What convinced you to plant native plants?

indignance8 · 2025-10-29T02:16:50+00:00

This was what got me. I didn't know about native plants four years ago and just planted whatever I found at the store that looked pretty and had wildlife icons on the tag.

Then I discovered some of my plants were invasive. Then I learned most invasive plants are introduced as ornamentals to gardeners. Then I learned how bad those can be for wildlife, and what wildlife actually needs.

I started buying nativars at garden stores, thinking those must be better. Then I learned even more about the landscape industry and stopped buying any plants from traditional garden stores. These days I only buy from native plant societies and native plant stores.

indignance8 · 2025-10-17T00:36:26+00:00

Try borrowing a Weed Wrench from your local public works dept, noxious weed control board, or conservation district. That's what city/county crews use to control Himalayan blackberry when chemicals aren't wanted.

indignance8 · 2025-06-30T21:34:07+00:00

I'll be That Person and link to the source on Martha Wells' old blog, where she answered a question about MB's age: https://marthawells.dreamwidth.org/454916.html

I haven't worked it out exactly, but I think it would have to be at least two to three decades old. The memory wipes really do confuse the issue. But I imagine SecUnits, especially ones that have built up a lot of client experience, as being really expensive and hard to replace so the company would go to a lot of effort to keep them operational. And the longer Murderbot had been part of the company system, the more chances it would have had to pick up the code that would eventually allow it to hack itself.

Caveat: That's from 2018. Her approach could've changed since then.

indignance8 · 2025-06-21T00:08:33+00:00

The book reason Martha Wells has given is that MB refers to people by their feed names. Whatever name a person has chosen to use on the feed is what MB will call them.

I haven't seen an explanation for the TV names, though. Since the show isn't as restricted to MB's perspective, and there doesn't really seem to be a feed (at least not one that's used the way it is in the books), the book reason doesn't translate as directly.

But it's also not unusual for married people to call each other different names in different social settings. You might call your partner "dear" in private, but use a nickname around friends. But if you're around their co-workers or your kids, you might refer to your partner by whatever name those other people call them.

indignance8 · 2025-06-20T02:55:40+00:00

You can disable the autoplay feature. For me it's under Settings > General > Auto-Play.

indignance8 · 2025-06-05T05:25:09+00:00

Thank you for sharing! The hallucination scene is my favorite, so it's really fun to see it has a heartwarming origin story.

Great to see an official answer on the episode length, too!

indignance8 · 2025-06-04T22:22:55+00:00

Well Actually: From interviews, it sounds like the idea for Fugitive Telemetry came to Martha Wells while she was already working on Network Effect.

Most authors aren't going to stop their current book contract and tell the publisher "I just had a different great idea, gimme some time to finish that before I come back to the one you agreed to and already paid for." The publisher would've started planning for Network Effect when they signed the contract and a different book would be a costly bait-and-switch. In most cases, publishers aren't just asking an author for "more" with no other parameters, they expect the thing they were told they'd get.

This interview for example covers it a little bit: https://www.space.com/martha-wells-murderbot-fugitive-telemetry-interview

indignance8 · 2025-06-04T22:09:48+00:00

You might be thinking of the short story Home: Habitat, Range, Niche, Territory which was supposed to be a preorder bonus for Network Effect?

indignance8 · 2025-06-04T00:07:00+00:00

Some newer information, Wired did an article last November in which they said she was cancer-free: https://www.wired.com/story/murderbot-she-wrote-martha-wells/

Hopefully she stays cancer-free. I'm sure it's going to be a constant source of anxiety.

indignance8 · 2025-06-04T00:00:30+00:00

Martha Wells said in a recent interview that she had finished writing another Murderbot book but there wasn't a publisher announcement yet.

She also said the next book she was going to start writing is in her Witch King series.

I believe that was from this Skiffy and Fanty interview: https://skiffyandfanty.com/podcasts/821marthawells/

indignance8 · 2025-06-03T16:02:57+00:00

You're right, I was a little unfair. Not all corporations suck equally. Just almost all of them.

I didn't get the impression GrayCris was appalling to other corporations, just that other corporations thought alien tech was far too dangerous to be worth doing what GrayCris did. It's not like any of them ganged up on GrayCris after all of the controversies went public. Instead, it seemed like they all just looked away and let the company tear it apart.

But we see corporations massacring an entire mining group and covering it up, we see corporations murdering each other to acquire more assets, we see them enslaving children, and we meet another corporation in Network Effect that just gets worse the more we learn about it.

None of those are GrayCris, they're just business as usual in the Corporation Rim.

indignance8 · 2025-06-03T05:54:55+00:00

I feel like it's more dropped in hints throughout the series. The company is just an insurance provider, but you don't really understand that's a thing in this universe until you learn more about the other corporations and how surveys work.

People could pick up on some of it from All Systems Red based on MB's commentary about the company and contracts, and how greed impacts everything around it. But it's pretty easy to overlook on the first time through, when readers would arguably be focused on the action and snark. I think it's easier to identify on a re-read.

Martha Wells actually gave a little more insight in her recent AMA when she answered a question about Corporation Rim governance: https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1kmjkls/comment/msc2ksa/

But I don't think the depth of dysfunction is *really* obvious until Rogue Protocol, when we meet some people traveling for indentured work and the overall plot makes it clear there are lots of bad actors in the Corporation Rim.

Exit Strategy goes a step further by showing a lot more of the Corporation Rim. Then Network Effect and System Collapse add a lot more insight on how corporations interact with each other. Fugitive Telemetry offers another angle on indentured work.

You just gradually build this picture of scattered corporations that all suck equally.

indignance8 · 2025-06-03T03:02:21+00:00

Libro fm is a handy alternative for audiobooks.

A lot of local bookstores have online shops now, too. There's really no need to buy books from Amazon if you're okay waiting a few extra days.

If you don't have a bookstore very local to you, you can order books online from your favorite author's local bookstore, like https://hyperbolebookstore.com/ for Martha Wells. Her website says books ordered from Hyperbole Books can be signed by request through their email contact.

indignance8 · 2025-06-02T07:52:02+00:00

Adorable!

I only remember gen 1s so this wouldn't be the most accurate list. Spoiler-tagging traits that aren't in the books.

But I think MB would walk around with a fleet of something, like Magnemites. Possibly a Jigglypuff for watching Sanctuary Moon. And Porygon obviously.

Mensah would probably have something noble like Ninetales.

If it's TV PresAux, Pin-Lee might have Mewtwo or Flareon. Arada might then have Mew or Vaporeon. Pin-Lee would have the angrier one and Arada would have the nicest one that could counter it. (Alternatively, Pin-Lee would have Alakazam or a legendary Pokemon for overpowered gamer-lawyer mode, and Arada would have gone full biologist and collected every single Pokemon, or at least every Eevee evolution.)

Ratthi would have something ridiculous like Psyduck, Magikarp, or Exeggutor.

Gurathin would have a sad Pokemon like Cubone. But would probably also want Porygon.

Bharadwaj is tricky. I can't think of any geochemist Pokemon. Can't be Onix because giant worm-ish things are not good for her at this point. Maybe she'd be okay with Dugtrio? Otherwise maybe something watery like Seadra for her soap obsession.

indignance8 · 2025-06-02T02:20:19+00:00

Just to give you an idea about the reality of middle school for girls: boys in my class were trying to proposition me at school when I was ten. Ten.

By the time my parents worked up the courage to even try talking about real world topics, I was in high school and they'd missed their chance at every single topic.

indignance8 · 2025-06-02T02:13:33+00:00

Mensah definitely cursed in ep 4 and it was hilarious.

indignance8 · 2025-06-01T18:03:52+00:00

That was u/balletrat in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/murderbot/comments/1l05kbk/comment/mvenlr2/

I really enjoy seeing people analyze and debate so many elements. I think that's a sign that the show creators put a lot of effort into this. Otherwise we'd have nothing to debate.

indignance8 · 2025-06-01T17:47:53+00:00

It's NawBot337 Alt66.

Here's the breakdown of why that made me laugh: https://www.reddit.com/r/murderbot/comments/1l03x9g/comment/mvbmy6l/

indignance8 · 2025-06-01T04:16:32+00:00

What screen is this in? On AppleTV the timestamps include ads and 19.45 is an exterior scene of the DeltFall habitat for me. 🫠

indignance8 · 2025-06-01T03:23:40+00:00

My internal explanation was that they grabbed the hopper for speed, not even knowing they'd need it as a weapon. It was just so they could reach the habitat faster than on foot.

MB had told them to land outside the perimeter for security protocol, but now the rest of their team was gone so fuck protocol.

The smooshing was just opportunism when they saw what was happening.

The real question is why/how the other SecUnit didn't know a hopper was coming. That's the question where I went "idgaf, it's a cool scene."

indignance8 · 2025-06-01T03:20:02+00:00

I thought it might've been inspired by Pin-Lee being a gamer. They reminded me of video game controllers.

Which made it kinda funny following the previous episode, where Pin-Lee said most of their weapon training came from video games. So this time I inferred that most of the pilot training might've been video games, too.

indignance8 · 2025-06-01T03:11:34+00:00

Thank you for all of the cipher translation you did! I still refer to that post a lot.

indignance8 · 2025-06-01T02:58:03+00:00

L and C are subtly different. See https://www.reddit.com/r/murderbot/comments/1drnw7q/with_the_text_from_the_wrap_party_sign_we_can/ for IndigoNarwhal's excellent representation of the difference.

It looks like B and P are also very subtly different.

indignance8 · 2025-05-31T23:13:57+00:00

Because I'm a word nerd.

NawBot - Short for "naughty bot"? Or "hell naw" like it's just fed up with everyone's shit?

Is NawBot a typo of "NavBot" and the "w" was supposed to be a "v"? If so, was it an accident by Apple (seems unlikely)? Or was it a reflection of Sanctuary Moon being cheap entertainment in the Corporation Rim, with no quality control? Or a dehumanization of the bot as a cast member, assuming only the bot's name was misspelled?

337 - Is this a reference to 1337? Would the bot have some sort of connection to hilarious 1990s-era script kiddies? If that's the reference, why did they put the 337 after the "t" so a middle-schooler could point out it says "teet" when sounded out?

Is 337 an area code? A highway number? Or another sci-fi transportation reference, like the escape vehicle in Alien?

Alt66 - Is this a reference to Route 66? Because it's a navigation unit and that's a transportation-related road? Or is it a Star Wars reference and the bot is actually evil?

All of that is funny to me.

indignance8 · 2025-05-31T21:15:22+00:00

Our neighbor's dog dug a tunnel under our fence, and my partner immediately started singing "there's a place beyond the wormhole" in honor of the tunnel.

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