Rarely do you hear people saying that The Simpsons changed their lives, even though it is a long-running franchise. And you don't see people getting teared up as they remember the first time they saw Terminator, even though that franchise hasn't quit since the early 1980s. Why does Star Trek stay with people as a source of personal inspiration?

I can't speak for everyone, but I will offer a personal confession. I grew up without a television set in my house, so I was never exposed to the original Star Trek series except through the movies. Which I saw, and liked, but they didn't deliver any soul-stirring moments of revelation. But then I started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with a group of friends right after college. It was the third season, when things really got good on the show, and I was drawn in absolutely.

It was a tough time for me when I started following the adventures of Picard and crew. I had just begun a really difficult course of study in graduate school, and I wasn't sure if it was the right thing to be doing with my life. I'd always had a rocky relationship with my family, to put it mildly, and I'd finally had the nerve to kick them out of my life for good. So I was trying to deal with those giant questions in life, like "Who am I?" and "What is my quest?" Most especially, I was trying to find friends who would treat me better than my family had.

I guess I was looking for models of community, and that's why Star Trek: The Next Generation lodged itself so deeply in my heart. I wanted to believe in a world where people who weren't family cared for each other, the way the Enterprise crew did. I wanted to think that the future would bring me adventures that weren't always just about smashing things up, but sometimes dealt with rather bookish topics like ethics and geopolitics. I'm a little embarrassed to admit how closely I studied the behavior of the crew and tried to imitate them in my new life as a grownup. I loved how they were very professional and rational, despite their strong emotional ties. When they were upset, the answer was always "do the work" or "solve the problem," not "mope endlessly." I can't tell you how many times I've told myself "do the work" when all I wanted to do was cry. And it's always helped me get through tough things.

I did find a few friends through Star Trek. One of my best friends for many years was a major Trek fan whom I met the year I discovered TNG. But it wasn't like I found a fan community who became my new family. It was more that Star Trek helped me imagine how I wanted my friendships to be, and then I found those friends in the usual places: In school, at work, at my volunteer job, or randomly at a show.

Star Trek: TNG is the reason I bought my first television set. It's also the reason I keep doing difficult things, even when the odds seem stacked against me.

So yeah, I get it when people freak out over how Abrams changed Star Trek - he's messing with a story that helped them through difficulties, or just kept them from getting too bored.

At the same time, I think we all know that stories exist in a specific time and place. I'm not sure that Star Trek: TNG would capture my heart in the same way if I were to see it now for the first time. And even if Abrams were to mangle my TNG canon the way he did with the original series, I don't think it would be life-shattering. Why? Because there would always be the original TNG, the one I saw twenty years ago that changed my life. Even if Abrams or whomever decides that his Picard likes disco and Data should marry a gynoid.

The fact is, stories are meant to be retold. You may like them less in the retelling, or you may suddenly like them more (hence the phenomenon of rebooted Battlestar Galactica). But nobody can take away the stories that changed your life. Those are always going to be yours, untouched, until the space worms nibble your ganglia. They will keep inspiring you, and keep being meaningful. Hopefully, new stories will come along that mean something to you later in life, or that spur you to action in a way you never expected.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that there's a difference between personal stories and public stories. Star Trek is a public story that belongs to the world, for better or worse. (OK let's not get into a copyright discussion right now - you know what I mean.) You can't control what happens to a public story. You can't stop slash fiction pervs like me from writing dirty stories about Spock, and you can't stop nerds like JJ Abrams, Roberto Orci, and Alex Kurtzman from blowing up Vulcan.

But then there's your personal Star Trek, the story that matters to you. For me, Star Trek: TNG is always going to be a personal story about finding community and solving problems even when it hurts. This, I think, is what powers the fandom of Star Trek. It's a rich enough public story that it can spawn zillions of personal stories, all very real. Fandom is made in personal byways off the public tale, in the strange little alleys the story builds in its viewers' minds.

And ultimately that's why I have no fear that Star Trek will get retold, often badly. What matters most is the personal story, which lives safely in my brain, far beyond the reach of Abrams and his reboot crew.

It’s true. I’d been making movies since I was about 11. It was very Rushmore-ian. I needed the parts to be played by all sorts of characters, so I needed jocks and geeks alike. It was good that I had both in my camp. My senior year, I kind of quit sports after meeting this supercool bodybuilder named Jim Arden [who was a teacher at his school]. He had a big, gray beard and his hair in corn rows—I’d never come across anyone as eccentric. He had a gym in the basement of the school; I went and trained with him for about three years.

To learn more about the jock who dared to turn one of the biggest nerd literary classics of all time into a movie, read the whole interview.

NORAD stands for North American Aerospace Defense Command, and its primary task during the 1960s, 70s, and 80s was to detect any airborne (or spaceborne) threat over the U.S. or Canada. A joint operation between the two nations, NORAD's walls are peppered with images of the US and Canadian flags flying side-by-side. NORAD's most spectacular and mythical feature is that the 5-acre facility is actually a tiny city, complete with enough food, water, and fuel to protect essential personnel after nuclear attack. When the site is "buttoned up," its blast doors closed and locked, it becomes one of the most hardened command centers in the world.

Or so we thought. That was the first myth to be busted when we arrived at NORAD and Lt. Lally gave us an introductory presentation about the facility. It turns out that it only ever had enough "button up" supplies to house essential personnel for 30 days (correction: Maj. Thomas Veale has written to say that 30 days is the minimum, but the maximum amount of time is "classified"). So there went all our images of a City of Ember style situation, with a generational city existing for hundreds of years underground while the Earth slowly decontaminates and the atomic mutants kill each other for tins of spam.

Plus, NORAD is no longer really all that hardened. Smart nukes mean that any hits on the U.S. would be precise and direct. "A direct hit would turn this into Cheyenne Valley," joked Lally. This is one of the many reasons why most of NORAD's essential functions have been relocated to Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs to the north. Today NORAD is like the Battlestar Galactica, a once-great military facility built to withstand threats of the past and slowly morphing into a museum. Still, like the Galactica, NORAD still has plenty of muscle.

Beyond the blast doors, we entered a high-ceilinged cavern, its walls dotted with rusting bolts driven deeply into the rock to maintain structural integrity. Water seeping through thousands of layers of the Cheyenne Mountain oozed down the walls. At the cavern's far end, a white steel box with an unassuming doorway marked the entrance to NORAD city proper. Once swarming with personnel, the place is now a kind of ghost town. Only a few hundred people work here at any given time.

Immediately, we saw the weirdest part of NORAD: The entire city is built on springs. Housed in a series of boxy steel buildings, some three stories high, the facility has to withstand the shaking of bomb blasts. A huge crawl space beneath the city is packed with giant 1000-pound springs that form the foundation for the entire facility. It was the first place all of us thought we'd want to hide if we were sneaking in. There are crawl spaces between each building, too, and a wily intruder could snake underneath the town, squirm around those springs, and inch up the side of the cement-encapsualted command center at its heart to gain access.

The city's interior had been designed by the Navy, and you could tell. It felt like being on a large submarine, with cramped metal corridors, exposed pipe, and a mess hall that smelled of frying donuts. As we approached the legendary command center in building 2, we were met with a reminder that NORAD is still alive and kicking. Apparently a general had called for a classified meeting in the command center, and so all we'd be allowed to do was gaze hungrily at its boxy body through some windows in the third floor.

The command center, where generals would coordinate with the president to deal with a space or air attack, is housed in a 60-foot capsule of smoothed concrete. From inside it, you can see the domed ceiling though windows in the top. From where we stood outside, we could see just the edges of that dome stretching over the straight-edged roof of the center, streaked with the water that continuously seeps out of every wall in the NORAD facility.

Instead of of the command center, we saw the snack shop and bought t-shirts. Lally told us the number of people the facility could support was still classified, though he did let slip that you had to have a "mission essential" badge to be on the safe side of the blast doors. "They won't let any mouth-breathers who aren't productive stay inside," he joked.

Perhaps the best part of our tour came next. We descended into the basement, to see the generator and cooling facilities that keep the entire NORAD facility running. "Without power, it's just a cave," read a sign stenciled into a door in the dim cavern packed with pipes and mysterious, locked rooms. We walked through a maze of caves where raw outcroppings of rock looked ready to crush the ubiquitous white steel boxes of control rooms and fat, blue pipes. Because the facility had been designed by Navy, all the pipes were marked in the colors that would be used to identify air, water, and fuel pipes on a navy ship. A riot of blue, red, and green pipes sprouted from every wall. Now the generators and other equipment are run by government contractors rather than military personnel.

The floor was pitted with holes where water from the ceiling had been leaking continuously for fifty years, and after squeezing between two huge tanks we came upon a sight straight out of a Dune novel. It was a long, underground reservoir of pure mountain water, completely black beneath a low rock ceiling. Enough light touched its surface to illuminate a single duck floating on its surface. For an instant, that duck gave me my first sense of claustrophobia. What was it doing here, 2000 feet beneath a mountain, breathing piped-in air and living in the deepest, most confined part of the facility?

Of course, it was just a decoy, a joke of a marker put there to orient anyone who was doing work in the reservoir. It sat perfectly still, staring at the dark area where the cavern sank down to meet the water, reminding me that nothing but artificial life could live down here. Or life artificially preserved.

As we left, we passed through another blast door and into mile-long escape tunnels that plunged deep into the mountain, lit only by a line of light in the ceiling. Like the rest of the facility, they seemed ghostly without anyone in them. Even the smoking area, located weirdly across the tunnel from one of the main air vents, was entirely abandoned. We waited for a bus to take us out from underground, smelling diesel on the air and imagining the end of the world.

So what did the other visitors think?

Pyr publisher Lou Anders was excited by pretty much everything. "So this is what the Batcave would really be like!" he exclaimed when we walked beneath the high, damp ceilings into the reservoir area. "It would be all wet and covered in crap." He also noted that the engine room looked like "a Doctor Who set." When we left, he mourned, "I'm sad that they can't live in there forever, in that realistic Batcave."

Others thought it was instant inspiration for fiction. Jeff "Plague War" Carlson enthused, "It was completely phenomenal, and pretty much made for action scenes with Bruce Willis. Especially the space underneath the buildings full of springs. Of course, you'd need even deeper caves underneath the ones we saw. A vast catacombs."

Robert "Rollback" Sawyer said, "It was great fodder. I was disappointed that we didn't get to the control center, but that means I'll always see it the way it was in WarGames. It was [also] surprisingly steampunky."

David "Mirrored Heavens" Williams commented, "I liked the plumbing. If you're going to be monitoring World War III, you also have to go to the bathroom. I liked those escape tunnels too."

Paolo "Pump Six" Bacigalupi added, "The world runs on springs. That's what I learned at NORAD. I would definitely want to be the person with 'mission essential' badge, as opposed to the mouth breather who gets kicked out."

"Into the nuclear wasteland," joked Sawyer.

Bacigalupi had done a little sociological research, too: "I wrote down all the magazines they had for sale in their shop: Playboy, Field and Stream, Runner's World, Cosmo."

Erin Cashier describes the castle we visited after NORAD, where Blake "Spellwright" Charlton mused:

The fiction was more important than the function — when you lock down, you only last for 30 days! So it was all about making it seem like we had this facility during the Cold War but it wasn't really that big of a deal.

Kevin J. Anderson, author of several Star Wars and Dune novels, said he was intrigued by NORAD as a symbol:

I'm fascinated by what it signifies about our mindset from fifty years ago. It was a time when you had to have big, powerful responses to a single monolithic enemy. So you could build a big facility like that. We don't have those monolitic enemies anymore. NORAD wasn't designed to fight an opponent like a terrorist — it designed against a rational villain.

David "Counting Heads" Marusek quietly noticed a lot of telling details. For example, the facility is largely run by government contractors now, and he figured out that the main contractor is an Alaskan company called Aleut, which he speculated (based on its name) is probably run by Natives. There's a certain irony in the idea of a Native-run company taking charge of operating one of the most iconic U.S. military installations. That in itself could form the basis of a short story or novel. Marusek also commented on the "tremendous naval influence" over NORAD's design. "There was a real ship feel to it."

NORAD, a ship city slowly drifting to sleep underground, is perhaps one of the most enduring legacies of the Cold War. Hewn out of the rock in a frenzy of space age paranoia, it's a technological marvel whose value was always more symbolic than strategic. But that's what makes it such a pure product of the U.S.: Here, we have faith symbols can offer as much tactical advantage in war as functioning technologies can. But symbols, like technologies, will obsolesce. And that's what's happening to NORAD, bit by bit.

Top image via US Navy; image of our group in front of the blast doors via NORAD; image (below) of NORAD being built in the late 1950s via NORAD.

We had grown sick of all the ARG marketing schemes for movies like The Dark Knight, which try to drum up fan support and brand recognition for forthcoming franchises with semi-mysterious websites and phone numbers and instructions on where to buy a cake that has an iPhone in it. Profoundly uncreative, the Batman ARG had done little more than inspire a lot of people to wear Joker makeup. While other ARGs are more fun and thought-provoking, we felt that in general ARG-making had become so bland that you could practically never tell what the games were about. They're little more than walk-in ads.

So we schemed, and said to ourselves, "Well what if we came up with an ARG that was so generic that people would think it was related to practically every movie coming out next year?" Seemed like a sure win — people would see the ARG and start guessing "Oh it's for GI Joe," or "It's for Watchmen." But we wanted our super-generic ARG to be a commentary on the super-generic nature of ARGs too, which is a rather tall order.

You Are Being Deceived was carefully crafted to seem as if it could be about Watchmen, G.I. Joe, or Heroes. Well, carefully crafted might be too strong a phrase — perhaps "slapped together in a caffeine-induced frenzy" would be more accurate. We put together the basic ingredients of every generic ARG: a "personal blog" written by somebody who has gotten into a huge conspiracy they don't understand and is telling you all about it; a corporate website from the conspiracy-manufacturing company (why do all ARGs include fake corporations?), and a phone number you can call (listed on the blog) to get more clues about the conspiracy.

We even invented a back story about how an evil corporation is controlling superheroes and the populace via a chemically-enhanced television signal. On the You Are Being Deceived blog, you'll see the main character, code-named Sheep Snake, who discovers that all her paranoid theories about chemtrails are nothing compared to the mind-control plot hatched by her employer Elegiac International. Using superheroes (like, say, the ones in Heroes or Watchmen), they're selling this thing called RapidEnhance that's already being used on soldiers (like, say, the ones in G.I. Joe). When Sheep Snake discovers the plot, then gets a FedEx package with her friend's severed arm in it, she goes on the run with a plan to stop Elegiac from turning the whole world into TV-watching, mind-controlled drones.

So why didn't anybody call Sheep Snake's voice mail, or send us e-mails, or even look at our ARG? You can claim it's because the ARG was lame, and that wouldn't be entirely inaccurate. But was it really lamer than the Batman ARG, which was just a website with a few messages telling people to dress up like the Joker to see some footage?

What's more likely is that nobody saw our ARG because we didn't have tens of thousands of dollars to promote it. We printed out 1000 postcards, and thought we'd just hand them out to people — even if only a few saw it, they might blog about it and it could spread via word-of-mouth. We even enlisted the extremely non-devious-looking Gina Trapani from Lifehacker to hand out our cards so nobody would guess it was the io9 crew behind it. She tried handing them out in the Expo, and was promptly kicked out for handing out postcards without having a booth. Without a ton of cash to pay for giant signs, a booth, or to hire people to hand out millions of cards outside the Convention Center, there was no way we could get our ARG started. We wound up handing the cards out surreptitiously, but mostly we left them out on the "freebies" table where they disappeared (but to where?).

Ah, you say with a cynical smile, you are so naive. Did you really think you puny creatures with your 1000 cheap postcards printed with a URL could put even a tiny dent in the promotional juggernaut that is Comic-Con? The simple answer is yes, we really did. I think that's partly because we'd actually fallen for the ARG hype, despite the fact that we'd criticized it and should have known better. We imagined that ARGs really could be kind of grassroots and DiY, and that people would want to go to a cool URL like YouAreBeingDeceived. We thought our snarky little ARG might stir up some shit. But we deceived ourselves.

ARGs are not grassroots. They are not about community, or word-of-mouth. They really are about saturating the market with brands in order to generate interest in something, just the way old-fashioned advertising is. I don't mean to disparage the cleverness of ARGs — a lot of them are terrifically fun. But the ARGs that get noticed at a media event like Comic-Con are always going to be the ones with lots of resources behind them. To create a "grassroots feeling," you need to have a top-down corporation with wads of cash. So when you play an ARG associated with a commercial property, you are in some sense being deceived. You're being made to feel as if you've discovered something, as if you're part of a community spontaneously coming together to play at something, when in fact you've been targeted by an extremely well-funded marketing campaign.

Or maybe it's a plot by Elegiac International to control your minds and corrupt your heroes. Yeah, I like that version of the story better.