for the record, i really do love hearing other peoples thoughts on my rambly fandom posts. my very bad brain won't let me respond most of the time but i definitely probably responded in my head

blacked out and wrote 3,500 words of a murderbot fic outline. will it ever be more than an outline?? who is to say.

unfortunately this problem persists: the set up for the premise and characters is very clear in my head, and so is the end goal. and the middle is just ???????????

act 2 is "and then murderbot does A Mission to get the person out of the Situation" and its like. man, i don't know how to write action sequences. i don't know how they physically get out of the situation or how the Bad Guys try to stop them. and yet i need the physical plot sequence in order to justify the emotional beat that I want to happen at the end, it won't land if I literally skip it. why did I have to hyper fixate on a series so focused on action-y sequences. i have read this books so many times but i still always kind of glaze over when it starts getting heavy with sci-fi terms. now i have to write them??? boooooooo

bot-rights are proving to be very complicated for me to figure out in tmbd-verse on account of the fact that i'm like, 75% sure some of the bots we've encountered in these books really are just machines with some basic automated functions similar to our real life ai? or at least they aren't equally sentient. and its really hard to tell what we're dealing with in any given situation

we've had an occasional reference to "sub-sentient" bots, which i guess is opposed to something like MB or ART who are undoubtably sentient and sapient (i never know if i'm using those two terms correctly, w/e). But how the hell is sub-sentient defined? And what made certain bots sentient in the first place??

I think sentience is being presented as more of a spectrum so...begs the question where on that spectrum does any given bot need the same moral consideration of a person. That's potentially a nightmarish ethical minefield (so maybe its for the best the books haven't tried to firmly define it. that could go wrong very easily...)

anyway, i started getting stuck on this because I don't know how hard we should judge ART for doing shit like threatening to delete other bot pilots, 'cause frankly MB narrates that situation with only slight exasperation as if they were discussing a mouse that snuck inside and one person wants to hit it with a shoe while the other would really prefer to just gently put it in a cup and take it outside.

like...I am starting to think that a lot of the bots we encounter are a closer equivalent to a work horse or a farm dog. (or maybe even domesticated bees, depending on how simple they are.) in that they have feelings, preferences, can experience emotional distress, and MB feels the need to take extra steps not to be cruel to them whenever its possible. And they'd deserve legal protections but not necessarily all the same ones as people??

(and you could say it is still morally dubious for ART to be metaphorically threatening to run over someone's dog in response to getting growled at, but its slightly less dubious than serial killing people on a whim?? I guess????)

maybe that's what all MI's were originally supposed to be; like a finely tuned working animal. was the person-level sapience an accident? and how common is it? cause I bet humans cannot tell the difference. i bet they'd mostly judge sapience based on how good a bot is at replicating human emotional/social language, which is not a great metric for judging intelligence level in general.

i cut like 5 more speculative paragraphs out of this post b/c i'm trying to practice being more concise but this rabbit hole gets very complicated if you think about it too much...

dude i wish i could write fanfics i have so many fragments of concepts and scenes that seem like they'd make for a really good one shot but then any time i have to think of, like, a plot or any lead up at all to GET to those scene concepts, i start mentally coughing up blood and my brain makes horrible mechanical screeching sounds before shutting off. and instead i just kind of stare at the wall for an hour replaying the scenes in my head from slightly different angles and remembering none of it the next day

i actually hope we get a chapter or a short story from the POV of a construct with an active governor module some day

I've read fics attempting it, they vary a lot and it's made me realize how much we don't know. Like, a lot of them speculate that if a SecUnit is given an order that's physically impossible to complete, or at odds with a preexisting Company rule, they'll just be zapped relentlessly on the spot for "failure to comply" but that surely can't be how they work? there has to be governor-accepted protocols for refusing certain kinds of orders, right? Or else the minute they are paired with a client who is kind of stupid or doesn't know how to give clear orders or doesn't know everything a unit can/can't do (which is...likely most of them tbh) they'd be constantly breaking their very expensive rented units on the first day.

I mean, of course we know govmods make them worse in a lot of ways (very easily exploited in hostage situations, among other things) but SecUnits still have to be mostly functional at their job...? The whole point of using constructs instead of bots (at least, according to MB) is that they're capable of making more variable/complex decisions in response to unexpected situations.

But...yeah I don't think we really know what the level of constant control is. Or what they can and can't get away with. Can a governor module read thoughts/intent or can it only perceive actions? does it care? Does the module itself have a decision making tree or is it just a switch that a SecSystem flips?

There has to be some way to slip small actions under the radar, or MB couldn't have hacked its govmod in the first place --- and that one ComfortUnit couldn't have slipped a "help me" note into its shoddy killware package (although, ComfortUnits might have way fewer restrictions than a SecUnit, since they don't have weapons)

in a similar vein, i wonder all the time what Three's relationship with its other two units was like while governed. maybe there were some kind of social gestures they figured out how to send to each other that the govmod wouldn't catch. I wonder if governed secunits could invent a secret language so cryptic and subtle that their secsystem doesn't even recognize it??

most of these questions probably won't be answered in detail since a lot of things in this world run on the sci-fi equivalent of a soft magic system. but i can hope and wish for more detail in the future nonetheless 🙏

re-reading exit strategy and thinking about our pal "that one rude combat secunit"

So, I don't really know how much micromanaging a SecUnit's human supervisor does on the job, and even less when it comes to CombatUnits. But that first part "It wanted me to try to deliver some kind of malware or killware, like I was a fucking amateur and didn’t know that wouldn’t work," it kind of reminded me of when Tlacey sent her ComfortUnit to MB and it said (paraphrasing) "Hey we should totally kill all the humans together :)" to which MB responds with "...did Tlacey tell you to say that? is that how she thinks constructs talk to each other??"

maybe that first ping was a stupid plan because it was an order from a human. Its been said a couple times even humans who work closely with constructs don't really understand how they work and vastly underestimate their intelligence.

So...idk, I wonder if that "I want to kill you" actually came from the CombatUnit? There was a long pause from it when MB was making its pitch about the hack. Maybe that was the time it took to translate to the human commanding it, and for that human to panic and respond with a command along the lines of "oh god nope no no, absolutely not, refuse anything it says or sends, forget surrender, kill it Right Now"

(wouldn't be unreasonable panic since, as later in the book states, no one knows how MB hacked its governor module or how easy it'd be for other constructs to replicate. MB is dangerous af for multiple reasons)

i mean, who knows, it could have come from the CombatUnit itself. Maybe the silence was just it fully ignoring MB's offer (as it says, it's not a great pitch) But even if it did say it, it doesn't exactly read as...eager to me? at least, not now that I'm reading the text rather than audiobook. I suppose that's my own projection since I don't like to think of CombatUnits as a uniquely lost cause, but i think it's easy to read it as just an exasperated "can you please stop fucking around and let me Get This Over With so I can go back into stasis"

also.......MB, babyconstruct, "Okay, I was a little offended" as if this was not also your literal first thought when you were faced with (presumed) rogue SecUnits the first time*

*(yes there were many different factors at play there, but the parallel is still very funny to me)

anyway, it's entirely possible, probably likely, that this CombatUnit was the same one that got on board the palisade shuttle that the company gunship exploded into pieces. but i hope it wasn't. yes it has only spoken twice, yes those two things were impersonal and threatening, but its still technically the first construct MB offered freedom to and for whatever reason i want it to work someday. i just think it would be fun

note to self, when going to edit a tumblr draft, make sure to copy the whole post before you click edit, lest tumblr randomly decide to delete your entire most recent draft and revert to the draft before it :)))))

gang i am in dire need of more songs to put on my murderbot diaries playlist, please please drop your suggestions and bonus points if u want to tell me what specifically you're connecting it with!!!

trust i do not CARE if you think your music taste is ""too cringe"" i put a haz*bin hotel song on here, its the god damn wild west, no genre no tonal consistency only self indulgent vibes

man gurathin was among my favorite human characters at one point, I keep forgetting that.

i fear i am becoming a bitter little contrarian about him In General lately. because his role in the tv show elevated him into a certain kind of popularity which also prompted a lot of fandom meta that, perhaps, imho, overstates his narrative/emotional importance to murderbot. somewhat. but, like, gurathin girl i'm sorry that is not actually your fault

you would not believe the amount of murderbot meta posts I have been writing in my drafts and never posting because they are only like, 45% of the way to a complete thought of the very big Feeling i have in my mind and I can't figure out where the remaining 55% of words are. trust if it seems like i stopped murderbot posting, I am definitely still murderbot Typing, mentally spinning away uselessly at turbo speeds. the engine mechanism is disconnected from the gears. by god is it Spinning but it's not actually moving the rest of the machine productivley. girl send help.

i heard that sanctuary moon was actually loosely based on How to Get Away with Murder (but in space) so on impulse i decided to try watching it

i feel like i am sharing mensah's experience in "i only meant to look up an episode out of vague curiosity but then i got Involved"

and also the idea of this being a ""comfort"" show is completely fukcing insane

another conversation i'd do anything to hear: ART and Mensah debating post-[redacted] incident about how to correctly approach Murderbot's emotional trauma without pissing it off and/or chasing it away (a guide book every friend of Murderbot is still frantically trying to put together with extremely mixed results)

someday i'm going to get around to writing some kind of devils advocate (i guess?????) post for system collapse so i can defend murderbots new relationship with ART and its crew. its not that i think SC was flawlessly executed in everything it was trying to do but the doomerism analysis i've seen spring from that installment in particular is depressing and a lil frustrating, and i feel like doing Murderbot itself a disservice.

but idk maybe i should just wait for the next book in may. a lot of my more generous arguments come down to "they've had one (1) installment together maybe we should at least wait to see what Murderbot post finally-agreeing-it-needs-trauma-treatment is like before jumping the gun and spiraling about its current chosen direction in life."