I'm the potato one

"What's happening?" "A hug."

Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

Ryan Gosling and James Ortiz as Ryland Grace and Rocky

"I didn't get you anything." "You gave me everything."

Project Hail Mary (2026) dir. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller

Connor, blushing: Because I'm hardworking?

Hank: No, because you sound annoying

I like being paid to have fun, so I bought some Transformers stickers and put one on every quiz that got over 90% (ie. the 'A' range). Any quiz that got an A+ got Optimus Prime himself. B grades still got a "good job!!" and any passing grade at all got a smiley face, but no sticker.

Y'all, 4th year arky courses are FULL of nerds. The MINUTE the first quizzes were handed back they went nuts over the stickers. There were stars in their eyes, they were crowing in excitement. These were students in their mid-twenties. Only one person got an Optimus Prime on that quiz, and when I told them the sticker rubrick and the requirements to get Optimus you could practically see the fire it lit. They would get those stickers. Optimus Prime was going to be theirs.

I fucking ran out of stickers TWICE throughout those courses. I had to go and buy whole packs JUST TO HAVE ENOUGH OPTIMUSES (Optimi?) for all the A+ quizzes that came in every time. That meant i had more generic TF stickers to promote the B grade papers to stickerdom. The materials lab was full of students every week, studying for these quizzes. They hyped each other up for them. They petitioned me to sticker their lab reports and final projects too (of course I did).

The prof, a delightful 80-something socks-and-sandals hippy of a guy who supervised my honours thesis, was fucking beside himself over this. He thought it was the best thing ever. He joked that the marks that semester were so abnormally high that he needed to look over the tests himself in case I was going too easy on them (I wasn't, those TF stickers were expensive). He had to look over them anyway in case *I* made a technical mistake grading them, which meant he was the first to see the stickers each time XD