mackenzie's corner

"oh ryland. only you would cry over a bunch of rocks."

I'm so sorry this is all I can think about now

the t conductor announces the next stop. it is a discordant screech filled with snarls. people sigh, gather their bags.

no one on the street will meet your eyes. no one has met your eyes for weeks. you’re lonely.

you walk over the thin dark grate above the subway tunnels. it shakes and roars and the wind from it stinks. it is 3:30 in the morning and the trains are no longer running.

there are old churches everywhere, hunched between skyscrapers, anchoring the corners of blocks. no don’t look around. there are churches everywhere.

no one parks their car in harvard yard. no one can get in to harvard yard. the heavy iron gates are shut. the ivy is getting thicker.

you walk into dunkies and the person behind the counter greets you by name and knows your usual order. you have never been in this store before.

you are late getting back to your hotel on newbury street. it’s dark, the stores are closed. the mannequins in pinkyotto watch you hurry down the sidewalk. the glass of the window fogs in front of their muzzles. down by the hems of their dresses their claws flex.

“yep, almost as bad as ‘78.” says the old man. his eyes are frozen shut, you are wearing three shirts under two jackets. it’s august.

you’re walking along the charles at night, the staggered pyramid of the hyatt reflects off clean water. you remember how it used to be multicolored and scummed with oil and fish kills. it’s okay now. something flickers through those bright squares of light, one, two, all. the muddy water churns. it’s okay now. we cleaned it, we cleaned it, it’s fixed.

This is just an art dump from sketches and memes I’ve done over the past year-usually inspired by my lovely friends in the Emily Wilde Discord server

Every shingle character in Book!Project Hail Mary: "So Grace, are you and Stratt fucking or not?"

Grace describes it as best he can, but all he can really manage to get across to Rocky is that he was surrounded by small floating lights.

Later on, Grace is talking about the stars and how important they've been to human cultures for millennia. “What do the stars look like, question?” Rocky wants to know.

Oh, y'know, they're a bunch of small floating lights.

There's a disco ball on the Hail Mary. Grace says it's there because it “makes me happy”. “How does it make Grace happy, question?” Rocky wants to know.

Oh, it creates the illusion that he's surrounded by small floating lights.

Rocky begins to do some research.

Glitter: a substance invented by humans to make things look like they're covered in small lights.

Human jewellery: mostly involves gemstones or polished metals, designed to reflect small lights.

Christmas lights. Candles. Lanterns. Fireworks. Glowsticks. Glow in the dark paint. Rocky is beginning to notice a pattern here, statement.

It takes Grace a fucking while after getting to Erid to notice that a lot of the gifts he's receiving from grateful Eridians are either a) sparkly, b) incredibly shiny, or c) fitted with lights.

While the last one is obviously a concession for his human light sense, he's confused about the former two. Are Eridian materials usually this shiny? Is there some quality about sparkly or highly polished surfaces that makes them sound better? Or is there something about Eridian geology/metallurgy that makes their materials like this?

He asks Rocky about it.

“Simple. I tell people humans like lots of small lights. Humans are easy to make happy.”

Grace kind of wants to protest that humans are much more complicated than that.

But honestly… it fucking works. Like yeah the polished gemstones, shiny metals and glittery rocks are beautiful. Yes those Christmas lights you put up around the house did markedly improve my mental health, Rocky. Thank you, I hate it.

the concept of flustered rocky... vents steaming, carapace trembling, arms scrambling to hide himself... soft little trills and warbles slip out involuntarily...

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

lilja and margret my beloveds <3