There are 160 days to go until The 2026 Trekzone Fan Film Awards.

Looking through YouTube for the latest fan films and YouTube pretty much offered up two major categories of videos in the last couple of weeks, one was AI made fan films and the other was anti-Starfleet Academy.

What a depressing sight it was.

Star Trek reactors saying that Starfleet Academy and CBS/Paramount were ‘Busted’, ‘Acid Reflux’, ‘Pure Cringe’, ‘It’s Over’, ‘It’s Dead and Done’, ‘It Got Worse’, ‘A Total Embarrassment’, ‘Cringe’, ‘Made by people who hate Star Trek’, ‘It’s So, So Bad’ and other descriptions.

Just browsing through the selections was very depressing, there was a time during Discovery’s run that there was so many of these videos that I didn’t feel like watching Star Trek anymore, the joy was sucked out of it.

Raging about something on YouTube is actually quite lucrative, it seems you need a thumbnail with you having a shocked expression on your face and a word like ‘failed’ on there and the cash starts to flow, so you got to wonder if people are really bagging it for legitimate reasons.

There’s no such thing as ‘real Star Trek’ and there is no requirement to like a series or a movie, you can like as little or as many of them as you like, that’s the lesson we learned from Enterprise’s four season run, there is no prerequisite.

Let those who like it be and let those who don’t like it be.

We are becoming nastier and nastier to each other in this world, you only have to flick through the many online news services to see that, the differing of opinions, the comments section of each one, everything is ‘woke’, everything is ‘the left’ and whatever people are throwing out there, 9 out of 10 people probably don’t know what they are talking about and they just copied whatever their chosen talking head or columnist is saying.

We’ve also lost a bit of our collective IQ because so many believe whatever AI serves up, thousands of people believe Micky Dolenz collapsed on stage or has cancer and that Paul McCartney is having a farewell tour or is performing with Bob Dylan and Stevie Nicks, nobody looks around and checks things out to come up with an opinion.

‘I saw it on Facebook so it must be true’.

The good thing about short the short seasons of Star Trek is that life returns to normal in ten weeks instead of 24 to 26 weeks, thankfully NASCAR is just a few days away from starting up again.

Until next time, be good to each other.