cuneiformkey

[cuneiformkey]

Crystal, Edwin, and Charles, doing a sweep of some building in the middle of a case:

Crystal: Holy shit, wait. There's something in this room.

Charles: What, where? Get behind me-

Edwin: I don't see anything. Are your psychic abilites picking up on something, Crystal?

Crystal: No, no, not that... I smell something.

Edwin: Crystal we are ghosts, we cannot smell. It is important you tell us exactly what it is you are smelling. A certain smell could indicate if there have been any curses cast on the place, or if certain potions were brewed near here or even if-

Crystal: It smells like... up dog.

Edwin: What is, "up dog?"

Crystal: *laughs*

Edwin: No, I need to know, what is "up dog," this could be a matter of life and death!

Crystal, laughing harder: Not- n-

Charles, also laughing: Mate-

Edwin: What about this situation is funny?! Is there some hex on you two? WHAT IS UP DOG?!

Crystal, now clutching her sides laughing, just barely getting out the words: Not much.

Crystal and Charles, in barely understandalbe unision: How about you?

[cuneiformkey]

Murderbot thinks all humans are idiots, and these idiots keep proving him right.

I understand Murderbot's pain.

Every single one of them are idiots.

Like, if you're trying to help during combat, you get a fucking gun. If you don't have a fucking gun, you stay the fuck out of a gunfight or a murderbot versus secunit fight.

The fuck did Arada think she was gonna do, jumping on it physically?

And Pin lee doing that fucked up weird little kicking thing!? What were they even thinking!?

I know, I know, Panic. Fight or Flight. I would think they would've had enough wherewithal while MURDERBOT was fighting it, to run into the ship and grab a GUN, though. I mean my god, Ratthi grabbed a fucking THROWING SPEAR?????

And the fact that they keep taking his every warning of 'that will kill you' as a direct threat on their lives, is fucking ridiculous. Humans have murdered, raped and enslaved so many people and they're mad their secunit has the same freedom to enact that upon them even though literally every human does????

You are literally asking why you should trust an ex-slave who just escaped because just like other free people, it now has free will!!! My god this irritates me. They are literally positing the idea that freed people's first instinct is murder. This is always a thing! I hate this thing!

I still like Mensah but she's kind of enabling all their weird idiotic bullshit. Gurathin is the only one who even remotely gets a pass because apparently people hack the secunits and make them kill quite frequently and he thinks that's just what 'happens' when one gets free, like it's glitching or something.

Otherwise, I see him as perfectly reasonable. He's afraid for a REASON. He's seen things.

And while he might be just as much of an idiot as the others at times, he's usually at least cautious. It's funny that Murderbot hates him when they most often might agree with each other if Gurathin could trust MB.

[cuneiformkey]

Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

[cuneiformkey]

I love a sentient spaceship with Absolutely Zero Chill

[cuneiformkey]

Amena in the first half of Network Effect: Escaping Targets with Third Mom

[cuneiformkey]

If Mensah had a nickel for every time she adopted a rogue Secunit, she’d have two nickels.

Which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

I think it would be absolutely hilarious if Three goes with them to Preservation Alliance. Imagine it from the perspective of the other people on the station. First this group goes on a survey mission that goes very wrong, and it eventually leads to there being a rogue SecUnit hanging around openly insulting your security and being a bit of a menace. Then the SecUnit leaves with some of them, gets kidnapped, and has to be rescued by the former leader of the alliance (who, by the way is the one who brought that asshole SecUnit with her in the first place), and then when they return it’s with a whole new rogue SecUnit, this one they basically stole. I can see them being like “what are you doing, collecting them.”

[cuneiformkey]

MURDERBOT 1.07 "Complementary Species"

[cuneiformkey]

It's feeling good. It's feeling confident.

Murderbot TV (Apple TV) season 1 episode 7

[cuneiformkey]

Can’t be Murderbot’s first friend without mad skills.

They were trying to help, which didn't help. But as much as it pissed me off, I kind of appreciated it.

Murderbot TV (Apple TV) season 1 episode 7

[cuneiformkey]

2029: Rogues of the Interior and the American Psychoanalytic Association think they can do worse and publish Venus in Chainmail.

2027: Wizards of the Coast and the American Psychological Association collaborate on the D&DSM, 6th Edition, widely regarded as the worst thing ever published

[cuneiformkey]

I have thoughts on Murderbot using its own wiring to repair the hopper — first that it did not immediately consider this possibility because it is a separate-type thing from the hopper. Then the obvious compatibility after Mensa used “machine lubricant” so realizing it is the same-type thing as the hopper. Then self mutilating to save his clients (or making Mensa cut him open). Even if it can disable the pain sensors, Secunit just had the combat override module, which was super traumatic. It’s a huge step so let Mensa into its literal and metaphorical insides.

Murderbot personhood is so central to the books and the character itself constantly wrestles with the self-concept. Good job, Murderbot TV, for translating this to the screen.

I need to go have an emotion in private.

[cuneiformkey]

i love this website i just feel at home here you know

[cuneiformkey]

The original plan absolutely involved kidnapping.

-Network Effect, ch8

Is it proof that ART was holding out on MB? If ART has the array of internal sensors that MB describes would it also need cameras? What for? It can sense and understand everything going on inside itself just fine. When the humans need to see another part of the ship it doesn't give them a camera view, it whips up a hologram. ART is a deep-space research vessel, the visual input it's used to getting is probably more like the James Webb space telescope than a security camera. And once it made friends with SecUnit in AC there was no particular reason not to allow camera access: there was no-one else on board to spy on and its research modules weren't attached.

If, however, you're a humungous space reaseach ship and you're used to looking at supernovas way the fuck over there and using your spidey-senses for stuff happening in your hull then it makes sense that visual media might not grab you. It's not encoded with heat, density, motion: it's mostly just optical. Which, you're a hyperintelligent supercomputer, you can parse it into a format that you can understand, but. Ugh. Why? There isn't even any gravitational lensing. It's like reading something boring in a language that you've got a rudimentary grasp of but aren't fluent in: you can do it if you make the time and effort but it's a lot of work for something that isn't even fun.

And then Murderbot shows up and gives it a three-week intensive course on Why Visual Input Is Fun, Actually. It gets a lot of practise and ART learns very quickly. So now that it's tagged and released Murderbot back into the wild it needs to upgrade its on-board systems to provide an appropriate habitat for once its multi-step plan to find it again and convince it to stay forever comes to fruition (hopefully the plan did not originally involve kidnapping).

[cuneiformkey]

Happy Pride Month! Dead Boy Detectives (2024) — Season 01

[cuneiformkey]

OK look I'm sure most people in the fandom have seen this @remnantglow animatic BUT I HAVEN'T SO I'M POSTING IT FOR OTHER PEOPLE WHO MAY NOT HAVE SEEN IT EITHER!!!

IT'S SO GOOD OMG

[cuneiformkey]

Sometimes I have to remind my dad that he’s a master furniture maker and most people do not possess encyclopedic knowledge of European and American furniture styles and the history of wood glue

[cuneiformkey]

SecUnit armour should attach directly to anchor points on the construct. If you're building something designed to wear armour then including couplings for it just makes sense. A human should not physically be able to wear SecUnit armour not because it's too heavy (though it probably would be too heavy/cumbersome to move well in) but because it doesn't have straps and buckles or lock to itself like human armour does: it clips onto the underlying foundation (the SecUnit).

It's disposable plating meant to take hits and then be replaced, but it's also an extension of the construct's body.

I have a lot of Feelings about Murderbot and its armour, how terribly it misses its opaque faceplate and how naked and vulnerable it feels every time it goes into combat without it. How in System Collapse it feels weird about taking Three's armour, and whether that's an extension on how it feels about armour in general, taking Three's specifically, or its evolving feelings about being expected to charge into combat in the first place. It's a component Murderbot lost early on and has never been able to replace, an exoskeleton it's struggling to learn to live without even as the humans around it don't even register it as a loss.

I think it's pretty likely that given the choice, it would generally prefer to chill in the argument lounge in full armour with its faceplate opaqued. Without that option it's been forced out of its comfort zone and has connected with its humans in a way that Mensah correctly predicted it never would have otherwise, which. Yay. But now it's done all this hard work and uncomfortable growth I hope eventually it gets its comfortable shell back.

Not to wear all of the time, because ART's crew uniforms are very soft and don't have seams or logos that it doesn't like, and ART's argument lounge and Preservation Station are safe places where it can be around humans without needing it. But next time shit hits the fan I hope ART gets to do a dramatic reveal of the bleeding edge armour it contacted the PSUMNT AI that has a special interest in materials science to make. It upgraded its fabrication units to be able to build it. It hacked Company blueprints to get a design schematic to scoff at and then improve. It's got the stealth coating they lifted from the NE hostiles. It's got extra data storage and processors tucked in there big enough to carry an ART partition. It comes with a whole fleet of matching drones. It's Perihelion blue. You can't buy armour this good (who would ever spend this much to protect a construct?), but it would hypothetically cost more than a fully kitted-out brand-new top-of-the-line CombatUnit. ART paid for it out of its own accounts and will not be taking questions about PSUMNT mission budgets at this time.

The wall retracts to reveal a secret armoury like in a spy movie, complete with theme music and coloured lighting, both because ART is Extra and because it knows that Murderbot has some mixed feelings about armour and having nice things. Giving it cheesy melodramatic presentation to nitpick and protest over will be comforting, even as they both unironically enjoy the homage to the episode of Timestream Defenders Orion with the chrono-displaced space knights.

This got away from me, but tl;dr: let the awkward turtle have its shell back!