[ID: Project Hail Mary fanart. Grace is shown smiling and waving, labeled as Ryland Grace. Then we see "Ryland as perceived by Rocky": a giant jellyfish with flowing tentacles, labeled as follows:
Such a fan of the way the audiobook narrator reads the scene where Stratt processes Shapiro and DuBois' deaths. It adds so much depth. Grace is hysterical, only half listening to her, strugging to accept that their friends are dead, and she's barely hanging on, a desperate edge in her voice when she tells him he has to make a list, they need a new science officer now.
It's like. Oh. This is when she realised what she was going to have to do. And she's going to do everything in her power to avoid having to do it, and she's going to fail.
i know itās very common to have fun with the fact that graceās lifespan is nothing compared to rockyās or adrianās, but itās seriously icking me out how many people just roll with āhaha wet cat science man is stupid pet of smart engineerā. grace is a grown man. he called the leading researcher in his field a staggering waste of carbon knowing full well what it would do to his career. he is not a dog, or a cat, or some other untrained animal (brainless blorbo) who only knows how to respond to his ownerās commands.
rocky and adrian would ship simon and grace together like good friends. like wingmen. not like two pet owners trying to acclimatise troubled pets to each other. for that matter, itās really dehumanising to say that a man who expresses weakness or unmanliness is āless thanā. rocky can call grace a leaky space blob because rocky does not cry and doesnāt see why anyone would. you are human and should know better.
also, also. humans are not inherently worse than eridians. rocky can be a piece of shit because the eridians think of going to space as a walk in the park, to the point where they pack way too much fuel, so theyāve never really given thought to the existence of other life. us? we feared being alone so much, we sent a golden record into the stars, and wondered for decades what aliens would be like, if they truly existed.
of course rocky would think humans are jackshit. heās thinking of how they would survive on erid, without hard carapaces or the ability to see through walls. but humans live on earth. we are persistence hunters. we are capable of great things in large groups. weāve achieved more in every frontier combined, than the eridians and their singular shining medal in material sciences. at the very least, humans are their equals.
reducing rocky and graceās relationship to that of a stupid human with his smart alien takes everything away from the beauty of their story.
I am begging you. Please learn about stress/discomfort tolerance. Practice raising it. You need this to survive. If someone online can ruin your day with a throwaway comment, you desperately need to understand discomfort tolerance and consciously, systematically build that shit.
Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!
Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.
No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.
It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.
Letting your discomfort dictate your actions and beliefs about things is a great way to become a terrible person. Learn. Discomfort. Tolerance.
gosh but like we spent hundreds of years looking up at the stars and wondering āis there anybody out thereā and hoping and guessing and imagining
because we as a species were so lonely and we wanted friends so bad, we wanted to meet other species and we wanted to talk to them and we wanted to learn from them and to stop being the only people in the universe
and we started realizing that things were maybe not going so good for usā we got scared that we were going to blow each other up, we got scared that we were going to break our planet permanently, we got scared that in a hundred years we were all going to be dead and gone and even if there were other people out there, weād never get to meet them
and then
we built robots?
and we gave them names and we gave them brains made out of silicon and we pretended they were people and we told them hey you wanna go exploring, and of course they did, because we had made them in our own image
and maybe in a hundred years we wonāt be around any more, maybe yeah the planet will be a mess and weāll all be dead, and if other people come from the stars we wonāt be around to meet them and say hi! how are you! weāre people, too! youāre not alone any more!, maybe weāll be gone
but we built robots, who have beat-up hulls and metal brains, and who have names; and if the other people come and say, who were these people? what were they like?
the robots can say, when they made us, they called us discovery; they called us curiosity; they called us explorer; they called us spirit. they must have thought that was important.
this is far and away the most popular post i ever made on tumblr. people have asked me if they could illustrate it, people have asked me if they could turn it into a novella, people just messaged me to say it made them cry. that means more to me than i can say.
you probably heard that the mars opportunity rover died today.Ā
it was hard news to hear. i cried at my desk at work. it doesnāt make it easier that it was only supposed to run for 90 days at all; it doesnāt make it easier that it lived 14 years longer than it expected to. it lived a full life. it lived a very good life. it was the first set of eyes on miles and miles of mars. it was an explorer, it was tough, it was very, very brave. and none of that makes it easier, none of that makes it okay that it is not going to sing happy birthday to itself again.
about a year ago, my childhood cat died. i loved her more than anything. i donāt live near my family any more, and i wasnāt there for it, but my parents were, and they held her while her body gave out, and they say she knew she was with them, she knew she was loved.
i know opportunity was a computer inside a movable body, and not a person, or even an animal. still, i wish it had had people to hold it. i wish it had been with the people who cared for it. it seems very hard to me, to die so far from home.
but i think - to the extent to which we can say computers āknowā things, which i think is a great deal; i think knowing is most of what computers do; i think if they have a consciousness, knowledge must be nearly all of it-
i think opportunity knew it was loved.Ā
every couple of months i dream that iāve gone home and my catās there. even now, even though my grieving is over and done with, i visit her in my dreams, and i hold her, and every time, she purrs. she missed me. sheās so happy to be with me again.
thatās a very human thing, dreaming of what weāve loved. what weāve lost. dreaming things that outlast death. like robots, and singing.
The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.
So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosityās birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.
This isnāt a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we canāt get to because itās name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.
Thatās not sad, thatās awesome.
*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing
Does anyone have any Ryland Grace glazing fics? I could use some everyone loves him, everyone wants him, he's so brave and good at everything reading material. Bonus points for maximum obliviousness.
letās face it, constantly being called stupid by a space rock doesnāt do wonders for self-esteem. it is also, objectively, not true. Ryland Grace is a smart man. humans, in general, are all cunning and smart. it is very unfair for Rocky to insult humans because heās comparing their survivability on Erid to native Eridiansā.
now, recommendations:
whatās a school teacher doing with allat? ā antenna_angel
Muscular!Grace walks in on a team bonding session in the gym and joins in. everyone is suitably impressed by how ripped he is. based on hephasstās All Muscles AU on twitter and instagram.
if gravity fails and you start to fall, Iāll be there to catch you ā Ikira
also Muscular!Grace, but with a side of BloodyMary. Simon assumes Grace isnāt all that strong, until he falls and injures himself. cue the effortless princess carry and Simonās subsequent gay panic.
Always Muscles??? ā IntrovertAtHome
ā¦you might be seeing a trend. i assure you this is because i simply read through everything in the Muscular Ryland Grace tag, and certainly not because of any desire to see buff men.
anyway, this oneās a collection of snippets where different characters realise āhey, this dude is packingā.
one way or another ā antenna_angel
incomplete, but humans are space orcs! i love this concept so much. Rocky refuses to believe that Grace counts as a successful example of a persistence predator, and issues a challenge: hunt Rocky down.
Deliver us from evil ā nopaintjustpain
another humans are space orcs fic! can be read standalone, but all the fics in Ave Maria are beautiful, so give them a chance.
after arriving on Erid on the brink of starvation, and spending the subsequent years in fragile recovery, many Eridians believe that Grace, and by extension humans, are weak. they simply cannot conceptualise the feats they read of on Wikipedia as being achievable by any organism, let alone humans. Ryland Grace is a man who once stood by his theory of non-water based life against the entire scientific community. he will not let this disrespect stand.
A Rollercoaster of a Retrospective ā Just A Kid Icarus (Lightningstrike5757)
a rare, but beloved trope: everyone involved in the central tragedy of a story travels back in time/sees the future, except the victim. all of Strattās Vat is now trying to save him. Ryland Grace Haunts The Narrative, indeed. incomplete!
Project Get Loved, Dr. Grace ā brysbeddixt
this entire series is so satisfying. Grace opens his heart to the people around him, and so they would willingly shield it with their life. he is, of course, oblivious to this.
youāre welcome!! :) after scouring through my history it turns out that iāve unfortunately left out some gems, so hereās some more:
We Like Out of Print Games, Retro Skates ('Cause Guys Like Us Are Cool in College)! ā FadedPurpleLights
a comfy fic about playing nostalgic games. Grace is entirely unaware of how loved he must be, for a Wii console to appear on the ship, for him to be allowed to play it throughout the night, and for him to even be granted more rest afterwards.
Class Is In Session ā IntrovertAtHome
it turns out that a sleep-deprived Grace is also a teacher mode Grace. this is, unsurprisingly, very effective on all the children around him. partly Competent!Grace, with a dash of love.
5 times Grace got what he wanted (and 1 time he didn't) ā Anonymous
what Grace wants, people tend to give. this is not infallible. ends with angst.
Drops of Jupiter ā TheTearThatHangs
incomplete long fic! at the physical age of 58, Eridās atmosphere is taking its toll on Graceās body. the homesickness has also been hitting him harder. itās time for a vacation home. only, Stratt kept her promise after all. Earth hails Doctor Graceāno, Sir Doctor Captain Ryland Graceāas the hero that saved the stars.
Does anyone have any Ryland Grace glazing fics? I could use some everyone loves him, everyone wants him, he's so brave and good at everything reading material. Bonus points for maximum obliviousness.
letās face it, constantly being called stupid by a space rock doesnāt do wonders for self-esteem. it is also, objectively, not true. Ryland Grace is a smart man. humans, in general, are all cunning and smart. it is very unfair for Rocky to insult humans because heās comparing their survivability on Erid to native Eridiansā.
now, recommendations:
whatās a school teacher doing with allat? ā antenna_angel
Muscular!Grace walks in on a team bonding session in the gym and joins in. everyone is suitably impressed by how ripped he is. based on hephasstās All Muscles AU on twitter and instagram.
if gravity fails and you start to fall, Iāll be there to catch you ā Ikira
also Muscular!Grace, but with a side of BloodyMary. Simon assumes Grace isnāt all that strong, until he falls and injures himself. cue the effortless princess carry and Simonās subsequent gay panic.
Always Muscles??? ā IntrovertAtHome
ā¦you might be seeing a trend. i assure you this is because i simply read through everything in the Muscular Ryland Grace tag, and certainly not because of any desire to see buff men.
anyway, this oneās a collection of snippets where different characters realise āhey, this dude is packingā.
one way or another ā antenna_angel
incomplete, but humans are space orcs! i love this concept so much. Rocky refuses to believe that Grace counts as a successful example of a persistence predator, and issues a challenge: hunt Rocky down.
Deliver us from evil ā nopaintjustpain
another humans are space orcs fic! can be read standalone, but all the fics in Ave Maria are beautiful, so give them a chance.
after arriving on Erid on the brink of starvation, and spending the subsequent years in fragile recovery, many Eridians believe that Grace, and by extension humans, are weak. they simply cannot conceptualise the feats they read of on Wikipedia as being achievable by any organism, let alone humans. Ryland Grace is a man who once stood by his theory of non-water based life against the entire scientific community. he will not let this disrespect stand.
A Rollercoaster of a Retrospective ā Just A Kid Icarus (Lightningstrike5757)
a rare, but beloved trope: everyone involved in the central tragedy of a story travels back in time/sees the future, except the victim. all of Strattās Vat is now trying to save him. Ryland Grace Haunts The Narrative, indeed. incomplete!
Project Get Loved, Dr. Grace ā brysbeddixt
this entire series is so satisfying. Grace opens his heart to the people around him, and so they would willingly shield it with their life. he is, of course, oblivious to this.
Whatttt is with the tendency of Tumblr users to seek absolution from every single person who offhandedly posts about disagreeing with something they do
I say this not unkindly, but firmly: to function as a member of a social species, you have to get comfortable with the idea that not everyone will like you
vaporwave
dailybridgerton
baratheonpilled
prguitarman
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
