Megan

• Blog for me to barf out all of my hyper-fixations •

[drawnsnake]

I cried watching Project Hail Mary btw

[seren-dipitous-art]

…okay so what if the problem with the taomeba never happened on the way back home. What if the radiation never got onto the Blip-A. What if Rocky ended up back on Erid, and Grace made it back to Earth. What if they missed each other desperately forever.

What if Grace made a lopsided crochet Rocky and cuddled it every night.

What if Rocky couldn’t stop making xenonite puppets of his alien friend.

What if I made myself cry, what about that? Huh? What then?

[all-the-weird]

Found a rock that looks suspiciously like a panini (the lines are not naturally occurring but idk what made them). I like everyone’s eridian oc’s that have been popping up. I can’t draw well, but wack five legs on this thing and this is my little eridian sona. I am aptly naming them Panini. Please accept panini into your hearts.

[all-the-weird]

Ta da!

[craetor]

My Adrian design and some Erid doodles! I think they turned out perfect, for my tastes🤎

Highly motivated by Pliocene by Cosmo Sheldrake. Glass Animals are kinda taking a backseat this year lol

[all-the-weird]

Found a rock that looks suspiciously like a panini (the lines are not naturally occurring but idk what made them). I like everyone’s eridian oc’s that have been popping up. I can’t draw well, but wack five legs on this thing and this is my little eridian sona. I am aptly naming them Panini. Please accept panini into your hearts.

[thepagemistress]

You know, one of my favourite things about Ryland Grace is how sociable he is. How easy it is for people to fall into his orbit. They show it time and time again. How much his students obviously love him, how he manages to hype up the dour suits whilst he's testing the astrophage, Carl playing with him in the Home Depot, the other government people eating his Skittles, Eva Stratt dragging him around everywhere and allowing herself to be just that little bit more vulnerable around him, Rocky and the Eridians embracing him as not just as a savior but family.

I know it's not explicit that Grace is aroace but so often, aroace people are portrayed as distant and independent and happily isolated. Sometimes even to the point of misanthropy. It's so nice to see a character like this who loves connecting with people. He's a rambler, he's excitable. So what if he doesn't have a family or a dog. He doesn't need them because he has everyone he meets and that's enough.

[faint-taste-of-almonds]

Ryland Grace has got to have one of the funniest scientific careers of all time:

Research

Dissertation (piss off your entire field)

Teach middle-schoolers

Be the first person to be in contact with alien life (non-sentient)

Have your dissertation (also what killed your career) be proven wrong

Kill and also breed alien life

Become expert in said life

Become first person to be in contact with alien life (sentient)

Successfully communicate and solve the universe’s biggest problem with sentient alien life

Live the rest of life on alien planet as the savior of the universe

[all-the-weird]

His Wikipedia page would be phenomenal

[annabelle--cane]

I think the core difference between the book and movie versions of ryland grace is that, while both are desperately afraid of taking action, book!grace's fear stems from the fact that he doesn't want to be hurt, whereas as for movie!grace it's that he genuinely thinks he's incapable of doing anything meaningful.

compare how they react to remembering they were forced onto the ship:

in the book, he stands around in numb ashamed shock at his cowardice for a minute before deciding, against rocky's better judgement, that they should voluntarily subject the hail mary to a six g force again to get the lab equipment up and running instead of just waiting eleven days to get back to the blip-A, and it hurts him a lot and he ends up passing out from it. he locates the problem in his memory as being that he was too caught up in concern for his own wellbeing, so he tries to counterbalance it by opting to do something bizarrely personally risky so they can get back to work more quickly. his refrain in his memories is "I don't want to die."

in the film, he remembers it all and then he's back to his old self when saying his farewells to rocky. his emotional vulnerability is gone, his walls are back up, he tries to leave without saying a real goodbye before rocky continues the conversation, and he rejects being called "brave." all his weeks of learning to do the scary thing so he can care for someone and be cared about are just gone. he locates the problem in his memory as being that he as a person is simply not brave; he lacks the gene for it and isn't capable of real accomplishment; he'd thought he could grow and change and he was wrong. his refrain in his memories is "I can't do it."

[craetor]

Adrian dearest🩵 (WIP bc I have so many ideas that they're gonna take a while to finish construction)

Reference photo taken by @all-the-weird

[all-the-weird]

AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE! I love this design so much!!!!! So cool to see my pic being used like this - thank you!!!!!

[notholaenas]

what grace reading, question?

[all-the-weird]

When I was a kid, if something historically significant happened, we’d be taken on a school trip to a pottery painting place to make a plate about it.

So now as an adult woman whose friend wanted to try pottery painting it wasn’t hard to find inspiration. I’m not an artistic sort of person but I had a lot of fun making this!

[all-the-weird]

Post firing! It lost a lot of its galaxy colouring but I’m still very happy with how it turned out!

[all-the-weird]

Saw this rock at the World Museum in Liverpool and thought it was very Adrian coded. Wish I’d taken a photo of its description because I can’t remember what it is

[romcommunist]

self discipline is so hard like. i know the sucker who's in charge...a pushover who hates authority and loves hedonism

[j-amatus]

had to draw all the little scenes i enjoyed after my 4th watch🙂‍↕️

[linkfrombreathofthewild]

whatever. go my aroace middle school science teacher and his best friend rock

[annabelle--cane]

talking about film stuff alone to the exclusion of book elements for a minute: it really reads to me that the thing actually getting to stratt in her last scene with grace isn't that she has to ask him to die for the cause, we've already established that it's not difficult for her to do that under these circumstances, it's that she has to do it against his will. her voice doesn't start going thin like she's holding back tears until she starts to explain that that they're going to force him despite his refusal, and three times over she asks him to stop fighting back, escalating to violence against him is the specific part she doesn't like. if he stays then he dies in thirty years with everyone else, if he goes then he dies in thirteen years as part of saving everyone else and also probably goes out less painfully, the death is broadly the same either way so it's not part of her arithmetic, but she didn't want to have to make his last memories on earth so distressing.

I saw a post around somewhere that I wish I'd saved about how it might have been less painful for grace if stratt had just told him from the get-go that he didn't have a choice about getting on the ship, and I think I agree; subjectively I feel like having a "no" ignored rather just being ordered into something in the first place is a worse experience. stratt not being upfront about it contradicts her usual "you now live on a boat" modus operandi, it prolongs the process and adds extra steps when they're already running on so little time, and I think it might be the one genuinely selfish decision she makes, letting grace believe he has a say in the matter for those three hours gives him time to agonize about it in his Dish Antenna Array Of Despair and opens him up to really feel that betrayal and removal of autonomy as hard as possible. and, let's be real, she goes into that meeting 99% sure he's not going to agree, that's why she has a doctor on standby and guards ready to give chase, but up until his last "you just can’t talk me into it" she's hoping that maybe he'll just say yes and she won't have to do something awful to someone she likes. keeping the opportunity open for the easy way instead of immediately taking the hard way also leaves the door open for the significantly more likely hardest way.

[army-of-bee-assassins]

okay i'm reading the semantics chapter of my language development textbook now and i know i've already posted a bit about the wacky methods researchers have employed to test infants' and toddlers' linguistic knowledge, but this is a really fucking great one.

so they were trying to figure out if children use syntactic knowledge to learn new vocabulary, specifically in this case they were researching two year olds. with verbs, some are done to a person ("x hit y") and some only have a doer ("x laughed"), and they wanted to see if these different sentence structures had an effect on how toddlers learn.

they got some grad students, put one in a rabbit costume and one in a duck costume. they had the rabbit repeatedly push the duck into a crouching position using their left hand. at the same time, both the rabbit and the duck were moving their right hands in a repetitive circling motion. they had a bunch of two years olds watch this. with half of the kids, they said "the rabbit is gorping the duck!" and with the other half, they said "the rabbit and duck are gorping!" afterwards, they showed two videos at the same time to the kids, one with the rabbit pushing the duck down but no circling motion, and one with both making the circling motion but no pushing. then they said "where's gorping now? find gorping!" and the kids who had heard the first statement would consistently look towards the video of the pushing motion, while the kids who heard the second statement would consistently look towards the video of the circling motion.

so it provided good evidence that kids do learn new words using their knowledge of sentence structure! my textbook says it's called the "syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis", which is also a fun term. anyway, i just think it's a fucking hilarious way to have tested this. imagine being a linguistics grad student and your advisor is like "hey i got this furry suit. i'm gonna need you to put this on for research purposes."

[foone]

ever since I took a developmental psychology class in college I've wanted this job. I want to be a professional baby-confuser, for SCIENCE