Finished the phm book and one thing I noticed about the time skip to several years later on Erid is how much the language and grammar changes of Rocky's translated bits. Like throughout most of the book it's all "astrophage on me star bad bad bad" and then in the last chapter he uses earth phrases and idioms and seemingly perfect grammar! And I find this so cool cause he's technically still speaking his own language and grace is automatically translating it so most likely grace has gotten better at translation but also rocky's adopted a very earth-like way of speaking into his own language from years of sharing a ship with a human on the way home to his planet and I love how you can see the effects of them spending so much time together on the way to Erid just from the difference in syntax and grammar in the last chapter

I love the dont-go-crazy room in phm because the lab I work for has received NASA-funded grants specifically about this. we've done VR experiments in isolated and confined environments (such as Antarctic stations) to see what type of scenes (nature, urban) people find the most calming. nice to know that Stratt read our papers.

Ryland Grace who has a swear jar in his classroom, and every time a kid swears, they have to put their name in and when he asks a question and no one raises their hand to answer, he'll draw a name from the jar. It's really discouraged his kids from swearing.

I know Grace probably had some organization system to all the data he sent back to Stratt, like at the bare minimum a folder labeled "HOW TO SAVE EARTH" or something, but it's funny to imagine that the rest of his data—all the fucking around he did and unsuccessful experiments and a bunch of stuff about Eridians—is just dumped in a large list of files with keysmash names and the scientists back on Earth have to dig through it and uncover the story of Ryland Grace making second AND third contact like the world's most complicated epistolary narrative.