#or at least what i imagine they'd be in mb

[save-the-villainous-cat]

Hello cat!

Just read your 3k series and wanted to give you a bit of feedback.

End of part two feels a bit hasty, besides the typo in the second to last paragraph (pretty sure you meant villain not hero there). There's a few typos but who cares, this one was just a bit confusing and stopped my reading flow. BUT.

Part four is GREAT OMG the feelzzzz

And don't get me started on the ending it's truly villainous~ and just over the top honestly. I love it. Hard, hurting, realistic. Wanted to let you know you did a great job on the series :)

Personal opinion: I feel like you could have made this a lot longer. There's only a glimpse of the feelings you're trying to express, they came out but they'd really sink in if you'd dwell on it a bit more, write about the stuff a bit more. Although I think that's mb just not your style since you put more weight on dialogue. Like I said it's just a thought it's still great you don't have to change anything in your style.

Something else entirely... I've read some german mostly in your tags sometimes. So I wonder where you're from if you want to tell. Don't have to ofc.

Greetings!

Uhm…okay?

So, when I put my work out here, I obviously have to expect criticism. That’s kinda unavoidable. People will have an opinion about me and my writing.

However, I don’t really know what your intention is. For example, I don’t see the “typo in the second to last paragraph.”

I wrote:

The hero stared at them, eyes narrowed. As if all of this was a trick. But then eventually, they spoke. Followed by a line spoken by the villain.

The hero stared at them. So, they spoke eventually. I get that using nb/nb for both characters is confusing but most of the heroxvillain community is structured like that and nearly all my writing is too. Which makes it weird to me to see this as a mistake on my part…? Like, you could use any line I’ve written on here and tell me I actually meant hero or villain because they both use they/them pronouns.

Also, I didn’t really catch any big typos/mistakes in that snippet. I used a lot of short sentences in this especially because the hero is extremely tired in these scenes and thinking in long ass sentences is just not really possible in such a state of mind (at least not for me lol). So, I guess this could be a reason for why you were confused/not satisfied with the writing flow? It’s structured like all my other snippets and it’s my usual writing style, so that confused me about your ask, too. Of course, I make mistakes as well and I make typos but again…you could say that about every snippet I write, so I wonder why you chose this one specifically?

Additionally, I don’t really see which parts of my snippets are giving “only a glimpse of the feelings [I am] trying to express.” I don’t think my readers are dumb. I think my readers get what I mean when I write “It fried their brain, making it impossible to even think straight. Old panic resurfaced but they put on a tired smirk.”

I think my readers get that old panic means that this character is familiar with panic, whereas putting on a tired smirk is a reaction to it. Which is (as we see throughout the whole story) a thing the hero does a lot. Hiding their pain and distracting themselves with flirting. Readers aren’t dumb. I don’t have to go into every little detail about every tiny thing the characters experience. In fact, part of being a reader is, that you get to imagine these things for yourself. As the writer, I give you a tiny bit of information and as the reader, you get to interpret and shape that however you want.

My readers get what I am trying to express with my characters’ actions and their dialogues. The villain asking the hero if they think they’re a good person has meaning behind it and normally, as a reader, you get stuff like that. I don’t have to describe in a paragraph that the villain doubts themselves and is beginning to value the hero’s opinion on them, no, I let them ask if they think they’re a bad person.

Of course, this series could have been longer. Could’ve been deeper. It could’ve been a whole book. But I am not here to write books for you for free. I am not here to write thousands of words because one anonymous user thinks a blog which posts snippets, should write more and more and more.

So, I believe this is more opinion than actual criticism. I guess? Because, like I said, there’s a reason for the way this snippet is written and if you want to “criticise” me for typos, you’d have to criticise every post I have ever made.

And another thing is, this message is coming from an anonymous user. So, I’m sorry if this offends you but I really don’t care about your opinion that much. I don’t think this message had any criticism in it which improves my writing.

Eventually, your opinion doesn’t have the same weight to me as the opinion of a certain epiclamer or a certain lilyaang or a certain creweemmaeec11 or a certain snowshowerwriting or a certain avvail or a certain thepenultimateword or a certain English teacher of mine.

This is your opinion of the series and this is mine — I don’t see any big mistakes or horrible decisions I’ve made and some anon telling me they didn’t like this or that won’t change that.

And yes, English isn’t my first language. I am German, come from Germany, live in Germany.

[mischas]

Oh I'm so glad you know that moment! I tried to screencap it and it doesn't do it justice, she looks like she's beaming and about to burst from joy really. It's incredibly cute. You make a great point, IMO Mischa shined in those happy moments too, it's hard to hone a particular skill as well when she's never given a chance to practice it either. She brought a lot of high energy to it and felt very real. They spoke on the podcast how M was actually quite goofy irl which we rarely see.

Is this the one you're also thinking of? (fastest I've ever giffed something)

I love her open-mouthed smile at the beginning. For once she's just a girl sitting on a ferris wheel with her boyfriend! It's so heartwarming.

I've been so jaded about this show for a few months now but I always come back to the fact that they center Marissa's suffering so obviously. Or at least make it a tenet of the show's foundation. And that plainly sucks. Sure it produces good (though convoluted) plot but eventually at what cost? She becomes more caricature than character.

By s3 (and earlier if they were honest with themselves) they'd written themselves in a corner so it's no wonder they tried to blame MB/Marissa as they pivoted. I really wish the culture of 2000s media was different for MB back in those days because I'm sure she was told (directly and indirectly) about her strengths and weaknesses as well as responsibility for a show's success. It's a lot to process to this day and I can't imagine how she coped back then.

[gamebird]

I love all of this! Squee!

First off, nearly all my headcanons about Combat SecUnits/CombatUnits found illustration in my series called Skulk, about the life and times of a rogue Combat SecUnit. This includes, in Valid Targets, Murderbot coming to terms with its right to exist as a proxy for accepting it's (Murderbot's) own right to exist as a potentially dangerous and autonomous rogue.

It’s just that I find the idea of construct made only for violence and killing really fucking depressing. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of their day-to-day existence.

That *is* depressing. To us. As humans. But I don't think it would be depressing to the CSU itself. No more than, say, a lion is depressed about the gazelle it kills or I'm depressed about the deer I butchered last month. I don't think the CSU would care very much. I don't think it would be programmed to have anything close to empathy, nor would it have directives to protect, nor 35,000 hours of watching human media to understand its emotions and see kinship between it and humans.

I look at the lack of empathy that can be displayed by 100% organic humans birthed and raised in families and communities, some of whom have no problem killing humans. Or the lack of emotional trauma carried by butchers, farmers, veterinarians, hunters, etc. about killing animals. It's a thing that you do. When you do it well, you feel very happy about it. Triumph! When you do it badly, you're disappointed. But I don't need therapy because I gut shot a deer and we didn't find it until the next morning.

My headcanon is that CSUs are used for military-level enforcement, which is when corporations or others have to engage with armed opponents, possibly in hardened locations (also, when they have to subdue SecUnits or ComfortUnits). As such, they're activated for that mission and kept turned off the rest of the time. If they need a job that takes constant vigilance, they use SecUnits. SecUnits are safer, because SecUnits have base programming that defaults to protecting humans. Even as a rogue, a SecUnit or ComfortUnit (or at least the four we've seen) default to helping and protecting. We have seen none who didn't default to helping and protecting.

So back to CSUs - used for short-term assignments and kept turned off the rest of the time. That limits their opportunity to form empathy or personality beyond their factory settings. My headcanon is also that they'd be destroyed after about a year of runtime, or some other suitable short period. Remove the brain, discard the organic material, wipe the inorganic, grow new neural material, reinsert the brain into the unit. Voila, new unit, no memories, no behavioral abnormalities, very dependable.

The horror is that this creature *could* become a well-socialized and worthy member of society if allowed personal actualization and some independence. They're just not, because that's not to the benefit of anyone in power. (Like, if my car stops deciding to obey my commands and drive me places, I'm going to go get a different car that *does*. And stop providing oil changes and refueling to the car that doesn't do what I want. Without any rescue agencies and recognition of personhood, my old car would simply die on the side of the road somewhere and have its carcass hauled off for scrap. The brilliance of TMBD is it makes us think about the personhood of the machines we make, and the ones we have yet to make.)

Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve felt differently about these books if MB had been a CombatUnit instead of a SecUnit. Would I have felt such an immediate connection to MB if its primary function before hacking its governor module had been killing humans, or if it didn’t have relatable hobbies like watching media? Or if it didn’t have a human face for the explicit purpose of making people like me more comfortable? I’m not sure that I would have.

I didn't read this series for several years because I thought it was about a robot assassin who kept a diary of its interests and life between kills. It was a murderbot, after all. But eventually I read it. If the character hadn't been made lovable, would we have loved it?

(Reminds me of that whole 'would you love me if I was a worm?' thing.)

I think about animals adopted at higher rates because they get better pictures or wear bows or otherwise accessorize to look helpless and adorable. I think about environmental rescue efforts that do better if they have a charming mascot or can otherwise put a face to their mission. I think about how quickly people judge other humans, in fractions of a second, based on appearance.

Would we love Murderbot if it killed humans as a core part of it's function? I'm not sure that we would have, either. (And that's why I wrote Skulk.)

Oh, you might also check out Nullverse for a thrilling psychological plunge into the mind of a jail-broken CSU and its eventual partial 'rehabilitation'. Perhaps even more than I did with Skulk, the author kept the character's lack of empathy intact (or at least, not empathy the way a human would recognize it). I did not read Nullverse until after I'd published the first stage of Skulk and it's amazing the parallels we ended up with. I didn't go the handler route (and in fact leaned hard in the other direction as a handler is a strategic liability), but otherwise we have a lot of similar takes.

Mamma mia here we go again…

So I have more thoughts because apparently there’s no bottom to the murderbot mindhole I’ve fallen down.

(Spoiler warning- minor stuff from several of the books, pls check tags etc.)

I’ve been reading a lot of things recently exploring Murderbot as an unreliable narrator, which I think is a cool result of System Collapse (because we all know our beloved MB is going through it in this one). There’s also been some interesting related discussion of MB’s distrust of and sometimes biased assessment/treatment of other constructs and bots.

And I’ve been reading a lot about CombatUnits! And I want to talk about them!!

Main thoughts can be summarized as follows:

We don’t see a lot about CombatUnits in the books, and I think what we do see from MB’s pov encourages the reader to view them as less sympathetic than other constructs.

I’m very skeptical of this portrayal for reasons.

The existence of CombatUnits makes me fucking sad and I have a lot of feelings about them!

I got introduced to the idea of MB as an unreliable narrator in a post by onironic It analyzes how in SC, MB seems to distrust Three to a somewhat unreasonable degree, and how it sometimes infantilizes Three or treats it the way human clients have treated it in the past. The post is Amazing and goes into way more detail, so pls go read it (link below):

https://www.tumblr.com/onironic/736245031246135296?source=share

So these ideas were floating around in my brain when I read an article Martha Wells recently published in f(r)iction magazine titled “Bodily Autonomy in the Murderbot Diaries”. I’ll link the article here:

(Rn the only way to access the article is to subscribe to the magazine or buy an e-copy of the specific issue which is $12)

In the article, Wells states that MB displaced its fear of being forced to have sex with humans onto the ComfortUnit in Artificial Condition. I think it’s reasonable to assume that MB also does this with other constructs. With Three, I think it’s more that MB is afraid if what it knows Three is capable of, or (as onironic suggests in their post and I agree with) some jealousy that Three seems more like what humans want/expect a rogue SecUnit to be.

But I want to explore how this can be applied to CombatUnits, specifically.

We don’t learn a lot about them in the books. One appears for a single scene in Exit Strategy, and that’s it. What little else we know comes from MB’s thoughts on them sprinkled throughout the series. To my knowledge, no other character even mentions them (which raises interesting questions about how widely-known their existence is outside of high-level corporate military circles).

When MB does talk about CombatUnits in the early books, it’s as a kind of boogeyman figure (the real “murderbots” that even Murderbot is afraid of). And then when one does show up in ES, it’s fucking terrifying! There’s a collective “oh shit” moment as both MB and the reader realize what it’s up against. Very quickly what we expect to be a normal battle turns into MB running for its life, desperately throwing up hacks as the CombatUnit slices through them just as fast. We and MB know that it wouldn’t have survived the encounter if its humans hadn’t helped it escape. So the CombatUnit really feels like a cut above the other enemies in the series.

And what struck me reading that scene was how the CombatUnit acts like the caricature of an “evil robot” that MB has taught us to question. It seems single-mindedly focused on violence and achieving its objective, and it speaks in what I’d call a “Terminator-esque” manner: telling MB to “Surrender” (like that’s ever worked) and responds to MB’s offer to hack its governor module with “I want to kill you” (ES, pp 99-100).

(Big tangent: Am I the only one who sees parallels between this and how Tlacey forces the ComfortUnit to speak to MB in AC? She makes it suggest they “kill all the humans” because that’s how she thinks constructs talk to each other (AC, pp 132-4). And MB picks up on it immediately. So why is that kind of talk inherently less suspicious coming from a CombatUnit than a ComfortUnit? My headcanon is that I’m not convinced the CombatUnit was speaking for itself. What if a human controller was making it say things they thought would be intimidating? Idk maybe I’ve been reading too many fics where CombatUnits are usually deployed with a human handler. There could be plenty of reasons why the CombatUnit would’ve talked like that. I’m just suspicious.)

(Also, disclaimer: I want to clarify before I go on that I firmly believe that even though MB seems to be afraid of CombatUnits and thinks they’re assholes, it would still advocate for them to have autonomy. I’m not trying to say that either MB or Wells sees CombatUnits as less worthy of personhood or freedom- because I feel the concept that “everything deserves autonomy” is very much at the heart of the series.)

So it’s clear from all of this that MB is scared of CombatUnits and distrusts them for a lot of reasons. I read another breathtaking post by @grammarpedant that gives a ton of examples of this throughout the books and has some great theories on why MB might feel this way. I’ll summarize the ones here that inspired me the most, but pls go read the original post for the full context:

https://www.tumblr.com/grammarpedant/703920247856562177?source=share

OP explains that SecUnits and CombatUnits are pretty much diametrically opposed because of their conflicting functions: Security safeguards humans, while Combat kills them. Of course these functions aren’t rigid- MB has implied that it’s been forced to be violent towards humans before, and I’m sure that extracting/guarding important assets could be a part of a CombatUnit's function. But it makes sense that MB would try to distance itself from being considered a CombatUnit, using its ideas about them to validate the parts of its own function that it likes (protecting people). OP gives what I think is the clearest example of this, which is the moment in Fugitive Telemetry when MB contrasts its plan to sneak aboard a hostile ship and rescue some refugees with what it calls a “CombatUnit” plan, which would presumably involve a lot more murder (FT, p 92).

This reminds me again of what Wells said in the f(r)iction article, that on some level MB is frightened by the idea that it could have been made a ComfortUnit (friction, p 44). I think the idea that it could’ve been a CombatUnit scares it too, and that’s why it keeps distinguishing itself and its function from them. But I think it’s important to point out, that in the above example from FT, even MB admits that the murder-y plan it contrasts with its own would be one made by humans for CombatUnits. So again we see that we just can’t know much about the authentic nature of CombatUnits, or any constructs with intact governor modules, because they don’t have freedom of expression. MB does suggest that CombatUnits may have some more autonomy when it comes to things like hacking and combat which are a part of their normal function. But how free can those choices be when the threat of the governor module still hangs over them?

I think it could be easy to fall into the trap of seeing CombatUnits as somehow more complicit in the systems of violence in the mbd universe. But I think that’s because we often make a false association between violence and empowerment, when even in our world that’s not always the case. But, critically, this can’t be the case for CombatUnits because they’re enslaved in the same way SecUnits and ComfortUnits are (though the intricacies are different).

There was another moment in the f(r)iction article that I found really chilling. Wells states that there’s a correlation between SecUnits that are forced to kill humans and ones that go rogue (friction, p 45). It’s a disturbing thought on its own, but I couldn’t help wondering then how many CombatUnits try to hack their governor modules? And what horrible lengths would humans go to to stop them? I refuse to believe that a CombatUnit’s core programming would make it less effected by the harm its forced to perpetrate. That might be because I’m very anti-deterministic on all fronts, but I just don’t buy it.

I’m not entirely sure why I feel so strongly about this. Of course, I find the situation of all constructs in mbd deeply upsetting. But the more I think about CombatUnits, the more heartbreaking their existence seems to me. There’s a very poignant moment in AC when MB compares ART’s function to its own to explain why there are things it doesn’t like about being a SecUnit (AC, p 33). In that scene, MB is able to identify some parts of its function that it does like, but I have a hard time believing a CombatUnit would be able to do the same. I’m not trying to say that SecUnits have it better (they don’t) (the situation of each type of construct is horrible in it’s own unique way). It’s just that I find the idea of construct made only for violence and killing really fucking depressing. I can’t even begin to imagine the horror of their day-to-day existence.

@grammarpedant made another point in their post that I think raises a TON of important questions not only about CombatUnits, but about how to approach the idea of “function” when it comes to machine intelligence in general. They explain that, in a perfect version of the mbd universe, there wouldn’t be an obvious place for CombatUnits the way there could be for SecUnits and ComfortUnits who wanted to retain their original functions. A better world would inherently be a less violent one, so where does that leave CombatUnits? Would they abandon their function entirely, or would they find a way to change it into something new?

I’ve been having a lot of fun imagining what a free CombatUnit would be like. But in some ways it’s been more difficult than I expected. I’ve heard Wells say in multiple interviews that one of her goals in writing Murderbot was to challenge people to empathize with someone they normally wouldn’t, and I find CombatUnits challenging in exactly that way. Sometimes I wonder if I would’ve felt differently about these books if MB had been a CombatUnit instead of a SecUnit. Would I have felt such an immediate connection to MB if its primary function before hacking its governor module had been killing humans, or if it didn’t have relatable hobbies like watching media? Or if it didn’t have a human face for the explicit purpose of making people like me more comfortable? I’m not sure that I would have.

Reading SC has got me interested in exploring the types of people that humans (or even MB itself) would struggle to accept. So CombatUnits are one of these and possible alien-intelligences are another. All this is merely a small sampling of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my brain-soup! So if anyone is interested in watching me fumble my way through these concepts in more detail, I may be posting “something” in the very near future!

Would really appreciate anyone else’s thoughts about all of THIS^^^^ It’s been my obsession over the holidays and helping me cope with family stress and flying anxiety.

[iasip808]

Smosh Marching Band au?

it's marching season again soooo

ian is back field drum major/pep band drum major but before he was he marched clarinet. sings the loudest during hey baby & pretty fly. in charge of stretches & pt.

mari is front field drum major who plays baritone for pep. she occasionally stops by the low brass section to bully shayne since she was section leader the year before ahaha

lasercorn is def trumpet. he's a chaotic section leader who makes the section do lots of exercises that seem Very weird but they all help

joven plays the tenor sax and has the best technique on the whole field. him and sohinki are usually the last 2 left in drill downs.

sohinki is on horn/mellophone. runs runs runs!!! always complains about not being able to see mari or ian conducting because of the size of his bell. always wears gloves & cleans so his instrument is shinyyyyy

wes is in battery. he plays quads and is like the only one so he works real hard to get all the cadences down since they're all pretty much centered around him

boze is in pit. she plays aux so she has like gong and triangle. the bells are too heavy & tall for her to get to the field so she makes keith & noah do it

damien is alto sax. him and shayne compete to see who can play the loudest/longest and shayne is almost always louder but damien's air lasts longer

shayne plays tuba and got one of the new ones since the people they were meant for dipped on the marching band (maybe im projecting...). Very loud. also very good at horn snaps. another competition between him & damien is seeing who can count louder during band camp.

olivia plays piccolo. she often plays the highest notes she can into shayne's ear just to scare him. shayne usually screams as she scuttles away to her locker.

courtney is also in battery. bass tingz. she memorizes her own music and everyone else's cause she's beast like that.

noah is in the color guard. he's rifle!!! one year during a run through he accidentally hit courtney in the head with the end of his flag and the sound of it was in time with the music

keith is our front ensemble boy. he plays marimba and his fingers are all beat from using 4 mallets at a time. he also giggles a little when he hears boze hit the triangle in the show.

kimmy! she plays synth during show and has a cheat sheet on the piano of all the different effects she has to use during show but the judges can't see from all the way up there so she's allowed to use it. but she has it mostly memorized, its just for when the nerves kick in and the muscle memory fails.

[mdverse]

thoughts on middle blocker santana? <3

oh god i'm so sorry to that author but middle blocker santana is the worst glee volleyball take i've seen so far and maybe i just have strong feelings about which positions the glee kids would play but also. no. to quote bob the drag queen, "mama this is garbage". santana would not be a middle blocker and let me tell u all why i say that because i really need to get it out of my system.

the first glaring issue there is that santana is rather short. canonically, at least, she's about my height and while i may make them all slightly taller in my own fic, i don't think that's what ote's author did. and even when playing with a women's height net, I feel pathetically short when i'm up close to it, which middle blockers often are. i don't want to say for sure that she would be too short to be a good middle blocker, but being taller would certainly go a long way. especially because if you look at most teams, the tallest players there will most likely be MBs (and they can be huge). and sure, short people could probably still be decent middle blockers (ie hinata in haikyuu) but it just does not make sense to put a short person in that position. middle blockers, more than anyone else at the net, are constantly switching between offence and defence. you pretty much always have to be ready to block the ball, or to go in for a fast-paced spike. it's a very hectic position to be in and, because you're jumping more than anyone else, height is crucial in getting to blocks quickly. a short person could in theory keep up, as hinata does in hq, but they'd be using a whole lot more energy running around everywhere, they'd have to jump extra high and get the timing right, etc. it's a lot of hard work. and they'd probably be suited to other positions anyway. and i'm not saying santana couldn't do it - i'm sure she could if she really wanted to play MB. but that leads me into my second point.

santana would hate being a middle blocker. maybe i'm biased as someone who has played mb maybe once or twice in games and absolutely hated it lmao but also. i see santana as someone who has much more of an offensive playing style. girlie loves sending a good, strong spike right past the opposing block, and having the time to wind up to it. you don't really have that as a middle blocker because things can get so hectic in the middle of the court. she'd hate having to make that switch right at the net. i also reckon she wouldn't be a great blocker generally, y'know? like she's not a terrible blocker, but it's probably her least favourite play. not to mention middle blockers don't actually play in the back row - once they're done serving, they get swapped out and the libero plays defence in the back until they've rotated back to the front row, and then the MB comes back onto the court. and i just don't see santana liking that. if anything, she wants to spend as much time on the court as possible and she loves the opportunity to attack from the back row. she's great at receiving, too. being a middle blocker would just end up being really frustrating for her. honestly, if i didn't see santana as more of an offence-leaning player, i might've considered making her a libero. clearly that didn't happen but it is a possibility i'd be more inclined to think about than middle blocker santana.

for what it's worth, if i had to rank the positions based on how likely i'd be willing to give them to santana, i'd say:

outside hitter (left side)

opposite hitter (right side)

setter

libero

middle blocker

1-2 are interchangeable, and 3-4 might be as well. but either way middle blocker is always dead last. like i never even considered it for her because it's such a weird choice, so imagine my shock and horror when i found out that was the position she got in ote. so much disbelief and a lil bit of rage.

in conclusion, MB!santana is garbage and anyone who tries to tell me otherwise would need a really compelling argument bc based on both her physical attributes and her personality, i could never see her enjoying it. thank u for coming to my ted talk <3