memory alpha

If Star Trek Fans for some reason are interested in myself as a person, here it is, for what's it worth:

Hurga is the name of my Klingon persona. I intended to make a new mask for the SciFi Con in Speyer, Sept 24/25, and to upload a nice photo then, so I didn't put too much work into the avatar picture you can see now. It turned out the manufacturer we had ordered our Bat'leths from didn't get them ready in time, so we just used Starfleet costumes from Amazon. You can read the whole story here. So, the old avatar will have to do until I find the time to photoshop a better one or to do the mask.

On Terra, I am known under the name of Benedikt and was born 1969 in southern Germany,

I'm an Archeologist by training, but there are very few jobs in that field, so I mostly worked as an IT specialist, admin and programmer.

In more Detail:

I studied Egyptology with minor subjects classical archeology and prehistory, graduating as a PhD in 2006. I did quite some research, mostly in the field of languages and religion, and hold courses for students, but I never got a permanent employment. I also did some expeditions to Egypt, documenting tombs in Thebes and making VR models of them.

Computers have always been a major hobby of mine since the times of the Commodore 64 (yeah, I was what is called a nerd today, pen and paper roleplaying being another major hobby), so to get a better employment, I took some formal training to get the certifications and turned the hobby into a job, becoming a network engineer and worked for the Lebenshilfe for eight years (a charitable association for people with mental disabilities and their families, providing housing, sheltered workshops, social works and more).

I have two sons, 11 and 8 years old, who share many of my interests. When the older one was 5, he asked me "who would win in a fight, Darth Vader or Godzilla?".

I remember "Enterprise" (TOS) was a thing when I was a child (TOS was first aired in 70ties in Germany, I'm not that old), classmates would talk about it sometimes. But in my family, we didn't watch it, and so I only picked up very few episodes ocassionally. By the way, I remember Raumpatroullie and Space: 1999 much the same way. There are two episodes I remember watching at least partly and which impressed me as a child: The Tholean Web (TOS) and "Yesteryear" (TAS).

I remember the hype when Star Wars hit the theaters in Germany. Expecially the toys... But I was nine at the time and when I was actually allowed to go to the cinema, it was the newest Disney flick (which was Bernard & Bianca in this year, Star Wars didn't belong to Disney back then). It was not until around 1985 that I would watch Star Wars (Movie 1 = Episode 4 = "A New Hope", though it wasn't named such back then) on VHS with a friend. Six years of delay doesn't seem that much from today's perspective, but to me it meant the difference of being age nine to being age 16 - it felt like forever. It really was an eye opener to me what movies really could be, We watched the other two classic movies as well as Blade Runner, Alien and Terminator (and some non SciFi stuff) shortly thereafter, it was a whole new world opening up. Of course I had grown up from Disney, but I never had seen films at that level of production value.

I became and I am to this day a huge fan of Star Wars, but it was just a private and personal appreciance of the great movies, I never did "fan things" like collecting collectibles, convent on conventions or pushing myself to learn the dialogue by heart. Star Trek remained in the background, as it did with most people in those years before TNG. I remember having read the parodies of The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock in the Mad Magazine.

TNG hit Germany when I was in university.

...To be continued...