” by saying “yes” and then following through.

Right now, if there were going to be a t-shirt, I think it would have this on it and the words “Question. I have a beard.” written in.