In 1992, Joe Reiss began the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary, an effort to collect ratings for each week’s episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” from fans on Usenet.
The “S.O.S.” caught on and remained popular for years, moving to the web in 1995. Ultimately, Reiss collected nearly 300,000 individual ratings.
This screenshot shows the S.O.S. homepage as it exists today.
Today, Sept. 24, is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Spoiler-Free Opinion Summary. The S.O.S. was a crowd-sourced ratings database, born in the early 1990s, which deserves to be remembered. I wrote this blog post to celebrate the anniversary. Also, don’t miss my interview with Joe Reiss.
In December, I created a new ANSI animation for the holidays called “Star Trek: The Trouble With The Rangifer Tarandus”, which was released in Blocktronics’ “Darker Image #2” artpack.
Here’s a video version of the ANSImation:
But (as always), the best way to view this is to use SyncTerm to connect to my BBS, Guardian of Forever, and watch it there.
So far, each of my ANSImations have been a way to try a new technique in ANSI, whether that’s parallax scrolling, perspective transforms, or whatever. This time was no exception.
Jon Radoff is an internet entrepreneur whose career has gone from dial-up to “Beam me up.”
Radoff broke into the gaming business as a teen, writing the BBS door games Space Empire Elite and Final Frontier for the Atari ST in the late 1980s. He built one of the original commercial games on the internet, and founded several gaming and net-related companies since then.
These days he’s the CEO of Disruptor Beam. The company’s latest game, Star Trek Timelines was released for Android and iOS on Jan. 16.
Space Empire Elite is probably the first BBS door game I played as a kid. Did you ever play? Share your memories in the comments. Want to try these old games today? I’ve included links to BBSes at the end.
This interview was conducted by Skype on Jan. 29. It has been edited for length and clarity.
So, Star Wars episode VII has a title: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.”
And while fans everywhere are eagerly discussing the title, I was more interested in the font they used for the title. Nerdy, I know, but I’m a designer by trade.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens has completed principal photography. #StarWarsVII #TheForceAwakens pic.twitter.com/mFTP9YbKNN
— Star Wars (@starwars) November 6, 2014
