#gurathin was right

[rosewind2007]

This is the best T-shirt in the world:

Let me explain why:

The chap in sunglasses is David “the Gurathin Guy” Dastmalchian—the actor set to play Gurathin in the upcoming Murderbot TV series

The image of Dastmalchian is from a video he posted filmed on the set parking lot and his jacket had a tag with “GURATHIN” on it

His jumpsuit could possibly be costume?

The lettering is from images which have been circulated of props etc from the filming—basically it’s Murderbot-TV-series script

An amazing bunch of Murderbot fans on the New Tideland Discord figured out the whole alphabet (give or take)

The amazing @crabs-brencil made the font/design you see above

The text reads:

“Gurathin was right”

[rosewind2007]

This 👆 is just so fucking GOOD!!!

official thank you to this post for reminding me of what presaux put that man through

[fascinatedfinch]

Murderbot September day 3: (Alternative prompt) “I don’t like you.” / “I know.”

[riseandfallofsecunit]

It would have been more funny if I hadn’t been leaking all over the deck.

[velocitic]

you. yes you 🫵. spare three fun facts about howie.

1. he really likes super dark chocolate (87%+) and after he quits drinking, he ends up eating a lot more dark chocolate instead as his kind of replacement. he doesn't really love chocolate baked into other things though, just the straight up chocolate bar experience for him

2. he can come off as kind of quiet and gruff but he'sreally just an awkward butch with muscle & a masculine voice so people think of him as dark and cranky instead of what he really is: a very shy and soft guy who should have been a philosophy major if he wasnt born in the early 1900s and evil-married during the great depression. he should not under any circumstances be at the club but more than anything he should have been at university. (his voice claim is hozier!)

3. with the other prophets (remi, skylark, wicker, and technically mimzy), howie had chance encounters with everyone before Zephyr tethered them as prophets to the narrative, except remi. he used to date wicker like 50-60 years ago, and he met skylark when she was a younger model like 15-20 years ago and then returned to work for her as she runs her syndicate, and he's seen mimzy in various places overlapping when she was very small, and after her parents were killed & she went missing, whoever did it was put on Mama's bounty board. remi just crawled out of the woodwork once everyone had been tied together and started throwing things at him though. i think this is why howie & remi tend to have the hardest time getting along in the group.

[rosewind2007]

I wrote a little essay about the fact Gurathin seriously has some valid points in All Systems Red, with the slightly provocative title

Gurathin was right, redux

He was right (not about everything, but then again who is?), and I still have the T-shirt (T-shirts, actually—though the writing has faded a lot, need to get some new ones made)

😃

Listen All Systems Red is so so funny from Gurathins perspective imagine you grew up with Space Socialism and was hired to go help some pal with science but you weren't allowed to go unless you rented AmaTeslas Torment Nexus Alexa Dot and then when you get there you find out a whole continent of people got annihilated by their Tourment Nexus rentals so you take a moment to check yours quickly and find out it already had disengaged its Don't Kill People box, the only thing you've ever been told prevented them from mass homiciding their clients, something that LITERALLY just happened to people you knew a day ago, and when you say to your fellow socialist doctors HEY I think our Tourment Nexus is fucked up and it's files said it killed dozens of people barely a year ago and we should probably get the hell away from it the same doctors are like look at what you're saying. You're hurting the Tourment Nexus' feelings. The Tourment Nexus is just a little construct who likes Netflix Gurathin stop antagonizing it on the plane ride.

[coquelicoq]

gurathin, thiago, indah...starting to get the sense that if murderbot didn't have any specific person playing the role of "someone i deep down respect who i'm convinced hates me" at any given time, presaux would have to assign someone, for enrichment purposes

[rosewind2007]

Currently in Cambodia…

[homosekularnost]

making sure your friends are safe is so hard when they have a right to privacy

[rosewind2007]

Well, it cemented my summer reading selection for me, so it did some good!

(to be honest, I’d already made the choice)

Why does that post read like a copypasta shitpost? Why do ppl insist that MB is canonically aplatonic? And what does the Locked Tomb series have to do with any of this??

[gafurtle]

Amena, Murderbot, and Violence

Thinking today about Amena and violence in The Murderbot Diaries.

Like, Amena is from Preservation, a planet whose murder rate is barely above that of an uninhabited planet, where finding an unexpected dead body is so shocking that they close the entire space station IMMEDIATELY. And the other characters from Preservation tend to...let's say look askance at Murderbot's murdering. There's Gurathin challenging whether Murderbot has the right to kill Mensah's captors or Thiago being really upset at the thought that Murderbot might have killed the raiders who were trying to kidnap and/or murder the survey crew. There's also the moment that Murderbot thinks about how it's never killed anyone directly in front of Ratthi, and how it wants to keep it that way, so that Ratthi will keep thinking the best of it.

And Amena was raised on this planet, and so far as I know hadn't really left up until the survey assignment in Network Effect, who suddenly finds herself kidnapped along with Murderbot. And Murderbot is losing it because it thinks ART is dead, and ends up ripping one of the Target's lungs out in front of Amena while messily murdering it.

And Amena's response is...shockingly chill? Like, I guess she's also in shock and scared and Murderbot is the only person on her side at the moment, but it's still an incredibly violent killing done right in front of her and she never really seems to blink at it. Later, the very second that Ras shoots Murderbot, Amena jumps onto his back and tries to choke him out. Like, that's her first and immediate reaction--and this is like 30 minutes after the "Murderbot rips someone's lungs out" thing.

And there is something touching about how "ride or die" Amena is with Murderbot even though she thinks it doesn't like her. And about how willing Amena is to deal with whatever is happening. How at the end of that day, when they've been in a space battle and kidnapped and Murderbot did some murdering and Ras died and Eletra was almost fried and Murderbot was having multiple emotional breakdowns...Amena is worried that Murderbot is mad because she didn't defend it enough when Ras & Eletra were being verbally mean. Like, THAT'S what she thinks might affect their relationship.

I don't know what I'm getting at, exactly, except that I think Amena is a fascinating character.

Things Amena gets upset about:

Murderbot interrupting her date with a predator

Murderbot forgetting to talk in stressful situations

Casual racism (bot-ism?) from Ras & Eletra

Murderbot & ART not talking

Things Amena does NOT get upset about

Murderbot doing the killing

[ruvviks]

right now i'm essentially just working through the list of my less talked about ocs from the cyberpunk extended ocverse, with this time: rikki! she's the youngest of the valentine family, leader of a small gang known as santa madre (previously a branch of the valentinos), and she works at club bodytalk as security specializing in cargo transport, escorts, and pickup/dropoff gigs :D

taglist (opt in/out)

@velocitic, @deadrlngers, @euryalex, @ordinarymaine, @gurathins;

@mojaves, @shellibisshe, @dickytwister, @mnwlk, @rindemption;

@ncytiri, @calenhads, @noirapocalypto, @florbelles, @radioactiveshitstorm;

@strafethesesinners, @fashionablyfyrdraaca, @radioactive-synth, @katsigian, @estevnys;

@elgaravel, @aezyrraeshh, @carlosoliveiraa

[imitationgame77]

Poking sensation in the Feed (tmbd)

It is interesting that Murderbot seems to get awareness of "poking" in the feed as something akin to physical sensations.

All Systems Red

Dr. Gurathin, the least talkative one, was an augmented human and had his own implanted interface. I could feel him poking around in the data, while the others, using the touch interfaces, were just distant ghosts. I had a lot more processing power than he did, though.

Artificial Condition

It said, You’re a rogue SecUnit, a bot/human construct, with a scrambled governor module. It poked me through the feed and I flinched. It said, Do not attempt to hack my systems, and for .00001 of a second it dropped its wall.

ART poked me hard enough to make me twitch. I snapped out of it and ran my recording back a little to catch up on what was happening.

ART poked me. I see it, I told it. The search had turned up a series of notices posted around the right timeframe.

Network Effect

The SecSystem poked me in response and I told it everything was fine, and it went back to happily interfacing with me again.

System Collapse

“So we land on flat ground somewhere, the area looks stable,” Tarik said. He’s not stupid. I think he was trying to annoy ART-drone, but I poked Ratthi on our private feed connection with a video file.

Of course, ART-drone said. It poked me in the threat assessment module. And what is the probability of that, again, exactly?

My impression (without getting different POV) is that constructs like Murderbot and bots like ART perceive poking in the feed as something similar to physical poking. Instantaneous and attention-catching. Humans perceive them more like alert notification. (probably stronger poke than the Facebook poke function...)

Ratthi responds to Murderbot's poke because it was a video file, set to autoplay.

Augmented humans with extra feed interface like Gurathin and Iris (?) may be more sensitive to pokes, but not sure if they flinch/twitch in response.

ART can poke Murderbot in specific place, like threat assessment module. Maybe it's a super AI thing, but I suspect it is because ART is given access to all the assessment modules (e.g., threat assessment module, performance reliability assessment module) during this mission. Again sounds pretty intimate.

[rosewind2007]

Oh! It’s Gurathin!!!

I love it!

And such a lovely green mossy planet, with a beautiful sky—what a gorgeous place to get stranded, briefly

❤️❤️❤️

"I thought that, by the time I got back, Gurathin would be long gone. [...]But Dr. Gurathin was still there. Sitting in a folding chair, looking as if he was on some sort of holiday."

Gurathin, from the Murderbot fic A Little Alien by Rosewind2007.

Calling this one 'Tide Marks' (which makes sense if you read the fic, sort of). Thank you for the prompt!

Pose reference from Posemaniacs.

[m00nymonster]

Tag You're It

Prompt: chaos

SecUnits, as a rule, don't interact with young humans. We're barely tolerated to outright feared by adults, and adult humans try to protect their young. The smaller they get, the less exposure they're given to us. At least, on the Corporate Rim.

"Thank you for helping Amena babysit," Farai said as Tano hovered nearby. Tano looked hesitant, but nodded anyway. It wasn't like there was another option. Ratthi and Gurathin were busy working on a paper, Arada and Overse were on their own date, and Pin-Lee didn't like small humans. That left Amena outnumbered six to one. Those odds were bad for anyone, so I had...not volunteered, but I also hadn't said no when Mensah asked me to help.

She now was looking at my drone, a little worry on her face.

"Are you sure you're comfortable?" she asked. Tano made a shooing motion to the door and said, "we haven't had a date night since--well. We're overdue."

"SecUnit and Amena can handle this," Farai said with a confidence she was clearly projecting. She kissed Mensah lightly, then pulled her to the door. "We need to go, Ayda."

Mensah glanced at me.

"I've had worse odds," I said dryly. Tano laughed outright, then pulled Mensah out the door.

"Be good!" Farai said, and followed. The door shut.

"Okay," Amena started, her arms crossed. "Listen up--"

"NOT IT!" screamed one of the taller small humans, and immediately began to run. After a chorus of "not it!", the smallest started chasing the others.

"No tag in the house!" Amena yelled, but the group was already running through the house, screaming as they did so. Amena groaned.

"I hate babysitting," she muttered. I looked at her. I wasn't going to admit it, but I wasn't exactly sure what to do. Adult humans were enough of a pain and they (usually) didn't have the impulse control of a small, dangerously neurotic fauna.

The screaming intensified, and the smallest human crashed into a coffee table, knocking a vase off balance. I dashed forward and caught it before it hit the ground.

"Neysaan!" Amena growled. "You almost broke First Mom's vase!"

"My knee!" Neysaan sobbed. I can never guess ages, but this one barely reached 100 centimeters and still had the chubby cheeks of a baby. He cried loudly as blood seeped from a scrape. The other children ignored him completely and continued their game.

"SecUnit," Amena sighed, "could you--"

I had already found the first aid kit and handed her the wound sealant. It was novel to use it on someone else. Neysaan continued to cry.

"Oh, settle down," Amena ordered and sprayed the sealant onto the child's knee. His sobbing didn't decrease. "Do you want a kiss?"

Neysaan nodded. I took a step backwards. "I'll be back."

I left Amena to comfort her brother and followed the screaming to the kitchen.

"That's enough," I barked, trying to channel Mensah's tone of voice when she scolded her brood. The small humans froze comically. I'd gotten it right. "Now--"

"SECUNIT'S IT!" one of the children screamed, and they all scrambled out of the room. I glared but started to chase the one who'd screamed. I couldn't go at my top speed in the cramped space, and small humans are surprisingly fast for their size, but I still caught up in seconds. I steeled myself, then reached out and tapped them as I said, "Freeze!"

The child froze. A second dashed by, and I tapped her as well. "Freeze!" I said again. She immediately stilled, one foot still in the air, panting. I'd changed the game. A third tried to dash forward to free her siblings, but I tapped her as well. Finding the last two was not a challenge. I had just captured the last as when Amena walked in, Neysaan in her arms. He was sucking his thumb.

"You're playing freeze tag?" she asked, disbelief in her voice.

"SecUnit cheats," the last child complained. "It runs faster'n us."

"You're the one who decided it should be It," another squawked. "It always wins!"

I shrugged. "No more tag."

There was a chorus of "awwww"s, and one "But SecUnit!", but Amena growled and they quieted.

"No buts," she snapped. "Let's just watch a movie, all right?"

When Mensah returned home with her spouses, Amena was reading on the couch and I was watching episode 12 of Toward Tomorrow on the largest display surface in the living room.

"It's quiet in here," Tano said as the door closed.

"It was a little crazy at first, but we got it under control," Amena said, looking up. "Did you have a nice date night?"

Mensah smiled. "Yes."

Amena yawned. "Good. I'm going to bed." She paused. "Did you know SecUnit knows how to play freeze tag?"

"It...what?"

[setokaibapetty]

Fic Friday 5 + 1 Roundup: Fun Postscripts

Have some fics with a postscript or two that are worth reading. Similar selection process to my fun tags grouping.

The Way of Conquest (AO3) - "All Din wanted to do was find the Child a sorcerer teacher, pick up a job or two, and follow his Creed. Three out of three is good, right? Right?"

Maria vs The Jedi Cult (AO3) - "Reborn just in time to join the rest of the younglings in asking Master Skywalker what they were going to do because there were too many of them. Oh well, she had future knowledge, a tendency to be overlooked and forgotten about by the Creche Master, and the reckless abandonment of someone who knows when they die."

That Time Fox's Fat Tits Saved the Galaxy (AO3) - "Fox starts selling pictures of his tits online. This is the fallout. (And the reason why.)"

I Am a Retired Hero and My Love Interest is a Former Crime Lord!? (AO3) - "It started as an accident that evolved into the Red Hood paying attention to Danny. And now ghosts are starting to lose objects that, if fallen into the wrong hands, can cause a lot of trouble for both Danny and the Ghost Zone. With the bats starting to take notice of him and the Zone's refusal to leave him alone, can he truly lead a normal life? And, more importantly, does he really want to?" Set to Private.

Between Life and a Death Place (AO3) - "Jazz and Danny got to college in Gotham. Jazz runs into Constantine, and gets offered an occult consultation job by Dick Grayson-Wayne. Fenton luck ensues." Set to Private.

Bonus: Comparative Analysis (AO3) - "Dr. Gurathin knows he and SecUnit got off to a bad start when they first met. Although it's been a while and things have improved since then, SecUnit is still pretty rude to him pretty much all the time. And honestly? He's getting sick of that. Hypothesis: SecUnit hates him. Objective: Find out why."