Not A Lot Of Original Content Here, If Any.

my one wish for the murderbot series is I want b-roll of ratthi totally reevaluating his relationship to all machines ever

like I want murderbot in its pod panicking about getting treated like a person and then we cut to ratthi gently asking like, a space roomba if it's comfortable and if it has enough food because you don't know, gurathin!

An Optometrist of Amethyst and Overcast

Bank of Sapphire Cold?

the concept and idea of “you can always start trying to be a better person” is extremely important to me both in media and irl and i continue to be deeply deeply disturbed by the trend on this site pushing that these ideas in media are bad writing or even morally reprehensible

because theyd rather someone stay terrible or just straight up die than become a better person 

from a compassionate point of view it’s deeply distressing and from a pragmatic point of view it’s outright frustrating

it’s fucked up. 

Reblogging for *ahem* posterity.

they forcefemming luigi so straight men will be incentivized to learn about why the us healthcare system is broken

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

Oh wow

Special Effects (1984)

Lupins and Indian Paintbrush!!!

let's rest with mama

Content warning:

A potentially sensitive blog and I need to say it mentions abuse of autistic children.

The two critical factor about me which I suppose lead to this blog are two loves and a hatred:

I love the Murderbot Diaries and the character who I (don’t need to say this, but some people may have missed it) love the most (other than SecUnit, obviously) is Gurathin*.

I also love science, it’s my passion: especially the communication of science.

My hatred (and this will need clarifying, as I have limited reserves of hate and use it sparingly) is of the people who run, coordinate, organise and monetize the anti-vaccination movement. I don’t hate someone caught up in their often seemingly plausible and oh so seductive lies, I hate the Wakefields and the Kennedys and the Bigtrees.

And one reason I hate them is for the way they portray autism: they claim autistic children are “vaccine damaged” and they promote dangerous “cures” (horrific things like MMS, aka bleach).

As if autism were a thing to be feared, that autistic children are somehow broken.

I HATE THIS

This idea that you can cure autism, that autism could or should be defeated, that it’s a form of damage.

Hopefully that indicates where I’m coming from…

The Corporation Rim in The Murderbot Diaries is a capitalist hellscape.

In this horrific future world where we have the literal, explicit, slavery of constructs and the enslavement of bond workers I can imagine that those in power might encourage (even force) parents of autistic children to “treat them”, make them “normal”.

Hopefully you can see this would be very much NOT what I’d see as a good thing, but an extension of the terrible things we already see being done today.

And what if one “treatment” was a form of augmentation: something that is in the autistic person's brain “correcting” their behaviour to “act normal”, a device which might be said to “govern” their behaviour. Like ABA, but a device in your brain.

In the Murderbot Diaries we have Gurathin, an augmented individual who has made his way to Preservation. The nature of his augments are never made explicit (though he does apparently have a better connection with the feed, and visual augments- though we don’t know if the two are related). I think Gurathin is great, and the Murderbot Gurathin canon relationship is brilliant and extremely funny, Exit Strategy:

(“I don’t want to be a pet robot.”

“I don’t think anyone wants that.”

That was Gurathin. I don’t like him. “I don’t like you.”

“I know.”

He sounded like he thought it was funny. “That is not funny.”

“I’m going to mark your cognition level at fifty-five percent.”

“Fuck you.”

“Let’s make that sixty percent.”)

There is friction, a lot of it, in their relationship. An obvious root cause of this is their similarity**, as Murderbot says in Fugitive Telemetry to take just one little example:

“Gurathin seems to hate talking to strange humans almost as much as I do. ”

Perhaps his augments are why? Perhaps Gurathin’s augments’ purpose (or one purpose) was to moderate his behaviour, like the awful treatments promoted for autistic children in our world, the augments’ intent was to make him act like “normal”, or allistic people. Perhaps this is why he (remarkably) notices that their SecUnit is acting unusually, or not like a normal SecUnit? Perhaps Gurathin knows what it is to have something in your head controlling you, like SecUnit’s governor module.

Gurathin asks:

“You don’t blame humans for…what happened to you?”

I wonder what happened to Gurathin?

I’m so glad the both of them found Preservation.

So- it’s just a thought!

*I adore ART

** there is the ‘revealing that it’s rogue, calls itself Murderbot and the whole ‘killing 57 clients’ thing’ too, but they seem to have gotten past that!

He's going to fuck that old man -> Assad is getting Mr bogosian's clothes off on my puter

He's going to fuck that old man -> baby vamp Daniel Molloy is going to top that 515 yr old vampire on my puter