convenientalias

[convenientalias]

For those who still haven't watched The Devil Judge—just a glimpse of what you're missing ;)

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Username Songs Tag Game

Rules: Share a song for each letter of your username

I was tagged by @sadviper. Thanks! I love games :D

...it's a lot of letters though.

C - Crazy, Classic Life by Janelle Monae

O - Obsesion by Aventura

N - Nearly Witches by Panic at the Disco

V - Vienna by Billy Joel

E - Every Rose Has Its Thorn by Poison

N - Night Vision by Transviolet

I - I Can't Decide by the Scissor Sisters

E - Ease My Mind by Hayley Kiyoko

N - Nada Valgo Sin Tu Amor by Juanes

T - Train by Brick + Mortar

A - Auf Achse by Franz Ferdinand

L - Labour by Paris Paloma

I - It's Called: Freefall by Rainbow Kitten Surprise

A - Almost (Sweet Music) by Hozier

S - Send in the Clowns by Judy Collins

This is a very funny playlist to me bc it varies from "good tense music to play while writing to get in the mood" to "chill music I listen to in the car/while scanning at work" to "I associate this with a very specific ship but you would probably never guess who bc it's kind of a reach."

I will tag @seamayweed @trifoliate-undergrowth (trifoliate... you may have to shorten your name a bit my dude) @peregreen @whoisthatmovinginthedark @minutia-r @avauntus @keircatenation

[convenientalias]

Tag game: Username songs 🎼

Rules: Share a song for each letter of your username

Thanks for the tag @romchat!

Was struck with "oh no, everyone is going to know I'm a kpop hag" feels for a hot second, so I made a half-hearted attempt to diversify. Then found out any song without an English alphabet was out of the picture. ^^;;

S: Simply Falling by Iyeoka - this is my classy pick for 'S'. My not so classy one is: Starry Night by The Alpha Prince - I think this is an AI-generated song, which ugh. But it is so catchy to me??? ;__; Something about that lo-fi city pop sound.

A: A Boy by GDragon

D: Dark Star by Tarja

V: ....I don't have a single song with V in the title. ^^;; So I'm putting anything here! The Olive Tree by Sally Yep, though this is a cover, I believe. The original is probably by the ever amazing Fei Yu Ching. And one of my favorite covers (and how I first discovered the song) is this. In the singing competition, these 2 singers had no idea who they would be paired up with until they heard each other sing on stage (the stage props block their view) No practice together, but they killed it!!

I: Into the Wild by Tanya Chua and Ayanga

P: Pain by Isaac Hong

E: Eat Your Young by Hozier

R: Rainbow Corporation by Kim Sung Youl

Tagging @solrosan @blau-s @numerodix @staidwaters @convenientalias if you are interested!

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Watched Bungee Jumping of Their Own this evening. I'd meant to watch it for some time bc hey, a queer movie with Lee Byung-hun? I wasn't NOT going to watch it.

When it comes to tragic or toxic queer movies, I generally love them or hate them, no in between. For example, I love Method and The King and the Clown. However. I hated this.

I went in having read spoilers so I was braced for the content. A teacher falling for his teenage student and being creepy about it; reincarnation handwaving the gay aspect as "I would love this person in any body"; even suicide because of a lack of societal acceptance. I was still willing to give it a chance to see if Lee Byung-hun's acting could win me over. His acting was convincing--I just hated the story it was telling. He's consistently creepy, but the story only acknowledges that something's off with him being attracted to another man. Like, there are much bigger problems here. Even in the initial relationship he had with his girlfriend who died, he was basically a stalker from beginning to end. Then the way he treats his student who is his reincarnation is even worse to watch, from just eerie staring to actual physical abuse. Despite this, his student is still attracted to him; honestly it must be destiny bc I can see no other reason.

Well, when it comes down to it, everyone has their own gauge of how much toxicity they want in their queer stories, and of what type. Like I said, I love Method, which has similar aspects of problematic age gap and gay-for-you dynamic. But Bungee Jumping of Their Own is just too far for me. I think the lack of chemistry between Lee Byung-hun and his male costar affects my view of it too; whether it's because of the real life age gap, because Lee Byung-hun can't play gay, or just that they didn't vibe, there really is nothing there. It's easy to believe Lee Byung-hun is obsessed with the dude, but there's no real sense of ease or attraction. (No shade to his costar, Yeo Hyun-soo; honestly he was slightly more believable. Probably the one time they have a genuine sexy vibe is in a scene where LBH is just staring angstily at a desk and Yeo Hyun-soo sort of comes on to him. GENUINELY MORE CHEMISTRY WHEN YEO HYUN-SOO IS DOING ALL THE WORK.)

Well, it was disappointing. I guess this is not my new favorite toxic queer movie. Will report back the next time I find a good one. ;)

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After System Collapse and Rapport, I can't help thinking about how completely and utterly insane ART and Murderbot's first meeting was from ART's perspective.

UplandGatewayOne, the station where they met, is ART's home station. In Mihira and New Tideland's system. Which is deeply anti-corporate. SecUnit even notes at the time that there aren't any security or bond companies there, so nobody should be looking for escaping SecUnits. Iris and Matteo, for all the anti-corporate missions they've been on, have never even seen one, which means Perihelion most likely hasn't either. They're not deployed on transit rings except in GrayCris-paying-to-murder-people situations, and when they are, it's a big deal accompanied by a lot of alarms and screaming and panic.

And one just kind of strolls across the private docks without setting off the weapons scanners. Wholly unnoticed.

So there was already no legitimate explanation for a SecUnit being here. That's point one. Which means it has to have an illegitimate reason.

And ART's paranoia is easily on par with Tarik's, generally speaking. Even though it's never encountered a SecUnit before it has to be aware that this could be an attack by a corporate. Except the SecUnit's got no drones, no additional weaponry, no armor, and it's wearing cargo pants and a hoodie. Which would seem to suggest that it's supposed to be mistaken for a human -- okay, maybe that explains how it got across the transit station a tiny bit? Not really. But at least it accounts for the lack of screaming.

But there's no point in it trying to pretend it's a human now, if this is the prelude to some kind of attack. It's not like ART is a passenger transport, and these are the private non-commercial docks. It can't get on board without trying to hack the lock, and it can't get too far from its handler without frying itself, so it has to do whatever it's doing before ART leaves the transit ring. Whatever attack is coming, it has to be soon. Like, right now, soon.

And it just pings ART directly.

Not even... trying to hide its presence as a potential hostile MI a little.

That is... possibly the most stupid prelude to a code attack it could have made? And if it had been trying to pretend it was human to persuade ART's crew (who aren't even here anyway) to give it access to the ship, it just blew its cover. What the hell is its human handler thinking? They're really bad at this.

And then it asks for a ride--which, again, is hilarious if it thinks it can gain entry that easily--wait. What the fuck? It's offering several hundred hours of entertainment media as a trade.

There is no human handler.

ART doesn't even have to check the governor module at that point. No human would imagine that transports watch television. Possibly, no other bots besides transports would know that they do, because transports are famously not-communicative. Nobody could have instructed it to say that. The only way the SecUnit itself could have gotten the idea that this approach might work is if it tried it before and it was successful.

Okay, so what we know for sure is: This SecUnit is a rogue, and it talks to transports.

And apparently it's hitchhiking?

This raises so many more questions than it answers.

Where the hell did it come from? How did it get across the station without setting off any alerts? Why was it chatting up transports before now? How did it even get several hundred hours of entertainment media downloads? And why the hell would any sentient being, let alone a rogue SecUnit, want to hitchhike to RaviHyral? A crummy little moon which has nothing on it except for mines.

ART's explanation of, "I was curious about you," for letting Murderbot on board is the understatement of the millennium.

This is the equivalent of a frigging walrus ringing your doorbell.

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My current bookish mode is reading good books that I genuinely like and going "yeah, but CJ Cherryh would have and HAS done it better and we all know it."

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Some Lotus Tower repair. They broke it, so they get to fix it.

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"I am awake now! I am very awake!"

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Too distracted to do any real writing this weekend, but somehow I managed to do fan art for the first time in ages instead? It’s been years! :O

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tired of villains/master manipulator characters who dress up their manipulation strategies as chess metaphors. i will make one who exclusively uses go metaphors instead. fuck you.

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I'm on vacation in a town that some of my coworkers have been to before and when I asked them what to do in the area they all said shopping. So I was like what about hiking, swimming, museums, etc... I don't really like shopping... and they were like yeah you can do that. Great town for shopipng though.

And you know what I've done since getting here? I've fuckign shopped.

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let's dance

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setting up a tiny detail in one chapter to pay it off in the next few chapters feels sooo devious like oooh i can't wait to write the small little reference here that 70% of readers will miss but 30% of readers will cheer for

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That’s when it dawned on me that Hostile One was a Combat SecUnit.

Exit Strategy has so many good scenes but this is the one that I can’t get out of my head.

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Golden retriever and jorts meetup