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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It's not like Deep Space Nine or Prodigy have handled their stories around genetic augmentation perfectly either. But neither of those shows opened with the main character comparing being disabled to being dead or viciously killed off their only disabled main character. I wouldn't like how Strange New Worlds handles its genetic engineering storyline regardless, but it is made so much worse by the fact that the writers have made it very clear that they do not care about disabled people and disability justice at all
The tie-in series to Star Trek (2026) starts here! From Nebula and Hugo Award–winning writer Charlie Jane Anders (New Mutants, Lessons in Magic and Disaster) and artist Isaac Sánchez González (TMNT, Godzilla) comes an extremely CLASSIFIED mission.
A starship graveyard on the moon. A captain haunted by failure. A mission that could change the future of the Federation…or end it entirely.
Raffi Musiker takes command of the U.S.S. Endeavour—and is immediately handed a classified directive from Starfleet. Follow the guidance of a powerful, untested A.I that can predict threats before they happen. But these missions aren’t exploration—they’re a gamble. As systems fail, pressure mounts, and missions spiral out of control, Raffi must decide who to trust: her crew…or the machine guiding them.
Because some discoveries are better left buried.
And some warnings come too late.
Also, for Lower Decks fans, Tendi is going to star here.
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PSA to fan creators who don't have a lot of regular contact with children: They are almost always bigger than you think. A 1-year-old baby may already be walking. A toddler is likely already hip-high. A 10-year-old may already be taller than at least one of their parents. A 14/15 year old may already have reached their adult height.
this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X
this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology
what
okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal
I wanted to ask for X and accidentally called someone a whore
This reminds me of that time my (Czech) family went to Poland for my uncle's wedding (because my aunt - his wife - is Polish and they decided to get married in Poland).
The wedding afterparty was in full swing, everyone was drinking and partying.... and an elderly Polish lady approached my two aunts (who were also drinking a lot and partying hard) and commented something along the lines of "jesteście odporne". Which in Polish means "you're resilient" (as in they're handling the alcohol well) but in Czech it means "you're disgusting".
It took my aunts a bit to remember that it means something different in Polish. 😅
Great project from radiotavisupleba about the august war of 2008, combating the Russian narrative that their attack on Georgia was a "one time thing" and not a continuation of Russia's historic imperialist ambitions
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Info: today, on August 7 marks 14 years since Russia started war with Georgia
On August 7 of 2008, Russian tanks moved towards Georgian borders. As a preemptive act, on August 8, then Georgian president Saakashvili opened fire to block Roki tunnel, the main way through which Russians were able to cross the border. Since then, Russia has claimed that war started on August 8 and not 7 which discredits Georgia's right to defend itself.
On August 9 of 2008, Russia bombed one of the biggest Georgian cities - Gori, devastating the area and killing innocent civilians (the photos are from Gori)
Russia took some Georgian villages during that war, which are still occupied to this day.
(suddenly serious) what i was saying was that Dungeon Meshi has some really well-written characters that also have flaws. half the cast constantly gives Laios shit for being socially awkward, Laios forgets about the basics of human decency a couple of times when interacting with Izutsumi, the funny late-story villain squad are 80% convicted criminals, basically every character is a bit racist in some way, and, yes, Marcille, everyone's favorite silly little disaster lesbian, gets the "ick" about Tall-men portraying the characters in her favorite romance novel because she thinks they're too ugly and pouts about the idea of Falin (her dear beloved Falin) wearing clothes that she would be happy and comfortable wearing because "that stuff is for men"
i feel really silly talking about this but a weird thing that happened for me when the Dungeon Meshi anime took off and the fandom really exploded was seeing how weirdly cutesified a lot of fan depictions of the characters was. the "canon versus fanon" of it all, if you will. a week or so ago there was a bonus comic drawn by Ryoko Kui that got spread around Twitter about a What If situation in which Laios got eaten instead of Falin, and people were shocked about the idea of the party basically immediately giving up on the idea of saving Laios, including at least one "why does the writer think she knows so much" joke (i'm hoping it was a joke), which really baffled me because it just made sense to me that the party initially wasn't all that close to Laios (besides Falin, obviously). the relationship of the main cast is something that grows over the series. please read that carefully: the main cast does care for one another, they care for Laios, it's just that it's something that is developed over the course of the manga... and even that idea was too much for some fans
i'm probably going to sound really snobby, but i think there's a lot of people who are more fans of the fanart than the actual series...
i was mainly being silly when i was like "yeah let Marcille be weird about gender" but i was also kind of serious because it kind of is a prominent part of her character. it speaks to the world she lives in, what she values and finds important, and if you think about it, it actually speaks a lot to the subtext around her and Falin: Marcille hates "gross things," Marcille hates being uncomfortable, Marcille thinks women should be girly, and men should be masculine, and yet she willingly journeys down into a gross dungeon and eats weird monsters in order to save Falin, a woman who likes bugs, fucking around in the dirt, and pants. what do you think that implies about Marcille?
i appreciate writers that don't smooth all the rough edges off their characters. in Kui's case, we all know she's put massive amounts of thought into the world Dungeon Meshi takes place in, and the views of her character reflect all these thoughts. i don't think Marcille being "conservative" is an accident- i would go so far as to say that i don't think the "contradiction" of Marcille's love of Falin is an accident. i think this is all the sign of good writing, and i think it's a diservice to the writer to try and make these characters more "palatable" (and fit all the corny "found family" memes lol)
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you know, i got over the darkness in prodigy's premise real fast like yeah yeah the protagonists start out as child slaves that's par for the course in modern day kids' shows right
the part i never got over was time amok. literally sometimes i'm lying down and then i remember time amok and i'm like. jesus christ they really did that to a little girl huh
“I have a thought about ‘kill your darlings.’ There seems to be a general notion out there in the ether that the phrase means, ‘Hunt down every sentence or image you really love and cut it down like a pernicious weed.’ That, my dears, is bullshit. In my opinion, what it really means is, ‘If you’re rewriting a whole scene just so that a paragraph or conversation you’re in love with will work, and it still kind of doesn’t, maybe it doesn’t really belong in this story and you should print it out and put it in a lovely, decorative folder labelled DARLINGS to read on those days when you hate every sentence you’re writing.’”
— Delia Sherman, American fantasy writer (via ellenkushner)
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