Sunshine on a Cloudy Day

She/Her. pretty random collection of stuff, lots of cat pictures

[knightotoc]

ok I was just telling my sisters about the Vito Russo test and I was trying to say "one of the founders of GLAAD," but instead I said "one of the flounders of Gad" which is an extremely fun phrase to say. So of course we imagined the live action Little Mermaid remake but with Josh Gad as Ariel, and he spends the whole movie managing his swarm of Flounders (who of course include Vito Russo). And actually this movie would pass the Vito Russo test because now Ariel is gay for Eric, but being gay is not his primary character trait; his primary character trait is managing all his Flounders and their various fish problems. It's called "The Flounders of Gad" and they go on quests and stuff. And none of them are actual flounders, they're all different types of fish who are just named Flounder -- except Vito Russo, who is a flounder named Vito Russo.

[pagesofkenna]

System Collapse thought: MB keeps going on about how weird it is that Three only seeks out nonfiction education modules but like... buddy...

MB literally hacked its own governor module and quickly reached for something, anything, as a mental escape while it continued to physically pretend nothing was wrong. Three was given an educational file ending in the hacking codes, and then immediate freedom along with a job and responsibilities it could say no to

Like, the thing that gave MB context for its own existence was fiction, while the thing that gave Three that context was truth. Of course it's going be hungry for more truth

[lyricwritesprose]

There's also the fact that Three just knows less about the world. As far as we know it has been with one company its whole life. MB was a rental unit, and has seen (a) bits of the universe that try to eat you, and (b) bits of the universe filled with miners who are likely being shitheads to someone, but it has seen enough of those to get some idea of recurring patterns (and the pattern it has discerned is that things suck quite a lot of the time). By the time it hacked its governor module, it didn't want more facts about how things sucked, it wanted a place where they didn't. Three needs, first of all, information about the universe outside its bubble.

In contemporary human terms, it's like MB is a recently-adult foster kid who has done ten different shitty placements in the last five years, whereas Three was raised in one weird fundamentalist family which had strict rules about How Reality Works (which in no way resembled reality, but at least were consistent).

ART in the meantime is the relatively privileged professor's kid whose family initially think it is kidding when it says that the problem can be handled with a few Molotovs. It is not kidding and it has already made the Molotovs.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

kind of a side thought from a couple of my posts about writing but I think it deserves its own post, so here goes:

when you’re writing a conflict between two characters or factions of characters, you need to consider whether their disagreement over the premise or over the methods. put another way: do they disagree on the problem or the solution?

this is a genuinely tricky thing to identify, especially in very complex narratives, so let’s do some very simple examples.

the situation: pacifist nation X is about to be invaded by empire Y. the laws and cultural practices of the Xians make violence and death so abhorrent that even accidental death is as minimized as possible. the Ylings, on the other hand, are totally cool with straight up murder and think diplomacy is for wimps, but are also pragmatic enough that they won’t waste troops if they don’t need to. the king of X calls in his council and asks for their opinions.

character A: It is more noble to die for one’s beliefs than to live having broken them. We should allow the Ylings to invade us and if we die, we die. character B: If all life is sacred, then our lives are also sacred. We must fight back against the Ylings, even though that means we’d be committing violence.

A and B agree on premise but not solution: they both acknowledge that the Yling invasion is a bad thing that will lead to their deaths if unopposed and that the nonviolence code is important; what they disagree on is priorities and methods.

character C: We should invite them into our nation as honored guests. Maybe they’ll spare us or at least kill us more mercifully. character D: We should propose an alliance and intentional annexation in exchange for our lives. Being part of the Yling Empire is a pretty sweet deal, actually.

C and D agree on solution but not premise: they’re both okay with just letting the empire walk in and invade, but C thinks the invasion would be a bad thing and is just trying to minimize the damage, and D thinks it would be a good thing and wants to maximize the rewards.

character E: We should fight the Ylings and stay a sovereign nation; the nonviolence code is stupid and holding us back. character D: We shouldn’t fight the Ylings and try to be peacefully part of their empire instead; we’d be true to our code and reap the rewards of an alliance.

E and F disagree on both premise and solution.

Now, all possible permutations of this argument are fine. “Is this the best way to solve the problem?” and “What actually is the problem?” are both great sources of conflict. Captain America: The Winter Soldier’s entire plot is an argument over the methods to prevent death and crime, but everyone agrees that crime is bad; one of Zuko’s big character development moments is when he realizes that the problem with the world isn’t the other nations ungratefully rejecting the prosperity and unity offered by the Fire Nation, but that the Fire Nation routinely commits genocide in their quest to colonize the rest of the world.

The issue is when a disagreement over methods is treated like a disagreement over premise. The characters are positioned like one side’s entire worldview is correct and the other is wrong, but it turns out they actually disagree with what the other does rather than what the other believes.

A big giveaway that what you’re seeing is about methods and not underlying beliefs? If at any point it is said or implied that one character “goes too far.” “Too far” implies a point before that cutoff that the other characters or the reader would be okay with. You can’t go too far if going any distance in that direction is wrong. “Frollo in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame goes too far when he tries to kill all the Romani in the city” implies that the problem isn’t racism in general, but mass murder specifically, and that if Frollo was only nonviolently racist, that would be fine!

Like, you know the joke about the guy who offers a woman a million dollars to sleep with him, then ten dollars after she accepts the million dollar offer, and when she’s offended and says she’s “not that kind of woman,” he says, “Oh, we agreed you were that kind of woman, now we’re just haggling over price”? If your characters are arguing about the best way to solve a problem, they have already agreed about the existence and nature of the problem. Now they’re just haggling over price.

Again: that kind of storyline is okay if you actually do want to discuss extremism v. moderation of the same basic principle. It’s okay for two characters to argue over the best way to free all of their country’s slaves. It’s also okay for two characters to discuss the best way of practicing slavery, if you want to show how ingrained it is in society or how even the character you think is a moderate is still evil or something. What doesn’t work is if your intention is to say how awful slavery is, but then the entire conflict is over the treatment of slaves rather than whether slavery is okay.

tl;dr: setting up the conflict as one over premise and then having all the action be a fight over methods undermines your story; at best it’s just confusing, at worst it turns your characters into hypocrites.

[elumish]

I would add a third piece to this (or really split out “solution” into two pieces):

There is the problem, the end, and the means, and those are all things that can be disagreed with in different ways.

Let’s take a very basic scenario. Two people live together. There is a bookshelf full of books and there are books all over the floor.

Disagreement on the problem:

Person 1 thinks there are too many books on the floor. Person 2 likes having books on the floor because it makes the house feel lived-in.

Disagreement on the end:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that there are too many books on the floor. Person 1 thinks the ideal end is that the house has exactly one bookshelf worth of books in it. Person 2 thinks the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house but simply being somewhere that is not the floor.

Disagreement on the means:

Person 1 and 2 have agreed that the ideal solution is every book remaining in the house and being on a bookshelf. Person 1 thinks they should buy more bookshelves to fit every book. Person 2 thinks they should double- or triple-stack their shelves rather than spend money on new bookshelves.

This is obviously a very light example, but I think it’s not just problem/solution but “do we agree what problem we are solving, do we agree what the solution should be, do we agree on how to get there.”

[skipppppy]

So can non-disabled people stop doing that thing where they act like it’s morally righteous to force yourself to work while you’re sick and assume taking sick days automatically equates to laziness. Any time now. That’d be great

[skipppppy]

The leader of the scout group I help out at approached me out of hours while I was walking to work to tell me that people have been talking behind my back because I missed more sessions than I attended this term (on account of having Covid twice) and was like “We all show up when we’re sick because we take responsibility” and I felt really shitty and guilty and cried the whole workday then I got home and told my mum and she was like “So they want you to throw up on the kids? That’s dodgy. They don’t even pay you. Stop going” and a wave of serenity hit me like a bus

[croaksac]

HUGE developments in the big silly baby wearing fluffy pajamas fandom:

Oregon Zoo 05/30/26: This flouf is one of 15 healthy California condor chicks to hatch at our conservation center this season. A new record! #Condorable #KeepCalmAndCarrion

[rosslynpaladin]

When I was a child there were

22

of these magnificent ancient creatures still alive on this world. and I was aware of this at that age because nearly half of them were in a very secretive building on a hilltop near my house, in a last ditch effort by conservation scientists to breed and raise babies.

fifteen. Just born. this season. I cry tears of joy.

You did it. You're doing it. Keep fighting for a future, everybody- it's working.

[tvguts]

something about Toy Story toys is so strange to me. versions of animated characters based on real world toys, turned back into toys that are slightly different than the actual toys. slinky dog with a rubber spiral instead of a classic metal slinky. the porcelain bo peep and cloth woody turned into jointed plastic action figures. when toy story 4 came out and i saw a $30 talking action figure of forky, a character made out of a spork and a pipe cleaner, i stood in the walmart toy aisle staring at it like cameron from ferris bueller's day off staring at that painting in the art museum

[queer-as-city-folk]

I love old union songs because it's like this fucking asshole was a scab so we fucking threw him in the river and he broke his spine and when he went to heaven he was scabbing on the angels so they fired him down to heaven and the devil was like you have to work in hell for being a dirty scab

[queer-as-city-folk]

I'm not joking, this is an actual song

[queer-as-city-folk]

The modern Union could never make a song this good

[nart-is-a-monster]

[parabins]

tumblr isn’t considered a social media because everyone on here is just talking to themselves

[parabins]

yeah i agree

[you-are-not-real]

why is the reblog from before the post..?

[agam-shel-barvadim]

why IS the reblog from before the post???

[you-are-not-real]

thst’s what i’m saying!!!

[darthwillies]

say what you like about him but i have a lot of respect for luo binghe’s courtship methods. like he tried the “look what you’re missing out on” approach okay, he gave it a fair go. “look how cool and hot and powerful i am” is a straight up classic and he had it nailed down, he had his evil sword and dramatic poses to strike, he was locked tf in. but then when that failed to work he pivoted like a champion, going from his sexy badass persona to full-on sad kitten out in the rain, and i don’t think he gets enough credit for that. he is a grownass demonic emperor with subjects and presumably a lot of enemies looking for weakness, and yet he has fully committed to the untried and extremely specific “warbling baby bird” approach to wooing shen qingqiu. he is wailing and clinging to the best of his exceptional ability, all dignity abandoned, to get his man. that’s dedication.

[quantumseeker]

There is nobody more upset by modern Star Trek than my 80 year old grandmother. She called me after SNW’s final episode and starts the conversation with “Neshama I have been strung along for 60 years. It is legal now, why are they doing this?”

What is she upset about you may ask? Straight Spock. She is an avid hater of straight Spock. She said it was fine in AOS because he was “In the closet. Clearly he was dealing with some things.”

But the main reason she’s upset about it is because Spock always reminded her of her friend who was a queer Jewish man in the late 60s when they became friends. And I think that story perfectly summarizes the importance of Spock as a character, he was created specifically for those who were outsiders. Removing both the queercodedness and the Jewishness from Spock’s character had been a massive mistake on paramount’s part because that was a major factor in why Spock was a favorite. Trying to force Spock to fit whatever mold the political climate calls for goes against everything Spock and Star Trek represent. If my nana says Star Trek was more progressive in the 60s then we’ve lost the plot, the boundaries towards progress should not stay stagnant on the show they should continue to be pushed. They should not bend for the conservative base.

[covid-safer-hotties]

I keep saying there are literally millions of good reasons to wear a respie in public, and people keep ignoring me.

[cursedpossums]

unrestrained summer fun

[cursedpossums]

every year around late may, without fail, this post starts getting notes again . and my little wet raw chicken breast of a brain gets puzzled. because i forget that summer is , in fact. a yearly event

[huffylemon]

[sreegs]

my wife and i have a mutual friend who's one of those old new yorkers (lived in soho in the late 70s/80s, she was very scene,etc) and its fun to talk to her because we can be like "oh we're going to watch this Herzog film at Angelika" and she'll just pull out a story like "I once ran into Werner Herzog while I was closing the bar high off his gourd and I said "Oh wow Werner Herzog is here!" and he gently grabbed my shoulder and said "No he iz not." and left"

[dendrochilums]

i see potential for a murderbot that doesn't know what it looks like because it's decided it's safe to delete that information and it automatically applies a filter to any recordings of itself that it processes, and then some day ratthi shows it a picture of of some of its friends doing something, and mb is in the picture, and it points to itself and says "who the fuck is that?" great comedy potential

[elexuscal]

A popular human bonding activity is sharing photographs and other recordings of social events. I could understand that in the context of relaying vital updates of things which occurred at these events (for a very, very loose definition of 'vital') except humans did it even for other people who had been there at the time, and even allowing for the extreme fallibility of human memory, should be perfectly aware of who wore what and won which game or climbed what cliff or whatever.

That was what this social situation mainly seemed to be centering around, besides eating a drinking. My humans were there, gathered with a number of their friends, family, and romantic partners, and a knot had gathered around a display surface where Arada and the others were showing off a slide-show at a recent Survey Youth Training Day they had supervised.

This picture was a more candid shot. Arada and Amena were crouched on the ground, showing a younger attendant how to filter through dirt or something. There was another person standing right next to them, who caught my eye because: a) Despite having given lengthy anecdotes for everyone else in these pictures, this person had been omitted time-and-time again.

b) I didn't like the way they were standing so close to my humans and glaring.

"Who the fuck is that?" I said, and everyone laughed.

Seriously. Everyone.

I crossed my arms. "Fine then," I grumbled. They didn't have to answer me if they didn't have to.

Gurathin snorted. "Seriously?"

"What," I said, because everyone was still either chuckling, or shooting confused glances at me/my drones.

That was weird. I had already started running a feed search for the person in the images to cross-reference with Preservation's (public) image data-base and--

Oh.

I figured it out before any of the humans could answer me and Murderbot, this is why you should just shut up and do your own research before asking humans anything.

"SecUnit," Arada said, "that's you."

Yep. It was me.

Ratthi, sounding like he was trying really hard not to sound amuse and not really succeeding said, "Don't you know what you look like?"

"Of course I know what I look like," I said. "It's just not information I bother accessing all the time." Why the fuck would I?

One of Ratthi's current romantic partners tilted zer head. "But... don't you have all those drones watching all the time?"

I actually didn't mind this particular partner too much (ze had been very accepting of the drones, which was more than some people could say) so I actually bothered to answer. "They're for watching other people, not me."

Which was only half an answer, and judging by the puzzled looks, most people knew that, even though they didn't press. The full truth was... I didn't really like looking at myself. So unless it was absolutely necessary (e.g. ensuring I didn't blow my cover in hostile territory), I generally filtered out that information. And I generally deleted my memories of it after the fact, in order to save space.

Which was the same answer I gave when Arada asked, "But SecUnit, don't you remember being at this event?"

Everyone boggled at my casual deletion of the day, as if humans didn't constantly forget all sorts of information with way less deliberation than I did. "But what if something important had happened?" asked Pin-Lee.

"Nothing did," I said. And to prove it, I began reciting the report I'd written of the event for my own records (text takes up way less space than any visual media): "8:00am, set-up completes with no incident besides stubbed toe. 8:15am, Arada practices opening speech. 8:45am, Gurathin spills coffee on himself--"

"I think we get the point," Gurathin said. And with that, everyone finally moved on, as intended.

I did, privately, take an extra moment to review the photos everyone had been sharing, now that I knew I was in them. I only inteded to quickly glance, because, as I said, I didn't really get the point of looking at myself more than necessary, but--

--but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was.

I mean, I still didn't think it was fun, exactly. I didn't understand how some humans could spend hours taking pictures of themselves in mirrors and things.

But normally when I looked at myself, it was stressful. It was something I did because I was in a dangerous environment, and I needed to make sure I looked like a perfectly normal SecUnit or a perfectly normal human, and usually there was a risk of being shot and/or killed if I failed. And anyway, my face was weird, alright? SecUnit neutral looked weird, and so did every other expression, whether I was scowling or (ugh) smiling.

Or I thought it looked weird. It always had in the past.

It didn't look quite as weird anymore.

I don't know how to explain it, okay? I was looking at these recordings of myself and I looked. Fine.

I was wearing the really nice leather jacket I'd been gifted by Volescu and the others at a previous holiday exchange. It looked nice against my blue shirt. I'd let my hair grow out a bit, and I liked the way it hung over my eyes. My skin was darker than I remembered it being, probably because of exposure to solar radiation. And while I was still scowling in some images, in others I looked.

Fine. I looked fine.

... Maybe it was time to revisit the filter I was running. Just for the sake of optimizing my ongoing processes.

[spookberry]

Was reminded of my old monster Cinderella x Snow White story and felt like redesigning them a bit