Wait let's go back for a sec to Rocky calling the laptops "portable thinking machines". At what point do you think Grace actually communicated to Rocky that computers don't "think", in the sense of possessing any kind of sapience? Did Grace tell him that (or did Rocky figure it out on his own) before Grace gifted Rocky with a laptop to take back to Erid??
(Btw, if you didn't know, in the movie Grace offered the laptop to Rocky of his own volition, while in the book Rocky asked Grace for one as a gift to take back to Erid, and Grace went "yeah sure! and can I have some xenonite to take back to Earth?", and Rocky went "yeah sure!".)
I don't think it's 100% unreasonable that Rocky might (at first) mentally categorize a laptop as occupying some weird semi-alive state adjacent to an animal, or between an animal and a fully-sapient person. If you think about it, a laptop's "brain" is much closer to what Eridians use to think than the lump of organic material that Grace uses. Maybe Rocky did even has some kind of ethical 'ick' running in the back of his mind about how Grace treats these 'thinking' things as if they were objects, but he can't afford to alienate Grace while the fate of Erid hangs in the balance. And Rocky can't be *totally* sure that there's some kind of Sentient (or even Sapient) Rights Violation occurring here. This space mission has already been so goddamn weird, who the hell even knows what the humans' deal with computers actually is?
Just think about how entertaining it would be if Rocky and Grace get started on their space road trip to Erid, and when Rocky is done unpacking all his stuff from the Blip-A, he corners Grace for a serious conversation and goes "So, uhhhh, just to clear things up a little -- are the laptops and the ship computer like... some kind of slaves that humans created, or...?"
"Between you and me," he said, his voice falling so low it became hard to hear through the glass, "I didn't think he had it in him."
Her face remained carefully neutral, "The mission or the volunteering?"
"No! Not the mission, no. Hell, he might have been more prepared than Martin and Annie. I'm sure you made sure of that." Something sharp slipped through underneath his laugh, but just as quickly it was sheathed and put away. "Very clever man. You always did put a lot of faith in him. Even when he wouldn't do the same himself."
"Modesty never suited him," she said. He hummed in agreement.
"But volunteering..." he whistled, shaking his head. "I mean, we were horribly unlucky. It all happened very fast. Sacrificing yourself with so little time to consider it takes courage. And well, you remember how Dr. Grace was."
"A coward?"
He raised his hands defensively, "Now you said it, not me! But... a little, yes. What is that American expression again—"
He drummed his fingers on his knee before lighting up. "Scaredy-cat!" he said, Russian accent wrapping thickly around the vowels. "That's him. Like a skittish cat. A good man—one of our best. But not a brave one. Not the stuff heroes are usually made of."
She pressed her lips together and rested her chin on her hands. "If anything it does him an honour. I hear they're already planning a memorial in San Francisco?"
"Yes. I will be attending," he murmured. He shook his head. "Funerals for the living. That is the world we live in, Ms Stratt."
They grew quiet. He blinked rapidly and grimaced, looking away. Suddenly, he burst into laughter. "Ah, damn him! I wish I could've said goodbye. Is that selfish?"
"Of course not," she said. Another scab fell loose. She pressed her thumb into her palm to stop the bleeding.
"He goes to save us all and I'm mad at him. But he was a friend. I wish the last time I saw his face wasn't while he was looking at me like a cornered animal."
"He was still afraid," she said, looking down at her hands. "Up to the very last moment. That's why he asked us to induce the coma early. Trust me, doctor, you wouldn't have wanted this. Neither of you."
They both gave the other a moment, eyes either shut tightly or resting vacantly somewhere above the other's head. A hand wiping across a face. The picking of a scab under a fingernail. A throat cleared.
"Well. As I said. Scaredy-cat." He wiped at his eyes, attempting a smile. "Cats like to go off to die on their own, I suppose."
Her nails bit into the meat of her palms. She said nothing.
I feel like if eridians tried to do human karaoke in a way that harmonizes with the song, it would be like....like if you, as a human, tried singing a song in another human language you didn't know. BUT rather than just mimic the pronunciation in that language, you match random words in your native language that rhymes/has similar pronunciation with the words in the song's language. It's gotta be confusing as hell, but would make for a fun game for Rocky and Grace on the way to Erid.
Rocky suggests different words that harmonize with sections of song while Grace helps pick which eridian word matches the best. They keep going back and forth until Rocky has his own version of 'lyrics' that sound nice when sung over the song, but are just utter nonsense babble in eridian.
(Obviously eridians can just translate the song lyrics directly into eridian language, but that would be a bit chaotic to hear + plenty of human lyrics have layers of cultural context that wouldnt be translatable so early into alien cross-cultural collaboration)
(Based on this post about the Project Hail Mary book's Thai translation!!)
So if Grace/Rocky is canon in Thai... hmmm...
Maybe someone on Stratt's Vat started a joke betting pool (going by fanon characterization, it would probably be Ilyukhina, but it could've also been Redell) -- and one of the bets was "which member of the Hail Mary crew is going to fall in love with and/or have sex with an alien".
Annie Shapiro bet on her lover Martin DuBois, going by the logic that he would need a truly epic rebound fling to get over her, and clearly nothing less than some kind of fantastical alien succubus would do. Martin obligingly bet on Annie in return.
No one wanted to bet on Yáo Li-Jie at first, thinking it would be disrespectful to his living wife, who would effectively become a widow as soon as the Hail Mary launched. This lasted until the first of only two times that Stratt permitted the primary crew's family to visit the Vat, when Yáo's wife somehow found out about the betting pools and wagered a decent sum on her husband, declaring that she knew of no one else whose bravery and fortitude would be better suited to such an adventurous endeavor.
Olesya Ilyukhina bet on herself, and pestered many of her countrymen aboard the Vat to do the same. She feigned incredulous offense when Dimitri Komorov elected to bet on DuBois instead (on the grounds that Komorov estimated DuBois' general range of preferences in a partner to be wider than Ilyukhina's or Yáo's).
Bob Redell put down smaller bets on all three of the primary crew, as well as some even smaller bets on the members of the backup crew. He claimed that he had carefully calculated the amount of each bet so as to best play the odds.
Steve Hatch put down a joke bet (at least, everyone assumed it was a joke) that an alien would fall in passionate star-crossed love with one of his beetle probes, and be left weeping in despair when it eventually departed for Earth along with its three compatriots.
The official pot did not contain any bets labeled as coming from Eva Stratt. She may have placed one under someone else's name as a proxy, but no one would have dared ask her.
Ryland Grace, Dr. Lokken, and Dr. Lamai were the longest holdouts who refused to bet in this particular pool for a good while. Lokken eventually gave in and followed Hatch's example, betting a paltry sum that some alien would propose a passionate affair with the Hail Mary herself (drawn in, no doubt, by her irresistible centrifugal gravity).
Dr. Grace and Dr. Lamai stayed stubborn about it for a little longer, but eventually they decided together that placing nominal bets would be a small price to pay in order to get the rest of the Vat to stop pestering them on the subject. Grace jokingly suggested that Lamai should bet that an alien would get a crush on her mechanical nannybot, only for Lamai to fix him with a indignant stare and declare that her distinguished protégé would certainly not engage in such an unprofessional relationship with a being who might well become its patient at some point.
"Whatever," Grace sighed, truly done with discussing this topic. "Why don't we just bet on each other. It's not like anybody in this betting pool is ever going to actually collect."
And so they did.
(Many years later, shortly after the long-awaited beetle probes had been caught and immediately hustled to some deeply-classified location, Dr. Lamai found an unexpected envelope in her mail. When she opened it, she found a small sum of American currency and a brief handwritten note. The note was not signed, but after a moment, she recognized Eva Stratt's severe, tidy cursive:
Forwarded to you on behalf of Dr. Grace.
The remainder of your winnings will be collected, where possible, and sent along when time allows.
Congratulations.)
Knowing your country’s folklore comes in handy more often than you’d think.
It’s not that long ago my mom was talking about some Danish period drama she had been watching where at some point a woman kills her newborn baby she had out of wedlock so as not to be ostracized because the father abandoned her and my mom went “Tha poor baby and that poor women but what were women like her supposed to do? What a horrible time”
And I could helpfully add “That’s why we have mylings in Scandinavian folklore. They’re the ghosts of babies that were left in nature to die for this exact reason and it happened so often people believed that if you saw one there would be more nearby and they would crowd you until you got crushed under their weight” (should be noted we use the word genganger which means “those who walk again” and can be used for anything from ghosts to zombies to vampires to anything that was dead and came back hence why they can be ghosts that crush you. The lines are very blurred)
The horrified look on her face really added something to the conversation.
The "smash the paparazzi camera" trope is stupid for a few reasons. First. Cameras don't pap people, people pap people. Second. If you break the lens the memory card is going to be literally fine and now they have a picture of The Character about to smash the camera that they can sell for the price of a new camera.
The much more badass move would be for the Character to take the camera, pop out the memory card (there might be 2), put it in their mouth and then walk away smiling. thank you for coming to my ted talk
An animated Batman show I would love is with Duke Thomas as the main character. There's so much potential with him. Not only is he the only Metahuman on the team, he's also the only day hero.
I would love an animated show of him just doing the craziest shit during the day, and nobody in the Batfam really knows or understands how hard it is to have the day-shift, especially when you're the ONLY one.
Like one episode, Gotham gets dimensionally displaced or something and Duke has to solve it alone because NO ONE was answering comms. Or some magic user casts a spell that sends Gotham back to the fifties or something, and Duke is stuck solving it before Bruce finishes his bat-nap.
Duke stops a robbery and talks to Dick about it afterwards.
Duke: I stopped a bank robbery today.
Dick: Oh, I've done that before!
Duke: See, something we day-shifters and night-shifters have in common! Honestly, the only troubling thing was trying to keep all the hostages safe.
Dick:
Dick: What hostages?
Dick then finds out that banks aren't decoration. People do indeed go to them during the day! It's something he's never had to deal with before!
This is genuinely my number one wish for a Batman show. Just Signal going through the craziest hijinks while the rest of the family sleeps. Occasionally we get appearances from the rest of the Batfam, most notably Alfred (who probably never sleeps), and Damian, since he's still in school but does not help Duke with day stuff.
Elderly lady mail clerk and young customer are chatting. Customer says, "oh! I'm wearing my boss's coat right now, give me something weird to put in the pocket!" Others within earshot all start looking for something because, hey, important quest. Mail clerk finally reaches under counter, pulls out a large roll of labels, and tears one off.
You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
Y’all know that I’m into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and I’m hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second
Emperor Hadrian randomly stabbed a slave in the eye in a fit of rage and he was supposedly unusually sympathetic to slaves.
There’s other instances of people randomly punching slaves that they didn’t even know because they got in their way or something. This was just normal behavior.
And slaves didn’t rebel en masse because if even one slave committed an act of violent rebellion it was common practice to kill every slave and former slave in the household.
People only took notice for posterity when these mass executions got into the hundreds of people. One of the few recorded for the history books is of over 400 people being killed because one guy stabbed his enslaver.
Like how many people throughout history were beaten to death because some rich asshole was angry and there was no legal or social consequences for doing so? We don’t know.
When you study ancient history you’re reminded that slavery has never once been kind or justified. It just takes on different forms of evil in every time and place that it infects.
This is Mary Marvel she runs a charity and has donated thousands of dollars of money to helping the poor. She builds homes for the homeless feeds the hungry, reads to sick children, supports free healthcare. She is the most terrifying person I know and everyday I live in fear that I might upset her. This is Captain Marvel Junior he’s committed several war crimes, is on the no fly list and is banned from most counties. They tried to give him the death sentence but nothing they could had could possibly touch him. Isn’t the cutest little guy ever I love him so much he’s my best friend I don’t know where I’d be without him!
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