birds, novid, and shitposts

unauthorized fucking thing!!!!!!

(warning: loud chirping throughout)

Some things we know about Season 2 so far: r/murderbot

This is an amazing compilation post by u/ESE-enthusiasm on reddit.

Some key takeaways:

debuting before June 2027

boiling down the 3 pre-Network Effect novellas into a single season

episodes will be a little longer

per MW circa 5/8, they hadn't cast ART yet, and had a stand-in reading lines (so no human actor on-set, yay!)

we will see more visual effects depicting MB's POV and operating processes

we will see more of Sanctuary Moon and other shows

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

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht. 

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

and those two moms eventually broke up while still sharing custody of her

and eventually both moms found new partners who also helped with parenting so she technically had 4 moms at one point

and i've known this for a while and it has meant nothing to me, but recently she dyed/bleached her hair a platinum blonde and ever since then i've been greeting her in the morning with a cordial "heyyy what's goin on?"

As we know, sometimes MB uses the entirety of its logs as a message for someone (the Mensah letter, helpme.file etc)

Well I was listening to fugitive telemetry again today, (I'm not gonna think about how many times I've listened to this book, but anyways) and this line at the end jumped out at me:

Indah said, “Good to see you in one piece.” Yeah, whatever. “You read my report?” “I did.” She added dryly, “I’m glad you documented the whole process. It’s good to have a reminder that we actually didn’t do too badly, except for that one basic wrong assumption.” The assumption that the perpetrator had entered the transport from inside the station instead of outside, she meant.

...

Unlike Indah, I wasn’t happy with our performance. Especially since I’d been the one to confuse everything by insisting the surveillance video on the transport dock had been altered. I just said, “I didn’t want anything to be left to the imagination.” “Probably for the best.” Then Indah sighed, and said, “I wasn’t the one who sent that photo of you to the newsstreams.” It was unexpected and it made me drop some inputs. I picked them back up again. I didn’t know what to say, because obviously what I should say was I didn’t think it was you except that was absolutely not true, I had been 96 percent sure it was her. She continued, “I wouldn’t use the newsstreams like that. If we have to fight about Mensah’s security, we’ll fight, but I won’t undermine you. Since we are actually both on the same side.”

Given that it includes a whole section in the book about how it assumes Indah sent its picture to the news feeds as petty revenge, and how much time it spends complaining about how lax they are about Mensah's security... Should we assume that Murderbot sent basically the entirety of Fugitive Telemetry to Indah as its mission report???

While Arada and Murderbot's relationship is not central to the narrative over the course of the Murderbot Diaries series, they still have a meaningful and close friendship based on mutual respect, as MB has with all of its humans. Furthermore, Arada serves as MB's social foil to demonstrate the extent of its interpersonal skills.

The Murderbot Diaries books are written in first person perspective (with the exception of the short stories) and focus on the development of MB into a person who is comfortable identifying as a person, especially in the original quartet. As such, all of MB's interactions and relationships provide narrative foils in some sense because all of them are contrasting characters whose "qualities emphasise another's [...] by providing a sharp contrast" to Murderbot [1]. Arada appears in two books as a major character, one as a minor character, and is mentioned in two more without a significant role [2]. Over the course of the three books she plays a large role in, she and Murderbot become friends and mutual clients, although to a lesser extent than Murderbot and Mensah [3]. Their relationship sets up Arada's role as a foil highlighting MB's surprising analytic abilities in social situations, as well as its capability to thrive in such situations. Murderbot is better at initial big picture analysis, while Arada is good at small-scale interpersonal interactions.

Tiny Mensah Child: SecUnit!!!! What’s your favorite character from Sparkle Defense Force: Musical Memories!!