im always saying this

Medium-term background: Over the last ten and especially last five years, college football has gone from the fiefdoms of stuffy provincial old farts so devoted to the mirage of amateurism that programs could get in trouble for putting cream cheese on bagels, to a free-for-all wild west where players go shopping for new teams every season and whoever has the biggest firehose of money wins. This is in large part because the athletes being unpaid in the first place was never legally sustainable and only lasted so long out of inertia and coordination issues. If you're pro-labor it's a good and necessary thing overall, but for smaller programs, their fans, and anyone with a bit of romance about the game, it's been a disaster. On a related note, sports gambling has gone from something only legal in a handful of US cities to infinitely accessible to anyone with a smartphone over the same five years. Some would say these are both part of the same trend, namely very rich people getting to do anything they want because no one gives a shit about rules or ethics anymore, but that's neither here nor there.

Short-term background: A year or two ago, Texas oil billionaire Cody Campbell basically bought the Texas Tech athletic program. Tech has historically been a B-to-C-tier team with a massive chip on its shoulder thanks to never being able to get past the A-tier schools. Campbell is now chairman of the board of regents, i.e. the boss' boss' boss of most of the other people in this story. This past offseason he paid $5 million to recruit a quarterback named Brendan Sorsby, previously with Indiana and Cincinnati.

Last few weeks: Sorsby is outed as having a massive gambling addiction, from the stereotypical "up 'til 3 AM betting on Malaysian soccer" stuff to betting individual balls and strikes in baseball games to (brace yourself) betting on his own teams to lose or underperform. For example, to paraphrase a redditor's take, 'he saw his teammate struggling and instead of wanting to help him get better, he put a hundred bucks on the guy to get Under 2.5 Catches next game'.

From most of the Chicago White Sox in 1919 to Pete Rose in 1989, any professional athlete who has done anything remotely like this has been banned for life from their sport and made persona non grata. But again, college sports is a lawless wasteland right now and Cody Campbell didn't get rich by taking losses on his investments, no sir. He paid for Sorsby and Sorsby's gonna play. After the NCAA (college sports' governing body, a shambling rotten corpse of its former cream-cheese-outlawing self) seemed to have finally found a rule they could enforce without a labor-law suit bitchslapping them, banning Sorsby, Campbell more or less went judge-shopping until he found a retired judge willing to issue an injunction allowing Sorsby to play.

To be clear, Campbell and his puppets (head coach, athletic director, university president; their collective inability to shut the fuck up throughout this has led people to suspect that Campbell basically ordered them to go all-offense in PR.) aren't disputing that Sorsby is a gambling addict who bet on his own team to lose. They're saying that it would be discrimination against the mentally ill to not allow him to play. The words the judge used were 'irreparable harm'. Analogies spread on reddit over the last few weeks have included "holding AA meetings in a bar", "letting a drunk driver go scot-free because alcoholism is a disease", and "a banker caught stealing from customer funds getting a promotion".

The entire college football world, which had spent the last five years tearing itself apart over TV money and private equity, immediately united against Campbell and Tech. Several colleges wiped any games with Tech in any sport from their schedule, their conference intimated that they can and would expel them by member vote, the attorneys general of Oklahoma, Utah, and Kansas all promised to take action. And to be clear this was a truly existential, all hands on deck crisis: if the athletes are taking dives for money, then there is no sport. It's a bunch of mercenary hustlers dressing up like football players to pretend to play football. Even the vampiric sportsbooks themselves don't want this: nobody bets on fixed matches.

Bear in mind also it's not out of the question that Sorsby could be arrested for this: he was under 21 for much of this and sent money across state lines for family and friends to gamble with. So Campbell got his own lawyer: Ken Paxton, Texas state AG and current senate candidate. While Reddit hates every Texas Republican politician, the Texan posters do seem to regard Paxton as uniquely stupid and incompetent. He was impeached three years ago, which, how do you manage to do that as a Republican AG in Texas?

Anyway, this is where my law-fu gets a little weak, but apparently Paxton's filing on Tech and Campbell's behalf was so incompetently written, so wildly aggressive without any authority to actually see it through, that it opened up his clients to legal vulnerabilities that wouldn't have existed otherwise and sets the prosecution up for a thorough beatdown. So, late last night, Tech dumps mutually parts with Sorsby, rumored to have kept around half of his $5 million payday for barely avoiding becoming the Shoeless Joe Jackson of football. Campbell gets told "no" for the first time in years and loses millions of dollars for nothing. Paxton was (admittedly they say this every time) apparently in a tight race with Democrat James Talarico, and now he very publicly has argued that the 5th-most-popular college team in his own state should let their quarterback fix games for gambling rings because his billionaire sugar daddy threw a tantrum over it. May end up mattering, may not.

There's some people in the comments saying "fandoms have always been like this" and others saying "No, it's worse than it was." And both are to some extent right. Fans (or at least a small percentage of fans, and the larger a fanbase gets the larger a group this will describe) have always been Like That; but they did not always have the level of access to creators and actors that they have now.

The notion that a performer needs to be constantly available to public scrutiny, that their personal information should by default be available to any rando with google, is pretty new. It used to be that actors would only be expected to engage with the public on limited, specific, and controlled occasions, usually with security provided. Now they're being asked to rawdog exposure to the mob 24/7 on their own.

(Also, production companies have always always always been exploitative cowards, just to get that straight; reading the biographies of literally any actress from golden Hollywood years makes that clear. It's just, again, more public now.)

She’s the first person Grace remembers from his past. He remembers her before he remembers he’s a teacher, before he remembers Stratt, before he remembers HIS OWN NAME.

He mentions no other people who he’d consider a friend that he’d hang out with.

The first thing Grace tells us about her is that she and him have steak and beer together every Thursday at the same time at the same place, at the same TABLE because the staff immediately recognize them every time and know their orders.

They met in grad school because Marissa dated Grace’s roommate for three months. They have no inkling of romance between themselves at all.

They’ve known each other for TWENTY YEARS.

She works at the DOE and learned about the Petrova Line absorbing the sun’s energy before Grace did—she’s the one to tell him about it. The information weighs on her enough that she drinks four whiskeys.

Every other named character calls Grace “Grace,” “Dr. Grace,” or presumably “Mr. Grace” in the case of the students. But Grace calls Marissa by her given name (doesn’t mention her surname), suggesting she’s the only character who would call him Ryland.

The dialogue in their one scene together suggests Grace is used to joking around with her without feeling judged

The book never brings her up again after this one scene. This makes me feel CRAZY.

WHY did Weir make them seem so close only to give Marissa one singular scene? Her only tangible role appears to be to give Grace exposition about the Astrophage Problem, but there’s plenty of ways to write a scene like that without specifying that she’s also apparently his closest human friend?

Did Grace ever call her to explain why he can’t show up to dinner anymore? Did he have cell signal on Stratt’s Vat? Did Stratt LET him call people after signing him onto the Project? She seems to have taken care of his job, but she wouldn’t have any reason to know about Marissa and the Thursday dinners unless Grace and Marissa left evidence on social media or something.

What happened to her after her one scene? Presumably she kept doing her job at the DOE and having a harder and harder time due to the crisis, maybe she worked on trying to get energy to warm people’s homes.

Did Stratt know about her at all? Did anyone know she was Grace’s friend, did anyone know she had dinner with him every week, did anyone know she would miss him?

Petrova Taskforce Guys: Oh yeah Grace is a loser he has no family or friends to miss him

Me: DO THEY KNOW

How did she feel hearing that Grace became the science officer of the Hail Mary? Without telling her, without saying goodbye?

Did she think Grace just suddenly cut off their friendship, or did she get suspicious of the government and Stratt because she knew Grace wouldn’t just do that to her?

I see posts sometimes of people being like “oh Grace didn’t have meaningful relationships before meeting Rocky,” and I feel like I’m waving the book around like DOES ANYONE WANNA TALK ABOUT MARISSA HELLO MARISSA THE GRAD SCHOOL FRIEND SHE EXISTS SHE’S REAL