Remember Starlog, the Magazine About Science Fiction?

Even if you don't, hie yourself over to the Internet Archive and start sampling them, because every issue is now available for free!

This is the one issue I can recall having. I know I had others, but this one always stuck out in my mind because of the story about the Hollywood SFX guys who created the elaborate Halloween displays in their yards. How I envied the kids who trick or treated in their neighborhood.

Sweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeet!!!

I kind of remember that and had a couple of issues, but I was more a fan of Starburst and Dreamwatch.

I had several letters in Starlog criticizing Star Trek. Some in Dreamwatch as well.

My magnum opus though was a full page letter in Sci Fi Universe ripping Star Trek. Mark Altman even made mention of it in a side note to the letters section.

So your real name is Curtis R. Heath?

Dayton sends in a letter in Issue #196.

...and promptly gets ripped a new asshole by other readers in Issue# 202.

I stopped getting Starlog in righteous youthful anger when they spoiled the plot for ST:TMP before the movie came out. Bastards.

How did you even find that!?

Pretty easy... just did a text search on Dayton's full name...

Oh my, the nostalgia is just flooding back! Thanks for the link, Tuckerfan!

If you read the letters in many subsequent issues, you see people repeating many of the points I made. Even using the same terms in criticizing Gene Roddenberry's "vision".

I guess this is proof that Dayton is not a troll but is a real persona. He was like this long before the internet as we know it.

Wow. A lot has not changed in 20 years.

Did I read that right?

Did someone actually sit there and (not just track down a letters page, but) transcribe from a PDF and then type the characters into wordforge quote, just so they could make a personal comment about another member and perhaps win some approval of their cohort?

This is Media Central, so I'll be polite about your complete ineptitude and apparent lack of understanding of the internet and/or document management.

PDF text can be copied and pasted. But, more importantly, the website has text-only versions of each issue which is clearly indicated on the left side of the page.

Glad I was wrong, thanks.

[But fire away, don't care a bit. Been working with pdfs a long time, don't always have searchable text, especially in the legal publ. world.]

It took less than 60 seconds. If we were talking seriously about maximising productive use of time, then none of us would post on Wordforge in the first place.

Ah, young Padawan. Allow me to teach you about the ways of the OCR.

Yeah, I regarded it a necessary feature the first time a bought I personal scanner.

These days, searchable text pdf is commonplace. But the first 10-15 years of use they were a bitch. Scanning into the OCR software to obtain a text block I could manipulate in MSWord was a huge tech breakthrough for making my life easier.

I didn't think or notice the Starlog or Omni was done in txt or searchable pdf. A lot of people that own stuff used to protect it by the old PDF format which only allowed pics of the content. So, oops.

The Dayton letter and response -- classic. Too bad this is Media Central.

keep reading. There are later letters supporting my position IIRC.

This thread needs more space battles!

Prove it.

You have the links. Look them up yourself.

So you're lying.


Again.

Okay Faceman, Dayton, that's enough. This is Media Central, not the Red Room. Note post 21 which should have made that clear. That means no trolling and flaming.

Dayton started it by breathing.

Actually it did not make it clear. In fact it seemed you were eagerly jumping into the fray and pouring fuel on the fire.

There's apparently a number of magazine collections there, including Heavy Metal and National Lampoon. I'm guessing that since the folks who run the Internet Archive have said they're not particularly worried about copyright issues when it comes to things which are out-of-print, that they've gone after defunct magazines, whereas Google only has those which are still in print and they've worked out a deal with the publishers.