funny title

"The Company is cheap" is people's "It's all Airplane's fault" in this fandom. (Airplane being the joke escapegoat/plot-hole-excuse from the SVSSS fandom).

The Company are cheap but I feel it's being conflated and misconstrued?? Beyond it's original context.

I think Murderbot calls the Company cheap, but it's best interpreted as the Company squeezing blood out of stone, really really thoroughly using, predatorily, every scrape of service they can out of SecUnits, sending the horse to glue factory sort of situation and feeding the meat to dogs, rather than not investing in the effectiveness of their weapons and shields and spyware.

There was a fun series of fics that explored CombatUnits and oooh was it juicy regarding the sheer technological advancement and care and deliberate "graceful degradation" put into Combats (the body horror!) but also how brutally pragmatic they were with scraping off the organic bits about a year into the Combats life and reusing the inorganic parts. Which is- exactly how you'd treat a weapon. You don't want your weapon to be ineffective. So you will build it durable and deadly because that's necessary otherwise you've wasted money. But... you can also refurb that fucker to hell and back as necessary. Brutal pragmatism. Less about being cheap. More about being very clinical and getting EXACTLY what you paid for, and more, squeezing blood out of stone.

When Murderbot says "cheap" you have to understand this is from the perspective of a living weapon. The Company isn't cheap in the sense that they wouldn't pay for whatever gives them an advantage. Because they absolutely would invest. They're cut-throat and as such want sharp knives. Cheap = the Company simply doesn't value life, personhood, or a gentle retirement for its SecUnits.

The Company knows and deliberately budgets for clients/prey who they don't see as a significant enough financial loss if they die, to carry greater risk. In financial terms, they have very precise and calculated "risk appetites". This translates to every second, every Joules of energy, budgeted for safe-keeping property/clients/prey whilst maintaining a good enough perceived reputation to not scare off future clients/prey.

The Company isn't "cheap". But Murderbot knows its specific personal value is cheap in the eyes of the Company. And so are the lives of its clients, if the Company can get away with it. Better yet, if they can make a profit off of equipment failure, why not set an "acceptable" (relative to average market standard) failure rate.

So don't portray the Company as dumb and inefficient. It's very calculated and efficient. The system does what it's intended to do. The Company is deliberate with. Every. Single. Penny.

Hornfels appreciation post

I thought it’d be cool if I could write/read Hearthian, so that’s what I did. I'm not expecting this to be easily readable but I wanted to stick to something similar to what we see in-game. I did originally want to do something funky than just a direct translation (like using sounds) but there's just not enough possible letter combinations? Idk maybe if I tried harder it'd be possible.

Anyway here's the alphabet:

There are 7 unique characters that letters can be made up of. The size/length and placement of the characters differentiate them.

Left image is showing the 7 possible unique characters all letters are made up of, and the image on the right shows which lines are supposed to be equal length with one another.

For now the Hearthians have the same symbols for punctuation as us.

Vowels

All vowels (I chose to categorise y as a vowel) begin with a floating character for easy identification. Only vowels begin with a floating character. (a) is a singular line, (e) is a double line, (i) and (u) are mirrors of each other, and (o) and (y) are mirrors of each other as well.

Consonants

There are 20 to memorise. I (loosely) based a few off the shape of their corresponding lower-case letters, for example:

Examples of words!!

Hey did you know every traveller apart from the hatchling has an (r) in their name

Now I don't know who's actually interested in learning this, but in case you are, here is some untranslated text if you want to try translating it yourself (answer at bottom of post*):

One flaw (to be changed/added) is the lack of capitalisation. In-game some of the founders do use capitals when writing their names, so technically both lower-case and upper-case probably exists. I had one idea, but I thought of it after I decided on the numbering system so I'll have to think of something else.

Now for the numbers:

This bit is a little more complicated. Having only 6 fingers, Hearthians are likely to count in base 6 as opposed to our base 10. I had to learn how a base 6 number system works for this dhjskndjs (it was fun tho). Um I had great difficulty explaining base 6 but I tried my best.

Now bear with me. Where we have 10 unique symbols for numbers (0 through to 9), the Hearthians would have 6 (0 through 5), and 6 would now be a two-digit number just like 10 is for us. I wanted the numbers to look slightly different from the letters, so only the numbers have horizontal lines (excluding punctuation, like -). 0 through to 5 looks like this in the Hearthian language:

In a base 6 number system, where we would normally have a ones, tens, hundreds, etc. column (which are 10^0, 10^1, 10^2, and so on), we would instead have a ones, sixes, thirty-sixes, etc. column (6^0, 6^1, 6^2 …).

In the image above we have a Hearthian 2 in the thirty-sixes column, meaning the value of that column is 72 (2 x 36). A 3 in the sixes column means 3 sixes (3 x 6) which is 18. Then we have 5 in the ones column, meaning just 5 ones.  Therefore this number is 95 (72 + 18 + 5).

6 in Hearthian would be written as 1 six and 0 ones:

Numbers that come after 6 such as 7, 8, and 13 would be written as “1 six and 1 ones” (7), “1 six and 2 ones” (8), and “2 sixes and 1 ones” (13) like so:

36 would be the first 3-digit number and would be written as “1 thirty-sixes, 0 sixes, 0 ones”.

Here are the digits for the first 48 numbers for reference.

Let’s figure out what a number is based on its digits so we don’t always have to refer to the image above and also so we can know what bigger numbers are.

Here we have the symbols 4 and 1 in Hearthian. A 4 in the sixes column means 4 sixes (4 x 6), and 1 in the ones column means 1 ones (1 x 1).

Now for a 5-digit number:

The first column on the left is the (big inhale) thousand-two-hundred-ninety-sixes column and the one beside it is the two-hundred-sixteens column, but I didn’t want to write that, and they are respectively 6^5 and 6^4. In actual Hearthian they would have simpler names for them like we have for “thousand’.

And lastly let’s combine both the letters and numbers in a sentence (answer will be at bottom of the post**):

There we go we can now write in Hearthian. Yippie!!!!!

Big thank you to my girlfriend @eucalyptmoth who greatly helped with this (especially with all the base 6 shenanigans).

________________________

*answer: "Timber Hearth is a planet among the Outer Wilds solar system."

Look up

But if you think about it from the pov of the university? (long rant under cut)

(Kinda long so under the cut it goessss)

The Outer Wilds aka one of the most incredible games I ever played and the one I can say absolutely nothing about

(also would love to have more lore on themmmm argh, especially their relationship with Feldspar, if you're willing to share?)

Awh thank you so much ! I tried to make them fit in with the rest of the travelers so it means a lot <3 !

As for Talcum's relationship with Feldspar !

Talcum respects Feldspar a lot, their bravery and eagerness to brave unknown territory was something they viewed as admirable even if others saw it as hubris or dangerous. Even before Outer Wild Venture’s founding, Talcum and Feldspar considered each other friends. The two often playfully bickered with each other, butting heads and arguing just for the fun of it. 

Talc became the third Hearthian pilot (intentionally) launched into space, after Feldspar was the first and Gossan was the second. Though friends, Talc and Feldspar rarely went on space adventures together as they were both driven by very different things. However, they still found the time to reunite on Timber Hearth with their fellow travelers. They shared their tales of adventure (at times trying to outdo each other in how exciting their trips around the star system were) and played music around the campfire. Until one day Feldspar went missing and never returned.

At first, Talc wasn’t too worried. They knew Feldspar and knew that at times Feldspar would take long periods of time off Timber Hearth, either held up by their shabby space ship or caught up in some kind of adventure. Hornfels was the first to worry and despite Talc’s attempts to reassure them, the concern only grew as more time went on without any sign of the pilot.

Talc slowly grew uneasy about Feldspar’s absence, wondering if they had somehow gotten themself killed out there in space or maybe they had intentionally gotten themself lost. But it was so like Feldspar to get themself into this kind of situation. Talc knew that if Feldspar ever caught them worrying like this, they’d tease them about it. And if Feldspar knew how long Talc was spending looking for that old fool they’d definitely laugh.

in which murderbot is a very normal terracotta soldier and ART the dragon spirit of a chinese junk who dwells in the ship's keel. they meet in the ming dynasty perhaps, when ppl are sailing places extra willy-nilly.

*Nüwa is the mother goddess in chinese mythology, known for creating humanity from yellow clay and repairing the sky.

thank you @mutualrapport for hosting the event! original prompt below.