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🖖🏼New Summer Event! Spirk at Sixty! 🤝🏼

🚀🛸SPIRK AT SIXTY🏳‍🌈🌅

In celebration of Star Trek’s 60th anniversary this September, our summer event is all about Old Men Spirk!

❓ WHAT IS IT? 🤔

The people who brought you Live Long and Pinup, Spirk in a Cave, and Shipboard Weekends are back with a shiny new Summer Spirk Event!

This time around we want to see your vision of Spirk at Sixty! Are they happily married with 2 cats and tenure track positions at Starfleet Academy? Perhaps they’re out stealing ships for enrichment in their old age. Heck, maybe they’re both in jail for...well canon gives us plenty of reasons.

Writers, artists, poets, filkers, and all other creatives are welcome to join the event and show us your vision of Spirk at Sixty! You’re welcome to use any iteration of Spirk: TOS, TAS, TOS Movies, AOS Movies, or SNW. They all deserve some quality retirement time.

New to fandom? We're here to welcome you! All you need is a love of Spirk and a desire to create.

⬇️Full event details below the cut.⬇️

startreklin

Hey everyone. I’m just $300 short on rent, and it’s been overdue since the 10th. I’ve received several notices from my landlord, and if I can’t pay this week, I may have to leave.

I hate having to make posts like this, and unfortunately this isn’t the first time I’ve struggled like this. Rebuilding after the last situation took a lot out of me, and I’m really trying to avoid going through that again.

If you’ve ever considered commissioning me, now would truly mean everything. This is my price sheet, so feel free to DM me if you’re interested. Even sharing this post helps.

If you’d rather support directly, my Ko-Fi is: ko-fi.com/itolynart

Thank you so much for reading and for any support at all. It genuinely makes a difference. ♡

2025 Reading Challenge

#my stuff

shamblerqueen-deactivated202605

This one gets me in the gut like . . . man fandom is such an important, intergral part of the internet and media that connects millions. Its really moving to see glimpses of its effects the ripples of it from the past. The importance of Star Trek can never be understated in fandom, it makes me so emotional to see this.

m00nnewt9

Star Trek has lived long and prospered!

idontwanttoboldlygo

This makes me feel like I'm part of something larger. I love you all.

inneroptics

Alrauna

tenderpoc

9 photos of Nichelle Nichols to make you GAY

(for @julianbashirlesbian)

#she’s the one

Yo uh guys???

#Star Trek #star trek lower decks #d'vana tendi #spock #star trek snw #snw spock

iskander-tm

COMMISSION INFO

Hello! I do commissions! You're always welcome to dm me!

I use hipolink(accepts paypal) for payment, okay bye!!!

iskander-tm

due to me not having commissions whatsoever I've decided to lower my prices and see if it helps my problem

so yeah. If you've always wanted to commission me, but never had a chance, maybe this time you can afford it

blanc-ci

Heyy i’m gonna be a little fucked financially for a while, but rn I just need atleast $50 for essentials this week 🙏 anything helps! Even reblogs! I’d be so grateful

Specific price will depend on what you want! I can do NSFW and furry stuff as well! (dm me for examples)

payment through PayPal preferably, for more details please dm me!💖

headspace-hotel

thinking again about TvTropes and how it’s genuinely such an amazing resource for learning the mechanics of storytelling, honestly more so than a lot of formally taught literature classes

reasons for this:

basically TvTropes breaks down stories mechanically, using a perspective that’s not…ABOUT mechanics. Another way I like to put it, is that it’s an inductive, instead of deductive, approach to analyzing storytelling.

like in a literature or writing class you’re learning the elements that are part of the basic functioning of a story, so, character, plot, setting, et cetera. You’re learning the things that make a story a story, and why. Like, you learn what setting is, what defines it, and work from there to what makes it effective, and the range of ways it can be effective.

here’s the thing, though: everyone has some intuitive understanding of how stories work. if we didn’t, we couldn’t…understand stories.

TvTropes’s approach is bottom-up instead of top-down: instead of trying to exhaustively explore the broad, general elements of story, it identifies very small, specific elements, and explores the absolute shit out of how they fit, what they do, where they go, how they work.

Every TvTropes article is basically, “Here is a piece of a story that is part of many different stories. You have probably seen it before, but if not, here is a list of stories that use it, where it is, and what it’s doing in those stories. Here are some things it does. Here is why it is functionally different than other, similar story pieces. Here is some background on its origins and how audiences respond to it.”

all of this is BRILLIANT for a lot of reasons. one of the major ones is that the site has long lists of media that utilizes any given trope, ranging from classic literature to cartoons to video games to advertisements. the Iliad and Adventure Time ARE different things, but they are MADE OF the same stuff. And being able to study dozens of examples of a trope in action teaches you to see the common thread in what the trope does and why its specific characteristics let it do that

I love TvTropes because a great, renowned work of literature and a shitty, derivative YA novel will appear on the same list, because they’re Made Of The Same Stuff. And breaking down that mental barrier between them is good on its own for developing a mechanical understanding of storytelling.

But also? I think one of the biggest blessings of TvTropes’s commitment to cataloguing examples of tropes regardless of their “merit” or literary value or whatever…is that we get to see the full range of effectiveness or ineffectiveness of storytelling tools. Like, this is how you see what makes one book good and another book crappy. Tropes are Tools, and when you observe how a master craftsman uses a tool vs. a novice, you can break down not only what the tool is most effective for but how it is best used.

In fact? There are trope pages devoted to what happens when storytelling tools just unilaterally fail. e.g. Narm is when creators intend something to be frightening, but audiences find it hilarious instead.

On that note, TvTropes is also great in that its analysis of stories is very grounded in authors, audiences, and culture; it’s not solely focused on in-story elements. A lot of the trope pages are categories for audience responses to tropes, or for real-world occurrences that affected the storytelling, or just the human failings that creep into storytelling and affect it, like Early Installment Weirdness. There are categories for censorship-driven storytelling decisions. There are “lineages” of tropes that show how storytelling has changed over time, and how audience responses change as culture changes. Tropes like Draco in Leather Pants or Narm are catalogued because the audience reaction to a story is as much a part of that story—the story of that story?—as the “canon.”

like, storytelling is inextricable from context. it’s inextricable from how big the writers’ budget was, and how accepting of homophobia the audience was, and what was acceptable to be shown on film at the time. Tropes beget other tropes, one trope is exchanged for another, they are all linked. A Dead Horse Trope becomes an Undead Horse Trope, and sometimes it was a Dead Unicorn Trope all along. What was this work responding to? And all works are responding to something, whether they know it or not

headspace-hotel

An incomplete list of really useful or interesting reads from TvTropes.

please note that yes many of these are concepts that exist elsewhere and a few are even taught in fiction writing classes but TvTropes just does an amazing job at displaying the range of things that can be done with them

legitimately so much of the terminology I use to talk about storytelling, and even think about it in my own head, i learned about from TvTropes

Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Watsonian vs. Doylist

Trope Tropes, for all the ways tropes are used, deconstructed, subverted, and played with.

The Oldest Ones in the Book, which is basically my favorite thing on the entire Internet

Punk Punk, for -punk subgenres

Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness, Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism

The Weird Al Effect is a fun one

Chekhov’s Gun, Chekhov’s Boomerang, Chekhov’s Skill, and further variations

Law of Conservation of Detail

Law of Conservation of Normality

Anthropic Principle

Word of God, Death of the Author

Sliding Scale of Fourth Wall Hardness

Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness

Genre Savvy

Flashbacks and Chronology breaks down all the ways you can handle chronology in storytelling

Show, Don’t Tell is a very good breakdown of what is showing, what is telling, and how both can be used effectively.

Lampshade Hanging

Noodle Incident is just fun imo

Genre Title Grab Bag

Fridge Horror

Rule of Cool, and also Cool of Rule

The Smurfette Principle

The Hays Code - not a trope but a very good breakdown of how the Hays Code affected storytelling in film

this is just a really short list of examples I encourage people who write or otherwise create stories to browse around on this site it’s so useful

thesaltofcarthage

Informed Attribute is one of the ones I reference most often as an editor.

musicalhell

Theory of Narrative Causality is one of my personal favorites, because it's kind of fun when a story acknowledges that things are happening in the story because that's what makes it a good story.

Also Applied Phlebotinum, because sometimes you don't need to know how something works, it just does, and that's all that matters for the purposes of the narrative.

athelind

When I was active on TV Tropes in the early days, I summed it up as "crowd-sourced literary analysis."

(There are a few pages I started on there, though most of them have been revised so many times that very little of my original content is left.)

iskander-tm

Hello! For some time I had troubles with my bank account but now I'm once again able to tale comms!

(I also do de portraits for 85$)

iskander-tm

Hey, so I'm struggling financially right now so I'm opening 4 slots for the sketch half bodies for 30$ Or you can commission me anything else, anything would help tyy

My submission for the Spirk Events @livelongandpinup calendar project wooo! I’ve never been a part of anything like this in any of my fandoms but now that I’ve taken the plunge I’m so ready for more lol

The supercool Duke wrote an accompanying fic based on my work!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

I’ll put their Linktree right here~

#live long and pinup #spirk events #star trek #llap calendar