Coworker who has only ever joined video calls from cluttered unlit bedrooms or his garage has finally finished his home renovations...

He is now seemingly in an empty room with bare walls, the camera shot is perfectly normal to the wall and goes down to the baseboard. Against the wall behind him are a man-sized vase on the left and a smaller vase on a plinth to his right, nothing else.

It is one corner cobweb away from the most Hanna-Barbera shit I've ever seen IRL.

I remember reading Murderbot Diaries and just assuming Martha Wells had to be a programmer or IT person that quit to write fiction. The machine perspective writing is too on the nose to not be anchored in hours spent gazing at pcaps in wireshark, or SOMETHING like that.

So it was almost confusing to me to learn that she's been a fantasy writer her whole 30+ year career.

Except, at a Q&A tonight she mentioned that between getting a B.A. in Anthropology and writing fiction, she wrote COBOL.