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Discussing baby’s future

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my mutuals are so awesome but my conversation skills are much less awesome

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This came to me today so I had to do a quick doodle!

Why does this sound so much like a conversation they'd have in the game?????

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Inchresting!

I have gotten the line where Jerry talks about Simon being his boss. I wonder if we will ever learn about what happened to Hank? Also, security realignment. Wonder what that's about.

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i feel so seen!!

(twitter thread)

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Finally got to play FBC: Firebreak with a friend! Enjoying the gameplay! And getting worried about the state of the FBC by the time Control 2 rolls around. Jesse, are you okay?

Also gnome craves violence.

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So, Firebreak huh?

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A little firebreak doodle, cause I'm really enjoying the" our first day on the job was fucked, and now we have to navigate this weired world we're trapped in" solidarity/friendship potential between Jesse and Hank

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there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

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On conservation and survival

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Is this anything

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what annoys me about explaining evolution to people who don’t think it’s real is that everyone’s idea of how it works seems to be from this

Whereas the reality is far more like

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Let's bother mama

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This is an Expanse joke.

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Murderbot 1x06

I'm behind on writing up my reactions, but this week's episode was super interesting to me, so just pretend I did write up those other episodes so I can skip ahead. Also, heads up to anyone who needs them: this episode was, uh, pretty gory!

The way this show leans so absolutely and uncompromisingly into discomfort is fascinating to me. Discomfort and comedy do go hand in hand, and not only with cringe comedy. Gallows humor, dark humor, humor that confronts power, satire--all of that can also be profoundly uncomfortable while still being funny. That's something I was thinking of a lot as I watched this episode, which did not at all pull its punches when it comes to body horror and violence. And that's so, so interesting to me!

Because I think a lot of this discomfort and horror arises from the change in medium. Now that we're no longer limited to Murderbot's unreliable narration, we see all the stuff that narration elides. And a lot of that stuff that's elided is the body horror inherent in being a construct, and the realities of violence. Some of these things pull double duty in the show by being both visibly and obviously horrifying, while simultaneously being darkly humorous punchlines. is this, tonally, a success? I'm not entirely sure! I think I'll have to watch the show all in one go to assess that. But it is super interesting.

I'm preemptively exhausted though by the way so many book lovers just--do not give this show time to do its thing. Like, I took one look at the tag and already saw people flouncing from the show because of what Murderbot says at the end about "liking" killing Leebeebee, and this after a bunch of other people fretted over Leebeebee in the last episode, like it wasn't goddamn obvious she was being set up as a villainous infiltrator and that she wasn't just comic relief there to make deeply unpleasant and gross sexual comments about Murderbot. This ties into the show's commitment to letting shit cause discomfort, and how there seem to be a lot of viewers who simply can't tolerate that or can't reconcile it with the context of the books. But like. I can almost guarantee you that Murderbot saying it "liked" killing Leebeebee is going to be expanded upon, complicated, given nuance. The show ends on cliffhangers/zingers, that's part of its whole adventure serial/soap opera format. Murderbot saying that is meant to make you, the viewer, uncomfortable! So sit with that discomfort! Think about it! Think about the potential nuance to what Murderbot expressed before you go off about how your precious Murderbot would never be so happy about violence, goodness, as if the books aren't chock full of violence that Murderbot tends to elide.

To me, btw, it is fairly obvious that the nuance is that Murderbot feels good about having performed its function and its duty: it kept its clients safe. It eliminated a clear and present danger to them. It did so somewhat impulsively--Gurathin is right that they could have gotten more information out of her--but it prioritized its clients immediate safety, and wasn't entirely wrong to do so. Murderbot's job isn't to solve a mystery, it's to keep its clients safe, and that means eliminating the threat and getting them off the planet.

I think it's very cool that the episode could have ended on that shocker of Murderbot clean blowing Leebeebee's head off, but it didn't. Again, it leaned into the discomfort of showing the accurate, ugly, messy, uncomfortable reactions of people unused to violence who have just witnessed someone being killed right in front of them, likely for the first time in their lives. This is a moment that is almost always glossed over or outright ignored in visual media, something that Murderbot itself alludes to when it says that people in serials are always happy to be rescued in such a way. The show instead lingers on this traumatic moment. It doesn't shy away from the gore, poor Gurathin is covered in it. And yes, all that is kind of funny, in a horrifying way. But it's also reminding you, the viewer, that deadly violence isn't normal. These normal-ass space hippies are not equipped to deal with it, just like many of us IRL are not equipped to deal with it. PresAux are having utterly normal and expected and unsurprising psychological and emotional reactions to a traumatic event. The show gives them space for those reactions.

Also, going back to Leebeebee, I will admit: I was uncomfortable during last week's episode when she was saying all that wild, offensive, sexual shit about Murderbot, and the PresAux crew didn't push back against it! But again, the discomfort was the point. Both Leebeebee's own point, and the narrative point. Because, like, this is a thing that happens IRL. Sometimes you're in a group of people, and someone says some wildly horrifying racist or sexist or whatever shit, and it's just uncomfortable. Maybe someone laughs, anxiously. But no one says anything against it in the moment, they just try to change the subject. They assume or hope that it was just a one-off thing, they find some excuse to let it go, and then when the offending person leaves, everyone is like what the fuck, that was fucked up, right? That's what PresAux were doing. And then in this week's episode, Leebeebee pushed the boundaries again with another horrifying comment, but by now PresAux have caught on a bit: Bharadwaj pushes back against the comment, kindly but firmly, letting Leebeebee know that kind of behavior and commentary is not acceptable among people from Preservation.

So if I had decided to flounce off from the show because how dare it have Leebeebee make such comments that were unchallenged, then, well, I wouldn't have seen the resolution! So idk what is up with so many other viewers that they have simply no patience to let a conflict play out, but it isn't a problem with the show.

Actually, come to think of it, I wonder if the problem here is that for a lot of book readers, the Murderbot series, despite all the action and adventure, has a cozy vibe. And the show decidedly does not. The show isn't shying away from a single uncomfortable moment, the show keeps confronting the viewer with body horror and violence and the realities of being a construct.

But like, the books also leaned into certain kinds of discomfort! I know when I first read the first two novellas, I had to grapple with the ways Murderbot was expressing and exploring its personhood, and its insistence that that personhood didn't have to be like a human's to be valid.

Anyway, also, I love all the Mensah & Murderbot stuff. Loved it. Perfection, no notes.

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About Murderbot Episode 6

I have briefly glanced around the net for reactions and I have noticed something, which is that some people do not appear to have noticed that part of the point here is to kick certain action movie ideas rather hard in the nuts.

Spoilers under the cut

In an action movie, if you are rescued from a nasty (and going downhill) hostage situation by an act of violence, the reaction is to be glad that you're well out of it, and probably really grateful to your rescuer.

In the real world (or close enough), the reaction to someone's brains splattering all over you is to freak the fuck out.

PresAux went with reaction two, which makes a lot of sense to their characters as they have been established. Most of them, the nastiest thing they've probably participated in is snippy back and forth in academic journals. This is (a) outside their experience, and (b) horrifying.

Murderbot is essentially designed for and native to the action genre (its heads-up display said something like hostile subdued, that is US military levels of euphemism and says to me that security work in this universe is supposed to involve lethal force on the regular, which is a whole other essay in itself) and it doesn't get their reaction at all. But that's not because their reaction is in any way wrong, it's simply alien to Murderbot's world—which is not a nice world, at all, and part of the reason the show keeps being called dark is that it delves into that.

But I have seen some commenters on other sites call PresAux ungrateful—sometimes not even in an angry way, sometimes just, I don't get it, why do they have a big problem with this? And the key is, I think—most people would have a big problem with this. Having a big problem with this is healthy.

In all environments except an action movie.

Which says some uncomfortable things about an action movie.

I think the show is saying those uncomfortable things very loudly and on purpose. It's not exactly a deconstruction, the show is still about the power of friendship and overpowered arm cannons, but it at least wants us to ask ourselves questions about the arm cannons. You know what I mean?