happy comic day here's mine

watched the stalks of a lavender bush by the bus stop dip and sway from the sheer amount of fat little bumblebees on it and you know what. some things in this world are good

You see, Perry the Platypus, when Vanessa was a little girl, she wanted to take estrogen. Of course, I said yes. And since then she’s always been my little girl. Well recently, Vanessa’s school deadnamed her on her reports! Can you believe that!? I mean we live in a fairly progressive area and—hey, isn’t that not allowed in public schools??

Anyway, that’s when I got the idea for THIS! The deadname-eraser-inator! That way, not only will Vanessa no longer be deadnamed, but EVERY OTHER TRANS PERSON IN THE TRI! STATE! AREA!

Perry spends this episode fixing the wall he put a hole through on the way in

perry raises an eyebrow and makes a little platypus growl at him, and Doof goes OH me???. heh, funny story actually!, I don't have a deadname!, see when I was born my parents forgot to name me, well i guess technically I do but it's in ocelot so it- it really doesn't come up a lot!

Unfortunately I suspect that the murderbot show will go for a giant JARVIS-type setup for ART rather than the almost cosmic-horror or biblical angel level of being that seems to be communicated in the books. I always always get caught up in the fact that in that first meeting ART drops its walls for .00001 seconds. A literally incomprehensibly tiny number. You can’t wrap your mind around how small that timespan is. And murderbot is so terrified by the vastness with which it is confronted in that time that it curls up in a chair and goes mute. This is a “don’t look directly at the angel’s true form lest your eyes burn out of your skull” type of situation. By definition nearly impossible to capture in a visual medium I fear.

dogs might look like their owners but cat people always have a cat with the same mental illness as them

'respectively' is such a good sentence modifier. it allows you to define lists in parallel and zip them

One thing i loved about Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy

is not just that it shows how much ART likes Murderbot (although this makes the first encounter between it and Iris in Network Effect so much funnier in hindsight)

Nor is it just that it showed the depth of the admiration ART has for Murderbot's skills, and the fact that it learned so much from watching it work (which highlights just how much competence Murderbot has at its job)

But no, my favourite thing is that one of the very first thing ART chooses to say about Murderbot, is that Murderbot taught it about trauma.

It doesn't say "exploitation" or "slavery" or "corporate greed". After all, with its job, ART knew these things perfectly well already. But Murderbot taught it to see the effect that those things have on people, the scars they leave behind.

This story shows how ART is starting to be (minimally, in its own "ART-way") more thoughtful of strangers' feelings, because meeting Murderbot made it grow, it made it better.

And also it shows how much ART is just constantly focused on Murderbot's mental and emotional wellbeing. We see this a lot in Network Effect and System Collapse, but it is fascinating to see it from Iris' point of view instead of Murderbot's.