#Defekt

[athgalla-arts]

Draw me like one of your Boskofnian cats

A little doodle of my friend's fursona, Hoax Palenix. He also features in my story, Defekt! 

Posted using PostyBirb

[techniktagebuch]

17. September 2024

Objekte im Rückspiegel

Der Laptop, an dem ich für einen Kunden arbeite und den ich von diesem Kunden leihweise erhalten habe, ist am Kaputtgehen. Der Bildschirm flackert wie eine Leuchtreklame aus alten Filmen. Ich rufe die IT Abteilung an, die sich zentralisiert um die Geräte kümmert, um den Schaden zu melden und Hilfe zu erfragen.

Ich soll die Störung beschreiben. Ich versuche es mündlich: "Es flackert :…", bitte den Herrn am anderen Ende, kurz zu warten und komme mit dem falsch bestellten Seitenspiegel unseres VW-T4 in der Hand, der jetzt bei uns im Bad im Schrank als Behelfsspiegel dient. Ich halte den Spiegel vor die Laptopkamera, sodass der Kollege von der IT den Fehler visuell einordnen kann.

"Ah!", kommt am anderen Ende der Leitung raus. Treiber sind up to date, es liegt wohl an der Hardware. Morgen wird mit dem Hersteller telefoniert und das weitere Vorgehen besprochen.

(Nathalie Passig)

[do-you-know-this-queer-character]

Do you know this queer character?

Darkness is Nonbinary and Genderfluid, and uses they/them pronouns!

[carriagelamp]

Had the sort of month where I could feel my books crying out for me while I was at work. They wanted to draw me home into their loving embrace…

My main take away from this month is that if you're going to be anything, by god be sincere

Bury Your Gays // Straight

My hold on Chuck Tingle’s latest horror novel came in just in time for spoopy season, which felt very appropriate, so I read both it and Straight, his horror novella that I hadn’t known about until I was looking up the release day for Bury Your Gays.

Both were quite enjoyable reads, and struck similar chords. He does a really good job of taking a potentially campy concept that’s been done before, and giving a very unique spin — not just in the inclusion of queer themes which can often come across as surface level and token if poorly done, but from the societal commentary that’s woven through both works. The queerness isn't window-dressing, but inherent to the story, horror, and criticism that’s present in both. Another thing they both have in common is that they are also, fundamentally, about hope and community and overcoming horror, which feels very relevant to the topic matter.

Straight is the shorter of the two, and on the surface is a zombie story. Due to vague cosmic horror, a strange thrall comes over straight people once a year that causes them to become rabidly violent towards all queer people. Two years out from the first instance, this story looks at how a group of queer friends deal with the trauma, how society has responded to it (and the fact that this came out 2021 feels very obvious as it looks at a fictional global pandemic), and how the friends themselves brace themselves for this years event. Isolating themselves out in the desert, they batten down and hope to wait for it to pass by relaxing and playing board games… obviously this doesn’t happen as intended.

Bury Your Gays was very different again, and between the two feels like the more ambitious in terms of imagination and story telling. The main character of this story is a partially closeted screenwriter for a major film studio who has had some success, both cult- and critical-success. However he starts to realise that there may be something sinister pulling the strings when he comes face to face with a fan dressed up as one of the horror monsters he had created for the screen. It must be a fan, right?

Both of these are excellent stories, and I appreciate how they shamelessly demand the reader suspend disbelief. They don’t bother over-explaining things, and allow horror to be unapologetically horror, slightly fantastical and campy and definitely scary. I have to admit, neither quite lives up to Camp Damascus, but I enjoyed both quite a bit nonetheless.

Defekt

The sequel (technically midquel?) to Finna, though it honestly stands alone fairly well. Finna, which involved hopping wormholes through fictional Ikeas, was alright, but I definitely think if you want something like that you’d be better for reading Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix. Defekt, on the other hand, I thought was an excellent novella and I’m glad I decided to give it a try! If you’re on the fence about this series, I’d skip right over Finna and just go straight to Defekt.

This novel is about Derek, who is LitenVärld’s most loyal employee. Everything about his life is centred around his work… even after his shifts he goes no farther than the storage crate in the LitenVärld parking lot where he lives. In this way, and many others though, he starts to notice that there are some… inconsistencies between how he views the world and how his coworkers view the world. He has never quite connected to them before, but do they have entirely different manuals? And why is his superior getting so angry about him taking a sick day when his colleagues seem to see no problem with it? Things come a head though when he’s scheduled for a special sort of inventory shift and he finds himself face to face with not just one but a whole team of people who seem to be his direct clones…

Doctor Who: The Day She Saved The Doctor

Like many Doctor Who novels this one is… fine. If you’re in the mood for more Doctor Who and want something easy it’s pleasant, but nothing world rocking. It’s composed of four short stories that bill themselves as feminist tales that focus on Sarah Jane, Rose, Clara, and Bill and how they “save” the Doctor. Honestly my main complaint is that they don’t actually do a great job sticking to this theme. The stories range from rather hamfisted to completely insincere — none of them have a truly impressive “save” but part of that might just be that they’re such short stories that they really have no space to come up with a complex rescue mission. None of them were actually bad, but also none of them stuck with me enough to describe them now…

Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries

I was disappointed by this one. I feel like I’ve seen rave reviews for this novel, and it’s been on my reading list for ages, but now that I’ve finally sat down to read it I found it… profoundly underwhelming. It seems to be going for a sort of “cozy academia” vibe and I’m sure that works for some people but mostly I just found it… very boring. Maybe I was hoping for something more like a grown up Spiderwick. Emily Wilde was an okay character, but without much depth, and the male character they introduced was uninteresting to me. I ended up giving up on it part way through when I finally gave up on the plot picking up in any significant way. If it does get better, it wasn’t worth the slog to get there imho sorry to all the people out there that love it.

Hakumei & Mikochi v1

I honestly just adore stories about Very Tiny People in a Very Big World. This completely scratched this itch I have for Borrower-esque stories! It’s an episodic manga about the lives of Hakumei and Mikochi, who live together in a tree house, and little events in their life such as shopping in town, camping, and befriending a necromancer! Normal day to day things! I wouldn’t mind reading a second, it was very chill and charming.

Jaws

I honestly don’t know what I expected here. I had never seen Jaws before, but me and my friends have spent so much time swimming this summer to keep cool that we decided it was the time to finally watch it. I see why the movie is such a classic, it was an excellent film! Very well made thriller! And a great end-to-the-summer movie. Then I made the mistake of deciding to read the original novel. I got about eight pages in before they said faggot for the first time. At that point I decided maybe I should read a review or two. Honestly I might have pushed past the homophobia if the novel itself sounded good, but apparently the types of horror used in the novel vs the film are very different. The novel has none of the subtly that the movie uses and is primarily sexual and gross-out horror that was fairly typical of the 70s pulp horror scene. So. I did not continue reading Jaws. I feel like I need a nega-pride flag for this one.

Poison For Breakfast

Really neat novella by Lemony Snicket, and honestly I have a hard time classifying this one. It’s technically fiction, but in a lot of ways feels like it’s not, it’s autobiographical about someone who doesn’t actually exist. It starts with the author receiving a note telling him that he ate poison for breakfast. More than anything, it’s an entire book of philosophy told through the lens and language of Lemony Snicket. If you have any fond memories of The Series of Unfortunate Events then honestly you should read this. Even if you don’t, it’s worth reading. The language is so evocative and it genuinely made me stop and think and squirm with a general discomfort that good philosophising around life and death can bring about. 

Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room, The Wide Window

I stumbled across Poison for Breakfast specifically because I decided to reread the Series of Unfortunate Events. I’ve been fairly anxious lately (more than usual, which is saying something when it’s me) and I needed something that would hold my interest but otherwise be an easy audiobook to listen to at night or during my morning commute. Since I’ve never actually read the whole series as a kid (they weren’t all out yet when I started and I never got around to finishing it) I decided now was the time. I’m especially excited to read it as an adult because I’m picking up a lot of nuance I simply didn’t notice as a kid, especially related to the Snicket / Beatrice subplot. Lemony Snicket really does now how to write a compelling mystery.

If you’ve never read The Series of Unfortuante Events, it’s got to be one of the best youth novel series out there (I say, unbiased). The narration is unlike anything else I’ve read in any genre, as is the strange world that the story is set in. The series starts with the three Baudelaire children learning that their parents died in a horrible fire that consumed their home, and that they will have to go stay with a distant relative who they have mysteriously never heard of before: Count Olaf. It quickly becomes apparently that the cruel Count Olaf is only after the Baudelaire fortune that Violet will eventually inherent, and though they expose him by the end of the first book it’s only the beginning of the tragic events that will dog at their heels from here on out…

The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window are the ones in the series I’ve reread the most, and were very comforting to return to! (also I feel compelled to mention that Tim Curry does the audiobook for The Reptile Room and he uses his fucking Nigel Thornberry voice for Uncle Monty and you haven't lived until you've heard Nigel Thornberry get horrifically murdered in a completely unrelated novel... wild experience.)

Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent

Easily the best book I read this month. This book was originally meant to be a series of interviews between Judi Dench and Brendan O’Hea about her time as a Shakespearean actor. The interviews took place over four years and were meant for archival purposes before O’Hea realised how much these might be enjoyed by a wider audience — and boy was he correct about that.

The interviews are profoundly insightful about the various roles Dench played, her opinions on the characters and plays themselves very compelling, while also being interspersed with wit, banter, and reflections on everything from her fellow actors, to costuming choices, to green room antics. Dench has a remarkable memory and it means the interviews are able to go into great detail about the specific productions of each play that Dench participated in. I listened to the audiobook and if you have even a passing interest in Shakespeare I really can’t recommend it enough.

The Scum Villain Self-Saving System v2

 I continue down the SVSSS rabbit hole and honestly I have to applaud this series for proving to be more than mindless fluff, which is kind what I had been expecting of it (sorry, I was very biassed against this series). Don’t get me wrong, it is a genuinely hilarious series and an absolute parody of the genre, but it’s more than that which I think is important. Despite being a parody, it’s very sincere in its characters and relationships and story; while the main character may bitch and moan about certain “story tropes” and the “shitty author” who wrote the webnovel he’s found himself in, he’s as much swept up in this world as anyone else is, and the story forces you to acknowledge even the tropier aspects and look at how they would fit into a world where such things dictated every day life.

In this volume Luo Binghe (the “protagonist” who is supposedly destined to kill Shen Qingqiu) returns from his “presumed death” in the Abyss, much earlier than in the original story. Shen Qingqiu is frantic when he finds out, desperate to ensure his back up plan is in place and that he might yet avoid the inevitable death his character is meant to suffer at Luo Binghe’s hands. Of course, nothing is that easy, and Shen Qingqiu has irrevocably changed the plot (and possibly the entire genre) of this story, though he himself may not realise it yet…

Yuri Is My Job v1

So, my earlier comment about sincerity? How both SVSSS and Chuck Tingle’s stories intentionally use a lot of specific tropes and parody their genres? Despite this, both examples clearly love the genres they’re lampshading and ultimately commit to the story they’re telling. They never break away from the story to wink at the audience and say “see how dumb this is?” (cough Marvel) — they are completely embroiled in the worlds they create, they are entirely sincere in the story they’re telling.

And then you have this. Yuri Is My Job is a yuri manga about a protagonist who hides her true self behind a cutesy, beauteous mask. She’s determined to be the prettiest, sweetest, most desirable person in any room — she always wants to be the first pick! And things continue well for her, until she finds herself getting roped in to covering a shift at an usual themed café: one that’s based around a fictional private academy where the “students” work at the cafe and play out little dramas for the customers.

This could have been fun, especially as the protagonists realises that everyone is wearing a mask, and how their performed personalities can differ wildly from their true personalities, but there’s just no sincerity here. It makes me think of Ouran High School Host Club but without any love behind it. OHSHC can get away with a lot, and I’ll suspend a lot of disbelief while reading it, because it’s having so much fun with what it does. This manga seems to suck away any joy by constantly poking fun at its own premise.

So I dunno… YMMV, maybe this is something someone else would enjoy a lot, but it honestly just kind of annoyed me, especially when I sat down to figure out what exactly I didn’t like about it.

If you’re going to be anything, be sincere at the very least. Show me that you love what you’re about.

[blackjessy]

Fühl mich wie ein Einzelstück.

Am Anfang geht es noch.

Doch dann merkt man, dass man mit nichts und niemanden kompatibel ist und wird ausgetauscht...

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 34 – Defekt by Nino Cipri

This is the second book of Cipri’s I’ve read, and I enjoyed it significantly more than Finna. Which still isn’t falling in love with it, if I’m being honest, but I’m not at all annoyed I read this one. The overall impression is kind of like watching the kind of rough pilot to an indescribably cheesy by fun adventure serial? Up to you how harsh a discretion that seems.

The story shares a setting with Finna – as in, it’s set literally in the same story, less than a week after. It follows Derek, a special exempt employee of the suspiciously Ikea-like retail megacorp who started a few weeks before, lives in a shipping crate behind the store’s loading dock, and has no memory of ever leaving store property. After he calls in and takes his very first sick day (a coworker saw him basically collapse while assembling furniture and browbeat him into it), his extremely disappointed manager has him come in late to help the outside team with a ‘special inventory’. The outside turns out to be, well, alternate universe versions of him – variations on the same mould, all mass produced in some of the controlled alternate realities the company’s insourced its production and logistics hubs too. The ‘special inventory’ likewise turns out to be a bug hunt, hunting down and killing all the products that have mutated or come alive due to glitches in their production before they have a chance to escape or damage company property.

The plot goes more or less how you’d expect – the alternate Derek’s are a queer and quirky band of likeable misfits (one might even say a found family!), except for their leader who is a monster convinced that if he’s enough of an abusive hardass to the others corporate will see ow valuable he is. The Defekta turn out to be basically benevolent, and Derek turns out to be defective himself, with literal magic empathy and enhanced senses and an involuntary sort of broadcast telekinesis when he’s dealing with strong emotions (which sounds like literal actual hell to me, for the record).In the end the shitty direct supervisor is trapped in an alternate reality, and everyone else unionizes and holds the store hostage until the company caves to their desired reforms Happy ending for everyone!

I’m not sure if it’s intentional or just an artifact of how Cirpri came up with the idea, but the whole ‘taking place literal days after the last book’ thing very much does make it seem like either this one Midwestern store in particular or possibly the company as a whole is like 90% of the way there to spiralling into a complete metaphysical collapse and possible destroying the world. The one scene with Jules at the start of the book also honestly made me like her more than the entire previous book where she was literally the second most important character and on like every other page.

I do think the kind of absurdist corporate horror setting worked better in this book than the prequel, if only because it was a bit more restrained and picked the one aesthetic/setting to actually develop a bit. Having a little bit more edge helped too. Reagan as the polished-until-she’s-glass always upbeat and friendly corporate upper management definitely worked as a more sinister and threatening figure than absolutely anyone in Finna, at least. I do still think the corporate jargon was like 20% too over the top and obvious to really work as satire or horror and just, well, not really funny enough to work as comedy. But that’s probably just a matter of taste

Speaking of funny – I’m not sure whether the megacorp in this is transparently specifically Ikea instead of something more generic (or, like, Wallmart) – Cipri spent some shitty years working at one, maybe. But given literally everything else about the book’s politics, it is kind of surprising how many times the books go back to the ‘look, this thing’s name is a funny-looking foreign word!’ well for humour. Or, well, ‘humour’.

Derek’s whole character arc from enthusiastically brainwashed retail drone to radicalized monster-whisperer was perhaps a bit abrupt, but it worked for me overall. The rest of the inventory team were all pretty much just archtypes with character designs attached, all basically being exactly what you would expect – the only real ‘reveal’ is that Dirk the supervisor isn’t the longsuffering professional leader trying to wrangle the rest of them and get the job done, he’s just an abusive piece of shit the rest of them actively fantasize about murdering – but none of them are, like, offensive.

The themes are, look, they’re really on the nose. There’s no way around it. Derek is so repressed and out of touch with/incapable of expressing his real emotions that his throat splits open and grows a second mouth that starts psychically broadcasting them. There are multiple conversations where people just explain their characters. There’s an interstitial bit of corporate propaganda between chapters about the risks of employees being radicalized by alternate universes into union organizers shortly before the main characters force the company to give them better treatment by sitting down and threatening to hold the store hostage the night before a big product release. And so on.

Still, I honestly enjoyed the read? Very possible my expectations were just lowered enough enough by the first one that I could just take this as it was, honestly, but still. Largely insubstantial popcorn, but not popcorn I regretted spending a few hours on.

[ninsiana0]

Read DEFEKT by Nino Cipri if you love big box stores, Corporate America, being overworked, employee handbooks, feeling broken & alone, taking a sick day, special projects, calezones, defective merchandise, found family, finding your super power & "Clair de Lune."

[unsichtbareseele]

Es ist ganz einfach, in meiner Familie war halt leider nie wirklich ein Platz für mich vorhanden. Weil ihre Selbstsucht und ihr Hass immer mehr Platz einnahmen, ich versuchte mich noch mit allermacht so klein, so dünn, wie möglich zu machen.. für sie zertrümmerte und zerstörte ich alles unwichtige von mir.. nur um ein Teil bleiben zu dürfen auch wenn es nur ein winzig kleiner wäre, doch dennoch reichte es einfach nicht aus, ich wurde vollständig verdrängt ,Bis ich am Ende nur noch störend, unangenehm und drückend empfunden wurde, als ein irreparabeler Schaden von allen wahrgenommen wurde, als ein eitriger Pickel der entfernt werden musste, also wurde ich einfach ausgelöscht, ausradiert, bei Seite geschoben, weggestoßen , irgendwo im dunklen allein zurück gelassen. Man warf mich einfach so weg, als wäre ich nur ein wertloses, unbedeutendes Stück Müll. Naja ,aber sind wir ehrlich wer möchte auch schon so etwas beschädigtes, defektes und extrem kaputtes wie mich in seinem Leben besitzen? Ich mach jedes Foto der perfekten Bilderbuchfamilie zunichte..

[genspiel]

Derek stepped gingerly into the water, not out of distaste for the cold water flooding his boots, but because he was distracted by a school of small fish darting around his feet, cutting through the water with a silvery glint. One seemed to pause before him, investigating his waterlogged boots. Beneath the murky water, Derek made out the smooth bowl and gilt handle, of a soup spoon, which had sprouted tiny, transparent fins. It darted away with the rest of the school of flatware when Derek took another step.

[athgalla-arts]

A friend wanted to update their fursona, so I doodled a little color ref for them with their guidance Say hello to the new and improved Hoax Palenix, a quick-witted bastard of a Scottish wildcat with a generous heart and a lot of strong opinions and hills to die on Hoax also features in Defekt as a sharp-tongued apprentice cartographer and historian turned revolutionary

[techniktagebuch]

Juli 2024

Das kaputte Handy und sein Freund

Ich fahre mit zwei kaputten Handys durch Schottland. Bei Handy Nummer eins ist die Batterie defekt. Man kann ungefähr zehn Minuten sorglos die Uhrzeit ablesen, aber dann bricht es zusammen, vor allem wenn man so anspruchsvolle Dinge plant wie die Kamera anzuschalten. Wenn man es permanent an eine externe Batterie anschließt, funktioniert es dagegen einwandfrei. Handy Nummer zwei hat Probleme mit der Netzanbindung. Man muss eigentlich direkt neben dem Funkmast stehen, und zwar eine halbe Stunde oder so, dann kann man vielleicht ein paar Nachrichten abschicken. Es handelt sich außerdem um ein Handy, das man nicht ein- oder ausschalten kann, weil der Schalter kaputt ist (Kathrin berichtete). Aber ansonsten geht es einwandfrei.

Beide Handys zusammen haben eigentlich alles, was man braucht. Wenn ich im Auto oder stationär bin, schließe ich Handy eins an eine große Batterie an, erzeuge mit ihm einen Hotspot, und gehe dann mit Hilfe dieses Hotspots von Handy Nummer zwei ins Netz. Das Chromebook kann dieses Internet gleich mit verwenden. Wenn ich rumlaufe, ersetze ich die große Batterie durch eine kleine Powerbank (die ich hinterher an der großen Batterie wieder auflade). Es funktioniert einwandfrei. Das Internet entsteht in meinem Rucksack und landet dann auf Umwegen in meiner Jackentasche. Ich darf nur nicht vergessen, es mitzunehmen.

Setup mit zwei Handys. Das schwarze Kabel führt zu Handy zwei, mit dem das Bild gemacht wurde.

Am Ende des Tages wird die Batterie mit Hilfe der Sonne wieder befüllt.

Neuer Strom wird geliefert. Die große Batterie steht hinter dem Kraftwerk.

Mit Hilfe der Sonne, weil ich in meiner Ferienunterkunft für den Strom Geld in Pfundstücken einwerfen muss. Es kostet nicht viel, aber wer hat schon noch Münzen.

Stromzähler mit Münzeinwurf. Nach einem ganzen Tag mit Kühlschrank und Wasserkochen habe ich 0,2 Pfund verbraucht.

(Aleks Scholz)

[theartificialintelligentsia]

i absolutely adore but also fucking despise the concept of "a corporation using multiverses to do vertical integration of its supply chain and thus cut costs"

[kilometermacher]

Alles wieder gut...

Bei meiner letzten Testfahrt habe ich ja festgestellt: Es kommt kein Strom vom Nabendynamo zu den Geräten. Das ist natürlich nicht gut und die Fehlersuche beginnt unverzüglich. Nabendynamo liefert Saft, Kabel vom Nabendynamo zum Sinewave ist offensichtlich ok. Der Sinewave kann nix haben, denn die Elektronik ist vollständig in Epoxidharz eingegossen und der vergoldete USB-Stecker rostet und…

[assaultsofthought]

Just finished Defekt by Nino Cipri and I’m calling Derek as autistic representation

- feels like an alien and tries his best to mimic others and appear normal

- everyone KNOWS that he’s weird no matter how hard he tries

- overwhelmingly lonely

- likes rules, structures, expectations

- strong sense of justice and empathy

[disease]

JON CONVEX x DeFeKT NEGATIVE ACTION | EP, 2015

[literary-illuminati]

So I'm starting Defekt and I'm enjoying it a decent bit more than Finna, I think?

Like, 80 pages in it feels like the pilot of a particularly cheesy urban fantasy adventure cartoon. But taken on those terms, is decent!