This is brilliant and I am going to use it.

“After this brutal belittling, gaslighting, and sexual harassment, you’re gonna have a lot of baggage. And the best way to carry it? The LTT backpack!”

Well, you can just ram them out of the way with your firetruck. Obviously that’s not a great option either, but if the FD does that then any damages are on the robot-taxi company.

Ding ding ding! We have a safe mode of robot transit: trains. See, we know exactly where they will go because they run on rails. Literally.

Observation is one I really enjoyed. Mild puzzling, tension but not really the sort that kills you, and a fun, mind-bending story. Also the title track is just amazing.

I cried that whole bit with the controller feeling like you’re missing an arm. So exact a representation of grief.

But the last scene, where the father simply falls to his knees at his son’s grave. He’s been granted his life back at a price no human parent would ever, ever accept. I cried racking sobs. It was so awful and true.

Not a book, but the Bastard Operator From Hell series on theregister.co.uk gives a decent picture, if a touch dramatized.

I just want you to know this brightened my day with a sensible chuckle.

I want to like this article and to share it with my relatives to help explain what I am so angry about. But it is so thick with irony and deep-cut references that even I, a long-time extremely online dude, had trouble parsing all of it.

Dead orca. Came upon marine biologists cutting up and disposing of a beached orca, and the smell was like a physical wall, and then a repeated series of roundhouse kicks to the face and eyes. Just an indescribable stench, regular rotting meat dialed up to dimension-warping, sanity-threatening levels. I will never forget it. I would never ever have got closer, but my girlfriend was driving and she knew one of the biologists and was really interested to chat about it right next to the pickup filled with chunks of tail. Just unreal all around.