Kal

Media: We put some petty drama in front of a camera and exaggerated the mistakes of strangers so you can be amazed at their behaviour

Media: here's a video of a woman whose mother was just diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Watch them dress shop, even though there's no partner, just so they can have that memory.

"wow that must be so terrible" "deserts are so ugly" "I would never want to live in a wasteland like that" "it's just empty nothingness"

wishing 10,000 exploding hammers upon you

behold New Mexico

[ID 1: tall, snowcapped rocky mountains rising above a plain filled with desert scrub

ID 2: brightly colored banded cliff walls of several mesas climbing their way into mountains

ID 3: a desert prairie

ID 4: colorful hoodoos against a twilight sky

ID 5: white sand dunes as far as the eye can see

ID 6: a collection of hoodoos against a stormy sky at sunset

ID 7: a juniper tree standing with a cliff wall in the background

right now the trump administration is attacking the public lands in the Southwestern US. most recently (July 2026), in Utah the Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments have been cut by over 90% to allow for mining. these lands are sacred to multiple Native nations in the area and contain irreplaceable archeological sites. additionally, the commission of Native representatives who aided in management of these lands has been dissolved leaving Native people without a voice in caring for the remaining land. (read more here)

here in New Mexico, the 10 mile buffer zone surrounding Chaco Canyon preventing oil and gas drilling is under attack. Chaco Canyon contains incredibly old and incredibly fragile archeological sites sacred to Pueblo people. these sites are threatened by mining and drilling. (read more here)

you can't appreciate the desert and also erase the fact that these places are under attack.

and I'd even say it's downright racist. this isn't "just" the desert, these are sacred locations to multiple Native nations and they are under attack because they are sacred to many Native people. the least you can do is reblog to raise awareness to the attacks on these lands. there is no going back from mining and drilling. there is no way to repair these ancient archeological sites when the vibrations in the ground topple them and when they are bulldozed.

Character has 2 PhDs: either they did a dual degree program and are braggy about it, had a life-changing experience after their first degree and pivoted their whole career, or they find the structure of being a PhD student, despite all its stress, more comfortable and familiar than the stress of finding a Real Job and have a very indulgent advisor.

Character has 3 PhDs: who keeps accepting them to PhD programs. Either this person needs psychological help or their department needs to be investigated for its academic standards. Probably both

Funny enough this post was prompted by learning this fact about book!DuBois. Looking at Andy Weir saying “Dr. DuBois has three PhDs” straight in the face and going. Dude. No He Doesn’t.

The favorites people are tagging here include Bruce Banner (7 PhDs), Engineer Team Fortress 2 (11 PhDs), and Stanford Pines (12 PhDs), and like, of course that is not how it works, that is not how anything works, but they come from cartoony universes that operate on cartoon logic. Looking at TF2 and going “that’s not how that works” is not the point of it.

Andy Weir is supposedly trying really hard to make everything in his books realistic, or at least plausible. That’s his whole schtick! This is a world meant to be taken seriously! But his aversion to learning/acknowledging how human social institutions work in the name of Not Being Political™ produces some real howlers that are impossible to take seriously. Eva Stratt’s “I can do what I want” permit is the famous one, and the idea that Grace got a personal attack paper petty enough to end his career through peer review really strains credulity to me, but DuBois’s three PhDs in very closely related fields is another. That’s just not how PhD programs work. This is not about any given character’s capability, this is about how PhD programs are not things you just keep adding to like that—once you have one, you go on to do research, write research papers and monographs, not more PhDs. Your PhD already proves you know how to do research! That’s the point of it, you don’t go prove it again, and any subsequent PhD program you apply to will seriously question why exactly you want to! Weir presumably wants to convey that DuBois is both very smart and very accomplished, that Project Hail Mary recruited the best of the best. Instead I look at this and go “this is a fake character and Andy Weir does not know what he’s talking about” and it breaks my suspension of disbelief.

So what could possibly have been in that paper that pissed everyone off SO bad they never wanted to work with Grace again, but the journal was still willing to publish it? The most recent big infamous career-killing take in archaeology was “NAGPRA is basically the same as creationism, and handling Indigenous ancestors’ skulls is this white woman’s right”! It’s hard for me to come up with something believable Grace could publish that’s on that level.

(Also, scientists in the first half of the 1900s could do basically whatever the hell they wanted in a way that does not fly today. Grace meanwhile got his PhD in the 2010s. Which is not to say that academic beefs where people go You’re Stupid And Wrong at each other don’t still happen—Surovell vs. Dillehay’s beef got published this year—but you do have to hew to certain standards of professionalism while doing so. Otherwise your peer reviewers will most likely be like dude you can’t say that in an academic article, revise and resubmit.)

This is why I actually do prefer the version where Grace goes “everyone thinks I’m crazy just because I don’t believe there’s anything special about hydrogen and oxygen” and Stratt responds, paraphrased, “no, everyone thinks you’re an asshole because you insulted your colleague at a conference in front of everyone.” Like yeah that’d do it.

(It’s also why I keep beating the drum that the whole backstory feels way more real and resonant if Grace were a woman—or, as @gaudebo has been writing about, Black! Like yeah the same eccentricities and uncollaborative behaviors that tend to get forgiven in white men do not tend to offer women or people of color the same second chances.)

There’s no stated reason. They just pretend to not be alive. We usually can suspend our suspension of disbelief here because when it’s something like a video game or an emoji because any odd occurrences is perceived as a glitch or something similar but the actual reason why they aren’t too hung up on this kinda shitty lot in life isn’t said

They get something out of their current relationship with humans (like in toy story)

They have some specific reason to hide that they’re alive, like they die if they’re seen (like in the christmas toy)

They perceive themselves as sentient, talking creatures, but humans can’t understand them. They just see a squeaking mouse or an inanimate hot dog or whatever. 

and the last one is what most animal movies do, and it’s like, not devoid of weird implications but you can see where it mostly works.

but barnyard is the outlier here: it goes with tier one: the animals can talk and walk on two legs but just pretend that they can’t for unstated reasons. 

in the history of the barnyard world non human animals, at some point, decided to just pretend to be unable to speak. a “cow” or a “coyote” or a “hen” do not exist as we know it in the barnyard universe. the baa of the sheep is false; the ewe doesn’t understand it either. they only made up that noise to hide the fact that they speak human languages. a dog barking and running on all fours is a facade. animals naturally walk on their hind legs and made up whole postures just to appear non sentient.

and for what? what do they gain from this? they have no rights and no voice by their own choice. at one point a donkey claims the farmer is a good person because he’s vegan and a pig mentions bacon - this is not a fantasy universe devoid of death and misery and meat. do animals, in hushed whispers, remind their children not to sob in their real voice as they’re taken away? do the dogs not beg for kindness when they’re tied up and hit? do cows and chickens not cry for their life in the slaughterhouses? does a rat not scream a human scream when the trap misses their neck and only breaks their spine? Why? what is the point? They loose so much and have everything to gain.

anyways does everyone remember this really awful cat. it only appears in one scene but i can just sense the porn of it that would pop up if i googled it’s name

But, you know, if every pork chop were perfect we wouldn’t have hot dogs.