King can’t take because a bishop is looking in her direction from half a mile away.

I’ve gotten into chess for the past year, and while I used Lichess for a little bit, I wound up going with chess.com primarily instead. The app is great. The learning modules are really helpful, and I love the puzzles.

It also has tens of millions of users on the platform, so your matchmaking is going to be more accurate, whether you need to be matched with opponents who just learned how the pieces move, all the way up to the top professional players.

As for outside resources, I’ve been mostly learning from random masters/GMs that have youtube channels.

We need a fourth, derpy-er dragon.

This is great. I have a new daily game to play. Thanks for sharing!

I’ve found that doing a metric ton of puzzles has greatly improved my tactics when I’m playing “recklessly”. It helps your board vision and you’ll generally have a better feel for what you can safely attack.

As far as playing too defensively, maybe finding an opening that leads to a natural attacking plan would be helpful. I’ve been really enjoying Queen’s pawn openings that point all of your pieces toward the opponent’s castled king, so even though I’m playing “safely”, I’m still creating threats.

This is why I love TNG so much. Even though TOS is the original that laid the groundwork for everything, TNG took that “boundless optimism” and ran with it. Watching TNG inspires me to continue to self-improve and encourage it in others.

Yeah, there’s a singular implied “universal morality” throughout Star Trek of accepting diversity and learning to not impose on other civilizations or each other on the basis of one’s biological differences or culture, even for Klingons! I’d say the rest is hard to define and subjective, as @ValueSubtracted@startrek.website said above, but post-scarcity and free agency in life to follow your passions has to be pretty close!

That’s a good point. I think this contrast between individual (often flawed) human judgment vs collectivist ideals has always been a theme. In TOS, you see Kirk calming McCoy’s knee-jerk reactions almost every episode. In TNG, it was Yar or Worf. In DS9, probably Kira.

Even then, I would say the collectivist ideals (i.e. Starfleet regulations) were more often portrayed as overly-cumbersome in implementation, which leads to someone like Kirk violating the rules in place of the ideals that they stand for. For example, how many naïve (but well-meaning) diplomats do we see in TOS or TNG? However, rules being restrictive or imperfect in an effort to support larger agreed-upon morals can still be trusted, compared to corrupt power structures, which cannot.

Ah damn, sorry about the paywall. It let me hit “continue reading” on mobile, but I know sometimes these types of sites can be inconsistent.

It’s just another tired bit about how following orders and perfect institutions are what Star Trek is really about, to hell with any evidence to the contrary.

I’d argue that the theme is less about following orders and more We are all individually flawed and are at our best when we follow our shared values - which is represented by both Starfleet and the utopian setting as a whole.

I can see the argument (for fiction and real life), that as we trust institutions less, our focus becomes more on individual judgement rather than collectivist ideas. It also tracks for me that as this occurs in real life, our media would reflect individualism more and more.

I’ve admittedly still only watched up through the 90s, but I’d definitely say that DS9 depicted a significantly more “morally gray” version of Starfleet than TOS or TNG.

I think the point the author is making is that the extent to which this idea gets explored is reflective of our society’s growing mistrust of institutions IRL, rather than suggesting the theme has never been explored.

Thanks for the input - that’s exactly my dilemma. I’ve been posting on AnarchyChess too, but the AnarchyChess from reddit that inspired the AnarchyChess community on lemmy was more for highly ironic shitposting, so depending on how strict we want to be, this comic and normal memes wouldn’t really work there.

There doesn’t seem to be a separate “Chess Memes” community on Lemmy yet, and I suppose I could just create one, but I also don’t know if the need is there to split the already small communities again. For now, I figure I’ll just feel out what the mods/communities in @chess@lemmy.ml and @AnarchyChess@sopuli.xyz want.

I have a new favorite comic now

After playing online for a while, every time I go back to a real life board, I feel blind! It’s an adjustment.

I’ve been thinking of hitting up a local chess club at a bar too and will probably have the same problem.

I hope you enjoy it! Maybe by the time you finish TNG, you’ll have switched “sides”!

Why aren’t we fixing this?!

Oh, hey satan

This sounds like good advice. I guess I need to learn my openings well enough to play them quicker and quicker. Reminds me of learning to play something complicated on a musical instrument: you don’t start at full speed, your learn it at a slow tempo first and then speed it up.