Calamus Currentis

Take up the pen, for there is no heaven and death is soon.

[bugsnbites]

Picture it. Decades after the world is saved, a huge alien spacecraft touches down on earth.

Scientist, politicians, and thousands of reporters gather to witness the aliens disembark the ship. A group of boulder-like creatures, clicking and whistling to the humans around them.

One of them raises something large and metallic towards the crowd.

There's an immediate recoil of fear (is it a weapon?!) before the audience realises it's human technology. A laptop, old and beaten and looks like it was put back together by a drunk.

The alien presses a button.

"Hello Earth, this is Doctor Captain Ryland Grace. These guys are Eridians and they're here on a shopping trip. I have a list and no money, but I did save the world so that has to count for something. Number one, salt and vinegar chips. Actually anything potato. Number two, I miss apple juice. Number three,"

[notholaenas]

rites of passage

closeups:

1. academia

2. teaching

3. family

[kingoftheu]

[buried-in-stardust]

Writing 和風細雨 (he2feng1xi4yu3; gentle breeze and light rain) with a cat's tail on a water-writing mat.

Water-writing mats turn black when wet and return to their original colour once dry, so they are often used to practise calligraphy with water. The black colour allows you to see your writing clearly, and the mat can be reused as soon as the writing dries and disappears.

[eng by me]

[artemissoftstepper]

need a bad sleep reset

this is a very delicate operation which involves not falling asleep until the late enough tomorrow that i can get a normal nights sleep

[voxelfoxkae]

[captain-price-returns]

he’s sitting in his discomfort and interrogating whether his actions were worth the consequences… a great many of u could take notes

[were--ralph]

[aroace-ryland-grace]

Hi guys! I thought I should just share my whole mini little library of Project Hail Mary-related things so they're all in one place:

It includes:

A digital copy of the movie (with English soft subtitles)

My transcript of the movie (more on that here)

Audio recordings of the movie

A PDF of the book

An EPUB of the book (for e-readers)

The full audiobook

A copy of Andy Weir's doc on Eridians

A copy of Andy Weir's spreadsheet on Astrophage physics (among many other things!)

A draft of the screenplay for the film from 2022

An audio recording of the director's commentary

My transcript of the director's commentary

The subtitle SRT file

The audiobook, audio recordings, and commentary all have their properties programmed so they (should) work just like songs with a track number, album cover, artist, and so on if you download them.

There are two audios of the movie, one is the entire film untouched and one is that same audio cut up and broken down into separate scenes for convenience.

Additionally, there are two versions of the movie transcript, one with time stamps that match the audio recording and one without. The time stamps (+ their titles from the audio) are outlined in that version, so if you double-click on that tab or click "show outline," they'll all show up and you can pick a specific scene.

Similiarly, there are two different versions of the director's commentary transcript. The first is made to listen along to the commentary, while the second is more intended to be read on its own. The first is a direct transcription of everything that's said (an attempt, at least), while the second is slightly cleaned up for easier reading, meaning things like jumbled sentences and stuttering were removed or reorganised, but nothing has been actually paraphrased. Both are broken down into different scenes based on how their conversation goes, and the listening version includes timestamps. 

The first few seconds of the commentary are missing unfortunately as my US friend who was kind enough to record it for me had some technical difficulties at the start, but the she paraphrased the part that was missed. The commentary starts at that first red shot of Ryland Grace's face in the coma suit 32 seconds into the digital copy.

There's also a google doc with some instructions to follow if any of the files aren't working, which usually happens when too many people try to access or download something at the same time.

As always, if anything's not working right or you notice any mistakes in anything, please let me know and I'll fix it as soon as I can!

[aroace-ryland-grace]

Looks like the digital copy is glitching out a bit, troubleshooting now!

[aroace-ryland-grace]

A new copy of the movie is up in the drive and should be working correctly, but please let me know if it starts acting up too!

[linguisticparadox]

One time when my dad was in the hospital they were testing his orientation to time and place and said "Okay and what year is it?" and he said "1995" (he had dementia). And the doctor and I unconsciously exchanged a Look because it was in fact uhhh 2024 😐 and dad saw that and so when the next doctor did the test a few hours later he said "uhhhh...nineteen...nintetyyyy.......seven...???" and I was like okay, well, that IS closer, you do have to give him that

[batbetbitbotbut]

#he still knew immediately who I was which was deeply funny to me bc I was 7-8 years old in 1997 #"yes that is my daughter who was apparently born in her 20s"

[sexy-people-contests-2026]

Tumblr Sexyman Contest 2026 Round 3 Part 4

Human Perry the Platypus (Phineas and Ferb)

Ryland Grace (Project Hail Mary)

Remaining time: 4 days 23 hours

Human Perry art by my personal favorite PnF fan artist @chio-chan2artbox

[adhdoofenshmirtz]

See full post here

[hungry-skeleton]

I think the biggest thing mascot horror things need to get a grip on is the reasonable balance of cute/creepy. The mascot in question needs to be cute enough to realistically be for children but scary enough to actually make for effective horror. Most games always lean too far in either direction and idk maybe it's just me but immersion with these kinds of games are important for me to actually find enjoyment in them.

[hungry-skeleton]

Can anyone hear me

[hungry-skeleton]

[hungry-skeleton]

GUYS...

[mavenmemnon]

[pinakotekams]

They had not been seen together in the museum galleries for quite a while. Monet’s “Women with Umbrellas” are once again side by side in the Impressionist gallery.

[peggaboo]

AND THEN THEY LIVED HAPPILY EVER AFTER THE END!!!!

[atenderofsycamoretrees]

ok every time this post comes by i resist geeking out on it but NO LONGER so these women are probably the same woman and that woman is monet’s wife camille doncieux. he painted her a LOT. but fun fact: monet had this asshole friend named ernest hochede, and ernest racked up some debts, and like an asshole he basically just fled the country, leaving his wife alice and their six kiddos behind. monet immediately got alice and kids to move in with him, camille, and their two kids. at this point, monet, alice, and camille became my favorite probably historic poly threesome. they lived together, taking care of the kids. they were so poor that alice and camille took turns wearing the nice dress so they could go out with monet. when camille got uterine cancer and began dying, alice helped monet cope and took care of things while he painted camille over and over. when camille died, alice is the reason monet was able to survive. when ernest finally died, monet and alice married, and remained married until alice died. at that point, blanche, the oldest daughter, took care of monet until he died. anyway, the point is, the umbrella ladies are probably the same ladies, but as far as i’m concerned, there WAS a historically queer poly family in that household and they were wonderful.

[possumberries]

this is a fucking joy

[chaotic-archaeologist]

BREAKING NEWS: screenshots from your phone not an appropriate format for submitting work in college classes.

[json-derulo]

my partner was a TA for an intro-to-subject course in grad school. finals week rolls around and the students are required to submit this big module assignment they've had like a month to do for a decent chunk of their grade. if you've submitted everything, you'll see a summary screen with a star beside each module name showing it's been completed.

an hour before the assignment deadline, he receives an email from a student claiming they completed the assignment, but the system is not allowing them to submit. there's an image attached to the email. partner goes to open what he assumes is a screenshot of that summary page.

instead, he sees that the student has taken a photo of their laptop from about 2 feet away, with that page open. strange, but it wouldn't be the first time a college freshman has lacked the tech literacy to take a screenshot. he almost doesn't look twice at it, but he realizes something about it just feels a little bit...off. so he zooms in.

the student had CUT STARS OUT OF CONSTRUCTION PAPER and TAPED THEM TO THEIR LAPTOP SCREEN BESIDE EACH MODULE NAME. you could see where they actually had completed the first couple of modules, but the stars for all the subsequent ones were like, double the size of the first two and exactly as uneven/irregular as you'd expect if you were freehanding them with scissors.

probably would've been quicker and easier to just photoshop them in but no, this student took a refreshingly creative, arts-and-crafts approach to getting an academic misconduct case

[maniculum]

The only time a student sent me a photo of their laptop screen was ALSO for purposes of academic dishonesty.

About a year ago, teaching an online World Lit course in summer session. First writing assignment is a short paper requiring one (1) outside source; half the class turns in papers with “AI-hallucinated” quotations & citations because they’re just savvy enough to fiddle with the text and get past Canvas’s built-in & very-unreliable “AI detector” but not savvy enough to actually double-check what the computer is telling them. I send out emails to the tune of “if you want credit on the assignment you have to prove this source you quoted actually exists.”

One student apparently clicks the link in their bibliography for the first time, and is presumably surprised to find the same thing I found: working URL, but the page it goes to is not the article they cited (which 100% does not exist; I checked). Student goes into Inspect Page Source, changes the title of the page to display as the title of the hallucinated article, then sends me an email saying they can’t give me a URL because something something VPN but here’s a photo of their laptop displaying the article in question with the URL bar conveniently cropped out of frame.

They didn’t change the body text of the website, so it was pretty clear what they’d done. And what I’d actually asked them to send me was a PDF, since they were claiming this was an article from an academic journal, and it was a real journal we had institutional access to, so the involvement of a regular website at all was actually a screw-up on the “AI”’s part anyway. I eventually went back at the end of the course & gave them partial credit on that assignment (just enough to bump their final grade from a C to a B-minus) for being the only student all summer to put actual mental effort into lying to me — everyone else just took the “nuh-uh” approach.

So, @werewolf-transgenderism, was your laptop-photo student flummoxed by tech or trying to pull a fast one?

[pmpkn]

Gameboy peripheral PediSedate was designed for dentists and dosed kids with nitrous oxide as they played games.

[defective-replicant-deactivated]

Time to enter the ＧＡＭＥＲ ＺＯＮＥ

[theindefinitejames]

Camera, printer, sewing machine, now a fucking anaesthetic adminstrator…was there anything the Game Boy didn’t have an accessory for?

[fakegeekguy]

Do you know about the fish finding sonar?

[britnxyspears]

gameboy sprinted so smart phones could lag and be ugly

[blondie-in-the-zone-deactivated]

[psychotrope777]

fuck it really has like almost the exact cadence

[zoesupreme]

I have started following the journey of a German soccer fan in the US for the world cup

[zoesupreme]

[zoesupreme]

[zoesupreme]

[zoesupreme]

@laeffy the euros have found buc-ee's

[zoesupreme]

[hope-for-the-planet]

70% Drop in Levels of Forever Chemicals Observed in Seabird Eggs Tracks Regulatory Success

These pescatarian birds are directly exposed to PFAS contamination due to the island's position near the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Over fifty years of data show a peak in PFAS (also known as "forever chemicals") content in seabird eggs in the 90s, followed by a decrease as regulations went into effect. The most recent findings show a 70% decrease of most common PFAS.

While continued vigilance a regulation is needed, this data indicates that regulations are working to reduce PFAS concentrations in marine ecosystems.

[sattarehi]

Yes!!!! I did a review of literature on PFASs in human drinking water about half a year ago, and there is a lot of really good progress! Please celebrate this, please don't let this solution be forgotten (at least so quickly) as the ozone layer or acid rain.

We are making genuine progress! Producers are dramatically altering how much they use PFAS and how much gets released in effluent, but also there's a lot better understanding of how to remove PFAS from the environment!

Environmental problems CAN BE SOLVED.

[covid-69]

this looks like a fake ad you’d see in the background of a movie but its real

[butch-king-frankenstein]

my orc bard in Pathfinder is named Gronk Ballspeaker