When Spiders Put Their Little Pedipalps Together

Yes! The lateral violence! I see this so much irl as a lower class American so the parallels are paralleling! I'm screaming about it from the rooftops.

something I found very interesting throughout the series was all the lateral violence

sure eventually SecUnit starts to ever so slightly reduce the violence it does to other SecUnits but it still doesn’t fully recognise its own bias against SecUnits.

anyway here’s some SecUnit on SecUnit violence ft System Collapse

It’s battle style kept giving me over-dramatic wrestler-grappler vibes, lots of up close grappling and desperate scrambling, and i also like doing figure studies soooooo

I really liked in the last two books especially network effect it had more introspective thoughts

it’s constant running thoughts and internalised hatred about how awful secunits are

that it admitted to itself that its angry all the time in one brief line then never went into it deeper

how willing and eager it is to tear other sec units apart but hesitated on killing people (admittedly took a few books for that to happen) and starts disabling instead

doesn’t quite make that connection between the constant anger, the safety it feels in being violent to other secunits and the anxiety and fear it still feels about humans in power over it.

but the others are not so violent against secunits and it starts to secondguess its responses (but not quite its internal thoughts)

then starts to disable (some) secunits where possible and even voluntarily giving some govmod hacks

perhaps it’s starting to recognise other secunits are people too? may or may not branch out to combatunits when?

secunit gets trauma therapy when

loudly going "YOU'RE GOOD YOU'RE GOOD" to myself to ward off the memory of every embarrassing thing i've ever done

i dont like it when electronics talk to me like i understand from a usability standpoint why they do but when i pair my headphones i'd much rather get a little beebeep than a white woman jumpscare

Just finished catching up on Dungeon Meshi. What am I gonna do with myself now while I wait for the next episode?! D:

the Federation itself as a concept is so funny because the founding members are

the Vulcans, who have been friends with humanity for years but don't seem to actually like them all that much, instead regarding them with a sort of perverse fascination usually reserved for virology labs

the Andorians, who were fighting the Vulcans for like a hundred years

the Tellarites, who don't like any of these people and whose cultural trait is arguing, and

humans, whom nobody knew existed until last century when they shot themselves into space on a heavily modified nuke, invented world peace and won a fight with the nearest imperial superpower

like imagine you're the Romulan Empire and these weird monkeys who've barely figured out interstellar travel show up on your doorstep in the equivalent of a shipping container with missiles strapped to it, kick your ass in front of everybody, and then start a friendship club with 3 of your neighbours who all hated each others' guts until like a year ago. now I understand why every Romulan on the show is so angry

the nuisance of our language is stunning

“I don’t know what my goals are, no. Thanks for asking.”

:( I didn't catch that first read. Man, Jod really is just lies on lies.

Jod promising Harrow that her conception by genocide is no one's business:

Jod a few months later casually mentioning it to a room of people including his worst enemy:

In a way that implies Augustine and Mercy at least have already been told? That's just rude.

i am nooooot locked the fuck in. im locked the fuck out. call the locksmith

I’ve seen a lot of videos going around of urban-dwelling critters coming to humans for help with various problems, ranging from boxes stuck on their heads to young trapped down a storm drain, and it’s gotten me to thinking:

On the one hand, it’s kind of fascinating that they know to do that.

On the other hand, setting any questions of how this sort of behaviour must have arisen aside for the nonce, does it ever strike you how weird it is that we’ve got a whole collection of prey species whose basic problem-solving script ends with the step “if all else fails, go bother one of the local apex predators and maybe they’ll fix the problem for no reason”?