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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Solas's general demeanor + his companion quest comes across very differently playing it now (in my 30s, playing as a male inquisitor) vs when i first played this game (in my 20s, playing as a female inquisitor)
i don't remember thinking about him that much during my last playthrough, but i do remember finding his general ~*~vibe of otherworldly knowledge~*~ vaguely intriguing, and i assumed he had A Lot Of Good Wisdom Worth Deferring To; i might've even considered him as a romance option until i learned about his only-dating-elves thing (fuckin' racist!) and Pursued Other Choices
whereas this runthrough, every time he's Somewhat Superior-ly Pontificating On The Fade (In Curiously Vague TErms) or acting Generally Aloof (while acting Oddly-Intrigued-By-The-Inquisitor-In-Particular) i'm just like—
oh you're That Guy. dude-at-the-bar-who-got-a-PhD-but-your-academic-career-didn't-go-anywhere-and-you're-bitter-about-it-but-you're-not-TALKING-about-that-right-now-instead-you're-hitting-on-bright-promising-young-women-who-are-too-inexperienced-to-ask-themselves-pointed-questions-about-Hey-Why-Isn't-This-Obviously-Smart-Dude-Married-To-An-Equally-Smart-Woman-Already-And-Instead-Trying-To-Find-Someone-With-"Potential." i know your type
("lua it sure sounds like you're Making Up A Guy—" this is a type of guy, i promise! iykyk! "lua how the fuck would you know this kind of guy—" in my 20s i lived in cambridge ma lol case closed)
like i don't think that's the WHOLE of what Solas's writing is doing, and i don't even think that's quite the intent, but that's the vibe? like that whole "~*~oh we've been in the Fade the whole time~*~" sequence felt SO tryhard/preening lol
and it's even FUNNIER because that atmosphere makes some SENSE if you're conceiving of your player-character as a young woman (given Solas's attractions etc), but when it's a middle-aged dude it's just... kinda goofy lmao? like Why Are You Trying To Sound So Ethereal Dude. You Are Barking Up A Tree That I Know Canonically You Aren't Actually Barking Up So What's The Deal Here Man
i don't think the fact that Solas is technically a god changes my assessment there btw. you can be an immortal supernaturally powerful being and also kind of a loser. plenty of precedent for that! thousands of years of life and yet absolutely no drip. do you really want a man like that
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the phrase "but i didn't mean to!" in the context of causing harm is kind of redundant to me, because almost nobody means to cause harm. most of us just want to do the right thing. and i don't mean that in a wishy-washy "oh, we're all good deep down" way, i mean that even people who regularly do the most heinous shit imaginable will have a way of justifying it to themselves. the world is not populated by hollywood sadists and psychopaths.
actually i have been thinking about this some more and i want to add on to it:
abuse in caregiving professions (like teaching or nursing) is not solely a result of power dynamics. it's also because people who go into those professions often have a idea of themselves as Good People, and are consequently incapable of recognising or acknowledging when they've hurt someone else. instead, they mentally put 'people who have inconvenienced me' into the Bad People box so they can freely abuse them while maintaining their moral high ground.
i read ross greene a lot when i was working with "difficult" or "behaviourally challenged" children. his refrain is "kids do well if they can" - meaning, in short, that most kids act out only when the demands of a situation exceed their capabilities. punishing them for this is not only cruel but also completely pointless, because they also don't want to be doing what they are doing.
a teacher who believes that there are two categories of people - Good People who Mean Well, and Bad People who Cause Problems on Purpose - is not going to see it that way. they're gonna put themselves in the first category, and the misbehaving kid in the second category. and once they have effectively depersoned the child and placed themselves on a pedestal, the world becomes simple again. because abuse is something that only Bad People do.
Warhammer 40,000 is of course, uh, not unproblematic. But patterning orks specifically and incredibly blatantly off English football hooligan culture was probably simultaneously the least bigoted and most creative thing literally anyone did with the concept of 'the orc' at any point in the 1980s
A thing no one talks about re: ADHD is that you can't... gain experience, the way other people do.
I don't mean you can't get good at things through repeated practice. You can do that, I have done that, but I don't trust it.
I was driving this morning and thinking about how I have never developed the blasé contempt for it most people seem to despite never having caused an accident in 20 years because my sense of time is such that I might as well have been driving for a week. I'm a good, safe driver, but I do not have a heap of confidence in my driving despite having regularly done it for two decades because my sense of time is such that those two decades may as well not have happened.
I finished editing a novel today. When I publish it, it will be the 64th novel I have published in the last 10 years, not counting ghostwritten work. You'd think after a decade and 63 novels I'd be confident that I was capable of writing, editing, and publishing a novel—even be confident about the timeline for this—but no. No, I feel like I'm doing it for the first time, every time, and I was surprised to have finished the editing at all, let alone on time. Because those other 63 novels were published in a past I have a vague at best concept of. I have a record that says it happened but I do not feel it.
I cannot trust my future behaviour because for me there is functionally no past. I know it occurred, I have records, but I don't feel it the way people without this kind of memory issue do. I feel inexperienced at everything I've ever done and I cannot accurately estimate my skill level at anything, particularly not on the fly.
I don't have a solution to this I just find it an incredibly frustrating phenomenon.
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