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 (6/7 stories written, 7th in draft): Masterpost
The Nameless Fanfic (AO3 series link) 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 6 up on AO3, and I am working on the culmination of the last big story in this cycle. There are also standalone short stories from OC and other canon characters' perspectives.
Length-wise, this cycle is five novellas, two novels (final one in progress), and two short story collections. For The Murderbot Diaries, the story begins soon after Fugitive Telemetry and becomes an AU after System Collapse. For The Treegrave Chronicles series, this is a canon-compliant post-canon story to Time to Orbit: Unknown, which becomes a non-canon compliant AU from The Void Behind onwards. (VERY heavy spoilers for TTOU—if you don’t want to be spoilered on several major twists, get on the normal spaceship before reading!) Closer to The Murderbot Diaries than to TTOU on the sci-fi hardness scale. Point of view is primarily—but not always—SecUnit’s
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.
Story 6: Mitigating Circumstances (AO3 link)
When the Second Great Ship of the Arborea Cosmica fleet, Dandelion Tenacious, commits a series of crimes that could lead to her being decommissioned under fleet law, two of the youngest generation of ships are raffled in to lead the investigation and present its results to the rest of the fleet. In a community of fewer than fifty individuals, bias and personal tensions are unavoidable in any court case, and the trial of someone who was a major contributor to the fleet legal system was never going to be a simple affair—but Prosecutor Nike and Advocate Blaze, two New Texan sisters with very different relationships to the first generation of Arborean ships, never expected to face off against each other in a precedent-setting case involving a critical political alliance, ancient history, and obscure theology. Now they must chart a course to steer Arborea Cosmica for decades and centuries to come, and the currents they must navigate are far more turbulent than they ever imagined.
Thematically follows Roots and Branches and takes place during Network Effect.
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 for Roots and Branches (s4), but probably a good post-epilogue read
Axiom (Ghostwheel) - set between chapters 44 and 45 of Roots and Branches (s4ch44-45), best read after Digging in the Dirt chapter 7 (s5ch7), "Monster."
Group Therapy (Joscelyn) - best read after s6ch12, "Trial Eve," but chronologically set after chapter s6ch8, "Saint"
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.
Death Penalty (Pin-Lee) - best read after s6ch9, Evidence.
Inaugural Rites (Ratthi) - chronologically between chapters 44 and 45 of Roots and Branches (s4ch44-45), best read whenever you want to learn specifics about how this is an AU from TVB. Same as before, mild Aspen/Ratthi nerd smut included.
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!
Extras:
A series that stands slightly aside from the rest is Interesting Biomes (AO3 link). This is the full-smut version of Ratthi's chapters, plus an extra sketch. Having two versions available is mostly for reader preference, because I'm writing in two "complicated relationships with smut" fandoms.
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 and music I write to tags. 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!
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Watching my toddler figure out how to language is fascinating. Yesterday we were stumped when he kept insisting there was a “Lego winner” behind his bookshelf - it turned out to be a little Lego trophy cup. Not knowing the word for “trophy”, he’d extrapolated a word for “thing you can win”. And then, just now, he held up his empty milk container and said, “Mummy? It’s not rubbish. It’s allowed to be a bottle.” - meaning, effectively, “I want this. Don’t throw it away.” But to an adult ear, there’s something quite lovely about “it’s allowed to be a bottle,” as if we’re acknowledging that the object is entitled to keep its title even in the absence of the original function.
My son was about three when he came to me in the middle of the day and said, “Mommy, there’s a knight behind the bush.” I thought he meant a toy knight or something. So I follow him outside and he goes, “Listen. Do you hear it? It’s night behind the bush.” It was a cricket. A cricket was standing in the little patch of shade under the bush, chirping. So, my son saw this dark area with accompanying nighttime sounds and decided, okay, well, that is a night right there. Their brains are incredible.
My little bean knows she’s two, constantly saying proudly ‘I’m two!’ And the other day she saw this very frail old lady who looked one foot in the grave, pulled a face and said ‘oh shiiiit. She’s three.’ I almost screamed.
A lot of people know him as Dr. Grant from Jurassic Park, but Sam Neill has an incredible catalogue of film and television, stretching back to 1975 on the big screen, but he cut his teeth in university productions of Shakespearean dramas.
All this to say, Sam Neill never let himself get pigeonholed as an actor. He was an incredibly versatile actor with a plethora of roles and genres to his name.
And that's not even touching upon his interests outside of acting. He was a passionate vintner (of the Two Paddocks winery) and an outspoken environmentalist who frequently spoke out against political policy that negatively affected indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zealand.
Jurassic Park is an incredible film, and I know many people have fond memories of the original trilogy.
But Sam Neill was more than just Dr. Grant. And I think that should be remembered too.
this honestly just came out of left fucking field i would have never expected to hear anything like this in this show. consider me Pleasantly Surprised tbh
I pointed this out the last time this post started circulating, but House is explicitly disabled because Cuddy didn’t take him seriously about his pain until it was too late to save his leg muscle, and then she tried to convince him to cut it off so he could have a “normal” life with a prosthesis. He’s quite literally a walking display of what happens when doctors refuse to listen to patients who don’t communicate in a socially acceptable manner, and the reason he gets away with so much stuff is because Cuddy knows he doesn’t share her blind spot when it comes to putting the wellbeing of the patient above everything else, fuck protocol, fuck insurance, fuck liability, fuck the Hippocratic Oath, this person is in pain right now, everything else can go to hell until their pain stops.
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all the rights that come with marriage you should be able to have without marriage btw. you should be able to designate a person who can visit you in the hospital regardless of your relationship to that person.
the amount of leftists who uncritically support the DSM-5—wielding it online in battles against random individuals who might be “faking” a disorder—boggles my fucking mind. you guys realize that the DSM-5 isn’t the only diagnostic manual on the planet, right? you realize that we place it at the top of the global hierarchy because it’s american, right? has it occurred to you that the APA shouldn’t have so much authority over what counts as a “real” mental illness? has it occurred to you that perhaps there are other diagnostic manuals? in fact, there are dimensional models that don’t rely on sorting individuals into “disorder/no disorder” boxes in the first place. food for thought, lmao
I ended up having a really interesting conversation with some people at the bus stop today. They were getting out of some sort of ‘clean and sober’ meeting and had starting saying how they were so bored because they didn’t have anything to do, and had to stay at home because all their old friends would pull them back. So I said something like, ‘So this is the time to do all the stuff your parents told you they didn’t have money/time for!’
“Whatcha mean?”
“You know, like when you were five and you REALLY wanted to have that toy or do that thing and you were like, ‘Please mom please I gotta have this I gotta go do this’ and they went ‘Hell no you think I’m paying for that do you want to goddamn EAT?’ “
And this light went on in their eyes. The lady is going to go check thrift stores for an Easybake Oven and I told her about Wilton cake decorating classes. The dude is going to Griffith Park and ride horses, because, ‘I always wanted to be a cowboy, and you can’t drink when you’re on a horse ‘cause you’ll fucking die!’
Fuck it. This is what being an adult is. Sure it’s bills and work and relationships, but damn it, it’s also time to do the things you LIKE.
I signed up for a free class/lecture on Water Gardens. I’m going. It’s time.
no joke, this is such an important aspect of overcoming trauma. I mean the trauma of abusive parents, the trauma of broke ass parents who got toxic because of it, the trauma of capitalism. Like fuck it. Go to Wrestlemania. Build a shit ton of terrariums.
[Image: Post by Time Capsule Tales: "Rick Astley &the Foo Fighters perform "Never Gonna Give You Up" in the style of "Smells Like Teen Spirit", after Dave Grohl spotted Rick on the side of the stage aand just pulled him up to do the song." Video is as described by the post.]
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once i was browsing a tag for a thing i like that i won't mention here but it had an addiction subplot and i saw a post that absolutely gobsmacked me which said that having compassion for addicts was misogynistic and pro-abuse so I empathize with your pitt plight
truly in the minds of some people addiction is a thing only experienced by men, white people, parents, and abusers. they view it as a "first-world problem" that actual oppressed people can't get away with having and thus of course oppressed people never have it. as we all know, the reason you are less likely to encounter multiply marginalized people with criminalized / stigmatized psychiatric conditions in every day life is because multiply marginalized people just elect not to have them and no other reason. why is someone linking me to a picture of a plane covered in polka dots.
I'm having difficultly articulating this in a way that sounds coherent, but I think there's a tendency on particularly this website to think of addiction as a problem that you couldn't ever have. one of the most common takes about personal substance use I hear on here is "my parents / other family members had addiction issues so I've decided to be sober to avoid that potential problem," which, yknow, valid and real, but I think when that's the attitude expressed in a given environment over and over again it gives rise to the idea that you can just Decide not to become an addict and so anyone who does become one simply never made that wise decision to #justsayno. another common take I see around on here is "why is it so normalized for people to pollute their bodies with poisons? I just don't see the appeal, why would someone do that to themself?" which, again, betrays a view of addiction as being the result of irresponsible choices that you would never make. you understand that substances are bad, you are responsible, you would never choose to make yourself a burden to others, and if someone isn't savvy and socially conscious enough to make those wise decisions that that person must be a them, an Other outside your social circles who just doesn't care and probably presents a threat to you.
to continue to use the above post as a little case study, it's written from a place of empathy for children being deprived of access to knowledge of things that are relevant to their lives, and the voice of the post can empathize with the idea of being a child soldier, murdered, trafficked, assaulted, those are all things that could happen to you, but it breezes right past the opportunity to empathize with the idea of being an addict in a really obvious way that breaks the form the post. that line also contradicts the post's own point, it's presuming that children are too "innocent" to be addicts and that the information about addiction available to children should center around "how to handle someone in your life being an addict" instead of "how to handle it if you are an addict." also kind of ironic, cause, like, what kind of children do you think the troubled teen industry is trafficking?
something something extremely sexy when magic users resort to physical violence. yeah i have the power of god and anime on my side but i also have THESE HANDS. i cast Punch You In The Face. i take my magic staff through which i channel the vast energies of the elements and the cosmos and i cast Severe Concussion And Skull Fracture. casting time for xenoglossy too long, chose the quicker route of Stab You In The Throat.
#chronicles of Amber#Merlin of chaos#Merlin of amber#computer wizard#can cast a heart attack spell#can dig a grave with a spell#can throw fireballs etc.#carries a garrote for murder reasons#swords are a tripping hazard but strangling cords are practical
Haha, I love this! Drawing smut in general is SUPER helpful for getting better at human anatomy, but anyway, the nail thing! I'm gonna turn this delightfully silly post into a mini tutorial, so—apologies. 😅
The reason nails often help hands look better is because they curve around the cylinder of the finger. If the viewer can see the curve of the nail, they can better understand the foreshortening and such going on with the finger and the hand in general.
For example, I quickly sketched what are essentially two cylinders, and on the right one, I put a nail and some knuckle wrinkles. As you can see, the blob on the left could be facing in any direction, but the finger on the right is very clearly pointing somewhat toward the viewer and is foreshortened.
*Keep in mind, you probably shouldn't be heavy-handed (haha) with fingernails. If you work with line art, the lines for nails should generally be very soft and thin, and often not continuous—you're more suggesting the nail. Thick lines around nails usually make people look like they have dirt under and around them, which is fine, but not something that fits most styles.
#i will caution people to not learn how to draw feet from internet fetish art for the same reason you don't learn to draw boobs from hentai#limited corration to reality which is kind of part of the fetish sometimes and thats fine#but if you want to learn to draw feet#you gotta go vintage#and by vintage i mean the OG hand and foot and fat fetish guy himself -#Michaelangelo di Lodovico Bunnaroti Simoni of Rome#Sistine chapel mike#The David micmac#go look at his work on julius 6's tomb for the most anatomically accurate#emotionally evocative and outrageously horny feet hands and fat
“One piece of advise would just be this: Don’t tell a story because you’re sustaining a franchise, don’t tell a story because they’ve given you hours to make a tv show and you want an audience. That’s the problem with most episodic television which is that, once you get a TV show up you think that the meaning of your life is to keep the show up at all costs. So if the audience wants one more Omar, give them more Omar, if they want more Stringer Bell, give them more Stringer. So the greater question that I think a lot of writers in television don’t ask are why are you telling this story, what does the story means. When you can answer the big questions then, you are ready to write.”
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signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy
#The number of compliments i have gotten for reading a thing
The ability to occasionally Read A Thing will make you a hero in your workplace, especially if it is for example an error message that tells you what you need to do differently, or instructions on unjamming a printer.
I work in tech, and much of what I do is support sales reps within the company by resolving errors with the software they use.
There is one sales rep who, every single time I send her a message or email with extremely specific instructions that will resolve her issue, does something completely different from what I tell her. Every time. Without fail. It is so glaringly obvious that she has never read even a single word that I have written to her.
So one day, she sends me a message that says little more than "(software) is broken, help"
So I do my standard song and dance of asking her what she's trying to accomplish, and what specifically is stopping her from doing that. And eventually, after much unnecessary back and forth, she tells me there's an error message. I ask her to send me a screenshot of the error message. She does.
The error message basically says, "these two required fields are blank. To resolve this, please fill in these two specific fields, and then click save."
So I take a few deep breaths.
Then I lie to her.
I message her back, saying "hey yeah, for some reason it's not loading that screenshot on my end. Could you type out the full text of the error message for me?"
Client is reporting that Some Thing Program doesn't work. I ask if there's an error message with further information about what's not working. Client says "no". I go over and ask Client to open Some Thing. Client double-clicks on the icon for Some Thing, it starts to boot, an error message dialog flashes up on screen, Client closes error message before I can read it, Thing closes after the error.
"What did that error message say?" I ask.
"What error message?" asks Client.
I tell Client to open the Some Thing again and then not click anything else. Client opens Some Thing, error message appears, Client clicks it away again.
I tell Client to stand up, step away, and give me physical control of the computer. I open Some Thing, start looking at the error message without closing it, and Client says "You should close that." I tell Client that I am reading the error message. Client is apparently accustomed to treating error messages as a kind of spam email that should be deleted as fast as possible, and gets agitated that I'm reading it.
I read the error message. It tells me what the problem is. I fix the problem. Some Thing works now.
---
Later, I start thinking about how such an error message might perhaps be engineered to be more attention-grabbing and close-resistant as a way of making people read it. It's not important for some random program here, but there are more important systems (medical, etc) where it would be reasonable to demand the user's attention because people's lives depend on paying attention to the error message.
But then people with a perverted intellect would still be thinking about ways to avoid reading the message, like dragging it off edge of screen or hiding it behind another window. So maybe the dialog box could have an always-in-front feature to override other windows, and the alert could use the computer's hardware "beep" functionality that can't be switched off by muting the regular sound system, and keep beeping... shit, I realize I'm reinventing pain, and get philosophical about it.
She was a computer programmer / analyst, a... Long Time Ago. Called in for a system she'd installed before, the office folk said they kept having problems where it Didn't Work Right (no error, a malfunction)
She investigated, and told them that could only happen if they did 3 specific things in a specific order, which they should not ever do.
So, she asked, did they ever do that?
No! Of course not, was the answer.
So she made a couple of small changes, packed up and said that should be fine, but they should call her if there were problems.
The next week
She had a call saying "We're getting a strange error message on the system, can you help?"
She said, of course, can they tell her the error?
And the message was:
"You Said You Didn't Do This"
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