He started writing in blue, remembered Carl, wrote Carl's name in red and IMMEDIATELY returned to "Single" to add a question mark lmao.

it costs too much to love

I'm up here on my soap box to gush to you about Kagi, a paid, ad-free, privacy-based search engine with a mere 50k users at the moment despite the fact that it provides the most useful and productive search experience I've had since, idk, 2018. Kagi allows you to block, deprioritize, prioritize, or "pin" websites to make your searches more relevant. Pinning is especially neat: it means I can pin Bookshop.org, and anytime I search for a book, that will be my top result. I can prioritize reddit and deprioritize Pinterest. I can pin my favorite recipe websites so I'm not wading through AI cooking blogs. You can auto-filter out AI images. There's a "small web" feature that allows you to query small, hidden gem websites. They'll intentionally pull interesting articles or older articles you wouldn't otherwise find. You can search PDFs only, or forums only, or academic sites only. Their AI features are opt-in only. My subscription money goes to things like providing Kagi free to public libraries. Have I adequately conveyed my enthusiasm yet?

If I search "Star Trek" on Google, I get AI "people also asked" questions I didn't want, an AI overview unhelpful to me as I'm already a fan, and corporate websites. No fan websites or small web sites in the first two pages. If I search "star trek" on Kagi, it gives me the official site, a few recent news stories, a Wikipedia page, one new trailer, a quick bullet points collection of "interesting finds" that includes a link to this collection of all commercially available chairs in Star Trek, and a collection of articles specifically pulled because they were published many years ago. Multiple small web sites come next, then some game sites, and a hackaday project for making a DIY communicator. Publication dates, when available, are highlighted right by the URL.

me: no live organism can continue to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality

first of all - it was clear to me that this decision was an answer to the "who would ryland grace die for" question, and it was clear that he was prepared to die for rocky because that had been established. what i was missing from the movie was the opportunity to live in that grief a little bit.

spoilers for the book below, but for context, here is the part of the book where grace is trying to decide whether to continue to earth or go and save rocky (and sorry if the quality is weird this is a scan of my own physical copy of the book lol):

he pulls on his hair. he sobs into his hands. going back for rocky is not a foregone conclusion. in the next section, even as he says he's sticking to his decision, he says "it wasn't easy." and that's the point!! that yes, grace would die to save rocky. but choosing to die is never easy, especially the way grace is expecting to go: starving to death on an alien planet. he has a friend, yes, but a friend who will have to watch him die and who is powerless to save him.

and then there's this whole part after grace rescues rocky (again, sorry if quality is weird):

this is what i wanted. not just the beautiful reunion, but an undertone of grief to it. that ryland grace is choosing to die, and he is mourning himself. i wanted to feel that pain with him and with rocky, so that the reward of finding out that he won't die after all would be that much sweeter. the ryland grace who thinks, "it's the first time i've felt genuine hope in a long time," is not the ryland grace in the movie who seems nothing but joyful to have saved his friend. and he is joyful! and he should be! but it's more complicated than that, and i wanted the complicated stuff a little bit. grace made an incredibly difficult decision to never return home again, and that's still a sacrifice, even if it's a worthwhile one.