zev

he/she (no they please)

[weiden-underscore-ww]

lil goobers partying the night away

[seducingavampire]

i love to use the transgender beam as much as the next guy but you Cannot convince me that ryland grace is trans in the sense of him having transitioned prior to the events in phm. he is NOT that self aware or decisive and would rather think about pretty much anything else

[snakussy]

"average eridian has like 30 kinks" factoid actualy just statistical error. average eridian super vanilla and waits until lifelong bond ceremony before mating. Savior Rocky, who lived in earth ship for 4 years and watched 10,000 hours of questionably inappropriate videos as a bonding activity with his alien mate, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[mercifulmother]

TFOFC-VERSE: PROJECT HAIL MARY FAKE BOOK RECS

The Father of First Contact: the Uncharted Life of Ryland Grace by Dominique Reid. (If you only read one book about Dr. Cpt. Ryland Grace, make it this one. Reid really humanizes him in ways that he deserves + this one has The Declassified Records. You know the ones.)

Amaze!: Languages of the Hail Mary by Ray Tamaguchi. (The Hail Mary Accent Book For People Who Want to Get Emotional About An Accent Shared By Two Beings And Other Cool Language Stuff Too.)

Microscopic Empire: The Fight For Taumoeba 82.5 by Thandi Mazibuko. (Mazibuko makes lab work feel like a forensics thriller, I never want to see someone say scientists can't write well ever again.)

Devour: A Human History of Astrophage by Devin Glenn. (Glenn skips absolutely nothing. Just mind-bogglingly thorough research, the bibliography is a rec list in and of itself.)

[mercifulmother]

For all that I've seen a lot of PHM posts that go on about 'patron saint of [blank]' for Ryland Grace, I don't think I've seen any that address what amounts to the scientific version of that: Mother of/Father of.

In order to be considered for the title of Mother of/Father [scientific field], you have to be the first to make significant contribution in that field. You're setting the groundwork in a way nobody else has. This can obviously cause a lot of debate in the end about who gets the title! That said, I think given the leaps and bounds that Grace makes in several fields of science that take them from the more theoretical to the practical gives him some notable options with strong arguments. So we've got options like: Father of Astrobiology (the discovery and study of Astrophage, Taumoeba, several other forms of life on Adrian, and the study of and first interactions with the Eridians; disproving the Goldilocks zone as the only area viable for life; making significant strides in proving the panspermia hypothesis), Father of Xenolinguistics (first person to create working translator and archive of an alien language), and Father of Interstellar Travel (this would be a title held alongside Dr. Dmitri Komorov, likely with Komorov being listed first, and there would be significant debate on if Grace should hold the title at all. I like to think Dmitri would want to share it though).

All workable cases, all real options. Buuuuut I think my very favorite option though would be the one that is the least open to debate and is the one that I honestly think Grace himself would like best: Father of First Contact.

Because on the one hand, yeah, that's a lot he was mostly doing. First contact with Astrophage, with the Taumoeba, with other life on Adrian, and most of all with the Eridians. The first ever intelligent form of life outside of Earth, he made First Contact with. He found ways to communicate, to establish common ground, to work alongside an alien being. He did something no one else on Earth had ever done before and changed the world with it. He made First Contact and saved the world.

But mostly that means there's a whole field of science that Grace's name is attached to forever because he got to meet his friend. Mostly, Father of First Contact is just a fancy way to say "I love my friend."

[hatokas-dreamengineer]

Lovely tags via OP, @mercifulmother

[marvinhere]

And comments too from @securitycapecreature !

securitycapecreature

1- father of first contact is the cutest option and if you can only have one title that would be best

BUT

2- the funniest opinion imo is him getting several of those so hes one of those "this guy is fuckin everywhere" scientists (i imagine one day in the distant future a group of college kids get together and one of them can be talking about learning of this great biologist that made so many new discoveries and someone else goes "you mean the linguist??" "You mean the ASTRONAUT??" And everyones confused for a little bit until they figure it out)

mercifulmother

2 - This is the ideal vision yes yes yes yes! Grace really went out there and decided to do a 100% speedrun on revolutionizing different fields of science, and now children of the future are going to suffer about it forever. It gets even worse once the political science kids get involved in the conversation. "Do you mean the DIPLOMAT?" STEM vs Humanities showdown is brutal. Trying to write a paper about this man is an absolute nightmare because the interdisciplinary sources on him are in five different sections of the library at any given point. Finding his stuff in a bookstore is even worse.

securitycapecreature

@mercifulmother Ahhhh!!! Yesss oh my those poor kids, im half glad i dont live in that universe rn, his Wikipedia page is the stuff of nightmares

On the other hand, someone does that type of post where they post a screenshot of the "subjects" in a weird wiki page with no context and everyone in the comments identifies him Immediately cause who else

mercifulmother

@securitycapecreature His Wikipedia page is so long and its a nightmare to look at and it can never be confused for anyone else. Its one of the best places to fall into a wikipedia rabbit hole on because you can redirect in so many different directions. He's also the new spiders georg. "'Average scientist discovers 3 field revolutionizing things a year' factoid actually [sic] just statistical error. Average scientist discovers 0 field revolutionizing things a year. Dr. Cpt. Ryland Grace, who lives in space and discovers over 10,000 revolutionary facts each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted."

[avoid-avoidance]

I'm a big fan of all of this!!

Grace has come a long way from "no immediate family, you don't even have a dog". He's the Father of First Contact. For the rest of time, as long as human and Eridian civilizations last, at all the points where humans and Eridians (or even humans and other species, or Eridians and other species) meet and interact and find joy in each other, making their own personal First Contacts -- all of those people become Grace's family.

[mercifulmother]

@avoid-avoidance Hey man you can't just make me cry on my own post like that, what the heck??? How dare you???? Like I'd halfway made a connection similar to that (more from a teaching perspective), but not with everyone who makes First Contact after him being Grace's family. I'm so glad you did cause that's beautiful, I love it.

That's his family forever! He's their family forever! He taught them all how to make first contact, how to be with another species, how to love in this totally new way, and that makes them his kids! He's the blueprint humanity learns from! He never stops teaching, and all his students are his kids, and now they're his family too! Augh I'm gonna go get some tissues now, I'm very emotional.

Anyways peer reviewed, highly approved, ten stars, sparkly good job sticker right at the top.

[stargirl-and-potts]

@child-of-flame-and-sky It was eight nine ten times!

ETA: ^ I made that list for a previous ask about this, but I think he’s also crying into his hands on the landing strip before he tells Stratt he can’t do it, so that’s nine. All times I would also cry.

Edited again to add: he cries when he gives Rocky the little Earth “so you can remember me.” You can hear the emotion in his voice, but it’s only visible for a moment—when Rocky asks what he can give Grace and Grace asks to see his ship. At that point a tear has trailed far enough down his cheek to catch the light from the fireworks clearly, just by his nose.

(He also has tears welling but not falling when he calculates it would take 113.8 yrs to reach Earth, and when Stratt tells him he has three hours to think. So you could count those as 11 and 12.)

In the book he cries even more—I count thirteen times, including tears rolling down his face saying goodbye to Rocky, and three separate times for joy. He’s so deadpan but so tenderhearted. It’s one of my favorite things about him.

[chasetheauthor]

project hail mary was about as book accurate as it could've possibly been but i think that everyone that made it was on some crazy soulmatism crack cocaine with grace and rocky ... that forehead touch towards the end when they reunited ... who's idea was it for rocky's handprint to be a permanent burn on grace's arm. i just want to talk to them for a minute

[voidsetup1]

and out of the darkness - you you you you you

[habken]

he looked so good when he was absolutely miserable

[bylophim]

LETS GOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

[the-irreverend]

Here's to hellsite solidarity!

[fosterova]

Two of us wearing raincoats, standing solo In the sun You and me chasing paper, getting nowhere On our way back home

[goldenaltar]

concept: no astrophage au where eridians and humans still make first contact but like, properly. a whole diplomatic mission meeting in the middle of space to save travel time. stratt is humanity's greatest representation. the eridian equivalent is equally as scary and secretly soft. it's all very star trek.

but rocky and grace put the whole diplomacy thing in jeopardy by being too best buddy with it. like they're both really low level members of the mission. some engineer necessary for ship maintenance, and an obligatory molecular biologist they brought along in case they found more alien cells out in space. and these two guys like, somehow keep ending up hanging out essentially "at the back of the classroom." consistently left out of the actually important negotiations, and well, they're bored!

grace steals some laptops and starts jury-rigging his own personal translator for rocky, despite the fact that the official translation software is way quicker to learn and much more nuanced. rocky starts learning english, simplifies his eridian, and immediately starts mocking grace for needing the software. they start blabbing to each other about all the weird quirks of their respective cultures and advanced science their planets can do. the whole time they are ribbing each other about culture stuff. grace eats in front of rocky. rocky forces grace to sleep in a corridor somewhere so he can keep watch.

then stratt and the eridian leader find out and it's like

stratt: you. you've been meeting in private with a member of the eridian deligation?

grace: ... yyyes.

stratt: and you shared with them classified scientific documents?

grace: i... maybe gave him. a laptop. he's so smart! what was i supposed to do?

stratt: HIM? you've assigned male pronouns to a genderless species?

grace: he said he likes to match!

stratt: do you even know the name of this eridian?!

grace: i call him rocky :)

stratt: 😰

then on rocky's side of things it's like

eridian leader: sorry did you say you called the human after one of its digestive noises?

rocky: yeah :)

eridian leader: and. you've been telling it about how to make xenonite. one of our most vital trading resources.

rocky: yes yes, grace is very ignorant about basic chemistry 🙄

eridian leader: right. and you watch it sleep. despite the fact that all the human beings we have spoken to have described this as a cultural violation?

rocky: well he didn't like it at first but he came around!!

anyway both sides of the delegation are sweating profusely (metaphorically speaking) until they see rocky and grace in action and are like ohh! they're both freaks. we are not to blame for this. these two are just really bad at navigating cultural norms.

cut to grace curled up with rocky while he sleeps like a baby.

[alienatedartt]

some grace doodles :3

[fuckyeahsufjanstevens]

Happy 50th Birthday to Sufjan Stevens (born July 1st, 1975)!

[wavezies]

big fan of strattland being a little too comfortable in each others' space and weirding everyone else out completely straight-faced

[cereal-phan]

So, this is from phil is not on fire (the first) Pay attention to the pillow (sorry about the lion in the way) in the first shot. It’s laying on the bed. And look at Phil and Dan’s noses, how black the marker is. Then in the next shot, the pillow is standing up and both of their noses are heavily missing marker. Can you say “Phan”?

Also, this video was literally filmed ONE DAY after they met irl and that just makes it so much more precious to me.

[phandomheritage]

date of origin: june 1st, 2015