I read the first chapter on a plane and I've been meaning to say, Found Cat is SO SWEET, like indesc

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Thank you! (Hope your trip was good! Welcome home!) 

I love reading fluff but it’s usually… somehow… not quite to my taste? Y’know? There’s a lot of great fluff out there, but I keep finding that there are just little things here and there that leave me unsatisfied about it, or that I bump into uncomfortably, or like– I don’t know, there are a lot of great stories, but there’s always something. So I really wanted to write my perfect fluff thing, y’know? 

I think I’m pickier about fluff than smut! With smut, if it’s something I’m not quite into, I can just kind of skim a little, but with fluff it’s more often the whole emotional tenor of a thing taking a wrong turn at some point, and you kind of don’t have the same momentum as with smut. (Sometimes you do. Sometimes it’s not your cup of tea but it’s close enough. Sometimes it’s just. Not cool.)

I don’t know. Anyway, I find it much harder to write and to read. And so I figured I’d take a shot at some pure id on my own. 

It turns out that my deepest-held, most id-tastic, secret fetish is for people to talk things out like adults.

And then fuck. I’m finally writing that part.

Poe just revealed that he has several tattoos in this AU, which I hadn’t expected. He has a collection of good luck symbols because he was a pilot and pilots are superstitious. I really didn’t plan on that. He’s a little pleased with himself. Finn is delighted.

took mother-not-in-law to the airport. am now at work. got here at 5:45 for a start time of 9. no...

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took mother-not-in-law to the airport. am now at work. got here at 5:45 for a start time of 9. no no, i asked if i could come in super early and everyone was like why not, shoot some product. cool. so, here i am. to shoot product.

my god there is not enough coffee in the entire world.

on the upside, tim horton’s was open (of course it was), so i have a bacon cheddar biscuit. i went through the drive-thru, and nobody was in it, so i just pulled straight through, and immediately paid and was handed my coffee, but by the time i’d put my coffee in the cup holder and turned back for my five cents change and… whatever I’d ordered… I’d completely forgotten what I ordered. So the kid hands me this waxed-paper package and I’m like– I have no idea what’s in this package, this is a Delightful Surprise.

(I was not disappointed in PastMe when I realized what it was. Timmy Hos breakfast sandwiches are bomb. 

(And just now I just remembered the first time I heard the phrase “the bomb” to mean great, and it was freshman year of college, and it was this kid from Connecticut, and I looked at him like he had three heads. Why do I remember that? I know, because long-term and short-term memory are different mechanisms and my long-term memory isn’t a fucking shitshow. But.) 

speaking of product photography.Here’s a sampli

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speaking of product photography.

Here’s a sampling of some of the cute shit i’ve photographed in the last couple of weeks. 

That Mercury II is freaking adorable and I’m going to put it on Etsy. The Fujita 66 already sold in the store. The Retinas are astonishingly worthless. As is that Pentax, which dates from the generation just before they incorporated light meters into the cameras themselves. 

i’m trying to make a post and can’t. so

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i’m trying to make a post and can’t. so this is a test.

so this won’t post? but my test post will?

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so this won’t post? but my test post will? what the fuck.

as i’m puttering around at work i’m adding words to the Porn Epilogue of Lost Cat (I wouldn’t write porn at work if anyone else were here, but ffs it’s seven in the morning and I’ve been here an hour, reality has no meaning)

(and i’m not just slacking off, it really does take forever to import photos to this computer)

and not only does this AU’s Poe have tattoos, he’s also incredibly subby, and I really didn’t intend for that, I wanted this to be super vanilla. But Finn just flipped him over to look and see if he has any tattoos on his back, and he’s so turned-on he can’t breathe because Finn is so competent at moving him around.

For fuck’s sake, AU!Poe, why are you like this.

You know, I really wanted to write one where he was kind of a prude, too, and that just didn’t happen. I can’t, with this guy.

Writing an Earth AU does drive home to me, a little bit, the fact that the normal Poe is, in fact, an alien. I’m always aware on some level that I’m kind of translating him through an Earth filter; he’s a little bit removed. It’s kind of weird and kind of a revelation to write him as an Earth native. I don’t know that there’s any difference to the reader, but there’s a bunch of difference to me, conceptually.

I guess it drives home to me that your subconscious influences are almost as important as your conscious influences, y’know? This is all coming out of my head, but it’s not all stuff I intend!

"It’s not just kids that form surprising bonds

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“It’s not just kids that form surprising bonds with these bundles of wires and circuits. Some people give names to their Roomba vacuum cleaners, says Darling. And soldiers honour their robots with “medals” or hold funerals for them. She cites one particularly striking example of a military robot that was designed to defuse landmines by stepping on them. In a test, the explosions ripped off most of the robot’s legs, and yet the crippled machine continued to limp along. Watching the robot struggle, the colonel in charge called off the test because it was “inhumane”, according to the Washington Post.”
-

Is it OK to torture or murder a robot?

(via maskandmachete)

okay reblogging this thing again because I’ve had a thought now that I’ve read the article: The writer says re: animal cruelty laws, “It’s less about the animal’s experience and more about our own emotional pain.”

While this may be true in some respects, there is also the noted connection between animal abuse and violent behavior towards other humans. Someone who does not have the empathy that prevents us from hurting animals will likely not stop there.

The bounds of this expected empathy are a socially defined concept, yes, but that does not make them any less strong. If there is a more fundamental basis for empathy, I would be interested to learn about it, but at the moment I’m quite tired and will hold off on personal research.

In any case, I’m in favor of robot rights on principle, but this adds another underlying layer of logic: robot rights can also protect humans in the process.

(via moniquill)

I really appreciate the idea that protecting robot rights can protect humans both from empathetic suffering on the robots’ behalf, and also from the moral injury humans can incur by being allowed or even compelled to be cruel to robots. 

i’m so cold, and have been sitting here for

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i’m so cold, and have been sitting here for almost three hours (i’ve shot a lot of pictures ok), and the manager just got in and said, “uh, can we turn the heat on?”

right this building has a thermostat, i can just– there’s a button. I showed him. He was like cool, and gave me a look; I’m bundled up like, well, like it’s freezing in here. I had no explanation for how I could have failed to notice that the heat wasn’t on and that it was something I could fix. I’ve also been sitting here with the lights off. (The lightbox has its own light source. But I almost put my coffee cup in my gum because I set the gum down to finish the coffee and then couldn’t see that it was there. I am so gross.)

duh.

so anyway.

so the porn epilogue for the Found Cat AU. i

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so the porn epilogue for the Found Cat AU. i don’t know that anyone cares about this as much as i do, but oh i do. nsfwish behind cut. just a preview. 

it’s Poe POV. The whole epilogue grew out of the extra scene from Poe’s POV, so it’s all his take, which is a shame, but I needed to know what his deal was.

“I was a pilot,” Poe said, “and pilots tend to be superstitious.” He licked his lower lip and grinned. “I have a bunch of tattoos like that.”

“I never would have guessed,” Finn said, and his expression went a little avid.

“Oh no,” Poe said, laughing happily, “now you’re going to find them all, aren’t you.”

“I sure am,” Finn said. He pushed himself up, skimming a hand across Poe’s belly, and bent to kiss the tattoo on his hip. Poe shivered ticklishly, mostly because Finn’s breath was hot against his cock and he was trying not to think about that too much. Finn sat up, then, and looked over the front of Poe’s torso. There were no tattoos on his chest or belly, but farther down, on his thigh, there was one curling around the outside of his thigh midway up from his knee, and Finn grabbed his leg and bent it to look. “What’s this?”

“It’s some Maya symbols,” Poe said, “my mom was from– oh!” Finn used his hold on Poe’s leg to flip him, easily, and oh no, Poe was really into that, he’d been trying not to let on. “Hngh.”

There were tattoos on the backs of both of Poe’s thighs, and Finn laughed in delight, running his hands over them. The leg that didn’t have the glyphs had another tattoo down on the calf, wrapping around to above the ankle bone, and Finn traced that, then pulled Poe’s leg up to investigate the little tattoo over the top of his foot that curled down toward the arch. Poe was effectively pinned on his face, now, and he could probably have broken Finn’s hold, but sweet Christ he didn’t want to, he was almost beyond speech with how turned-on he was. Finn was just so confident, strong and competent and gentle, like he knew how a human body needed to be handled and wouldn’t exert more pressure than necessary, but had no shyness about exerting pressure at all.

“These are cool,” Finn said. He turned Poe’s foot easily– he just knew which direction it could go comfortably, and put it there, no hesitation or awkwardness or force necessary. “It’s your name and– you have a serial number too.”

“Yeah,” Poe said, and explaining the trend of getting your dog tag info tattooed on you for ease of remains identification was beyond him, but he did feel like he had to explain. “It was voluntary though. I wanted that there.”

“Why here?” Finn asked.

Poe breathed for a moment; he was so turned-on he was almost blissed-out with it. “Boots,” he said. “Sometimes– I was a pilot. If there’s fire sometimes the only parts of you left are what’s in your boots. So, ID label.”

“Oh,” Finn said, “that makes sense,” and he was so unconcerned– Poe remembered that he wasn’t a civilian. That absolutely did just make sense to him, and didn’t upset him at all like it had every civilian who had ever noticed it before. He ran his hand up the back of Poe’s leg. “Hey, are you okay?”

“I’m so turned-on,” Poe confessed. “I’m so turned-on I. Sentences. Can’t.”

Finn laughed, and then he caught sight of the tattoo at the back of Poe’s hip. “Does that one just say ‘Lucky’?”

“It’s my classiest tattoo,” Poe said, and sweet Jesus, Finn bent down and licked it. It was one of those little text-banners, and it said “Lucky” in script and was wound through an upright horseshoe and a four-leaf clover, and Poe had gotten it on a dare at the height of his cocky phase. It had won him several bets in bars. It had not saved him from his career-ending crash.

“Is it that you’re lucky, or that whoever’s seeing it is lucky?” Finn asked, breath hot and damp and right next to Poe’s ass and he still had Poe’s ankle in his hand so Poe was still de facto pinned in place facedown and his brain was pegged in overload, his whole body tingling. He’d felt like this before but not from such innocuous contact.

“You tell me,” Poe managed to say.

Announcing The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells

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marthawells:

So, this happened! I’ve sold two SF novellas to the Tor.com novella line, and the first one The Murderbot Diaries: All Systems Red will come out in next summer in ebook and paperback.

summersrage: @abunchofstuff

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@abunchofstuff

It Should Not Surprise You To Learn That Singing St.

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spoliamag:

by Lydia Brotherton, from our Virgo issue of Spolia

In November of 2012, as the last crazed election in the United States was coming to a close, I was on a train from Berlin to Namur, Belgium, to sing alongside six other women on a recording of music by the abbess (and poet, mystic, visionary, healer, saint) Hildegard von Bingen.

Our rehearsals for the recording took place in an old church along a busy commercial street in Namur, conveniently across from a Le Pain Quotidien. The church’s sanctuary was a wide expanse of unheated, ancient stone, lined on three sides with ornately carved wooden confessionals of a later period that hid frightening metal grates in their shadows. Freezing, we huddled in plastic chairs arranged near the altar, bordered by those dark, secret spaces; we learned the music together and in our breaks spent too much money on fancy sandwiches, chocolate croissants, and coffees. At night, we ate roast chicken and fries in a sort of agreed upon quiet. Or we spoke and maybe it just seemed like we were all on mute when we weren’t singing.

After rehearsals we began to record, in a church on an estate deep in the countryside, a place called Franc-Waret. Every morning we gathered into a van and set off from our hotel in Namur to the estate, where the French engineer and his assistant waited for us in a small stone room incongruously filled with recording equipment. In our breaks we wandered through pastoral scenes from 17th century Belgium: there was frost on the grass, sunlight sparkling off the church windows. We were served lunches in the basement of the chateau opposite the tiny church, under arching, crumbling, very cold white walls. According to the recording company, the church was chosen for its acoustic – a crystal warmth wrapped ideally in quiet countryside. And yes, the acoustic was beautiful out there, but I think the idea was rather to somehow record the isolation of our voices, to get down on tape how the six of us women had enclosed upon ourselves like nuns.

Keep reading

spoliamag: Lydia Brotherton’s performance of a

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Lydia Brotherton’s performance of a St. Hildegard composition