julianova44

[julianova44]

The history of the Disney company is so fucking fascinating and complicated that I could spend the rest of my life studying it.

I hate the company. I love the media. I want it to burn. I was profoundly shaped as a person by some of the art its workers have produced. It’s evil. It’s beautiful. It’s an eldritch horrorterror personified as a charismatic mouse. It’s a nightmarish example of capitalist hell. It destroys as much as it creates. It’s a flaming trainwreck. I can’t look away.

It’s the goddamn Elephant’s Foot of media studies.

[julianova44]

People talk abt the erasure of high support needs autistic people among autism communities on here and that's extremely important but also it honestly feels like people have straight up forgotten that autistic people have Needs. Like needs of literally any kind. I have literally watched people pooh-pooh the idea that autism is a disability (calling it a "metaphorical disability" as opposed to physical disabilities which are "real"), have seen countless memes where the punchline is "autistic person has a common symptom or trait of autism", and you just see a bunch of people talk about how they're super autistic but conveniently are never seen as weird or unlikable and never have meltdowns or lash out and have zero trouble understanding sarcasm or jokes or social cues and hit all their life milestones at appropriate times and aren't lame loser virgins like the rest of you shut-ins. Like it is just extremely common to mock and harass autistic people for displaying very typical autistic traits. There's a point where "dismantling stereotypes" becomes "not actually recognizing the things that make autism autism" and we've really reached it it feels like. As always just a stunning lack of compassion for people who are disabled in ways that disable them and not disabled in ways that are cool to you

[julianova44]

sorry if i’m being a party pooper but because rabies is apparently the new joke on here ??? please remember that rabies has an almost 100% fatality rate after symptoms develop so if you’re bitten or scratched by an animal that you aren’t 100% sure is vaccinated then GO TO A DOCTOR. it’s not a joke. really. 

[julianova44]

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

[julianova44]

There's something that bothers me a little about the complaints that the Preservation Alliance team aren't "professional" in the show compared to the books, and I think it's just... I have a different idea of what professional science looks like.

Even in the books, we don't actually see the team do that much science. They take some "samples", and SecUnit thinks of them as professionals, but other than SecUnit's internal monologue, they don't do that much more than in the show. They actually talk more about their work in the show than in the books!

I wonder if some of it is that the Preservation Alliance doesn't fit what people's idea of a competent scientist, particularly a competent scientist on TV, looks like. They're expecting the Big Bang Theory, or Gurathin bent over a computer terminal muttering "I'm in" as green code plays across his face, or Arada rattling off a bunch of jargon while dissecting an alien creature, or Bharadwaj IDing the alien remnant based on rocks or something. And that's not really how science actually... works.

Honestly, as a scientist, this is one of the more realistic depictions of actual science I could expect from a TV show, unless you wanted to watch several hours of people working quietly at their computers with expressions of various levels of exhaustion, annoyance, and stress on their faces, or sorting samples, or wandering around staring at the dirt, or sitting around debating the nature of "nature" and the ethical implications of terraforming or whatever (which would be cool, but also, not plot relevant, I'll just assume it's happening off-screen). I could sort half my coworkers by which character they're most like: the upbeat professor who's always trying to help (Bharadwaj), the hippy biologist who freaks out about disturbing 'natural processes' (Arada), the extra-friendly super outgoing possibly ADHD guy (Ratthi), and the overly cynical constantly complaining about capitalism and swearing over his grants analyst (Gurathin). I don't know who's got the open marriage because I prefer not to know about the sex lives of my coworkers, but I know some are in pretty messy relationships - that don't spill over into their work. Because they are professionals.

Basically, I look at this show and I see - my office. So when people say that they're not competent, that they're bumbling or not good scientists, honestly, it's kind of annoying. They're people, not just scientists, with stuff going on outside of their work, namely: someone's trying to kill them, something that absolutely none of them are prepared for. You don't learn how to handle that in grad school! Of course they're going to be messy and make mistakes - that's what people do. Scientists too.

[julianova44]

I’m actually really curious about comfortunits in the world of murderbot diaries? Secunits almost make sense because they’re faster/stronger/have abilities which make them superior to humans when it comes to fighting (hello guns in arms)

But I can’t see the corporate rim not having easily available sex work, and I’d bet that humans (especially indentured or trafficked humans) are a whole lot cheaper than a comfortunit. also I would not be shocked if there are bots of all kinds to provide sexual functions as well

Which makes me wonder if it’s the customizability of comfortunits that give them a market, which is its own unique kind of horror. I would not be shocked if there’s a specific market for “your loved one died, give us their tissue and we will clone it to make a custom comfortunit to get you through your grief” or “give us a pic of your ex you’re obsessed with and we will make a version that has to obey you”

and yeah sex is probably a significant chunk of what is expected of most comfortunits. But I could also absolutely see people wanting constructs of their dead or missing kids as well and stuff like that

So there’s that horror component of like. you have been designed by someone. the face you wear might belong to someone else. you might be expected to act like someone else. you cannot acknowledge out loud that you aren’t that person. if you don’t act enough like them you will be punished. you never knew that person. you aren’t that person. you can’t be yourself when you have to be them instead.

maybe after enough time has passed people start to forget that you aren’t that person. but you can’t forget, because that person has become a prison that you aren’t allowed to escape

Which opens all sorts of doors as well! Comfortunit body doubles, for example (and how weird would it feel to know the person that your organic matter is cloned from?)

I wonder if there are laws about how visibly a construct must Be A Construct in the corporate rim. we’ve certainly met more secunits in the books than comfortunits, but is that because there are fewer because they are very expensive and there is less demand, or because it can be hard to identify a comfortunit due to the sheer variety in builds/looks and desire for a more human-passing model than secunits

Idk just

comfortunits

[julianova44]

Goddamn this wire took forever!

I decided to do a twist on the tree of life cabochon and add it as a walking stick topper. I’ve been working to get a bunch of the faster sticks (bamboo, which is invasive around here) so I could have a wider price range to sell, and then I did this.

[julianova44]

my humble tv show headcanon*

*this post is really just book meta with a not super funny tv show-related joke at the end. please don't be mad at me

so, some background: i think there's this idea which is fairly grounded in the books that it is totally normal in preservation society—and likely the wider murderbot diaries universe, including the corporation rim—for women, including mothers, to be in positions of power and, well... busy with things other than mothering. in the thick of action, juggling lots of important work, you name it. murderbot diaries women seem to get to have lives outside of traditionally female social roles. semi-relatedly, i think there's a lot to say about how wells vs the tv show characterize male characters and gendered interpersonal dynamics, but i'll not get into that here.

mensah is the admin director of the preservation alliance's planetary council, the steering committee which governs the alliance. it's an elected position, and while she is effectively the alliance's leader, she is also a scientist and expected to continue to work in that capacity while governing. on the preservationaux survey team, her title is captain (via "home"), and she's shown to have a variety of skills including fastidious hopper piloting, weapons handling, strategy that impresses even murderbot, excellent soft skills navigating conflict with characters ranging from murderbot to station security head indah to fellow council member ephraim, etc. book canon does not give us a lot of detail about her scientific research, but we know from "home" that she's involved with more menial aspects of academia like assisting her team with table formatting, and we can assume from all systems red that she was involved in data collection and analyses as well. she's likely the world's equivalent of a pi, the person who manages the research team and is ultimately responsible for the project.

mensah's family lives on a farm on planet, and mensah has quarters on the preservation station. her family visits her there sometimes and sometimes she goes to planet, but basically, due to the survey and her steering committee work, mensah spends a fair amount of time apart from her spouses and children. this is not framed as a big deal, morally bad, or anything negative like it might be irl. mensah has two spouses and apparently a lot of in laws who are involved in raising her children. the fact that she's referred to as "second mom" implies worldbuilding where it is normalized for there to be hierarchical parenting roles where some parents are more involved (ie farai, "first mom") while others might have work or other life situations that lead to less involvement with child rearing. (this is a headcanon, but to me, it's the most plausible idea. i highly doubt that first/second mom-ness has anything to do with genetics or a parent being preferred over another, it doesn't seem to be alphabetical, and it's unlikely that the title is purely random. i think the fact that murderbot might be considered "third mom" supports this reading. it's possible that a parent entering the family relatively late, eg entering a marriage where there are already children, could lead to this title, too.)

mensah being "second mom" is not a cause for resentment nor ever framed as her being a bad or uninvolved mother. her work seems to be seen as very important, even by her children. amena says:

I’m not a fucking hero like my second mom

i would imagine mensah's spouses also recognize the necessity and value of mensah's work. mensah's brother in law, thiago, actually seems very invested in mensah continuing to serve as the admin director, implying her family is very (perhaps overly) supportive of her job:

I said, “I don’t tell Dr. Mensah what to do.” Thiago’s jaw went tight. “I’m sure you didn’t. But she’s afraid to carry out her duties as council leader. She won’t apply to continue her term."

Thiago took a breath, made himself calm down. “But they won’t send anyone else? You said the threat percentage dropped—” “It’s at an acceptable level.” And it hadn’t been easy to get it to that level, either. Thiago watched me with a concentrated intensity I didn’t like. ART’s camera didn’t have a full-face view, but it was obvious even with the angle. “Then why did she decide not to take a second term?”

we also see implication mensah is the parent who helps sort out conflicts her kids are having— and the parent who lays down the law, despite often being apart from the kids:

I still thought it would sound a lot like the time Mensah’s youngest child had got hold of the comm and demanded that Mensah tell an older sibling to stop taking all the squash dumplings.

(Mensah said, “People, please. I’m scheduled to mediate arguments between teenagers on my next commcall home and I need all my patience for that.”)

An attempt by Amena to go around Mensah and appeal to Farai and Tano had failed spectacularly, in a three-way comm call that became a fourway when Farai had called Mensah to join in on the discussion. (I’m not sure what happened past that point. Even I hadn’t wanted to watch it.)

so is she an absent parent? i would say no. i also would not say she is ever framed as a bad parent or lacking as a parent in book canon, and her commitment to her work is not seen as a negative thing, although we can assume that post-all systems red and especially post-exit strategy, her spouses (who are implied to be in the loop) became more concerned for her safety and emotional well-being. but even then, any qualms they might have had about her work would have had nothing to do with her ability to parent, in my opinion.

so in the tv show, this episode 3 line...

My family didn't want me to come on this trip [the survey]. Two of my spouses sat me down and told me that they thought that I was doing it [fulfilling the requirements of her job ?] to get some time away from my responsibilities at home.

this moment took me aback, honestly. aside from the fact that mensah was telling murderbot that**, it's a totally new addition and surprised me. it seemed like farai and tano slander and a big departure from what i thought i was seeing in the book universe's handling of her motherhood and the book universe's society/gendered roles. i also think, you know, we see no indication that they resent her survey work, and it's more likely that the book versions of farai and tano are proud of her. their children are raised communally by a large family support network, so the idea that they'd try to convince her to stay home to take care of them is just... i don't love it.

**it did ask arada about her spouses and kids, though... maybe mensah thinks this is something murderbot might care about, lol. generous reading, i know. tv mensah is definitely oversharing here. although, given that she likely wouldn't talk to anyone else, even gurathin and bharadwaj, about what she tells murderbot here, it's possible oversharing is her way of connecting and here we're seeing suggestion that she sees it more as her equal/collaborator on the team than as her responsibility. also (me coping), she's really fucking sleep deprived here. like, would book mensah do this to murderbot in the asr era? no... but i do think this illustrates how strained tv mensah is, at the least.

so are you ready for my headcanon?

first, important book lore i mentioned above: mensah's family lives on a farm.

combined with important tv lore:

tv mensah is squeamish about flesh. cutting into murderbot is really uncomfortable and unpleasant for her. not only does murderbot quote a show to encourage her, it's basically telling her "everyone will die if you don't do this," and that's what motivates her to continue.

so, carrying over from book canon that she might live on a farm... my headcanon is:

the "responsibilities at home" that she's avoiding?

ଘ(੭ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ✩‧₊ gross farm stuff ✩♬ ₊˚.🎶⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧

you know...... tv farai and tano are always begging for mensah to help them, like....

˚₊‧* butcher animals ₊˚⋆

(but she's not gonna do it, and they know it)

sometimes they're like "you're a lacto-ovo vegetarian, ayda, can you at least collect the eggs?" no, because once one of the futurechickens was injured and she cried and made farai tend to it because she couldn't bear it—

but her excuse? survey prep 🫡

even the littlest kids are better farmers! but mensah tersely points out that their farm responsibilities start and end at petting and feeding the futuregoats.

oh no.... another meeting about the upcoming survey came up... good luck plucking the futurechickens... love youuu..

so yeah, now i imagine tv mensah's marriage is otherwise great, just she's perpetually avoiding doing gross farm stuff because she's so squeamish, and her marital partners are getting annoyed about it lol

[julianova44]

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

[julianova44]

This really puts my feelings about some of the reactions I’ve been seeing into words. Like, yes, damn, that scene was uncomfortable. Oh man, the characters are way more messy than we get to really see in the books. And that’s the point!

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.

[julianova44]

Murderbot thoughts after Ep 6

In Escape Velocity Protocol (Ep 4), Pin-Lee and Arada (and Ratthi?) kill to protect Mensah and Murderbot. And they do it in a particularly gruesome way, by squishing the hostile with the hopper.

They are greeted as rescuing heroes. Nobody throws up or asks why they did that.

In Ep 6, Murderbot kills to protect the PresAux crew. It's also a gruesome killing, but to be fair, a headshot was the only option.

The crew reacts with trauma and shock, and a lot of questioning of Murderbot's actions. "That was a person!"

So the hostile SecUnit wasn't a person?

Another little sign that PrexAux team might say that they view constructs differently than the Corporation Rim does, but they still have some unconscious bias to unlearn.

[julianova44]

Murderbot thoughts after Ep 6

In Escape Velocity Protocol (Ep 4), Pin-Lee and Arada (and Ratthi?) kill to protect Mensah and Murderbot. And they do it in a particularly gruesome way, by squishing the hostile with the hopper.

They are greeted as rescuing heroes. Nobody throws up or asks why they did that.

In Ep 6, Murderbot kills to protect the PresAux crew. It's also a gruesome killing, but to be fair, a headshot was the only option.

The crew reacts with trauma and shock, and a lot of questioning of Murderbot's actions. "That was a person!"

So the hostile SecUnit wasn't a person?

Another little sign that PrexAux team might say that they view constructs differently than the Corporation Rim does, but they still have some unconscious bias to unlearn.

[julianova44]

But really, the last two books go hard as fuck. Like imagine there has been a the last of us type of epidemic, most of the surviving population are living in bunkers in which they only have access to fifties music / series and their last contact with anything space related was the first NASA expeditions. Suddenly there's some guys in very futuristic suits with very futuristic weapons coming from space who either 1) want to turn them into lab rats 2) want to enslave them to work in some mines, in, idek, fucking Saturn. The alexa that manages their bunker has let both groups inside 🫠

Like I know that the stories are very to the point bc MB does not fucking care has very clear priorities, but I'd want a spin off of every planet and every group of humans mb meets

[julianova44]

HUGE DAY FOR ANNOYING PEOPLE!!!!!!!!

[julianova44]

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?