if i look back, i am lost
Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
gracie abrams
RMH
$LAYYYTER
d e v o n
titsay
sheepfilms
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
oozey mess
todays bird
cherry valley forever
occasionally subtle
NASA
Cosmic Funnies
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
noise dept.
Mike Driver
Keni
seen from India
seen from Argentina
seen from El Salvador
seen from Malaysia
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Poland
seen from Vietnam
@jennelikejennay
I should probably write a pinned post, shouldn't I?
This blog is about 80% Star Trek. Currently I like TOS best. I write reams of Kirk/Spock fic here. I also love making up stuff about Vulcan culture, speculating on their biology, learning their language, etc.
I also write books. My Imperial Mars series is like if you put Master and Commander in space, and then it somehow morphed into Les Mis. Frock coats, solar sails, revolution, lesbians. You can get into the series here.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Not all venom fans are monster fuckers 😞 some of us are just aroace disasters who like the idea of a platonic soulmate who likes to murder annoying people for you, is that so bad?
Guys I’m part of the club 🥺
monsterqueerplatonic
Aces are welcomed and are valued members in the monsterfucker community.
This is asexual joy!
Imagine being a civilian on a Starfleet starship.
"How was your day, honey?" "Not great. Had to pick the kids from school early because the ship went back in time. There's a confused Roman centurion in the living room, btw. How was your day?" "Couldn't get much work done because Jerry got taken over by a space parasite." "Again?" "I think at this point he's doing it on purpose."
Child in the Enterprise daycare, drawing a picture entitled My Family: "This is me and this is my daddy and this is my daddy's transporter duplicate and this is my mommy and this is the subspace entity that poses as human that used mommy as it's template that calls itself her sister and this is our dog and this is the shape-shifting salt-vampire that snuck on board disguised as our dog but decided it likes dog food better than salt so now we have two dogs."
"And this is my brother Jacob."
"Why is he gray?"
"I tried to make him transparent to show how he doesn't fully exist in this timestream."
Philon 2026 reading list
It happens the same every year. When I finally buckle down to filling out my Philon nominations, I have way too much in every category to nominate them all!
So: I tend to make a longlist first, the stuff that definitely deserves it, which I have to sift among. And then I try to inflict it on other people, in the hopes that whatever I don't nominate, somebody else will. After all, the biggest hurdle in front of every fic is simply getting found and read.
So, here we go. I have not read everything put out this year, not by a long shot, and I am positive I've forgotten some of the things I have read. But here are a few in each category which are definitely worth checking out.
Podfics and poems! Putting off art for now because I seriously do not have ANY idea how to search for art from this year rather than previous years; I've been reblogging it quite heedlessly without tags all year.
Podfic
I used to never listen to podfic, but I have started getting really into it. Having somebody read a good fic to you lets you enjoy it in a whole new way.
Silent Star by cookiemom6067 (from my fic)
This was a huge challenge for her, because Spock has a severe stutter and communication takes place with speech, sign, text, and telepathy. But she took care to accurately depict stuttering and distinguish all the kinds of communication, and I think she did an amazing job.
Discounts at Starbase One by cookiemom6067 (from AndroidAndAle)
The fic is a longtime time favorite and cookiemom never fails.
Unconditional by Catchatorie (from lettered)
One of my favorite fics ever, and the narrator somehow manages to make it even hotter.
Captain Pike's long-game beneficial Starfleet business scheme by Starlafoxfire (from thembonesthembones)
I'm not finished listening to it but it's definitely worth a listen.
How hard can it be? by me, from my own fic
I'm a beginner at this but hey, I think it turned out okay.
Poems
Halfway by SpockLovemail
The Scientist Observes His Captain's Botanical Interests by Kyra
The Cock on the Spock by JoJoB
One day left to get nominations in!
Still stuck on art so please recommend anything I should be nominating!!
If you're going to create an alien culture, giving them our human complexes and bigotries is about the most boring thing you could possibly do.
Like, I adore Amok Time, but "oooooh in Vulcan society women are property!" isn't what you'd call creative, now is it?
Our human biases are accidents of our unique biological and cultural development. There's nothing natural, logical, or necessary about them. Having them appear over and over in other species would suggest there's more to them than there is. Homophobia, for instance, isn't even universal on Earth, so I see no reason for it to be duplicated all over the galaxy.
Now the second most boring thing you could do is simply write a utopia. The really fun thing is to give them their own cultural problems, completely untethered from anything we do. And make them a culture in flux, different from place to place and from time to time. Maybe the people on this continent rank people by smell, but people on this other continent left that prejudice in the dark ages.
And that's why I simply ignore any canon about Vulcans I don't like. My justification is that humans have often misunderstood what they were doing, ascribing human categorizations and motivations to them which were never very accurate.
It's just more fun to say "oh yeah they've never heard of homophobia. But they do think men are unsuited for the priesthood because pon farr destabilizes their telepathy," or whatever.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
one argument you often see about fanfiction is that it's like 'training wheels' writing? like 'oh it's fine to do that while you're still learning, it's easier than coming up with your own ideas'. and I have to say I have just never agreed with that.
in my experience it's actually pretty common for newbie fanfiction writers to gravitate towards coming up with OCs rather than writing about the canon characters (hence the infamous Mary Sue); this suggests that many people find that 'easier' than attempting to write about pre-existing characters.
I would say that recreating the characterisation, mood and general vibes of an existing work of fiction is in fact a skill in and of itself that's acquired via practice. A common compliment delivered to fanfiction writers is how well they have captured the spirit of the original work. Inexperienced fanfiction writers fail to do this.
When creating an original character you can, ultimately, say anything about them and now it's canon bcos you created them and you said so. conversely, well, if you are covering a well known song and start playing the wrong notes people will notice immediately.
In addition: a lot of fanfiction, IMO, is in actuality a form of metafictional literary analysis. a story where two characters sit down and talk about their feelings about a canonical event? literary analysis, which is of course a skill. Sometimes fanfiction is bad bcos the writer is not good at interpreting texts.
finally I have made this point before but you never really see anyone suggesting that fictional works based on existing public domain texts are on 'easy mode'. is it 'easier' to write something based on a copyrighted work than a public domain work? Of course it isn't.
I know I said 'finally' but I forgot a point:
A major strength of the transformative work is its ability to create dramatic irony. If a fanfiction's emotional resonance is dependent on being familiar with the source material that's not necessarily a bad thing. sometimes it's a sign that the author has done a really skillful job of engaging with said source material.
And this is the real reason it seldom works to file the serial numbers off and publish it. Not because it wasn't a good work when it was a fanfic, but because a really good fic is good because of the resonance with the source material. The reader knows all along what you are echoing, what you are subverting, and what themes you are trying to pull out of the original text to examine.
Take that away and you've got a much emptier story. Imagine Paradise Lost with all references to the Bible taken out. The Aeneid if the destroyed city was legally distinct from Troy. It just wouldn't be the same!
I'm not going to say you can't do it. First because you can ship of Theseus your way to it: if it was already OCs in an AU, it'll be much easier to change to original fic. Or you can do a full rewrite following original fiction conventions instead, making sure the characters are developed on the page and the themes stand on their own. But it's like adapting a book into a movie: it's a different medium, and therefore it won't translate perfectly beat for beat. You have to work with the new medium to get good results.
TOS special effects stuff :)
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
I wrote a short story about this once.
Climate fiction by Sheila Jenné | “Do I really have to be here for this?” said the finance minister, sweat rolling down his round face as th
By far the easiest planet to settle and terraform is ours. No matter what we did to it, it would still be more habitable than Mars.
I know we’re all like lawless nonconformists but you really can’t be texting and driving. that’s one of the ones you’ve gotta listen to for real
Not even at stoplights!!! I know it’s so so tempting to just glance at your phone when you’re stopped, but there’s actually something called “distraction hangover” where even once you put your phone down, your brain is still processing the interaction and isn’t fully paying attention to the road for up to 30 seconds afterwards. So it’s still really dangerous even if you’re stopped when you look at your phone. If you need to check something on your phone, pull over.
this especially applies to people with adhd. you know that symptom you may have heard of called “difficulty transitioning between tasks”? you don’t want piloting a ton or two of potential death to be the task you can’t mentally switch back to.
Interesting! I hadn't heard of the "distraction hangover" before, turns out because it's pretty recent research!
Also, you are not good at multitasking even if you think you are.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
heckin jobs
obviously i think AI is an abomination. i have talked about this for a long time and will continue to do so, but today i was struck with something REALLY COOL that i do not think is discussed enough on the opposite end: the JOY and FULFILLMENT of being able to hire and work with human artists.
obviously not everyone is able to do this, but that is kind of my point. IT IS A GOAL TO BE ABLE TO GIVE, and AI is fundamentally ALL TAKE. when looking at my career i am just so honored to be like 'wow now this is big enough that i get to bring other creators along to join the fun'
we are just now starting the cover journey for my next traditionally published horror novel, and are working with an artist, and i just have so much gratitude in thinking 'how wonderful. i have my job, my editor has their job, my cover artist has their job, and ALL IN THE CREATIVE ARTS. heckin JOBS'
so i guess this morning i am just kind of meditating on the fact that when you reject AI as a creator you are not just bringing things back to the baseline, you are actually PUSHING in the other direction. you are opening space for human joy and creation and even income and that is so cool
Hey, don't kill yourself. We gotta be alive in 2061
Zoozve, my beloved
"...we don't live in a big clockwork, we live in a dance club..."
This is my favorite line.
It is now called Zoozve :')
why does star trek strange new worlds make the assumption that vulcans are all rude and self-superior. there are some vulcans with self-superiority but generally even they arent that outwardly rude just subtly catty. but most vulcans in trek are generally just normal???? I feel like vulcans acting the way they do in strange new worlds is like kirk drift but for vulcan behaviour. stop the flanderisation of vulcans im begging yall
And the way humans act toward them is....in-universe, it's awful behavior, even given they make Vulcans seem like jerks. The new cadet is having trouble adjusting to Starfleet because it's chaotic, and instead of adjusting things for her, they shrug and go "well she must just be very Vulcan."
Maybe she wants to hang someplace other than the noisy Port Galley, have you considered that?!
Yea it’s bad.
I think the reason for it is a combination of going too far with the direction Enterprise started for Vulcans, honestly ever since then Vulcans as a group have just been ENT Vulcans. This isn’t necessarily bad depending on how it’s done, Discovery was able to depict Vulcan societal problems without being… Like This.
But SNW like… thinks Vulcans are inherently funny and largely doesnt think about the implications of any of this beyond a punch line. The “very Vulcan” racial microaggression is meant to be a punchline. It sucks. It’s bad. The human characters being this shitty and the Vulcans being so over the top mean and short with everyone are both bad. It makes Spock feel like their allegorical One Black Friend. It’s weird.
"It's okay to say Vulcans are jerks because Spock said it once!" Yeah the SNW crew really think they're defending their friend against the big mean Vulcans, when really they're loudly rejecting half of what he is, all the time 😭
If I were writing this season, you could trust that it was working up to a plotline where Uhura realizes that smiling and saying she knows how people feels aren't communications strategies that work with everyone. She learns to connect with the Vulcan cadet on her terms, and becomes a better comms officer.
I just don't trust the SNW writers to do this. It feels like they're playing the sitcom thing of the one nerdy guy existing purely for lols, only it's a whole species.
That would be a really cute arc for Uhura and I think season 1 or even season 2 SNW couldve done this well, but season 3 and some aspects of season 4 like the treatment of A’Sha feels like reverse WandaVision where the show becomes more and more subsumed by sitcom tropes as it goes on and frankly i prefer when the show feels like these people’s actual lives and not a show within a show; thats genuinely how artificial the overly sitcom-ey elements feel for me
Exactly. It just doesn't feel sincere most of the time. I feel like they are winking at me with all these references to other things or past canon. Please just show me a story with actual people behaving in the ways real people do!
I think being subsumed by sitcom tropes is the perfect way to describe it. And although its not ‘the good guys’ being good, I think the crew of enterprise being shitty about vulcans and half of who Spock is is actually a good setup as a prequel of the original series, although I don’t think its something the show is doing on purpose and most of the audience wouldn’t come away with that, especially when their portrayal of vulcans is such a caricature even of ENT vulcans and consistently proves the humans’ racism to be correct.
On top of all that you hit the nail on the head with ‘one nerdy guy just for lols but its the whole species’. And worse its a whole bunch of autism stereotypes and they’re shown to be mean and be the butt of the joke.
Yep. I think possibly they did think "well it is appropriate for humans to be suspicious of Vulcans at this point in time," but then they didn't consider that they justify that attitude repeatedly in how Vulcans behave. Similar to how they have said they felt free not to redeem the Gorn, because we know they don't make peace with the Gorn at this time, but it didn't occur to them to make the Gorn be a species you could ever make peace with.
And yeah the one nerdy guy is ALWAYS an autism stereotype, and this is no exception.
Contributor Spotlight: MORETA1848 / JENNELIKEJENNAY
Above is a sneak preview of two (of many!) beautiful vulcan script translations by the talented @jennelikejennay for TZD, our print K/S fanzine. Ordering begins soon, so don't miss out: Follow @the-zine-directive for updates!
｡ ⊹₊ ⟡ ⋆ ⭒ ₊ ⊹
Most of you probably know the talented @jennelikejennay (she/ish-veh) from her fanfiction, but we asked her to join us for an entirely different talent... her understanding of the Vulcan language, both in script and transliteration! Our very own universal translator... or at least a darn good Vulcan one 😏 We just know she and Lieutenant Uhura would have a lot to talk about and are incredibly thankful for all she did for TZD 🫶
｡ ₊ ⭒ ˚｡ ⋆ ₊
✴︎ Most important question: Kirk, Spock, or Bones?
Spock.
✴︎ What is your “specialty?”
Taking kinks and making them soft and tender.
✴︎ What is something you've made that you're particularly proud of and why?
My fic A Tall Ship and a Star to Steer Her By was just a way of combining some of my biggest interests, but it turned out so much more than that. I'm very proud of it.
✴︎ How has it felt to be a contributor in a fanzine?
I feel in continuity with the past. So many of my obsessions have been solo endeavors. This comes with a community that's been going on for sixty years.
✴︎ What does K/S mean to you?
It's the devotion..... being such a unique person that you can never find your match, then finding the one person who truly understands. Of course you'd be devoted!
✴︎ Anything else we should know about you?
I also write novels. They are not what you'd call popular but I am very proud of them.
✴︎ Where can people find you?
Tumblr | AO3
｡ ₊ ⭒ ˚｡ ⋆ ₊
Thank you so much @jennelikejennay! See more of our contributor spotlights here!
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
why does star trek strange new worlds make the assumption that vulcans are all rude and self-superior. there are some vulcans with self-superiority but generally even they arent that outwardly rude just subtly catty. but most vulcans in trek are generally just normal???? I feel like vulcans acting the way they do in strange new worlds is like kirk drift but for vulcan behaviour. stop the flanderisation of vulcans im begging yall
And the way humans act toward them is....in-universe, it's awful behavior, even given they make Vulcans seem like jerks. The new cadet is having trouble adjusting to Starfleet because it's chaotic, and instead of adjusting things for her, they shrug and go "well she must just be very Vulcan."
Maybe she wants to hang someplace other than the noisy Port Galley, have you considered that?!
Yea it’s bad.
I think the reason for it is a combination of going too far with the direction Enterprise started for Vulcans, honestly ever since then Vulcans as a group have just been ENT Vulcans. This isn’t necessarily bad depending on how it’s done, Discovery was able to depict Vulcan societal problems without being… Like This.
But SNW like… thinks Vulcans are inherently funny and largely doesnt think about the implications of any of this beyond a punch line. The “very Vulcan” racial microaggression is meant to be a punchline. It sucks. It’s bad. The human characters being this shitty and the Vulcans being so over the top mean and short with everyone are both bad. It makes Spock feel like their allegorical One Black Friend. It’s weird.
"It's okay to say Vulcans are jerks because Spock said it once!" Yeah the SNW crew really think they're defending their friend against the big mean Vulcans, when really they're loudly rejecting half of what he is, all the time 😭
If I were writing this season, you could trust that it was working up to a plotline where Uhura realizes that smiling and saying she knows how people feels aren't communications strategies that work with everyone. She learns to connect with the Vulcan cadet on her terms, and becomes a better comms officer.
I just don't trust the SNW writers to do this. It feels like they're playing the sitcom thing of the one nerdy guy existing purely for lols, only it's a whole species.
That would be a really cute arc for Uhura and I think season 1 or even season 2 SNW couldve done this well, but season 3 and some aspects of season 4 like the treatment of A’Sha feels like reverse WandaVision where the show becomes more and more subsumed by sitcom tropes as it goes on and frankly i prefer when the show feels like these people’s actual lives and not a show within a show; thats genuinely how artificial the overly sitcom-ey elements feel for me
Exactly. It just doesn't feel sincere most of the time. I feel like they are winking at me with all these references to other things or past canon. Please just show me a story with actual people behaving in the ways real people do!
why does star trek strange new worlds make the assumption that vulcans are all rude and self-superior. there are some vulcans with self-superiority but generally even they arent that outwardly rude just subtly catty. but most vulcans in trek are generally just normal???? I feel like vulcans acting the way they do in strange new worlds is like kirk drift but for vulcan behaviour. stop the flanderisation of vulcans im begging yall
And the way humans act toward them is....in-universe, it's awful behavior, even given they make Vulcans seem like jerks. The new cadet is having trouble adjusting to Starfleet because it's chaotic, and instead of adjusting things for her, they shrug and go "well she must just be very Vulcan."
Maybe she wants to hang someplace other than the noisy Port Galley, have you considered that?!
Yea it’s bad.
I think the reason for it is a combination of going too far with the direction Enterprise started for Vulcans, honestly ever since then Vulcans as a group have just been ENT Vulcans. This isn’t necessarily bad depending on how it’s done, Discovery was able to depict Vulcan societal problems without being… Like This.
But SNW like… thinks Vulcans are inherently funny and largely doesnt think about the implications of any of this beyond a punch line. The “very Vulcan” racial microaggression is meant to be a punchline. It sucks. It’s bad. The human characters being this shitty and the Vulcans being so over the top mean and short with everyone are both bad. It makes Spock feel like their allegorical One Black Friend. It’s weird.
"It's okay to say Vulcans are jerks because Spock said it once!" Yeah the SNW crew really think they're defending their friend against the big mean Vulcans, when really they're loudly rejecting half of what he is, all the time 😭
If I were writing this season, you could trust that it was working up to a plotline where Uhura realizes that smiling and saying she knows how people feels aren't communications strategies that work with everyone. She learns to connect with the Vulcan cadet on her terms, and becomes a better comms officer.
I just don't trust the SNW writers to do this. It feels like they're playing the sitcom thing of the one nerdy guy existing purely for lols, only it's a whole species.
