Known Gurathin Username

I'm RJ. Pronouns: he/him. Banner by Xavantina

[the-yearning-astronaut]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Rating: Explicit

Archive Warning: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Fandom: The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells

Relationships: Asshole Research Transport/Murderbot (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Murderbot & original bot character(s)

Characters: Murderbot, Asshole Research Transport (Murderbot Diaries), SecUnit 3 (Murderbot Diaries), Original Bot Character(s) (Murderbot Diaries), Seth (Murderbot Diaries), Iris (Murderbot Diaries), Martyn (Murderbot Diaries), Karime (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Mensah (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Bharadwaj (Murderbot Diaries), Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Amena (Murderbot Diaries)

Additional Tags: Fake Married AU, Marriage of Convenience, Bot Marriage, Legal Drama, Canonical Character Death, grief and mourning, Angst, identity crisis, bot culture, sexual fantasies, Robot Brain Sex, Things get weird, dubcon, Consensual NonCon, Enthusiastic Consent, maladaptive coping mechanisms, Dom!Murderbot, Switch!ART, Murderbot doesn't have primary or secondary sexual characteristics, aro/ace themes, demi aroace Murderbot, emotionally intelligent Three, Post-Book 7: System Collapse, Additional Warnings in Author's Notes

Summary: I’d been trying really hard to start working on myself in the run up to my Preservation humans heading home and my PSUMNT humans heading back to the university. And that’s my excuse for why I didn’t notice sooner that something was off with ART.

I’ve received my next assignment from the University. They’ve ordered me to recreate 2.0.

At long last, @rj-abacura and I are finally beginning to post our second (and very late) fic for the @murderbotbigbang! It's been such a labor of love and I'm so excited to be able to share it with you all.

We plan on posting this twice a week for the next ten weeks!

[apolladay]

[mckitterick]

ever since the early 2000s when a couple brain-dead frat boys on campus said "Cute skirt" at me and giggled, I've worn kilts pretty much every day

because to hell with the delicate gender-enforcing losers who don't understand the origins of kilts, to hell with people sticking their noses into other people's choices, and to hell with the whole notion of gendered clothing

[alientitty]

💀

[spazzbot]

I don’t say this often, but you really should unmute and listen to the song



[overflowstuff]

Murderbot needs to kill the 30-50 feral hogs that come onto the planetary survey while its scientists play in the dirt. it needs the arm guns. Why don't you understand

[solarprominence]

I maintain that the best summation of my feminist beliefs are that men and women are not fundamentally different. There are a few quantifiable differences if you average out every woman and every man, but they are not qualitative. And most of them are socially constructed, and would be fixed if we started treating men and women the same. Neither is inherently smarter, neither is inherently kinder, neither is inherently more stoic or stronger or angrier or softer. Everyone is obsessed with the differences between women and men, with finding them and creating them and distancing themselves from the "other half". It's fucked up

[storyweavingspider]

This was the mainstream feminist belief like. A decade ago. Thats how hard we’ve regressed within mainstream feminism and it’s mainly because of right wingers/radfems/TERFs deciding trans women need to die.

[grimark]

did you see they made jane prentiss from the magnus archives real

this is the correct way to feel about having a wasp's nest in your house.

[grimark]

oh fuck you were not kidding

[cacodaemonia]

Ahhh that's beautiful!! and so cool. I want to have them as neighbors 🥺

I thought I'd share some of her quotes from the article:

[cheekyvank]

forgive me father for i have zoomed in on some images

[so-many-ocs]

hey, don't cry. fictional character in dire & perilous situations. ok?

[overflowstuff]

Thinking about CR Gurathin. I bet it was awful. We know it was awful, but like. It was still home, he grew up there, had people (friends? Family?), wore the clothes, watched the media, ate the food. Preservation is different, arguably better, but do you ever think he gets homesick for the place he grew up, a place he’ll likely never go back to. Do you think he tries to make dishes he remembers from his childhood but they were corporate mass produced and he doesn’t have the right ingredients here even if the herbs and spices are organic and home grown now, it doesn’t ever taste the same.

Do you think he imagines going back sometimes, just before he wakes up.

[rj-abacura]

He doesn’t regret it, the decision to leave. To follow her wherever she led him. It saved his life. It saved his soul, if such a thing exists. But he wonders, some mornings, if this feeling will ever go away. The Ache.

Not for the drugs, that’s a different ache, one he knows he will probably never be rid of, a hunger that will be his constant companion until the day he dies

No, this is an ache for something familiar and easy: his comfort foods printed for him, the softness of synthetic fabric draped over him after a long day wired into a terminal, clothes with an easy soft but silky texture that never scratched or caught. The view of the wormhole from Port Free Commerce before he shipped out for a mission. The ice cream dispenser by concourse D2 that sold a flavor that was an artificial recreation of a fruit that had gone extinct a century ago but that he’d get himself as a treat after a particularly hard job. The smell of recycled air.

The food here on Preservation is excellent. Better for him, healthy, fresh, sustainably produced. The textiles are a source of cultural pride, all hand-woven, hand-dyed, and mended with care. Colorful and long-lasting. And the sunrises! So rarely seen in his previous life, he can now see the sun rise and set nearly every day, smelling fresh air and drinking coffee that Pin-Lee roasted for him, with a deep and complex flavor that a part of him still wants to drown out with artificial sweeteners and dehydrated creamer. It’s good here. Life is good here, better than it had been any time before. He never wants to leave. Never.

So why does he still yearn to go back? Why does he long for a home that chewed him up and spit him out, a home that nearly devoured him? A home that couldn’t love him back?

There was a certain easiness to his life before. The horror and humiliation was mundane in its familiarity, the same way the kindness of his new life still registers as dangerous and strange. Every interaction is fraught with pitfalls: things he says that should be normal that make his friends look at him with either horror or pity, rules he is still learning and constantly breaking that make strangers look at him askance, norms that he fears he will never truly feel at ease with. Better to be an outsider and be alive and loved than to die beneath the heel of the CR, but he still wishes it was easier.

He’s started learning to weave fabric. He’s apparently good at it, too. A blanket, the first one he’s finished, lays over his lap as he watches the sunrise. The fabric is textured despite his best efforts to make it smooth and uniform. Bharadwaj says the texture is a part of the final product, part of the appeal. He wishes he could run his hands over the fabric without feeling like he failed. He wishes he could eat Mensah’s cooking without needing her to make him a milder version. He wishes he loved the way his room smelled like wood and wildflowers and sunshine and that he didn’t miss the scent of recycled station air. He drinks his coffee not black, but not with the sweetener and powdered creamer Mensah had secured for him. Today he drinks it with just a bit of oat milk and vanilla syrup, both from Mensah’s farm.

It’s good.

Maybe one day it will feel normal.

[jacobwren]

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

[gaslit-dipshits]

Man at City Council Meeting Makes Devastating Case Against Proposed Local Data Center

A former programmer spoke up during a city council meeting in a small town in Ohio, making a well-articulated argument against data centers.

[freak-motion]

last network effect chapters destroyed me here's a shitpost

[gloriousmonsters]

when you're feeling full hater mode about a piece of media but you know one of your beloved mutuals enjoys it

[annabelle--cane]

crucial to understanding the tone of this is that she's talking to graycris blue leader and means this as a completely earnest condemnation of graycris's shoddy managerial policies

[ooppo]

Sometimes pervert shit is all we got in this dark world

[future-crab]

The key to writing good fanfiction is to harbor a deeply humiliating desire, and the trick there is that even pretty basic and societally-accepted desires like “being held” and “being wanted” CAN and WILL be humiliating if they’re intense enough. Become so estranged from human connection that the idea of someone playing with your hair fills you with yearning so deep you feel like you’re going to throw up and you will write some banger fanfiction. It might have some other consequences too but idrk about that.

[jotctumb]

PresAux Competence and Roger Rabbit Rules

One of the topics which circulates is whether TV PresAux are kinda incompetent compared to bookverse. And at first it seemed like all the comments I saw were about how were "hippies" (and being a "hippy" means being incompetent), and how they danced to music and painted the hab, etc. But dancing, loving music, wanting to add some personal touches to where you live, those things don't make anyone incompetent.

I do think there's something real though.

For example, consider TV Mensah investigating the missing map section.

First Bharadwaj gets chomped by a worm. Murderbot itself gets chomped pretty hard too, while rescuing her. Then the team figures out they can track the worms by ground vibrations. And then Mensah goes out to investigate. The sensors pick up another giant worm. Murderbot tells her to turn back and she won't.

That was really stupid! And yeah, she got important data and didn't get chomped. She was lucky.

And yet Mensah is not generally shown as incompetent or as a blind risk-taker throughout the show.

I claim the show is following these rules: PresAux should do or say something derpy if and only if:

it's funny

it's exciting

it's visually cool

Every less than perfect moment has to fit at least one of these categories.

Mensah climbing up a big hill mid panic attack, and then a giant worm rushes past her? All three! I know the story but I was still afraid she'd get chomped.

Ratthi hitting himself by not accounting for recoil? Funny! People can argue all day over whether it's realistic for someone to mishandle a gun that way. Of course it's realistic for someone who never handled a weapon and who is also extremely stressed to screw up. I'm amazed he kept his head as well as he did! Behold, Ratthi actually managing to fire at a moving target!

Also behold, Ratthi falling!

That scene didn't happen for realism. It happened to break tension. If it was for realism, moments like this would sometimes lead to tragedy.

Tragedy happens in the show, but never because of these obvious screw-up moments. Mensah doesn't get eaten by a worm, Ratthi doesn't get killed by the enemy SecUnit. That kind of outcome wouldn't be funny.

I think of it as "Roger Rabbit" rules, based on that movie, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" In the movie, living cartoons share a world with regular humans. There's a lengthy subplot involving a human and Roger Rabbit (cartoon) being handcuffed together. The human is going batty. Finally at a key moment, Roger just pulls his hand out of the cuffs using cartoon powers.

The human flips out and asks if he could do that any time??? And Roger says, "No, not any time. Only when it was funny."

And Roger was telling the truth! He really could only do that when it was funny!

Similarly for PresAux.