All-all0s-eyes - All All0's Eyes

This has vast CSU energy.

i love, therefore i bite

Related: Aspec people are confused/inexperienced/late-bloomers/prudes/traumatized.

But the thing that really puts a cherry on this post is that line at the bottom: "Have the day you deserve."

For a lot of reasons, I hesitate to wish vitriol on other people even when they're being cruel or harmful to me (due to Very Normal anxiety that I would feel bad if such a thing actually came to pass) and I appreciate the phrasing here so much, highlighting both personal guilt and social shame as *consequences* not *retribution/punishment* and doing so without malice. People don't always get what they seem to deserve, but there's something freeing about wishing it to them anyway - especially if they claim to believe in fairness or righteousness, or any other merit-based mode of engagement with the universe, as such people very often do. it means that they'll never be entirely free of the concern that anything bad that happens to them might just be a confirmation of their worldview, and if it's not, then they must be wrong. They can resist the conclusion that they're doing the wrong thing in any case, but they can't expunge it. Such people are *always* feeling like bad things are happening to them.

My 90yr old Irish Catholic grandpa doesn’t miss with my gender. He’s never gotten my name wrong, or my pronouns, never even faltered over it.

It’s all so natural too: son, big man, young man…

We’ve never talked about it. He’s the only one who hasn’t pushed for details. He just accepted it and carried on because it’s not a huge deal.

It’s so comforting.

An enemy is just a friend I haven't worn down

I don't know.... that just sounds like Murderbot and PresAux with extra steps! ^_^

while i understand why a lot of sci-fi has humans being shitty to AIs while the AIs are like “i am just existing what the fuck” I think it’d be fun to do the opposite. Homo “will packbond with anything” sapiens DESPERATELY trying to get the favor and friendship of an Artificial Intelligence that is mostly indifferent to them. They want the ship’s computer to like them sooooo fucking bad!!

One thing I really like about how Murderbot relates to gender is how like--no wait, two things, in order.

So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it's not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.

But that's a human thing, those are human categories, and it has that deep determination not to naturalize into humanity just because that would be simpler, would smooth the ugly edges between the categories of person and non-person and make an easier, more convenient story for other people.

But then also there's the part where the two construct genders are, effectively, 'cop' and 'prostitute,' as distinguished at construction per Murderbot's own account by genital configuration, in this case 'having' or 'not having' 'sex parts.'

Leaving aside how easily that analogizes to human gender categories for the average reader, which I'm sure was an intentional writing move--Murderbot's assigned gender is, in a meaningful sense, 'SecUnit.'

And what's neat, and what I was going for to begin with only I had to set out my thoughts first for context, is how Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically!

But in a deeply queer way, that only gains a sense of meaning as it's able to detach the performance from service to the oppressive power structures that created it, and redefine the identity on its own terms.