One thing I really like about how Murderbot relates to gender is how like–no wait, two things, in order.
So first how it is emphatically devoted to eschewing human gender categories. Like, it’s not a default thing; there are shown to be multiple nonbinary pronouns in routine use, and life would be simpler for picking one or even making a new one up, just as it would be for picking a name that it is willing to use in public.
But that’s a human thing, those are human categories,and it has that deep determination not to naturalize into humanity just because that would be simpler, would smooth the ugly edges between the categories of person and non-person and make an easier, more convenient story for other people.
But then also there’s the part where the two construct genders are, effectively, ‘cop’ and 'prostitute,’ as distinguished at construction per Murderbot’s own account by genital configuration, in this case 'having’ or 'not having’ 'sex parts.’
Leaving aside how easily that analogizes to human gender categories for the average reader, which I’m sure was an intentional writing move–Murderbot’s assigned gender is, in a meaningful sense, 'SecUnit.’
And what’s neat, and what I was going for to begin with only I had to set out my thoughts first for context, is how Murderbot actually performs its assigned gender pretty emphatically!
But in a deeply queer way, that only gains a sense of meaning as it’s able to detach the performance from service to the oppressive power structures that created it, and redefine the identity on its own terms.
Being a SecUnit, being security, providing security to others, is very important to Murderbot, is absolutely in competition with the conceptually-entwined 'fiction’ and 'freedom’ for what it’s most passionate about.
But that passion only comes out as it’s able to choose to 'do its job.’ As long as security was defined on Company terms, within the Company’s shitty boundaries and for the Company’s shittier goals, when it meant being a blunt instrument and surveillance device and living bullet sponge for and against shitty people with no say in the matter, Murderbot hated it, didn’t care about it, narrated detachment from it and performed whenever possible to the absolute minimum standard. And rightly so.
It performs SecUnit-ness half-heartedly and under a mixture of implicit and overt coercion.
But given something to protect, something it both wants to and is free to, Murderbot vastly exceeds all expectations in its design function. Murderbot is a fantastic SecUnit precisely when it gets to decide what that means.
Security work wasn’t something it chose for itself, it was built for it and forced to it, but reclaiming that and remaking it into something better, something it believes in, is a fundamental part of its growth and healing process. And I think that’s really cool. And just as much part of the 'gender’ elements of the story as it is of like, the 'labor’ and 'liberation’ parts.
In fact the 'social control of labor’ and 'assigned identity categories’ always have heavily overlapped, being related forms of structuring the utility of persons, so of course this is both.
“"The index, Monroe said, is named in honour of Pratchett’s creation Sam Vimes, who in the Discworld novel Men at Arms lays out the “Sam Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness”.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money,” wrote Pratchett. “Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of okay for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.”
The Pratchett estate has authorised the use of the name, tweeting its own Pratchett quote in support of Monroe’s campaign. “Sometimes it’s better to light a flamethrower than curse the darkness,” wrote the late Discworld author in Men at Arms.
Rhianna Pratchett said: “My father used his anger about inequality, classism, xenophobia and bigotry to help power the moral core of his work. One of his most famous lightning-rods for this was Commander Vimes of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch - a cynical, but likable, man who attempts to better himself whilst railing against the injustices around him. Some of which he’s had a hand in perpetrating in the past.
“Vimes’s musing on how expensive it is to be poor via the cost of boots was a razor-sharp evaluation of socio-economic unfairness. And one that’s all too pertinent today, where our most vulnerable so often bear the brunt of austerity measures and are cast adrift from protection and empathy. Whilst we don’t have Vimes any more, we do have Jack and Dad would be proud to see his work used in such a way.”
This campaign came about because the current poverty index tends to look at mid-range luxury items, the price of which is often less affected by inflation, rather than the bottom-of-the-range necessities that the poorest in society actually rely on, and which have been massively hit by inflation.
“Did you see the way that little girl looked at me? Kids. Little kids. They grow up believing that they can be a hero if they drive a sword into the heart of anything different. And I’m the monster? I don’t know what’s scarier. The fact that everyone in this kingdom wants to run a sword through my heart or that sometimes I just wanna let ‘em.” “We have to get you out of here. Over the wall. We won’t stop until we find some place safe, okay? We’ll go. Together. No matter what we do, we can’t change the way people see us.” “You changed the way you see me… Didn’t you?
NIMONA(2023), based on the comic by ND Stevenson, who came out as transgender in 2022
Hi g3nesis, this is so polite! And anon, I’m sorry that happened, Cloudflare Warp is not a safe and anonymous VPN.
Let’s talk about Torrenting!
So let’s start with the basic requirements. What is a VPN?
A virtual private network is a secure encrypted tunnel you make to someone else’s computer, and that’s what actually accesses the public internet, so it looks like all your traffic is coming from that computer. The obvious downside here is that you have to trust whoever’s running that computer to 1) Ensure a safe connection that doesn’t leak your info, and 2) Not keep logs of who you are or what your traffic contained.
Usually that means a paid VPN service, because the general rule of the internet is that if you get a product for free, then you are the product. Paid VPN providers companies have more of an incentive not to keep logs, since they’re already getting their money, but you still have to take their word for it.
The one big exception to the above rule is FOSS: Free, Open-Source Software. This means someone committed to the principles of transparency and community/cooperation has made their software free to use, and the code public to anyone who’d like to peruse it. FOSS generally isn’t particularly profitable, unless they also offer some service, e.g. hosting servers. It’s like saying, “You can read the code and run it yourself for free if you want to, but I’m already running it, I’m know how it works and I’m good at maintaining it, so I’ll let you use my server for a small fee.”
So let’s talk about Windscribe.
Windscribe is my preferred VPN because much of their software is open-source, and they have a Freemium model. That means basic services are offered for free, while upgraded services (like unlimited monthly data) is a paid feature. While nothing is guaranteed, this model is generally pretty safe.
(Full disclosure: This is my refer-a-friend link. Free users get 10Gb/month of data, but with this link, you’ll get 11Gb/mo instead! I also get an extra 1Gb/mo for every friend I refer. Consider it a free, easy way to tell me thanks if you found this post helpful!)
Now the fun stuff: How do I torrent?
First you need a torrenting client, AKA a program that can download torrent files. I recommend qBittorrent, which is a completely free and open-source program. It’s lightweight and ad-free, and has versions for any operating system. Install your torrent client, install your VPN, start up both, and activate a VPN connection. Now you’re ready to torrent!
How torrenting works:
Torrenting (aka “bittorrent”) is a decentralized method of file-sharing. Basically, one person hosts a file (or multiple files) on a torrent client. That’s called a seed - the complete file, available to be downloaded over the internet from their computer. While they have their client open and running, they are seeding the file. If they stop seeding or turn off their computer, that file will no longer be accessible over the internet, because it is not hosted permanently on any server.
They might post a link (called a magnet link) on a website like ThePirateBay so others can find it. If I want to download that file, I can click that magnet link, and it will tell my qBittorrent client how to start downloading the file in little bits and pieces of data. If the download gets interrupted before finishing, I’ll still have those pieces of data, and I can always resume later. Downloading the file is called leeching.
Once I’ve downloaded (aka leeched) enough pieces of the file, qBittorrent can make it accessible to others. Now if you start downloading the file, you might download some pieces of data from the original person, and some from me. It’s a way of decentralizing the burden of constantly uploading data. If I do this, I am called a peer. If I don’t, I am called a leech, because I am downloading from the torrent without contributing to it. Don’t be a leech!
Once I have fully downloaded the file, if I leave qBittorrent on, it continues sharing that file. Since I have the whole file, even if the original person stops seeding, others will still be able to download it - from me! I am now a seed.
And that’s how torrenting works! One person starts sharing a file, and as more people download it and then share it themselves, it remains accessible long after the original host abandons it. This also means that if no one continues seeding a torrent, then it will be dead. Unaccessible. You won’t be able to download it unless someone decides to start seeding it again.
There are many websites that host magnet links. You can search them to try to find whatever file you’re hoping to download. They will list the Seed:Leech ratio. The more seeds there are, the easier/faster it will be to download. If there are zero seeds, the file cannot be downloaded.
❗❗❗ IMPORTANT ❗❗❗
Once you have finished downloading, you must seed the file. Yes, it’s tough when your VPN has a monthly data limit. Seed it anyway. Seed it next month if you have to. In your torrent client, your “seed ratio” is how many times more data you’ve seeded vs the amount you’ve leeched. (AKA, if you downloaded a 1Gb file and you’ve seeded 800Mb, your seed ratio would be 0.8). Common courtesy is to continue seeding until your seed ratio is 5.0. This number depends on how many other peers are trying to download that file, though. Soat minimum, you must seed for 1-2x as long as you leeched. (AKA if it took you 1 hour to download your file, continue seeding it for at least 2 hours after that).
Last notes: Internet safety!
Now, you might have heard torrents are full of viruses. In truth, anything off the internet could have malware. I recommend having a good antivirus program. Kaspersky Free is a good option. Make sure it’s one where you can run a scan on an individual file; anytime you torrent something, scan it before opening it. For smaller files, you can upload it to VirusTotal.com to run it through a gauntlet of different antivirus scans simultaneously.
Also, torrents are generally safer if…
a) There are lots of seeds/peers
b) It hasn’t been uploaded super recently
c) It has comments that look like they’re from real people
d) The person who uploaded it has a website-specific symbol of good reputation (e.g. on ThePirateBay, it’s a colored skull-and-crossbones next to their username)
e) It’s on a private or paid-access torrent site. I don’t generally use these so I can’t give more info.
P.S. If you’re like our dear anonymous asker, and you receive a notice from your ISP about pirating, don’t panic! Unless you’re seeding terabytes of movies, you’re very unlikely to actually be sued. Your ISP isn’t even likely to actually do anything. They may threaten to cancel your internet, but that’s because they’re required by law to notify you. Typically, they don’t actually care. HOWEVER, don’t be lazy or unsafe about it! Make sure you’re following the above steps. For extra security, connect to a VPN server that’s not based in your home country, and make sure you don’t run out of your monthly data halfway through a torrent, or it will kick you back onto your regular internet connection. Always activate your VPN tunnel before opening your torrent client, just in case some torrents connect automatically (to avoid this, always Pause all torrents, even ones that are seeding, before closing your client!)
‘Why is trending so weird’ because of tag spam. Because people (and bots) are tagging like it’s Instagram.
This is spam. It’s against TOS and it throws trending completely out of whack, along with being wildly annoying.
Please, please, PLEASE report posts like this as spam, because otherwise it’s just gonna get fucking worse
‘Cottagecore’ is trending right now and the tag is literally 80% spam from real humans who don’t fucking know how tumblr tags work
I’m glad more people are addressing this because it is a serious issue, arguably as bad as the bot epidemic.
But here it is in the Terms of Service. It’s been there long before this shit started happening.
Intentionally tagging incorrect tags is abusing the tag system and therefore against the TOS. The posts that tag shit like images of cigarettes as celebrity names.
That’s what the TOS is trying to avoid. Within good reason. OP is right; the longer this is condoned, the more people will join in, the more prevalent this gets, and the less relevant tags will become. Tags will be as relevant here as they are on Instagram or TikTok and shit.
That and it’s just fucking annoying and disrespectful to other people’s time, all for the sake of scrambling for popularity online whatsoever, let alone Tumblr out of all sites.
So to anyone still bitching on how this “unfair” because you want an excuse to abuse the algorithm to get likes on your dusty ass selfie, please fuck off back to one of those platforms instead.
Oh crap I didn’t know about this lemme go through my posts o-o
Just to add to this. Having tags, even a lot of them, is ok, as long as they’re relevant. Posting art of several characters and tagging them with the fandom and each character or something is ok. Tagging your selfie as every generic/popular tag you can think of is not.
somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
ALT
