jack

Knives out was great fun!

Daniel Craig plays a modern independent detective, described with mild irony as the last of the gentlemen detectives. Sometimes he's just in the same general genre, but occasionally the film leans right into it and he drops a Holmes reference and it's never clear if it's the detective doing it on purpose or the film doing it in a world where no-one knew about the original.

I thought he would be good in this role and he was. But he has this great Boston accent and I just never got used to it. Like, obviously some people just have Boston accents and it doesn't have to be FOR anything, but it still just really stood out.

There's a dysfunctional extended family descended from a rich mystery writer, and the characters comment how his mansion leans into the genre too. His children, and their partners and wives, are all characterised very well. The observant biting businesswoman and her "I'm Important but I Don't Actually Have Anything to be Important At" husband. The frustrated son running his father's publishing company. The screwed up teenage grandson.

But the plot doesn't follow them, it follows the detective and nurse/companion to the old writer, and how they progress through the mystery and how they navigate his screwed up family. It's very well paced, flitting between flashbacks to show how events happened, and between different interrogations happening at similar times.

It wasn't perfect but I enjoyed it a lot, I'd certainly like to see more.

Spoilers relegated to the comments, read carefully if you haven't seen it.

There is an emperor of the world. Like this modern, real world, except this guy magically underpins the very fabric of the universe. He took over, about 6000 years ago, overthrowing some other ruler about who little is known. He has powerful allies, beasts, planets, sometimes humans but not usually.

His power is in magic, mostly in the form of knowledge. The language of beasts. Incredible healing arts. The ability to walk the lands of the dead and resurrect others or possibly yourself. Stored in a vast library.

For complicated reasons, he has an identity as a regular human in a suburb somewhere. Hosts barbecues, etc. His neighbours are, unbeknownst, some protective camouflage, if any enemy finds him.

He ends up adopting twelve children, and raising them, each being taught one of twelve major fields of study. There is a lot of being sent off to live with powerful sea creatures, or live in the woods with deer, or study endlessly under his guidance until you know whole books.

The novel skips through the early years, and then the bulk of it is what happens when the emperor goes missing and his children try to deal with it: there is a lot of one of the quieter ones trying to juggle multiple balls of intrigue amongst all the others.

I loved, loved, loved, loved the worldbuilding. It was a marvellous marrying of a traditional academic-y magic education, like things from Dark Is Rising, or Earthsea, or Once and Future King, with an almost urban fantasy setting of these ridiculous people trying to juggle alliances and also get familiar with mainstream american society.

The first caveat (and content warning) is, their upbringing is very abusive, both emotionally and physically, both from their father and some of the other siblings, including some occasions of torture and sexual violence. This is very well written, and it doesn't linger on it gratuitously, but it was still pretty heavy.

The second caveat is, I loved the worldbuilding and inter-sibling politics more than the overarching change-the-whole-world stuff. Some parts of that worked very well (when the emperor's rule overlaps with mundane politics, for instance). Others were ok, but just felt like they were too much for the book to carry.

So, if you like the magical library and people training in specialities with animals and learned other powers, this is a book you might REALLY REALLY REALLY like, or you might not.

I've watched about a third of the way through the first series, so my thoughts are a bit premature.

Grim remakes

I quite like the trend of grim remakes. I think there's two main things I like. One is the same thing as fanfiction, of putting the same characters into a new setting often brings out new stuff out of the same premises, which is really interesting. The other is, making it "grim" or "adult", often means engaging with the premises more deeply: plumbing for implications the original shied away from; taking characters emotions seriously when the original had them more as a joke; etc.

And like fanfiction, it still benefits from all the character building in the original, people watching it often already have sympathy for the characters, and know how they'd react, so the new version doesn't have to re-establish all that.

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For the first time for, um, a very very long time I returned to a book I was interested in but didn't finish the first time.

And oh boy. This book is so *interesting*. The gender stuff, the prisoner stuff, the family-structure stuff, the political-group stuff, the utopian other worlds projects, the policing, the transport system. Even before mentioning the miracles-exist-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-that stuff. Almost everything that happened and everything about how the world was sparked another tangent of introspection.

But almost all of them also aggravated me into fits of ranting about them as well.

Being that interesting is clearly a good thing, I think it deserved the attention it got. But I am still aggravated about the things I'm upset about, some of which I think are a real problem with the book, others of which I think are moments of weakness that are not a big deal in theory but really rubbed me up the wrong way.

Having a protagonist who's a terrible person, on the plus side, gives my brain a good workout: you can't just accept what happens, you always have to be considering "is this accurate" and "is this ethical"? But on the bad side is unpleasant to read about and makes it a lot harder to understand aspects of the book you can't trust his description of.

It reminds me of Humbert Humbert from Lolita or Rick from Rick and Morty: it's interesting to understand someone who's a terrible person, but you bear responsibility for the fact that however horrible, readers may sympathise with them and treat them as role models :(

The prison system

There's this idea of convicts guilty of serious offences "serving time" by serving society. Indeed, wandering around in public, forbidden from holding jobs or possessions, surviving on charity, but doing odd jobs (or weirdly important jobs) for people.

The book is clearly not saying this is OK, it raises it as a thought provoking way of dealing with serious crime, but shows how dystopian it can be, so it's hard for me to say that it *shouldn't* have been part of the book.

But as I've grown up, I've got increasingly less patience with clever philosophical experiments about society. I've always *loved* thought experiments of all sorts, I think they often do serve very well to show what we think is important in various circumstances. But I also think, they often gloss over how much of ACTUAL real life problems are problems that depend on the specifics and logistics of the real world problems, and one clever abstract decision does almost nothing to actually help resolve them.

Like, I don't want *every* book to be a morality tale about the problems of contemporary society. That's a good thing, but it's not the *only* good thing. But if you wrote a book about how criminals are stripped of their civil rights and forced to work as slaves... you didn't think to compare that to the way that happens right now AT ALL?

That's a kind of striking omission, isn't it?

Or maybe it's me that's missing the point. Maybe it IS intended as a "this is wrong" polemic.

But if so, it seems strange that it omits the LARGEST question about the situation which the real-life parallel immediately raises. You've described the fate of criminals who (a) have committed crimes sufficiently horrible, mostly murder, that their sentence effectively lasts the rest of their life but (b) are sufficiently harmless they can wander around society without being significantly guarded.

Surely that's a TINY MINORITY of people who commit crimes. So what about everyone else? Are these the ONLY sorts of criminal in this society? If so, how come? Is everyone else humanely rehabilitated? Or not driven to crime because there's a universal good education system and minimum income? Or incarcerated somewhere unmentioned? Or what?

Like, if you took our society, and premeditated murderers were treated worse, but all other crimes everyone just never committed in the first place... that doesn't make it ok, but it probably means life is overwhelmingly better for almost everyone. Shouldn't that have been more prominently mentioned in this system? Or is the system just as bad as our one, but especially bad murderers have special less-humane punishments? That's what America does, and it's awful, but I think those disproportionate punishments don't exist in isolation, they're a part of how the system is inhumane to almost everyone subjected to it.

Was all this deliberately left out?

Or does just "throwing interesting ideas at the wall" lead to this sort of hole where you don't have room to follow through all the implications?

Apparently we have a normal-ish police force? And people committing casual street thuggery are almost inevitably caught immediately? But do it anyway? What?

Gender stuff

Similar questions arise with the gender stuff. The book postulates, as far as I can tell, a society where people are referred to with gender neutral words and pronouns, but people still have some similar tendencies and prejudices in what's likely to be true about people who would be AMAB or AFAB in our society.

This is massively obscured by the protagonist who observes that people are potentially being hypocritical about this, and responds by being incredibly gender-essentialist and judgemental about everything.

This did raise several interesting questions in my mind and as I struggled to put into words his attitude. Eventually I settled on, he has an unexamined belief/assumption that people divide into two boxes, one labelled male, one labelled female, that accord with various personality traits and body types. Which makes *no sense* because it's *not* how the world works, but obviously, he proceeds as if he's correct. For instance, he assigns people pronouns according to how he sees their personality, even though often finding an excuse to mention that he thinks they look like they have a different biological sex. But the fact that he has to do this all the fucking time doesn't clue him in to the idea that maybe his dichotomy doesn't actually work like that.

So, although that was *unpleasant*, it was also certainly *interesting*.

I think (?) that this is deliberately intended to show a society which has weird taboos which are a bit different to ours, to throw light on both our taboos, and the underlying concepts of gender.

But what it says that that's the society they ended up with seems to have a lot of unpleasant implications. Like, they've spent hundreds of years avoiding *saying* there are two binary genders, even if people think that. But my current best guess is that some people strongly identify with a gender and some people don't. If everyone is "they" I would expect a lot of people who today let themselves get sorted into a box corresponding to the sex people see them as, instead thinking of themselves as the equivalent of non-binary. And we *definitely* have plenty of people who don't fit into one of two binary categories personality-wise, even the protagonist admits as much.

But we don't seem to have a society where 40% of people don't really identify with a binary gender. The protagonist makes a big deal about not knowing the right binary box for *one* character. And how the more tabloid-ish sort of newspaper makes a big deal about wanting to know that celebrity's biological sex. That suggests he thinks he can tell in all *other* cases. If everyone dresses gender neutral and lots of people don't choose to grow breasts, I don't think that would be true. I mean, even if he doesn't AGREE, surely he would notice that in order to denounce it?

So where does that leave us? Is this deliberate? Are we supposed to assume the protagonist is lying to himself about this and actually there IS a big nonbinary majority and the protagonist just hides it from us? That would be consistent with the plot, but... if there's no indication that happens, if the book builds up no trust with the reader that the real situation reflects something different to what's shown, are we supposed to know that? Or is it disagreeing, is it saying that most societies DO stream people into binary identities, and that even after hundreds of years of avoiding that we will inevitably still have them just as strongly?

This isn't especially personal to me but I could barely read the book because of it, and writing a book partly about nonbinary gender politics without thinking about whether it would be hurtful to actual real life trans people seems like a really bad idea. But OTOH, I know trans people who had the opposite reaction, that they disliked reading "everything will be fine" futures and almost preferred reading about societies which were fucked up in different ways.

And the economics

So, everyone works a 20 hour week at most, with the exception of people with a strong vocation? We think? Although we only really deal with political leaders and senior scientists and engineers, and prisoners, we don't see anyone in a typical economic situation.

I gather that's supposed to be an actual 20 hour week, not a zero-hour-contract-you-can-barely-live-but-the-economic-figures-look-good week?

But also, everyone is really worried about their rents going up? And land/building ownership is concentrated in one particular political group?

How do these things go together? How many people are living in politics? Many? Few?

As I commented about the prison system, we have a lot of interesting concepts, but seem to miss the most important questions. We have a lot of worry about economics. But like, do most people have enough to eat and shelter and so on? Or not? If so, the system is working *quite well*, even with all the bad things going on. Or is this theoretical utopian work life actually only apply to a small proportion of people and most people, especially people who are discriminated against, get utterly screwed but aren't "counted" when estimating how much people need to work? I can't tell.

Sometimes not telling us stuff is interesting, letting us ponder the question, but when too many important things are left out, it undermines our connection to the world and characters.

So. Neal Stephenson's recent-ish doorstop about the moon blowing up and the earth becoming uninhabitable, and humanity jump-starting a space settlement to continue the race until the earth's surface recovers. He did write short books once, but not for decades now IIRC :)

The near-future space stuff is all interesting. Sometimes it feels a bit on-the-nose, "I learned about this interesting thing, now I'll force it into my book", but as a look at what humanity could potentially build if countries threw ALL their resources at it, and what an ongoing settlement in space might realistically look like, it's very interesting.

The politics references are a bit tedious. Both the "oh look, geeks resent politics, yes, politics even of a few hundred people is a giant sewer" is probably... plausible, but feels over-done. And the references to earth politics, we get another big dump of libertarians-aren't-exactly-right-but-don't-we-empathise-with-them-lots, which I sympathise with a little bit, but am also massively critical of. And the female US president is an interesting character, and god knows I don't expect us presidents to automatically be nice people, but her naked ambition and cynical manipulation feel like they came out as criticism of a female president *at all*.

He does successfully introduce many female characters -- I haven't counted, but the titular Seven Eves are seven of the most major characters, who all happen to be female.

The post-timeskip "what space settlements look like after 5000 years" was interesting, but felt much less likely. And a bunch of other stuff that happened felt MUCH less likely.

Can you really produce a closed underground system recycling oxygen and carbon dioxide, growing plants under electric lights, all powered solely by geothermal power?

I think epigenetics means "magic ways experiences an organism has as an adult can affect what their children inherit, i.e. basically all hereditary biology that's additional to DNA". But Neal Stephenson seems to think it means "magic ways an organism can suddenly change as an adult and become a significantly different organism". Is that right??

I'm annoyed by, AFTER the seven eves, we revert to current-stereotypical-gender-roles at least somewhat. I do suspect there are SOME inbuilt reasons for that. But after that cultural bottleneck, you didn't think it might be interesting if we DIDN'T have those assumptions?

And I'm annoyed by "oh no, the last seven members of the human race disagree what children to engineer -- lets all just do our own thing and create seven eternally distinct tribes." They couldn't find ANY more compromise than that? Stuck in a small habitat, all the different offspring didn't immediately interbreed?

Azul

Liv knew she wanted this game for ages, and I wasn't sure but immediately fell in love with it. It's based on Portuguese Islamic-derived ceramic tilings. All the parts are absolutely gorgeous, the tiles are fairly simple design on simple plastic, but they feel sooo tactile and are sooo beautiful.

The gameplay is collecting tiles to fill out a grid, and blocking the opponent from doing so, but the rules are really quite simple, and the strategy really quite complicated.

Trail of Lightning

By an urban fantasy by Rebecca Roanhorse, who won the Campbell Award and Best Short Story Hugo this year. Set after global warming causes catastrophic ocean rises and political cohesion in America dissolves, in the newly evolving and ironically-drought-ridden Diné nation from what had been the Diné (Navajo) reservation.

The protagonist is a monster hunter. It's interesting to read a story with some of the immortal figures like Coyote who've shown up in other fantasy novels I've read, but by an author who presumably knows the original stories better.

City of Brass

By S. A. Chakraboty. An early 19th century Egyptian con-woman discovers she has Djinn heritage and is immediately sucked into complicated multi-sided supernatural politics between factions of Djinn, and other more powerful immortals, and not-exactly-Djinn, etc.

If, like me, you like supernatural politics, history of Djinn through Islamic dominance, to before to their capture by Solomon, all the way back to the early world, this might be the book you've been waiting for.

I can't vouch for the accuracy of the real-world cultures depicted and drawn from, but it felt very much like characters actually being there, a wide variety of people.

I'd been meaning to read this for ages, and it was really awesome.

The main character is the daughter of a minister, a famous archaeologist, shortly after Darwin published the Origin of the Species. He is taking his family to an island, I think a fictional one, but situated near the real channel islands, to help in some newly uncovered archaeological find.

She is fascinated by her father's work, and educates herself a lot, whilst resenting that she's judged against the standards of a dutiful, conforming daughter instead.

It was complete coincidence I was reading when I was on the channel islands.

The minister is an important character, but equally important is the main character's mother, tasked with running everything about the household, from one angle seeming remote and bossy, from another angle, excelling at the tasks life set to her. And the servants, native to the island, with varying degrees of unease at this new strange family they're supposed to be living with. And her uncle, easy-going, but jealous of his brother-in-law's success. And the various other people associated with the dig, the gentlemen officially sponsoring it, and the women who have one reason for another for being involved, all with their own weaknesses and own problems.

And the premise, which is spelled out on the back cover, that via her father's work she finds a tree reputed to feed off lies, and begins experimenting with it.

I really enjoyed it, mostly the pure people aspects, but also the potentially fantastic aspects. If anything, the one problem I had is that the potentially fantastic elements stand in contrast to the main characters' scientific dedication.

Liv and I wanted to see one of the Cambridge Shakespeare plays this summer. The selection didn't have many we really wanted to see, so we ended up seeing Peracles, and I'm really glad we did.

Cambridge Shakespeare have often made some of the lesser-known, honestly less good plays really fun, and that's what they did here. Pericles is described as "at least partly by Shakespeare": I think roughly the "Pericles sails around having adventures" is by someone else, and "everyone is lost at sea and thinks each other dead, then, surprise, they're reunited without knowing who each other are" is by Shakespeare :)

Antioch

It starts off with Pericles, prince of Tyre (eastern Mediterranean), visiting nearly Antioch (just to the North). The king has a beautiful, accomplished, and widely admired daughter, but is violently protective of her, and has decreed that no-one may court her unless they answer his (secret) riddle, but if they guess wrong, they will be executed.

Pericles rocks up, says, "that sounds like a good deal", and then SURPRISE, it turns out NOT to be a good idea.

(Content Warning: incest mentioned in next paragraph)

The riddle turns out to be, basically, "incest, but in verse form". Pericles explains at length to the audience that answering the riddle will cause the king to have him executed out of hand just as much as failing to answer. Instead, he *hints* that he knows, but asks for more time to think about it.

For some reason, the king, ashamed of his sin, and equally willing to execute suitors for guessing, or not guessing, the riddle, is too embarrassed to have him executed for *maybe* guessing the riddle, and agrees to the delay.

Pericles wasting no time, as soon as he's outside the palace, immediately flies back to Tyre.

The king is outraged by this deception, and -- belatedly -- sends an assassin after him.

Tyre

The narrator was amazing. She was dressed up like a cross between a headmistress and a clown, lecturing the audience about all the things they were supposed to know. The back of the stage had a chalk-board divided into six sectors with all the relevant places on (including "the sea" with waves) and a little pointer which span round. Whenever the narrator announced a place, she turned the pointer, and whenever the scene changed without narration, she came on stage to turn it, or crept up from behind, just to keep everyone oriented with where they were.

Pericles immediately sort counsel with his Loyal Underling Ruling In Pericles' Absence Whose Name I Forget. LURIPAWNIF said, running away had been a smart move, well done, but maybe having announced yourself as "Pericles of Tyre" don't just sit around in Tyre waiting for assassins, but make like Sir Robin and split.

I was positively convinced this guy was going to stab him in the back or something, but no, he was genuinely committed to ruling Tyre fairly, but letting Pericles have all the glory and handing everything back to him whenever he turned up again. Later on, we have a brief scene in Tyre where various nobles call on him to have the crown, and he says, no, wait five years before we give up on the Big P.

Pericles takes the advice and takes some ships and men and sails off for adventure.

And by "adventure" we apparently mean "loading up with grain and sailing somewhere with a famine".

TBC.

"Thuurgla Disseminute", "Gleggrot Disseminute", the names of these Fungus' navy fleets are very very them. As are some of the others. Including the pirates! :)

Pets

I found some alien pets! Alas they were on one of the fungus' core worlds, and for whatever reason the fungus' concentrated more on building warships than petting pets. I only found them when I flew through their home system in the post-war truce and conducted a little informal surveillance.

Liv immediately asked me to save them, but I had to admit, I was already trying as hard as I could to rescue the normal funguses from their own government, but it wasn't possible to speed up the processes without another war and maybe even planetary bombardment.

AI personalities

The characteristics of an empire (and I think, their ruler, and maybe a couple of other things) determine in their 'personality' according to a complex algorithm. Like, empires who are spiritualist and also militaristic usually get the "honourable warriors" personality. Many empires get the "hegemonic militaristic" which just means they want to conquer things. Etc.

Some are fairly specific, like the "assimilate everyone in the galaxy" and the "eat everyone in the galaxy" empires.

I think the personality is deterministically determined by those values. And the effects of the personality are mostly or completely determined by various modifiers like "chance of declaring war" and "positive/negative modifier to their opinion if you have a border with them" etc.

So it's a bit fiddly, but I quite like the concept, that you can (hopefully) just play by understanding that you can probably trade with the "spiritual seekers" especially if you're spiritualist yourself, you may or may not be able to form pacts with the hegemonic militarists depending on their political situation, and you might as well give up on some of the xenophobic personalities who mostly hate everyone.

But that because it's all run by an algorithm, it's all exposed to modders who can tweak it in various ways. And "never" is expressed as "modifier by -1000" so if there's some overwhelming pressure the other way, that might still happen.

Opinion, Trust, etc

It took me a while to get an idea how this works and I'm still not sure. There's a few relevant values, opinion, trust, and attitude, and I think a couple more under the hood.

Trust represents a relationship built up over time. Any ongoing diplomacy (trade deals, guaranteeing their independence, non-aggression pact, defensive pact, alliance, federation, etc) provides both a small monthly increase in trust, and a maximum value of trust, higher for more significant relationships. If you don't have an ongoing relationship it slowly decays to 0 again.

Opinion represents an instantaneous snapshot, which comprises (a) trust (b) various relevant modifiers, like sharing politics and philosophy gives a boost, xenophiles/xenophobes have a flat bonus/penalty to their opinion of everyone, etc. And (c) various short term effects, like breaking a treaty or making a favourable trade deal gives an instantaneous bonus/penalty to trust which slowly expires over some number of months.

So the general process of diplomacy where possible is, find empires who have at least somewhat positive base opinion of you. Build up trust by making a trade deal of guaranteeing their independence. Then combine increased trust and if necessary a temporary boost to opinion (say, a one-sided trade deal to just give them a temporary bribe), enough for them to accept a more significant diplomatic overture, which will hopefully have a higher trust cap etc.

This can see-saw back and forth based on various things -- if you're far away, diplomacy is more difficult, if your mutual border is too long, there's a penalty for needing to police it, if there's another empire mutually threatening, that's a positive to various pacts, etc.

There's also an "attitude": "wary", "cordial", "friendly", etc. This is partly due to opinion (and trust?) and partly due to relative empire strengths and to AI personality (?). I'm not sure if that's mostly just due to opinion and trust and obvious overall modifiers, or if there's a extra determinants behind the scenes.

Lots of diplomatic options have a default "no", so it can be a bit of a hurdle to get anyone to agree. You need to max out trust, but then you're left with some negatives if your empires are incompatible. And some empires will just never like you unless you're overwhelming in military force because you're naturally incompatible.

And as people helpfully clarified on the previous post, once you've got a bad diplomatic situation with someone, i.e. their opinion of you spiralled downward and they declared you a rival (or declared war or proclaimed a claim to some of your systems), it is nigh impossible to increase their opinion again because those all provide an ongoing negative modifier. You just have to hope an extra-dimensional threat spawns nearby :)

So now I'm less talking about every new experience I have and more talking about the SECOND dragged out war against the fungus people, this is less entertaining :)

War

My God, this isn't good from my planets' populations point of view though. First war, they declared war out of idealism, and I screwed up the economy and got food shortages, and pirates ravaged most of the outer systems, including a pre-spaceflight world in my territory. Second war, the funguses saw I hadn't rebuilt fast enough out of the first war, made claims on a few of my border systems -- and then instead flew a giant fleet straight to my home worlds and bombarded them from orbit.

Even the Centauri baulked at that!

They occupied my homeworld for about ten years. Imagine that in a novel. Earth has multiple successful colonies -- but earth itself is occupied by an alien race.

But fortunately they suck at tactics. If they'd used their two giant fleets smartly they could have easily brought a lot more armies through to actually occupy my planets. But actually they just flew them there in a straight line, and as long as I attacked them -- even if they were in the middle of a convoy -- they couldn't take any planets.

If they'd used their fleet more proactively to protect their supply lines I'd have been screwed.

And they dramatically occupied my homeworld -- but never actually staked a political claim to it, so after the war, it just reverted to me. Whereas I claimed the systems from the rear of their empire I actually managed to take over, while their massive fleets were busy elsewhere.

Indeed, when I took the territory from their rear, they reversed one of their big fleets to fly all the way home to deal with it, so I could have snuck in to liberate my homeworld then if I'd wanted to.

Which teaches me some things about tactics I should have been more on top of. Decide whether to concentrate your force enough it's worth attacking an enemy fleet head on. If so, do. If not, avoid them. Defeat their ships in smaller packets if you can. Conquer territory you want, ideally while their ships are elsewhere.

But I'm still pretty vague about military stuff -- probably I should be tooling my ships with rock-guns to counter their scissor-beams or similar, but I haven't got that worked out.

Science

My scientists asked me to collect seven or eight specimens of particular species -- usually dangerous ones -- from planets all across the galaxy. Fortuitously, once I got my ships past the fungus mass, enough empires had open borders I was able to fly one science ship all round the galaxy, collecting the angry dangerous macguffins and cataloguing various other space creatures like crystalline entities at the same time. I mean, the fauna ate some of the science crew, but too few to have a mechanical effect.

Even some of the conquer-everyone empires were sufficiently friendly to me to have open borders, so I'm wary of them, but grateful for their cooperation.

I also found a "make all the planets glow orange and you can't see where to turn it off again" button :) I figured it out eventually.

Diplomacy

As my fleet builds up, or gets lost in space, the other empires' military strength bobs up and down between "equivalent" and "superior". Once one non-fallen empire was "overwhelming" and almost everyone was superior which was dispiriting. But apparently the Racist Space Parrots got such a kicking in the last war they're back down to equivalent, when they were almost always superior before. I should pick a fight with them quick to endear me to their neighbours while I still can.

The Reavers, who I was worried about because they looked super-expansionist, have actually lost ground, and maybe some territory to neighbouring empires. The names are cool. I don't know how it works, but fleet names, planet names, etc usually sound vaguely appropriate to the different empires. Banthurian Reavers is their actual name they call themself, not my gloss :)

Alas, I built up diplomacy as much as I could, but didn't have the timing right, because several of the most friendly empires already made defensive pacts with other empires and aren't that interested in another one. And I can't grow their trust further without a more intimate deal of some sort. I'm not sure if there's a path to improve relations I'm missing, or if I need more of the diplomacy path to increase the max trust cap, or if I need to be closer to them, or all of the above.

I screwed up slightly with the Anteater Napoleons. I was guaranteeing their independence, partly to increase their opinion of me, partly so I could join in a war against the Racist Space Parrots if it happened. But during the other war, I wasn't sure if I could turn that off without penalty, and got confused, and ended up breaking it, and they closed borders against me. But I re-guaranteed, and then they liked me again.

Meta

I started playing ironman, partly because I wasn't sure if I'd care about achievements or not, partly because I wanted an excuse to keep playing, not to keep reverting until I do everything perfectly. But in the war, I was much more worried about screwing things up from not quite understanding how various mechanics worked, and I discovered I could copy the save file if I wanted to (at least in non-cloud mode). And I *think* I can replace the current version with those if I want to, although I haven't actually done it yet.