Like Some Impossible Tree Sloth

Fandom ramblings and the occasional art dump. 18+

[diasdelfuego]

the thing about art is that sometimes you'll be moved to tears by stuff that is not very good

[my-tardis-sense-is-tingling]

[destructorkitten]

[tuttle-did-it]

Where is granny ghost sex candle?

[subterraneanna]

Sub Rosa, 2024 Pencil, gouache, and digital paint Romance novel cover commission for my dear friend @lizziakana. Just in time for Sub Rosa's 30th anniversary! Prints available!

[greensweetie]

obsessed! and the sketches are so beautiful too!!

[quasi-normalcy]

Things that I SWEAR I'm not making up about the Star Trek franchise:

A shifty alien bartender, his brother, and his nephew were what happened at Roswell

There are three mutually contradictory canonical explanations for what exists at the centre of the Galaxy, none of which are "A fuck-off gigantic black hole"

Two of these things are, respectively, God and the Devil

(The crew got along well enough with the Devil, but Spock had to blow-up God with a torpedo)

One of the most compelling and sympathetic characters in the franchise is a hologram of Professor Moriarty who gained enough self-awareness to realise that he didn't need to be evil just because he was written that way

If you fly too fast, you turn into a salamander

(Said salamanders are actually the inevitable endpoint of human evolution)

The universe is balanced on the back of a giant koala (why is it smiling? What does it know!?)

There have been three separate groups of Space Nazis (not just aliens with a fascist government; literal Nazis with armbands and swastikas)

There are also: two (2) cowboy planets, two (2) planets that are just post-apocalyptic versions of Cold War-era Earth, one (1) planet ruled by Chicago mobsters from the 1920s, and one (1) version of Earth where the Roman Empire never fell

The Roman planet has its own Jesus

There is an anthropological law governing parallel planetary development that holds that planets are likely to recapitulate eras from Earth history

Because of the intervention of an ancient race of ur-humanoids, most sentient races in the galaxy look like human actors with rubber prostheses glued to their foreheads

There are so many planets centred around sex and hedonism that people in the fandom use the term "Roddenberry Sex Planet" to describe them

Jack the Ripper was an alien ghost

Amelia Earhart was abducted by aliens

If you have a high ESP score, you turn into a god when you try to fly outside of the Galaxy

The major antagonists are: Space Vikings/Samurai, Space Romans (not the Romans mentioned earlier), Space Fascists (not any of the nazi groups mentioned earlier), the Space British Empire (ruled by goo people), and Space Bees (except you'll turn into one if they sting you)

Klingons have two dicks

Borg assimilation can be catalyzed by eating car batteries

[kingofdoma]

you forgot to mention that one of the roswell aliens eventually becomes the pope-king of his capitalism planet

[quasi-normalcy]

When a Ferengi dies, their families dry out their body, chop it into pieces, and sell those pieces as collector's items

The fight for Ferengi women to gain the right to wear clothing is an ongoing plot thread throughout Deep Space Nine

There is a sentient patch of chaotic spacetime that communicates only by punching

There's another sentient patch of chaotic spacetime that communicates by rearranging hallways

Somehow both of the abovementioned episodes manage to suck

Various spacetime anomalies can: + Make you violently, murderously insane + Make you violently, murderously insane but in a way that specifically attacks your ability to enter REM sleep + Retroactively prevent life from arising on Earth + Make you hyperfixated on whatever you're working on + Turn gravity sideways + Turn you inside out (offscreen) + Cause you to turn insubstantial just long enough to fall partways through the floor and then turn solid again and die horribly + Trap you in a timeloop + Trap every member of your crew in a separate quantum reality in which time flows at radically different speeds + Splinter space into regions where time flows at different speeds + Splinter your ship into regions existing at different points in its history + Turn reality into musical theatre + And more!

[quasi-normalcy]

Deep in space, there's a hellish planet, bathed in radiation and rocked by unending storms. There, in the stygian darkness far below its thick, turbulent atmosphere, you will find a single antique revolving door, hanging in the void. Passing through it, you will find a late-20th century Las Vegas casino hotel, where shades that look human endlessly re-enact a terrible pulp novel to amuse the skeleton of a long dead American astronaut.

[quasi-normalcy]

Several people are asking for it, so here's the list of sources.

"A shifty alien bartender..." This happens in DS9's "Little Green Men"

"There are three mutually contradictory explanations..." TAS's "The Magicks of Megas-Tu" (the devil), Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (God), and TNG's "The Nth Degree" (a giant floating head that is, apparently, not God, though it kind of looks like him)

"One of the most compelling and sympathetic characters..." TNG's "Elementary Dear Data" and "Ship in a Bottle"

"If you fly too fast..." Infamously, VOY's "Threshold"

"Said salamanders are actually..." also "Threshold"

"The universe is balanced..." Lower Decks's "Moist Vessel" (and then a running gag for the rest of the series)

"Three separate groups of Space Nazis..." They appeared, respectively, in TOS's "Patterns of Force," VOY's "The Killing Game", and ENT's "Stormfront"

"Two cowboy planets..." These appear, respectively, in TOS's "Spectre of the Gun" and ENT's "North Star"

"Two planets that are just post-apocalyptic versions of Cold War-era Earth..." These appear in "Miri" and "The Omega Glory," both from TOS

"Chicago mobsters..." TOS's "A Piece of the Action"

"Roman Empire never fell..." TOS's "Bread and Circuses"

"...Has its own Jesus" Also TOS's "Bread and Circuses"

"Anthropological law governing..." This was also mentioned in "Bread and Circuses"

"Because of the intervention of an ancient race..." TNG's "The Chase"

"Roddenberry Sex Planet..." Wrigley's Pleasure Planet, mentioned in TOS's "The Man Trap"; Argelius II, from TOS's "Wolf in the Fold"; Delta IV, mentioned in Star Trek: The Motion Picture; Betazed, mentioned throughout TNG and DS9 and shown in TNG's "Menage a Troi"; Rubicon III in TNG's "Justice"; Risa in TNG's "Captain's Holiday" and "The Game", DS9's "Let He Who Is Without Sin...", and ENT's "Two Days and Two Nights"; probably others that I'm not remembering off the top of my head; parodied by the planet Dulaine in LWD's "The Least Dangerous Game"; not a Roddenberry creation, but the planet Taresia in VOY's "Favourite Son"

"Jack the Ripper..." TOS's "Wolf in the Fold"

"Amelia Earhart..." VOY's "The 37s"

"If you have a high ESP score..." TOS's "Where No Man Has Gone Before"

"Space Vikings/Samurai" = Klingons; "Space Romans" = Romulans; "Space Fascists" = Cardassians; "The Space British Empire" = The Dominion; "Space Bees" = The Borg ("If they sting you, you will turn into one" This was established in Star Trek: First Contact and has been shown many times since then)

"Klingons have two dicks" ENT's "Will You Take My Hand?" (implied a few times earlier)

"...Eating car batteries" Picard's "Mercy"

"...Pope-king of his capitalism planet" DS9's "The Dogs of War"

"When a Ferengi dies..." This was established in DS9's "The Nagus"

"The fight for Ferengi women..." Several episodes of DS9, notably "Profit and Loss," "Family Business," and (*sigh*) "Profit and Lace"

"...communicates only by punching" VOY's "The Fight"

"...rearranging hallways" VOY's "Twisted"

"...manage to suck." Try watching them and you'll see what I mean.

"...make you violently, murderously insane" TOS's "The Tholian Web"

"...Make you violently, murderously insane but in a way that specifically attacks your ability to enter REM sleep" TNG's "Night Terrors" (technically it was alien telepathy that blocked REM sleep; the anomaly was unrelated);

"Retroactively prevent life..." TNG's "All Good Things"

"Make you hyperfixated..." ENT's "Singularity"

"Turn gravity sideways..." ENT's "The Xindi"

"Turn you inside-out..." Mentioned in ENT's "The Expanse"

"Cause you to turn insubstantial..." TNG's "In Theory"

"Trap you in a timeloop..." TNG's "Cause and Effect"

"Trap every member..." Prodigy's "Time Amok"

"...Splinter space into regions where time flows at different speeds" TNG's "Timescape"

"...Splinter your ship into regions existing at different points in its history" VOY's "Shattered"

"...Turn reality into musical theatre" SNW's "Subspace Rhapsody"

[assuming-dinosaur]

Among the reasons why Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is the best Star Trek is that the outfits look like they were designed by a competent costume designer who had been given a pile of the world's most miscellaneous fabrics and told that if they didn't use it all up by sunrise, Rumpelstiltskin would take their firstborn child.

[buffaluff]

[teaboot]

“Why are you scared of dating” I’m not scared of dating, I just haven’t found anyone’s company to be more enjoyable than my own. And also I don’t care

[justlightmeonfire]

I just don't want anyone to steal my very cursed amulet

[teaboot]

Also the amulet

[whimsicalmayhem]

Is that you talking? Or the amulet? Are you SURE a new hand doesn't want to touch the beacon?

[teaboot]

The amulet and I are not currently looking for a third

[madeofklay]

I saw this perfectly in my head and had to recreate it

[teaboot]

Holy Shit

[justsomeguycore]

lesbian scifi is so easy. here’s a woman in cargo pants and a tank top on a spaceship. are you with me

[justsomeguycore]

maybe it’s not even cargo pants. maybe it’s coveralls rolled to + tied around the waist. maybe she even has fuckoff boots

[queen-karis-nonsense-ramblings]

TOS Episodes: "Who hath cometh for thine own lamentations?" and it's about an interdimensional slime that eats sadness

TNG Episodes: "The Defense" And it's about a defense

DS9 Episodes: "Hold the Line" and it has a A-plot of dramatic war and philosphy, with a B-plot of Quark scamming a single mother out of her life saving, before being forced to give some of it back

VOY Episodes: "Combat" and the whole episode is a master-and-commander style space battle.

ENT Episodes: "The Ship" and it's about the ship docking with another ship.

DIS Episodes: "Cometh thou for thine'sths own might so that hath we art to belongeth" and it's part 7 of 24 of chasing the alien that eats planets because it's sad.

LD Episodes: "The Good, the Bad, and the Boimler" And it's where Boimler and Mariner trade personalities for a week.

SNW Episodes: "E Pluribus Union" And it's a a complex metaphor for the current socio-economic situation of the United States, immediatly followed by an episode where they are all transported into an alternate universe where they can only communicate through Canterbury Tales quotes.

PRO Episodes: "There and Back Again" And it's about a group of unqualified 13 year olds making the worst string of decisions possible and somehow stopping what would otherwise be a galactic crisis on a scale never before seen

[gloriousunderstanding]

Party Bus

[hellotailor]

starfleet: we’re glad you’re home

starfleet: we’ve been reviewing your records

janeway: k when is my promotion

starfleet: what makes you think you’re getting a promotion

janeway: my future self told me all about it when she broke the temporal prime directive and brought me stolen future technology

starfleet: yeah so in that vein there are some things we need to discuss

janeway: if there’s a problem with the paperwork blame chakotay

janeway: i don’t do forms i do holographic irish bartenders and former borg drones

starfleet:

doctor: i can assure you that while in the delta quadrant we conducted ourselves with grace and dignity according to the highest principles of starfleet

b'elanna: yeah step off our balls you weren’t there you don’t know

tom: yeah you weren’t there that time we stole a keg of omega molecules from some douchebag aliens who were going to blow up the quadrant

harry: or that time we played space nascar and ended up in the center of a terrorist plot

tom: or that time we were all super horny and built a fake irish city so that we could get drunk and laid

harry: or when we tied that guy to a chair and waited for the aliens to eat him because he wouldn’t tell us what we wanted to know

tom: oh shit remember that time i got 30 days for ignoring the wishes of some foreign government and destroying their mining operation

harry: that was almost as crazy as the time you restored that old shuttle but then it fell in love with you and tried to kill b'elanna

b'elanna: speaking of which remember when that bomb i made for the maquis came back and tried to kill us

chakotay: that reminds me of when seska stole my dna and tried to impregnate herself with my child

tom: nothing will ever compare to the time me and the captain had kids and left them on that planet

janeway: we were young and innocent then

tom: how many lizard years to a human year i feel like i should send a birthday card

janeway: like 6

tom: you don’t even know you’re just saying that

janeway: you should talk you’re such an absent father

tom: oh no you didn’t

janeway: i didn’t even want kids

starfleet:

starfleet: is there a reason you stenciled PARTY BUS on the side of voyager

tom:

harry:

b'elanna:

doctor:

janeway: is there a reason i shouldn’t have

so this post is the thing that finally gets me to watch voyager after all this time

[somebodys-weird-mom]

I just spent the whole commercial break during “Twovix” looking for this post. God, I love how batshit insane VOY was.

[coyoteralyn]

Lisa Tepes (SOTN)

[stra-tek]

Random spoilerific reasons to read Star Trek novels, with little to no context:

Ro/Quark is a thing

A Jem'Hadar joins DS9, tries to fit in but eventually snaps and tries to kill everybody

You learn the origins and final fate of the Borg

A thinly-veiled Dr. House clone joins the Voyager crew

Geordi briefly has 2 girlfriends at once (due to different writers not co-ordinating enough, but still)

There's a TOS book that's a musical

There are YA stories about Jake and Nog making mischief on DS9

YA stories about Worf, Geordi, Picard, Beverly, Kirk, Spock and McCoy at SFA

YA series about the Kelvinverse gang (including Gaila!) as cadets, taking on a drug problem at SFA and a very unique Borg scout in San Francisco

We very briefly meet the people who are to Q what the Q are to humanity

Janeway/Chakotay is a thing

Kirk's first mission in command of the Enterprise! Erm, at least twice.

Kirk was married between TOS and TMP

Her name was Lori

In the future, you have yearly marriage contracts that you either update or you don't and I think that's amazing

Trip didn't die! He faked his death to join Section 31 and go undercover as a Romulan

It's not great, tbh

The ENT books get better after the Romulan wars though, it's proper founding of the Federation stuff

We meet Jack Crusher (erm, the OG) when 4 timelines start overlapping and he's a bit unhinged

Teenage Kirk stole a car and his choice was go to jail or join Starfleet

What happened when Voyager got home? Seven broke up with Chakotay like 30 pages in

Kirk gets cloned, and his clone becomes the sub of an evil invincible super genius and its all very gay

George Kirk was Robert April's first officer on the first ever mission of the unnamed starship with the Naval Construction Contract 1701

Robert is a hard-core pacifist and has to turn command over to George whenever it's time to fire weapons

Data becomes fully human for a couple of days and it's really sweet

They never say "wristwatch" or "phone", it's always "wrist chrono" or "personal comm"

There are gays but they don't say that word because it's the 1990's and Rick Berman runs the franchise

Spock has a son in the past with Zarabeth

Everyone in the post-Nemesis era does spy missions all the time non stop, as if Starfleet has abandoned exploring the cosmos for doing Space Mission: Impossible

Bashir does it better than anyone else, he takes on Section 31 from the inside

Remember Control? It's from the novels, except the novels do it SO MUCH BETTER.

Remember how we never found out who Future Guy was? We do.

It's very underwhelming, nobody we know

We find out how the Romulans and Vulcans split

Surak was a Vulcan internet blogger

A Borg Cube eats Pluto

Janeway dies

Janeway gets better

At least one TOS book features a wizard

There's a Star Trek TOS/Here Come the Brides crossover novel

It had cameos from The Doctor (as in, Who), Han Solo, Starbuck and others

Whole book series about Section 31

Whole book series about the Department of Temporal Investigations

One time they do the Bill and Ted thing to escape confinement and it works

Wanna know how Riker and Troi met?

Wanna know what Picard got up to on the Stargazer?

Andorians have 4 sexes and it's very complicated

Data comes back from the dead as Data 2.0, and it was fresh and exciting because it happened long before ST: Picard did it twice.

Lal comes back too and we get father/daughter android stuff! They have a home and everything but keep having to save the universe

One time Mirror Seven is led around on a leash naked on Terok Nor

Geordi becomes captain of the USS Challenger, decides it's not for him because plot, and goes back to engineering on the Enterprise

Kirk is shot on the bridge and dies

Kirk gets better

They watch 3D holos of old Doctor Who episodes in the Enterprise rec room

The Enterprise also has an AI named Moira, which was Zora long before Zora

The TOS crew get together for one last mission. About three times.

There's a Perry Mason book except it's about Kirk's lawyer from that TOS episode

Data 2.0 owns and runs a massive gambling empire on Orion

Spock keeps randomly showing up everywhere in the TNG era

Scotty keeps randomly showing up everywhere in the TNG era

Bones keeps randomly showing up everywhere in the TNG era

You're on Tumblr so you already know about Killing Time

There's a guy named McKenzie Calhoun and he's a total badass and captains a ship of weirdos and misfits

Kirk comes back from the dead, saves the galaxy repeatedly, has an intersex child (who identifies as male) with a Romulan/Klingon hybrid

Kirk beats up Worf

Kirk's child has superpowers

Kirk's child saves the galaxy at age 6

The Kirk stuff is 100% ignored in the other novels

About 50% of the novels are ignored in the other 50%, and the ones that are meant to be in direct continuity with each other aren't always quite

Just like the TV shows and movies, then

Lwaxana Troi meets Q, and it goes as well as you'd expect

Someone tells Data, yes you idiot you had emotions all along and he's like, oh shit you're right

McCoy is left in command of the Enterprise as a joke by Kirk, who is then immediately kidnapped

Ro Laren is captain of Deep Space Nine

Picard/Beverly is a thing, they get married and have a child named Rene. No running away and raising your kid in secret here

Riker and Troi are married, serve on the Titan together with a bunch of adorable weirdos and have a daughter named Tasha

You get to watch all the 24th century characters die horribly in the end along with their entire universe. Holy fuck it's a bleak horror show. Personally, I love it. But if that's not your cup of tea I'd skip the Coda trilogy

[ciricearts]

hehehe hii

[neopuff]

[fractally]

Remember when I posted months ago that I was working with my mom on a crocheted horta?

Well, she's done!!

She's been rounded for huggability and lives on my lap while I work

[sevenmothsinatrenchcoat]

I’m gonna say it again. I love this funky silicon creature.

[rhosinthorn]

The Four Chemistry Classes You Might Take in College

Because apparently my descriptions of chemistry are apparently amusing to @papalogia

Gen Chem: A mix of “hey I learned this in high school, this ain’t so bad”, “they lied about this in high school but it makes a bit more sense now”, and “I have never seen this before, but let’s roll with it.”

Organic Chem: You hate carbon. You hate bonds. You hate stereochemistry. You may or may not hate reactions, depending on if that makes sense to you. If you can’t imagine molecules, you hate your life.

Inorganic Chem: This isn’t organic! It makes sense! And then you get to Molecular Orbital diagrams and you cry a bit. Or a lot, depending on if you get them right away. Or at all.

Physical Chemistry: The bastard hell child of physics and chemistry. It has no soul, and you will come out of it hating every sentence that contains the words “particle” and “box” together. If your calculus skills aren’t up there, you will cry in frustration. If your calculus skills are up there, you will cry, but it will be out of joy. You may not know what’s going on, but you just solved an equation, so that’s something.

[misfitmiska]

You don’t understand I need them in every post TOS fic.