wildforce71

I've just decided this: I think every fandom (more fandoms? at least more) should have a Steve&Robin relationship.

KEY FEATURES LIST THAT I'VE JUST MADE UP:
*ride or die? YES
*do they love each other? YES
*is it romantic? NO
*is it sexual? NO
*do they hold hands? YES

It probably helps that in Stranger Things fandom, they have to explain this a lot. Yes, they're listed as each other's emergency contact on every form. No, they're not dating. Yes, they date other people. No, that doesn't seem weird to them.

WHY IS THIS SO GREAT?
*please can we have a million more examples in popular media of the vast multitudes of human relationships?

marcicat

An article about Martha Wells from The New Yorker!

Do Androids Dream of Anything at All?, by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, June 13, 2025

If Murderbot ultimately comes around to the desire to not kill all the humans he encounters, it’s not because he’s come to identify with them. It’s because they produce something watchable. As he puts it in one of the novellas, “Granted, I liked the imaginary people on the entertainment feed way more than I liked real ones, but you can’t have one without the other.”

marcicat

privilege escalation, by ariex09

You know, sometimes I miss the days when ART was just a dictatorial asshole, instead of a dictatorial asshole who was overly invested in my wellbeing and choices.

tassosss

While I'm waiting for my manuscript to cool, I'm doing a short book marketing course that I bought to see if I can get my head around where the heck to find readers. I know I'm not doing a lot of marketing and I'm okay with that because my strategy right now is in the one hour of useful creative energy I have a day I want to get the writing done. The next book sells the previous one and all that. So the goal is to get this trilogy done, then lean into marketing hard for a while.

I've set up a foundation - I have a brand style, I'm on Instagram and have indie author friends. I have an email list. I have not... done much else. I don't even have freebies to get people to sign up for my newsletter (see above one (1) hour of functional creative energy per day.)

Hence this little course. It's basically all stuff I know from my day job. But it does have worksheets, and I'm a sucker for worksheets.

So, since my target audience is exhausted, demoralized older millennials/borderline gen X whose hips and knees hurt, who are tired of their favorite characters dying and into competence porn, who like sci-fi and fantasy in the Gen and Bob flavors (me. it's me.), where do they hang out online?

I'm on Instagram and that's about it, because I can only handle one social channel at the moment. Is Bluesky the new Twitter? If I'm going to put energy into marketing, I want to be in the right place, because I sure as hell am not going to be able to do more than one or two channels.

marcicat

*placed an order online

*received an order, but it was not mine -- box was addressed correctly, had the correct pick ticket in it, but none of the items were correct

*attempted to explain situation to an online "live agent" (Yael, if you were not a chatbot, I apologize, but you definitely seemed like a chatbot)

*they want the order back, said I would receive a return label via email, and would ship out my original order (tracking number provided)

*I have not received a return label via email

*the 'reship' confirmation email says I need to return the order within the time specified or be charged full price for all items in the reship

*no time has been specified

*OPTION 1: a return label was not sent, possibly no return is required

*OPTION 2: a return label was issued and has disappeared into the ether

*OPTION 3: neither A nor B, but some secret 3rd option

marcicat

Yesterday a department director (not mine) sent me a message asking how many times a certain thing happened last year. And I was like: ...

Meanwhile, my brain was all:

*how would I know that?

*what is a tactful way to say 'that thing is managed by your team, so shouldn't they be the ones keeping records on it?'

*I might be able to search my way back through emails and give an estimate?

*but all the emails would have come from your team! you could ask them!

*what in the world do you even need that information for?

Finally I gave as careful an answer as I could, and offered up a [measurable, replicable] search filter for documents (my actual job, lol). I layered it with caveats of low accuracy and non-inclusiveness.

The director: That's exactly what I'm looking for, but only do it if it will take less than ten minutes.

[NOTE: It had already taken considerably more than ten minutes, which could not have been more obvious from the time stamps of the messages we were exchanging.]

In conclusion: I sent the data anyway.

marcicat

Fauna One, by Avonya

On an otherwise tedious survey, Murderbot meets a cat.

aka the pre-canon one where SecUnit sends cat pictures to another SecUnit

Then, after a pause, the other SecUnit followed that up with, Additional information requested for potential further identification to establish a thorough threat report.

I knew what it was really asking. So I wiped a couple more pictures I’d taken and sent them along.

marcicat

I was thinking about the Murderbot tv show (as one does), and I thought 'I wonder why Mensah decided to tell SecUnit all about her kids?'

And I was like... humanize the hostages? (Like, if you just found out that the dangerous killing machine absolutely could start killing you if it wanted to, you'd want to give it reasons not to? Like putting baby pictures in your wallet, I guess?)

But that didn't seem super likely. Neither did 'setting up a REALLY funny joke for a future season,' even if SecUnit remembering all that stuff when it met the kids later would, indeed, be REALLY funny. To me, personally.

And I thought maybe Mensah was too nervous to be willing to sit in silence, and figured talking about her kids would keep herself from panicking and also not distract SecUnit from anything important it was doing, which kind of made sense, until I realized...

SecUnit ASKED ARADA ABOUT HER KIDS. The first time they all saw it interact with one of them unprompted, it asked about children. It makes perfect sense to think that it would be willing to hear about them. Mensah galaxy-brained a topic of conversation she genuinely had reason to believe would be acceptable. SECUNIT, YOU BROUGHT THIS ON YOURSELF.

tassosss

Draft 1 of book 2 is finished.

It's a messy draft and I'm not looking forward to editing it.

But it's done and done.

Final wordcount: 107,659

I wrote ~7k in the last two days.

marcicat

So, technically I finished listening on Friday, but I definitely fell asleep during the last bit and had no idea what happened. So on Saturday I went back and actually awake-finished!

In conclusion: AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

(Great book!)

So, this is basically The Murderbot Diaries series so far:

BOOK 1: Murderbot makes some friends

BOOK 2: Murderbot makes some friends

BOOK 3: Murderbot makes some friends

BOOK 4: Murderbot rescues its friends from BOOK 1

BOOK 6 (the internet was definitely right about reading this one after 4): Murderbot thinks its BOOK 1 friends may need more rescuing, so it hangs around (and makes some friends)

BOOK 5: Murderbot rescues one of its BOOK 2 friends, and makes some friends, and gets rescued itself (it's the longest book; a lot happens!)

BOOK 7: ???????

(Note: I LOVE THIS. THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I WANT TO READ ABOUT. YES, PLEASE.)

tassosss

Today: 4,222 words

Total: 104,505.

I'm so close to the end. 1.5 chapters to go.

marcicat

Okay, there are plenty of things not to miss about how tv was back in, uh... ::checks internet:: 1990, when ST:TNG did the summer Borg cliffhanger thing, but CAN YOU IMAGINE if Murderbot Season 1 was 20+ episodes long, and ep 5 was actually ep 10, and was the summer cliffhanger?

And MOST IMPORTANTLY can you imagine the absolute MOUNTAINS of fanfic that would be created between now and September?

Which is to say, yes, I'd like to read at least a hundred AUs spinning off from the end of ep 5.

marcicat

GET Request, by ariex09

If they didn't want a transport able to autonomously decide where the most important place to be was, they shouldn't have built me, Peri says coolly.

marcicat

LOL the boat scene in the beginning -- all the 'this stupid boat' complaints reminded me of the 'stupid mental health walk' song, so I went on a search for it!

STEP ONE: I first saw it in this video on tumblr. (Probably not that tumblr, but searching is hit or miss, so who knows?) But I couldn't find any source attributions on that one, so I kept going.

STEP TWO: Ugh, tiktok, but okay. Same video, and very helpfully attributed to Andy Neal, aka andyfilmsandhikes. Nice! It even includes a music attribution, leading to:

STEP THREE: February 2023, this youtube short by Holderness Family Music. Success! Video and music both sourced and attributed!

(The internet informs me that 'stupid mental health walk' has a previous source, but honestly three steps felt like enough, so I stopped there. Time for my own walk!)

marcicat

Happy Birthday

starandrea!!!

marcicat

I've now read (listened to) the first four Murderbot Diaries audiobooks, plus Fugitive Telemetry (book 6, but the internet advised that it fits into the timeline as book 5, which it definitely seemed to do).

They were great, I loved them! (ESPECIALLY 'Artificial Condition,' because of ART, and also 'Exit Strategy,' because of TEAMWORK)

And NOW I'm up to Network Effect, and I'm NERVOUS! I have a vague idea of stuff that happens, and it's SO MUCH! I'm taking a break right now by listening to some other more relaxing audiobooks before I dive in.

marcicat

For various reasons, I've wound up on multiple mailing lists that email me near-daily with information about books and audiobooks -- sometimes I think about unsubscribing, but sometimes I see something interesting that I want to look for on the library apps. And of course, there's the reviews!

(Also, the absolutely random spread of 'number of five-star reviews on goodreads' that get shared. Some books are like 'received over 250 five-star reviews!' and others are like 'received over 5000000000000000 five-star reviews!' and I don't really believe either of them.)

Anyway, the one-line reviews are often VERY funny, because they could be interpreted in almost any direction. My favorite ones are things like (I just made these up, because I couldn't be bothered to actually go back and look for any):

'Reading this is like waiting for a wave to break.'

'The book version of a bouncy house!'

'If I was reading in a field in Toulouse, France, I would pick this book.'

Because I can't tell ANYTHING from those. Please make all reviews as absolutely incomprehensible as possible, for me, personally. Because it's funny.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
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3	4	5	6	7	8	9
10	11	12	13	14	15	16
17	18	19	20	21	22	23
24	25	26	27	28	29	30
31

thanks, Stranger Things fandom

caturday reading

fic rec Friday

marketing blah

what?

workaday Wednesday

fic rec Tuesday

LOL

That's a wrap

finished Network Effect!

word count

Murderbot ep #5

fic rec Friday

finally started 'Network Effect'!

happy happy birthday!

(don't) look at it, it's got anxiety!

more than one five-star review

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May 2020

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