I imagine if you could pass among a local populace in a reasonably impenetrable disguise, it would be super cool to tour alien worlds. In fact if you could facilitate that, you could probably make a pretty health business out of it. There’s a jillion things you’d have to take into consideration though, everything from basic biological compatibility to the environment and the food supply down to ensuring your tourists don’t smell like kerosene to the locals. They rarely address body odor in sci-fi shows, but even just among humans, we all tend to smell like the thing we eat a lot of that another culture doesn’t (not just our bodies, but the stuff we cook with gets in our hair and clothes), and humans have a pretty poor sense of smell compared to other mammals.

Imagine a race that evolved from some kind of scavenger that strongly smells of carrion because that’s what attracts mates. Sapient Carrion Crawlers or Neo-Otyugh for example, or what about a race that farts chlorine? The big Sci-Fi franchises rarely touch on that stuff. In Star Trek all aliens are humans with prosthetic foreheads that have The One Quirk™ like they’re not allowed to travel at warp speeds until they get married or their amassador has to get to first base with the ship’s doctor or all diplomacy will break down or they’re a race of shapeshifters… And seriously, Wesley didn’t want a girlfriend who could shapeshift? Who cares that she turned into a Spider Wookiee? It shows a staggering lack of imagination on Westley’s part that he couldn’t look past that. I can guarantee whoever wrote that episode had never been a 14 year old boy.

But I digress.

Does this mean the team will eventually have to deal with stinky aliens? Honestly I’m not sure how many aliens the team will deal with in the near future, but there will probably be some of that. Dabbler will eventually break it down for Sydney at some point when I can figure out how to not make that an 8 page expo-blast.

Originally Sydney was going to say “Offer not valid in Florida and France” as France is a perennial go-to to dump on but I didn’t want anyone to misinterpret the not-really-a-slam given recent events.

Let me throw out another reminder about the Amazon link. I’m so bad about Xmas shopping myself, but that’s partially cause it’s easy to lose track of time when you don’t socialize at school or work all day. One of the benefits of being married is there’s someone else around the house to remind you of major holidays.

This page colored by Keith.

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.