Star Trek Blogfest & Campaigning For Platform

This is kind of an ambitious week for me as a blogger.  I'm taking on two blogfests.  The first one is the Star Trek one going on over at Ellie Garratt's blog.  The second one is the platform-building campaign taking place over at Rach Writes... with Rachael Harrie.  I figured since both are different and one is getting started slightly before the other, that I think I could do both.  Hmmm.  My brain may explode.

Okay, first up are the rules for the Star Trek blogfest.  Post your top five episodes, characters, or films and tell us why you love them.

I'm a big fan of Star Trek: Voyager so my top two favorite episodes come from the Voyager season four finale called Scorpion 1 & 2.  Up above you'll find my favorite scene from Scorpion 1.  It's a short clip and really sums up the awesomeness of the series finale.  Upon seeing this, I had to wait all summer to get the conclusion.  Talk about cliff-hangers.

Scorpion introduced us to Species 8472 who was at war with the Borg.  Now previously, the Borg had been established in the Next Generation via the episodes Q Who, and the Best of Both Worlds to be essentially a type 6 lifeform which is really darn powerful.  Type 6 lifeforms were far above humans and the Borg were so hostile that nothing seemed to be able to threaten them.  Well lo and behold, a species from an organic universe went to war with them and Species 8472 had planet destroyers!  If you watch the clip (pardon the dumb subtitles in another language) you will see them destroy a Borg planet in basically ten seconds (killing like 9 billion borg in one swoop).  It really got me excited to watch this show. Oh and we got a new cast member out of this...the Borg 7-of-9 which I thoughy became a great addition to the show.  Cheers to Jerri Ryan.

In Next Generation, I liked the episodes The Best of Both Worlds, part one and two.  These were incredibly well done and followed up on an enemy that we only had a glimpse of in a prior season (but knew were badass).  Plus we saw some interesting things happen with Jean Luc Picard.

The borg as villains had many good things going for them. One, their technology was impressive. Two, they had a hive mind which goes against all human individuality. Three, they had this mantra that they uttered constantly in one voice, "RESISTANCE IS FUTILE! YOU SHALL BE ASSIMILATED!" It just doesn't sound like a pleasant experience at all.

And then from the original Star Trek series (first-season in fact) I liked the episode "Space Seed" because it gave us Khan Noonien Singh who returned in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.  This is one of the best Star Trek movies ever not only because it gave us a frickin' awesome villain in Ricardo Montalban, but it also gave us the Genesis device which was quite frankly, incredible.

The Genesis Device quite frankly, was an incredible weapon. It was better than the Death Star in Star Wars. Imagine being able to totally destroy a planet filled with your enemies and have it terraformed for your habitation within a week...completely cleansed of all the life that you hated.  I was in awe of the device and the implications of it were so grandiose, that Genesis carried the theme of the third movie and even to some extent, the fourth movie as well.

This concludes my highlights of why I love Star Trek and I'm off to check out other blogs in the blogfest.

Also don't forget to check in on Rach Writes... if you too are as ambitious as I in getting to know more bloggers out there.  You get to add this pretty badge to your blog...how cool is that?

See you Tuesday :)

Blogging Stuff + Get More Followers

You know the cool "Feed" button that we all have installed on our blogs that updates our feed so that it's available to be seen everywhere in the interwebs?  Well, the fact is that this feed doesn't always update.  I've been tracking it for a while trying to figure out what's going on and my first real clue came when I started following my own blog.  Basically, after I posted, my writing was not visible in Google Reader or in the dashboard feed sometimes for 14-hours or more after I published it.  That's kind of bad for a number of reasons.  But there's also a solution to this.

You can force Google to update your feed by refreshing it in your Google Reader.  But, you have to follow your own blog. That way you can click on it and then hit the refresh button.  I sometimes wonder...if this has been happening to me, how many other people are experiencing the same fail?  It could be a reason behind why I haven't made it to some blogs very often.  If I see the information is old, I don't click and move onto the next one.

Here's how you do it.

Step One:  Follow your own blog.

Step Two:  Go to the dashboard and launch Google Reader.  See picture below:

Step Three:  Once you are in Google Reader, select your blog and hit the "Refresh" button at the top.

Here's a link to an article that discusses this well-known issue with the blog feed so you guys know I'm not just making this up.

BLOGGING NEWS--OR HOW TO GET 100+ FOLLOWERS IN LESS THAN A WEEK:

Monday, August 22nd is Rachael Harrie's Platform-Building Campaign.  This is a great way to meet other bloggers and to build up your following so that you have more blogs to visit and more people to get to know.  I made nearly all of my blogger buddies in Rach's last campaign...most notably Rogue Mutt.  You'll get a huge spike in traffic while it lasts (that's always fun) probably pick up a hundred followers (if not more) who for the most part will visit your blog only that one time.  However, 10% of them will probably become frequent visitors and consequently, you'll pick up 10% more friends.  I'm going to participate again because it was decently fun the last time and really low-pressure, unlike some of the other blog fests like that A-Z challenge thing.  Here's a link to Rachael's blog.

A BLOG AWARD:

Theresa over at I Need To Write gave me the Blog On Fire Award.  It's my third time winning this one, however, I'm honored that she would think of me.  I'm just going to post this here and encourage you all to visit her wonderful blog and I won't be passing it on as I think that this thing has been passed around enough already :P

This really should be called the "Rode hard and put away wet" blog award seeing as it has been around so much, but it is still kinda hot. ;)

Have a great weekend. I hope to see a bunch of you on Rachael's blog on Monday getting ready to gain mega-followers!