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#brilliant #it's having an emotion #mbtv #alexander skarsgård

I’m out of practice at controlling my expression

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Thankyou - it is beautiful

While answering this ask, tumblr froze, ate my draft and your ask. thank you for your lovely words <3

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Can't wait! (But I have to.) "Home" is my comfort re-read, it is beautifully written and fingers crossed the new one is just as good.

Omg omg omg omg omg!!!! A new short story in the MURDERBOT universe!!!!

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I knew if I looked long enough there'd be a Murderbot:Australia connection! I don't think we're responsible for Bitter/Sweet though. Love Martha Wells even more now.

I made a blue sky account to make exactly one post to martha wells thanking her for the murderbot fb shows creative work including indigenous adjacent cultures and practices especially in a sci fi setting and she saw my post and sent it to the producers and I am very happy that they’ve seen my comment and know how seen I felt

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This is gorgeous!

Ratthi's hair ...

PreservationAux X The Rise & Fall of Sanctuary Moon

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My little albino Armadillidium vulgare have mellowed to a warm vanilla colour as they've grown. This one seems to be gravid! Fingers crossed for more white pods. (Bad photo as she was quite agile and good at getting off the spoon and legging it across the table.)

This small group is about six months old and all turned up in my wild-caught stripey morphs tub.

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Jane Hume on 2GB radio explaining how the voters, not the Liberals, got it all wrong.

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The counterpoint to this is performative niceness.

I was once negotiating with another lawyer who went above and beyond in stony silence and generally indicating that he was repulsed by the fact of my existence (or maybe just deeply disappointed in me, it was hard to tell).

So my strategy was to beam with joy each time we met and generally act as if I was so, so glad that it was him I was dealing with. He ramped up the "you are an idiot, I despise you and I pity your client" act as evidently I wasn't getting the message. This gave me enormous personal satisfaction and I got the deal my client wanted.

this is from a "manipulation advice" video and it's just so fucking funny to me. why didn't I think of responding to insults like this

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And in breaking news (actually, a few days old so probably slightly bent news by now) both parties in the Coalition woke up with a big hangover and regrets. About 48 hours after the split they started reconciliation talks. The Nats (National Party), who did the dummy spit, would have lost significant front bench pay and staffing so it all looked like a bit of an own goal. Ominously for the Nats' leader, various senior figures have publically declared their support for and confidence in him.

The LNP (coalition) just divorced and things are about to get very interesting in Australian politics.

To ausplain to the people outside of Australia: Imagine if the Conservative Politically Right-wing Party was actually two smaller parties in a trenchcoat, who decided to work together over 70 (edit: ITS BEEN 80 ACTUALLY) years ago to defeat the centre-ish party once and for all, and had been happily married as one Coalition ever since. They, and the centre party are the Two Major Parties.

In the election we just had, the Coalition was so badly defeated by the very party they had been created to defeat that they lost even what they assumed were ‘safe seats’ because their only policies were 1) build new nuclear powerplants with no economic or infrastructural reason behind it and 2) end wokeness by fucking over the poors

Instead of taking a look at themselves and admitting that ‘hey maybe those were both bad ideas’, the Coalition insisted they just didn’t emphasize the evilness of socialism enough. One of the little parties in the trenchcoat however realized that maybe Nuclear was a bad idea. Their other half? They insisted that No, it Is The Science/Economics/Infrastructure That Is Wrong. This became an internal argument so bad that they have decided to Split. The coalition as of yet hasn’t officially dissolved but they’ve bought different homes and are splitting their stuff.

So what does this mean for Australia going forward? Well. Currently that means that Labor (the centre party) is now our only Major Party. Experts are suggesting that the divorcees - the Liberals and the Nationals - will probably still vote along similar lines, but it’s less than guaranteed like it previously was. In the meantime, there may be two options for a new second major party.

The more centre conservatives decide to form a new coalition with the Teal Independents, who are kind of more like the fabled economic-conservatives of old, as opposed to reactionary-cultural-conservatives. This would be more ideal but it’s probably not very likely

The evil option is that the end-wokeness divorcee will team up with One Nation and Trumpet of Patriots (yes that is a real party and exactly as awful as they sound) to form the Super Mega Culturally Out Of Touch Far Right party.

There’s probably more options than this but these are the main two coming to mind. This also has consequences for Labor. Do they slip more right? They held a majority before this but now they become even harder to defeat, and a new culturally-far-right party would shift the Overton window more right. Or does the emergence of a new economic-right party force labor to actually start voting more economic-left policies? Who tf knows? (No seriously if you know anything about aus policies and parties please @ me)

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The unglamorous side of acting.

Alexander has the right physique: 6'4" ("was I looming?") very fit, very physical but not built. You can picture Mensah backing up and bumping into its chest and it then slipping its "lean bulk" protectively in front of her, smoothly, without fuss, and damned fast.

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Apple, if you're listening, I want a poseable Murderbot action figure...

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Space Law 102: Corporations Are People Too

A few hundred years ago, the people running a business were personally liable for whatever happened in the course of that business. (Back then, negligence wasn't really a thing and consumer protection laws were unimaginable, so the exposure was mostly about having to pay debts.) This was felt to be A Bad Thing which would Stifle Innovation and Limit the Otherwise Excellent Growth of Commerce etc etc.

So they fixed it.

I don't remember the timeline or specific order of events, but there were two developments which profoundly changed the course of common law commerce and led to contemporary society & culture, at least in English-speaking nations.

The first thing is that a corporation ("company" can mean other things, so this is another thing Martha Wells got absolutely right) became separate to its owners/operators. You could go a company all you wanted, the owner's assets were no longer available to settle a judgment* in your favour (subject to various exceptions built up over the years). Also, people could buy proportion of the ownership - a share - and be safe from liability accrued by the corporation.

The second thing is that a corporation became not just a legal mechanism, but a legal person. It's known as a legal fiction, everyone understands that the corporation itself isn't going to enjoy its own birthday party. The ways in which a corporation undertakes activity, makes decisions and so on are defined by its constituent documents which provide a high level framework for its Board of Directors, whose strategy and directives are implemented by management. The rules around that take up a great deal of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) and similar legislation in other jurisdictions.

It's disturbing.

Murderbot is not a legal person, though it is a sentient, self-aware being capable of experiencing emotions and having direct interpersonal relationships. But it is owned by, it is the property of, a legal person that is incapable of any of those things and has no will or intent as such.

But:

What if the company, Greycris, DeltFall, GoodnightLander Independent, Barish-Estranza and all the others in the Corporate Rim were actual people as well as legal people?

What if somewhen, somehow, boards of directors or a company's shareholders or the stock exchanges on which shares were traded established AIs, maybe to facilitate information management or processes or whatever?

What if those AIs became the companies themselves?

*Judgment (no e) is what a judge hands down as a result of a court case, at least in Australia. Judgement is what most of us can't help doing at some point or another.

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Murderbot's favourite show is a hammy, ridiculous soap opera ... from which it learned how to process its emotions and the basics of human interaction (as well as some strategies that occasionally work out). Then ART learned how to experience human emotion and narrative context from piggybacking on Murderbot's viewing.

No wonder MB has such a jaundiced view of "having an emotion" ... and if I were Seth I'd be a little concerned about my ship's new experiences of emotions.

Boldness is all.

(x)

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I love being Australian

actually the funniest election season moment was the current (and as of tonight, continuing!) prime minister going on the radio and dedicating "am I ever going to see your face again" by the angels to the opposition leader - a song that, when played in Australia, is accompanied by a mandatory response from the crowd of "no way, get fucked, fuck off"

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Release schedule for the Murderbot TV show, thanks to Winter is Coming. We get two episodes in the first drop! No idea why there's episode 11 instead of 10, unless that's a nod to This is Spinal Tap.

https://winteriscoming.net/what-is-the-murderbot-premiere-date-on-apple-tv-complete-release-schedule

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lets roll up with mama

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Very important information for any fellow Aussies farnarkling on Tumblr rather than voting in tomorrow's Federal election. Just be wary of the onion placement.