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we as a society do not explore proxy sex enough………….

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you know you're good at your job when every single person tells you "thank god you're back"

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We all love the "becoming the very thing you sought to destroy," trope. but I have a growing fondness for "destroying the very thing you sought to become"

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been thinking about bi zuko a lot lately

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saw a post that was like 'that could've happened in the books mb would have just deleted it from its logs' which made me immediately watch ep 4 and i was not disappointed

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in the club freakin it in a sensitive style

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Maria Magdalena by Guido Cagnacci (1601 – 1663) | Germanic warrior with helmet by Osmar Schindler (1867 – 1927)

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NetworkEffect.mp4

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why tv!Mensah is the best

So, in the last five-six years, I went through a divorce, a pandemic, a sudden life-threatening illness (I'm fine now!), the absolute chaos and terror of US politics, perimenopause (continuing, sigh), and a major work reorg (still in progress; academia is slow about everything). Oh, also I just got promoted to part-time management as a first-time manager and am desperately hoping not to fuck it up because the people I manage are terrific and deserve somebody far more ept than I am.

It's been a lot. Really truly a lot.

But a thing I learned from my father the tenured professor, because he was exquisitely bad about it and I did not want to be like him, is that educators cannot shove their shit off on their students. This is a thing that Cannot Happen. Must Not Happen. Educator persona must be shit-free. My colleagues, too, do not come to work to help me deal with my shit.

I don't always quite manage this. I'm human, and I actually have a filthy temper; keeping it in check has been the work of a lifetime. But I always try, and usually I succeed.

It's been a rough time for students too, the last five-six years. Consensus is that the pandemic messed students up pretty good, academically and socially, kindergarten to grad school. I've noticed. There's only so much I can do to fix it for them. And some of them don't hesitate to take their shit out on me. Not all by any means! But... enough. Enough to be grindingly hurtful and saddening and exhausting.

So trying to teach in higher ed becomes this awful tug-of-war between the endless abyss of student needs, the institution's needs, and the needs of the professions I train for -- if I pass someone despite them clearly not doing the damn work, I'm not doing anybody any favors, actually.

It's a lot. Really truly a lot. But, you say, what does this have to do with Mensah?

This woman has got so much on her plate. Good lord.

The economic survival of Preservation Alliance. I hope it doesn't uniquely depend on one trip -- I doubt it does; Mensah's smarter than that -- but this trip is a big honkin' deal and it'd be Very Bad for it to fail.

A team she is managing that contains some pretty strong personalities (I have a strong personality; it has not made me easy to manage), at least one person with a deeply messed-up personal history, and some romantic entanglements that are probably not the greatest idea in a work situation, if I'm honest.

A SecUnit she didn't want, imposed on her by the corpos, who is (as she astutely recognized early on) going through something.

A planet that's a helluva lot more dangerous than she was told it was. Attacks, deaths, a spy. More attacks coming.

Several team members trying to cope with immediate and severe trauma -- the longer they're on the planet, the more and worse the trauma has piled up.

Having to be the rope in a tug-of-war between the neediest, most messed-up person in the team and the needy messed-up SecUnit.

A pre-existing (untreated? seems that way) anxiety disorder.

Gurathin's called her naive and repeatedly questioned her decisions. So has Murderbot, perhaps not in so many words. Pin-Lee's straight-up yelled at her. The only person who's offered her anything I would call support this entire time is Murderbot, who's trying its level best (to its credit) but is the opposite of a therapist.

But Mensah's first among equals. That means holding her shit together in their presence. She also has to be the person it's safe to yell at, to insult, to flake out on (sorry, Bharadwaj and Arada, but it's true), to blow off steam at. And she's so damn good at being the aggro sponge that I am literally fucking taking notes on how she does it, because I need to do it too, and management is slightly different from teaching in that respect.

I cannot with the book fans who think tv!Mensah is lesser. She is everything. "Intrepid galactic explorer" barely scratches the surface of this woman's level of awesome. I want to be her if I ever grow up.

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I finished reading The Lord of the Rings for the first time in my life. With all of *vague gesture at everything* this going on.

I Am Not Okay

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couldn't help but gif some shots from this episode 6 preview clip!

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caught in orbit

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The giant bug sex was meant to put the audience in sympathy with Murderbot's asexual and sex repulsed pov on human sex -- as it thinks, human sex is exactly the same to it as watching the huge insects mate. Kinda boring and yicky and irrelevant and annoying. I thought that was well done, actually.

They once again even used Murderbot's thoughts to drive the point home. Like. They're *actively trying* to get the audience to comprehend its feelings on the topic through analogy. The human audience at home can understand finding the bug sex inconvenient and yicky; the writing invites them to understand that Murderbot's pov is the same about something most of them don't personally find boring and yicky--human sex-- but they can connect the two things now: their experience of the bug sex and its feelings about human sex.

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made this for my twitter but there's more fans here so have a murderbot fan cam ✨ (it would hate this)

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Aurora Borealis by Frederic Edwin Church, 1865