No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

bahrmp3

[id: 8 gifs from season 3, episode 20 “Improbable Cause” from the tv series “star trek: deep space nine”, the gifs show julian bashir, garak elim. the first four gifs show julian and garak sharing a meal, the other four gifs show garak in the infirmary and julian behind him.

1st, 2nd gif: garak is holding a knife in his right hand, he gestures with it as he talks, "fear of starvation amid plenty. it points to some dark secret hidden in the human soul,"

3rd gif: the camera cuts to julian, who sighs as garak continues, "a gnawing hunger."

4th gif: the camera cuts to garak once more, he pauses before saying, "perhaps someone should do a study."

5th gif: julian and garak are in the infirmary, garak is seated with julian behind him, he hands garak a mirror.

6th gif: julian stands with his arms clasped behind his back. "someone should do a study." he echoes garak's words from earlier.

7th & 8th gif: "a study?" garak wonders, he is looking at himself int he mirror, checking where he was healed. julian starts "to try and figure out why some people can't bring themselves to trust anyone," garak pauses his inspection of his own face, while julian completes his sentence, "even if it's in their own best interest." /id end]

anti-subtle-b

Whenever I go back to the Murderbot Diaries book series it’s very comforting. Part of this is because I’ve listened to the books so many times and I know what is going to happen. But the familiarity isn’t just ‘I know these words,’ I also feel very seen in the text.

SecUnit isn’t like the people around it, the people it cares about. And it doesn’t want to be.

The crux of the series is navigating an array of challenges that stem from the fact that SecUnit doesn’t want to be human, but it still deserves rights and autonomy and it isn’t wrong to feel these things.

In one of the books we get the line

“I don’t want to be human.”
Dr. Mensah said, “That’s not an attitude a lot of humans are going to understand. We tend to think that because a bot or a construct looks human, its ultimate goal would be to become human.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

The fight for personhood has to do with rights, not for being person-like. The point is not to change SecUnit, the point is that the system has been abusing SecUnit.

This is part of what makes me feel seen (~~the rest of the being seen is all in the autistic coding of our lovely SecUnit).~~ Because I don’t want to be different than I am, at least not in most ways.

I want to be met where I am at.

Other neurodiverse and disabled folks have voiced this same idea I don’t need to be like you to have personhood, my personhood should not hinge on whether you ‘get’ me.

Through the book we SEE people, humans and bots, meeting SecUnit where it is at. When it tells the Preservation crew or ART that it dislikes eye contact they don’t try to make eye contact with SecUnit, they give it drones to look through so it can continue to AVOID eye contact. We also see SecUnit meeting other bots where they are at, communicating in the languages native to their processing systems. It’s so lovely.

a-stitch-in-time-and-space

glow-melt-flow

jackie cox did lwaxana drag at the picard season 3 premiere 😭💗

english-history-trip

enriquemzn262

I really like how many of the world’s most iconic structures and places are just right next to some of the most mundane stuff imaginable, for example

Stonehenge

Is right next to a busy road

The Pyramids of Giza

Are at the outskirts of Cairo

Niagara Falls

Are part of the town of the same name

And Agrippa’s Pantheon

Is crammed inside downtown Rome

It just so interesting to notice.

spectralarchers

I lived in Nîmes for three years, and the mundane feeling I got whenever I would walk from my apartment, by the Roman coloseum in the city which was 2000+ years old, and continue with my life because it was just sort of there still surprises me when I think about it.

This post is just that feeling put into words and pictures.