Related: Aspec People Are Confused/inexperienced/late-bloomers/prudes/traumatized.

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.

gonna call in a shitter like it's a medevac helicopter and I'm a wounded GI in the jungles of Vietnam

today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.

The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."

Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response

Saw a reddit post today about a girl who was upset that her childhood best friend replaced a photo of the two of them in his wallet with one of him and his girlfriend. And while yeah, she was being unreasonable with a lot of what she was saying, I totally understand the sadness of a friend "replacing" you with someone they have romantic feelings for. Makes it worse when the top comment is this

Every single comment on this post is about how family and romantic relationships always take precedence over friendships. I don't have anything more to say to this aside from the fact that... this is why it's hard for aroaces to imagine futures for themselves. Society drills it into your head that you're going to live in a world where you are no one's priority if you don't have romantic relationships and it fucking sucks

Space cube, idk.

plant in space, being metal af

!!! Mostly responded to the top of this (thoroughly excellent) thread, but!!! This is very close to the exact reason I think ART *also* has little sib energy. Some of its pushiness is no doubt a function of well, it's function, but there's an element of "this is how I understand affection bc my role models for it showed it to me by being bossy and overly accomodating/helpful/nosy, so (as younger sib destined to Surpass) Imma blow the Lid off bossy/helpful/nosy now that I'm Big and Know Everything."

There is a Bigger Sibling in the vicinity of Perihelion somewhere, I KNOW it. That might not be coherent, but I think about this all the time - with ART - so it's really interesting to consider in terms of Thiago!

Thinking about Network Effect in terms of family structure and familial relationships made me realize that Thiago has such younger sibling energy lmao. Like my impression is that for a lot of readers he reminds them of people they don't like but, as eldest of three, my strongest familial association is with my younger sister, lmao. Huffy little junior of the household who thinks that caring deeply about her family means she can tell us what to do. We're adults now, so the vibe is no longer so acrimoniously "but that's not right"/"shut up, I'm older than you"/"I'll tell mom on you!!"- our concerns are much bigger and more complex, and we're much more capable of talking them out as reasonable people with valid concerns- but a certain pushiness remains in our dynamic. I mean, legitimately, everything about Thiago's introduction, from needing to be told by Farai to quit nagging Mensah to flouncing to Arada about the raiders SCREAMS pissy younger sibling to me. An annoying type of character, and hard to take seriously, younger siblings are, but I love them like I love my sister.

Anyway this was mostly a joke post but genuinely, I suspect that if you swapped out his pronouns with she/her and changed nothing else about the text, readers' reaction to Thiago as a female character would be totally different. I didn't use gendered, "bitchy" terms like "nagging" and "flouncing" by accident in that previous paragraph- I did so to call into question how much our gendered perceptions of power and aggression, especially in a brown man character, affect our reading of the text. Did those terms fit with your impression of Thiago's character? How seriously do you take the "threat" of his dislike of Murderbot in light of that?

Thiago's mostly just not listened to except in his professional expertise as linguist (as with the archetypical younger sibling, that's probably where a big part of his pissiness comes from: no one likes feeling unheard by their family). He has a voice in the proceedings and he uses it, but he's not a character who is actually in a position of authority- Murderbot's reaction to him as such is partially rejection sensitivity and partially the long-standing habit of the traumatized in the face of assertive people- and I wonder if readers would be able to see that more clearly if he were a female character. But that's a trite approach to gender, and as usual Martha Wells is doing something more interesting with the series: positions of authority are for women characters; it's her men who are emotionally sensitive and concerned with relationship issues. Ratthi and Thiago are fascinating faces of the same coin in this regard.