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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This scenario has wormed into my brain the past few days, and I've finally written some of it down! It's unfinished, but if I don't post it now, it will languish in my drafts forever, so here you go: a little bit of Julian Bashir angst!
---
He doesn't find out until much later, when they're docked on Starbase 365, in the middle of what had been an innocuous, enjoyable discussion about latest medical research with the Honshu's CMO. But of course, it's wartime, and even little joys aren't allowed to last, these days.
Their conversation meanders from topic to topic, until Doctor Ashande brings up how impressive she'd found his research into the Teplan Blight, especially his ongoing dedication to it, despite the planet's recent destruction by the Dominion. "What made you choose to continue?" she asks.
"Destruction? No, I— I think you must be mistaken..." Julian replies, even as he hurries to the computer to double check. Because she can't possibly be right, he'd have heard something, been told—
"Teplis III" flashes up on the screen, and Julian's heart stops. Words blur together – "warning", "interference", "resisting Dominion authority", "complete annihilation" – and yet, as jumbled as it is, he understands immediately what has happened. The Teplans are dead. And it's his fault.
"No..." he breathes, mouth still trying to deny what his brain already knows. "No— No, it can't be, that's not, I-I don't..."
The date of the attack stands out, laying the blame squarely at his feet: 51625.3. Less than a month after the changeling had been rooting through his files while impersonating him. That's how the Founders must have found out about the Teplans' "resistance" - his own damned research.
"Vaccine", "Blight", "Bashir", "Bashir", "Bashir" – he can't look away from the screen, can't stop re-reading these words that he's already committed to memory, that he'll never be able to unsee.
"I'm sorry, I'd assumed you'd know," Doctor Ashande is saying. "Your Commander Dax is next door, should I fetch her?"
He shakes his head: he's fine, he's fine, this is his mistake, his responsibility, he just needs to—
"Breathe. That's right, nice and slow. Why don't we sit you down, yes? And breathe again, in.... hold.... out.... That's it. Ashande to Dax - could you come through, please? Doctor Bashir's had a bit of a shock."
Time is too slow and too fast; a million thoughts burn through him before Jadzia appears, but all at once she's there, crouching down beside him, asking him what's wrong.
"I should have listened, I should've— They told me not to help, Jadzia, and now they're dead. They're all dead."
His stuttering barely makes sense, even to him, but somehow, Jadzia seems to understand. "Teplis," she says, her gaze flicking from Ashande to the computer and back to Julian. "Oh, Julian. I'm so sorry."
"Nine months," he whispers. "If I'd only left them alone, they'd have had years."
"Julian, it's not your fault. We both wanted to help - it's the Dominion who sent them the Blight, who attacked them. Not me, not you. You were only trying to help."
"Well, maybe I shouldn't have!"
"Julian, you aren't responsible! And your vaccine, Mechlem's birth – that gave them hope, Julian. That's got to count for something."
->Julian argues that it was his obsession with finding a cure that made the Founders catch into what had happened. He reckons that the changeling might not have picked up on the vaccine if its only mention had been in one of many Starfleet reports he files - but he'd ran so many experiments, written so many pages of research while trying to find a cure that he'd made it impossible for the changeling to miss what he'd done on Teplis.
-> Much later, he finds out that Sisko had known about this when it had happened, but hadn't been able to bring himself to tell Julian, since it was around the time his parents had just left the station. He had told Jadzia though, who'd agreed that now was not the right time to tell him.
OOOOH, now THIS is a FEAST!!! Love it when Starfleet fucks up by telling people far too little, and when Julian fucks up by thinking he knows best, goddd. This is perfect ✨👌✨
AAA video game publisher voice: "Look. The goose layed a golden egg, and that's nice! Everyone loved that egg. But keeping the golden goose means paying for bird feed and I don't want to, so I killed the goose."
#‘that goose keeps laying golden eggs. that’s stagnation. I’m going to kill it and go look for a goose that lays diamond eggs’#‘that goose normally lays golden eggs but this time it laid a silver egg. I’m going to kill it because even though I can still make good#money with that it’s not as good as a golden egg’#‘that golden egg laying goose only lays an egg once a day instead of constantly shitting them out. I don’t care that golden eggs take time#if they’re not constant the goose is worthless to me’
@thebaldursmouthgazette y u leave all the good stuff in the tags
I know this would be a massive overhaul of, like, the entire site, so it's pretty unfeasible, but it really would be nice if ao3 had an easy way to filter for, for lack of a better term, secret third thing relationships. obviously this would have a lot of utility for aspec characters in weird relationships where the honest answer to "are they dating and/or having sex?" is "we shrimply don't know," or for characters who are straight up explicitly in qprs, but I think fandom as a whole often enjoys digging into blurred, indefinable, and dramatically over-intense relationships. examples: characters who don't want to kiss or sleep together but are in a committed bond and functionally act as spouses, friends with benefits who are decidedly not romantic with each other, and characters who are romantically and sexually involved but mostly as a side effect of the Weird Intense Thing they already had going on.
it wouldn't be a defined Third Type of relationship filter, it would be a grab bag for anything outside of "romantic and sexual" and "nonromantic and nonsexual," but as it stands I think it's mostly the "&" tag being used as the grab bag for "???" relationships currently. what if I want to write about that classic "two queer woman characters have been best friends since elementary school and functioned as an inseparable unit until young adulthood and have had moments of attraction towards each other since high school that they've never acted upon but they absolutely never would have had this kind of bond with straight female friends" experience? is that a / or an & ?
In short? The Trump DOD thought the Iran War would be over immediately but the aircraft carrier has been at sea for 9+ months and in combat for 5 months and it is running out of supplies and having major maintenance issues. Morale amongst the 5,000+ crew is abysmal because they thought this was going to be a 7 month deployment and now they have no idea when they’re going to go home and conditions aboard are growing shittier and shittier.
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As an older queer, allow me to say: the walls of the closet are load-bearing. It is our job as a community to stand in front of that door and tell everyone who wants to peek inside to fuck off.
There are so many reasons a person may choose not to come out and there is no reason a person would owe the public or a stranger that information. Certainly it's not owed simply because someone is famous.
We have fought for decades to make it safer for people to be open and authentic about themselves, but we are not yet there. And even if we were, the closet would still be something we need to maintain for those who are not ready to reveal that part of themselves.
I was outed by Star Wars fans within moments of AHSOKA being announced back in 2016. It went fine, but it could have gone badly, and I think about it from time to time.
TVL is some of the densest writing I have ever seen on a tv show. The writers treat every single line like it needs to be doing three jobs at once - foreshadowing, character work AND a callback to something said in season one. No show is above criticism and when all is said and done i'll have my own critiques of season 3 but the quality of the writing or the writers room not understanding these characters is not one of them. you WILL need the rewatch. you WILL need to pay attention or you miss something important or misunderstand the characters. they will not hand it to you easily.
I have seen it all five or six times now, and even then I had to put on subtitles for some lines. They talk over each other, there's music everywhere, accents, etc.
And that's just the physical thing of actually hearing what they say. I bet I have to rewatch iwtv to get at least a few more callbacks. Also, foreshadowing everywhere. Blending of scene snippets in rapid succession. Music interpreting story, story interpreting music. Repeated scenes, corrected scenes. Lightning cues, music cues, word cues. Even fucking costumey shit I only start to notice now.
It was a BREATH OF FRESH AIR having a show that doesn't give it to me straight. I was so so so so tired of today's shows being a patchwork of fanservice and remakes and vertical iconic scene slop made to watch while you scroll tiktok
Right? It was a fun, trashy ride in dramatic theatre kids style the first time, but what makes it addicting to me is that I'll always find new things on every rewatch. While still being a fun, dramatic ride^^
Even a “wow, cupcake, you sure tried” attempt is better than not trying. (Also he’s from 2005. Art styles have improved a lot.)
And also-also…if you’re one of those “but I like the sameface look,” okay listen you’re allowed to have weird taste but Yu-Gi-Oh was still kicking your ass back in 2000.
Technically I think this is modern art, but the colors are the same as the original. Character on the left is ancient Egyptian. Surprise surprise, they were able to darken his skin and use his clothing, jewelry, and surroundings to separate him from his Japanese lookalike. And yes, “ancient Egyptian” is not the same thing as Black, but there is some overlap in skin color between light-skinned Black people and pre-Arab Egyptians, and the case shows the possibility. You could do this with a darker skin color. It is possible.
kirk: happens every other week on that ship. there is no need to theorize, we know
sisko: he has mutually enjoyable sex with dax and they laugh it off the morning after and there is some regret but like they both admit it was kind of good because they would spent this whole time wondering about the what if if they didn't. they don't talk about it but they exchange a knowing smile in the morning
janeway: she doesn't even notice it happened at first because she has such an iron grip on her own desires. then she sees chakotay and has sex with him however somehow it leaves chakotay with the distinct impression they didn't, or maybe he just imagined it very vividly or something. life goes on, we have a ship to get home
picard: has sex with riker but it's honestly a bummer because he earnestly contemplates suicide after. can no longer look himself in the face in the mirror. the relationship never recovers but he was so stingy with his affection towards riker in the first place it doesnt really make much of a difference.
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Unfortunate truth: There are times at which, silent walker who occasionally delights in accidentally spooking people, you must be very careful to NOT move like a gentle summer breeze along the rooftops
These scenarios may include:
Moving around folks who are already spooked or easily-startled
Approaching people who you absolutely do not want to alarm, such as people with poor spatial awareness, people experiencing paranoia or a panic attack, folks who are very focused on a different thing, people handling dangerous chemicals or machinery
When you very urgently need to get somewhere and there are people in your way
Any other time when you require others to be aware of your presence and location
Sincerely,
-Quiet walker who wears big stompy boots on purpose
Here’s what I love about Some Desperate Glory and about Gaea station’s little militaristic fascist society. Their core belief, that the destruction of the Earth must be avenged, is not wholly wrong. Humanity was at war with the alien coalition called the Majo, and the aliens won the war by destroying the Earth, killing most of humanity. A whole planet is gone, its biosphere, flora and fauna, settlements, culture, history, and people. The survivors are refugees, in permanent exile. The loss is infinite, irreparable and unforgivable. The survivors’ thirst for revenge is justified, their extremism is justified, their violence is wholly and utterly justified. The problem with Gaea Station isn’t that it’s waging war on the Majo, or that it presents a real threat to alien societies. The problem with Gaea station is that its leaders use their just cause as an excuse to run the station like an insular cult. And like any cult, the ultimate point is for the leaders to enjoy petty power trips and rape teenage girls with impunity. Gaea station indoctrinates its children to hate and shun outsiders, to subordinate everything to the one true goal of avenging the earth, and how convenient, while they’re committing themselves to avenging the earth, they themselves remain available for their leaders’ control and harm. The brave human resistance of Gaea station is barely causing any real harm or posing any real threat to the Majo, and at the leadership level, I don’t even know how hard they are trying, because the real point is the harm they get to do to their own women and children. (The purpose of a system is what it does, and like in numerous real-world cases, the purpose of a terrorist organisation is not terrorism, the purpose of a terrorist organisation is child brides.)
(youve probably posted this before sorry ahh) but do you have a recommended viewing for the 28____ movies? i was going to get around to just watching the bone temple, but that's not advised?
I have posted it before!
Bone temple is movie 3, its actually very important you watch 28 days and 28 years beforehand! Especially 28 years later, as 28 years later: bone temple picks up right after the first ends.
28 days later to establish literally everything about the worldbuilding and politics (also its a great movie!!), skip 28 weeks (not made by same people, self contained story and full of largely retconned concepts), then watch 28 years later, and the bone temple after that.
Tldr: everyone stop skipping to bone temple its an insane choice 😭😭😭 pleaaase... its like the second half of a bunch of character arcs!!!
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I think that if you want relationships depicted in your fiction – whether primary media or fan-work – to be emotionally compelling, there's really no getting around the fact that one of the most compelling relationship dynamics in fiction is "hey, wouldn't it be fucked up if".
And I don't just mean "one of them is clearly taking advantage of the other" type relationships, either. There's a whole spectrum of upfuckery to explore, including (but not limited to):
Each of them thinks they can fix the other, but really they're just enabling each other's worst impulses
Sticking together no matter what because no matter how bad they are for each other, the terror of the unknown is worse
You're pretty sure staying in this relationship constitutes a form of wilful self-harm; for whom is genuinely unclear
They actually just straight up hate each other, but each regards the other as the only one who Gets It
They're perfectly happy together, but the way they play off of each other is harmful to literally everyone around them
I think a lot of this 'religion is necessarily oppressive' stuff honestly is kind of like the confusion about ppl thinking that like, slavery and scientific racism and etc came about BECAUSE OF beliefs that Black people etc were not fully human rather than those beliefs -- those ARGUMENTS, really -- being JUSTIFICATIONS that were invented to allow white ppl to continue to engage in slavery which was at its core about economic exploitation. Like that most systemic bigotry serves a Useful Purpose to those in power and that's why it exists; the policies aren't put in place because of the beliefs. The cart isn't pulling the horse. Christian stuff was used to justify the same things that later, "scientific progress" was used to justify in the west (e.g. scientific racism, eugenics, etc. Very very very much rooted in the idea of certain beliefs and cultures as inherently more rational and forward thinking because BEING RATIONAL AND VALUING SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS WERE CULTURAL VALUES AT THE TIME.) (This does not say anything about Science. It says things about Institutes and power and oppression.)
Similarly, you see a lot of people saying "well religion is used to justify oppression by the people in power" and its like yes. Religion is not unique. Beliefs about what is true about the world -- ideology -- can always be used to do this and frequently is.
When there are common beliefs held by a majority of people in a given culture those beliefs will be used by the people in power to explain and justify the things they do to maintain power and control in society.
This isn't a function of religion. It's a function of power.
When people say "well, this religious rhetoric is/was used to justify misogynistic legal standards in this society" the answer is yep. And if it wasn't that it would be something else because that society had an investment in that specific kind of oppression of women. We have seen this morph into 'rational' 'scientific' explanations for women's inferiority and justifications for making women second class citizens once the cultural values swing more towards rationality and science, as well. Thats... regular.
Like... love to have a good faith convo about this with someone who doesn't get weird and reactionary about "Religious People" but sure not seeing much of that going on. Weirdly.
#i think this can be a tough pill to swallow bc it necessarily involves#accepting that your secular ideology and philosophy can be exploited just as easily for violence and harm#as religious ideology can#because thats humans babey#fascinating also to me is the phenomenon of people believing that bc they do not subscribe to any beliefs that they see as#''religious'' or ''spiritual'' they are immune to magical thinking of any sort.#i promise you that is not true in the slightest.#and also the things that we each identify as SILLY AND OBVIOUSLY UNTRUE FAIRY TALE SHIT is... culturally determined hee hee#im sorry to tell u that no one is objective about reality. thats rough buddy!
