In other news, Brian Moss stepped down as AGMDir, while Deanne Ashton moved up to AGMDir in his place. Deanne later stepped down as well, paving the way for Jeff Field's current occupancy of that position under GMDir Stuart Coll.

Michael J. Ballway also contributed to this report.

For those who completely missed Election Season, you can get all the nitty-gritty from the SNN Election Toteboard:

The number one composite score and MOTDOTY Award goes to Larry Garfield's USS Alliance, with a score of 7.43. The Ally is the Flagship of Fleet Four, as well as the origin of Garfield 1.3 format, variants of which are used on a number of ships. Second Place for overall score goes to Deanne Ashton's USS Ogawa with a score of 7.4. The Owwie is Fleet One's resident medical cruiser and uses a unique layout with some very slick but small images. Third place was a tie, with Mike Ballway's USS Constellation and Fleet Four's Crell both scoring 7.25. The Connie is STF's most bizarre ship, and birthplace of the renegade [we call it "colorful" --Ed.] GWF 3.0 format. Crell, maintained by Larry Garfield, is Fleet Four's Self-RPG planet and the only ship that still uses Garfield 1.0 format. An honorable mention went to the stopgap Athena MOTD, designed by B.J. Phillips, which is text-only following the accidental loss of its graphic intensive predecessor. The Athena shows that fancy graphics can't compete with a good, clean design and color selection.

Scoring as the Most Aesthetic ship in STF with an aesthetics score of 8.2 is Deanne Ashton's Owwie. Honorable mention goes to Paul Jones' slick USS Columbus in Fleet Four. Yet another tie was Seamus Hughes' USS Revelation and the Academy's USS Challenger, both scoring 7.4 for Efficency. Honorable mentions in that category go to Colin Wyers' USS Independence and Fleet Four's Crell, both scoring 7.2. The Most Useful MOTD Award goes to MOTDOTY Winner Larry Garfield's Ally, which netted a Usefulness score of 8.0. Honorable mention goes to Cordell Garrett's USS Aries, which uses a modified version of the Alliance's Garfield 1.3 format, scoring 7.8. Topping the chart for Timeliness is Adam St. Clair's USS Dresden with a score of 8.2 in that category. Honorable mention goes to Deanne Ashton's Owwie and Mike Ballway's Connie, both of which scored 7.8 in Timeliness.

Look for all winning ships to display their Award Plaques shortly. Overall, STFs ships collected average scores of 6.1, 6.3, 6.0, and 5.9 for Aesthetics, Efficency, Usefulness, and Timeliness, respectively, giving STF as a whole a composite score of 6.09375..

 

Fleet Two, the so-called "Great White Fleet," entered its first-ever Fleetwide Sim (excepting 1995's Clubwide sim) sporadically, with each of its four ships joining the plot at a different stage -- and none of them knowing that this plot would be shared with its three rivals. The plot (how appropriate that word is, in more ways than one!) eventually centered on the planet Pilton, a quiet backwater with a growing rebel force that alleged illegal activities on the part of Starfleet itself -- viz., that illegal experimentation was taking place on the planet's surface. The Arleigh Burke and Nautilus were sucked into the would-be revolutionaries' web of lies, pitting them squarely against a task force led by NPC ships George Washington and Lexington, plus Fleet sister-ships Constellation and Trinitron. Using a unique cross-linked ship called "INSURRECTION," GM Garfield accelerated the pace of the sim in December, to culminate with the destruction of the Arbie and death of its Captain. Mike Bowman, CO of the Burke, then disappeared from STF.

Or did he?

A special investigative report by the Nameless Ensigns' Weekly Standard has reported tracked down the elusive Mike Bowman. Starting from his alleged home in Syracuse, New York (where no records could be found of a Mike Bowman living anywhere in the Onondaga County region), the N.E.W.S. followed the nonexistent trail to Argentina, where apparently the former Captain is alive und liefing vell. A more credible report put together by the GalaxyDoppler Weather Team of KNST's morning drivetime talk show (93.3333 on your Subspace Radio!) has unearthed the biggest deception of them all: The supposed Mike Bowman, erstwhile captain of the Arbie, was none other than . . . B.J. Phillips, hired by the FComm-2 to play the fall guy in an intergalactic practical joke on the Fleet's newest ship. KNST morning personality Commander Sraek, freshly tanned from his five-hour vacation on Vulcan, proclaimed the revelation "illogical." When pressed for elaboration, he amended his statement to "highly illogical."

FComm-4 and former Fleetwide GM "Larry Garfield" (if that is his real name) was unavailable for comment, having fled the STF2 area immediately after the Christmas-day conclusion of the sim. Reports, however, have found him engaged in acts of self-deification on all four major STF2 ships, leading us here at SNN to believe that some sort of conclusion ought to be able to be drawn from the previously presented facts.

 

Meanwhile, in Fleet Four, USS Columbus XO Krystelle Bromilow was promoted to Captain and given command of Starbase 202. Edict #9 dealt with the Asimov, where New Member Council Chairman and Azzy XO Brady McGuinn was promoted to Captain and given command of the ship. Steve Ashton will assume the XO position on the Azzy. Since NMC rules forbid the ship COs from serving as Chairman, McGuinn has passed along that title to LtJG. Barry Vogtman.

 

Brady, 28, is the Administrative Director and Senior Counselor of the local Youth Crisis Center. In Federation Standard, that means he is the head psychologist at the Jacksonville center for helping adolescents who are "at risk." He also is in charge of hiring and firing the staff of police officers and psychologists who work under him. When not at work, Brady enjoys football, reading, and of course STF. As proof that siblings don't always fight, he cares for his 16-year-old younger brother, Kollin. Brady has been his legal guardian since their father passed away in early August. His canine companion Foxy takes up much of the rest of his time -- except for that which he saves for Susan. Susan is a Pediatric Physician whom Brady has been dating for two and a half years, and hopes to someday marry.

 

The pundits have talked about it. The media couldn't get enough of it. The religious fanatics had a heyday. Your neighbors stocked up on food, their neighbors stocked up on guns, and that weird person down the street had a sign up assuring you that "It's the end of the world as we know it!" Well, I don't know about you, but I'm Sick of Y2K! Aren't you? If you aren't, you will at least be sick of this song by the time it's done.

 

The STF6 Fleetwide, which we'll refer to as the Alexia Witherspoon story arc, died recently, which can only be compared to putting an animal to sleep out of some sort of pity. Except, y'know, you really miss your pets when they're dead, and this just went out and nobody really missed it, and most breathed some sigh of great relief.

Ever heard that too many cooks spoil the soup? Well, that's what happened here, except that most of the cooks went absentee and that left us fishing about for some sort of stone to fool people into thinking it was good eatin', to mix several metaphors that God decreed should never go together, for a good reason.

The STF6 Fleetwide was set up under one very simple concept. Most fleetwides revolve around one or two seasoned GMs running the entire show. This worked reasonably well in the STF3 Fleetwide, and showed great promise during the STF4 Fleetwide. The problem is, the amount of really seasoned GMs willing to put up with the hassle has dwindled to about nobody. (We'll exclude Larry, because he really didn't want to GM STF2 by himself, and I can't blame him.) So the idea this time was to cast a wider net and to inclue more GMing talent, to allow each ship to have more individual attention. In theory, it's a good plan . . . it lets more people direct the plot and should have let things run smoother than previous efforts.

In actual practice, the idea has led me to consult local blowfish vendors.

Even scraping up enough GMs in the first place took about two weeks of recruiting effort, which otherwise would have been two weeks worth spending. But after a little while, the GMs that had been so painstakingly recruited started dropping like the proverbial flies. We had the Brandywine GM jumping ship before we even got the Independence started, the Pict soon followed, and we went through two GMs on the Kestrel before we even got the sim up and running.

So already you've got major, major problems, i.e. most of your staff has up and left you. But then more problems arise. Not all the GMs read every ship, so contradicting posts between ships would often be made. This was partly due to the fact that we were breaking GMs into a already developed complex plotline that they hadn't been exposed to yet, and we assumed they knew more than they did due to oversight. And not everyone can GM the same plot; each has his own style. When the STF3 and STF4 teams were assembled, they had certain cohesion. At this point in the STF6 sim, we were pulling people with little to no GMing experience and trying to get them to GM a very specific sim for us.

So what happened? People got fed up. People got tired. People got very irate and started sending me packages with return addresses in the Montana backwoods. So, we took the sim out back, stiffled the screams, and cooked it in the oven that evening for Christmas ham a bit early.

And this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper. . . .
 

New members are indeed welcome to participate in OOC events. I am an OOC Area regular, and on numerous occasions we have new people come in and say "so what do you guys do here and can I play too?" The answer is always "weird stuff, and sure, come on in." Some of these people stay, some don't. Most of the OOC regulars right now started coming there only recently. Yes, I've been there a year and a day, as have Bourdaa and Wyers. But Chris Ashley joined only this summer, Charles Marshall isn't all that old there, Shalon Hurlbert only recently got his first DH position, and many more. These people are often more active than the standbys. One problem with the OOC is that like any ship, there is a critical mass point. Any more than about 20 people actively posting, and it takes hours to get through, so people leave. Once it has quieted down, people begin to come back, sometimes the same people sometimes new ones.

On the ships themselves, it varies ship to ship. Any OOC comment by nature is an inside joke. And an inside joke, of course, is not accessible to someone who does not catch the reference. There are a few ships, most notably the Constellation, where such OOC comments and references are the norm, and RPing takes second billing. Some new people do merge well into it, others don't.

STF is about that OOC interaction. But OOC interaction, by its very nature, tends towards cliques and inside jokes. A recent comment in OOC referred to Charlie McCarthy, which spun off into a discussion of the Muppet Show. Now, if you don't know that Charlie McCarthy is the name of a ventriloquist dummy who appeared along with his favorite ventriloquist on The Muppet Show, and that The Muppet Show was a TV show in the early 1980s, and that Kermit and Piggy were two of the regular characters, and the interaction between those two characters, there is no way that you are going to follow that line of thought. Does that make that thread invalid? Of course not.

In every case I've seen personally, new members are welcome and encouraged to participate in OOC activity, if they have the self-initiative to put themselves there. If members choose to go to OOC, they are welcome into the various discussions and Jello fights just as much as anyone else is. I skip over posts about Jason Lee and his "Tech Shop" far more often than posts by people new to OOC. But new members need the self-initiative to come to OOC, or to ask questions, or to see out help in the first place. One new member, Shalon Hurlbert, recently began asking me how to get more involved in the OOC side of STF, and I gave him every help I could in as friendly a manner as I could. He has since fought for STF4 in the OOC STF4 Birthday Party Pie Fight, has shown up in IRC numerous times now, been promoted to a DH, and is a member of the New Member Council. He has commented to me that many of the discussions in IRC are beyond him. Is that the fault of the people in IRC? No. They are discussing U.S. Politics, a fairly regular subject of conversation in IRC, and Shalon isn't well-versed in that topic. Is that his fault? Of course not. Then should the people in IRC be encouraged or forced to water down their discussion of socio-economic theory for the people in the room who can't pronounced the word "socio-economic?" Of course not.

Older members do indeed make up the majority of the news reported on MOTDs and in the media. Why? Because they are the ones doing something newsworthy. The IDir is more like to do something that everyone should know about than the Sci-3 on the USS Brandywine. The government areas of STF are where major newsworthy events take place, and the majority of the people there are members of the government. There is no regulation that only government members read Command, and in fact new members are encouraged to go to Command to see what is going on. In some cases, they come up with some very interesting ideas. I recently had a conversation via e-mail with Philip Hobday about the AO, and some of his ideas are being integrated into the AO. I did not go to him to get his opinion. I posted in Command asking if anyone had an opinion to let me know. He then took the initiative to contact me, and we discussed the AO at length.

STF should make an effort to help new members integrate into the STF Community, and any STFer should be willing to help a new member who asks for help. But that new member has to ask for help in the first place. Just as one cannot force education on a student, one cannot force STF on a new member. New members have to be responsible to take that first step to try and become a part of the STF family. If they don't, there is nothing the Academy, the NMC or a "Buddy System" can do. Neither can we ask existing members to spend their entire time helping new members. What is the purpose of being in STF if you can't have a few inside jokes with your friends that no one else gets? That's what friendship is about. If someone spends all of their time making sure that they are "newbie-friendly," they're not going to have any fun themselves. And then what purpose would they have in staying?