Advent Day 8 Mint Choc Miranda Mystery

Hello everyone,

Day 8 of Advent ! What's behind the doors today :

There we go.

Another Mint Choc Chip marshmallow today - this one was lush last time so I'm looking forward to eating this one. (Yep, it has survived so far, I thought I should get something more proper in me first !)

Not too sure that the Lego item is today though ... (quick peek at spoiler places later, it's the island in Last Jedi).

In the background we have the daily Mass Effect lore pic and it's the turn of Miranda Lawson today. She turned up in the second game and was essentially your handler and ship Executive Officer. Except it doesn't really work out that way in games like that and she's essentially another member of the crew with specific talents who you can bring along on missions. In the case of Miranda, she had been genetically improved for intelligence, looks and biotic power.

This character got a lot of stick for that and for good reasons too ...

The biotic powers weren't quite as good as the other primary biotics (spoiler redacted but I fell foul of it in my first play through).
The intelligence wasn't brought out in the character development and writing.
The looks were exploited by means of That Outfit and the poses which the animation team put the character in.

I liked Miranda ... but I was cringing at certain elements of the characterisation which, as said above, were just plain exploitative. Her counterpart, Jacob, had similar issues ... he just played with his guns and did crunches all day. Nothing more interesting than that.

It's a shame too because the other characters were far more fleshed out and intelligently written, making you have genuine feelings for them. I'm sure there are a few more of those coming up and I'll write about them as their turn comes.

The Elite theme for today is Orrery and it's another where I struggled to find something I could draw something for, outside of screenshots. The usual view of solar systems in Elite is like :

The system is represented in a logical format, showing you the stars, planets and whether there is anything juicy to look at. This one is Jambo Dadi, where I was enjoying doing some bounty hunting yesterday. The Orrery is a more 3d representation of the system :

And there we go. I don't think that actually tells you much ?

That's the system map for our Solar System. In Elite terms, we have a pretty complicated solar system with lots of moons and moonlets orbiting around the bigger planets. (Click for bigger and hopefully readable text and ... picture's from the wiki). The typical interesting systems tend to have between 10 and 20 objects to have a look at.

Scanning's tomorrow actually, I should do some more prep for that.

May add something later too ... my Elite character is about 500 ly away from Sol at the moment but I may well add in a picture of how our place looks in the two views. Actually, let's do that ...

There's the system map. Looks like they've added in a bunch of extra-solar objects over to the right there and just counted the smaller moons of Saturn and Jupiter.

There's the outer system Orrery, showing the gas giants and those extra-solar objects ...

And finally, the inner system. The Orrery nicely shows the representation of how far apart the various objects are.

That's it for today I think !