pea soup diet:

you fast until either you're hungry enough to eat pea soup or you starve to death

gotta try that some time

ryomina demons are winning

Ramon: Fit.

Fit: Yes? What is it, my child? What is it, light of my life? What is it, my beautiful baby boy? My reason for my existence on this planet?

Ramon: are u going to get married here too?

Fit: WHOA whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa! Um... I, well– Let's take things one step at a time, Ramon! Ok? I haven't even told Pac how I feel yet. Let's take this one step at a time. Yeah, let me have a conversation with him first about –

Ramon: for u to marry on spreen's lawn

Fit: [Laughs] Oh my god. Ohh, the disrespect! Holy sht–

I do feel like the way Kyoshi was written in the Avatar reboot was lowkey influenced by the fandom's perception of her. Cause like in the original show she's really just portrayed as a pragmatist who's willing to kill if necessary. Like Aang is conflicted about killing the Fire Lord and she's like "well if I were in your position I'd do it but that's just me. Good luck." And then people started making memes where she's like a murderous psychopath who thinks extreme violence is always the solution. And it was funny at first cause it was just exaggerating for comedy but now everyone thinks she was actually like that in the show when she really wasn't. And then in the remake her introductory scene is her angrily yelling at this 12 year old that he needs to stop being a little pussy and be a ruthless warrior or whatever and the only explanation I can think of is that someone in the writer's room maybe looked at a few too many of those memes.

I feel like there's an interesting aspect when it comes to vox and huskerdust in that there's a non-zero chance that vox also has a sort of indirect relationship with husk along with the already existing indirect relationship he has with angel, like yes there's the former overlord stuff but they may also know each other a bit more personally due to vox's past association with alastor, like how mimzy knows husk and niffty, so huskerdust to him is like… the weirdest crossover of all time to him, val's whore getting together with alastor's pet lmao

honestly bonus points if he also calls husk "husker" like alastor and mimzy

they're really layin it on thick this season huh

"my oshis graduated" outfit swap

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.

sss day my favorite national holiday WOOOOHHHH

bonus

I love three houses discourse because I'm pretty sure everyone just picks their route based on which house leader they're the most gay for and then tries to defend their pick by pointing out the other sides's war crimes via twitter memes. Reader, all four of them do substantial quantities of war crimes. So many. We're just here because the woman with Issues and a big fuck-off axe said so, and then we gotta justify everything she did in the name of dismantling the class system. I mean, I'm here for that, but you could also try justifying Charm Man uses poison and perfidy to try to stop racism, A Sad Little Meow Meow gives no quarter instead of doing therapy, or the Thicc Pope tries to bring back her mom via human experimentation, depending on your tastes

More MDZS and Hollow Knight! The cool bugs I found in my backyard have started to unionize.

Part 1 - Part 3

My silly thoughts on chapter 1119

*confused Nakamori noises*

Menelaus rambles a lot about not only Helen, but also Hermione. About how she used to say Olive like "Olifs". How she lost her first tooth running too fast and running into a low branch while out with Helen. How he'd sometimes wake up to Hermione leaning over him and poking his face to say, "Dad, can we go see the horses?" even though it was barely daylight. How she was much nicer waking Helen and how he thinks Hermione did that on purpose because she found "dad's face funny". How her favorite color was every color.

And Odysseus listens.

And he thinks about how his son only had a few teeth coming in when he left, teething on everything. How he could only say one syllable with his babbles. How his son needed balance to stand but Odysseus was so proud that Telemachus was very good at rolling over. How his son loved pulling at his and Penelope's hair.

How his son would be talking, walking, maybe even lost his first tooth by now. And he doesn't even know if he'll ever know his son's favorite color.

don’t you hate it when your civilization flees deep underground to escape the wither only to find yourselves trapped down there with something even worse. anyway surprise! i can still draw

"Dooku had not loved her. She had thought he had. Not as a woman, of course, or even a daughter, but as an apprentice. Someone who showed promise, who he enjoyed training and shaping."

-Asajj Ventress, Dark Disciple by Christie Golden

Frankly, he probably did love Asajj as a twisted Padawan figure - and that was the problem. People Dooku love tend to have a pretty short shelf life; Sidious already went through so much trouble to eliminate the first batch of them (with some serious help from Dooku himself) he's not going to go down that path again with his already problematic ex-Jedi apprentice getting nice and stabilized by a mutually beneficial relationship. It's an interesting piece of characterization, almost worse than if he had moved entirely beyond the concept and capability. This tragedy that Dooku does still seem to love, or close to it, but that love doesn't fucking save anybody, least of all himself.

For some reason I can really imagine Tori having a letterboxd account, though she doesn't tell anyone about it (obviously) and is under the same username as her blog, so no one actually knows who she is on there. She would log every film she watched even if she does it days after she actually watched it, sometimes give reviews (which are probably unhinged in some way or really indepth or extremely concise and to the point), constantly change her ratings of films because she would end up thinking about one she watched in the past and end up realising how it wasn't so great as she initially thought it was (like what she said about Garden State in Solitaire) and her top 5 films would change all the time. She would have had this account for years and because of that she would end up having a fair amount of followers from obscurely named lists and random reviews she's made over the years.

And then one day, Tao goes to log a film he just watched and sees her review though he doesn't know it's Tori and vice versa. They then realise they like a lot of the same films and have a similar opinion about loads of them and sometimes watch films they see the other just logged and maybe Tao starts debates in reviews with Tori. (I know in the 2023 Q&A Alice showed Tao's Letterboxd and his username is his actual name, but in this he doesn't haha)