If there were ever to be a Murderbot Diaries and Star Trek crossover, Murderbot would be Data’s favorite, but Worf would be Murderbot’s favorite. Hence, I drew Data attempting to explain how awesome the Enterprise is to a Murderbot that does not care and is secretly watching Sanctuary Moon
I sent this to the Murderbot Diaries discord, and got a request to put it on tumblr, so here it is! I really think Murderbot and Worf would love hanging out, you know? Complete silence, complete control over the entire ship’s security system, no immediate threats to the fragile humans you’re protecting…
If there were ever to be a Murderbot Diaries and Star Trek crossover, Murderbot would be Data’s favorite, but Worf would be Murderbot’s favorite. Hence, I drew Data attempting to explain how awesome the Enterprise is to a Murderbot that does not care and is secretly watching Sanctuary Moon
Honestly though: how can anyone read the Murderbot Diaries and not think Gurathin is utterly adorable?
This is the man who says to A ROGUE SECUNIT:
“I can’t tell if that’s you being passive aggressive or you being willfully obtuse.”
Later: Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now. On our private feed connection, he sent,
Or you could just show them where you were when this person was being killed.
Gurathin is utterly adorable. He is a sweetie. He is clearly (as, let’s face it, anyone with any sense at all would be) hopelessly smitten with Murderbot. It’s a sensible interpretation of the text. And it likes him too…it even uses its private name with him in Exit Strategy:
Picture commissioned from @cmdrburton , it is lovely, you could get one commissioned too, just for you, buy more art
“Murderbot Impersonates an Augmented Human Security Consultant,”
Tony Hancock or Hannibal Lecter: which metrics to use for volumes of blood in documents for the general public; a semi-serious quantitative and qualitative approach
Image 1: Hannibal
CONCLUSIONS When writing documents for a general audience (the man in the coffee shop, the nonbinary person on a train, the woman in the street) referring to volumes of blood:
1. use millilitres in preference to spoons (tea or table)
2. use the abbreviation ml in preference to mL
3. someone will always (ALWAYS) suggest the use of ‘arm’
Often, in documents such as patient information sheets, there will be references to blood tests where various volumes of blood may be taken. Clearly the aim is to INFORM the reader of the volume which will be taken. You want them to understand how much blood (the metric) is involved. There is a clear ethical drive for this, and it will also (hopefully) reassure the reader.
The volume of blood will be decided by the needs of the trial.
SPOILER: use millilitres and abbreviate to “ml”
HOW this volume is COMMUNICATED is decided by how the document is written.
In this essay I will demonstrate that a general audience prefers millilitres, and in addition we apparently prefer the abbreviation ml (this was an unexpected finding).
Based on results of polls (n=519)
It is important that the volume is given in a way which is clear and unambiguous: it is X quantity. This metric should not be open to interpretation.
You want your reader to feel happy about the volume of blood, to be reassured.
There is also the manner of the connotations of the metrics used. When you read a word, it will conjure various associations in the mind.
In the context of a clinical trial, you want the reader to genuinely understand what the volume means, so that true informed consent is given.
With this is mind, note that currently the metrics most often used (personal experience) for blood test volumes are millilitres or spoons (teaspoons or tablespoons).
SPOILER: use millilitres and abbreviate to “ml”
Image 2: see below somewhere spoons and mls, (author’s own, I have many spoons)
SPOILER: use millilitres and abbreviate to “ml”
In this essay I will demonstrate that a general audience prefers millilitres, and in addition we apparently prefer the abbreviation ml (this was an unexpected finding).
Based on results of polls (n=519)
Millilitres are clinical, they sound scientific. This has positives (it sounds professional), but also negatives (lacking the ‘human warmth’). There may be concern that there is a lack of true familiarity. Though people are very much aware of 5ml as a concept, their actual approximation of what this volume IS may not be accurate. Weighing against this is the ubiquity of the internet; if anyone is puzzled, they can ‘Google it’. The millilitre is an internationally recognised unit of measurement. I would also note that every parent/carer of a small human has several of these which they are incapable of throwing away:
Image 3: again, tumblr images, they come free with cough syrup, we keep them, no idea why (author’s)
Spoons are perhaps seen as hugely familiar and ‘comforting’. Most people will have spoons in their home. This domestic ‘vibe’ (as the scientific one above) has both positive and negative connotations. Positive are the familiarity, the domestic and the safe. Negative is the association with cooking, the Hannibal Lecter problem. As someone said, “What are they making with the blood? Cookies?”. In this way, spoons full of blood can become a disconcerting image, there is a very real ‘ick factor’. The Hannibal Lecter factor?
In this essay I will demonstrate that a general audience prefers millilitres, and in addition we apparently prefer the abbreviation ml (this was an unexpected finding).
Based on results of polls (n=519)
Another problem with spoons is that the quantity has regional variation, UK spoons and US spoons are not equivalent. 5 tablespoons of blood in the UK is 6 tablespoons in the USA. Spoons are also a less exact measurements than millilitres, people may have their own spoons they use for baking. In my cutlery drawer I have a ridiculous number of teaspoons, their volumes are not consistent.
Therefore, with spoons people may be confident but inaccurate with their understanding of the volume.
The abbreviation used for the two measurements may also cause confusion:
SPOILER: use millilitres and abbreviate to “ml”
Tbsp may be confused with tsp (teaspoon) and the capitalisation seems open to debate. With millilitres the convention is apparent mL, but the preferred abbreviation is ml, with a lowercase l. There is potential for confusion with 1 or uppercase I in various fonts and typefaces. People will argue this point, and indeed they do. The majority of people polled prefer ml, and I do (and this is my essay):
Image 4: Poll is ongoing but look, image at the bottom I guess - tumblr’s fun like this
Back to spoons or millilitres: I conducted three polls on different social media platforms: Facebook, BabyCentre and Twitter. The overall response n=519. The same question (give or take) was asked in each poll:
Image 5: All the polls! Yes, the people of Twitter can be silly people-images of the three (yes 3) polls
Hopefully these polls make the ml preference clear, though do note the slightly different wording of each question (damn).
Overall preference for mls was 73%, and for spoons 22% - more than three times as many people prefer mls.
CONCLUSIONS When writing documents for a general audience (the man in the coffee shop, the nonbinary person in the street, the woman on a train) referring to volumes of blood:
1. use millilitres in preference to spoons (tea or table)
2. use the abbreviation ml in preference to mL
3. someone will always (ALWAYS) suggest the use of ‘arm’
I realise this essay is a little off topic for me, here on Tumblr where it’s all about Murderbot: but this is a subject very close to my heart.
To tie things together: blood gets mentioned A LOT in the Murderbot Diaries but there are no spoons in the future…or at least none that Murderbot sees fit to mention.
Gurathin: Hey it calls itself Murderbot and I have some concerns.
MB: You do not trust Murderbot implicitly and without question? Murderbot, who would give its life for you? You betray Murderbot! Jail for client! Jail for client for one thousand years!
Gurathin sighed and rubbed his face and looked off into the distance, like he regretted all his life choices that had led to him standing here right now.
I have a friend who is taking a course on how climate change is represented in literature. The general thesis of the course, she tells me is “novels are shit at dealing with climate change, because they are character based works and can’t deal with systemic issues“. No hero can stop global warming
anyway Im back on brains instead of Murderbot disease so….
Murderbot is a character based story that is at it’s thematic fundamentals about how unchecked capitalism turns people into things. How these systems stop the ability of human kindness and compassion, how easy it can become to hide someone’s personhood behind a mask, on a spreadsheet about a backwater colony, behind contracts and the bottom line or as a ‘hostage of conditional value’.
Murderbot interfaces with these ideas and the ideas of capitalism as a system through the effects on the characters but also through never giving a face or single personified cause of these problems.
The ‘villains’ that characters interact with are lower level lackeys and supervisors, or people twisting the uncaring system to give themselves more power. Tlacey isn’t just a problem because she’s awful, she’s a problem because within her society she’s able to have significant unchecked power on individual people with no fear of repercussion.
@uovoc‘spost about how The Murderbot Diaries is a story with crappy people but not villains also gets into this
Larger antagonistic powers such as The Company or the Corporation Rim as a whole are never personified as something that could simply - by someone clever enough - be defeated. Individual people and small groups can be saved but the only methods offered for lasting change - Preservation Law changes regarding constructs, Bharadwaj’s documentary - are the types we see in real life.
This can be compared this to something like Space Sweepers which personifies capitalism to their evil-Elon-Musk-CEO-villain. Saving the world from capitalism’s horrors is reduced to just stopping his one individual plan, after which the world magically gets better. The problems that lead to that state of the world never need to be addressed.
(Space Sweepers is super good tho! You should watch it. There are robots and pew pew space battles and it has a real sweet heart.)
Murderbot’s solutions also have that element of fantasy: the very good but still slightly imperfect Home. As a book series however it succeeds in a far more nuanced take on capitalism by not allowing the core systemic problem to have a single heroic solution.
The most popular novels tend to be character-focused and most are certainly character-driven, but I could see a genre of fiction arising that is more focused on how different groups on a large scale end up influencing each other and ultimately banding together to effect change- a political fantasy genre, if you will. We don’t often think of documentaries (especially the ones about nature or science) as being narratives, but they are, and novel writers could and maybe should lean on that structure and perspective to write broader fiction for a more nuanced world. Maybe a genre like that would be able to depict climate change both more honestly and more hopefully.
(I mean, maybe that’s my perspective as a tabletop rpg GM- when I think about how to manage tension and drive action, I’m thinking in terms of antagonist squads beholden to faceless machineries of empire, or an underworld seething with dangerous criminal factions whose greatest danger is that their disenfranchisement is inescapable. Even if all my players see is the next fight, I’m always thinking in terms of Fronts and Factions- about how a larger and more complex world’s changes are driving the setting. It feels like the next logical step, to foreground that narrative work as the main story, and then to apply it to forces that aren’t personified at all.)
Anyway, thank you for pointing out that the Murderbot Diaries depicts using real-life strategies to effect long-term changes. I’ve always loved that there is an element of wider world politics there even though our protagonist is disinterested, that the books depict this kind of activism with an element of honesty that I rarely see in other comfort-type media. I loved “Home” because we got more of a look at that work from a new perspective, and I think I may have been similarly disappointed because I wanted to see more. I’d be really interested in hearing your take on the slightly imperfect Home, and any other thoughts you have about Murderbot and depicting big change in fiction that you’re willing to share!
there aren’t really villains in the murderbot diaries. There’s crappy people but they’re just run-of-the-mill abusive (Tlacey) or callous (Leonide), rather than people who actively try to cause widespread suffering on the scale associated with fictional villainy. Not to say there isn’t widespread suffering in the murderbot-verse – constructs and corporate employees being the prime examples – but their supervisors aren’t written as the bad guys who need to be defeated in order to fix everything. The GrayCris executives hardly even appear in ES. The way Martha Wells writes it is that GrayCris and Palisade are characters themselves, sort of. Rather than assigning the figure of corporate authority to, say, a named CEO character, and putting the evil in easily-defeated physical form, the corporations are kept as vaguely impersonal entities off in the distance because corporations can’t be defeated by jailing a few CEOs. People aren’t the villains of the Murderbot Diaries. On the whole, people in the Murderbot Diaries are pretty nice to each other. The villain is capitalism itself. CEOs don’t set out with the goal of making people suffer, they set out with the goal of making as much profit as possible and then decide that it’s acceptable to exploit people as a means to that end, because by definition capitalism prioritizes profit over all else
anyways the Murderbot Diaries isn’t about people fucking people over, it’s about capitalism fucking people over
(not pictured: pin-lee attempting to drown ratthi in the background as menseh gives them a Mom Look and mb tries to decide whether or not it should intervene. three of its drones have been threatened by seagulls already. there is sand in ALL the joints in its feet. despite that…it’s kind of nice.)
“SecUnit—” Arada started at the same time as Ratthi said, “I don’t think—”
ART interrupted, SecUnit’s earlier statement that I “lie a lot” was untrue. I obviously cannot reveal information against the interests of my crew unless circumstances warrant.
Arada nodded. “Right. We understand. I think SecUnit is looking out for our interests—”
i’ve been wanting to draw this scene since i first read ne and finally got around to it HSDJKS
