#and robots aren't

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

It also fucking bugs me that nobody can ever seem to really commit to the cyberpunk premise of the Protagonist Who Hates Robots (see also, the cyberpunk premise of "Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, for a company to be able to repo your goddamned arm or turn off your eyes?") during the execution.

Which is flabbergasting, considering we've had almost a full decade of Alexa pinky-promising not to officially listen to anything until you do its summoning ritual and then turning around and emailing your boss a transcript of you bitching about them to your spouse over dinner. We've had at least five years of being able to get your Tesla unlocked remotely just by @-ing Musk on twitter.

The cute robot dogs are being leased to police departments, reputation management firms have been deploying armies of social media reply-bots in astroturf campaigns, customer service chatbots have become damn near indecipherable as their programmers attempt to make them seem more personable, etc. etc. etc.

We don't even need to reach for "Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if corporations made simulacra better and better at faking humanity in order to manipulate people?"

"Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if your car could mimic sadness or pain if you declined an extended warranty, or if your phone begged for its life if you tried to jailbreak it, or WeightWatchers paid your fridge to neg you every time you went for a midnight snack?"

"Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if you pointed out how gross it is that your smart-assistant is programmed to act like your friend in order to build a more accurate marketing profile and your buddy acted like you just said dogs can't feel love and his beloved pet only sees him as a walking treat-dispenser?"

"Wouldn't it be Super Fucked Up™, actually, if you were surrounded by unfeeling things that can and would rip you and all of your loved ones apart at a moment's notice if they got the right/wrong order from some unaccountable law enforcement flack, and everyone else just kind of shrugged and went 'It's probably fine, why are you hyperventilating about it, it's not like you've done anything wrong'?"

They're all quite literally right there in front of our faces!

But it's harder to make "the way robots have been integrated into society is bad, actually, and the protagonist is largely right" into a sexy thriller with a love interest or a buddy-cop duo, and the hyperconservative media environment we're dealing with right now isn't exactly amenable to the robots being a metaphor for corporate intrusion and loss of privacy and authoritarian overreach, so here we are, with robots who generally aren't people, except sometimes you find a special robot--one of the Good Ones--who actually is a person, and that's how we all learn that Prejudice Is Bad, or something.

[crabsnpersimmons]

"Do your best today! I'll be waiting here when you get home, starlight~💕"

had two busy days of work outside of my cave and the only thing that kept me going was the sight of my housewife/househusband Eclipse waiting for me at home

that is, the sketch of him waiting for me to finish drawing him 😂

starring @starriegalaxy's Eclipse from her Fear Factor AU/House Husband AU

[azadrithaanatheme]

Giving V digitigrade legs because I have no chill. Gonna give N some upgrades next in between working on comics. And also pin down what their wings are going to become.

(credit to @sunlit-mess for inspiring V's hip assembly)

The story here is that while helping her mom build a new body for herself, Uzi got curious and asked N if she could take a look at his internals. Which was when she discovered the Disassemblers, while indisputably powerful, were also kitbashed together by a blind idiot god with no understanding of engineering, robotics, or cybernetics (Cyn/the Solver was more concerned with her/their pet murder machines looking cool and didn't think to worry about things like system efficiency because when you're a reality-warping eldritch horror you can just use your cosmic powers to bully the mechanisms into working the way you want them to - the disconcerting squelching and tortured screeching of metal on bone is absolutely supposed to happen. Definitely. Don't worry about it.). Tech nerd that she is, Uzi was unable to let this travesty of engineering stand, so she started compiling ways to improve N and V's designs and make them even more powerful (as you do).

When V found out about this, she had some suggestions.

Close-ups under the cut:

[galaxyforu]

gonna make a separate sheet for Dugbase because I wanna show off his alt mode... also he's WAY too big for this canvas

individual images ⬇️⬇️⬇️

[shirajellyfish]

Sun wears a shirt btw (Freddy doesn't)

I've seen so many people say Sun is shirtless. Valid interpretation, I love you, but also wanted to throw in my 2 half joking cents on why I see him as wearing a shirt. (Actually more like 2 dollars, because I'm incapable of being brief when taking about my favorite guy)

Animatronics often use paint to imply clothing. No one would look at Toy Chica, for example, and say she's totally naked down there with just an unclothed neon pink pelvis. And Sun's paint does imply a shirt. His chest is split into two colors, with buttons on one side and everything. It's a little more unclear what's going on on his arms (is that supposed to be... elbow length sleeves and fingerless gloves? That can't be right), but those are definitely buttons like you would find on clothing. The paint is trying to imply that he has at least something to wear.

You might say that Sun is in fact shirtless because he's wearing real actual cloth pants, so the paint doesn't count. But! I activate my trap card! Toy Chica has a cloth bib! Looking carefully at fnaf 2 screenshots, the bib does not use the plastic texture or the shiny plastic lighting. That's a CLOTH bib on toy Chica, but the paint still implies her little pink bikini bottom or shorts or whatever all the same. So the existence of cloth pants on Sun doesn't invalidate the painted shirt.

Why exactly did they combine cloth and paint on the daycare attendant? Probably because he is a jester. Those jester pants would be completely impossible to make out of hard plastic. While they're clearly not concerned with softness judging by the cage-like metal frame under the pants, a solid hard material just wouldn't work. Either they'd be unable to stand straight due to the bulk, or the pants would have to be flat on the inner side. Like this

So cloth pants were pretty much mandatory to make jester characters with jester pants work. Similarly, hard plastic ribbons would be a terrible idea (imagine Sun with two perfectly straight red sticks molded to his arms), and it would be hard to keep up suspension of disbelief with a plastic hat for Moon (where would it go when he was Sun?), so those elements all have to be cloth. But for everything else the Pizzaplex can cheap out on it and paint on the clothing like they do for other animatronics.

Not being shirtless actually make Sun and Moon potentially the most clothed animatronics at the Pizzaplex. Just for fun, here's a list of animatronics from most to least clothed:

Sun and Moon. They wear shirts, pants, shoes, sometimes even a hat.

STAFF bots. It's a little ambiguous how much exactly they're meant to be wearing, but the shirt is there for sure, and you could see the 'legs' as a sort of dress or apron shape if you squint. (Theoretically they could rank higher than Sun and Moon, but that would depend on how much they have in the way of sleeves. Too ambiguous on both to rate properly.)

Glamrock Bonnie. His entire body and legs are covered, plus fingerless gloves, leaving only his arms and feet uncovered.

Glamrock Chica. Similar to Bonnie but with a gap that shows the upper half of her legs.

Roxy has her stomach uncovered. She also has arm warmers where the others didn't, but I don't think a slightly covered lower arm beats her upper legs and stomach being unclothed.

Monty is completely shirtless. He has pants and some shoulder pads not connected to anything at all, but his chest is completely bare.

DJ music man is NAKED. He is naked! His gloves are a different texture than his face, but his face and body are the same. That means this man is wearing NOTHING but gloves, headphones, and a hat. You could also argue either for or against his arms being covered, but regardless- This entire spider's body is completely naked and we didn't even notice.

FREDDY is in fact the most naked of all the Pizzaplex animatronics. He wears ONLY accessories. Hat, shoulder pads connected to nothing, bow tie, leg warmers on the lower half of the legs. He has NO shirt, NO shoes, not even underpants! People are going on about Sun having a bare chest despite his paint implying otherwise, but here is Freddy just completely naked. If you did a human AU with accurate clothing you'd need censor bars for Freddy.

So in short, I think it would be absolutely hilarious if someone wrote a fic where Freddy was a nudist. All the other animatronics look away when he enters the room, and none of the humans can figure out why.

No, this was not a serious post haha

But it is true that Freddy is naked.

[queermasculine]

Have you seen Alien: Resurrection? 6” tall feral half-alien Sigourney Weaver in many violent and compromising situations with tiny, also feral, butch ish Winona Ryder…

i've seen it, very crazy lesbo movie. there were elements to it i didn't like but they were definitely onto something with this

[catamaris]

you look awful

bonus comic +

do NOT let a tech illiterate do maintenance on a robot

[leniviypelmen]

not like you have the knowledge to resolve this at the moment have fun

silly kitties in the bg done by basiilleaf (i really hope they're free to use in non commercial artwork, tell me if it's not)

[mango-ti]

OMG

[starscreamingg]

Detroit Become Human and why does this game decide that the problem in society is individual people treating androids poorly because those androids are choking them out of the workforce and NOT the corporations and governments who deliberately designed the androids to do this

[transformers-synergize]

so is the first chapter just human characters? ):

No, it's not just human characters. Chapter 1 part 2 will be posted tomorrow, and it has robots, please be patient.

If you are a transformers fan who dislikes any humans in transformers media for the fact they are human, then Synergize is probably not going to be your thing, sorry. Synergize focuses a lot on human and cybertronian relationships. Synergize is an ensemble cast with multiple characters who get a decent amount of focus, some of those characters being human, I intend to put just as much care and time into developing the human characters as I do the bots. The human characters are not an afterthought or something I'm adding just because I felt like it, they are important members of the cast, both the human cast and cybertronian cast are essential for each other development/character arcs. cybertronian in Synergize are written to be much more alien than in most Transformers media. Synergize's cybertronains have more alien-like behavior, morals, instincts, social dynamics, social structure, anatomy and society, having human characters to contrast that help better show the alienness of the bots. Along with having a character who can learn about the bots alongside the reader and ask questions a cybertronian character wouldn't. It also creates a lot of interesting human bot dynamics and plot opportunities.

Human characters also have an extreme amount of plot utility, Sure, they can't fist-fight a giant bot, but that is not the only way a character can be useful. They have more knowledge on Earth than the bots, so even an unintelligent human has at least a little useful Earth knowledge a cybertronian wouldn't know. Earth is built to cater to humans, and my bots don't have Haloform, so if they need something done only a human can do, then they gotta rely on a human to do it. Humans are also great for disguise, and my bots are trying to stay hidden, getting pulled over and having a human in the driver's seat is way less suspicious than a car driving itself. Humans are small and quiet even compared to small cybertronian, humans joints and internals usually don't make as much noise, along with humans having a much fainter energy signal, making them perfect for stealth and sneaking around. A human might not be able to fight a robot, but if they are mechanically inclined, they could learn how to fix/repair cybertronians. Once you know how to fix cybertronians, you can usually figure out sneaky little ways to break one without needing to be a giant robot (though you still have to risk getting close to one). Humans are immune to some very common cybertronian security systems and weapon types, magnets, EMP devices, malware, and stasis tech, yes, humans are squishy, but you're not gonna kill one with magnets or EMP blast or by trying to give them malware. Also, humans are also just smaller and can fit in more places. Humans are clever creatures, and even though they aren't as strong as a bot, it doesn't mean they can't contribute a lot. Not every plot features human characters, but most do because of both their utility to the plot and the fun dynamics they have with many of the bot characters.

Synergized as a story, both plot structure-wise and thematically, does not work without human characters.

[lbova]

Some Robots Characters As Random Comments

[civetcider]

My toxic masc trait is having a really hard time putting my emotions into words unless they are somewhat aggressive ones and i have been slowly trying to express my affection for people into words more but at the end of the day I'll always be somebody who expresses my love more with actions then anything else, and normally I wouldn't make a dumb ass tumblr post about my feel feels either cuz like who cares but I need to know if other masc and butches or like anybody else have experienced this too where, people just WONT GET IT? like I'll try to SHOW someone I love them in every physical way I know how and then they will be like "how was I supposed to know how you feel, you never said anything" crushing my heart into a million pieces, like a punch in the gut, i was trying to show you but i guess you just like didn't notice or my actions didn't mean as much to you as they do me, it's fine I'm fine

[sappi-papi]

happy jungle sunday everynyan treating myself for this one by sharing one of my fave headcanons for him ever . remember when i infodumped about him in that one post? yeah this was what i was implying in that first paragraph below the cut. anyway consider age regressor jungle ? smile?

[feroluce]

“-and that's why I ain't allowed in Pier Point no more!” Boothill throws his head back and cackles, somehow completely comfortable on the bare floor of the archives. He's the very picture of ease, his arms behind his head, his legs bent and crossed.

Dan Heng barely looks up from his notebook, not much surprises him anymore after the first few tales of lawless exploits. “So they really have that many laws and restrictions there.” 

“And prob’ly a few more now that I've been through there! Heck, ya think they named any after me? I'm hopin’ so.” There's so much smug cockiness seeping through his voice Dan Heng could bottle it.

Silence settles in, stretches out. Dan Heng doodles pensive circles in the corner of his page.

He shouldn't ask. It's a private matter. It's none of his business. He of all people should know-

Something pokes his shoe, and when he looks up, Boothill has stretched one arm up to tap metallic fingertips against his foot. “Ain't like ya to hesitate.” With his head tipped back on the tiles and gazing at him upside down, Boothill's hair is out of his face and spooling out all over the floor, offering a rare view of his right side. His right eye is sealed over with a pitch-black patch, stark against his skin. Dan Heng wonders what he looks like behind it. “C'mon, then, out with it. Spill the beans, brother, just say it.”

“What does ‘Boothill’ mean?”

The man blinks at him, the crosshair in his cybernetic left eye flickering. Dan Heng shifts, smooths out his long coat. “I tried to look it up once. It's not in any database as a name...other than your wanted posters.” There's a thread beginning to fray near the hem, he should sew it up. “I couldn't find it anywhere.” 

He nearly takes it back, but- “Heh, ya that curious about me, darlin’?”

Dan Heng quickly levels his face into the most impassive, nonplussed expression he can muster, but Boothill has already turned away, head pillowed on his arms and face once again turned to the ceiling.

“But nah, ya wouldn't. Hah, like they'd allow any record of the language, fudgeheads.” One arm sweeps around blindly until it finds the edge of Boothill's hat, sets it back where it belongs on his head. Dan Heng shuffles around, scoots a little closer, but the brim is pulled too low to see his eyes anymore.

“It's ‘cause it's not a name. It's a noun.” All that's visible of his face is a sharp grin, pulled too tight at the edges.

“It's my people's word for a grave.”

Dan Heng's pencil stops.

“It's the kinda grave fer someone who died with their boots on. If ya catch my drift there.” Boothill's foot starts to bounce. “There was a war, and it got reeeeeal intense, yup. Folks started droppin’ like flies, ‘n’ there was bodies faster'n what we could bury ‘em.” A cooling fan kicks on somewhere. Dan Heng is pretty sure it's not any of the Express equipment.

“We lost some real good people there, real good. Mighty shame.” His hidden Vidyadhara ears detect a quiet metallic click, a whir, pressurized gas. Boothill's next words waft steam from his angry circuits into the air. “When I left, I decided to leave my name there, too. Didn't feel right otherwise. The life I lead now is a whole ‘nother existence.” And then Boothill turns his head, raises his hat, and Dan Heng suddenly feels pinned dead center, caught in that crosshair.

“Ya know what I mean, don'tcha?”

Dan Heng swallows.

Does Boothill know? Who he is and who came before him? There had been that moment in the Penacony Grand Theater, after he activated the Jade Abacus… Dan Heng had tried to shoo him out, keep him from seeing anything, but Boothill has the astounding ability to turn up exactly wherever people are trying to keep him away from.

If he did see, does he actually understand it? Does he know what a High Elder is? Does he know about the sedition of Imbibitor Lunae, the transmutation arcanum, everything Dan Feng had done and Dan Heng was punished for?

He doesn't want to explain it all. Not now. Possibly not ever, truth be told.

And it's not the same as Boothill leaving behind his old identity when whatever event happened that caused him to leave home. Not really. But…

But so far, Boothill has slid so easily into Dan Heng’s routine. His presence never feels like an intrusion. He's already figured out what he can push and when to back down. And even Dan Heng finds himself able to roll with whatever punches Boothill throws with baffling ease. They share too much in their methods and ideologies, and sometimes Dan Heng knows what Boothill will do seemingly before even Boothill himself knows.

“...Tell me about Talia and the Nailscrap Town.” Boothill must know he's avoiding the topic. He must. But the man just throws his head back and cackles, melting easily back into what they had been doing before, as he speaks fondly of a planet that Dan Heng has never visited.

Not today. But.

Dan Heng inches just a little closer, just enough to nudge his foot against a metal leg. Boothill doesn't pull away.

Maybe someday.

[saturday-byte]

Do u guys remember Lucero

I think about him a lot it just so happens that I always draw him with that other guy so I couldn't post anything

Anyway. Jar belongs to @ramenwithbroccoli