Cory. they/them. Things you might see here: tech, libraries, birds, other cute animals, accessibility & inclusion, herbs, witching, and crafting. TERFs not welcome. #CovidIsNotOver 😷
At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.
The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.
It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.
The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.
This map required:
North and South Vietnam in it
All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated
Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)
Has Laos and Cambodia in it
Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it
So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'
I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.
Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.
The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.
The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc
At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"
My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond
good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map
My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.
We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.
Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.
i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.
as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.
disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.
at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.
i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.
i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.
and those two moms eventually broke up while still sharing custody of her
and eventually both moms found new partners who also helped with parenting so she technically had 4 moms at one point
and i've known this for a while and it has meant nothing to me, but recently she dyed/bleached her hair a platinum blonde and ever since then i've been greeting her in the morning with a cordial "heyyy what's goin on?"
but what she doesn't know is that i've been doing this because i can't look at her now without thinking of the phrase 4 Mom Blonde
Good evening everyone, specifically my murderbot peeps.
As we know, sometimes MB uses the entirety of its logs as a message for someone (the Mensah letter, helpme.file etc)
Well I was listening to fugitive telemetry again today, (I'm not gonna think about how many times I've listened to this book, but anyways) and this line at the end jumped out at me:
Indah said, “Good to see you in one piece.”
Yeah, whatever. “You read my report?”
“I did.” She added dryly, “I’m glad you documented the whole process. It’s good to have a reminder that we actually didn’t do too badly, except for that one basic wrong assumption.”
The assumption that the perpetrator had entered the transport from inside the station instead of outside, she meant.
...
Unlike Indah, I wasn’t happy with our performance. Especially since I’d been the one to confuse everything by insisting the surveillance video on the transport dock had been altered. I just said, “I didn’t want anything to be left to the imagination.”
“Probably for the best.” Then Indah sighed, and said, “I wasn’t the one who sent that photo of you to the newsstreams.”
It was unexpected and it made me drop some inputs. I picked them back up again. I didn’t know what to say, because obviously what I should say was I didn’t think it was you except that was absolutely not true, I had been 96 percent sure it was her.
She continued, “I wouldn’t use the newsstreams like that. If we have to fight about Mensah’s security, we’ll fight, but I won’t undermine you. Since we are actually both on the same side.”
Given that it includes a whole section in the book about how it assumes Indah sent its picture to the news feeds as petty revenge, and how much time it spends complaining about how lax they are about Mensah's security... Should we assume that Murderbot sent basically the entirety of Fugitive Telemetry to Indah as its mission report???
Desperately curious to hear people's thoughts about this.
"One of them can read the room and it's not her": Autism, ADHD, Arada, and Murderbot
While Arada and Murderbot's relationship is not central to the narrative over the course of the Murderbot Diaries series, they still have a meaningful and close friendship based on mutual respect, as MB has with all of its humans. Furthermore, Arada serves as MB's social foil to demonstrate the extent of its interpersonal skills.
The Murderbot Diaries books are written in first person perspective (with the exception of the short stories) and focus on the development of MB into a person who is comfortable identifying as a person, especially in the original quartet. As such, all of MB's interactions and relationships provide narrative foils in some sense because all of them are contrasting characters whose "qualities emphasise another's [...] by providing a sharp contrast" to Murderbot [1]. Arada appears in two books as a major character, one as a minor character, and is mentioned in two more without a significant role [2]. Over the course of the three books she plays a large role in, she and Murderbot become friends and mutual clients, although to a lesser extent than Murderbot and Mensah [3]. Their relationship sets up Arada's role as a foil highlighting MB's surprising analytic abilities in social situations, as well as its capability to thrive in such situations. Murderbot is better at initial big picture analysis, while Arada is good at small-scale interpersonal interactions.
Both Arada and Murderbot are commonly read as neurodivergent and both display a variety of traits classically associated with autism, ADHD, and/or anxiety. While Martha Wells has come to identify as neurodivergent[4][5], she does not write MB as neurodivergent[6][7]. Her personal revelations came in part as a result of fan connection to the personal experiences and feelings MB represented for her[4][5]. As a result, a neurodivergent reading of one or both characters is contrary to the original author intent, but is consistent with canon[7]. However, this contrast is still apparent from the beginning of ASR; a neurodivergent interpretation of both characters contrasts Arada and MB more strongly, as characters with a similar collection of traits expressed differently. (The humans' role as individual and collective narrative foils for MB is intentional, at least partially. In a 2024 interview, she describes the humans in All Systems Red as important because they are "the diversity of personalities [she] wanted to have in there" for it to "see their interactions as friends" and interact with it [5]. Her explanation focuses on the group dynamics, but it is clear she was intentional as she made them individually.)
In social situations, Arada tends to be behind in her reactions to large issues. It takes her longer than the other characters to recognize potential problems before they're spelled out, and she sometimes needs direct prompting from Overse. In contrast, Murderbot reads the room immediately and picks up on that form of subtext very quickly.
For example, during the discussion before the team heads to the DeltFall habitat in All Systems Red, MB enters the room as Mensah says, "I’ve checked the big hopper’s specs and we can make it there and back without a recharge" [8]. From that information and the fact that they can't contact DeltFall, MB "could wince a lot without any of them knowing," as it recognizes the potential threat awaiting them there and the bad situation, potentially including the death of all or part of DeltFall. In fact, it clearly knew going in, as it later notes that the wince was because "they could just drown" (as in, the wince is about the likelihood its clients would choose to go visit DeltFall and die on the way) and not a new realization about the DeltFall group's chances of survival. It knows DeltFall is probably dead from the start.
Meanwhile, Arada, who has been in the room the whole time and likely involved in the conversation about what to do and why, does not realize the potential problems for the DeltFall group until Overse tells her outright that "If they aren’t answering our calls, they might be hurt, or their habitat is damaged," at which point "Arada looked like it was just occurring to her that everybody over at DeltFall might be dead." Every other character picks up on the subtext of the conversation, the fear that DeltFall might have been hit by something really dangerous, before Arada does. Yet once she's aware of the underlying possible problem, she can keep up with everyone else just fine. For instance, the end of the rogue reveal scene later in the same book transitions into discussions about who might be trying to kill them, and she makes an astute observation, asking "If it isn't the company that's doing this, who is it?". The possibility of a third group had not been directly stated at that point, only implied. Knowing there's something out of the ordinary happening, Arada makes conclusions at the same speed as everyone else in the group.
Furthermore, Arada is good with interpersonal interactions and understanding, equally or better than MB. In All Systems Red, during their escape in the hopper, she shuts Gurathin down by saying "You need to give it time. It’s never interacted with humans as an openly free agent before now. This is a learning experience for all of us." Her tone is at the right place for the rest of the humans to recognize that the conversation is at the end, as they all nod and move on afterwards. If she hadn't been running on the wrong assumption about Murderbot (namely, she doesn't know yet that it doesn't like to be touched), she would have effectively smoothed over the interaction on all sides. And she adjusts her behavior to accommodate MB's touch-aversion, as in Exit Strategy when she "didn’t hug me, though she bounced up and down and waved her arms" [9]; now that she understands what MB needs, she can adapt and interact with it without issue. This extends to handling larger interpersonal issues as well. In Network Effect, during her first introduction to ART, "Arada and Thiago [exchanged] a brow-lifted look [...] they had both noticed that ART had deliberately not answered the direct question"[10]. Arada picks up on the issue at the same time MB does, but doesn't immediately challenge ART the way MB tends to, because she doesn't think it's the best way to handle the situation, and she's right.
Even when she gets nervous, such as with Leonide, her anxiety only partially overrides her interpersonal skills. ART tells her she's "talking too much" and she hesitates in the wrong points, but at the same time, she can negotiate with Leonide largely unaided. Her choice to go to Leonide's ship herself is not an accident or a mistake on the small scale, to her. She says it will "save us a lot of time" later, but at the time, she seems to do it because it's what Leonide would expect; the problem is with her large-scale social analysis which tells MB she's making a dangerous choice. This is consistent with earlier characterization of her in comparison to Murderbot, as she knows how to interact with people interpersonally, but doesn't immediately extrapolate those interactions into a larger context without prompting.
On MB's part, it can also analyze small-scale social interactions. For instance, in the scene before visiting DeltFall in All Systems Red, it picks up on the less obvious subtext of Overse's interaction with Arada in the scene and the implications it has for their relationship. Another time, in a conversation shortly after ART makes its demands clear in Network Effect, it catches that "ART paused for 8.3 seconds for no reason I could think of except to make the humans think it wasn’t going to answer the question" [10]. Each time, it picks up on the small interpersonal details the same way Arada does, as it analyzes the situation before it acts.
The contrast between Arada's large-scale issues and MB's competence in multiple areas of social interaction develops Murderbot's character. MB does not believe it is capable of interacting with humans as an equal; it calls itself "awkward with actual humans" early on [8], and it does not improve its opinion of its social skills throughout the series. Even in Network Effect, it still doesn't think it knows how to interact with Farai at the festival or with Mensah at the end [10]. However, when you compare its behavior with Arada's, it is clear that Murderbot is good at socializing with others and intuiting their meaning [11].
Notes
[1: Peter Auger, The Anthem Dictionary of Literary Terms and Theory, with Internet Archive (London ; New York : Anthem Press, 2010), 114, http://archive.org/details/anthemdictionary0000auge.]
[2: She appears as a major character in All Systems Red and Network Effect, as a secondary character at the end of Exit Strategy, and receives mentions in Fugitive Telemetry and System Collapse.]
[3: Mensah and Murderbot's close relationship is similar but deeper. It would be interesting to contrast Arada as Mensah's narrative foil in the context of these different client and SecUnit relationships.]
[4: Martha Wells, "Martha Wells Reflects on 'Murderbot' S:01 | Creative Conversations (WORLDCON 2025 LIVE) - YouTube," (Seattle Worldcon), Ink to Film, August 29, 2025, Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=700&v=W-JRHSABM24.]
[5: Martha Wells, "I Didn't Know How Non-Neurotypical I Was until Murderbot - YouTube," New Scientist, June 21, 2024, Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=276&v=lZ0wIHRXq0Y.]
[6: Martha Wells, "Book Tour 33: Martha Wells -- System Collapse | Tales from the Trunk," Tales from the Trunk, November 6, 2023, Audio, https://www.talesfromthetrunk.com/e/book-tour-33-martha-wells-%e2%80%93-system-collapse/.]
[7: Martha Wells, "Introduction to the Subterranean Edition of The Murderbot Diaries," October 21, 2021, https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/564808.html.]
[8: All Systems Red]
[9: Exit Strategy]
[10: Network Effect]
[11: Further analysis covering nonverbal communication was not included in this meta as it requires a much closer reading than I did in preparation. To properly cover the differences in nonverbal communication (which Arada does perform and analyze in canon, and not just with Overse) would just about double the length of this meta.]
SecUnit: “I could have become a mass murderer,” gun arms, dangerously ungovernable, punched blood out of a guy so hard it got literally everywhere, private name Murderbot
Tiny Mensah Child: SecUnit!!!! What’s your favorite character from Sparkle Defense Force: Musical Memories!!
Was just having a discussion with my fiance that taco bell should change their slogan to "it's gonna be okay" or at the very least shorten "live más" to "live". just feels like thats what we need from them
under US law, it's illegal for anyone who's not a member of a recognised native tribe to own an eagle feather. the penalty is a $100,000 fine.
14 years ago when I had recently moved to Alaska, I went hiking with an Aleut friend, and she pointed to a feather lying on the ground and said "hey that's a bald eagle tail feather, you should grab it!" and I was like "uhh I'm very white and that's very illegal" and she went "they're fuckin everywhere up here man. I have 20." so she grabs it off the ground and hands it to me and says "there, now it's a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person."
and I'm like, okay, cool, I guess this is how we do things in Alaska. nice.
so I keep this bald eagle tail feather around for years. display it in my home among other cherished memorabilia from places I've lived and visited, etc.
on a whim, I have just now looked it up. there is no exemption to that law for a ceremonial gift from an indigenous person. the last 7 years I lived in the US, I was technically a bald eagle poacher.
probably a good thing I don't intend to move back there anytime soon. I wonder what the statute of limitations is on bird crimes.
@freedomisscaryshit I'm fucking dying I think you forgot the word "feathers" in your tags?? or do you just wish you could grab whole ass eagles that land in your yard??
As an Indigenous person, it continues to astound me that there are such strict laws (written by White people) in our name, laws against...picking up things just found on the ground. Like, stop pretending this is "for" us. We don't want this.
so, for clarity, that's not what this is. the law against possessing feathers is an anti-poaching measure, derived from a North American treaty protecting certain migratory bird species from hunting. that treaty has an exemption for indigenous people to allow tribes that use eagle feathers in ceremonial or religious practices to continue doing so.
i used to collect feathers (illegally) as a teenager and the thing is that it's incredibly important for feathers from wild birds to be illegal to possess because it ensures that they never become fashionable to wear. the reason we passed the migratory bird act was because the american and european fashion industry was driving species to extinction in a timespan of years. not just decades. the ecological devastation of exporting birds for hats was absolutely insane and people were watching wetlands and forests and meadows just empty out in realtime. look at the wikipedia article for the plume trade.
the law against 'picking feathers up off the ground' means that you can't go shoot an eagle then sell the feathers on etsy by saying you 'just found them'. you can't own them no matter where they came from, which makes sure that they're not going to come from any birds killed and then secretly disposed of.
these laws, as harsh and ridiculous as they seem, saved flamingos, spoonbills, egrets, and all kinds of hawks and eagles from extinction. the minute these laws weaken and people can make money off killing them again, they're fucked.
this is one of those "no actually this regulation exists for a reason" laws much like work place safety and building fire codes (that Republicans keep trying to roll back) and is written in blood just like them as well. it's just not human blood this time, and the fact that people actually cared enough about long term future over short term profit to get it put in place is nothing short of astonishing. That it didn't get put in place in time to save several species is heart breaking.
