allthingsmarvel100

After Earth receives the Hail Mary logs and everyone sees Grace and Rocky together ... after the sun is saved and everyone knows they have a middle-school science teacher and an alien rock spider to thank ...

What place does Rocky occupy in human culture?

Because he's the only Eridian most humans have seen or ever will see, and he's 50% of why humanity survives. Sure, Grace will be a hero and there will be millions of kids named after him, and there will be humans who try to minimize Rocky in the story (call it the Tenzing Norgay effect) ...

But I'm just imagining all those little baby Rylands and Graces snuggling up to their plush Rockys at night. (Because you don't name your kid after Doctor Captain Ryland Grace and NOT give them a Rocky. Even if you have to make it yourself.) We make bears and tigers cuddly and give them to children to help them sleep; why not an Eridian?

And when those children grow up and some of them become scientists, those threadbare Rocky plushies will occupy places of honor in their labs and offices. Imagine the movement to reclaim Rocky as a co-savior of the stars. Imagine angsty tweens creating Eridiansonas. Adults getting Rocky tattoos. Songs being written that incorporate clips of Rocky's audio. And always, always, the children hugging their Rockys. Rocky keeps them safe, after all. Love is shaped like Rocky.

And then the Eridians show up, however many generations later, and find a planet full of people who have seen exactly one (1) Eridian and decided, as a species, to make him soft so they can hug him forever.

here is the full photo. in my opinion it very much misses the point to crop it. we don't need to sanitise the horrors of Colonialism.

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.