Changing my belief system from "this is the hill I'll die on" to "this is the hill I'll kill you on" has done absolute wonders for me 10/10 do recommend
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RE: talking to conservative parents, I’ve found a good method to de-worming their brains is to not get riled up, just act a little bored and remind them “the news cycle only shows salacious stuff. They want you to be mad and scared because it makes you easier to control. Think about it for a second. Do you REALLY believe everything they have to say?” Or “you can’t believe everything you read or see on the internet. Remember, they earn money every time you click on their video.”
And especially when my dad starts getting huffy about Prices or Artists He Doesn’t Like, I tell him “that’s the beauty of capitalism. they have a product to sell and the freedom of expression if you don’t like it you don’t have to buy it.”
Might not work for everyone but dad’s KRYPTONITE especially is saying “but dad that’s capitalism! You LOVE capitalism!” And he either has to stop complaining or admit capitalism is bad and so far I haven’t lost
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Okay, my brain refuses to think about anything other than Murderbot, so I looked at every use of the word "friend[s]" in TMBD and... created some pie charts. Normal human activities.
Some Thoughts™ I had while putting this together (under the cut):
In All Systems Red, Murderbot notes that the PresAux crew are all close friends (twice! and goes on to explain their internal relationships which I think is very cute). This is pretty much the only use of 'friends' in ASR, except for when Murderbot says that SecUnits can't be friends with each other.
It seems that this may be one of the first times Murderbot has ever really been around a group of friends before? Murderbot notes that this is not the norm for its contracts and admits that the fact that they are all friends and the way they interact with each other make it actually enjoy that contract (before!!!! the hostile attack, so it already enjoys this contract before they start seeing it as a person etc ghghhhh). [Inference: Friendship seems enjoyable.]
The first character that calls Murderbot its friend is ART in Artificial Condition. Murderbot immediately refutes this (and then goes on to call ART its friend to its clients for the rest of the book). [Inference: Maybe ART is Murderbot's friend. And maybe that is... agreeable]
Rogue Protocol has more than twice as many instances of the word 'friend' as any of the other novellas. Why? Miki. Friendship and its implications for non-humans are a central theme because Miki is friends with everyone. Murderbot initially scoffs at the notion that Miki and Miki's humans are friends. At the end of the book, after witnessing how desperately Don Abene tried to stop Miki from trying to save them, and her grief after its death, Murderbot has to admit that she had in fact been Miki's friend. [Inference: Humans can be friends with bots and can sincerely care about them]
In Exit Strategy, Murderbot tentatively uses the word "friends" for its humans for the first time (several times actually). It questions whether it can actually call them its friends or not and later realizes that it had been afraid what admitting that the humans are its friends would do to it. At the end of the book, Mensah tells Murderbot the PresAux crew are its friends, which is the first time a human has directly said that to it (at least on-page). [Inference: Humans can and want to be Murderbot's friends]
In Network Effect, Murderbot seems to be more habituated to the word 'friend', confidently calling ART and Ratthi its friends, like it is no longer just trying the concept on unsure if it fits. There are many instances in which other characters refer to MB as ART's friend or the other way around and Murderbot's humans refer to Murderbot as their friend several times. Generally, there seems to be less hesitancy, because yes, all of them are Murderbot's friends, why wouldn't they be. [Inference: SecUnits can have friends. This SecUnit has friends. They care about it a lot.]
Conclusion: The Murderbot Diaries tell the story of a construct that does not seem to consider the possibility of friendship for itself and is fine with that - until it accidentally starts caring a little too much and suddenly more and more people annex it as a friend (ew) to the point where it can no longer deny that this is happening and has to begrudgingly admit that yes, it has friends now and maybe that is actually not a bad thing.
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if you're wondering what the big deal is about the louis-philippe sentence in les misérables, it is, in the original french, 760 words long. the subject of the sentence doesn't appear until 95% of the way through, at word #711; the main verb is word #712. the sentence contains 91 commas and 49 semicolons and is almost entirely a list of laudatory adjectival phrases describing the erstwhile king of france. this is perhaps especially notable because les mis is, shall we say, not known for being particularly gung-ho about the monarchy.
this sentence copied and pasted into Word takes up more than one page single-spaced. in the 1800-page folio classique edition, it is fully two and a half of those 1800 pages. that means that les mis is 0.14% this single sentence. more of les mis is made up of this sentence than earth's atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide (0.04%). if the page count of les mis stayed the same but every sentence was the length of this one, les mis would consist of only 720 sentences total.
incidentally, guess who named hugo a peer of france 17 years before the publication of les mis?
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I haven't done art professionally in years but there's this fancy gallery down the street that often has the worst art I've ever seen on display for thousands of dollars and it makes me so angry that I wanna create better but then I get home and I. Don't
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I don’t typically recommend his channel because I don’t always love his responses to certain situations but I highly recommend watching cr1tikal/penguinz0’s video about the watcher situation because he breaks it down from the perspective of someone in the industry who knows a lot about the financial aspects involved and it’s a lot more insightful than the posts I’m seeing from the average tumblr user on here, just feel like it’s important to share because there’s a lot of misinformed people on here
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Characterization Post
There is so much discourse about characters being ooc. So Here's my guide IF it BOTHERS you.
1. Write. Write about the character. Reasoning why they wanna do what they wanna do. Write the stories you wanna see.
2. Actually look up how their respective fandoms see them. Ask someone to gush about them to you. That's how I learned more about Tim Drake. (Tumblr was actually my source for all of the bats, i recommend tumblr and social media a lot for this)
3. Find the piece of media that appeals to you. Whether that's the source material for the character, or some youtube video of someone analyzing the character. Whether its a video game or a comic book. Just find one that interests you.
ITS okay not know every obscure lore, but knowing a basic backstory and personality traits can help a lot.
4. Enjoy the character. Whether its one you're suppose to hate or not. Enjoy writing them. Have fun with their character.
5. Understand fandom. There will always be someone that will disagree how you portray a character or there will be a story that portrays them in a way it makes you cringe. And that's okay. Its up to you whether you agree with the commenter or not. And its up to you as a reader whether to continue or not.
Its okay not to like something. And its okay to like something the majority doesn't.
But Also know when we try to stamp out things we don't like- it stamps out the potential for things we do like.
6. Experiment. uwub
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i hate Pokémon so much because these lines are being delivered by a girl who wears such absurdly massive rubber boots that she has to walk everywhere while keeping her knees locked and swinging her legs out straight ahead of her like she’s trying to kick everyone to death, and also this was one of the most touching moments in a video game i played this year
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my dumb brain had a dont look back prompt of Obi going hey Leia fake marry me so I can adopt all the clones and get legal case on the citizenship, and hell throw in Anakin and Padme into it and now the crack thought wont leave me alone. Like I know that legally its too chancy a concept but various fake marriage for legal nonsense are in my brain. fake relationship turning real / legal shenanigans. also that Lando 36 marriages to mess with tax nonsense so everyone in a convoluted marriage chain.
Friend, if we're talking fake marriage/legal nonsense, you're sleeping on the best one.
Shmi Skywalker hunts down Jango Fett, drags him before the nearest legal authority, names him the father of her one million children, and gets them married so she can have custody of all of them, including Boba. The entire GAR are now citizens of Naboo. So is Jango. Palpatine is having daily fights with Queen Jamillia over the legality of it all and we must have our army back. Jango is fending off assassins that are coming after his new wife, not because he likes her or appreciates her interfering in his business, but because if he lets her die it's a professional smear he will never be able to live down.
Leia, Anakin, Padmé, and Obi-Wan are all enraged. Jango cannot be in the Skywalker clan. He has committed Offenses against them.
Shmi is undeterred. It is his penance. She is looking after her boys.
(She and Plo work out shared custody of the 104th. Eventually.)
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