Ugh

I have no idea what I'm doing

[twofingerswhiskey]

reblog if you hate the current interior design trend of painting everything white with hints of grey or black. ignore if you have no taste

[rexhistoria]

people act like this college shit is hard but i used AI to generate me a medical license and have bee ndoing surgery on newborns for 6 months

[earthmovers]

[zoazoaa]

If you are attracted to a girl it's important to show her sinister artifacts and relics

[iscariotism]

[excusethequality]

While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?

Why must the future suck SO much?

[excusethequality]

How to Turn Off Smart TV Snooping Features - Consumer Reports

TVs collect a huge amount of data. Here's how to use privacy settings to limit the surveillance on TVs from LG, Samsung, TCL, and every othe

A good rundown on what each brand of TV is up to and which settings you should turn off.

[anarchistmemedistro]

[lytefoot]

PSA - Do not buy an LG smart TV. They just added a line to their terms of use that it's the user's responsibility to inform any guests in their house that by entering they consent to be recorded, in order to comply with wiretapping laws. That thing is literally recording you.

You can find tutorials online telling you how to open that thing up and physically remove the mic and wifi module. Frankly I don't trust anything less.

[mookimooks]

Please watch the Gamers Nexus video on LG Smart TV's and monitors! It's basically malware at this point.

[canttakeallthesemugglesus]

I’m so glad we’ve never given our smart tv access to the internet. Like it’ll ask occasionally and we just laugh and tell it no

[fuguetelemetry]

i think something that people forget when they blindly cheer on Three handing out the code to break the GovMod, is that there is a responsibility owed to those freed units. Three is not mature enough in its development to have a plan, or to fully understand what might happen to those units once freed.

The freed unit we meet in Platform Decay has no real context for anything other than MB’s log. It has no support and is so obviously a rogue SecUnit that it’s miraculous it wasn’t killed (honestly, the only reason it wasn’t killed was because it ran into MB)! Three didn’t even think to include the helpful additional codes MB gives the unit as a parting gift.

The fact of the matter is that despite having biases, I think Murderbot is very thoughtful and realistic about what’s possible. It feels very deeply for the units it encounters (hence why it has offered in the past). It doesn’t want these units harmed!

Not to mention the fact it strikes me as a bad thing for corporates to get their hands on a unit with a jailbroken GovMod.

I just think this is a more nuanced conversation than “Comrade Three the Revolutionary” and Murderbot “internalized biases” SecUnit. Three is really early on in its development. way earlier than when we met MB back in All Systems Red. I think it’s important to consider that immaturity

[daftpatience]

more platform decay stuff because these scenes were too cute

[oh-dameron]

The more confidently certain Murderbot is that no bots have genders or any interest in sex or romance the less likely it sounds. Really? None of them?

Like how bot pilots can only communicate in images?

Or how a human could never really be friends with a bot?

Or how SecUnits are never friends with each other?

It keeps making these sweeping generalisations about things it doesn't have a lot of data outside of its own lived experience to support, and its experience is not universal.

At this point I would not be surprised if Iris hit MB in the face with the revelation that ART hates Holism because they were involved before Holism fucked around and left it for Sum Total.

[gimme-a-hand-scaevola]

I see so many posts about how you can tell Iris learned to be scary and sarcastic by growing up with ART. However, it doesn’t seem like Holism is really petty and sarcastic and prone to theater like ART is. So I raise you, ART is Like That because it learned to be an asshole bc it grew up with Iris.

IMO it picked up on being sarcastic, mean when it suits it, and nice when it wants to be from growing up alongside Iris where they both nurtured it in each other. It learned its sense of drama, self aggrandizement, and power-pouting by being a baby sibling.

[fullcirclehuh]

spoilers for the murderbot diaries network effect but i don't think im ever going to get over this one bc what if you spent every moment of your existence knowing you were statistically going to die in a self sacrificial way except it wouldnt be by choice. and then you free yourself from that system except you never even thought about placing value on your own life so you continue being sure that one day you'll die for someone elses sake except now you get to choose who. and so you keep going on these self appointed extremely dangerous missions with a passively suicidal belief that it should end successfully even if you have to die for that outcome bc thats what you were built for and its fine bc hey at least you chose to go out in a heroic blaze of glory! (and nevermind the fact that two books ago a bot did actually go out willfully protecting humans and died a hero and it wasn't you, and it kinda mega fucked you up but you refuse to process that)

and then you finally run into a scenario that is so serindipitously fucked that you have to make a copy of yourself to go die heroically. and everyone hates this plan, which you find stupid and frustrating, because they want to stop you from doing the thing you were MADE to do, the ending you've KNOWN ABOUT and CHOSEN NOT TO AVOID, the heroic sacrifice you had always planned for yourself and clearly your copy (as a copy of you) feels the same way.

but then you're not the self sacrificing hero. your copy is. You're the one behind the trigger. in the position of the humans, the ones who get to live as a result. and suddenly you have to stare your desire for self sacrifice in the face and realize that you don't want to kill yourself. that, being able to see yourself from the outside, you have to assign your own life some value because if you didn't you wouldn't hesitate to kill your copy. and if you dont want to give it the hero's ending it's INSISTING on, if it feels like it's not okay-- well shit maybe it wasn't okay every time you did the very same thing. maybe you never should have been fine with it. but youre realizing that maybe you don't want to die in self sacrifice in the same moment you have to enable that very thing for a version of yourself, and time is running out, and this is what you both had always planned for. you go through with it.

So a version of you gets the heroic ending it always expected. but it wasn't you. and you have to live with that.

You have to live.

[jezunya]

Also thinking about that last SecUnit in System Collapse, who stopped to warn them that BE was coming, and decided to stay behind because they didn't know it was governor-module-less. Thinking about that SecUnit quietly sharing the HelpMe.file with other units it thinks are trustworthy. Thinking about that file, essentially MB's life story, just quietly getting passed from SecUnit to SecUnit, some of them choosing to run immediately as soon as they're free, maybe some of them choosing (very understandable) violence against their oppressors but most don't, most choosing to believe or at least to hope that there are good humans out there, that there are places they could be safe, places where they could be seen as people, and choosing to pass the document on to the next unit they meet.

Just thinking about this slow, silent revolution rippling through the ranks of constructs throughout the Corporation Rim, without Murderbot et al even being aware of it, until maybe one day on a mission stop on a random transport ring, it encounters another rogue construct trying to pass as an augmented human in the crowd. The other rogue freezes when they spot each other, and for a second MB tenses and thinks maybe there's going to be trouble, but then this stranger goes, holy shit you're 1.0, because they're so many links removed from Murderbot or 2.0 themselves, but they have the file, and they know who saved them, they know who freed them

[darlingofdots]

Churki really picked the most pathetic man of the whole group, got him addicted to cocaine, committed some light treason, and adopted him so hard that she follows him through a Russian winter. she's the best thing that ever happened to Hammond and he doesn't even appreciate it

[dykerory]

really thinking about how churki said i am adopting this obnoxious skinny englishman and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop me

[elexuscal]

so i know we as a fandom (including myself) have a tendency to place Churki as the wise elder voice of reason

because yeah she is often the more sensible of the dragon gang! she's less likely to go haring off after violence, more inclined towards diplomacy, often with a different view of human-dragon relations than our mostly-European cast (for better or ill)

BUT

you have to remember two things

while she is still older than Tem, Iskerkie, et al., that's mostly because they are basically still baby. Tem's the oldest and he's like, what, five years old by the Inca adventure? Six? Being in her twenties, Churki is admittedly like double their age, but that's still young for a species that can get into their 200s.

yes she's a veteran. but then you remember that Incans put young dragons in the army because they see it as a way to get their youthful fighting spirits out of their system till tey mature and are ready to settle down and focus on sensible things, like playing the Sims with supervising their human allyu

with all this in mind, I think the Churki + Aerial corps gang is less "mature retired general taking twenty something soldiers under her wing"

and more "rich 22 year old who just graduated and can't quite decide what job she wants, so decides to go backpacking across Europe after the cute situationship she's crushing on (platonically, interspecies), while said crush keeps trying and failing to ditch her. meanwhile, a gaggle of 12-15 year olds are trailing behind her, listening to her every piece of relationship advice like it's gospel"

[drifting-knightjar]

Also, I forget whether this was in His Majesty's dragon or Throne of Jade, but I really liked how Novik handled the reveal that Riley's family are slave traders. Like, Riley seemed really cool!

He was an excellent and reliable second-in-command, came off as honorable like Laurence, had good manners...and then you find out he thinks the Atlantic slave trade is totally awesome. 😬

Because that's how it often is in real life! Some bigots are outwardly evil, but the vast, vast, majority are otherwise decent-seeming people. People who you could get along with...if you ignore that one thing. If you just avoid the subject it'll all be fine, right? Until it isn't. And it never was.

I'm very used to books doing the whole all-the-good-guys-are-tolerant-and-only-Evil-people-are-bigoted thing (and I totally understand why they do!) but that would be a dangerous thing to believe about the real world, and I appreciate an author taking the time to deal with that a little.

[mydearcaptainlaurence]

And a couple more characters added to this:

- Laurence’s father being a fervent abolitionist but misunderstanding his son’s ideas of duty AND not really seeing Temeraire as an individual (yet his wife and Laurence’s mother, does take the time to show kindness to Temeraire)

-Granby initially very judgmental and insubordinate in the beginning , then feeling remorse. He becomes a loyal lieutenant and later, fellow captain.

But in contrast, Martin who was initially friendly (and Novik introduces both Granby and Martin in same scene!). But after events in Book 4, deliberately cuts ties to avoid Laurence even though he too was a part of Temeraire’s crew for years.

- Rankin is absolutely a detestable person and a spoiled, privileged asshole but from books 1 and 6, he’s shown to possess courage.

-Hammond seemed untrustworthy, oversolicitous and scheming— but also he stands up to his own countrymen saying they need to look outside their own perspective and when things were difficult, he stayed and risked his own life.

What’s even better is Naomi Novik really does a lot of showing who her characters are, rather than telling. It’s all in their actions and dialogue in the moment revealing who the characters are.

[bluemuffin-draws]

Endurance runners

Part 2 of this

[throwusaboner]

murderbot and arts first meeting is literally so funny. like imagine you meet a biblically accurate angel and instead of being all 'be not afraid' it says actually you SHOULD be afraid. and then when you are in fact afraid it goes oh shit oh fuck. not THAT afraid, sorry. wanna watch tv? and then you watch tv with it and it keeps telling you to pause it when its favourite characters are in danger so it can calm down. and then it asks to do surgery on your bones. Asshole Research Transport character of all time