#It is inconsequential anyway.

[loveletterworm]

Spending your formative teenage years on tumblr dot com instead of other websites or outside will induce a really baffling worldview that I can only describe as "Cave Madness" which is really difficult to explain or do anything about

[iloveluxu]

im going to go to hell for this probably

[platoapproved]

armand + a few offhand lines that give some insight into how he thinks (imho)

[brushstrokesapocalyptic]

Having now finished reading the Murderbot Diaries, I'm poking through parts of earlier books, and right now I'm thinking a whole lot about This:

I said, “At some point approximately 35,000 hours ago, I was assigned to a contract on RaviHyral Mining Facility Q Station. During that assignment, I went rogue and killed a large number of my clients. My memory of the incident was partially purged.” SecUnit memory purges are always partial, due to the organic parts inside our heads. The purge can’ t wipe memory from organic neural tissue. “I need to know if the incident occurred due to a catastrophic failure of my governor module. That’s what I think happened. But I need to know for sure.” I hesitated, but what the hell, it already knew everything else. “I need to know if I hacked my governor module in order to cause the incident.” […] “Either I killed them due to a malfunction and then hacked the governor module, or I hacked the governor module so I could kill them.”

Now, my assumption the first go around was always that the sequence of events went something like Mass murder happens > Memory purged > Governor hacked. Something along the lines of Murderbot waking up with all its digital memories gone but its meatbrain still screaming about the horrors, to which it responds by borking the governor module. And I've seen one or two other posts that seem to make the same general assumption.

But that can't be the case, because if it happened after the purge then Murderbot would remember it. It would have a clear, cold-hard-facts record of "this is the moment I deactivated my governor module" and this whole passage wouldn't be a question. So it can only be Mass murder happens > Governor hacked > Memory purged.

Now, we don't know anything at all about the incident and the following hack, apart from what Murderbot remembers and learns. It's possible there was some sort of gap— The company picks Murderbot out of the bloodbath, assesses the malfunctioning SecUnit for a little while (during which it hacks the governor module), and then decides to wipe it.

Just as likely (and IMO more compelling) is the possibility that Murderbot hacked it during the incident. SecUnit with a particular proclivity towards hacking recognizes that something is VERY WRONG with its governor module, it does not want to be doing all this murder, it hacks the module and shuts down due to a combination of physical damage and mental distress.

Then it wakes up with no cold-hard-data type memories, just a borked governor module and the account of its squishy meatparts to go on. It's pretty sure it knows what happened, at least in the broad strokes. But four years later, with the horrors no longer freshly screaming in its ear, it can't quite be sure.

[shorlinesorrows]

here is ur daily reminder that Kevin Day leaving the cult that raised him was never selfish

thx send post x

[rbtlvr]

chat i think i might be cooking with this (hugemassive spoilers for both games :thumbsup:)

[webothblackedout]

i don’t remember who but at least one of sam nivola/patrick schwarzenegger (although i would guess sam just based on the tone of a lot of his comments) has said they think lochlan and saxon just never really talk about what happened again and their relationship never rebuilds but i just simply do not think this is true. i think there has to be a breaking point. and i think the text supports this; even after the “let’s just drop this forever” conversation, saxon and lochlan still look at each other knowingly when tim mentions the lack of trauma in their family’s lives during the murder piña colada toast. that’s not “dropping it forever”! and the fact that it’s not even a full day before they’re acknowledging it again to each other tells me that this breaking point isn’t going to take a very long time to reach. i give them like a month at most before they’re tearfully making out in their shared room at the holiday inn express or wherever they’re staying post canon

[tvlandofficiall]

revisiting ch1 for the anniversary and one thing that's always stuck out to me is the couple of times darkness is associated with being able to "see the way". i don't know if it means anything or if it's just me reading a bit too much into some flavor text but if it does mean anything i definitely think it has something to do with how, like how venturing further into the darkness reveals the truth of what's hidden there (the switch in the ringaround puzzle room or the path to a key, for example), entering the dark worlds themselves reveals the hidden truth of the objects of the light world to us and the lightners — that they're not just ordinary objects, but living beings. the darker it gets, the more the whole of these worlds and how they are connected is revealed to us.

[orphiclovers]

When Kim Dokja says he did powerscaling of Ways of Survival characters in the corner of his notebooks as a teen I think he's lying. He doesn't do anything of the sort as an adult, when he actually meets the characters. What we actually DO see him doing a lot is 'prettyscaling' - comparing how hot everyone is in comparison to Yoo Joonghyuk, with the precise metric of how many times they could slap his cheeks. We literally have enough info to make a ranking of Ways of Survival characters based on prettyness  - THAT is the actual ranking Kim Dokja was drawing in his notebooks.

[ulteri0rm0tives]

Twilight - Bôa

(+ a couple without effects below!!)

[beatcroc]

something about perspective, representation, or finding beauty in imperfection, i don't know. i mostly just wanted to say that fake pep looks like shitty ice cream.

[karalovesallthegirls]

It’s very interesting to me when folks add to stories I post on tumblr partially because it is so unexpected every time, like little fanfiction of my fanfiction, and then partially because they almost always take a solemn/sad story and add a happier twist to the end of it.

My Kara diaspora one has had two story continuations added to it by folks and both focus on Kara feeling connected to her earth family or Lena specifically. Taking this idea that she’s all alone and changing it to be less hopeless/sharp. I totally get that, that was my original perspective for that story too. I actually rewrote that story three times before sharing it. I originally wrote it as a conversation between Kara and Lena, but I kept getting stuck on Lena comforting Kara or trying to soothe her. It never felt right. This wasn’t something that could be fixed. It almost felt like it cheapened it? Like I was invalidating Kara’s pain in an effort to alleviate my own. “I have a deep and unshakable grief” being met with “you’ll be okay, though!”

This is by no means a critique of folks who added to my story, as I also wanted to have that sort of ending for it. I know how painful it is to see someone you care about suffering, and the instinct is to make it go away. But some pain is permanent, and sometimes the most validating thing you can do is to see it without trying to fix it.

[bookshelfdreams]

ofmd wasn't "profitable" enough but I didn't even get the feeling hbo wanted to make money off of it. They didn't promote it when s1 dropped, and the promo for s2 was erratic at best. They don't sell merch. Or physical copies. There's no bts documentaries other than what actors (shoutout to Samba ilu) make themselves in their spare time.

It took more than a full year for me to be able to watch s1 legally! I still can't access s2 legally anywhere! It's not that ofmd is unprofitable, it's that hbo refuses to profit off of it, because - well, because profiting off of it would mean investing work and money into it.

And like. Of course, when you compare it to the juggernauts hbo holds rights to, like GoT, ofmd is small fishes. But.

How on earth do these clowns think cult classics happen?

A Game of Thrones was first published in 1996 and didn't make it on the NYT beststeller list until 2011. The first edition of the first Harry Potter book was 500 pieces. And yeah, TV shows are different, but if you look at today's media landscape, would things like Star Trek, or Buffy, or Doctor Who stand the slightest chance? These things take time, is my point. A piece of media doesn't become a massively profitable, beloved classic over night. It takes time and effort to build that kind of franchise.

And the thing is! Nobody who makes these decisions even likes stories. I'm convinced that whoever is in charge at hbo, at amazon prime, even at disney, thinks storytelling is dumb and for idiots. They think it's enough to just slap the name of something people love on whatever garbage they spit out, for it to be profitable. They think it's the brand that sells: Look this has "Lord of the Rings" on it! Look, this one has "Game of Thrones", you like Game of Thrones don't you? Watch my show, boy.

But this isn't how this works. It's not the name that sells (unless, I suppose, you're the MCU, and even there one gets the impression the trick is finally stopping to work), especially not when the product is bad. People aren't idiots.

But it's not about making something good. It's not about making a meaningful piece of art, or telling an engaging story. ofmd served its purpose; it drew in all the subscribers it ever would, so there's no point in letting it go on. Even in the s2 that we did get, this is evident: the penny pinching is palpable, it's clear that the studio didn't want to spend any more money than absolutely necessary on it, and then cut the budget by 40%.

It's not about art. It never has been.

And it's not even about profit, because to be profitable eventually, stories have to be allowed to thrive first. You tell a good story first, and success happens later, often much, much later.

And ofmd was incredibly, astonishingly successful. It was the most in-demand series for weeks after the s1 finale. But even that wasn't enough, it's never enough, ofmd could have made record-setting profits and it still would have been cancelled, because -

Well, I don't know. Because we live in a bad time for art. Because Orwell was right, and stories have become commodities, like shoelaces. Because. Well. It's not about telling a story, is it?

What's the point of a story? What's the point of making something for the joy of making it? What's the point of a piece of art, existing, if it cannot be transferred into numbers for the stockholders?

idk how to end this. I hope David Jenkins finishes the story he wanted to tell, even if just for himself. I hope, against all odds, that weird, fun, heartfelt, beautiful little stories like ofmd continue to happen.

But goddammit.

[buckynats]

How do people make friends. Irl

[simcardiac-arrested]

never volunteer for anything university related man. also go listen to this

[stayatsam]

AGGHHHHHHHHHYY 💔😞