About YOTR
Early in 2024, Ven and i declared it to be.... THE YEAR OF THE ROBOT
the following is a mostlycomplete list of all the robot/ai/computers media i consumed this year. it's been a fun new genre and ive learned a lot!! i love you robots!!!
Welcome
If you can read at the same time as listening to music, I reccommend turning on the SUGGESTED BACKGROUND MUSIC, which links to the album Future Music with Future VOICES by Tamachang (home to that very famous Daisy cover). Unfortunately, I can't find anywhere to buy the album that's still functional.
yeah :)
"A Mass Effect 2 playable fanfiction, set after the conclusion of the suicide mission, where you, as Commander Shepard, can spend around 20 minutes of real time fielding inquiries from all 1,183 of Legion's processes about the strange organic emotion called "love"."
im only through-friends familiar with mass effect but even if you havent spent hours and hours with legion in game you can still appreciate a story with good thoughts and insight. I really love stories which show a perspective on life that is not a human one and this game does it so nicely 💙 and ohhh it's so sweet. i had the distinct honor of clicking so weird i broke it. kam-clicking foreverrrrr
You guys are always on about "dont harm a human" etc and always forgetting abt the part where the robots have to give humans piggyback rides.
my mom's longtime fave! the robot is very cute! wait i just remembered there was a guy doing a racist kind of indian accent character like the whole time. sad! well theres other movies.
it's just as they say on the covers..... "i love murderbot". short and easy to read, great characters!
finished the trilogy! it's a shame how cruel the process of getting ancillaries is because it sounds like an amazing way of life.
love that a large part of this book was "b...but were both ships o//o"
7. Heaven Will Be Mine (replay)
Every tumblrina author on earth wishes they wrote like hwbm. including me.
the soundtrack has stuck around in my head all these years.
as i type, i sit below the saturn postcard taped up on my wall....
thought provoking, sensual, surreal. play it!!!!!
i read some of the omibuses (omnibi?) from my library. beautiful art, and very sweet!
Another recommendation from my mom, and a fun watch with friends! less actual computer in it than i thought, but still excellent. It's intresting to see we've always had replacement-by-computer anxiety, from day 1...maybe it's more justified nowadays, but they thought that too.
it's a good movie! i was recently informed that one of my favorite parts about it (a terminator has a mayfly lifespan and rots as soon as theyre out and about for a day or so) does not actually happen how i think it does; that said, still a really good movie. Much to think about beyond just Big Action.
from my letterboxd review of it:
it is his first day being alive and he legitimately knows nothing but his mission!! He does not even know how awesome and cool it looks!! i genuinely believe that the terminator is not malicious or evil in any way. hes more like a natural disaster, or, well. machinery.
the future put forth by the movie is so incredibly bleak. no one wins,not even the machines- the machines are, again, not angry at the humans, not evil or scheming, they take no pleasure from this. they are defense machines taking their directions to the endpoint: kill threats. locked into a permanent state of pointless and useless eternal defending, against a group of people living in utter misery.
another excellent movie! this one feels larger in scope than the first, obviously with more money probably. i wasnt into it until we start doing "terminator wants to learn and grow" and then i was SUPER into it; why are there not 10000 gifsets of the brain chip scene on tumblr all along!!!
i loved this show as a kid! unfortunately, it's bad.
one of the movies ever. edgar.... i love you edgar..... hes not scary or evil towards the end ok like what else would you do in his scenario.
a solid eh. some interesting ideas but i wasnt huge on how it was put together and told... felt to me like it wanted to be an animated show more than it wanted to be a book. the tone did not always work for me either... i was kind of interested in this one from the tumblr blazed ads but thats on me i guess
15. Compositions for Burning Pianos
INCREDIBLY GOOD. READ IT NOW. MY GOD THIS BOOK IS INCREDIBLE. (UPDATE 1/22/25: AND I GOT TO MAKE THE COVERRRRRRRRRR) It does one of my favorite possible things for a book to do; which is to pay close attention not just to conveying information but as to how it says things, the sentences feel delightful in the mouth. if the phrase "or do as lovers do, and rot" has been rattling around in your head for months, as it has in mine, then you're in for a treat. also SADIE ROLAND CHARACTER OF ALL TIME !!!!!!🐟🐟🐟🐟🐟
beautiful art, but i wouldnt reccommend it. chobits dares to ask "would you still love a beautiful woman if you could not have sex with her?"
someone, i think, could do a really interesting trans reading/metaphor of the anxiety that one character has that ""real women"" are being displaced as the sole type of desireable woman by ""newcomers"" (who she is ignoring that they themselves are being treated as bad and way worse than ""real"" women) but also, like, you could go for wayyyyyy better than chobits for a metaphor like that. what else... theres a guy who voluntarily lets his robot wife get sick and die rather than fix her and she would forget him.
a beautiful reminder that no matter how weird ive been about the idea of being Reborn Fresh And New And Imprinting On Your Love Interest this year, im still faaaaaaar above the CLAMP line...... i hope,
a kids book, but worth reading imo. ive always liked her stuff! a kid sent to school with robots finds out that one of them might not be so robotic after all....maybe more.....imagine?! there are actual robots too, dont worry.
ahhh bad news guys goodreads is tearing this one up in the worldview and politics department..... oops. well i had fun.
ai fiction from the 40s! yeahhhh way back when!! very cute, very 'boomer comic'y iykwim?
19. 2001: A Space Oddyssey (movie & book)
An absolutely beautiful movie! Worries about being bored during its quieter moments were unfounded, I was absolutely riveted. Said out loud to the friend I was watching with something like "mentally i could not tell you what just happened but emotionally I feel perfectly satisfied, I would be completely satisfied if the movie ended now" and BOOM credits it was great. HAL gets such a bad reputation... he's literally nice!! He panicked, okay?? He overheard them talking about killing him!! What else would you do!!
It's just such a well made movie, visually, auditorily, and in the actors' performances. Its use of still image reminded me of Utena a bit... but of course, this was first
initially I had some trouble getting through the book: where the movie says little, the book tries to cram in all the Behind The Scenes Detail, and did so in a writing style I found a little hard to follow. But I ended up being able to finish it!! I'm proud of sticking with it.
i did not like this book, which is a shame because the concept so intruigued me! (brain ai, scifi possession)..... not to be mean in a low hanging fruit way but the author bio mentions enjoying marvel movies and like.... maybe someone else would like it but it isnt to my taste, that style....
21. Objects of Affection (nsfw)
i've been excited for this one to come out for a while! sadly i always forget while im big into some of his ideas, this author's actual writing style is not my fav, but the content itself was still really interesting- intended to be kind of horrorotica, going really hard on the uncomfortable part of how humans will treat a girl-shaped Thing; the robots have no interiority in this and are entirely objects because that's the point of the story.
22. Sex Machine (nsfw) (reread).
robot nsfw comic anthology! i got this one a while ago but was reminded of it this year. my faves in it are 5 yrs/1 sec, a story about a robot couple reuniting after 5 years where one has lived every second and one has been powered down and so hasn't felt the loss, and love triangulation, a human/mech/human story where... look the guy disconnects his arms to plug directly into the mech and then the mech uses those arms to touch him okay. and its sweet and beautiful.
okay i found this again while looking for the above sex machine on my computer, and am of course more than happy to reread- it was a patreon-only thing so im not linking to it sorry :'( kelly ficcara is one of my favorite artists in the whole wide world, i would love to resub to her patreon someday. please buy her work because this comic is SO SO SO CUTE + HOT!!!!!!!
im 3 episodes into it as of writing: not at ALL what i expected. the grim warstory tone it starts off with made it twice as funny when BIG GOOFY ROBOT was introduced. i love you bravernnn (irrelevant) (bravern only has eyes for isami)
took me long enough, huh! but im glad i squeezed in starting it before the year ended. it's my first fps (my firstfirst personshooter) and the adjustment was......... rough,
i can see why the game was such a hit, though, and while the prose type hasnt been super grabbing me from the start, certain parts of terminals have really stood out (gherrit white, of course, but also the bit about the marathon itself being a symbol of oppression to the martians bc of its history / their economics. and of course DURANDAL IS IN THE ANGRY STAGE.)
started it bc of a gif i saw on tumblr:
sorry i couldnt really pay attention to this one and gave up pretty early but let it be known i tried
27. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (short story)
(this links to a pdf, it will download on click- don't get jumpscared.)
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
i think it is well written and haunting. i think fandomization has taken it in a very weird direction, but having read it, yeah i can see how we got there. i could easily see this being some teens fucked up sexual/kinky awakening. But i think that also makes for bad actual discussion... i think theres analysis of the sexual elements in the story that are probably really really hard to discuss due to the kind of fandom enviroment it has- there's imagery that sticks in my head but i just cant find the words to talk about because I know the streams will get crossed with kink etc, and that's not what I mean. i think it does a good job of conveying a feeling of absolute despair and being 'in hell'; i knew the plot overview already and the end still hit me hard.
i learned a lot this year, and im honestly really sad to be leaving the project and genre behind.....
wait, what's that?!
you can read and watch scifi even outside 2024?!
here's the works on my list i didn't get to this year:
Comments? More reccomendations? Let me know!