Yes, that is my circus, and, yes, those are my monkeys, but I am not on shift yet.

Kaledo Art
RMH
Sade Olutola

#extradirty
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
$LAYYYTER
cherry valley forever

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Today's Document
KIROKAZE
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Not today Justin
Acquired Stardust
sheepfilms
occasionally subtle

@theartofmadeline
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Show & Tell

Love Begins
Cosmic Funnies

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@queer-moon
Yes, that is my circus, and, yes, those are my monkeys, but I am not on shift yet.
I think one of the goals of society should be that someone who requires expensive medicine and a lot of care can live an amazing life, the longest life they possibly can, with dignity, even if they have no friends or family or anyone who cares enough about them to help. the goals of a society should be to make life better than if we are alone, society should want life to be as good as possible for as many people as possible, and those goals should account for people not having social support networks.
social life aside, the most hated or ignored person in town should be able to live as good and fair and just of a life as the most loved person in town. survival needs to stop being a popularity contest.
i don't care about monday's goals, tuesday wednesday dig some holes, thursday clean my mandibles, it's friday i'm a bug
ultimately the truth about frankenstein is that we are all grotesque amalgamations of the best and worst parts of everyone who came before us. and sometimes the people who are supposed to love us because of and in spite of this will not. and we can kill them with hammers for that. and i think that’s beautiful
my brother in christ frankenstein is the title of the book
COUNTERPOINT
well i can’t argue with that one
Ah yes, Mary Shelley’s monster.
You mean, Lord Byron?
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
okay okay i can close some tabs i don't need this google image search of "pear trees"....well you never know actually
Just deleted a harsher version of this post but,
It's been very weird watching "Murderbot is not just an unreliable narrator, but a highly unreliable narrator" build steam through the fandom and become a communally accepted reading such that people add it as a disclaimer or even a statement of fact to otherwise unrelated fandom posts because it's just ... not, in my opinion, an accurate reading of the text. And people aren't even putting it forth as a possible interpretive lens anymore, they're just - stating it as if it's both true and something everyone agrees on.
When it started, people were just saying "unreliable narrator" or even "somewhat unreliable narrator," and I didn't agree with it, but I saw the point. Murderbot has strong opinions on things that it doesn't hesitate to share, it struggles with self-awareness at times, and there are occasions when it's made a blanket statement about the nature of constructs or machine intelligences that it later started to question as inherent qualities of SecUnits or just part of its own unique personality as an individual. If your definition of what an "unreliable narrator" is is broader than mine, I could certainly see Murderbot just squeaking in at the more reliable end of that spectrum.
But people are now casually tossing off "extremely unreliable" and -
There are first person narrators in fiction whose narratives contain such strong contradictions that its clear they must be intentionally lying about major events, and the reader can retroactively no longer tell what parts of the narrative are true or false.
There are first person narrators in fiction who are experiencing mental health related breaks from reality such that you cannot tell which events in their story actually happened and which were hallucinations.
There are first person narrators in fiction who are pushing an agenda so strongly (and I'm not talking about just having a point of view on the narrative events at all, I'm talking about "the fictional prologue explains that the narrator wrote this in prison as part of a plea for sympathy and lighter sentencing from the jury" kind of agenda) that everything described has such an extreme spin on it that you can't trust the narrator's depiction of any event to be accurate.
Not only does Murderbot not fit into any of these categories (no, not even the third one, having an opinion is not the same thing as being a spin doctor), but I struggle to see how anyone could place it in comparison with these and then decide in good faith that Murderbot is hanging out with them at the "extremely unreliable" end of the scale.*
(I also really want to know who the first person narrators are whom this section of the fandom considers to be reliable narrators, because if any subjectivity at all renders a narrator unreliable such that one whose only questionable quality is a particularly strong personality and perspective falls at the "extreme" end of the scale, how could any narrator at all qualify as "reliable.")
*in the deleted post I said something snarky about how I read "Murderbot is an extremely unreliable narrator" as "I have never read another book before," and that was unfair, which is why I deleted the post, but I do wonder if some of the people pushing this interpretation don't read a lot of first-person narrated fiction and therefore don't have a great basis of comparison with overtly unreliable narrators vs those who are a bit subjective but to a more normal degree
whatever. go my secunit
CHAPTER 5 WE ALMOST THERE
ART remembers some things again. And hopes it can remember enough to make everything work out okay. Here's hoping!
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Future Ones (Prometheus)
Summary: Across time and space, Murderbot learns about its own legacy. A legacy that is yet to be made, that now it must fulfill.
We were on a run of the mill trip into the wormhole when it happened.
I was on my favourite couch in the argument lounge. ART and I were watching The Preservation Baking Spectacular while it was initializing the wormhole jump. It was totally normal.
Then suddenly it wasn’t.
An alert flashed in ART’s feed. I couldn’t read it (something about space-time fluctuations outside acceptable parameters) and suddenly ART was gone. Whatever this was, it was suddenly taking up basically all of its processing power.
I pinged it. Everything okay?
Give me a moment, we should be-
Then it was gone. ART? ART! I pinged it desperately.
Hello?
That wasn’t ART. That wasn’t anyone I knew. What the fuck? What was going on?
Who the fuck are you? I sent.
ART is liquid... to me.
ft. Ratthi
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood is also exploring whether chemical castration could be made mandatory.
This is about the UK specifically.
See this? This is the trap. This is how they get you. You appeal to outrage and emotion, you make a bold statement like "sex offenders don't have rights" and whip up that righteous anger, get people all thirsty for blood and punishment, right? And that's their foot in the door. Once you've decided that there's a class of people it's okay to do this to, there's no clean line in the sand anymore, is there? Now chemical castration (or whatever fucked up shit you wanna bring into it) is an option on the table. This is how fascists talk, this is how fascists think, and this is how fascists appeal to you to get what they want. Because once you've given them that inch, they can use it to take a mile.
Alan Turing (as in the Turing test) was chemically castrated following a conviction for “homosexual acts” in 1952. He committed suicide as a result.
Seriously, conservatives are already calling trans people perverts and sex offenders for merely existing. If you cannot connect these two obvious dots you are just not paying attention.
tongue in cheek art about weird bodies and waiting for a diagnosis
So I'm approximately 150 (short) fanfics in for the Murderbot & ART tag on AO3 and I've read a couple really, really good ones, but damn, this one just hit a perfect homerun.
It's short, extremely well crafted, creepy, full of (unstated) emotion and what's actually going on is open to the reader (do you want it angsty or hopeful? It's your choice!)
Read at your own peril.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
I'm still on my bullshit, where I figured it would be fun and nice for Murderbot 2.0 to live long enough to meet ART. Just nice and calm and pleasant and- wait, what? *Checks fic* good lord what's happening in there
Anyway here's chapter 3
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Was going to make a post about how murderbot makes friends with other bot systems so easily, and how frequently it describes their personalities as “the friendly secsystem” or somesuch and personifies these entities that the humans just see as tools. Then I started thinking about the separatists’ system in System Collapse and how Murderbot remarks that it might be friendly to him, or it might just be that it hasn’t explicitly been programmed to be unfriendly. And then I started thinking about ART, and how Murderbot calling it an asshole is basically a term of endearment. And now I’m thinking about how subservience can look like friendliness, and how being able to choose when and to whom to be kind is a cornerstone of murderbot’s personhood. Being a hater as a form of self-actualization.