radianceandmist

[radianceandmist]

murderbot is peak queer rep because it’s about living as an inherently transgressive form of being, it’s about the complexity of passing, or the complexity of hiding, or the nuance of never fitting binaries and not wanting to even when fitting those binaries is seen as “better”, and it’s about making people uncomfortable just by existing, it’s about measuring forms of freedom and having to decide which you’ll save and which you’ll sacrifice. but most importantly it’s peak queer rep because murderbot is free for like five minutes and it immediately attracts the nearest supposedly-rare transgressive-illegal-superbot (ART) in a hundred light year radius to be its best friend, and what’s that if not your classic Queer On Queer Magnetism

#murderbot

[radianceandmist]

fucking love when I'm on a call with someone and they start to do a little errand or go somewhere else and they say "and you're coming with me" like. absolutely I am let's go on an adventure I've been spirited away

[radianceandmist]

Some spins on the "mostly male team with a token woman" trope:

The woman is trans and stayed in her old circle of bros even after transition

The woman is the only one in her circle of "girls" who didn't turn out to be a trans man

#gender #tropes

[radianceandmist]

sitting anti-kink posters down in front of a wrestling match and explaining kayfabe to them with the patience of a preschool teacher

#sex #sexuality #kink

[radianceandmist]

one year anniversary of downpour yay!!! thank you for further expanding the world of my favorite game ever

#rain world

[radianceandmist]

if you give “stupid” characters rural/southern accents i don’t like you and if you give “smart” characters rural/southern accents but it’s a punchline i don’t like you even more

#writing #language

[radianceandmist]

For anyone going into Animorphs expecting it to be just wall-to-wall body horror and war and gore and thinking “I wanna read the book where an ant turns into a human and screams until it dies, that sounds real fucked up” I feel like I should emphasize that for every raw Animorphs moment there is usually at least one moment of “they turn into dogs to sneak into an Offspring concert without paying” or “evil alien warlord gets foiled by a skunk” or “Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up”

#animorphs

[radianceandmist]

Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1

The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.

So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.

So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.

Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.

And the probe is working again.

From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.

#space #science #NASA

[radianceandmist]

the simplicity of lactase supplements is so funny to me. it costs like $4 to circumvent evolutionary biology. want to eat dairy but your body doesn’t produce the enzyme necessary to digest lactose? the devs haven’t patched that yet but you can download a mod

#food #medical

[radianceandmist]

I think it's fascinating that the quotes:

"Have you forgotten sir, we were at war? A fight with an alien race for the very survival of our species. I feel I must remind you that it is an undeniable, and may I say fundamental quality of man, that when faced with extinction, every alternative is preferable."

"When you spend every day fighting a war, you to demonize your attackers. To you, they're evil, they're subhuman. Because if they weren't, what would that make you? What I'm trying to say... is I've been afraid to see you for what you really are. You're our brothers. Our sisters. And the things we've done to one another are unforgivable."

"These guys want to use us, take us away from our families, and send us all over the dad-gum galaxy just to test if their agents are ready for the big fight? Well... guess I'm interested in showin' em exactly what a big fight is all about! So I'm not ordering you to go. I ain't even asking. You do what you gotta do, Private."

came from the same series whose standard fare is lines like:

"What in the hell are you two doing?" / "We're being executed by our own men, sir." / "Cut it out."

"I only drink the blood of my enemies, and the occasional strawberry yoohoo."

"You always said I could sleep when I’m dead, Sarge, and guess what? I am dead. This purgatory is about to become purga-snore-y, yawn!"

...and both categories manage to be a poignant statement about the nature of war and what it does to the people in it.

#RvB

[radianceandmist]

I love you robots and artificial intelligence with mental illness. I love you repression being depicted as literally deleting archived data to preserve functionality. I love you anxiety attacks being depicted as a system crashing virus. I love you ptsd being depicted as an annoying pop-up. I love you anxiety disorder being depicted as running thousands of simulations and projected outcomes. I love you artificial beings being shown to be human via their own artificiality.

#RvB #murderbot #writing #robots

[radianceandmist]

I really do wanna stress the Trocadero thing is fucked, like.

The various intro pieces across the series (Intro, Big Prize, the opening to Contact, Relay, ect.) are iconic. The Meta would not be scary without 'When Your Middle Name is Danger'. The way 'First Wave' greatly boosts the impact of the Director's final letter. And this might just be me, but 'Fifty' still fucks me up this day.

Or how some songs are just synonymous with a character. 'A Girl named Tex,' 'Another One Down' for Tucker, 'Good Fight (Instrumental)' for Wash, 'Half Life' for Kimball, 'Loom' for Locus.

Blood Gultch Blues. Contact.

And that's just Trocadero. Doesn't even touch the work of Jeff and Casey Williams, Sandy Lee Casey, Lamar Hall, David Levy, or Meredith Hagan.

The music of a show is so important to setting the tone of the work, and it greatly helps those emotional moments to hit, especially in a series where the characters physical acting is so limited. I sincerely believe that Trocadero and collaberators' work contributed massively to rvb's longrunning success, especially as the series became more dramatic in tone.

But rather than respect these contributions Trocadero has made to the series for the last 20 years, RT would prefer to hire newcomers or use stock music bc it's cheaper.

RT doesn't value it's artists' labor. When Restoration comes out y'all better be pirating that shit.

#rooster teeth #RvB #Trocadero #This feels so unfair to Trocadero et al and also to Burnie and Matt and the rest of the creative team #Honestly also kind of unfair to Omega Sparx and anyone else who does music for s19 #rvb restoration #rvb19

[radianceandmist]

HEY that's MY emotional support morally ambiguous misunderstood full of trauma touch starved yearning for love drenched in blood responsible for numerous atrocities comfort character who is TRYING & u will TREAT them with RESPECT

#Not even gonna tag with any specific thing #because there are TOO MANY

[radianceandmist]

Hollow Knight thing I think too much about: the Dream No More ending.

The Pale King was so certain that the only way to prevent the Radiance from taking over Hallownest was to create the singular best, strongest, purest vessel to imprison her. He created countless vessels so that the could isolate and train and hone the one with the most potential, and discarded the rest. Which worked for a while.

But the Radiance is actually defeated when the Knight, the Hollow Knight, and Hornet work together and help each other, with even more of their siblings rising up to support them and lend them strength.

#hollow knight #delta talks

[radianceandmist]

Still losing my mind over ‘I never loved you because you were fighters – I loved you because you were builders.’ This is the thing about Drummer that has always killed me. She is a builder! She is an optimist who is deeply suspicious of her own optimism, but she cannot bear to eradicate it in herself! Everything keeps crumbling around her and she’s filled with rage and grief about it, but she just keeps trying and trying and trying to build anyway.

Like, she aligned herself with Dawes because she believed he was working in service of the Belt, but eventually she decided his way of doing things (violence, corruption, power-seeking for power’s sake) wasn’t a viable path forward. ‘No future down his road.’ So she chose Fred – even though he was an Earther – because she felt like he was actually building something. He had a plan for a peaceful future, for economic security. A way forward for the Belt. And then she had to leave him, too, when she felt he’d turned into another big man with big dreams who was willing to hurt innocent Belters to secure political power. So she turned toward building something else. A different, smaller kind of life: a family instead of a nation.

She has always looked for the builders. It’s why she loves Naomi, who is forever trying to construct a bridge between two worlds; why she forgave Ashford, who truly believed he was saving humanity when he tried to destroy the Ring; why she hates Marco, who is tearing the universe apart in her name. And it’s why, she tells us now, she loves the PolyAmBelterFam. They were making something together. Building something. A family; a world. That is what love is, to Camina Drummer.

Absolutely. fucking. FERAL about it.

#the expanse

[radianceandmist]

It’s mad that York didn’t even get a hint of a backstory. Like you don’t just pick up hacking into government buildings. Carolina really told him about her super secret military agency?? His best option was to join a super secret military agency?? What was going on in his life?? I wanna know!

#rvb #oh no

[radianceandmist]

It's just that what you have to understand about animorphs is that the most important thing about animorphs barely happens in animorphs. The most important moment in animorphs is when marco's dad says that in the year before his wife died he and his wife stopped fighting, their relationship became smooth sailing, it was like all the little things that any couple has trouble with just disappeared, and marco (maybe 14? 15? at this point?) listens to him say this and understands with cold certainty that what actually disappeared a year before his mother's ''death'' was his mother. This declaration from his father gives Marco a timeline for a familial trauma he had never before been able to fully parse, which is the precise moment in his life when his mother's body was taken over by a brain controlling slug from outer space--hey. hey. stay with me. look at me. look at my eyes. don't worry about the alien slug. just keep reading. this is a chilling and deeply compelling statement about patriarchy and colonialism and you have to not worry about the slug--anyway Eva Animorphs (an immigrant woman of color) lost all control of her life and voice and body and that was, in reality, the moment that Marco lost his mother to a colonial power, the moment he lost his childhood, the moment he and his mother lost their home, which even after winning the war they will never return to, but his father never understood that moment as anything but a mysterious sudden increase in harmony in his household. Because his wife stopped arguing with him.

#animorphs