Life update, and Murderbot!

[lunasariel]

So it's been a while since I've posted here!

I'll try to avoid talking about IRL politics/world events, especially US ones. Things are bad and scary for all of us, in various permutations. Those "joy is an act of resistance" posts that keep going around have never really worked for me. If even things that are supposed to be escapist are suddenly Heroic Political Resistance, then all this awful shit is truly inescapable. Let's just say that I'm taking Tolkien's direction to "think and talk about other topics than jailers and prison-walls" very much to heart. I'm also making a lot of soup. (I hate making soup. I'm not a fan of cooking in general. But it's something that I like to *have done*, and making soup in particular weirdly makes me feel better. Maybe it's a control thing - everything that's happening feels so wildly beyond my personal ability to affect it, but at least I can make sure my family has something nutritious and okay-bordering-on-good to eat, so that's one less thing to worry about. Or maybe it's so I can tell myself that I'm stressed and upset because I had to spend all afternoon making fucking soup, rather than all the other reasons to be stressed and upset. I dunno.)

So, yeah. I hope you're all escaping your prisons, making your soup, making somebody you love smile, whatever works for you.


Geopolitical aaaaaaaa aside, weirdly, the news in my life has been mostly good. R2 continues to be the Actual Best Husband, and a few years ago we adopted two extremely fluffy and wonderful cats, Jasper (who is voluminous and gentlemanly) and Sammy (who is paranoid but slowly coming to accept that we're not trying to eat him *all* the time). Pics to come!

My brother P moved in with us temporarily... I think two years ago now? He's an extremely peripatetic person, so he has traveled widely/briefly lived elsewhere, but he does spend most of his time here. At first I thought I might be a little miffed, but I've been loving it. Not only is the extra income helpful, both monetarily but also mental health-wise (R2's finances, as a freelance artist/office temp, tend to be a little unpredictable, which has caused me some anxiety), but P is just a very nice person to be around. In his own words, he is well with himself, and that leads to a certain even-keeledness that I find restful. And it's just nice to have another pair of hands around, to spread the housework a little wider, have an extra person to run errands, etc. He also works remotely (doing something involving the water model for the entire freakin' United States, which he calls "making rectangles," which he fucking loves), so it's super handy to have someone who can, ex. let the plumber in at 10 AM without me having to get fancy with taking time off from work/arranging WFH.

Oh, speaking of which! I'm a capital-L Librarian now!!! I mean, I've always described myself as a librarian, and I do have my MLIS, but technically, up until last July/early August, my job was library specialist, aka library tech. Which is technically a paraprofessional position, but I know that I used my degree just about every day. The Cataloging department at my library (which, btw, it's now actually super rare for a public library, especially a mid-sized system like ours, to even have dedicated catalogers - we also handle cataloging of anything above a very basic level for two surrounding counties as well. So we're very lucky!) consists of four specialists/techs and two original catalogers/librarians. One of the techs has been in her job almost as long as I've been alive, and I'm pretty certain that at least a quarter of the building would collapse if she were to retire/leave/etc. She definitely Has Her Ways, but she is absolutely, immovably perfect where she is. One of the two original catalogers is the department supervisor, and then there's another librarian working under him, and still working closely with the techs, but generally doing different things. The previous non-supervisor librarian (let's call this position the Lieutenant) was BB, who was just about the most chilled-out guy I've ever met. But he started having increasingly serious health problems a few years ago, and switched from Cataloging Lieutenant to the general pool of extra-help/sub librarians, which gave him a lot more flexibility with his schedule.

Other librarian-level positions have come up for internal transfer before, and I've never been interested enough to apply for any of them. I definitely do not want to switch over to Public Services. Shall we say, I have a very specific skillset, and this is not that. :P As far as the Collection Services side of things, the only opening that's come up has been several librarian-level positions in History & Genealogy (aka Special Collections). I wouldn't absolutely hate working at H&G, since we collaborate with them to the extent that I think we have about a third of their collection in our storage. But I like Cataloging - I love getting to play with taxonomies and metadata, I love working with a wider variety of different materials (in one single day I'll have a bestseller from five years ago, a children's book in Ukranian, a translation of a well-known English-language picture book into Vietnamese, six installments of the same series that are all fucked up in slightly different ways, an impassioned screed against the way the local junior college handled some pipe repairs [yes really], a government report on low-income housing, and an in-depth history of one particular street in rural West County), and sure, H&G get all the really cool physical materials, but Cataloging also gets to work with them not infrequently (see above re: storage :P) *and* we hardly ever have to field weird donation requests or deal with irate genealogists.

So tl;dr, Cataloging is the home of my heart. And I was very happy as a specialist, of course, but I admit I was chafing against the boundaries that the union has put on what a specialist vs. a librarian can do. Which, I'm glad those rules are there! They're there for excellent reasons - to protect specialists from exploitation/undue pressure to do more than they're paid for. It's just that the Cataloging Lieutenant position has always been something of a bottleneck, and I certainly have had the knowledge to help; I just wasn't allowed to. Plus, a librarian gets to make way more decisions/have much more free rein than a specialist, and I admit I was champing at the bit there, too. Like, I know why I have to run every decision past two people who are already crazy over-busy, but that was still annoying. So it was pretty widely known in Cataloging that I would like to move up.

We did get outside applicants - quite a few of them! I'm not sure whether we got any internal transfer requests, but I don't think so. But (and I'm really really not trying to sound braggy or stuck-up here) I really was the obvious choice. I'm not the cataloger BB was (yet), let alone GS, the Cataloging department head. But I was already deeply entrenched in the department, and I'm intimately familiar with all of our eight zillion local practices and procedures - in some cases because I helped write them. So the Impostor Syndrome Brain Weasels have been insisting that I was only chosen because it would have been awkward to pick someone else, when I was already there to glare accusingly if they passed me over. But I really think that GS and JA (our division manager, GS' boss) wouldn't have picked me if they genuinely didn't think I could hack it. One of the many ways that I'm fortunate is that my division manager not only knows exactly what it is that I do, but has a history of making extremely sensible & well-reasoned calls as to what's best for our division. She Does Not Suffer Fools Lightly, But, Like, Diplomatically. So if someone else had been a better candidate, I think she could have handled it gracefully... but here I am. :D

It's been about a year, and the brakes have definitely been off this whole time. At first it was a little weird, pseudo-managing people who used to be my same-level colleagues (especially when one of them is *staggeringly* better at that job than me, even though I've been in the role like 3-4 years longer), but pretty soon after I was hired/promoted, our authorities processing vendor announced that they were going out of business after something like 40 years(!!!) and the scramble to find a replacement, get set up with them, and iron out the ensuing snags (which tbh we're still doing), and suddenly I had 0 time for dithering. And now we've just heard that we're switching ILS vendors (who provide the main piece of software that makes up the 'guts' of the library), and I'm repping Cataloging in the search for a replacement. Which, boy howdy I'm glad I am - last year, our ILS vendor kept trying to get us to switch from their legacy product (which we've been using for ~15 years, generally fairly happily) to their shiny new top-of-the-line one, and jesus fucking christ it doesn't even have batch record import. So that was a fairly hard "no" from us, and I'm glad that I was there to deliver it. (Well, I was one of the people delivering it - apparently IT and other Collection Services departments were also less than enthused, for various reasons.)

So, yeah. It's a hard job, and sometimes I feel like the ignoramus of the world (regexes in particular have been kicking my ass for some time now, although I think I might be starting to make progress there???), but I LOVE it! It's intellectually stimulating, I feel like I'm doing something genuinely good for the world (not, like, curing cancer or anything, but I do genuinely believe that libraries are a powerful, powerful force for good, and we need to make them as useful and accessible as humanly possible), the people are great (I genuinely think that we have the best team culture in all of CS, which I ascribe mainly to GS being an A+ manager), the pay bump is welcome, and the perks, such as the option for (limited) WFH, are nice.

Overall, my IRL life has been a series of surprisingly bright spots!


Reading/fandom stuff has been... a bit up and down, actually. There were quite a few things that looked promising but staggered in vital ways/failed to fulfill their early promise, but there were also a few solid hits, and a few at least interesting failures! (Or at least "I respect what you're doing even if I don't like it.")

First, because it's what everybody is talking about: the Murderbot TV show. I know I always harp on about how I miss the old 24-episode format, which allows for broader and less-hurried character development, but for this, the 10-episode prestige miniseries format worked perfectly. For a short, tightly-written, fairly high-octane story, it made a short, tightly-written, fairly high-octane miniseries.

Did I like it? ...I think so. I definitely liked that everyone involved seems to have been a massive fan of the books, that Martha Wells was involved so heavily, and (it sounds like) that she was given so much creative control. I think most of the things that annoyed me are actually either "they changed it and now it sucks" or inevitable consequences of the print-to-screen process. So while my overall enjoyment might have been like a 7/10, fairly I think this is a solid 9-9.5/10 show.

OK, commence with the harping!

• I think Murderbot was mis-cast. Sorry, but I do. Alexander Skarsgard clearly understands the soul of the character, but this is a "Benedict Cumberbatch as Khan" situation - no matter how good the actor is, he just didn't embody Murderbot for me. Part of this is definitely me being salty that yet another character almost universally depicted as brown-skinned (in a world where the most common skin tone is a range of mid-browns, and Murderbot is designed to look unremarkable) being played by Generic White Guy #57. But also, and I'm not sure whether this was an acting choice or a directing choice, I think the choice for Murderbot's default expression to be "Marvin the socially anxious android" rather than "blank inhuman stare" really undercut a lot of the story for me. For one thing, a lot of the comedy relied on the disconnect between Murderbot's utterly blank expression and its "aaaaaaah we're all going to die aaaaaaaah someone is trying to make eye contact aaaaaaaaah"/"Could U Actually Fucking Not"... er, rich internal life. So having it look upset & alarmed pretty much all the time was... certainly a choice.
• This was definitely a "they changed it and now it sucks" thing, but I didn't like the super comedic tone of the first few episodes. I acknowledge that "it's a robot with social anxiety, forced to coexist with the most relentlessly cheerful and extroverted people in several galaxies" makes a great hook, but the humor didn't quite land for me - I liked the drier, more reserved, ""I don't care," it said, caringly" (thanks, cyanmnemosyne !) tone of the books.
• Something that undercut the comedy, I think, was that the turned-up-to-eleven Touchy-Feely Space Hippies of the PresAux team also didn't work for me. I've seen some interesting meta about what the show was going for here - by turning them from generally kind and competent people to more overt Space Hippies, it forces the viewer into the viewpoint of a Corporation Rim denizen, and highlights the idea that we're trained to react to kindness and empathy as cringey, rather than celebrating them as strengths. ...Which I think the books do just fine, by having the PresAux folks in general be kind and empathetic, in the sense that they think slavery is evil and education, food, and housing should be universally and freely available, but have the rest of the Corporation Rim react to them like they're insane. Turning these qualities up to 11 actually, IMO, makes them less effective. The chanting of "we can talk this out" actually felt kind of creepy and cult-like to me, and their treatment of Murderbot was, especially in the earlier episodes, neither kind nor empathetic. Like, it was very clearly uncomfortable (see above re: default expression), and instead of giving it space and respecting its boundaries like they do in the books, they keep pushing it to conform to their standards of acceptable/friendly behavior.
• Also possibly a "they changed it and now it sucks" thing, but I liked Dr. Mensah in the books a lot better. There, I was immensely impressed by her ability to remain calm and make smart decisions even under truly extraordinarily adverse circumstances, and I loved how she immediately respected Murderbot on learning that it was sentient - both in the personal sense, where she didn't pressure it to interact in social situations where it was clearly uncomfortable, and in the professional sense, where she started treating it as their security expert/consultant, which it pretty much was. But in the show she was getting right up in Murderbot's space along with the rest of the crew. Also, and this is definitely just a personal preference thing, I was unenthused about how she constantly seemed about two seconds away from a complete mental breakdown. Panic and general anguish certainly aren't *un*realistic reactions, especially to a career scientist/planetary administrator of a small and generally peaceful polity, but I remember being super impressed with how quickly and smoothly she transitioned from "holy shit holy shit that's a lot of things trying to kill us holy shit" to "okay, what's the best way to not get killed here?" She certainly does deal with a fair amount of trauma in the books, but if I recall correctly it doesn't begin to impact her until after the events of Exit Strategy, which makes a certain amount of sense - at least the first time around, she had a certain amount of agency, and some useful resources at her disposal, but the second time around, she was just fuckin' kidnapped.
• Murderbot as a general work of fiction does not need a romantic subplot, let alone two of them. I liked Gurathin A LOT in the show, but his whole pillow-sniffing/"wHy CaN't YoU LoVe Me"/hero-worship-but-way-too-intimate thing for Dr. Mensah did not work, especially early on. It made him look like a creep. It did improve as we learned more about his backstory (see below), and we started to see why he was so fixated on her, but I could have done without this. And the whole Ratthi/Pin-Lee/Arada (or whatever the arrangement was) thing just seemed like filler/a way to differentiate the characters. And it took Ratthi from a sweetheart with (as we learn in a later book) an active and varied love life to a Super Sunshine Derpy Sparkle Puppy!!!! I dunno; I don't think it was a particularly good look for him.
• The fights generally looked fairly clumsy and staged; it seemed to me that the stunt doubles were having trouble moving in the armor and were just kind of lunging/flailing at each other. I think this was just one of those inevitable consequences I mentioned earlier; it would be damn difficult to put someone in what looks like 20-odd pounds of bulky, vision-limiting armor and expect a fast, kinetic fight. (There were some exceptions to this, like the final shootout and when they used the hopper to land on one of the other SecUnits, but both of these, notably, involved non-armored participants who were much freer in their movements.)
• I was kinda meh on Sanctuary Moon... I think?? I'm truly unsure where I fall on this one. On one hand, one of my first thoughts was "just once, I wish somebody would have the guts to make a show-within-a-show actually, y'know, good, instead of taking the easy way out and going for over-the-top campiness", and the color scheme actually did hurt my eyes a little... but that's all very much the point. All the actors were clearly having a marvelous time, especially John Cho, and I did end up getting caught up in "what happens at the end???", so it was certainly effective in that regard. So I do applaud what it was doing, and I think it succeeded... I just wish it was doing something slightly different.

Anyway, enough harping! On to the things I did like:

• Thank goodness the PresAux team got some differentiation, because I couldn't remember a single thing about any one of them that I learned in All Systems Red, except that Mensah was the leader and Gurathin was an augmented human. We learn a lot later - Pin-Lee the legal badass, Ratthi's general sweetheart-ness, Mensah's family, etc., but there was n o t h i n g in the first book. Gurathin I was especially impressed with (more on this below), but the above-mentioned turned-up-to-eleven-ness aside, I did like the characters that were pretty much created whole cloth - Arada the critter-lover, Bharadwaj's "we're all going to die I think???," Pin-Lee's pragmatism and peace-keeping.
• They fucking knocked it out of the park with Gurathin. I thought the backstory stuff we got from everybody else was competent but not outstanding, but omg, Gurathin!! Granted, the setup ("let's reveal our most psychologically scarring memories as a fun party game at a fancy restaurant! :D") for the first part of his backstory reveal was fairly forced, but David Dastmalchian, Gurathin's actor, did a devastatingly good job. It suddenly made a lot more sense, why he was so worshipful of Dr. Mensah - he sees her as his salvation, both literally and metaphorically. It also made me respect Dr. Mensah and he treatment of him a lot more, how she was gently but firmly distant with him - knowing that she saved his life and gave him a reason to keep living, and that he glommed on to her SUPER hard after that. It suddenly became clear that she was gently trying to encourage him to detach from her and live his own life, while still respecting him both as a scientist/teammate and a person who was clearly still dealing with a shitton of trauma. I still think the pillow-smelling was creepy, but now that and the "why can't you love me?" thing now read as desperately sad rather than purely "ewwwww why." Like, less "omg dude, get a life" and more "...you know it's not her job to be your Load-Bearing Emotional Support Person forever, right?"
• Related to the last point: the ending was quite different, but I really liked it! I thought the book's short, punchy ending worked marvelously well for a short, punchy book, especially the reveal of the framing device, but a longer, more complex, more cinematic ending was much better (unsurprisingly :P) for a miniseries. Once again, Gurathin did a devastatingly good job, especially his quietly scathing fury at his old dealer's house, and his reluctant mutual understanding with Murderbot - both of them have a much more intimate understanding of the dehumanizing (sometimes in the literal sense) effect of the Corporation Rim, and both of them have variations on "oh my sweet summer child" attitudes towards the Preservation folks. In particular, I loved the weight this lent to their last conversation - for all that they understood each other way better than either of them was comfortable with, Gurathin had so much trouble with the idea that Murderbot had a chance to get out of this whole shitty system and go to Preservation - where people are actually kind to one another! no, really! - and was choosing to nope out instead. I think this might even be a slight improvement over the books, come to think of it - in the books, like in the show, Murderbot points out that the whole "guardian" system on Preservation is not fundamentally different from the way constructs are treated in the Corporation Rim; the language is just prettier. But I think the show did a better job of bringing that home, with the PresAux team clearly caring a great deal for Murderbot but not necessarily respecting/understanding it. So this way, Murderbot choosing to leave and go figure out what this whole "self-determination" thing means makes a lot more sense here.
• I liked a lot more of the ending than just Gurathin and Murderbot's Best Enemies relationship! Pin-Lee finally got to unsheathe her (their, in the show, I think? I might be wrong about that, tho) legal claws, the team got to go on a rescue mission of their own, and we got a glimpse of the wider Corporation Rim (which I assume doubles as setup for the next season/Artificial Condition). I admit I was curiously unmoved by Murderbot's memory wipe and subsequent non-recognition of the PresAux team, but I did like the legal maneuvering/heist combo to get it/its memories back, and of course it makes total sense that it would have hidden its memories in Sanctuary Moon! For once, the team's turned-up-to-eleven emotions were completely justified - they got their SecUnit back, and it got itself back!
• I thought that Leebeebee was a great addition. There definitely wasn't time or space for her in the book, so I wonder whether she was one of those ideas that Martha Wells had to cut for length, and then took the chance to reintroduce here? Anyway, aside from the fact that she was devastatingly obviously a plant, she was a great window into the Corporation Rim mindset, beyond the Evil Corporate Executives and oppressed masses - it was interesting to see how her "fuck you, I got mine" worldview was a result of her environment and not, like, inveterate personal evil or whatever, but also something she couldn't give up even when given another option. (Although the show also did an excellent job of making it clear why "just choose kindness! :D" was not the simple and easy thing to Leebeebee that it was to the PresAux team.)
• The set design (hell, the overall design of the show) was excellent; in sharp contrast to the "Future by Apple(TM)" that I remember being weirded out by in the Star Trek reboots, this world looks very lived-in and slightly distressed (in the material sense of the word) in a very believable way. I also really liked the cinematography (yay for everything not being too dark to see!!!) and the use of Murderbot's narration/HUD to complement the dialogue. I think they did about as good a job as they reasonably could in translating Murderbot's multiple input streams into a single stream for us un-augmented humans.

So overall I don't think I'm quite as enthused about it as the rest of the fandom is, but I think it was made with enormous love and respect for the source material, and not an ounce of the generic corporate lazy cynicism that keeps cranking out live-action remakes of classic Disney movies.
I had planned on writing about a whole bunch of other stuff (Le Guin! Romance novels! Hugo nominees!) buuut I do want to get this post out sometime this week, so I'll have to save those for next time. XD

Comments

[duskpeterson]

Congratulations on the new position! And thank you for (1) the Murderbot analysis and (2) the quotation from Tolkien, which I'd read long ago but fogotten. It reminds me of a similar quotation from Le Guin (also regarding speculative fiction) about how the only people who are upset at the idea of escape are captors.