On Shut Up We’re Talking #8 I said that Player versus Player should be the richest and most fulfilling experience in an MMO. It should also not sacrifice or be completely separated from the PvE experience. I firmly believe this.

PvP in MMOs should be awesome.

It is not.

At least not right now, not for the vast majority of MMO players.

The Inspiration

But first, why am I insisting on this all? Why do I believe that PvP should be so damn good? What is wrong with PvE? And aren’t I a card carrying CareBear?

Yes, I am primarily a PvE player and I enjoy the PvE experience. I have been known, on occasion, to run screaming from the room at the mention of PvP… or at least what PvP amounts to in some games.

But after 21 years of online gaming I do not have to think very long to pick out an example of a PvP environment that was exemplary.

In 1988 there was a multiplayer online game on the GEnie online service called Air Warrior. It was a real time, multi-player combat flight simulator. It was primitive. It was low resolution. (I played it on a Mac SE!) It could get as laggy as Qeynos Harbor.

But it was a persistent online world where you flew against live players and it was more fun than any flight simulator I have ever played since.

And the key was a large population of players of different skill levels. Flight sims have become much more sophisticated, but nothing computer controlled has beat the excitement of live players. You couldn’t see who was flying a plane, just that there was a P-51 8,000 feet above you. It might have been some noob, or in might have been Tango Circus (3799) looking for the next in a long line of kills that night.

Stellar Emperor and MegaWars III were very addictive (if costly) PvP games back in the day. There were much better looking space empire games available to play on your computer at the time, but live opponents made for an more engaging game.

Or, getting closer to this century and a bit further from when some of you were born, think of any given first person shooter. I find the online environment much more challenging and exciting than a scripted game. Half-Life 2 is cool looking, but it is Counter Strike that has a huge fanbase that plays every night.

PvP is what drives the popular (6+ million subscribers) XBox Live and even the Wii is finally getting into the PvP act with Mario Strikers Charged.

Heck, I even prefer online backgammon to any version against the computer. Now if I could just punish people who quit the game when they are losing.

But to get PvP to take its place in the world of MMOs, a world financed primarily by the PvE audience, two things will have to happen.

PvP needs to evolve

The problem is that when it comes to MMOs, PvP is still evolving.

I think we are seeing some experimentation right now with things like the PvP servers for EverQuest II. And we will see a lot more of change and experimentation going forward. As mentioned on the show, Warhammer Online, Age of Conan, and Pirates of the Burning Sea are all going to have some flavor of PvP that will hopefully advance the cause of PvP becoming a much more integral part of MMOs.

We are past the age when free for all PvP can be considered a good idea, a concept covered well over on Nerfbat a month back. PvP cannot be a noob ganking bloodbath an expect to drive a successful game. Nor can PvP be an arena or a battle ground over in left field and expect people to take it seriously. Some games, like EVE, have been exploring a new ground, but they are not there yet because there is another side to this coin, a side that they ignore.

PvE needs to evolve

One of the problems with PvP is that PvE is not at all on the same page in most games. How often does something beyond the basic skills you learn in PvE apply to a PvP match up? In current MMOs, the PvE game really does nothing to get you ready for any sort of PvP content. You have to start playing the game all over again… a different game.

If PvP is going to be an integrated part of the game, the PvE content needs to help with that integration.

EVE Online, which I said was blazing a trail for PvP ideas is falling down in this regard. What you learn about fighting by running missions and killing rats won’t do you much good against a live player. You need only go check out the forums to see recommendations for fitting out ships. They are usually quite clearly defined as “for missions” or “for pvp” and don’t mix one up with the other.

Evolving PvE means that you have to make mobs that are more complex. You cannot have mobs that just stand and fight to the death, mobs that just sit there minding their own business while you finish of their neighbor, or mobs that are “harder” merely by virtue of dealing more damage and having more hit points. (Hey, we had some of that in EverQuest. What happened?)

This is not easy, of course, and it means changes to the accepted system of PvE encounters. If you have gnolls that don’t just stand there and take it but who run away looking for back up, you cannot have a huge number of gnolls standing around in close proximity the way you do in Antonica in EverQuest II. The gnolls would feast upon the noobs and you wouldn’t need a noob ganking PvP system to drive them away, your NPCs would take care of that.

If you cannot have masses of mobs hanging out waiting to be slain piecemeal, then you have to get away from the “kill a bunch of mob X” sort of quests that so many people hold up as the bane of the PvE experience in high fantasy MMOs in the first place.

Then suddenly you are recreating the whole PvE experience to align it with the PvP experience and make a single game that has both elements.

If done right, you won’t sacrifice the PvE experience in favor of PvP. You will make PvE better and make it applicable to the PvP experience.

And that is a lot to ask. But if you don’t go there, then PvP and PvE will remain divided gaming experiences.

Pipe Dreams?

I will end this up where I started by saying that I think that PvP should be the richest, fullest, most satisfying part of the MMO gaming experience. I won’t commit for all MMOs, but for most out there today I am willing to stake that this isn’t the case right. What comes to your mind when I write “PvP” almost assuredly is not, there being already so much baggage attached to the term.

And PvP won’t fulfill that high role for some time to come. But I think that the players and, more importantly, the developers know that these games need to get to this point some day if they are going to be the rich and immersive games that we want them to be.

But some day, when it is done right, chances are you won’t even think of it as a PvP or PvE experience.

You will just think that it is a really good game.

The Ancient Gaming Noob

2006-09-21 16:54:58

Stellar Emperor – 1986

Back in early 1986 I was in college, I had a job that paid the bills with a lot left over for fun (at least it seemed like a lot back then), an Apple //e, a 1200bps modem I bought from my friend Dennis, and a desire for a new gaming experience.At the time CompuServe, The Source, Delphi, and GEnie were all offering some sort of online gaming, but only GEnie and CompuServe had games that sounded good to me. I chose GEnie because they had the bargain basement connection price of $5 per hour (non-peak hours only!) while CompuServe was charging $6 per hour for 1200 bps (less for 300 bps, more for faster), a monthly minimum charge, plus a surcharge for dialing in from my location through another service.$5 per hour! So think about that next time you bitch about $15 a month for an MMO.

The game that appealed to me was Stellar Emperor (SE) by Kesmai. (Had I chosen CompuServe, it would have been MegaWars III, which was the same game.)

I set up my GEnie account one Friday night, found my way to the SE menu and entered the game.

I was assigned the number 2451. Each player had a number assigned. You also put a name in with your number. The name could be changed, but the number was associated with your account. To change it you had to leave your account inactive for a set period of time (90 or 120 days as I recall) and then you could start again and be assigned a new number.

I chose the name Wilhelm because I happened to have Hogan’s Heroes on in the background while I was logging in and I had just heard Werner Klemperer announce to somebody that he was “Colonel Wilhelm Klink, Commandant of Stalag 13!”

This is why my handle on the blog is Wilhelm2451. It represents my first online gaming name. (In game it would have shown up as “2451 Wilhelm” but whatever.)

Stellar Emperor, which began commercial development in 1981, had some things any MMO player will recognize.

– A persistent universe. The game kept going when you logged off.
– Guilds. Well, teams, but effectively the same thing.
– Public and private chat channels. You could have three channels active. The channels were numbered from 1-999. Channel 1 was the universal channel, everybody kept that live. Then your team could grab a channel and use that for private communication.
– Direct tells to players for private messages.
– A trade skill of sorts (planetary management)
– PvP

A game of Stellar Emperor lasted four weeks.

The first night of the game was the busiest. You might find 100+ players on at once. The galaxy was laid out into sectors with each sector containing a number of stars. The stars, each identified by a number, remained in their positions from game to game. The planets around those stars changed from game to game. On the first night people would scout the star systems looking for planets to colonize.

Each player was allowed six planets. Planets had two attributes, habitability and metal content, both on a 1-100 scale. You wanted both to be as close to 100 as possible. You and your team would divide up the galaxy and begin scouting the 1200+ star systems.

There were text files available of each of the sectors and the stars they contained. These were a requirement as the stars were not numbered in any order, so if you tried to scout them in order, you would spend most of your time traveling across the galaxy.

Travel, while not slow compared to EVE Online, still took time, so even in scouting a sector you would try to choose an efficient path from star to star. We would all note where the decent planets were in our sectors, especially those already occupied by members of other teams, and we would try to find six good planets for ourselves.

You had to grab your planets on the first night if you wanted to have a chance of winning the game. On a 99 habitability rated planet even a few hours lost could change your final score enough to drop you a couple of pegs in the ranking.

There was a scoreboard that was updated once a day. For the first week or so, it reflected kills made by individual pilots. You could attack any other ship and get points for kills, but in the end, the scores for planets are what decided the game. Still, there were people game for combat, especially on the first night when everybody was out in scouts. One player who went by the name Berserker (ship ID 7020 as I recall) who wrote a fighting program for the game that was viciously efficient. You would have to gang up on him with three or four other ships to kill him. So here it is 1986 and we already have botting.

Later in the game, as people built shipyards, score began to reflect ship size. Only in the last half of the game would planet scores begin to take over. You had to be careful not to let your score spike too soon. Other teams probably scouted the locations of your planet so they could take them away from you if they looked good enough.

Planetary management, planetary defense, and planetary take overs were all arts unto themselves.

And did I mention that all of this was played in text on a screen that was 80 columns wide at 24 rows tall? No ANSI color even, just plain, scrolling text.

Further notes about Stellar Emperor can be found by clicking on the tag or going here. I also wrote a bit about Stellar Warrior and Air Warrior, which were also games on GEnie back in the day.

online service provider

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

Ranking Star Trek Films

Section 1

It goes without saying that I am a huge Trekkie, and have been for almost 35 years since I first started watching the later seasons of TNG live. Andrle and I met because of Star Trek! A literally life changing franchise.

With the release of Star Trek: Section 31 I was thinking of trying to update my mental total ordering of all 14 Trek movies. Since I have this blog everyone gets to see it! This is also in part inspired by reading Rolling Stone’s list and hearing Scott and Jason talk through their mutual rankings.

Ordering is quite difficult because some of these I’ve seen many many times and others only once or twice. Perhaps unsurprisingly my ranking correlates strongly with that view count. For the most part it’s about what are my favorites, not necessarily which films are widely considered the best. Throughout I mostly left off title prefixes like “Star Trek” and associated roman numerals.

Since our kid is older now (11) he’s seen all of the PG-rated ones. I think he’s a few years yet from wanting to see the more modern action ones. As an aside, my first exposure to some of the original cast films was actually through my grandfather’s Mad Magazine collection which included all of the Star Blecch parodies; I think I had only seen the one with the whales at the time I was reading through those.

Sensors are detecting spoilers decloaking off the port bow!

The Ordinal Frontier

14. Section 31

We did it everyone! We managed to make a new worst Trek movie!

I already posted my initial impressions and even a few days later I think I’m in the same place. Obviously it went through production hell in reworking from a series to a movie, but I think that wasn’t even the main problem.

I firmly believe in Star Trek as a place where one can tell many tonally different genre stories, just like we’ve seen over the course of 900 plus hours of Trek episodes. They had a chance to take a fairly interesting side character from Discovery, with an amazing actress, and they blew it. It should have been an interesting heist or spy thriller with Michelle freakin’ Yeoh kicking butt!

I think what bothered me the most was the direction… Osunsanmi’s shakeycam style was my least favorite element of the later seasons of Discovery. There were several action sequences where it was difficult to see what was going on because they couldn’t afford a locked down tripod, and again, you have a martial arts star in Yeoh! They also had an extremely annoying character (Fuzz) that didn’t otherwise fit the vibe. Finally a lot of the design elements felt more like 32nd Century later seasons of Discovery than back in time closer to TOS era.

The opening in the space bar started okay but as the “crew” came together it quickly went downhill. The flashbacks for Georgiou were interesting but without the redemption arc we saw in Discovery S3 it’s hard to understand how she’s not just evil.

I think they tried to make “edgy” Trek for a broader audience and a modern darker streaming era but failed to keep the Trek core. It’s still recognizably Star Trek but missing much of the heart of what makes Trek… Trek. For whatever reason a bunch of people decided this was good enough and they should just ship it.

For some other recent podcast takes on the movie, check out Transporter Lock and The Greatest Trek.

13. Nemesis

Even though I had a poster of this up in my dorm room (As did Andrle! Destiny!), I don’t really like this movie, especially as what at the time seemed to be a final sendoff for the TNG crew. It looks good and the soundtrack is quite good, but it doubles down on Action Picard and tries to make us believe that Tom Hardy is his young clone as part of a ridiculously convoluted Romulan/Reman plot?? And of course Troi gets telepathically attacked again.

Their lack of confidence in the story is further emphasized by how they undid a lot of the ending in the Picard series by resurrecting Data.

12. The Final Frontier

The often maligned Star Trek V is definitely a bit of a mess, in large part because it can’t decide what genre it wants to be. It’s quite the tonal shift from IV as well. The long Mad Max-adjacent sequences on Nimbus III kinda don’t fit Trek. Famously there with production issues with Shatner’s direction style, the effects, and the budget.

It’s definitely the worst of the original six, and a rough movie, but it at least has our favorite characters and tries to say something interesting, even if it doesn’t quite make sense. I do hope we’ll see more of the Sybok they hinted at in Strange New Worlds.

Plus it gave us this banger:

youtu.be/HU2ftCitvyQ?si=yRuIdK…

11. Into Darkness

There’s still a lot I like about this reboot of The Wrath of Khan, so I don’t think it’s as bad as some say… but redoing the classic death scene only to save Kirk with magic blood was a bit over the top. I liked the creeping militarism allegory, which is something Trek does very well in general. I do think Cumberbatch was the wrong choice for Khan, and combining that with the other plot resulted in an overloaded film.

Since the new movies came out during my Twitter Era, I can see my thoughts at the time were quite positive, which as I recall went a bit against the Trekkie consensus. It obviously looks great and modern, I think the plot just got kinda burdened. And no, it doesn’t make sense that the Enterprise can hover in a planet’s ocean… but Rule of Cool?

10. Beyond

We’re starting to get into the movies that aren’t bad but aren’t really that good either, except for grading on a Trek curve.

I honestly just don’t remember much about this movie. I was excited at the time. I think Idris played an interesting villain that they didn’t give enough time to understand? As with all three NuTrek movies it looked great and was fun with broader appeal… but kinda to one side of my usual Trek preferences.

These movies got us through the doldrums between the end of Enterprise and the start of Discovery.
Apparently I used some Jaylah selfie filter??

9. Insurrection

I enjoy this movie when I watch it, but agree with the main criticism of it, which is that it’s an extended high-budget TNG episode. It even has that sorta non-serialized effect where it introduces a bunch of things (Son’a, Picard love interest, immortality planet) that don’t come up again (outside of some references in Lower Decks). Like an episode, it doesn’t use the ensemble very well, focusing on Data and Picard and really sidelining Crusher and Troi a lot.

I think it came out at the right age for me and it’s mostly a lot of fun. F. Murray Abraham plays a good scenery chewing villain. There’s Gilbert and Sullivan! Riker uses a joystick that looks almost exactly like the one I had for playing X-Wing and Descent.

We quote it a fair bit (especially the “How are you doing this?” time freeze moment). If you are going to rewatch, I highly recommend the hilarious Frakes/Sirtis commentary track from the 2009 release.

8. The Search for Spock

This one has grown on me, but it suffers a little from being the middle chapter between two better movies and so doesn’t stand on its own as well. It’s got some interesting stuff and introduces the Klingon bird-of-prey which is an iconic ship design that became very familiar throughout the TNG and DS9 era and has been riffed on since. It also introduced the full version of the Klingon language by Marc Okrand, which along with Tolkien’s Quenya had a non-trivial impact on my interests, education, and career.

The Enterprise heist is great (and gives Uhura one of her best moments), and Lloyd’s Kruge is a good villain (and establishes a vibe for many Klingon characters going forward). We often quote his “Get out! Get out of there!!!” when the Enterprise is about to self-destruct.

Some of the costumes and scenes feel the influence of Star Wars, but overall I think the conclusion on the Genesis planet is a bit weak. While killing off David sets up some of the conflict in VI, it’s just kinda weird.

As many others have said over the years, you kinda need to watch II-III-IV as a unit. (And not, as a kid, where I saw IV a ton, II a few times, and III once.)

7. The Motion Picture

There was on and off potential throughout the 1970s for a Trek movie, and this one feels very standalone from both TOS and the other five TOS cast movies. A lot of that is due to the design elements, but you can definitely see the influence on some of the TNG sets. It also gave us one of my favorite ships, the Enterprise refit.

Sure the pacing is slow, and has a certain epicness that I think can be blamed on 2001, and V’Ger is a bit warmed over Nomad from “The Changeling“. The transporter accident is a weird moment. You can see how Decker and Ilia from Phase II concepts became Riker and Troi in TNG. (Plus we dodged having a sex offender main character actor in Trek.)

The long ship and alien probe sequences are long but also still look really good decades later. Great model and effects work. The best version of the movie is the recent 4K remaster of the director’s cut.

6. Star Trek

There’s a lot about this movie that is clearly J.J. Abrams’ audition to direct Star Wars, but it’s still a really solid movie even if it’s not classically Trek all the time. The cold open on the Kelvin is one of the better film moments I’ve ever seen, both action packed and emotional. Giaccino’s score is excellent, too.

I think there are two main weaknesses of the movie: Bana’s Nero is trying to be like one of the better Trek villains but instead of good scenery chewing he’s just kinda intensely angry; and a chunk of the planet destruction plot doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you read the Countdown comics.

I am glad we got Nimoy’s Spock back, even if it was in the context of Death Star-style destruction of Vulcan. The themes around taking responsibility and riffs on previous storylines are fun. It’s quite watchable as a standalone.

5. Generations

This one has really grown on me since I was a kid, especially now watching it as a family. I think when it first came out (and I’m pretty sure I saw it in theaters?) it felt like “hey you got TOS in my TNG!” and like a weird extension of what was a really excellent series finale. It’s also strange seeing the sets we know so well shot darkly and cinematically, especially when they’re at Amargosa.

One thing we quote often from the Nexus sequence is “Thank you for the _____, it’s very beautiful” because the kid’s Victorian vision delivery is so weirdly funny. Also things not being installed until Tuesday.

The crash landing of the D on Veridian III still looks amazing for model work, as do much of the other effects (except for the weird Data face stretching). Soran is another great big villain whose plan is kinda ridiculous but fun to have him bring back some recurring antagonists in the Duras sisters (RIP).

I think the fisticuffs on top of the mountain go on a little long and Kirk saving the day one last time is a little underwhelming. No wonder Shatner wrote The Return! (Which as I recall is not very good and involves combining Romulan mysticism and Borg technology to bring Kirk back again.)

4. The Wrath of Khan

Now we’re on the mountain of Trek movies I love and would watch any time.

It feels bad to put Khan this low, since it’s such a great film and the Battle of the Mutara Nebula is a really great translation of submarines into space. The film design (and their constrained budget) gave us some iconic stuff that was reused over and over again, including the Regula model and the classic red uniform which held up well enough in-universe (compared to how often the shows changed things) that Picard apparently wore it when he was first in Starfleet!

I think the main things that bump it lower than my other favorites are the body horror elements of the Tau Ceti eels as well as the gory attack on the Genesis scientists. Montalban’s Khan is chewing scenery with the best of them, and it’s kinda wild that they brought back a character from a one-off episode 15 years previous that worked so perfectly in this.

One thing I think is super neat is how the original Genesis planet animation was the first pure CG sequence in a feature film, by the Lucasfilm Computer Division under Ed Catmull that later became Pixar! Given how much my kid loves some of those films, another place where Trek has had an indirect outsized influence on our lives.

3. First Contact

I remember seeing the teaser trailer for this in front of some other movie and getting so excited as the Borg ship is revealed to be the Trek insignia. This gave us the look of the more vampiric Borg through Voyager and beyond as they keep going back to that well, for better or worse. Definitely more horror-adjacent than the other movies.

The Borg Queen is a good and creepy villain and I remember being scared of the assimilation elements even as a teen. Picard’s version of Khan’s obsession with Moby Dick is really good and really digs into how traumatic being Locutus would have been.

The whole Vulcan first contact storyline with Cromwell’s Cochrane is very fun and funny history of the future, including him being afraid of future fame and an excellent use of Steppenwolf. It obviously went on to influence a lot of what appears later in Enterprise as well as references in other series. Don’t go criticizing my reviewing technique!

This definitely cemented Action Picard as the look and feel for the remaining TNG movies and Picard series as well as influencing the Abrams movies and even the new Section 31.

As a tradition, Andrle and I often watch this movie on our First Contact Day (when we first exchanged messages on OKCupid ) because we’re cute and weird nerds like that.

2. The Voyage Home

I would guess I’ve seen this movie over 30 times, including at least five with our kid. My dad recorded it off of TV (carefully editing out commercial breaks) at some point in the late ’80s and I watched that VHS many many times. It is an all-time favorite.

It’s a really fun and silly fish out of water timey-wimey plot with many quotable lines. At one point as a teen I insisted my family visit Monterey Bay Aquarium in part because it was the filming location for the Cetacean Institute. I almost put this in the number one slot, it was super tough especially considering how many times I’ve seen it.

Super quotable, super fun time travel, super strange Spock… it’s all great, from “Hello computer” to “get them back!” and from “I love Italian. And so do you.” to many more.

The sci-fi premise of trying to communicate with aliens you don’t understand because they’re not talking to you is also really great. Of course humans in our hubris would assume a message was meant for us and not cetaceans (or, more likely, cephalopods). And the movie might have helped literally save the whales?

As additional fun this is the first Trek movie we showed our kid and he has just let the ’80s-ness of it wash over him. He’s specifically requested it a few times and I think that’s very beautiful.

1. The Undiscovered Country

One of the things I’ve always loved about Star Trek is when they focus on allegory… and this loose Chernobyl and end of the Cold War metaphor is my favorite. It also came out right as I was really discovering Star Trek through newly airing TNG (though I had seen IV a bunch at that point).

This movie has so much over the top theatricality that I love including all the heavy Shakespeare quoting. Plummer and Warner really do it all justice. It’s fun to see Sulu captain the Excelsior and come to the rescue, too.

Kirk is in some ways almost a villain himself, paying off what happened to his son in III, but never takes it as far as Valeris or General Chang. (Notably Brock Peters hated what they did to his Admiral Cartwright being part of the conspiracy.)

I’ve always been here for the Klingon storylines over the years and this one is one of the best. All the trial scene and imprisonment on Rura Penthe is great. We find ourselves saying “Don’t wait for the ____, answer me now!” more than a few times.

taH pagh taHbe’

Comparison

So how did my rankings compare to the lists I linked up front?

Some interesting things is that we all agree on the top 5 except I have Generations just edging out 2009’s Star Trek. Jason and I also agree exactly on the three “bad” tier movies. The middle is the most inconsistent across the four lists, except for Alan and Jason both putting The Motion Picture at #8. I’m left as the weirdo who didn’t put Khan in the #1 spot.

Now to attempt to summarize this with some math… I thought about using something fancy like the normalized Kendall 𝜏 distance to compare our lists, but settled on a more basic normalization of the number of rank moves made between lists. For comparing two lists, take each movie in one list, find its rank in the other list, and sum the absolute difference before dividing by the binomial coefficient for the total number of ranks. (I think that’s the worst case maximal reordering distance? Let me know if my math looks way off.)

That yields six list overlap scores (1.0 being identical):

So I agree the most with Scott, but only slightly. Scott and Jason have a lot of cohost overlap (agreeing on the top 5 with different order), and Jason is in the middle between Alan and Scott because he overlaps with each of them equally even though they don’t overlap as much with one another.

#1 #8 #list #math #movie #sciFi #section31 #starTrek

Ok, so it's time for round #8 of our community challenge. Having won last week's challenge, it's my turn to open the new one.

Formatting is shamelessly stolen from @Anahkiasen@lemmy.blahaj.zone, thank you for your hard work 😀

Theme

This week's theme is "Distant lands". I adore stories about exploration, travels and faraway lands (real and imaginative) and would love to see what sparks your imagination.

Rules

1. Follow the community’s rules above all else
2. One comment and image per user
3. Embed image directly in the post (no external link)
4. Workflow/Prompt sharing encouraged (we're all here for fun)
5. At the end of the week each post will be scored according to the following grid

   Prize	Points
   Most upvoted	+3 points
   Second most upvoted	+1 point
   Theme is clear	+1 point
   OP’s favorite (me, this week)	+1 point
   Most original	+1 point
   Last entry (to compensate for less time to vote)	+1 point
   new Prompt and workflow included	+1 point

6. Posts that are ex aequo will both get the points
7. Winner gets to pick next theme! Good luck everyone and have fun!

Past entries

1. Dieselpunk
2. Goosebump Book
3. Deep Space Wonders
4. Fairy Tales
5. A New Sport
6. Monsters are Back to School
7. War and Peace

Ziggurat

2023-09-22 07:52:29

[Community Challenge #6] "Monsters are back to school"

Following invitation from @[url=https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/Sphks]Sphks[/url] in the latest challenge, here is my turn to propose a challenge.

We're in September, kids are back to school, but what about monsters ?
So this week theme will be Monsters are back to school too can't wait to see in which direction you'll go

Rules
merging some of the idea from older challenges, and trying to find the good balance between "upvotes" and "organizer privilege" The winner gains the right to organize the next challenge

Points from upvotes

• Most upvoted post : 3 points (3 points each in case "ex aequo")
• Second most up voted post : 1 points(1 point each in case of "ex aequo")

Arbitrary points from organizer

• Theme is clear : + 1 point (this one can be given to several images)
• Favourite image : +1 point
• Most original idea : +1 point
• Last image to enter : +1 point (Because the only late image is the one you never submit, so this let you a bonus if you're too late to collect upvotes)

I close the game on the morning of Saturday 30th (European Morning, might be afternoon for our friends in Asia and and night for our friends in the US)

1. A big ship at the edge of the universe (The Salvagers #1) by Alex White, 473p: It is fantasy in a sci-fi setting which I found was unusual and cool. I liked the diverse group of characters in a “found-family” kind of setting. I missed having more information about the villains, they seemed underdeveloped. Some action scenes where magic, space battles, or spacewalking were being described seemed a bit confusing to me, it was hard to understand exactly what was going on. It is a light read, with lots of action scenes and I tried not to overthink the magic to enjoy it. I don't think I will continue reading the series, but the book builds nicely for the sequel without ending in a cliffhanger.
2. The Air War (Shadows of the Apt #8) by Adrian Tchaikovsky, 646p: This book escalated way more than I thought it would. I don't know why I wasn't expecting so much war in a book with “war” in the title. So, it's heartbreaking while both the Wasps and the Beetles are developing new weapon technologies. It focuses on the development of fixed wings airplane fighters and a more efficient way to drop bombs from them. The parallels with the Second World War are inevitable. Taki, the Fly-kinden pilot shines on this one. This series continues to be very entertaining.
3. Exhalation by Ted Chiang, 352p: I don't usually read short stories but this one was recommended to me. Maybe I had too high expectations? Anyway, I enjoyed the first stories “The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate”, “Exhalation” and the “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” and “Dacey's Patent Automatic Nanny”. But I had a hard time engaging with all the other stories. I didn't find the ideas that interesting and for the most part, I didn't care at all about the characters/narrator of the story. Most of the stories were disturbingly weird to me. I was a little bit disappointed overall.
4. Selfish, shallow, and self-absorbed: Sixteen Writers on The Decision Not To Have Kids by Meghan Daum and others, 288p: It was nice to read thoughts on the topic from people of various ages and sexual preferences, males and females. I find it’s hard to have an open conversation about this topic nowadays. The essays are very personal and honest bringing diverse perspectives. I'm glad these voices are out there debunking the prejudice that childless people (especially women) are selfish or that there is something wrong with them. Being a woman who decided at an early age to not pursue motherhood, this was a refreshing read for me.

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By Noisy DeadlinesMinimalist in progress, nerdy, introvert, skeptic. I don't leave without my e-reader.