Local Cryptid

What if we were capable of love

[mercurialraven]

i support the Rocky is actually not the definition of the most socially competent Eridian on Erid headcanon

he's an engineer it comes with the territory /lh he's great with humans though, trust

[astriiformes]

Still thinking about middle school teacher Ryland Grace being like oh, you know, I guess I know a little more about queer stuff than the average ally, but it's really just so I can help my kids, you know?

And then he gets to have an aro/ace identity crisis years after getting blasted into space against his will and is just like oh. Huh.

[mybloodymaryarchive]

Sitting here thinking about Grace's problem with food when he comes back to Erid, and how Simon comes from a culture where engerneering their way around not having food is crucial. Like, literally they were investigating if it was viable to make food out of an ocean of blood. I imagine the moment Grace mention's how it's gonna be tough Simon looks at what they have to work with and goes "let me cook"

[the-pineaple-tree]

I've seen many people compare Grace and Simon for both being the Expendable, but I think that there is an inherent difference there that not many people talk about.

Grace is said to be expendable because he has no partner or pets, but it wouldn't really make a difference if he did have those things. The outcome would have still been the same. The mission is humanities only chance so they need to send the most qualified person. He is the most qualified so he needs to go. Him having five children and a loving partner would have made the decision harder, but it wouldn't have changed it. Grace wasn't expendable because he doesn't have anyone to miss him, he was expendable because at the end of day every single human is expendable if it comes to the survival of the entire planet.

Meanwhile, Simon truely is expendable because he wouldn't be missed. The hope to find something down in the blood ocean was already grasping at straws and there weren't enough people left to send anyone of value, like a scientist. From the COIs perspective, Simon didn't add anything of value to society so he was the most logical choice. He truely was expendable because he wouldn't be missed and nothing would be lost if he didn't survive.

[rmmrq]

As a language enthusiast, I so much appreciate the gradual development of Grace-Rocky connection. They begin with simple words, that I can imagine how to show to an alien, then they develop phrases, long sentences and what’s so cool: science terms comes before emotions, because if you think about it, of course Petrova line is easier to understand for an alien than a hug. And in the end, on the Erid when Grace and Rocky speak without a laptop - I nearly cried because of course they speak without it, they made an effort for each other!

[atsuk1n]

[rovenderkitting]

I took this screenshot bc of Rocky swearing but him pointing out at the end of the book that Ryland Grace hasn’t cried in a long time is honestly making me emotional.

Don’t get me wrong, I love that Grace is a weepy guy, I think it’s an essential part of his character. And he’s humble about his new situation like “it’s not perfect but I’ve got my friends and my meburgers and I get to teach again.” But dang this just goes to show how happy and calm and safe life on Erid is for him. Because Tears Georg, who cried 10,000 tears every day aboard the Hail Mary hasn’t cried in a “long-ass time” according to his closest friend. 🥹

[minart-was-taken]

Part 1 - Part 2

What age are the characters in this comic? Don't ask me lmao I'm bad enough at math without the chaos of space. If you think Grace is too old then uuh, being on Erid made him age faster... If you think Eva is too young, uuh. She found a magical potion that gave her a decade more of life. Don't worry about it.

PS. If you're enjoying these consider checking out my webcomic @local-aliens-comic 🫶

[wordfather]

what in the world could i have pinned for this to happen

[wordfather]

[wordfather]

its ok

[siphoneuphore]

Every dog has a “dog pearl”. It makes it by eating grass. When a dog dies it uses its pearl energy to manifest one wish. We don’t know what they wish for, but our thaumaturgists have traced their leylines through history. The consequences of dog wishes on the current political climate can’t be understated.

[depsidase]

[truenoodle]

Oh god this resonates so much. I don't know how to communicate the emotions I felt being one of like 3 women in a class while all 20-30 guys around me made rape jokes and laughed and told me to lighten up when I complained, or talked about "what type of Asian is your favourite" like we were breeds of dog or cuts of meat, or hear the guy beside me say "who cares?" when the prof announced that the first woman had just won the fields medal, or even just the blatant staring when I walked into class like I was some kind of foreign object.

[butchscientist]

[ID: A tweet by dyke to watch out for, @dyke3watchout5, which reads: "It's always "how do we get more women into math" and never "how do we get more misogynists out of math". /end ID]

[penrosesun]

I once spent a summer working on research project in a chemistry lab at Harvard, and you know the biggest thing that stood out to me? The building I was working in had exactly 1/3 as many bathrooms for women as for men. It had clearly been built with no bathrooms for women at all, and had only reluctantly converted some of the men's bathrooms to be for women after the fact. There was a seminar about "advancing women in STEM" on campus basically every week, and I fucking guarantee that not a single one of them did as much to advance women in STEM as my group's PI, who declared about two days into the program that all women in the building should "feel free to use the men's restrooms if they're closer or less occupied, and men who are uncomfortable about that should consider how their female colleagues feel just existing in a building like this one". Women aren't mysterious creatures who need to be lured into the sciences with treats and special programs; they're human beings, and the main things keeping them out of STEM fields are those fields utterly refusing to treat them as such.

[lokijiro]

Young Mycroft and Sherlock have an agreement whenever they go to the supermarket : Sherlock can pick one treat (within a certain amount of money), and Mycroft will buy it for him, but Sherlock has to choose only one, and he may not throw a strop. (Occasionally Mycroft will allow two treats or a more expensive one if Sherlock has been extra good.)

Years later adult Mycroft and Sherlock go the supermarket together. Somehow the same agreement is still valid.

[holmesian-adaptationsrose]

The boys found an arrangement that worked and never left it after then— if it works, why mess with it?😂 (Of course it never hits them that they're adults and Sherlock should technically be able to just buy whatever he wants for himself)

[lokijiro]

Exactly. (And yes, it feels so natural to them that doing things differently doesn't occur to them.)

[godblessthesickos]

World historical loser

[drwiltz-official]

[wordfather]

all i want is to get hellsitegeneticsed. i want to know what kind of creature my post is. god i want it to be something cool sooooooooo bad do you think they have the genetic code for werewolves

[hellsitegenetics]

String identified: aattgttgtcattatcattgattttgcattatgtcc

Closest match: fucking badass werewolf Common name: hell yeahhhh

[wordfather]

so this is what it's like to be god's favorite

[whiteshakira]

u cld write a whole thesis abt this xkcd & how the only workers personified here r the upper class college degreed tech & management workers & not the third world workers facing unsafe grueling conditions working in mining or even manufacturing..... the wood source described as a "legal fight"

[eviethekiwi]

he's also greatly overestimating how much design work actually goes into most products like that

[peak-widow]

not leaving that in the tags

[sailor-kaiju]

It’s funny how the response is doing the same thing they’re mad about XKCD doing.

“it’s chosen from a list of available tubes” and where do you think those tubes came from? The tube tree? Do you think the press to cut the metal is a natural occurring formation? That the company that made the wood that was bought bu this other company that was bought by the other company just appeared out of thin air without having to be grown, and all the processes that entails (like legal issues mentioned in the comic.) that glasses are shaped that way by coincidence and not literally centuries of trial and error testing to figure out the best vessel shape?

Because yes, maybe your glass from walmart didn’t redo all the testing and planning from scratch, but someone did it at some point. It didn’t appear in the air from nowhere.

And a lot of that effort comes from the blue collar workers who did it so well you don’t think they did it at all.

[ifyouknowmeirlgoaway]

So weird that a STEM comic is talking about STEM workers!

Like, the thing is, those dumb design decisions actually do involve a lot of work that nobody ever thinks about and is completely invisible. We know about mining and logging and manufacturing, we don't know about the hours twenty people spent in multiple meetings making a tiny decision. I've been in those meetings! I've been in the meetings where people spend an hour discussing one sentence in a two hundred page document. The meetings are so tedious and the people involved care about the details so much. Just because you haven't seen the meeting doesn't mean it didn't happen.

And it's really important to think about that. When us consumers have a product with something that seems like a really dumb choice, we can assume everyone involved was an idiot and we'd do it better, or we can think about how maybe the manufacturer they sourced from didn't have the correct size available and it'd be three times as expensive to go elsewhere, or if they made the choice we wanted it would have caused other issues. We spend our lives thinking that we could do things better than an expert, because we don't take expertise seriously. But sourcing lumber is really fucking hard! Making sure products follow safety requirements is hard!

Also "upper class" is absolutely not where you'd find the people designing your cheap ass desk lamp. Just because you think their job is overvalued doesn't mean they're wildly rich.

[dogpuppy]