Peregrine Lake – A Weekly Webcomic Written by Trae Dorn and Drawn by Ethan Flanagan

In the old 1.0 days of the internet, we used to build our own spaces. This was the space that I chose to build for myself, and it served me well for quite some time. The forum was small but active. I updated this blog multiple times a week, and followed friends through RSS feeds. It was a space that was ours.

But now it sits here more a memory than anything else. I maybe make one post a year, and spend all my time on Tumblr, Discord, and occasionally Facebook. And the thing is… I have a community on those services. Nerd & Tie has a Discord that runs at a steady hum. But our data lives on services we don’t control. As Twitter has shown us, the spaces we thought we had can disappear at the whims of billionaires who only see us as engagement on a spreadsheet.

And it’s exhausting.

So I decided to do something about it.

In the year 2023, we’re launching an official set of Nerd & Tie Forums — we’re calling it NerdAndTie[dot]Social and it’s a community that’s all our own. Right now we’re in a soft launch (I expect very few people will actually read this post so it’s not really a public announcement), with the hopes of getting everything locked down and settled in the next week.

Then we’ll tell more folks about it.

And maybe it’ll fail. Maybe no one will use them. But we’re going to give it a shot. Complaining about things only gets you so far — sometimes you need to offer solutions.

So I’m doing that.

(Also, Forum software is way better in 2023 than it was in 2000… holy crap.)

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Look, I don’t know if this is a hot take or not, but I’m of the firm opinion that if you plan on watching both TNG and DS9 that you don’t watch one then the other — instead watching them in order as they aired.

Like, the way they fell on the timeline.

There are a couple of reasons for this. The least important one is that it makes sure the minor crossovers line up. This is just a minor thing, but it helps to know who the hell Bashir is when he shows up on TNG.

The other reasons are far more important. First off, it means you’re alternating episodes during the early seasons of DS9. DS9 was still finding its footing early on, while TNG was a well oiled machine telling some of their best stories. It gets you through any of the weaker episodes by knowing you might watch a great episode after.

But also… it preserves the experience Trekkers and Trekkies had in the 1990s. Like we were getting two Star Trek episodes a week. Even today, when we literally have five fucking Star Trek shows on TV it’s not the same. Picard, Discovery, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks and Prodigy are all set at different time periods (although Lower Decks and Prodigy are weirdly just a couple years apart). These are shows that will reference each others canon, but never have a major cast member walk on from one show onto the other in the same timeline as their original show.

I love the hell out of all the new Trek, but it isn’t the same.

Like, when we watched DS9 and TNG together there was this idea that these were happening at the same time. They aired the same week, the events from one could influence the other… Like even if it rarely happened it really felt like they could. Worf literally joins the crew after TNG’s run ends.

And when you just watch all of TNG and then watch all of DS9 separately… you lose that and I personally think it’s a very important part of the experience.

So, y’know, something to think about.

(I love VOY but it can be watched on its own, just because the Delta quadrant setting meant it was never affected by DS9 when the two ran concurrently beyond the first VOY episode. Also, if you want an airing list, for 1990s Trek, this list from a long time ago is the easiest to read I’ve found.)

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It’s here, I’m forty.

It’s a weird thing. Like if you’d asked me growing up where I thought I’d be at this age, the life I would have pictured for myself would have been so different. I had a lot of expectations I put on myself back then, and I’m happy I defied so many of them.

I mean, seriously, twenty year old me had no idea what they were doing and had no place trying to tell forty year old me what life should be like.

My thirties were a decade of change — at thirty I had just gotten married, Crysta and I had just moved to Indiana, and I was sort of lost. I was lost for most of my twenties too. Not having a rudder was kind of my THING it feels like sometimes. I’ve spent most of my adult not really having direction. Even when we moved back to Wisconsin three years ago, it wasn’t with any purpose beyond “we like it more than Indiana.”

If the last year has taught me anything though, having “direction” is friggin’ overrated though. I know so many people whose plans were tossed overboard in the storm that is 2020, and I’ve learned to appreciate what I have so much more.

I mean yeah, it’s been stressful as shit and I’ve had a massively hard time working on creative projects (I was going to start Peregrine Lake and revive Crosarth this year — which very much did not happen), but that’s just, y’know, because we’re living in a nightmare.

But my turning 40 is not a part of that nightmare. Turning 40 is, frankly, kind of nice.

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