it’s wanting to know that makes us matter

they call me "the fastest thumbs in the west" and "as subtle as a hand grenade." ripley, they/she. here, queer, and ready to schmear. on ao3 as longwaytogallifrey (my former tumblr URL; i can also be found at a-teardrop-of-the-sun). dyke parade is a real place!

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366

still can’t believe i’ve done this but since the idea has possessed me body & soul, please enjoy chapter one of what’s turning out to be a stupidly long daemon AU of project hail mary. i think you can all probably guess what grace’s daemon is

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225355066

gooooooood morning or whatever time it is for you, please enjoy chapter 2 of god's silence never breaks aka my ongoing PHM daemon AU which has consumed my entire brain!

this work is already about 75% written and i plan to continue posting chapters regularly throughout this week!

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225358136

happy saturday folks! here's chapter 3 of PHM daemon AU god's silence never breaks for your weekend reading pleasure. we finally get to meet rocky! and get our first clue into what an alien's soul might be like!!!

(also, it's a holiday weekend for me so i'm just gonna keep posting daily chapters for the moment since i have time to keep forging ahead with the last 25% of the fic! as promised, the chapter count IS going up lol)

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225360696

as promised here's chapter 4 of god's silence never breaks for your sunday morning (or whenever)! we've got alien souls; we've got echolocation; we've got fist bumps, it's all here!

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225363936

happy memorial day to those of you stuck in the US like i currently am and happy unamerican monday to the rest of the world! here’s chapter 5 of god’s silence never breaks, in which rumours abound about stratt’s daemon and the petrova taskforce nukes antarctica

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225365791

chapter 6 of god's silence never breaks for your tuesday morning, featuring spaceballs, scientific ethics, and secret third things! join me in considering a question i truly cannot imagine the answer to: why the fuck was there a disco ball on board the hail mary? (and yes the chapter count has gone up and yes, it may happen again)

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225371171

having a shitty day today so just gonna go ahead and release chapter 7 of the phm daemon AU for y'all's reading pleasure now! this time feat. Grace being proven right, radiation sickness, the mystery of Stratt's daemon, mythology, secret third things kinda edging into unknowable fourth things, and making promises.

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225274161

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY aka chapter 8 of god's silence never breaks day! it's easily the chapter i've been most excited to release thus far (not that i'm not excited about all of them haha) - with Adrian's Petrova line, plus panspermia and its impacts on Dust throughout the universe!!!

[dyke-parade]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

hello! it's only been one day but today sucked for me SO i'm going ahead and releasing chapter 9 of god's silence never breaks! it's one of the longer chapters of the fic (which is, by the way, now 90% written and yes, the chapter count went up again) and has many of my favourite things: panspermia, everybody but grace knowing grace is the number two of the project, making chain, making peace, and yet more mythic/literary references

[dyke-parade]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

it is wednesday my dudes. one of my irl bosses is being a butt and i have a slightly nervewracking appointment later today and i have to fly to fucking ohio tomorrow, so i'm pre-rewarding myself for enduing these many trials by posting chapter 10 of god's silence never breaks! it's time go fishing, statement.

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225766216

posting ch11 of god's silence never breaks for ye FROM IN THE SKY aka the inflight wifi on this airplane, in honour of the person back in the airport with an "amaze amaze amaze" backpack pin i complimented and the flight attendant with a giant progress pride pin on his lapel. definitely gonna just keep posting probably daily at this point given that tmrw's my birthday!

anyways, please enjoy one angsty post-fishing chapter, featuring an explosion and a saving grace!!! :)

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/225967471

happy saturday (and one-day-belated birthday to meeeeee) from the godforsaken midwest of the USA! i've finally got a moment away from seeing 10,000 different cousins for the first time in like a decade to post chapter 12 of god's silence never breaks! whatever it takes to stay sane while i drive my mother & the world's weirdest rental car on a whistlestop tour of every maternal/paternal relative i have within 200 miles of this family wedding!!!

in this chapter...i'm gonna be real, everyone's having a pretty rough time. you know how it is post-fishing

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/226111131

hello friends! i am back from my whirlwind tour of every non-homophobic midwestern US cousin i have with a profound gratitude that i no longer have to drive that weird-ass rental car AND more importantly chapter 13 of god's silence never breaks!! we're officially T-5 chapters until the end of this ride, y'all! we've got our Taumoeba and everything!!!

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/226496211

amazing news friends! i have officially FINISHED (everything but the epilogue, which is why our final chapter count will be 19 lol) writing this sotry! so please enjoy today's release of chapter 14 of god's silence never breaks, in which rocky wakes up, everyone celebrates, and surely no one will suddenly recover any upsetting memories, right? thank you so much to everybody who's been reading/commenting, this has been such a blast!

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/227290106

it is wednesday my dudes...and it's also chapter 15 of god's silence never breaks! as one commenter said, "whoomph, there it is...[traumatic flashback]" aka it's time for The Memory. you know the one.

[dyke-parade]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/85301366/chapters/227445701

hello friends, i have just written the final word of the epilogue of this now-fully-completed fic!!!! so i'm gonna go ahead and post chapter 16 (of 19) from god's silence never breaks, and save all my gushy stuff about how awesome sharing this whole story has been for the last author's note of the epilogue haha bc otherwise we'll be here forever!

[rylandgracie]

stop infantilizing characters who don’t speak perfect english just because you subconsciously believe that someone speaking broken english or with an accent puts them intellectually below you

[goosewraith]

one of my favorite things about project hail mary is Eva Stratt’s wardrobe. she said yeah i’ll save the world but i’m gonna do it in big sweaters and comfy pants and FLAT SHOES and I love her for it

[thesidesidesideblog]

fans get defensive and mad at stratt for pointing out grace had no family or friends, "not even a dog," and try to make it out to be some aspect of grace's identity or some benign choice,

meanwhile grace with half his memories gone struggling to figure out who amongst his students and acquaintances and coworkers was Worth Dying For, what drove him to join the hail mary,

because he already knew, even then, that he didn't have any connection on earth that would drive him to that; that his life really was that empty at the time

[dyke-parade]

also like...from a utilitarian moral perspective, it is relevant. not because a person is worth more or less if they have immediate family or pets – because a person with immediate family/v close friends (or a dog) has dependents. people who need and rely on their presence specifically. so if you're telling someone to go on a suicide mission and they do have a kid/partner/pet, you're not just asking that individual to die – you're asking everyone who relies on that person to lose them. (hence the pics of yáo & ilyukhina's friends & families in their burial scene – the crew's choice to die in space was also a choice to leave their connections in order to save them.) whereas if someone willingly doesn't have deeper connections, like grace prior to the mission as OP states so well, there's no one but them who's materially harmed by their loss. it's not a statement about one individual's inherent human worth, it's about reducing as much harm as possible for as many people as possible – aka the entire thing eva stratt strives to do for humanity.

(also like. it's okay that grace's character kept walls up & ran from deeper human connection prior to the hail mary mission. that's like. the whole point. it's what gives him an arc and makes his choice to cultivate a connection with rocky, a literal alien, and choose to give up his life/home to save rocky & an alien planet so meaningful.)

[abbasnails-silly-art]

finally, a fictional scientist i can accurately transpose both my benchwork woes AND colorful vocabulary onto

[grayscale-sparks]

had to do the trend i know i know

[shmooseee]

if eva stratt has no fans im dead

[where-is-the-sam-standee]

The Sam standee is looking at Adrian (planet) from Project Hail Mary!

(made by @jupiterhead)

Submit your own edits!

[blanketcoffin]

shoutout to adrian for the great view

[annabelle--cane]

I think eva stratt has detailed files on all petrova taskforce personnel that contain more information about their subjects than the subjects even know about themselves. several people in her employ have mild food allergies that she noted and had cut out of their diets via requests to the catering staff but that the people themselves have never consciously noticed, ilyukhina just thought she stopped getting regular stomach aches when she arrived on the vat because she's god's specialest engineer and not because all the dairy in her diet got swapped out for alternatives. grace does some shopping on the mainland at one point and doesn't realize he bought a different scent of moisturizer than usual so stratt just goes into his room and switches it with a hypoallergenic formula in an identical bottle. this is because she has never been normal about anything in her life.

[tedisfishing]

the ipad brothers. they're rotting.

[meggriffin24]

men be like “apparently hating women makes u a misogynist 😂😂”

[depsidase]

[bauliya]

so women are supposed to grin and bear the books, the comics, the movies, the plays, the tv shows, the stories, the sci-fi, the translated ancient poems, the fucking millennia of men writing about their self inserts torturing women and it being declared as High Art by other men, we’re supposed to read it in our free time, study it in classrooms, include their styles in our own writing, accept their cultural influence as natural, watch it in the cinema, write about it, talk about it, accept it, aspire it, but men can’t tolerate three seconds of female wish fulfilment of a woman snapping the wrist of a creep without feeling personally kicked in the balls.

[darkshrimpemotions]

This reminds me of something I observed in college while I was doing my honors thesis on women in modern horror films. I watched a LOT of horror during that time as part of my research, and sometimes that was done with my family around.

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

And they flinch every time.

[tzikeh]

Here have a newspaper comic from 1993

[tyrantisterror]

A daring chess strategy called the Scheming Chancellor, wherein you move as few of your pieces as needed before moving your king directly into enemy fire, letting your opponent reach check mate without losing a single other piece.

[peachfromcmbyn]

People on Tumblr love sharing information about themselves no matter how asinine it is. And I'm the same way. Everybody tell me what the last thing you drank was.

[goth-queen]