readingpast12

Fandom sideblog for Nettle (she/her). Hyperfixations are fleeting, but right now I'm into Baulders Gate 3, TMNT and the Vorkosigan Saga. Expect semi-consistant content for Daredevil and Star Trek. Fanfiction published as readingpast12 on AO3. Ask box is open!

[readingpast12]

Intro!

Hi! My name is Nettle/Reading. I am a lawyer who works in dependency law (kids who are abused or neglected).

I'm asexual biromantic and my pronouns are she/her/hers

This blog is the quarantine area for my fandom nonsense. If I ever get back to my WIPs, I will also post about them here.

Everything that isn't related to a fandom (mostly generic memes, political commentary, and cool facts) is posted on my main blog, @uncommon-nettle (which is the username you will see if I follow back)

[evidently-endless]

the odyssey (2026)

[specialagentartemis]

Grace falls asleep on his biodome beach and learns that the Eridian scientists who made his false sun replicated Sol a little too well because he woke up with a sunburn.

Rocky is concerned. Grace’s skin is the wrong texture and temperature, question? What happened? Is Grace sick???

And Grace has to go, “no I was just dumb, it’s just a sunburn.”

“Sun burned Grace, question? How??”

“Yeah, sort of. I mean, it’s not the same as a burn exactly, it’s…”

And then he has to pause and say, “Okay. Rocky. I will explain to you what a sunburn is and what causes it. But first I want to promise you that I am okay and I am not going to die, and you have to promise not to freak out.”

[echoallegro]

had to share this on here cus what if I exploded

[prismatic-bell]

Hey PHM fans. Sorry to crash your party, but something's been bugging the FUCK out of me and I need an answer.

Did anyone in Project Hail Mary ever stop to ask "hey what do we do if Grace's glasses break"?

Because I know a lot of people don't think of poor eyesight as a disability, but it's a pretty significant one. I can't drive without my glasses. My roommate can't even walk to the mailbox. I had to get replacements after my frames snapped so I was wearing my three-years-ago glasses for a week this spring, and I had splitting headaches the entire time.

They did think about this, right? He had spares and a way to adjust his prescription? They didn't leave a semi-truck-sized problem in their world-saving plan with casual ableism?

[ferrousferrule]

He clearly isn't that blind bc half the movie he doesn't wear them. In the movie, it's a very "What would be funny and or dramatic in this moment?" Level of use.

But real answer is that I'm sure Eva had like 6 pairs made while he was unconscious. Book and movie, her thought process was entirely about "what can break and how do we avoid it?"

[prismatic-bell]

I mean, tbf, if you don't know what my specific eye issues are, my usage could look like that too. (Oh, I need glasses to watch TV from the right side of the room but not the left? Clearly this is some kind of visual gag--nah, actually, it's about angles. I only wear glasses for some books? Yeah, it's about printing size. And so on.)

But all things considered, what I'm gathering is that Hollywood went "lol we can't have him be attractive, put him in glasses." So it is ableism, just from a different vector.

Thanks, Hollywood, I continue to hate you.

[alexseanchai]

pretty sure you're not wrong, it's just, if they didn't want Ryland Grace to be attractive, then they should've checked internet thirst levels before casting Ryan Gosling

[go-go-devil]

The more I think about Tears of the Kingdom I more I believe that about half of the core issues with the game could have been solved if Link was the one who was sent back in time instead of Zelda.

All of the locations would be different due to being in the past so exploring the landscape wouldn't feel nearly as monotonous

Sheikah tech wouldn't exist in that point of time yet so you can more naturally exclude it from the gameplay instead of it all just... vanishing for no explainable reason

The sky & underground areas existing only in the past also keeps the verisimilitude of why we weren't able to access these areas in the previous game

Getting to run through the kingdoms pre-Calamity Ganon Apocalypse would be really cool and add more depth to the world that BotW built

The player could leave messages in the past for Zelda to find in the future as a means of linking (heh heh) the two time periods together

Link turning into a dragon in order to get back to the future would not only be equally as awesome & dramatic as Zelda doing it but also more thematically relevant to the Zonai animal mythology set up in BotW which connects the Dragon to Courage

As for how Link would turn back into a Hylian in the future... Zelda could be the one who finds a way to restore his true form via all of the clues we left for her in the past! This would involve her in the plot while also giving us a cool role-reversal we haven't seen in the series yet!

I'm just spitballing here, but with the state of the plot that was given to us there's honestly a dozen ways you could re-write this game into something more compelling.

[hadescavedish]

o captain my captain

(the pattern is based on that mysterious clock sisko built in s1)

[occudo]

They wear suits, but they don't even know basic etiquette.

inspired by @cowardsexual 's post of a very sleepy phm science team and Grace's teacher instincts

[foralittlewile]

According to Andy Weir's Eridian biology document, Eridians are better multitaskers than humans will ever be, but the trade off is they're physically incapable of locking in. SO funny to me. Yes this species can build a diorama while simultaneously blitzing through mathematics equations and also partaking in intense gossiping, but they cannot do any of those things for longer than, like, half an hour without going crazy. Species of supercomputers cursed with the TikTok attention span.

Rocky mocks Grace when he says that Rocky is distracting him by starting complex conversations while he's Trying To Do Science. "Human brain have to stop activity just because talking question? Useless! One track mind!"

Then Grace is on hour six of his "trying to recreate skittles" hyperfocus and Rocky is like What The Fuck. Statement.

Yeah human brains can only do a single very consuming task at a time but it can do it for a very long time. The one track in our one track minds spans multiple countries. Persistence predators, babey.

[riverfortune]

I just finished listening to a book the other day. It's called Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold. It is listed as the first in her Vorkosigan series but the recommended reading order is to start at book 2, so I initially skipped it. The rest of the series is basically a bunch of action/space opera books following a particular family in their adventures in a sci-fi future involving a planet that does feudalism in space and a boy who is born with a fragile body into a warrior-based society. They're really fun and I recommend them.

But.

Falling Free is about a man whose company sends him to a space station to teach a bunch of people with extra arms where their legs should be how to do space welding. When I first read the summary, I thought it was really weird and figured I wouldn't get around to reading it. I'm so glad I read it after all.

It's not just about a bunch of four-armed freaks learning space welding. It's about recognizing the exploitation of those around you. It's about the dehumanizing nature of bureaucracy. It's about the danger of outsourcing your morality to what's legal. It's about how offloading responsibility onto the next guy results in disaster. It's about learning what kind of labor is needed to make a society. It's about how sometimes you can weaponize bureaucracy against itself for good. It's about how others can weaponize it for evil. It's about understanding the value of women's labor. It's about the value of free will. It's about the importance of taking responsibility for the consequences of your own actions. It's about the dangers of eugenics and it's about the dangers of coorporations and it's about the dangers of personal ambition. It's about standing up for what's right even if it goes against what you always thought was right. It was published in 1988 and it's about four-armed people welding in space.

[assiraphales]

despite knowing for a fact that project hail mary was a success imagine the absolute rollercoaster of emotions eva stratt would have gone through. “I am the only one alive on this ship” holy shit bro is NOT an astronaut……….he doesn’t know how to fly that thing……….. “this is rocky and he lives w me now!” first contact with a sentient alien has been made by a middle school teacher. *rocky makes a pop culture reference* ok so in between the fate of their planets resting on their shoulders they’d been having moving nights. “rocky’s ship is made of xenonite” ahhhhhh— “I’m turning around” awhhhh

[djpachipikachu]

rocky being a fucking freak is my favorite headcanon This is who was first contact with aliens. doomed all eridians really

[almondcroissantsandink]

Stratt: tries to make a going-off comfort gift and instead creates the most insensitive thing possible

Also Stratt seeing Grace wear the shirt in the video logs: oh good he likes the shirt

[astriiformes]

Really funny to think about the knowledge gap Eridians and humans are going to have about each other the next time they make contact due to Grace spending the rest of his life on Erid (plus all the information aboard the Hail Mary, and especially the laptops Stratt put basically entire internet on!)

Eridians are going to have a fairly solid grasp of the English language (and possibly even some others), an intimate understanding of the environmental conditions a human needs to thrive as well as their nutritional and psychological needs, a solid grasp of a number of scientific concepts discovered by humans, and decent familiarity with human culture and customs (if probably an American-centric one). Some Eridians might even be explicitly trained as diplomats or ambassadors with the expectation that one day the two cultures might interact more regularly.

Whereas humans are like. Well. There sure are talking rocks in space somewhere!

[owenhcrper]

i just love all the stories about production on project hail mary. they didn't use a single green/blue screen in the whole film. they built the whole interior of the hail mary. the petrova line scene was done practically by putting infrared lights on a chicken wire cage. rocky's voice was one of the puppeteers because he did such a good job during filming that they couldn't imagine anyone else voicing him. and rocky was a practical puppet/animatronic! sandra huller picked sign of the times as her karaoke song and she asked her daughter if it was still a cool song. i just feel like there was so much love making this film and im obsessed

[autisticlittleguy]

"Grace Ryland is Rocky's dog" is such a funny fucking dynamic when you think about it

Eridians are further behind than humans technologically right? They dont have computers, relativity, quantum mechanics, etc. In fact, Eridians probably dont even know about the Big Bang because their atmosphere would filter out most of the cosmic microwave background radiation we use to detect it. On a human timeline, theyre anywhere between like early-mid 20th century. Rocky's basically a cosmonaut.

So the human civilization is pretty advanced from Rocky's perspective. Rationally he understands this. On a conceptual level he knows this to be true.

But at the same time... imagine youre one of the first ever cosmonauts to make it into space. Then you meet a 10 year old alien dog who cant do 2+2 without pulling out its calculator. It forgets everything constantly and has to keep notes everywhere, like it basically lives in Memento (2000). Also if it doesnt nap constantly it gets even stupider. And you somehow has to reconcile this with the fact that this dog has a better understanding of physics than your entire civilization does. Like the dog knows how the universe started.

[p4nishers]

the project hail mary universe is one of the only ones out there where orpheus turning around actually saved eurydice btw