Catching Rare Moths

b. 1988, they/them, peer-reviewed and certified Weird™ | also on AO3 as catchingraremoths

[raremoths]

I already owned paint pens and acrylic gloss varnish, and I use a staple puller every day at work. Why not make my tools more fun.

[uovoc]

I’m pretty comfortable with Murderbot being called “SecUnit" by its humans for perpetuity because the flavor is like title (familiar) in the way that in some cultures (Chinese, Japanese, probably others too) it’s normal to call some people by title rather than name, to the point that calling them by their actual name feels downright weird. Like you wouldn’t typically call your relatives by their names, you’d call them “third aunt” or “older sister” (how the Mensah’s kids address her as “second mom” translates nicely to 二妈 which makes Farai 大妈 I guess), so calling MB “SecUnit” feels like a pretty normal form of address in the same vein as Laoshi or Shifu, in that it’s both casual and respectful while at the same time reaffirming what your relationship to each other is

[brawltogethernow]

On top of this fitting nicely with my few thoughts heart full take that SecUnit simply feels correct and Mb is for specific situations, I like framing it as relationship-based. Like, yes, there are other SecUnits, but I am their SecUnit; this is our SecUnit.

[uovoc]

#okay I LOVE this tho#and like obviously being called SecUnit by the preservation crew as a title/sign of respect#is waaaay different than being called SecUnit by a corporate as a sign of objectification#wow now i have Emotions (via normaldownload-failed)

ugh I was JUST thinking about how using numerical designations in the context of CR has a dehumanizing/objectifying function, since calling someone “Worker 238” or “SecUnit 3” emphasizes their replaceability and replaces their individual identity with their function. While on the other hand using numerical designations in familial address does something more like… encoding information about your relationship to each other and your wider social relationships. For instance, 四叔/4th uncle encodes the information “my father’s family has at least 4 sons, of which you are the 4th (and younger than my father)”

anyways the books moving from CR to Preservation space goes hand-in-hand with SecUnit changing from a term of objectification to one of relation, also to go on a tangent since Murderbot was the first one to go rogue it’s always going to be either 老大 or 大 SecUnit wdfdsfsdfdsfds

[whetstonefires]

大 SecUnit……………….!

[parkchanwoohoo]

I love seeing stores and cafes that display and sell shitty local art. Everybody on the planet should be making shitty local art. Everyone in the community should get to see what shitty local art everyone else is making. Eventually you will find something and be like hold on. This weirdly speaks to me. I've never seen anything quite like this, whether because of this person's idiosyncratic style or strange choice of subject matter or what. And suddenly your favorite piece of art is a collage painting done by a woman who waits tables during the day and does roller derby at night and uses the excess flyers and paper menus from both places of work to make amateur art on the weekends and you realize this is such a bizarre combination of circumstances that has produced something so striking to you, how lucky you are to live in a world where this got to exist and you got to see it

[raremoths]

It is even blond!

[raremoths]

Mr. Bones Teddy Bear from Steiff 😍🐻

[raremoths]

Mr. Bones is available again, just a fyi

[raremoths]

After, uh, more than a year of silence, Chapter 5 of Maritime Salvage Law is up.

Cheers!

[worms-for-brains]

I love it when soap and ghost are like this

[raremoths]

The look of confused and growing horror on my friends' faces as they quizzed me on sailing jargon will fuel me through the winter.

They all grew up with freshwater fishing and bass boats, and they thought that because I didn't have much lake- or outboard-motor-related experience, that I hadn't really spent much time on the water.

No, my dudes, my ENTIRE FAMILY IS EITHER CAREER NAVY OR HAVE SAILBOAT-AUTISM.

[juggalokomaeda]

Visit Original Link

i put “All I Want for Christmas is You” through a MIDI converter, and then back through an mp3 converter

the result is this garbage

[red3blog]

I’m driving myself up the wall because I swear I can hear the vocal line but I don’t know how that could be if it was truly converted to MIDI. Unless you can replicate speech sounds entirely with modulated MIDI notes, in which case I’m actually impressed with this tire fire of an MP3.

[staff]

[exeggcute]

the holiday season is almost upon us and I’d like to bring back this absolute fucking monstrosity of an audio file

[tetrafelino]

I'm noticing some interesting choices with regards to pronouns in Laura Pohl's translation of All Systems Red. See, in Portuguese we don't have object pronouns like "it/its" and neutral neopronouns like "elu/delu" are considered more analogous to the English "they/them", so gendering Murderbot the way that it is gendered in the original was always going to be tricky. There's also the other difficulty that adjectives are gendered in Portuguese, so whenever Murderbot describes itself or it's emotional state or anything, necessarily it was going to gender itself grammatically in some way. What this translation does at first is that the Murderbot's internal dialogue it genders itself in the masculine which I assumed to be just sort of defaulting Murderbot to be a masculine character, but in reflection of a different detail, I think it's just defaulting to this formal almost archaic notion of the masculine as neutral. Now, the detail that made me rethink this is this line that I just came upon of Dr Mensah's:

"UniSeg, preciso que você fique parada aí até eu chegar."

[SecUnit, I need you to stay still (female form) until I arrive]

The reason that Mensah is referring to Murderbot in the feminine in this case is that it's referring to it as a security unit, right, and the word Unidade, Unit, in Portuguese, is a feminine word. So I just went back now and I found one other previous instance in which characters refer to Murderbot in the third person and, Ratthi, he calls Murderbot by masculine pronouns but that's when it's being referred to as a robô, robot, which in Portuguese is a masculine word. So I guess the way that Pohl found to express Murderbot's object pronouns is by just using whatever pronouns are in agreement with the word being used to describe it. Which to be fair makes a lot of sense for treating objects in Portuguese. If you call something a cadeira, chair, you're going to refer to it with feminine pronouns, but if you call the exact same object a sofá, sofa, you will be using the masculine pronouns.

[tetrafelino]

okay I just realized the reason Murderbot refers to itself with masculine pronouns in its internal dialogue all the time is because it's referring to itself as a robô assasino, murderer robot, which is masculine okay this is kind of genius actually

[tetrafelino]

okay okay this is so cool actually literally the next page and Murderbot is talking about other SecUnits right and it says this

"Elas não eram os robôs-assassinos mais astutos, (...)"

[They (feminine plural) weren't the (masculine plural) most astute murder robots, (...)]

...feminine pronouns for Unidades de Segurança, SecUnits, and masculine pronouns for robôs-assassinos, murder robots...

so yeah it's it's literally exactly as I understood it we are simply using our own grammatical gender rules for objects... it's so cool

[onlybylaura]

hey, translator here! (: this was absolutely done on purpose. gendering Murderbot would always be a problem, so I, the copyeditors and the brazilian editors worked together to make sure that bots/constructs could be referred with both masculine/feminine pronouns, sometimes even in the same paragraph. same goes for ART in the second novella, who's also an It in english, but varies between nave (ship, femine) and transporte (transporte, masculine). it's an important detail and i'm happy it was noticed!

[raremoths]

Bearded Seal (Erignathus barbatus)

[stinglesswasp]

Connection 💬 (part 2)

And a wee bonus about the band-aids on Ghost's arm 🩹

[coffeeeandbaileys]

[raremoths]

I "ran point" - see: walked at the front - for the majority of scare houses in a haunted house bar crawl last night and just pointed out every change in elevation / change in flooring to help avoid trip hazards for my drunk charges.

Imagine highly intoxicated ducklings following a very friendly safety officer.

[cobaltbeam]

Feral boy

[ceeturnalia]

why are dudes in fanfic always getting hit with freight train orgasms. why not an orient express orgasm, classy and romantic. where are the shinkansen train orgasms? his orgasm hit him like the TGV atlantique breaking the passenger rail speed record. like the shanghai maglev, his orgasm was a feat of engineering but something of a commercial disappointment.

[elveny]

Don’t tell me delayed orgasms aren’t a thing

[ceeturnalia]

learning new things about the german rail system today

[melh1art]

hello everyone! I'm back with a little surprise for you, my dears ^)

[agnesandhilda]

shoutout to the woman from my high school martial arts class who liked to get me in joint locks and then joke about how I was easy to catch. you cannot comprehend how psychosexually formative that was for me

[agnesandhilda]

imagine, if you will, having an adolescent half-crush on someone way older than you, which is also confusingly blurred up with admiration of them as a role model. now imagine that you and that person are in a social environment where it is acceptable to (platonically, consensually) choke someone. I think I was very normal about it considering the circumstances

[agnesandhilda]

she would demonstrate takedowns on her husband (also in the class, and who was not a small man) before we got to try them and the first time I saw her twist him around and down onto the floor like it was easy my entire abdomen clenched

[agnesandhilda]

I cannot stress enough how eager this guy was to be manhandled (womanhandled?) and flipped around by his wife. he was her de facto guinea pig whenever she got to teach and I never saw him unenthusiastic about it. he'd set himself up for a joint lock fully smiling. the other adults in the class occasionally teased him about it (being so quick to let your wife put you in a submission hold tends to raise a few eyebrows), and I always kind of wanted to defend him but what would I have said? like, don't worry. I won't judge you. I also like being pinned down by your wife

[draculaisagothwizzard-deactivat]

That last sentance really hits ya like a psychosexually formative takedown

[agnesandhilda]