A Literal Garden of Words

It gets so bad he's always being woken up by adverts that offer insomnia cures and better bedding that play when he tries to sleep.

So he buys the ad-free tier, and it's great... for a few months. And then he starts getting adverts from 'premium partners'. So he goes up a level... and the same thing happens.

So he jailbreaks his wallpaper and sends all the ad servers to 0.0.0.0 and voila... he can sleep.

Until this SWAT team blows his door off and drag him off to jail. The Ad companies are suing him for loss of revenue for the products he' notionally have bought if he'd watched their adverts, based on some weird 'The average consumer buys X products with an average value of Y' calculation.

The judge is like 'well I dun wanna annoy the sponsors' so he RICO's this guy's house and possessions and sends him to jail.

... which is a nice relaxed non-volent offender jail for the corporately disenfranchised. But because these people have no money... there's no ads and now he's happy because the only place he's free... is in prison.

Which at the time was a bit much and now it's like: Called it.

Elon's suing companies for not advertising because he's losing revenue. He's also cranking the price of Ad Free Twitter. Disney and Amazon play adverts on their paid service when services used to be free because of the adverts... and now you have to pay to watch the adverts or go up a couple of tiers.

i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3

unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it

i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map

i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs

this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.

crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.

Rocky and Grace

The ENTIRE POINT of Grace’s arc is that he is a Coward, with a capital C. He is a coward not only in his refusal of the Hail Mary mission, but in the way he lives his life before the Petrova Line was ever discovered. Grace has no close friends or coworkers, no pets or hobbies, no partners (short or long term), no family that we know of. His two main drives in life are (1) being a Cool Teacher to his students, and (2) nursing a grudge over getting kicked out of academia for proposing wild theories about life forms not based on water. As Stratt ACCURATELY points out, both of these things have large self-serving components. Grace genuinely loves his students and is good at teaching, but it’s at least partially because his classroom allows him to demand respect and attention without returning emotional vulnerability in the same way a peer relationship would. His academic theories were also largely motivated by a desire to be The Specialest Boy - and while Grace DOES prove himself very smart and capable, his pet theory wasn’t supported by his work with astrophage. Grace doesn’t jump at the chance to work with Stratt when she first approaches him, and he isn’t out there Living LIfe to the Fullest every day. He ADMITS to himself and to Stratt that he IS a coward, both for the way he’s lived up to PHM and for refusing to go on the mission when the timeline made it clear that there wasn’t enough time to bring another candidate up to speed and have the same odds of success. He straight up tells Stratt that he’ll sabotage Project Hail Mary if she tries to force him, DESPITE HIM KNOWING that Earth is headed for a literal apocalyptic Ice Age, and that everyone on the planet - including his beloved students!- has a pretty good chance of DYING if the mission doesn’t succeed! Stratt has to give him a coma cocktail that induces mild amnesia, and bet on him being at least good Enough (TM) not to kill the whole planet because he hated her for doing this to him.

(Also no hate for Eva Stratt, I love her and I will SUPPORT THIS WOMAN’S WRONGS until my dying day, she committed so many crimes and I cheered the whole way)

Despite Ryan Gosling’s very pretty Sad Boi eyes and sweaters, Ryland Grace is NOT a manic pixie dream scientist in love with Earth and its life and cultures. He just ISN’T. And if he WERE, then. Well. He certainly didn’t love Earth enough to fully embrace it while he was here, OR to volunteer to save it when he had the chance. This IS one of those situations where the distinction between “I love life” and “I don’t want to die” is a meaningful one. Does this make Grace a Cancelled Villain of All Time? No - it makes him a coward, but that doesn’t mean he inherently deserved to die. Does it ethically or morally justify forcing him onto a suicide mission while he fought and pleaded not to go? No! It makes Grace ORDINARY. Just some average fucking guy, not evil but not valiant, either. It’s like trying to claim Laika was the top search and rescue dog in the city when she got put into the pod. You don’t NEED to give Ryland Grace all these Tender Tragic Qualities of “loving Earth/Life” to have empathy for this poor dude who got launched into space.

In fact, Grace’s arc DEPENDS on him STARTING from that place of “I don’t really have a reason to be here” to “I have EVERY reason to turn my back on survival and do this act!” Grace wakes up on the Hail Mary, and has no context for why he’s on the ship but assumes that he was a Heroic Volunteer, like Yao and Ilyukhina. He sees their personal effects and Reasons Why They Volunteered, and keeps searching for his own Reason Why until he remembers that he didn’t HAVE a “reason why.” He was never a heroic volunteer. He comes to terms with the fact that he’s going to die, and IS. IN FACT. AS STRATT PREDICTED. A GOOD ENOUGH man to want to save the earth anyway rather than die alone without even trying to figure out the Petrova Problem out of spite. And he can do some pretty neat science along the way, which has always been one of his life motivations! At least he can do that before he dies, in the absence of anything else!

But the thing that Grace ACTUALLY loves enough to die for is ROCKY. The one in a million friend! Who saved his life and opened up his entire view of the universe! Grace’s core trait was NEVER “loving the Earth,” or “loving life.” The WHOLE FUCKING EARTH wasn’t enough to get Grace willingly onboard the Hail Mary! What made him turn the ship around was his GOTDAM SINGING ROCK FRIEND. The whole point is the change! Humanity’s capacity for massive apathetic cowardice and also astonishing bravery and hopefulness in connection. Andy Weir has his head in his ass about politics in his work, but you see?!?! You see, right!?!?!?!