“Fandom is a Potluck Dinner… you’re invited!”

Hello friends, it’s that time of year again!

Grab a plate, pull up a chair, and consider yourself enthusiastically invited to StarTrekPotluck2023!

The challenge is to create a piece of fanwork that is food or drink themed, and based within the realms of the Star Trek universe.

If you’re interested in joining in, here’s what you need to know:

What do I do?

Pick a type of food or drink, a meal time or a place where nourishment is served/prepared, then create a fanwork around that place/event/object.

It can be any type of fanwork, for example; fanfic, gifs, fanvid, fanart, poetry, podfic. The only constraints are that it needs to be set within Star Trek (any series), and it must include the theme of food/drink.

When do I do it?

Choose a publishing date between 1st August and 14th August. We will fill up each slot, and if more people want to join in the fun, we will open double bookings. That way, we can all enjoy up to two servings of delicious fanworks a day!

How do I do it?

1. Pick a Star Trek fandom, or a mash-up of Trek fandoms. (Please do not submit crossovers with non-Star-Trek fandoms.)

2. Send an Ask to this blog with your chosen date, the Star Trek fandom(s) you’ve picked, and the type of fanwork you’ll be creating.

3. Message this blog for any questions / changes etc, your hosts @regionalpancake and @procrastinatorproject will be happy to help :)

4. Post your delicious fanwork on your chosen date.

5. Message this blog with the details of where your fanwork is posted, and tag your post with #startrekpotluck2023

6. If posting on AO3, add your fanwork to the StarTrekPotluck2023 Collection.

7. Follow this blog for updates!

I’ve messed around with AI a little, because I like to understand a thing when I’m formulating opinions on it and I’ve found the best way to do that is to climb into the thing and start pushing buttons. I’ve been unimpressed with ChatGPT; its fiction chops are oddly saccharine, and of course you can’t trust the nonfiction it spits out because everything it says needs to be fact checked. It claims it can’t “lie”, only misinterpret data from the sets it was trained on; devs call the misinterpreted data “hallucination”.

Part of what I was testing was whether it could competently do my job, so that if my boss starts asking about it, I can give him a decent report. I asked it for biographies of a few wealthy people I’ve researched in the past, and it spat out some respectably generic information that was mostly correct. However, most of the people I research now are not like “so rich I’m famous for it” levels of wealthy, and harder generally for me to find information on, as I assumed it would be for ChatGPT. 

So I thought I’d see what it could do with someone more middle class, and asked it for a biography of Sam Starbuck. 

What it returned was like what you would get if you told me “Write a flattering biography of yourself and don’t worry that I’ll be fact-checking anything you say.” It was mostly true, but it hyped up my achievements as an author in ways that I would consider not entirely honest, and said I was also a professional editor and that I had led prestigious writing workshops in the past. That’s plain untrue, but I can see where it would be making that assumption, because my author bio sounds like a lot of other, more famous peoples’ author bios, and I would guess it just pulled in some of their verbiage for color. 

But the wildest part of the bio was that it named three of the novels I’ve written. Or rather, it named two novels I’ve written and one novel that I definitely have not. It said I was the author of a novel called “Like Clockwork”. Just in case I had written a fanfic titled “Like Clockwork” and forgotten about it, I checked AO3 and also asked ChatGPT for a plot summary of Sam Starbuck’s “Like Clockwork”. And sure enough it hallucinated a multi-paragraph summary of an entire novel I’ve never written, on AO3 or anywhere else. (It was not a good summary. Very Generic YA SF Thriller.) 

ChatGPT is very good at one thing: apologizing. When I pressed it about where it found the data it couldn’t say, when I asked why it had made up the plot summary it couldn’t tell me, when I asked if it could show me source links or data it drew on to create “Like Clockwork” it of course would not. But it always said it was sorry…

Anyway, my best theory from googling is that every year there are roughly nine million news stories about how Starbucks Coffee’s holiday cups are back “like clockwork”. 

I suppose I should be glad the novel’s title isn’t Unicorn Frappucino.

Trying to remind myself that im allowed to take painkillers even if the pain is "my fault".

A migraine is a result of, not a punishment for forgetting to eat - take the painkillers.

Back pain is a result of, not a punishment for poor posture - take the painkillers.

Sore joints are a result of, not a punishment for overexertion - take the painkillers.

Pain is not a punishment for a mistake. Painkillers are there to ease suffering. There is no glory in misery. There is no virtue in agony.

I see it a lot in my students that the ONLY mode they can engage with literature on is one in which they either say it's good because it's "relatable" or it's bad because they "can't relate to it" as well, and I feel like this is a symptom of the same problem. An unwillingness to engage with fiction outside of its ability to be a mirror to your specific worldview and set of morals. But art doesn't exist to give you moral purity badges--it's a mode of expression that produces conversations between artists and readers. And to engage in those converesations on an adult level you need to learn to process the discomfort of flawed human realities productively.

"you need to learn to process the discomfort of flawed human realities productively" ABSOLUTELY 100%. and 100% YES the kids self-policing their fiction consumption and crimethink and Badness are going to fuck up their mental health in a severe way (i was there like seven years ago. it was Hell)

at the same time... i've also slowly grown to LOATHE the argument that "people should be able to cope through fiction" as a reason for why writing fictional darkness is fine. not because it's UNTRUE but because i very obviously use fiction to process/cope and... like. every fucking time i hear someone say "we need to ban all works about X dark topic because they're glorifying/normalizing/fetishizing it," and i say, "okay, but i've written this topic before, very clearly to process my own feelings about stuff that has happened to or around me. have i done something wrong by sharing it and tagging it so others can avoid or find it as they see fit??"

the answer is always the same:

"oh, but YOU do it RIGHT. you clearly SHOW that the thing is bad. you clearly have LICENSE to write feelings about this thing. because your writing is good and thoughtful and IMPORTANT. i'm not talking about YOU. i'm talking about people who are actually bad"

and it makes my skin CRAWL.

i have far more in common with people who create and consume 'bad' content, even when they aren't doing it for trauma / coping reasons, than i do with people who are deeply concerned about sanitizing and purging and shaming and eliminating content on moral grounds.

i don't want to be the person that you cite as someone who's "allowed" to write these kinds of stories. i just want to be a person who writes them and doesn't fucking worry about it. because people who want to read them will read them and sometimes feel seen/understood/loved, and sometimes they'll HATE my takes on things and wish i'd never written a goddamn word, and people who don't want to read that content WON'T read my stuff because they're practicing reasonable self care.

trauma fic isn't okay because it helps people process stuff, which mitigates the ephemeral abstract 'harm' potentially being done by creating or sharing it, or whatever. trauma fic is okay because fiction isn't fucking real.

typewriter!

I love the orchestra trying and failing to maintain a straight face throughout

Exactly. These people had to rehearse at least a few times all at once yet when it's nkt their turn to play they still look at that guy with the typewriter as if he was the most fascinating thing they have ever seen.

My husband's wind ensemble played this song when he was in high school! you can do it with normal auxillery percussion, but it's so much more fun if you do it with a real typewriter

now that is a writing mood

they were really like, the only reasonable approach to this piece is to insert a clown at the center of the orchestra

Your periodic reminder that this is called "The Typewriter" by Leroy Anderson.

And that guy isn't a clown. He's a percussionist. They're all like that.

@kisahawklin I feel like this would be sonething you'd enjoy

They musician right in front of the conductor is laughing so hard he has to get out a handkerchief and wipe away actual tears by the end of the song. I love this whole piece so much!

Awesome 👏

Dear lord!

@advanced-procrastination iM

drift compatible

it took me a moment to realize what was going on with their hands. Drift compatible indeed!

RAW Irish Gay Music

[video description: two women playing a violin and a banjo. where ordinarily each instrument is a two-handed single-player operation, one hand working the strings on the neck of the instrument and the other plucking the strings on the banjo body or bowing the strings on the violin body, here both instruments are two-player because each woman is working the neck of one instrument and the body of another. partway through, a third woman comes up with a tin whistle, which again is ordinarily single-player, requiring both hands on the holes and mouth blowing into the mouthpiece; here, the third woman does the hands part for the whistle while one of the first two does the blowing.]

I feel like I’m exposing myself a little bit with this bc my introduction to fic is soo random I think, but whatever your answer please tell me the story! I wanna know haha

On Nick.com! Atla was the first time that the website hosted fic on the message boards (if i remember correctly) and I was like “OH this is a thing other people do and not just me when I finish my work first in class????” and that was all she wrote. A few months later one of my friends introduced me to FFN.

oh your pronouns are he/they?

well that’s mathematically incorrect becuase you can still simplify the fraction since both sides have “he”

making your pronouns technically 1/ty

>:)

Mixing sodium with potassium is crazy!

Holy WHAT

MORE PHOTS IN MUH REBLOG

Psst. Don't tell the jolkein rolkein rolkein estate, but this is amazing. DO consider buying a print from the extraordinary artist responsible:

https://www.inprnt.com/gallery/leiaham/

Original Twitter thread with the artist's thoughts and commentary:

fuck it, I'm romanticizing underrated ao3 works now. 8,000 word fics with only 13 kudos, even after 5 months. multi-chaptered works with only 11 comments from the same 3 people and the author themself. incredibly specific works featuring OC's mingling with canon characters that only get 5 kudos. rare-pair fics. gift works that are literally ONLY for the receiver.

I’m here. It’s all right.

Yeah. 😏

Not people saying “Fandom has always been like this” in that vent post I made. No. It hasn’t always been like this. Fandom has NEVER been like this until recently and if you were in fandom pre-tumblr purge, pre-twitter, pre-netflix boom, pre-tiktok….then you would fucking know it was nothing like this.

We still had the drive to create. We still sold prints and charms and made zines…but it was never like this.

The introduction of streaming, binge shows that drop all at once, tiktok and vine RIP i still love u vine but you were the beginning of a particularly ugly era) creating this bite sized, quick paced ‘content’ era of creation and it bled out into fucking everything else.

Fandoms didn’t die down when the show ended or the season was over. You didn’t mass unfollow artist, writers or moots just because they changed fandoms. There wasn’t this need to please the algorithm in order for your posts to get seen by people and enjoyed.

Fandoms used to last YEARS. Star Trek is literally the oldest running fandom out there and you got people in there that could care less about the new stuff and still have been happily prancing through their fucking fifty year old fandom today. Hell, even SPN after all it’s fuckups and shitshows has a dedicated fanbase STILL creating tons of art and fic.

There is no patience anymore. No calm feeling of taking in fandom and friends at a pace that which doesn’t make you stressed and is still fun.

Do I blame fandom for this? Of course not, but people are complacent with it and start changing their vocab to accommodate and end up making the situation so deep it cant be fixed.

We call Art & Fic Content now, completely stripping the value of what it is to a level of consumerism instead of personal entertainment & community bonding.

Let OP talk, they’re absolutely right.

We spend so much time arguing about corsets when we could be spreading the gospel of "women's clothes DID used to have pockets and they were F*CKING HUGE and we should bring them back"

BRING

THEM

BACK.

#If you pocket can't be used to steal an entire chicken what's the point of it?

That's the spirit

ITS THEM!!!!!

I am in tears this is so important to me

Yes exactly that! He ALWAYS cared, he was ALWAYS there!

First look at Jack Quaid and Tawny Newsome as Boimler and Mariner in the flesh on Strange New Worlds