This concludes the Chapter 2 AMA, next update, next chapter! Also, you can read more about Jovian holidays here (spoiler free).
Transcript
Birdie asked: Talita, what holiday traditions did you grow up with, and which of them was your favorite?
Talita: Oh, mostly just the Jovian holidays... so like, the maintenance weeks, Easter, the quarters, Allnighter, Independence Day... Allnighter was always my favorite. In the Garriton District kids got to help program the festival lights. At the UoJ us engineering undergrads would set up these races with improvised vehicles, using scrap they scrounged during maintenance week duties. Allnighter on campus would get pretty rowdy, and we definitely weren't helping. I usually ran with the races and played watch duty for campus security, heheh...
Anonymous asked: Gillie, how many people on dirtball know ASL? How do you communicate when the other person doesn't understand sign?
Gillie: Calcery had it on file, and when I was in the plant he'd do translation service for me. Now that he's gone I'm probably gonna have to talk to Mel by typing on my phone... Tod knows enough to say hi but not enough to like, talk. You know? Rasheed from plant ag and Yomi from animal ag probably know more sign than the rest of the human staff combined, lol. I talk to them when I pick up groceries. It's a good thing most of my work is
done through emails. If I have to type to talk to people anyways, I'd rather stay in my pajamas.
Anonymous asked: Idrisah, are there any sophonts that can eat each others foods (like avians being able to eat human cuisine or vice versa), and if so have you had any other sophont's cuisine? Any you think are good, or especially bad?
Idrisah: What?? No, no! Eating alien food is terrible for you! You might as well down the contents of a chem lab! It's full of stuff your body can't digest, and it usually tastes like nothing or tastes AWFUL. Ugh, a couple years ago, alien food tasting videos were all over Jovian Megaforum. This one popular vlogger was filming himself traveling on the avian homeplanet and sampling cuisine. He was chewing then spitting, but... ...one dish he tried triggered anaphylactic shock, and he died before he could be taken to a xenophysician. I saw a lot less tasting videos after that.
Anonymous asked: Talita, Is it hard for you to pronounce words with a TH sound like Thursday and therapod without teeth and a tongue inside your trunk?
Talita: I mean, it's got vocal ridges... that's how I'm saying anything other than "aaaaaaaa." ...But I've been told my "th" kind of sounds like an "S" when I talk fast...
39 thoughts on “RttS Reader Questions 5”
Vagus nerve
it would be real funny If their was a bumper page where it’s an alien recipe, but there’s a bunch of bright red pop-ups and various other languages, telling the viewer not to try or consume the recipe if they’re not an avian
Lenny
upsetting yet satisfying that dangerous viral trends persist <3
zofifi
So trying aliens’ food was a lot like that washing capsules eating trend.
Its kind if tragic that sophonts cant try each others food. On earth trying others cusine is the very important part of inter-culture interaction. Its much easier to accept someone who cooked you something yummy. But hey at least they can’t get infected with each other disseases! Right…?
MyUniverseinaBox
Oh I love the can’t eat alien foods thing. I never really thought of that?
Your worldbuilding is always sick as hell. No pun intended.
Chakat Firepaw
Even if you were to assume that ours is the only possible functional biochemistry, there would still be a 50% chance of any world’s food being entirely deadly poison. This is because most sugars and amino acids are chiral, there are two forms that only differ in being mirror images.
Mirrored sugars are simply not something your body will take up. However, your body will happily absorb mirrored amino acids and try to use them to make proteins. Those proteins will then fold in the wrong way and have a variety of effectively random properties.
Felgraf
Probably not 50%, actually! There’s some recent research that showed that our DNA’s chirality is *slightly* less likely to absorb energy from certain cosmic rays (which at ground level tend to only have one form of chirality? Which is odd), so there was actually a *selective pressure* on DNA chirality! https://communities.springernature.com/posts/life-the-universe-and-cosmic-rays
Liza
RIP that vlogger. It’s very telling and realistically tragic that it took the death of someone to put a stop to the dangerous viral trend and even then it didn’t stop completely.
Ginkgosauras
The fact that the elf girl trying food in question 3 looks like Marcille is everything to me
Jay Eaton
I didn’t do it on purpose she just emerged from my subconcious
Joysweeper
Oooh, I always like when alien foods are incompatible! In the Janitors of the Postapocalypse books, there are establishments that can denature and otherwise alter ingredients from one world and can make them into something edible to a species from a different world. They won’t get much if anything out of it in terms of energy or nutrients, but it’ll pass through without issue. It’s fun to think they might still taste awful but get tweaked to be palatable, making a food just farther and farther from its origin. At that point the better thing probably is to just make food suited to a species that’s got alien aesthetics and presentation.
That poor avian bright with the human vlogger! Looks like this was fun to participate in until it was not and then traumatic instead.
Arcstone
Fan car gjy has definitely played tears of thd kingdom.
Solanuma
Rasheed and Yomi look chill to hang out with
zaratustra
Nobody will comment on Mel’s clueless face so I will.
Should these be mirrored in the Patreon page? I mean I will read both anyway.
Ruby
That poor blogger should have done a different kind of test beforehand 😬
Tyrone the Miner
Hey ….Everything for a Billion+ views!
Fang
your worldbuilding, in simple moments like these, is so entertaining. Im in love with the universe you’ve built up.
Michi
Great now I’m reading Talita with a German accent.
anon y mouse
The can’t eat alien food is such a cool worldbuilding detail.
Peter Jensen
It makes a great deal of sense, but is often overlooked in fiction (though I have seen it explicitly addressed a couple times). Thing is, we, and indeed most animals, can’t even eat more than a tiny fraction of the plants and animals that evolved alongside us and shares the biochemistry, and the fraction that’s edible is different depending on animal. Most things we encounter would in fact be indigestible, taste of nothing, taste horrible, and possibly trigger anaphylactic shock. So it’s perfectly reasonable that alien food would do the same.
At best you might luck out on having similarly structured lipids and sugars, so if you weren’t killed by stuff that’s toxic, maybe you could get some energy out of the food. But the chances of having similarly structured amino acids apart from a few of the very simplest ones (like glycine, which has been detected in space), is zero. So you’d still die of only having that food, just … a little bit slower.
JoB
Lest we forget about the plot-to-be, it also means that the hydroponics of a spacecraft – say, one called The Runaway – should be nontrivial to switch over to a crew of different species …
Cam
Even setting aside the fact that alien foods are indigestible in the first place, Avian cousine would indeed be the worst one to experiment with because it’s all drugs. All of it.
Jay Eaton
I mean, the avian drugs are just more random organic chemicals that would not necessarily interact with human biology at all, much less in a drug-like way.
Gar G
But probably increases the risk, since in addition to the usual chemical mix you have even more chemicals mixed in with it, increasing the chances of something potentially triggering a reaction
tickfleato
the drugs wouldn’t be so much of an extra problem, like jay said, but i’d be more worried about cobalt poisoning tbh
JoB
Well, in order to run into serious problems from a *one-time* exposure, you’d need to ingest in the order of 10 g of cobalt (assuming that you’re a human ;-). One won’t get that from “chew and spit out”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_poisoning
Of course, depending on *what* subtype of cobalt we’re talking about …
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt-60#Safety
… how hardcore *are* those avian hepatokidneys? 😉
JoB
(Gah, rookie mistake … 10 g of cobalt *salts*. Which may or may not be the form/molecule the cobalt’s in as it laces avian food.)
Adrienne
I really love this story so far! The characters, dialogue, art, and universe are amazing. I can’t wait to keep reading!
hal9000
oh my god Talita sounds French? incredible news I love it.
also im so glad to see stupid viral challenges still exist. hate to admit i would also die of anaphylaxis in the RttS universe after eating some weird critter. the temptation is too strong
Apollo235
You could perhaps argue its Portuguese accent Talita, considering her relation to Doug. They do both have trouble with ‘TH’, but at least with a Brazilian Portuguese accent it tends more towards ‘T’ ‘D’ or ‘F’
Meechee
What I’m getting from Talita is that she has a slight accent that could be described german-ish
Apollo235
Is that a trunk smile from Talita? Its precious!
eeeeeee
she does trunk smile and mouth smile, i love her
feesh
the airplane in the festival lights is so cute 🙂 most of those kids probably have never seen an airplane in real life, too… must suck to be a kid who loves big vehicles in the middle of space lol
Jay Eaton
An airplane is fanciful the same way a cartoon rocket is, to them.
Paroxysmall
Undergrad Talita running in the improvised races and watching out for security is too precious, she looks so happy
eden
I love how the pins in idrisahs hijab resemble extra avian eyes! (I also love your clothing designs, I remember you saying you hated most “futuristic” clothing so you based them on more modern day, but the deep sense of practicality and all the paneling really nail the “future” feeling! it makes everything very believable
Zidane
good (bad) to see that potentially dangerous viral trends haven’t disappeared in the future
Greenjoe
Yikes, that vlogger death situation feels like it would’ve made quite the news. Can imagine a bunch of PSAs about not eating alien food after that.
Doubloon
French accent Talita? French accent Talita!