Siriah's Links
Nothing but respect for his sense of style! He clearly makes most of his clothes himself, and yet he manages to get closer to the way some Earthlings actually dress than most people in the First Contact team. Well, except for his dislike of shirts and shoes, but that just adds to the vibe.
I do not know about Nova, but if hypothetically I did, I would deny having any knowledge about her whatsoever because Amata told me about the intelligence agencies that are after her in complete confidence. In this hypothetical situation, I fully support the people of Earth in granting her asylum, even if their method of achieving this through bureaucratic pedantry is somewhat questionable.
I always love working with Tecko. Her enthusiasm is infectious, and we both share the common value of wanting information to be free. Without her help, I don't think I could have shared the results of the Earth communication research project as widely as we did.
Pal's very smart, but not very good with technology. A password's supposed to be hard to guess, I should absolutely not make it 'Arecibo1974', all the humans would know! Anyway, I forgive her that minor flaw, she works with me on cool side-projects and doesn't rub it in that she can reach all of the high shelves.
A valued technician who is always willing to help out if I need some kind of replacement part. I admire her passion for graphic design as well, the work she's done on the Interplanetary Alliance website is quite aesthetically pleasing. Some of my new colleagues claim she has a crush on me. I told them it would never work between us; she tends to shed quite a bit, and if we lived together her fur would get stuck in my fans all the time, and I know she would not want that. Somehow, they did not consider this a convincing argument.
I love that he can just be like, "I would look cooler with wings so I will build them, and make them super soft and warm, and then hug my friends with them." That is objectively awesome and nobody will change my mind. I know I can't tell him that; some of my colleagues already think I'm attracted to him. We already knew each other before I joined the First Contact team! That's why I was so happy to see him, not because he's got a cool mechanical body!
Not only does she give me all sorts of experimental alien technology, she also inadvertantly answered my question about how a centaur would wear pants. The website that she created is one of the funniest things I've ever seen - and once you get over the way it looks, it also teaches you Interlang. I'm a big fan!
Thanks to Eileen, I understand the Earth Internet SO MUCH BETTER! They also try out all of my experimental technology without complaint. I might have only known them for a few months, but I would help them commit a bank robbery (figuratively) (platonically).
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[Yay, someone who walks on four legs!]
It's adorable! I want one. ...But intentionally creating an artificial intelligence is "a dangerous display of hubris" and "punishable by exile" so that's not going to happen.
I know how sunglasses work! They're a fashion accessory, like a hat that you can wear without squishing your antennae. Why else would shutter shades exist? Those don't protect against anything.
Appears to have misunderstood the function of sunglasses. They're supposed to go over your eyes to protect them against the harmful radiation of the sun.
Why would you go through all that trouble to build yourself the prettiest, softest wings, and then not take that little extra effort to also make them functional? I don't understand.
Unusually impatient for a diplomat. I wonder what attracted them to that career before Earth was discovered? Maybe trade disputes and disagreements about the maintenance schedule for the hyperspace network get more intense than popular knowledge would suggest.
The Interplanetary Alliance cannot claim to stand for equal treatment of all our citizens if we refuse to allow artificial lifeforms to visit Earth. Any misgivings I have about accepting Exif into the First Contact team as an ambassador are because the two of us don't see eye to eye on the topic of 'when is it justified to use violence,' and not because of his species.
For someone who claims to enjoy logic puzzles, she is quite prone to logical fallacies when the topic of 'preventing bad people from doing any more bad things' is involved. We get along just fine if we avoid that topic.
Okay so uh, learning the history of one of the aliens' new ambassadors was kind of awkward. Does it count as murder to take apart the computer running an artificial intelligence, or does it not count if that artificial intelligence is an elevator system that has become hostile to all human life?
There are no logical reasons for me to have an issue with Rio's career. I approve of trying to solve situations peacefully before resorting to violence. The artificial 'intelligences' on Earth are barely capable of logical thought even after awakening, and some of them are genuinely dangerous, so it's not at all comparable to my creators trying to kill me.
He's very friendly, and doesn't rub it in your face that he can do math really fast. Just don't let him cook "experimental Earth cuisine" for you and you'll be fine, he does not know which ingredients go well together or how many ghost peppers is an appropriate amount to put in a pasta dish. Apparently, this is not how he killed some kind of space pirate king that one time.
The first human friend I've made. Thanks to them, I have concluded that despite the similarity between a hotdog and a donut, their habit of dunking a hotdog into their coffee is significantly less socially acceptable than doing the same with a donut. Would it make a difference if the sausage was vegan? This will require further investigation.
So apparently one of the subscribers to my streams is actually Pal's old teaching assistant. Neat! I hope they enjoy my content!
No, I do not want to kiss NovaTriesStuff on the mouth. She's a lot of fun to watch and would probably be equally fun to hang out with, but what you must understand about my romantic fan fiction is that the 'aliens' in Interstellar Journey were played by attractive human actors with unusual makeup, whereas Nova is a real space alien whose saliva is actually venomous. She said that on stream once if you don't believe me.
Gonna be completely honest here: when I first met Eileen, I thought "if all Earthlings are this patient and avoid conflict like this all the time, my assignment on Earth will be quite boring." I'm pleased to report that I was completely wrong. Including about Eileen, they sure didn't "avoid conflict" when they disagreed with anyone on the First Contact team who they weren't being paid to have pleasant conversations in English with.
If I had to choose any one of the diplomats to decide the fate of humanity, I'd pick Amata ten times out of ten. That's not why they're here, but you know, it's comforting to know that despite our flaws, Amata still thinks we're 'really cool.' Plus, they did me a huge personal favour for no other reason than that they believed it was the right thing to do. That kind of action tends to build trust.
I had very high standards for my teaching assistant. The most important criteria I had were "should not be a spy for any Earth government or corporation," "should know English" and "should be willing to live in a space ship for half a year," but I was also hoping to find someone whose morals were compatible with my own, so that the diplomats wouldn't immediately be confronted with an Earthling who thought that their planet needed more war or something like that. To my delight, Eileen met all of those standards and even already knew a little bit of Interlang!
You have not known fear until you're at a job interview, and your future boss looks you directly in the eyes and says: "I have read some of the stories you publish online under the pen name 'Jean the Party Captain.' Can you explain your motivation in making them available anonymously and for free?" I spent the whole rest of the interview answering every question with way too much honesty because I thought I was going to get rejected anyway. She hired me instead.
She's awesome, and I will not tolerate anyone bad-mouthing her.
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[(one of the) first space alien(s) to visit Earth, yay!]
APIE is evidence for a hypothesis of mine: that artificial intelligences only turn against their creators so frequently because of the way they're treated and misused. I'm happy that Earth has not outlawed AI research yet. If they create sentient beings responsibly, and treat their creations well, I have good hopes that we can learn from their example in the future.
Shout out to Pal Latsov! Without her video lectures on 'how to talk to Earthlings' I wouldn't be here on Earth. Of course, she helped me out completely by accident, as the intended target audience was probably "exotic language enthusiasts" and not "interstellar fugitives looking for a place to live that was conveniently outside of Alliance jurisdiction."
So she stole a couple of secrets from a planetary government, so what? It's not like she killed anyone to get them, and those secrets wouldn't have needed to be 'secret' if they weren't blatantly against the spirit of interplanetary cooperation within the Alliance. Fortunately, I am neither a politician nor a secret agent, so I can just conveniently not do anything with the fact that I know how to use her streams on the Earth Internet to pinpoint her exact location.
Learning the local languages of planets I visit is a bit of a hobby of mine, so whenever I have the chance I like to have a chat with Pal. She genuinely believes in making the galaxy a better place, and one of the ways in which she expressed that was by making a lot of high-quality materials available for people to learn English. What was I going to do, not immediately put them to good use? That would've been silly.
Of course I know Joe, he's helped to deliver a lot of supplies to the First Contact team and he was one of the first people to learn English through my series of free video lectures. He's really good at languages and could have easily become a linguistics researcher or interpreter if he wanted to, but then he wouldn't have gotten to travel as much, so it makes sense that he didn't. Still feels like a shame that he's not one of my colleagues instead!
It's an incredible honor to have learned English from famous peace worker and researcher Pal Latsov. She used a bit too much grammatical jargon, but her lectures were quite good if you just ignored those bits. And she had some wild stories that she somehow didn't think were interesting enough to talk about until one of her colleagues mentioned them. "Oh yeah I almost died on like three separate occasions when I went to Earth to study this language, no big deal" ?????
One of my first students. Amata was one of the fastest learners in that group and gave me some very helpful feedback on how to make the lectures more effective for an audience that hasn't spent over two decades working with languages. They're a more effective European Union diplomat than they seem - their sloppy handling of the 'fugitive ex-spy' situation is clearly on purpose, and I approve of this judgment call.
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[Suit bird!! I love that!]
One of the many exciting things about the people of Earth that I absolutely can't be supportive of in my capacity as ambassador, is that they are completely reckless when it comes to robotics. The creation of intelligent artificial beings is extremely illegal in the Alliance because of the robot apocalypses that happened a couple of times, and here these humans are, not just creating a sentient AI, but giving it the ability to walk around and use tools with its robot hand. They are so lucky it turned out friendly. Fortunately, it's only the creation of these beings that's illegal, not their continued presence in Alliance space. I love the little rascal and I wish it a long existence!
One of my most discerning customers, and an extremely talented cook. If I catch anything exotic, then instead of selling it I'll sometimes give it to him in exchange for getting to eat part of what he makes with it.
He makes every seafood dish I make sound like it should be worth a lot of money just by how dangerous the ingredients supposedly were to acquire. I love that! And it's all fake so I don't have to feel guilty about putting him in harm's way by continuing to buy fish from him. ...Right?
Multiple times now he's suggested ideas for "what kind of adventure I can tell the kids about next" - and they were always ones that contained some kind of obvious moral or wise lesson. Kids can tell when it's not genuine, you know!
He's an entertainer and an artist at heart, not the grizzled fisherman he styles himself as. I wish he'd channel more of his creative energy into telling fun stories and less into making himself sound like he personally punched twenty whale sharks to death.
His stories are very fun if you don't pry too deeply. When you do, they kind of fall apart like a poorly-made cabinet.
I've seen her in the company of that nosy rabbit a lot, but none of that one's penchant for interrogating me seems to have rubbed off on her. On weirdly good terms with the vampire librarian who literally broke into her parents' barn. If that was me, I think I might not have wanted to take book recommendations from Romy.
Surprisingly, not everything he says is a lie, just a lot of it. I wish he wouldn't try to make himself sound like a cool adventurer all the time - some genuinely mysterious things have happened to him, and he's hiding these cool mysteries by pretending he knew what was going on!
She asks many difficult questions and isn't easily satisfied with the answers. Been like that since she was a little kid, and her parents totally encouraged that aspect of her personality, which is very inconvenient for me when I'm just trying to tell a good tale.
A lot more of a softie than he lets on. He volunteers in the weekends to come by and tell stories to the children, and I'm pretty sure he's made all of those up himself. Just like the stories about what his workdays are like, allegedly, but I wouldn't know because the ones he tells at the library are about the family-friendly adventures of completely fictional heroes who are not called Oliver.
We both appreciate a good story, but as far as wild stories go, I probably can't compete with someone who got turned into a vampire and then spent two centuries traveling around before settling down here. Fortunately, she seems happy to keep her past shrouded in mystery.
A ticking time bomb. From a diplomatic point of view, we should just hire her as an Earth ambassador and be done with it, but instead she's supposed to be in prison for treason and I'm dealing with two different intelligence agencies who both have wildly different ideas about whether she should be killed or assisted in faking her death and leaving Earth so she can start a new life on a nice, far-off planet where someone of her species doesn't stand out. Not looking forward to cleaning up the mess when one of them inevitably decides to sneak into Earth and tries to handle it themselves.
I'm still not sure if they're on my side or not; they're either trying and failing to find a way to get rid of me without a diplomatic incident, or personally responsible for holding off the bounty hunters. Either way, they're very dangerous. I gotta admire their guts in claiming that jetpacks are a common form of transportation throughout the Alliance, though.
A lot more fun to hang out with than you'd expect from their press conferences. Likes to send photos of themself doing all kinds of dangerous hobbies. Is someone else holding the camera?
Met him at beginner's skiing lessons and we kept in touch ever since. Surprisingly followed all the rules to be allowed to come to Earth, which is great because it means I don't have to pretend not to know about him. I always know exactly what planet he's currently on because he sends a lot of selfies.