Subtly Brilliant

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

obligatory grace almost kills rocky scene. they make me ill

NO he doesn’t look anything like rgos but he does have kind eyes. is that not enough?

plus full canvas for those who celebrate ->

- Rocky's clock ticks at the slower almost 2-Earth-second interval that is an Eridian second (yes I counted one Mississippi two Mississippi in the theater, why?).

- Yao and Grace discussing how the unit conversion error was the cause of the explosion, which feels to me like a callback to that one time we crashed a Mars lander because the US part of the team worked in imperial units and the EU part of the team worked in metric and I guess they forgot to cross-check?

- The cut from the aircraft carrier karaoke bar scene to The Moment at Adrian mediated by the lil red-suited scuba guy in the fish tank.

- As Grace is starting to say "She said I had my head in the clouds", the background scenery of the mental health bay turns to a scene of a blue sky with fluffy clouds, camera angle slightly below his head and looking up to that background.

- The bright projector bulb with dust in its beam shown quite deliberately, twice, during the "What is Project Hail Mary" presentation, evoking a star and its Petrova line cloud of astrophage.

- The way the clock-like rhythm to the music and the night-day-night-day changes to the light show the passage of time while Grace is patiently waiting for Rocky to wake up during Taumoeba.

- When Rocky joyfully shakes the filaments in his ship to show Grace how it works, reminiscent of how some spiders shake their webs.

- How both the images and the sounds of Grace's very first memories were visually and auditorially hazy and blurry and fuzzy.

- Grace has his Rocky figurine on his ship's dashboard, and Stratt has her Grace figurine on hers.

- The art behind Stratt in The Betrayal is the two ships. I have seen someone else say this, but I had trouble seeing it at first. But now I do. I'd even say it's clear the Blip-A is the one on viewer's right and the Hail Mary on viewer's left.

- Curiosity killed the cat (Cats t-shirt, cat on San Fran bridge tshirt). (Dunno if this is a thing for real, but it occurred to me so I figured I'd throw it in, because Grace canNOT resist a mysterious person or situation).

ryland grace + orange 🧡, yellow 💛, white 🤍 & blue 🩵💙 outfits

House of leaves

Piranesi

:-)

“For a moment I had an idea of what it would be like if instead of two people in the World there were thousands.”