That one chick who said that thing.

DabuQlu’DI’ yISuv!

When Grace is still incredibly amnesiac and manages to remember what his apartment looks like, he remarks the lack of feminine touches in the decoration and casually wonders if this means he is single or maybe gay.

Upon learning of the astrophage problem, all the nations of the world get their shit together in record time and give Stratt basically unlimited power, authority and resources to do whatever is necessary to save Earth. This itself is a political choice. Pair it with the vastly different real world response world leaders have to climate change and it becomes a social commentary, sorry Andy but it really does.

The reason Grace decides to join the Hail Mary project is because of his students. He's in the middle of a class when he realizes the incredibly hard and bleak future that awaits his students due to the cooling Sun, and tells Stratt he wants to keep helping.

Shortly after figuring out how astrophage reproduce on his own, Grace is taken to the aircraft carrier, where he meets for the first time the other scientists involved in the project. After explaining his findings, a Chinese scientist announces their team has been able to reproduce Grace's findings, the implied reason being they had somehow spied on them.

During one of his first conversations with Rocky, Grace remarks on an unexpected hurdle of meeting aliens: pronouns. His conclusion is to just shrug and slap he/him pronouns on Rocky. There are no further conversations about this topic, not even when both of them are able to communicate fluently. Grace doesn't re-examinate his pronoun choice any further, nor, despite having a PhD in molecular biology and being curious about things like how Eridians eat, ask about Eridians' concepts of sex and gender.

Following that previous point, when Rocky mentions having a mate back home, Grace chooses for said mate the name Adrian. This is yet another reference to the Rocky movies, albeit a more obscure one, and a lot of the people that didn't realize this simply read both Rocky and Adrian as male and therefore gay.

One last bit re gender and sexuality is the fact that at no point during the book does Ryland Grace, a single man of unspecified sexuality, lament being single or express any sexual desires, which is why many people read him as being on the asexual spectrum.

The movie had to gloss over many things and completely skip over others, some of these later things were the incredible sacrifices and hardships Earth had to go through to survive until hopefully Project Hail Mary managed to find a solution to the astrophage problem. First off, in order to produce the astrophage fuel for the ship they paved a huge chunk of the Sahara desert, which had devastating ecological and climate consequences, altered or destroyed the homes and livelihoods of millions of people and created tons of refugees. Also, in order to win time and counter the effects of the cooling Sun, they start to nuke chunks of fucking Antarctica, because making climate change worse will make Earth hotter and therefore buy them time. The first time the scientist (a self-declared hippie ecologist) in charge of this orders the release of the bombs, he understandably breaks down and starts to cry. Needless to say, nuking the fucking Antarctica raises sea levels and also has horrendous ecological and climatic consequences and once again would in fact create millions of refugees. The fact that the book doesn't dwell on the consequences of any of these two actions doesn't change the fact that we as readers are supposed to extrapolate and put two plus two together whether Andy intended to or not. Expecting otherwise is frankly insulting.

At one point Stratt tells Grace what will happen to Earth while they await for the solution to the astrophage problem. She talks about the famines and how many people will die, but that's just the people that will starve to death. Millions more will die in the wars that will break out all over the planet because there is no way the richer and more powerful nations will be willing to share resources equally with the rest.

Grace gifts Rocky, a member of an alien species, a laptop that contains the sum of all human knowledge, history and media. He knows Rocky, but has never met other Eridians, and despite this he chooses to give it to them.

The fucking foundational plot of the book is interspecies collaboration, trust, and friendship. Choosing to meet and befriend an alien despite all the possible risks and dangers is just as political of a choice as choosing to kill an alien would be.

I love you Safety Wizard.

May I suggest, The Lot:

In the Infinite Ikea or Backrooms you can convince yourself there's gonna be a door round the next corner or behind that wall.

Just wanted to bring to your attention that the term whump was actually coined by the Stargate fandom specifically to describe making this guy suffer. He is the original Mr. Whump (no that's not his actual name). That's how torturable this guy is.

Everyone say mean things about him.

Here is a non exhaustive list of what he goes through in canon btw:

His parents get crushed to death right in front of him when he is a kid

He is forced to relive the memory of his parents death countless times

He dies and gets resurrected

His wife gets possessed

He fails to save her and she dies in his arms

He dies and gets resurrected again

He gets infected by a virus that makes him act crazy and gets put in an insane asylum

He dies and gets resurrected again

His ex gets possessed

He is exposed to a lethal dose of radiation

He dies and ascends to a higher plane, then gets kicked out of the higher plane and his memory is wiped

He gets kidnapped by a princess

He gets kidnapped by a fish alien

He gets kidnapped and tortured by some terrorists

He gets kidnapped and tortured by another alien

He is driven to insanity by an alien device

He dies and gets resurrected again

Alright my dudes, I worked in a flower shop when I was in high school and I’m here to bring you some potentially useful information for all your flower shop AU needs. this is all my own experience, take it with a grain of salt, etc etc etc.

making a custom arrangement right when someone requests it (ie they walk in and say “I want XYZ” and the florist then making an arrangement on the spot and selling it, all in one customer interaction) is pretty rare- I see it in fic a lot, but I can only imagine it happening on a really slow day, and probably from a pretty good-natured florist. custom arrangements tend to be something that are ordered well in advance for very special occasions (weddings, quinceñeras, etc), because you’ll be paying for the consultation and the time that it will take to design the arrangement.

most places will have a bunch of pre-designed arrangements to choose from- there’ll be pictures of the options near the register, often with cheesy names like “a thousand wishes” or “happiness blooms”. because greens keep longer than flowers, a shop usually keeps a stash of greenery arranged in vases, so when someone orders one, you just have to add fresh flowers to a pre-made vase. if someone came in and said “I want this pre-designed arrangement, but with X instead of Y”, that’s a pretty reasonable request.

customers usually don’t know anything about flowers. you get a lot of people coming in and basically asking “what do you think my date/partner/parent will like?” the obvious answer is “why the fuck would I know?” but that’s “impolite” or whatever, so a good florist will ask questions about what the person likes, if they have a favorite color, what your price range is, etc. basically you have to just pretend you know what the recipient wants- ultimately, in nearly every circumstance they’ll just be happy to receive flowers, so it’s hard to go wrong.

sorry to say it, but I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone, florist or not, who was actually familiar with flower meanings. like it honestly never came up. it’s a fun element to include in a story, but realistically the only way someone’s going to “get the message” of an arrangement is if you tell them directly that the flowers are meant to “say” something, or maybe if you’ve talked about flower language in the past.

often, in the process of unpacking, processing, and storing flowers, you’ll get a few flowers that break at the stem, which makes them essentially unusable in an arrangement (generally speaking, longer stems=more expensive) however, you could, in theory, save any snapped-stem flowers, make a little bouquet of them, and give it to someone. (I did this a few times when I was working in the back room- I literally just snuck discarded flowers into my backpack. a rose with a 5” stem would get thrown out normally, but if you save it it still looks adorable in a mason jar). I’m just saying, “florist gives crush a little bouquet nearly every day” is something we need a lot more of, and it’s totally feasible.

a list of things a person might do while working in a flower shop (if you need to just have ambient activity or whatever):

“front of house” work: 

arrangement, including assembling dozens of identical arrangements assembly-line style

taking orders (on the phone and in person), usually from people who know fuck all about flowers. requires the patience of a saint and/or a take-no-shit attitude.

general cashier/sales work. a lot of flower shops will also sell potted plants, small gifts/trinkets, greeting cards, chocolate, etc. so there’s the usual maintenance, stocking, etc associated with retail.

“back-of-house” work: 

opening and processing shipments (flowers have to be unpacked and have the ends of the stems sliced off with one of those guillotine-ish paper cutting things, then stuck in buckets of water. a single shipment can take hours, especially if the flowers are delicate or individually wrapped)

clean-up, which involves sweeping pounds of plant matter into two-foot-tall mountains, then shoveling the mountains into garbage cans. “shoveling” is not a hyperbole there, you literally use a snow shovel as a dust pan. it’s a full-body workout.

clean-up in the cool room/walk-in (the giant refrigerator where the flowers are kept). same as normal clean-up, but there are more shelves and corners to get packed with leaves and shit. also it’s about two degrees above freezing. this is an excellent opportunity for sharing sweatshirts, coats, etc.

organizing orders by zip code and date of delivery. during a busy period, this is a one or two person job that involves being stuck in the walk-in for hours. great potential for “begrudgingly realizing I like this person’s company” moments.

delivering arrangements! door-to-door is a one person job usually, but delivering to a single location (ie taking flowers to a wedding or graduation) takes two or more people taking an often-very-long drive in a truck/van. (I’m not saying “road trip games” but that’s exactly what I’m saying).

little details (idk maybe for someone to notice about the florist character?): 

when you work in a flower shop, you will smell like flowers until you wash it off in the shower. the smell lingers like you wouldn’t believe.

calluses!! a florist might have calluses on the outside of their thumb and the backs of their fingers from holding scissors and clippers (the location’s hard to explain but if you hold a pair of scissors, all the places where the scissors touch your skin), on the bases of their fingers on the palm side (from carrying buckets, etc), and possibly on their fingertips (especially the tip of the thumb) from snapping stems and generally working with their hands all day.

also, your hands are a little damp nearly all day, so a florist is likely to have some really chapped skin, in the winter especially.

lilies are normally sold with the stamen removed, so they don’t get pollen stains on the petals. lily pollen stains everything it touches, so when your job is to remove the stamens of a hundred or so lilies, your fingers will be stained yellow for a while.

also, green-stained fingertips and nails are common. (snapping stems with your thumbnail will turn it green, stripping leaves off stems will stain the space between your forefinger and thumb)

scraped-up hands and arms. it just happens- it’s physical work with a lot of sharp tools, nicks and scratches are going to happen.

it’s pretty physically taxing work, especially if your boss has a “no sitting on the job” rule (mine did.) after an especially busy day of work, your character will probably be exhausted and sore. massages? massages.

“Ghosts aren’t real” it’s very fair and rational that you believe that

“Ghosts aren’t real anymore” I’m about to hear a poem or very sad story