Decemberween: Certifiably Ingame

Okay, look, not everything I’m going to bring up is going to be something deeply enrichening or uplifting. It’s not all about necessarily learning an extra language or promoting artists of colour in a marginalised field. Sometimes, what you want is some brain-off youtube content that you can tune in and tune out of, and that does something to remind you of stuff you like, without necessarily demanding you put that thing straight in the forefront of your attention.

And to that, I offer the work of one Certifiably Ingame, who, unfortunate name aside, seems to be one of those wonderful nerds who wants to talk about science fiction a lot but is doing it with a pause and mute button on hand.

The USS BOZEMAN Legacy

The work presented by the channel has a bunch of different types of feature. If you want something to mull over after watching some new Trek but don’t want to like, go to reddit or anything like that, Rick’s channel produces a bunch of stuff about the shows, but it’s all done through a fairly affable ‘I liked this’ or ‘I didn’t like this’ lens. Despite being a channel about overwhelming attention to detail on Trek Lore – and there are playlists of this stuff – the channel is very firmly in the ‘it is a story told by people for money, and things change’ camp. 

I find that sometimes there’s something very comforting about these lists that remind me of things, and it’s a really good way to approach an enormous continuity that’s mostly available on streaming services. The episodic nature of Trek means that if I want to go look for ‘the good episodes’ of a thing, there’s just an enormous list of readings that people want me to do. But if instead, I, say, put on a listicle of ‘ten big creatures in Star Trek’ and I get two episodes from Voyager, one from TNG, one from TOS and so on, that’s an interesting linked list to kick off a bit of a watch.

I dunno, it mixes stuff I know and remember with stuff I don’t yet, and I think that’s pretty cool. It’s certainly more approachable an a holistic, top-down approach when it comes to Trek lore.