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!
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Materials science is the most subtly cool field of tech advancement tbh like while the techbros are going on about their newest ridiculous "world-changing" piece of software, materials scientists will slowly work in the background and suddenly laundry detergents are just better, electronics more efficient, just these little incremental things
i step out onto stage clad in full corpse paint and death metal regalia and start playing the most middle-of-the-road soft rock you've heard since 1974
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We only find the bangers! This is a really important thing to remember both when analyzing ancient literature and when comparing your own writing to historical authors.
The less brilliant stories don't survive because people didn't make a million copies of them to pass around. It's pretty much guaranteed that there were a hundred other Gilgamesh stories circulating around the same time that did in fact suck balls, and just as many that were solidly mid, but people didn't write them down as many times (if ever), so fewer (if any) fragments survived.
It's easy to get discouraged thinking that 95% of ancient writers were brilliant compared to maybe 5% of modern writers. But really, it's just that 95% of what survived came from those few truly genius writers. Everybody else was out there telling stories too, and finding audiences who loved them, and producing beautiful art, they just weren't lucky enough or famous enough to get their stories recorded enough times for us to piece them together from whatever fragments survived the intervening centuries.
"The [1728] essay Peri Bathous was a protracted dunk on contemporary poets the author didn't like ... The essay is very incomprehensible to a modern reader because none of the poets getting dunked on are remembered nowadays on account of how they sucked..."
Ooooh, we have a bunch of really fancy pedestrian traffic lights in Germany! I need to share:
Starting off with the difference between formerly Eastern German traffic lights (upper images) and formerly Western German traffic lights (lower images):
The city of Erfurt had some additions, like an umbrella or a heart:
Same sex love in Marburg (upper image) and Frankfurt (lower image):
Traffic light lady in Bremen:
Karl Marx light in Trier:
Face of Friedrich Engels in Wuppertal:
Elvis in Friedberg (Hessen):
A sparrow (for the Golden Sparrow film awards) in Gera:
Winemaker in Bad Dürkenheim:
Mainzelmännchen (mascot of the public broadcasting service ZDF) in Mainz:
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misfingering a note in a fugue feels exactly like catching an edge while skiing which feels exactly like what i imagine a computer feels when you dereference a null pointer
no but like its crazy how the mind works. i couldd not tell you gun to the head why i like geten so much i used to hate the little cunt and he doesnt have much going on. but wretched are the ways of the miracle, i guess
ID: A youtube comment with 11 likes by Niceone, it says "I've lived 46 years without knowing this. How nice of life to save some of the best bites for later." End ID.
Normally, people tend to get frustrated, even jokingly, if they miss out on something. This comment was on a song from 1974 and it made me smile quite much. Simply appreciative. Like a dessert after dinner.
It is genuinely mind blowing to me just how many Tumblr posts have changed my life for the better and taught me to be happier. Not all of the thoughts originate on Tumblr, but the way people collect and frame them has literally changed my brain chemistry.
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Blame the government! Ordinary people are not at fault!
Ordinary people are working at factories and making bombs. Ordinary people are going to the occupied cities to settle there. Ordinary people taking the abducted children for "re-education". Ordinary people doing all the soft power work and whitewash state's crimes. Ordinary people launching missiles. Ordinary people go to newly occupied territories for vacations. Ordinary people do nothing and say nothing about state's crimes even when they have a chance. Ordinary people teach their kids to be the same.
And ordinary people loudly play victims while sending you death threats and calling you slurs. Ordinary people are telling the people their government bombing that they deserve to be bombed. Even if they were claiming they hate their government just a moment ago.
Army consists of ordinary people who decided to go to kill people in another country for some cash.
And some of them even think they should be praised and rewarded for leaving Omelas.
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