Col. C.E. Harper

I'm actually going to disagree with this. I don't think a biography should be an epic for two reasons. First, because the more you write about your character, the less room you have to develop it later. Secondly, the purpose of a bio is to introduce your character to your crewmates; the easier it is to read and remember, the better basis they'll have for interacting with you. However, you don't want to go to the other extreme and give people nothing at all to work with. Logs, on the other hand, can really benefit from some length. A paragraph rehashing what you did during the sim is a log, but it doesn't do much to expand your character or the plot. Adding details and giving us a look at your characters thoughts, feelings, opinions, and background make the game so much richer. Joint logs, or logs that include and develop your own NPCs, can also be really fun. Where STSF really shines, I think, is the mixed-format of the sims -- the action and interaction of the live chat plus the depth and development of the logs. Don't skimp on the latter. (And if your crewmates aren't reading logs, shame on them!) :) The bit about staying in the bounds of canon is spot-on, though.

There isn't a standard form for our biographies. Some people write novels (check out N'Dak's sometime), while others just stick to the bare essentials. There's no need to write a bio while you're still in the Academy, so you might want to wait until you graduate and are posted to a ship, then look at their bios for ideas. EDIT: LOL, A9 and I cross-posted. :)

The colonel's back from her trip. Chatlog flood! Ag072507.txt

The colonel's back from her trip. Chatlog flood! Ag071807.txt

The colonel's back from her trip. Chatlog flood! Ag071107.txt

The colonel's back from her trip. Chatlog flood! Ag070407.txt

Wow, which fansites were you reading? The Potter communities I hang out on were ablaze with "yep, we called it!" about 5 hours after the book was released, when people started finishing. (I didn't start reading them until 8 hours after, since my friends and I went to a party and didn't get to crack open the books until almost 3 am. Anticipation... woo!) Very few surprises in the book, I felt. Except for the very first death - that was a sad surprise.

Happy birthday, Dac!!

Clearing the paddwork off her desk was an immensely satisfying feeling. Nevermind that she wasn't actually at a desk at the moment, but rather working from a tablet-display in the tiny 'lounge' area of the NNC. Nevermind, even, that by morning the pile would be back, reconstituted from its own component parts in some parody of the replicator system. (How many times have you filled out that form? How many times have you eaten that cheeseburger?) Tonight, at least, she would go to bed finished with her work. Such a novel concept, really, and one they didn't warn you about -- that clocking out at the end of a shift became a fantasy when you got to command; the work and the worry followed you home. Not that the shiny-eyed, fresh-faced, eager young things she remembered teaching would have listened if they'd been told... So maybe someone did warn me, she reflected with wry good humor. Ah, well. It wouldn't be the first lesson I missed. It definitely wasn't going to get her down today. She had one last set of messages to send before she was done for the day. Harper sent that last one off with a flourish and a grin, pleased. Then a thought occurred to her and she penned one last short note.

I think will was trying to give you this link: http://www.stsf.net/howto.php

Hey, any time we get to see Corizon leashed and muzzled is bound to be a hit.

Silicon is actually the element most commonly theorized to be a basis for life. (Carbon-based life isn't a theory. :) ) That's because it's in the carbon family, so it has a lot of the same properties. Lately there's been a lot of 'debunking' of that, based on the pickiness of life as we know it. 'Course, "life as we know it" is a pretty small part of even our own home.

Siyar> "Of course I'm right. I'm always right. You traitoress!"

Snopes has a piece on it. (Gotta love Snopes!) http://www.snopes.com/politics/bush/house.asp The numbers are a bit exaggerated, though the basis is there. The Gore family does take steps to reduce the impact of their energy usage. And I'd love to see the stats on the other residences of the Bush family. Should Gore walk the walk better? Yeah, probably. But he's doing more to reduce damage to the environment than most of the rich in America. In any event, the impact of one family's usage pales in comparison to the impact of corporate usage... and Bush's record on instituting eco-friendly regulations on corporations is horrendous.

But that's precisely the kind of medical puzzle a scientist operating without the medical ethics we use would be interested in -- maximum stimulation with minimum damage. And, personally, I read his impatience with the Tholian as frustration that his predictions had been proved false.

The line between torture and science is thinner than we'd like to pretend it is. If you don't care about the fate of your research subjects, but only about the medical data you collect, then what you call an experiment, they would call torture. Phlox seemed to me to be far more interested in the physiological response of the subject than in causing pain for pain's sake. Regarding the Booth, it seemed to me he approached it as an exercise in stimulation -- how much can the nervous system be stimulated without long-term damage? How can techniques be adapted across species?-- And as for the Tholian, that was clearly a desire to learn its limits; he was much more interested in discovering the precise effects of extreme cold and the point of death than he was in causing the Tholian pain. It isn't surprising to find the scientific interest carried to extremes in the mirror. In the real world, we've really only started codifying the ethics of human experimentation in the last 60 years -- largely as a result of atrocities committed in the name of medical knowledge. The Nuremberg Code was adopted after the trials of Nazi scientists, and reaffirmed in '64 with the Declaration of Helsinki. But the Nuremberg Code didn't stop experiments with malaria, mustard gas, and syphillis from being carried out on uniformed and unconsenting people right here in the US.

The DS9 mirror didn't hold true to the original concept of the mirror, which involved changing the nature of the characters so that their baser qualities came to the surface, their flaws were made into virtues, and vice-versa. Only Kira's character was properly "mirrored" that way; small wonder the Intendant is the most popular character from the DS9 mirror episodes. Otherwise, we saw mainly the characters we knew in a different setting. They were a little rougher, because the setting required it of them, but they remained the essential 'good guys,' just opressed, and the bad guys remained the villains. (This is, incidentally, one of the reasons Agincourt threw out the DS9 mirror canon - aside from the difficulties of operating in a universe where Starfleet doesn't exist.) As for TNG and the mirror - the book "Dark Mirror" by Diane Duane is a terrific look at a TNG mirror universe. The recent mirror universe books "Glass Empires" and "Obsidian Alliance" were also good reading, but they follow the DS9 canon and once again the good guys remain truly good.

In a Mirror, Pink-ly?

I'm not sure how to explain it any more simply... you save the picture, then upload it to a photo-share/image-hosting space. Have you got an account on Photobucket or Flickr or something like that?

The 3D avatars are Sims avatars that people did custom Trek skins for. We had a few members on the boards who were taking requests a while back, but as far as I know none of them are still doing avatars. The rank bars so many of us use in our signatures can be found all over the 'net. Mine's from Kuro RPG, as are several of the others I see around. What you do is find a site that has rank images and allows people to use them, pick the one you like, save it to your computer and upload it to your own image hosting space. (Because people were nice enough to share the pretty pictures with all of us, we're nice to their bandwidth in return.) Then you put the image into your signature through your control panel.

The application you get sent has space to list your top 3 choices for department, and top 3 choices for ship, as well as asking which is more important to you -- getting the department you want, or the ship. You can attend any Academy you want, and many people do attend several during the week, but it's best to become a regular at one so that the GM team gets to know you and your simming abilities. It's easier to evaluate whether someone is ready for promotion if you've seen them several times.

You are neither helpful nor amusing. Stop trying to derail actual conversation with jokes in poor taste.

When I get there.

Oh, that was the Equinox. It was a two-part episode that ended with the Equinox being destroyed and what was left of her crew joining Voyager. STSF doesn't have anyone in the Delta Quadrant... permanently. Ships have occassionally been tossed out there for a plot or two, but the only ship that's based in another quadrant is the Excalibur, which operates in the Gamma Quadrant.

Not sure what you mean by "from Voyager itself" -- there's nothing in the Delta Quadrant, but except for Challenger, Hood, and Agincourt, all our ships are in that time period, more or less. (Some don't specific an exact time-frame)