Somehow wound up mostly blogging about sci-fi and fantasy and writing bullshit, with the occasional "this I gotta see" and "don't do that, you will die". Also this is my "cool stuff" pile, no sideblogs, no sorting, abandon all hope you who enter here. Art on banner is "Sphinx's Day Off" by Sandara (https://www.deviantart.com/sandara/art/sphinx-s-day-off-179426159). Art on avatar is "Lost Track" by Aron Wiesenfeld (https://aron-wiesenfeld.squarespace.com/2018).
The Nameless Fanfic (5/6 stories written, 6th in draft): Masterpost
The Nameless Fanfic is a series of crossover fanfics for Time to Orbit: Unknown and The Murderbot Diaries. I post the rough drafts here as I write them, then edit them and post them on AO3. As of right now, I have stories 1 through 5 up on AO3, and I am working on the beginning of the last big story in this cycle. There are also standalone short stories from OC and other canon characters' perspectives, and a planned standalone that's between a short and a full-size novella.
The series begins post-canon for TTOU and just after Fugitive Telemetry for TMBD, but spoiler-wise it's extremely heavy spoilers for the end of TTOU (of the "you should probably read the original first" variety), and light spoilers for Fugitive Telemetry for TMBD. As of the story 3 time skip, we've entered post-canon territory for TMBD as well, with extremely heavy spoilers for NE and SC.
Most of the rough drafts for these stories can be found by going down The Nameless Fanfic tag, but as this has already grown... Unwieldy, below the cut you will find AO3 links and blurbs. Enjoy!
Story 1: Connection Test Start (AO3 link)
SecUnit has told Senior Indah it is open to further work, but only if the work is really weird. So when a research transport from an unfamiliar non-corporate political entity called Trellin arrives at Preservation Station and starts throwing strange errors within seconds of contact, SecUnit is tasked with figuring out what the hell is wrong with that ship. (A lot. A lot is wrong with that ship. One, it’s not ART. Two, it’s kind of an asshole anyway. Three, it has feelings. And morals. And that last one might be the worst.)
Story 2: Formless and Vanquished We Shall Travel (AO3 link)
One Public Universal Friend runs a corporate blockade with a shuttle full of refugees, fully expecting to die in the process. Instead, it wakes up on an unfamiliar ship, with a bot pilot that informs the Friend that it is well aware of the Friends' existence and has helped it escape pursuit. In the Corporate Rim era, the Friends have been forced into becoming an underground operation, and they have few allies. Stranded, disoriented, and hounded by a corporation in possession of an anti-terrorism mandate, the Friend must deal with its situation and not sink its entire organization in the process.
Direct continuation of Connection Test Start.
Story 3: The Worst Movie Night (AO3 link)
The alien remnant contamination did far more damage to Perihelion's wormhole drive than anyone had initially realized, and the PSUMNT researchers are at a loss with how to solve the problem. But SecUnit and its Preservation humans have seen “super fast organic wormhole drives” before. With the reluctant permission of Perihelion's crew, a distress call is sent to Trellin, and three scientist teams, two sentient research transports, and one SecUnit convene to figure out how (and whether) ART can get its wings back.
Set after System Collapse.
Author's note: the main thing that you need to know about this story is that I started writing what I thought would be the NE analogue in this cycle, and it turned out to be SC: ART Edition instead. So expect a marked tone shift in comparison to the previous two stories, leaning towards introspection and existentialism. Also, altered states of consciousness.
Story 4: Roots and Branches (AO3 link)
Being responsible for the security of two separate groups of humans is hard enough when SecUnit knows and likes the ships they are travelling on. But once its humans arrive at the incredibly normal space station in orbit of Trellin, SecUnit finds their potential new allies to be much more difficult to deal with than most hostiles. To do its job, it must navigate local privacy customs, dead and/or naked humans, experimental biomes full of planetary fauna and, worst of all, the helpful local HubSystem, which happens to be a) very friendly, b) totally useless at security, c) really fucking creepy. Can SecUnit keep its humans safe and not be driven absolutely beeshit by argumentative social scientists, HubSystem or human, along the way? It’s about to find out.
Direct continuation of The Worst Movie Night.
Story 5: Digging in the Dirt (AO3 link)
Following the events of Connection Test Start, one doctor from Preservation Alliance decides to make things right and sets out for the Corporation Rim, hoping to unearth and eventually bring to justice a certain humanitarian-cum-terrorist organisation. Utterly unprepared for the reality of the Rim, the good doctor finds far more horrors than they ever bargained for—but also many more friends than they expected. Nobody is what they seem to be, and now Dr. Mrinal must decide what to do with what they have discovered and live with their choice.
Direct continuation of Connection Test Start and Roots and Branches.
Short stories, collected as Voices From the Pegasus Constellation (AO3 link)
A collection of short stories portraying some of the events of The Nameless Fanfic from the perspectives of Trellians (and other members of Starwind Accord). Character tags updated as stories get published.
Note that these short stories are placed in different points of the main continuity and are best read one at a time! Links to the relevant stories are given chronologically in the main storyline.
Right now, this includes:
Chosen Burdens (Captain Reed) - after s2ch5, "Verdict"
ship's haunted (Navigator Brisote) - a view of s3ch4-5
Cultural Significance (Senior Engineer Haze) - between s3 and s4
what's in a name (Senior Computer Technician Iceblink) - after s5ch18, "Preparation"
Losing Starlight (Dandelion) - during s5ch24, "Beeshit".
Massacre (Blaze) - during s4ch30, "Preparations"
Medicine From Your Hands (Aspen) - after s4ch41, "Puppetry"
As Above, So Below (Ruby) - technically set between chapters 44 and 45, but probably a good post-epilogue read
Axiom (Ghostwheel) - set between chapters 44 and 45 of Roots and Branches, best read after Digging in the Dirt chapter 7, Monster.
There is also an equivalent collection from the points of view of various TMBD characters, Voices from Preservation Alliance and PSUMNT (AO3 link).
Little Miracles (Ratthi) - set during s4ch13, "Visage", but best read after s4ch31, "Chief". Note that this contains mild Aspen/Ratthi smut (because they are nerds).
People Worth Knowing (Mensah) - the events of Connection Test Start from Dr. Mensah's perspective. Functionally a prequel to s6.
There are more short stories in the tag, but they're not quite edited yet and also a little bit ahead of the currently posted storyline. I will update them as I go!
If you're the sort of person who likes comparing text versions, some old chapters are up on the nameless fanfic: deprecated tag.
I also occasionally post music, pictures, reference materials, etc on the nameless fanfic: supplemental tag. This is mostly for my own convenience, but if you're the sort of person that enjoys finding new music or something that way - enjoy!
Re your last rb, my friends and I read Are Prisons Obsolete? last year for our book club. What I remember of our discussion is that we agreed the answer was “yes!” but we weren’t sure what it actually looked like in practice, especially around (e.g.) murder or sexual crimes. What are some of the recommendations from the prison abolitionist movement?
I am also planning to check out some of the linked books, but this has always been a challenge for me to wrap my head around!
The first thing you have to let go of when you're imagining this is the idea that anywhere near this number of people in prison is normal or okay in most Earth societies. And to do that, you have to understand why people in prison are in prison.
Like half of them are there for probation or parole violations. That means it's hard to tell why exactly they're there, but, looking at the breakdown of probation and parole violations I've defended, it's actually not super likely that this is because of a new crime conviction. People get dinged on probation/parole violations for stuff that's legal for other people to do, including marijuana and alcohol, or not calling the probation officer enough, or being homeless, or not having a job because you got fired because of your probation meetings.
Next, the bulk of people in and out of local jails are there for honestly just stupid nonsense. Misdemeanor assaults, trespasses, drug possessions. There's compelling evidence that these short stays in jail increase recidivism, which, if you think about it, makes a lot of sense -- imagine your live being interrupted by an abrupt few months in jail. If you have family support, they might be able to retrieve your stuff from your place before your landlord leaves it all on a curb. You get an eviction on your record. You're fired. You might lose all your important documents if no one was available to get them from your apartment. And then you're spat back out with nothing, an overdrawn bank account, zero possessions except what you were arrested with, and told "now get a job or you're going back to jail."
Then there's mid-level cases that are felonies. Most people think felonies are Serious Business. They are -- in terms of consequences. The crimes that are felonies are defined in ways that are often absurd and ass-backwards. It's very hard to explain what I mean without just providing an example, so here goes.
In my state, there's a crime of "shooting at an occupied dwelling" (something clearly intended to be a law against drive-by shootings, which I would like to note were ALREADY ILLEGAL, it being illegal to attempt murder on people and to recklessly handle firearms etc., so the law was arguably totally unnecessary, but I digress). There is also a crime of discharging a firearm inside an occupied dwelling. This is not as bad of a crime as shooting at an occupied dwelling.
There is a notable case where a prosecutor chose to prosecute someone who shot inside a dwelling under the shooting at a dwelling law. Why? Because worser penalty is why. The higher Court, after appeal, ruled that a shooting done inside a dwelling is by default at a dwelling, since the dwelling is in fact in every direction from the shooter. Thus, every shooting in an occupied dwelling must be a shooting at an occupied dwelling. The less serious law is thus effectively nullified by the court.
I'll take it one step further. The law about shooting at an occupied dwelling also says that it doesn't have to be a gun, it can be a "missile." There's some language in there about how it has to cause significant risk of death or bodily harm. Despite that language, my most notable case under this law was the following facts:
One thirteen-year-old shot another thirteen-year-old with an Orbeez gun in a living room.
The judge refused to dismiss the charge. "Those things can put an eye out," she said. And thus the child was subject to felony liability for the drive-by shooting law for A FUCKING ORBEEZ GUN I SWEAR TO GOD I COULD NOT MAKE THIS UP IF I TRIED okay maybe I'm still a little mad
But the discussion on prison abolition tends to center not on these INCREDIBLY VAST MAJORITIES OF CASES where the law is stretched to fit the facts, where people weren't really hurt, where the police even generated the crime themselves perhaps by responding to a mental health crisis and provoking the situation until there are felony assault & battery on law enforcement charges.
Prison abolition discussions are all about what to do with murderers. Rapists. Abusers. Sex offenders.
To be clear, I believe there are some situations where a person will keep doing societal harm and will not stop. These situations are so shocking because they are so rare.
The first murderer I ever met was this guy who freely admitted what he did: he said he killed the guy who raped his daughter. He managed to get an incredibly low sentence out of the jury that heard the case. He was willing to pay the price of prison. He was honestly pretty interesting and willing to talk my visiting law student clinic through a lot of what had happened.
The first murder case I had, the client killed because of a sincerely held belief that he was in danger. The fact that this sincerely held belief was from an intense delusional psychosis makes it a deep tragedy.
Different places report different figures, but anywhere from half to 90% of the women in prison for murder are there for murdering an abusive spouse. Women don't fit under traditional definitions of self-defense, see; they don't wait until someone is coming at them ready to kill. Women shoot when the man is asleep. Women want to survive.
So even when you think of 'murder,' question this: why is heat-of-passion murder less bad in our system than premeditated murder? Premeditated murder, apart from serial killers, is a one-and-done thing. It's also much more common for female murderers to fall into the category of premeditation and for masculine to fall into heat of passion. People who murder when they're angry are an ongoing danger to society.
Prison abolition says: everything about this is wrong. Looking for an "alternative" is in many ways the trap question -- the wrong question. It's not about finding a different, better way to punish people. Maybe we still do need 1 in 100 of our current prisons to confine people who won't stop hurting others. Maybe a mental health system that's a tiny bit less pathetically anemic could help handle the load.
Prison abolition says: there's no reason to take this person out of society for x years, all of them at 100k/year expense to the taxpayers, subject to cruelty and dehumanization, in the interests of punishment, because it does too much harm. One year, nine months for possession of a meth pipe with residue? Go to a drug program, for god's sake. Two years, one month for larceny? Why spend more on locking the person up than they stole? Why lock them up where they can't pay restitution?
I can imagine a lot of ways it would look. Maybe prison abolition looks a lot like what we already have, except we have actual money available for other things. I think the point of books like Are Prisons Obsolete? is to start people thinking outside the box they've lived in their whole lives. Busting down that box is hard. It's super cool that y'all are reading that, btw. Hell yeah!
emotional responses are deeply evolutionarily advantageous in any animals that are making complex decisions and behaviors (in many vertebrates, say) because they act as a reinforcer for a behavior. a bird taking a vigorous bath in a puddle is probably happy because if that behavior didnt elicit a positive feeling they wouldn't do it (it is dangerous to be on the ground and wet!). if an animal can feel fear, which i think is a less contested assertion to make, then it can certainly feel the opposite, that is, happy.
The two wolves inside every writer: "this is genuinely the best thing i have ever written. i am gifted. i am changed. this paragraph alone justifies my entire existence on this planet." and then five minutes later, same paragraph: "who wrote this. who allowed this. this reads like a golden retriever trying to describe grief. i need to lie down and reconsider everything." both wolves are always wrong. the paragraph is fine. you need a snack.
I try not to fall into the "I never liked their work anyway" ditch when an artist/creator reveals themself to be a terrible person
BUT
a feeling I do have and will stand by is "While I enjoyed their work overall I did have some gripes that I overlooked out of affection and whimsy, but now that my loyalty is gone and my affection tainted there is nothing holding me back from enumerating my many grievances, to which the revelations of the creator's shittiness may or may not provide a new and infuriating context."
JRPG where the teenage firebrand protagonist is taken under wing by a wise older mentor figure in their twenties, as one does, except the third party member to join is in their thirties and regards both the protagonist and the initial mentor as dumb kids; the fourth is in their forties and thinks the same of the first three; and so forth.
There are a lot of people who start creative projects with no business or financial plan, because "who cares, it isn't important, we'll figure that out later". And you can't let yourself become that person. Not because I'm a sneering finance bro who thinks your woke animated youtube series wont make money, but because if you don't you'll wind up financially exploiting your friends for years
Look, it's none of my business if you wanna work yourself to the bone for no money so you can make your dream project a reality. I think you shouldn't, but also let's be real that's basically a rite of passage for young creatives. But as soon as you start involving other people? You need a plan. You need to be able to compensate them for their time, and you need to have it in writing
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.
I love it (sarcasm) when an author very clearly gets upset when they write an asshole, and then the readers hate that asshole. Because they wanted people to love the asshole because they're a sympathetic asshole or an asshole for good reason.
Especially when they get equally upset when they write a tragic villain and then get upset when people love that villain, but they hate the villain they wrote because "cool motive still murder".
If you're going to be upset that readers aren't feeling the same way about your characters as you, you should probably not be sharing your writing with others on public sites where anyone can see and comment and have an opinion.
Especially if the ""hate"" comments are something like "ough why they gotta be a dick to the kids it isn't their fault?"
(I am paraphrasing slightly to maintain the anonymitiy of the author).
If you can't handle people changing their opinions on your characters over time, idk maybe public writing isn't for you.
--
Heh. Yes, true.
It's also funny how often this isn't a case of outliers. You could have an author who is so sensitive that they're hugely bothered by the inevitable idiots with terrible reading comprehension who have some wildly bizarre take on canon that everyone else knows is nonsense.
Most of the time, however, I see this kind of crying about a character where I might even agree with the author's take, but engaging one single brain cell and knowing literally anything about tropes and tastes would allow you to predict that 90% of the audience would have the annoying take.
A lot of it comes across as "Why would you reinvent leather pants Draco???" Because we will always do that. Next stupid question!
It's partly an oversensitivity issue, but it's also partly a skill issue. If you don't want the common-but-annoying reaction, you have to go out of your way to include cues about how people are supposed to read this character. Make the cool-motive-still-murder one kick some puppies. Don't make them hot or give them a cool outfit. Or just make them cheat on their wife.
That's a simplistic example, obviously. A high degree of skill would be subtler, but it often feels like this type of author didn't even bother with the puppy kicking option, which should be available even if their skills are not impressive.
funny enough i think morrowind almost does the whole "nameless bandits" thing better than any game after it, mostly bc they're literally not nameless. almost every single bandit/smuggler/what-have-you has a fucking name. they're literally whole guys and sometimes they're related to other guys, and sometimes really important guys. galmis dren is not just a random battlemage you fight at the end of nammu. he's evidently a member of the prestigious dren family, which includes the literal duke of vvardenfell vedam dren himself. (i headcanon that galmis is actually orvas dren's illegitimate son.)
like unrelated to the point i was originally trying to make with this post. i love how interconnected the world feels due to the reuse of common surnames. like there'll be multiple people with the same last name, and that doesn't technically mean they're related but it's fun to pretend they are. and you can literally go to the ancestral tombs of LIVING families. eso tried to incorporate the ancestors of several morrowind characters but tbh morrowind did it first and better imo. you can literally go to a tomb and fight the great grandad (as a ghost or bonewalker or skeleton, albeit never named) of somebody you met in ald'ruhn that one time
blue sunset on Mars is a real phenomenon caused by the way Martian dust scatters sunlight.
Unlike Earth, where sunsets are red and orange due to the scattering of shorter blue wavelengths by our atmosphere, Mars has an extremely fine dust that scatters blue light more efficiently near the Sun.
So during sunset on Mars, the sky turns reddish-brown while the area around the Sun glows a soft blue. It’s the opposite of what we experience on Earth.
NASA’s rovers have captured this eerie sight
The Long Way Round @thelongestway - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
