Table of Contents
(Due to problems with my website, this post was also posted to https://squilla.vitaulium.eu/@leonieke/statuses/01M67BE9CG6NNDZ7X7RD4XJJA4)
Yesterday evening after reading about the death of Sir Patrick Stewart, I told a friend I was sad because it feels as if I was revisiting the life I have lived since my student days. This morning I realised that even for me, Star Trek, its actors and stories in the end gave me my career, but not through an education in STEM. Instead it seems I have the career I have through fanfiction.
What does ST mean to me?
A thread of memories
"This nebula was once a star. It could not have evolved into this present without every moment of its past."
Captain Nahla Ake (Star Trek: Academy, S01E04)
1/n
(Link to full thread)
Favorite Trek Bits and Pieces
(and also: 31 days of Trek)
Student Life
After my stay in the USA, where I became a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, I was studying Law / English at Leiden University, and in the central library, I had access to the wonderful world of newsgroups like alt.startrek.creative. These newsgroups gave me endlessly captivating fanfics by great authors, which partially stilled my interest in P/C stories from ST:TNG.
A few years later, I was studying in Edinburgh: this university gave each of its students an email address, so now I was able to subscribe to email groups. First there was the BonC list (look it up yourselves!), but I quickly also joined JetC groups, following my enjoyment of watching J/C, apologies, watching Star Trek: Voyager.
These email groups were mostly there to share fanfiction, and this brought me to the world of building websites, both for various groups and for myself.
Since then, I’ve kept up my own website(s).1
Work & Career
My knowledge of tinkering with my own websites brought me to the attention of a colleague who invited me to join his website/platform team. Now, over 30 years after first seeing a TNG episode, I still keep my own websites, domains, fediverse instances, and more, while at work, I can still play around with code and data, keeping busy with gigs of XML while being a very happy Trekkie.2
Thank you, Star Trek!
Footnotes
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caldosh.com (Disclaimer: Bad fanfic, be warned, and no, I still do not own any of these characters.) ↩
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Of course I still read fanfics, both ST-related and from other fandoms. The current situation at AO3 is horrible, but good luck to the devs of AO3! Check out the OWT/AO3 donation page: https://donate.transformativeworks.org/otwgive. ↩