#i can now make So Much Noise now

[keeps-ache]

we didn't have internet yesterday so i was playing with this music box app i found :>

[scificrows]

Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.

Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):

In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.

It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]

The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]

Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]

In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]

In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]

Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.

[tagerrkix]

back with my astarion bullshit again

[thelostmoongazer]

sighs wistfully........... i wanna be more active in the vocaloid community....

project sekai girlies where are you

[no27-autonation-honda]

congratulations to Mme. Pascale Leclerc, who has surely just experienced both the funniest and most unhinged weekend a mother could ever have. Dear fucking christ, I hope your middlest son brought you a bottle of champagne for yourself, ma'am.

[twentyfivemiceinatrenchcoat]

i could talk for hours abt the differences between itafushikugi and sashisu but ultimately it comes down to the former being the cutest little bunnies and the latter being dirty raccoons you find in a trash can outside of your apartment complex

[liesmyth]

by the way. there's no conceivable universe in which the FTL fleet that left Earth in NtN didn't have it incredibly rough.

I've said this before, but it bears reminding: they jumped blind, using untested technology, with NO supply lines back to earth and no concrete plans for a colony. they took ships that were supposed to stack 11 billion people canned in like sardines and nothing else and stocked them full with enough resources to live on for generations and somehow found a settlement, and that was before they had to rush the schedule because John was making noise about transparency and mask their actual launch as a trial run.

it wasn't a comfortable journey. I'd be very, very surprised if the total passenger count was higher than 10k people, for space/resources allocation reasons as well as for secrecy reasons. Every person on board was a mouth to feed, and their descendants, and their descendants. I've seen some people in fandom say stuff like "Of course they'd bring along servants! Rich wouldn't do chores!" and IMO that fundamentally misses the point.

This wasn't the space equivalent of a cruise liner, or the Titanic crossing the Atlantic with first-class quarters and third-class decks. This is the space equivalent of climate refugees crammed in 500 in a tiny fishboat crossing the sea with a non-insignificant chance of dying en route, after emptying their savings to pay for the trip. The fact that the people on board the FTL ships were once insanely rich doesn't mean they travelled in comfort.

This was a desperate last-chance trip, destination "anywhere but here", chances of survival unknown. Their privilege got them on the ships, but the moment they left Earth, that privilege ceased to exist; there was no way to enforce an existing social structure. This is why, again, I think there were no luxuries on board and absolutely definitely no servants - if you're about to willingly enter into complete social collapse, you don't WANT to bring people you regard as less than yourself, knowing that they will be your equals tomorrow.

I'm still convinced that half the fleet at least didn't make it out, and those who managed to found settlements were nearly wiped out multiple times at different points in history.

[bunnihearted]

lately i've been finding it so so hard to be positive and hopeful. and it's making me so bitter and hateful. i hate it but i dont know what to do about it

[tequiilasunriise]

Let’s see here- an abusive, narcissistic prick who manipulates women and has a clear red raging bull design but the fandom calls him a “fucken goatman” regardless?

At the very least Adam was so homophobic that, in a roundabout way, he became the number one Bumbleby truther (“I will make it my mission to destroy everything you love, starting with her”, “WHAT DOES SHE EVEN SEE IN YOU?!”, etc etc), the fuck does Montyass got going fer him???

[thesnivy123]

And taking a cue from the animals burrowing down,

You dug a hole inside the architecture- A shelter, just to be sure!~

[egberts]

girls wake up there's a new worm bike playlist in progress

alana said the new one is way more funky, I've noticed a lot of punk bands are piggy dippin in a funk/punk sound more than a pop/punk sound and honestly? I'm so obsessed.

[shimyereh]

Done with my third semester of grad school!

[sysig]

Bad time of it, all things considered (Patreon)

[lauronk]

the absolute lack of awareness and consideration some people have continues to astound me. (personal life rant under the cut)

i live in an apartment complex with a neighbor across the breezeway who regularly plays music so loud i can make out THE WORDS in my own living room

and a downstairs neighbor with a sound system up against the wall so when they watch a movie it vibrates our floors despite us repeatedly going down to ask them to do something about it, be it adjust the bass or move the sound system or just simply turn it down a little (and every time they’re snippy with us about it)

and people who like to gather at the pool right across from our building and play loud music until past midnight ON WEEKNIGHTS

i’m all for people having fun in their homes and enjoying life and music and parties and whatever. but also it takes just a minute to consider that there are other people existing around you and be considerate of them

[milo-is-rambling]

I can’t even imagine living without anxiety. Like. How. What?

[legionofpotatoes]

nimona thoughts! still my top movie of the year so far!!

been thinking about how to frame my thoughts on this gem, and I ultimately arrived at a bit of a pretentious jumping-off point. but honestly, my favorite stories are always the ones that end up demoting the whats, the hows, and sometimes even the whos in service of the whys. it's the hardest question and context to tackle in any story, and it's worth interrogating the most in order to find any true meaning, any connection at all to what's told.

nimona shows exactly why walling yourself away from the "others" isn't good enough. it shows why you have to do the work and see them.

not just that it is dogmatically "the right thing to do". not just depicting what certain systemic injustices are, how they are deployed, and who they are targeted at. but the why. that simplest, purest shape of questioning an injustice dating back to your gentlest time as a child, when you were vulnerable, naive, and truly curious in the best possible faith. the question you would always ask was why.

you are picking up a sword to threaten the unknown. you've been told the whos and whats. you parse it thus. but you don't know the why. you are watching this happen on TV, contextualized, simplified, dramatized. you are connecting the dots. understanding the why.

nimona painstakingly drills down on that why. arduously, achingly digging past the institutions of fear fed by cycles of indoctrination and right down to the core of it. packaged in a simple-to-parse fantasy world built with deft, elegant metaphors and archetypes that immediately fall into place and make sense to a person of any age.

it is animation as a medium and fantasy as a genre both working in concert. a fun and colorful romp that ends on a gentle embrace of reassurance that tells children - both literal and the ones buried deep inside adults - that their first question to the world was always the correct one. because it was the kindest.