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Yeah, nobody'll mention you did that at the store to Junior or Lana, nobody at all...

Mann, Day 8, Part 1

Rich finished feeding the baby - which he'd just started at the end of last rotation. That's one long feed, Margot!

Rich: Hey, baby. I'm at that place the kids call "the makeout spot" if you're free to meet me?

Candy: Sure - let me just check Dad or Rhett are around to watch Alma!

Candy: You know, I was just thinking about you when you called...

Rich: I see you're wearing your new jumper... dress... whatever it is. I knew you'd look stunning in it.

Candy: Fishing for a compliment about your fashion sense?

Rich: How come your shoulders are so tense? Too much hunching over that new laptop?

Candy: A little, maybe. I'm on a roll with the book... I have good inspiration for all the woohoo scenes...

Rich: And how's my grandbaby? Nearly big enough for school, huh?

Candy: Yeah, she's definitely ready. She's so chatty - she needs more people to talk ears off! D'you... d'you wanna come to her birthday party?

Rich: I'd like to... I'm just not sure I could keep my hands off you...

Candy: We could meet up earlier in the day, maybe... get it all out of our systems before the party?

Rich: I can't decide it that'd make it better or worse...

Candy: Someone's excited to see me...

Rich: Are their people at your place?

Candy: Yeah. Where's your car?

Rich: Getting a new front bumper.

Candy: Had an accident?

Rich: Something like that.

Candy: Clothing booth at the Store?

Rich: You're on!

Rich Mann woke up with a wants panel full of Candy, so he went for a walk and called her.

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I know for a fact that this has been posted elsewhere on Tumblr, but I wanted to share this:

This is a document ful of resources about things you can do politically that are not voting or going to protests. As a disabled person who struggles at protests, this is incredibly valuable. It has tons of resources about mutual aid, political education, migrant justice, disability justice, and much much more.

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Chapters: 1/19 Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: ART | Perihelion & Murderbot, Dr. Gurathin & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin/Murderbot (unrequited), Dr. Gurathin & Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Arada & Dr. Bharadwaj & Dr. Gurathin & Overse & Pin-Lee & Dr. Ratthi (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah & Gurathin Characters: ART | Perihelion, Murderbot, Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Original ComfortUnit Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries) Additional Tags: Family, Found Family, Recovery, exploitative media, sensationalist media, past abuses, New tags with each chapter Series: Part 2 of Neither Family Nor Property, but a Secret Third Thing Summary:

Murderbot discovers that Gurathin's tragic backstory is salacious entertainment in certain parts of the Rim. ART, constitutionally incapable of minding its own business, turns up the whereabouts of the ComfortUnit who raised Gurathin and helped him escape to Preservation,and then killed his father. An expedition is mounted, a rescue is made, reunions both happy and strained occur, and then the hard part starts. Are there some issues that will just never be resolved?

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This boomer meme is pretty damn good

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Duh. L. Frank Baum.

The previous post is making me think of the 20th Century's American Fantasy Writers for Children. Lloyd Alexander? Edward Eager? Susan Cooper? Jane Louise Curry? Zilpha Keatley Snyder? Who am I forgetting?

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JANE YOLEN!!! What is the matter with me. Also Bruce Coville but less emphatically.

The previous post is making me think of the 20th Century's American Fantasy Writers for Children. Lloyd Alexander? Edward Eager? Susan Cooper? Jane Louise Curry? Zilpha Keatley Snyder? Who am I forgetting?

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Carol Kendall. There's at least one more but my head hurts. Madeleine L'engle? Andre Norton?

The previous post is making me think of the 20th Century's American Fantasy Writers for Children. Lloyd Alexander? Edward Eager? Susan Cooper? Jane Louise Curry? Zilpha Keatley Snyder? Who am I forgetting?

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Look. I am not, broadly speaking, a smut reader, but this is high-quality smut. This is smut where the plot lays down a problem, and the solution is Sex. Frequently kinky. Or, the problem is Sex (like, we are two different intelligent species and our parts don't fit) and the solution is perfectly logical but squares would call it kinky. All three kinds of conflicts are addressed - Self, Nature, Man. It's mostly fantasy or science fiction and the sex is the opposite of gratuitous. Epiphanies and orgasms are had. Characters are developed. Love and friends are made. Evil is defeated. Silliness happens.

I think it's all or mostly het stuff, but nothing's perfect.

Foglio Publishing News

Discordia Publishing will be doing a XXXenophile reprint omnibus through Kickstarter! You can sign up to be notified when it launches. I'm told it will NOT be available in stores, so grab it when you can.

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I want to be politically informed and educated but I also wanna have a good day and be in a good mood. Do you see my problem?

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I get it, I do. But I'm seeing people who have clearly never looked in the tags they're condemning (because they are making wrong assumptions about what's there based solely on the slash) and saying "Let aces have this one thing" when the most interesting things happening in the tags are being written by ace people. You're trying to oppress your own kind here.

Even when somebody allo like me writes it, do us the courtesy of not leaping to the conclusion that we're doing it in bad faith and writing ace erasing content. Literature is a great safe space to explore things beyond our experience, and fanfiction with established ace characters is a great platform for launching that exploration. We no longer have to ask how an ace person would respond to this situation, we have to ask how this character would respond, which is a lot more manageable. Are we going to screw it up? Yes, to a greater or lesser degree, possibly most of the time. But we have to start somewhere if we want to expand our comprehension of the human experience. I'd much rather write a cringey ignorant fanfic, I'd rather learn from a good fanfic, than annoy ace people with questions, many of which I can't articulate anyway.

Narrative is how we structure our knowledge of the world. You hurt real people by restricting how we use it.

And you can't actually restrict people from using it, anyway. Choose better battles. There is so much you can do in the world that is more productive than antishipping, which is what this boils down to.

Antishipping is the tool of oppression. We have seen it; it is part of fandom history. It will turn in your hand and cut you and yours. No porn ban has ever lessened the amount of porn, but they have greatly harmed queer people of all stripes.

Listen. Listen. This could be the beginning of the restructuring of the slash tag to be more inclusive. To transform our understanding of intimacy. This could be the beginning of great things!

'You shouldn't ship these characters because they don't like that kind of thing'

Y'all... do you really think any characters would want us to do HALF the things we've done with them in fanfic? I read a lot of whumpfic, and let me tell you, if fictional characters had real rights and had to consent to what's written about them, most of the authors on AO3 would be in deep shit.

No, look at me. This is not a threat to your real-life rights. Look at me. This is not hurting real people. Whatever you're angry about, it is not justified. Don't read it. Block the tag. And for your own sake, maybe try to train yourself out of the mindset that you're better than people who don't write the way you want. It's juvenile. It's peak early-2010s Tumblr, and none of us want to go back to that.

Also please please stop trying to hide your ship dislike behind a progressive cause, like fighting aphobia. As an asexual fan who's seen a lot of actual aphobia in fandom, I understand where some of this might be coming from. But you have got to recognize the difference. Don't lose sight of the line between reality and fantasy. One carries real consequences; the other is a matter of personal taste, no matter how much you try to give it some kind of moral weight.

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VeronaHills, Round Eighteen: Sharpe (Beach)

All of a sudden, Wilbur's wardrobe became far more sophisticated.

The onesies no bigger than a tea towel were passed along to baby cousin Hunter in true Land reusable family fashion. Wil now wore button-up shirts and denim coats; he picked out a matching baby blue hat to wear and never wanted to take it off, even for bathtime. Effie, who had operated on the intel that Wil was her little baby brother, couldn't quite believe her eyes. She thought he might look all scrunched up and pink forever, but here was, arms and legs akimbo with eyes wide open at the telly.

She wasn't being forgotten, though. Apparently that could happen to the oldest sibling when a new one came along - mum had haltingly mentioned such a phenomenon once before with a faraway look in her eyes. Uncle Scot brought cousin Quinn around for a playdate when she was closer to Effie in age, and dad was always on hand to fix a broken toy or supervise an especially tricky homework page.

So far, so good was the current assessment of being a big sister!

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Everyone's a work in progress till we die, Rocky!

VeronaHills, Round Eighteen: Land (Beech)

Rocky accepted his expulsion with his head held low.

It was a shame. One day, grief overtook grades and he logged off the university computers for the last time. He probably should've just taken a break or even dropped out of his own accord but the world had rended such power from him. Mum and dad were gone and there was nothing he could do. He recalled the feeling of being dumped by a bigger-than-expected wave at the beach as a kid, how he tumbled and bit the sand. Strong arms lifting him up, smiles, promises of ice cream. The university board made no such concessions.

Then, mid-hauling a suitcase to the campus bus stop, a car tooted and pulled to the side. Virginia grinned from the driver's seat, all light and bright with the breeze bouncing her ginger hair. They would get ice cream when they arrived in Desiderata Valley. Quinn, now a school-aged youngster, was near pinging in the backseat when she saw her uncle. Scot was at work, Virginia said, but he wanted to welcome Rocky home with a small gathering, if he felt up to it.

All this while expecting baby number two (eventually arriving as a boy named Hunter). Rocky had to allow mum and dad's smiles to fully come into focus, and nana's too. They would be so proud of Virginia.

In the meantime, he was a work in progress.

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Sorry, nonbinary people, but you need a nonbinary mammoth on your flag!

Personally I would support all pride flags having charismatic Pleistocene megafauna on them.

Flag Wars Bonus Round

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Sorry, nonbinary people, but you need a nonbinary mammoth on your flag!

Personally I would support all pride flags having charismatic Pleistocene megafauna on them.

Flag Wars Bonus Round

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Sorry, nonbinary people, but you need a nonbinary mammoth on your flag!

Personally I would support all pride flags having charismatic Pleistocene megafauna on them.

Flag Wars Bonus Round

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By the way, did anybody else demand: "Why are they letting Ratthi run around the station on his own?" during the Murderbot season finale? Mensah, Gurathin, and Pin-Lee were the only ones needed at the meeting. He should have had Bharadwaj and Arada with him. Not that they excel at keeping out of trouble but they're better than no supervision at all. Especially when there's no megafauna around.

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I realized this morning, while making anniversary blueberry pancakes, what the Problem of Miki is.

It's not that MB made friends with it, had a fight with it, and it died trying to help it before they made up.

It isn't even that Miki's situation turns its own situation upside down: a bot who is only ever treated well, who loves its friends and is loved back, enough that it had freedom to set its own priorities.

It's that Miki was MB's friend, and MB was never its friend back.

It never expresses anything, in the narrative, but contempt, irritation, and envy toward Miki, but it resents it tattling on it to the humans enough that it stops talking to Miki on the feed, to Miki's visible distress. It uses Miki the way it routinely uses connections with lower-level bots and systems, but Miki isn't lower level at all. And then it goes and dies like that.

MB at this point doesn't know what Mensah is to it; or it does know and is afraid of what that does to it. So it's no wonder that it screws up at every stage.

It's no wonder that Miki haunts 2.0.