being on Tumblr is like playing a violin in a concert hall for thousands of people and a few of them clap, then honking a kazoo to amuse your 2 friends AND SUDDENLY YOU HAVE 20K NOTES
kinda curious to see how results fall on here. I know a lot of these boxes are a bit constricting, most sober people I know irl have reasons more nuanced than these, but if one of them is mostly right then go ahead and pick it.
I just saw someone say AO3 is “gay teens writing gay shit” and I have no idea how to tell you that most of the writers you love so much are adults.
frrrr i look at the notes and the author is always like “sorry for the late upload!!! it’s my 10th anniversary and my husband took me skydiving 🥳🥳 plus i’ve just finished my third phD!! anyways here’s 30k”
Yeah…I’m not a teen lol
“Why is your fic so good”
I have a bachelor’s in creative writing, a mortgage, and a working knowledge of which cleaners you use to lift grease stains. I am unstoppable.
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
Y'all don’t even understand how legit all this is to real life.
Manhattan Project.
If the Vulcan Science Academy had been running it, they would’ve agonized over the math for years. And that’s before even building a prototype. Which they wouldn’t actually test. No, they would endlessly gather data and measurements. Then they would submit countless reports. Then they would debate those reports. Then they would present the findings of those reports to various committees.
You wanna know what happened in real life? A few of the scientists involved were like, “Uh, guys, should we really be doing this? There’s a chance we could ignite the entire atmosphere.” The people in charge of the project were like, “Quit being pussies!” and they pushed the button.
And don’t even get me started on the Large Hadron Collider.
“Guys, are we absolutely certain this isn’t gonna create micro black holes that destroy the Earth?”
And they did it anyway.
Okay listen the Manhattan project got 10000% crazier after the bombs. Let me tell you a story about something called “the demon core”…
See, there were originally three nuclear prototypes in the project. Two became the warheads of Little Boy and Fat Man. After the Japanese surrendered, we had one left over: the Demon Core.
Instead of, say, carefully disposing of this volleyball-sized radioactive nightmare, a handful of scientists decided to play with it. In a government-sponsored game of “fuck around and find out” they used various methods to bring it as close as possible to super critical without actually exploding.
Most of the researchers died of acute radiation poisoning, some even going back to the lab after a colleague perished. The Demon Core project was absolutely fucking INSANE.
We need to talk about Engineering Student Pranks.
Most universities have started cracking down on them lately, but the basic idea is they would hang a car from some nigh improbable place, leaving the city to spend days trying to figure out how to get it down.
Usually done by 2-4 people overnight, in as short of a time as possible to not get caught. Universities started cracking down on it because of the resources it wastes to undo.
rebump
HuMaNs ArE sPaCe OrKs . Puh lease, humans are space GOBLINS unless space octopuses exist, then we would fight with them over the title of “Galactic Trash Rat” in the neutral zone of a Space Denny’s docking port
To be honest, Space Goblin does sound more appropriate for Project Orion.
I love seeing the additions!
This entire thread is the most epic collaborative thing I’ve ever seen. I am in awe
