JUST A CLOWN AT OPEN MIC NIGHT

"The Company is cheap" is people's "It's all Airplane's fault" in this fandom. (Airplane being the joke escapegoat/plot-hole-excuse from the SVSSS fandom).

The Company are cheap but I feel it's being conflated and misconstrued?? Beyond it's original context.

I think Murderbot calls the Company cheap, but it's best interpreted as the Company squeezing blood out of stone, really really thoroughly using, predatorily, every scrape of service they can out of SecUnits, sending the horse to glue factory sort of situation and feeding the meat to dogs, rather than not investing in the effectiveness of their weapons and shields and spyware.

There was a fun series of fics that explored CombatUnits and oooh was it juicy regarding the sheer technological advancement and care and deliberate "graceful degradation" put into Combats (the body horror!) but also how brutally pragmatic they were with scraping off the organic bits about a year into the Combats life and reusing the inorganic parts. Which is- exactly how you'd treat a weapon. You don't want your weapon to be ineffective. So you will build it durable and deadly because that's necessary otherwise you've wasted money. But... you can also refurb that fucker to hell and back as necessary. Brutal pragmatism. Less about being cheap. More about being very clinical and getting EXACTLY what you paid for, and more, squeezing blood out of stone.

When Murderbot says "cheap" you have to understand this is from the perspective of a living weapon. The Company isn't cheap in the sense that they wouldn't pay for whatever gives them an advantage. Because they absolutely would invest. They're cut-throat and as such want sharp knives. Cheap = the Company simply doesn't value life, personhood, or a gentle retirement for its SecUnits.

The Company knows and deliberately budgets for clients/prey who they don't see as a significant enough financial loss if they die, to carry greater risk. In financial terms, they have very precise and calculated "risk appetites". This translates to every second, every Joules of energy, budgeted for safe-keeping property/clients/prey whilst maintaining a good enough perceived reputation to not scare off future clients/prey.

The Company isn't "cheap". But Murderbot knows its specific personal value is cheap in the eyes of the Company. And so are the lives of its clients, if the Company can get away with it. Better yet, if they can make a profit off of equipment failure, why not set an "acceptable" (relative to average market standard) failure rate.

happy new year -------------_--------------------

Digital heaven

The pixels and codes and lightwaves hold you because I cant anymore

And you are always waiting for me to come home

People have gotten so anxiously stagnant with tokenism that when these characters are part of a story regarding the struggles of their bodies, there's a certain tunnel vision, the idea of loving someone including loving their body and these aspects of their body included means the rest of their person is not being respected, the idea that showing a trans person might not pass, or a disabled person might need help with their pain and physical limits, means that the artist is defining them by those traits. It feels like they only see one thing at a time and are discomforted by the acknowledgement of why people like me are often oppressed, not some storybook baseless bigotry, but an actual ideology based on a disgust they might share, making empathy hard to choose over sympathy, hard to understand that we're more than pitiable wretches and our bodies that people find maligned and broken could never be loved in the same way, and doing so is the result of some taboo of abuse.

Everyone could do the male, only the girls could do the female. (Not a surprise)

There was a bit of giggling. Then, we played the penis game**. All the boys LOVED this. They were yelling penis like their life depended on it. The girls were mostly disinterested.

Then I said "vagina". The boys froze. The girls started shouting.

"clitoras"

"ovaries"

"mensturation"

"uterus"

"tampon"***

I questioned the boys. Didn't they love this game? Why weren't they playing it anymore. I made**** them join in. If you can say penis, you can say vagina. By the end of the lesson, they were all just as comfortable saying male and female words.

*I am using male and female for ease of communication. We spent an entire lesson looking at intersex conditions, as well as the difference between sex and gender.

**usually, the game is that you have to say penis louder and louder until the teacher catches you and you "lose"

***we also talked about the fact that tampons are taxed under GST as a non-essential item, but condoms are not.