across an immense ethereal gulf

MDZS, other cnovels, various sff. I make books and write less fic than I used to. Bookbinding blog: @teleportbooks, EHyde on AO3.

[ehyde]

I will admit to being slightly baffled at the number of notes my War of the Worlds bookbinding keeps getting compared to my other books, if there is a secret hidden WotW fandom I don't know about someone please tell me

[witchesversuspatriarchy]

Same

[allthefoolmine]

Reblog if you too do not want to share outside with them.

[ehyde]

affinity publisher help how to display page numbers in base six

[ehyde]

how to teach yourself eridian numbers/counting in base six:

manually type in all 231* page numbers one at a time

rely on those page numbers to put your book together in the right order after it's printed

*91 in earth numbers, it's not actually all that long

[cowardsexual]

the eva stratt in my mind is a conglomeration of movie stratt and book stratt because god fucking bless sandra huller put her entire pussy into that performance, but while weir is bad at character writing (women especially) he IS disconcertingly good at coming up with plots that generate interesting character concepts through circumstances... which due to story cuts the movie sadly missed out on.

it's really interesting looking back at both iterations of the story and how stratt and grace's rapport hinges on unrequitedness. there's obviously the karaoke scene in the movie acting as grace's bid for human connection vs stratt's necessary refusal in order to do her job. the book rarely if ever interrogates stratt's interpersonal relationships in the project and how her sense of duty and utilitarianism extends to them (well, aside from grace. more on that in a sec). She's a History major and an administrator and She Loves Humanity, but it's a characteristic that when analyzed deeper rings pretty hollow (possibly because the author thinks social analysis/critique in science fiction is stupid and thus doesn't exactly have much to say about People like someone in the humanities would. SAD!) so that's an addition to her character from the movie that i'm deeply pleased about. what i don't like as much is that the bid for connection starts from grace.

because book stratt and grace? the one sidedness of their rapport is the driving emotional conflict of the entire pre-launch plotline—and of grace's character development throughout the whole book.

like most scientists on the team, grace was brought onto the project by force, but he's the only one who fulfilled his purpose, was allowed to return to his own life, and then came back of his own volition, out of a sense of personal duty and responsibility. which is the reason stratt takes him back on! and why she begins to rely on him more and more, as an administrator, as a mediator, as a scientist, as an advisor. she has all the more reason to do that when she discovers he's coma resistant, but she was already doing all that baby!

grace spends the rest of their relationship half-assing that sense of responsibility. one thing i adore about book phm is how merciless it is with grace's "modesty" "insecurity" and "social anxiety". children are easy to dote on. they're not stupid, obviously, but on an interpersonal level they're not your equal, they have no way to actually demand accountability from you and call your ass out. he doesn't actually think he's a failure, he's not blind he should know damn well he's not like the other scientists. "science lapdog", "ooo i'm just a little guy cmonnnn i'm just a middle school teacher", he downplays his own importance because if he genuinely grappled with the level of responsibility she holds him to towards the people in the project he'd run like a fucking dog.

he is a good man AND he is a coward. stratt's relationship with him verges on the tension between those coexisting truths. he is both someone she wants to respect but can't, someone she can rely on but has to act behind his back least he realizes. she WANTS them to be equals, she WANTS him to understand. on the day the hail mary is scheduled for launch she paces HIS prison cell like SHE'S the caged animal, trying to get through to the glimpse of the man she saw that day, the one who barged into an FBI guarded facility, looked atlas in the eye and told her scoot over, i'm carrying this with you. she cares about him. she wouldn't feel so betrayed if she didn't. please understand why i'm doing this to you. please understand why i need you to be that fundamentally good man. i am tied to the tracks right next to you. and as far as she is concerned, ryland grace dies on earth saying "no".

[escuerzoresucitado]

[typhus-andronicus]

[slorty]

The fact that this is completely incomprehensible to me makes it funnier than if I could understand it

[silver-tongues-blog]

skill issue. i understand it completely

[autistobrat]

scientists are experimenting on cross-breeding a crab and a cheetah; things could go sideways real fast

[ehyde]

affinity publisher help how to display page numbers in base six

[ehyde]

Felt slightly nostalgic so I pulled my old customized dolls out of their box in the basement, tomorrow I may line them up for a picture and you can see which characters I liked enough back in the early 2000s to re-create in doll form.

[nordreys]

james ortiz provided some of his own personal rocky backstory on the sag aftra podcast, transcribed by me because we all have to be miserable about it together.

link to the podcast, this section below is from timestamp 24.35

“andy weir provided a packet to the creature shop that was like a packet of eridian biology and stuff but there wasn’t much about eridian culture or eridian sociology and i made a bunch of choices going in because i just needed to have like a ‘who am i?’ right? 

[…] and i made a decision that rocky’s species, that eridians are really social animals that in fact are like a beehive or a pod of dolphins - it’s a unique and really integrated ecosystem of everybody doing their [specific] part. and the fact that rocky had to fly that ship for about 45 years - longer than grace has been alive, i wanna point that out - he’s been alone on that ship, having to run that by himself and- ryan and i would talk about that, one day we sat down and he was like “so what’s the movie from rocky’s perspective?” and i was like “oh it’s like ‘alien’, […] like he’s in a ‘contagion’ movie by himself and he has no idea what’s going on.”

he’s basically in castaway by himself which of course ryan is too but like, one reason why we never cut to the past of rocky is like, i think it was really horrifying! i don’t think rocky has slept in however many years and so a thing i was really struggling with is this idea of like “rocky must watch sleep” because how do you make that a need as opposed to like, a cute idea? and i just had to make the decision that […] he has a lot of unprocessed trauma around the things that he doesn’t understand and how much he is blaming himself because he’s the guy who fixes, he’s the guy who fixes and there was something really freeing about deciding that rocky was a deeply emotional, deeply anxious, deeply horrified person - being - that is trying to move through that in some way and how that affects the early scenes with him until there’s a point in the story where you can see we’ve physically softened rocky’s behaviour, because he’s finally feeling more safe and ok but all of that lore, all of that information [was essential].

i also decided, this is just a small nerdy thing, that there was actually some of his family, was on that ship too.”

[xieliancore]

soowon doodle!

[ehyde]

Ryland Grace needs a hip replacement because he's been living on Erid under 2x gravity for a couple decades

Ryan Gosling Ken needs a hip replacement because he's made by Mattel and should frankly consider himself lucky to have elbows.

[ehyde]

Found a drawer which still contained some old doll supplies. I found: green hair. Obitsu hands. Patterns! (all for Barbie, not super helpful). Tiny ribbon flowers. Parts for display stands. I did not find: snaps or any type of fasteners. Alas.

[pekingopera]

huber0203

[wp-38-rg-p08]

[ehyde]

Ryland Grace needs a hip replacement because he's been living on Erid under 2x gravity for a couple decades

Ryan Gosling Ken needs a hip replacement because he's made by Mattel and should frankly consider himself lucky to have elbows.

[thingsidrawgohere]

Coming in directly under the wire, here's Bob Brown's 1955 "The Complete Book of Cheese"- a book so inconsequential, so padded, so rent-is-due that 'complete' really upsells the experience. I lovehate it.

I'll discuss the build specifics in another post but this is red leather on yellow book cloth.

[oliverplague]

[guoccarmole]

feels her aura