I Scream About Whatever Pops Into My ADHD Brain

Dr. Ryland Grace was arguably the perfect backup candidate for his mission. Stratt got that right. He had no children, no life partner, no family, not even a dog. All he had was his students and that was enough for him, but that made him replaceable.

Right?

Not only were Grace’s wishes completely ignored, his life and his value as a person was undermined. Simply because he had no one but his students to care for his wellbeing, because he wouldn’t have someone at home waiting for him to come back.

Aroace people deal with similar treatment simply because romance and sex are seen as essential to the human experience, completely disregarding any and all other types of connection. One’s inherent value as a person is not lost when they choose to live life without romantic or sexual relationships. One’s value is simply in existing.

Aroace people know this well, which is why so many have become so attached to Ryland as a character. Many of us see his way of life as the end goal for ourselves, so any one of us would have been seen as just as dispensable, by Stratt and by society as a whole.

Thank about it. Rocky's a spitfire and bounces off the walls at baseline and they looked at that little autistic, bossy ball of energy and went 'yes. that's them. the creature I want to spend the next 500+ years with'. They have to at LEAST match their energy somewhat. And if you think you wouldn't be a fucking ball of PTSD and bitterness at your culture and society after fifty plus years of not knowing they were alive or dead, you're fucking operating on moon logic. Honestly, Adrian and the other families were probably begging for a rescue mission that never happened for various political and logical reasons; and while it probably would have ended in mass fatalities as well, so thank goodness that figurative and literal ship never got off the ground, the fact that it didn't happen probably burns more than a little, reasonable or unreasonable.

So one day Adrian gets some Eridian diplomat on their doorstep, and they're expecting the formal condolences at long last, but instead they go into this whole spiel of ' so. So! Turns out twenty two of the original crew died, but your mate survived! When did they die? Oh, early on, so your mate was submerged in crippling and literal deafening loneliness for over four decades; and now he's back and acting weird, and he's become codependent with this weird fragile squishy human being that's the only reason he came back at all, and he's refusing to send down the cure unless we make the blob an aquarium. Could you come to the space elevator and tell him to stop being so unreasonable?' If that were MY mate? I'd fucking lose it.

Just throwing things at this poor messenger and shrieking like " Oh! Oh!! So it's somehow Rocky's fault that you're refusing to take a few months out of the several hundred Eridian years we have left to ship the cure we already have to Threeworld before things actually become problematic to make sure one of the two saviors of our entire species doesn't die?! To give the sole survivor of the mission--my mate, who's been alone and in silence, with no one to watch him sleep, for hundreds of years--some sort of solace and peace?! And you're wondering why he's acting erratically?! Maybe you wouldn't be in this position at all if you'd sent the rescue mission for which we've pleaded for years at every single thrum! I don't care if this Grace thing is a literal giant space amoeba; get the fuck out of my house and tell the powers that be to give it literally everything it wants and needs!" And they're all 'be reasonable' and Adrian's like " I've been reasonable for hundreds of Eridian years, and you would not be in this situation if you'd actually sent a rescue mission and not simply wrung your claws and hoped for the best, so fucking live in the nest you made. All I'm going to do if you get me on the radio with Rocky right now is tell him he's doing amazing and give him advice on how to properly parboil the Taumoeba so that you can't even recover even the slightest scrap of DNA if you don't give the flesh blob that saved his life and saved OUR lives PLURAL goddamn vitamins." Like, they think it's bad that Rocky basically stands over Grace's sleeping body and hisses? Wait until they get the MUCH LARGER ERIDIAN doing that for Grace and Rocky. Wait until the much large Eridian leads the families of the dead twenty-two crewmates to the space elevator to riot because this sure sounds like a coverup to them!! This sure sounds like the deflection of blame on the sole survivor!! This sure sounds like the same paralysis that left them to die alone in space because you didn't want to admit failure!! Yes, I know, I'm weaving some sort of political intrigue plot that probably doesn't exist in canon. All I'm saying is that you all are missing the delicious implications of a mission that went radio silent for fifty plus earth years with no word from the government and no obvious attempt at rescue, followed by your partner coming home with the only being that's been around to watch him sleep since the rest of the crew died forty-some years ago, and people are calling him weird and changed. You'd be horrified. You'd be sick.

They’re so naturally curious and ask questions the other had not thought of. Adrian asks Grace for tissue samples to run experiments on and Grace is thrilled to receive tissue samples in return. They make absolutely crazy advancements in molecular biology.

I think part of the reason the rumor mill is working overtime here is because credible sources of news are so thin on the ground. Which is highlighting a bigger problem about US politics right now: it's difficult or even impossible trying to get your hands on any actual news. Because this administration doesn't put out statements or information; its only concern is PR.

And it's far worse PR to just let the ominous silence about the issue stretch on and on for weeks than it would be to actually show us whatever state he's currently in.

This is an administration that has no problem putting people in front of the camera when they are clearly in no shape to be doing anything other than convalescing. Trump is literally decomposing, and they're still perfectly happy to let him stagger around in front of the cameras.

An independent journalist published an audio of the paramedics responding to the situation. They were responding to a unconscious person in cardiac arrest and the audio indicates they performed CPR

This is what Red Cross says about CPR plus NPR article talking about CPR survival rate (trigger warning for disturbing details about patients deaths in the NPR article)

The odds of a person being restored to life after CPR is 7.6% as per NPR and cardiac arrest is 90% fatal according to Red Cross. Additionally McConnell was very old and frail. NPR says chances are much more dismal for older patients as CPR can be brutal on the body for an older patient

Chances are even lower if McConnell didn't start receiving CPR until paramedics arrived, every minute the brain is deprived of oxygen the situation worsens

People witnessing the ambulance taking McConnell away said the paramedics didn't seem to be acting very urgently which they thought was strange. The sirens were not on when the ambulance left. All of this from CNN article

Assuming the audio of the paramedics is real -- news media seems to treat it as reliable -- it would be highly unusual if McConnell wasn't either dead or incapacitated

That said, as a former journalist, scanner traffic is infamously unreliable. Journalists should NOT be using scanner audio as a source unless they have something else to back it up (for example, I used to report on local house fires; there have been multiple times where I’d go out to a reported fire and it turned out to be nothing/highly exaggerated).

The scanner audio itself seems real enough (and both big and small outlets should have the tools to double check this), but until there’s independent confirmation of the facts, I’m not treating a single word of it as true.

From ancient to abstract, this one sure got around.

We barely know anything about Madagascar pre-500CE. We don’t even know whether the island had a permanent population before then, despite finding a bunch of much older signs of temporary human presence.

Malagasy mythology makes mention of the vazimba, a “precursor” ethnic group that might or might not be distinct from Madagascar’s current population.

The point is, we do not know.

So you were in Madagascar when the pyramids were being built in Egypt, i.e. during one of the most obscure, most undocumented parts of Madagascar’s human history?

so funny story. I tried this once!

My kids are in 5th and 6th grade. They’ve never even seen a fingering chart. The 6th grader is expected to do nearly all of his schoolwork on a computer, and he doesn’t even know the term “home row”. I don’t know how they expect them to excel without giving them the skills they need to use the tools they have to use.

Typing classes were only availble to those taking the secretarial class, which was not open to boys.

It should be noted that there is a distinction between typing as it used to mean and word processing. Typewriters were unforgiving machines, not only could you not cut, paste or delete (for obvious reasons) so your spelling had to be very, VERY good, but the legibiity of each letter produced depended on how hard you hit the key (unless you went to a fancy school which had electric typewriters, which were not the norm).

Those of us who were subversive enough to learn keybaord skills through computing had a MUCH easier time of it. Though it was often offset by the shitty keyboards some computers had, and YES, I’m calling you out ZX81!

If you can’t see any depth to those keys, you are correct, they have none because the ZX81 keyboard was a damned membrane!

But believe me, if you could learn to typeat a decent speed on of these, then NOTHING could stop you, expcet for the fact that the odds were good you were typing faster than it could process input.

It’s successor, the ZX Spectrum had spongey keys, which whilst not great, were better than nothing.