efaardvark

Wait.. what? Minecraft and Kerbal Space Program.. two of my favorite games!

I need to get back to MC. This last week or so real-life has been way too intrusive. I haven't even downloaded the the 1.5 "Dressed for Success" update for kerbal space program yet!

I don't either usually. In this case I'm mining snow for snowballs. Blazes are (relatively) easy to kill with snowballs. I want to try making a snowman in the nether too, though I'm sure it won't last too long. Maybe I should try a splash potion of fire resistance on it?

THERE'S A POLAR BEAR IN MY BOAT!

Been there, done that. Never did get the hang of it. (Hope that's not too discouraging.) I can make a sandwich. Sometimes I can even successfully heat soup in the microwave. Beyond that.. best not push it. I don't even have the BBQ gene that a lot of guys seem to have. My ancestors must have been the fruit-eaters because that's the only way they could have survived.

Amanchu! Kind of a Sawako goes scuba diving thing so far.

We used to get really into Halloween here. When I was in high school especially a bunch of us would get together and spend a week buying/making some cool costumes, decorating the yard, and fixing up the porch and front room as something spooky. One year it was Dracula's bedroom. Another year it was a witch's lair. Etc. All of us are/were D&D players and half of us SCA members so sometimes we got pretty into it. We had an all-you-can-carry candy policy. If you could get to the cauldron filled with the candy you could have your pick of what was there and take as much as you could carry in two hands. Of course you had to do this while about half a dozen or so of us energetic highschoolers dressed as werewolves and zombies (or worse) tried to scare the crap out of you. We were motivated because we got to eat whatever candy was left. Unfortunately we've all scattered to the four winds since our school years ended so we don't do that sort of thing any more. Even now though we occasionally get parents who were kids back then bringing their own kids to see if that haunted house is doing anything special this year. I do have a few electronic gizmos that I usually set out that do "fun" things based on sound or motion triggers - arduinos are great for that kind of thing - and I still decorate the yard and porch somewhat. Nothing approaching our glory days however. It is usually just me and my brother and we don't have either the time or the energy. In the last few years it seems like fewer people are out doing the neighborhood trick-or-treat thing anyway in favor of going someplace "official" like Knott's Scary Farm or Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights. (I'm about 20 minutes from Universal in Hollywood and maybe twice that from Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park.)

Getting into the Halloween spirit a bit early with this pic.... Too bad you can't tame bats & have them hang out in/around your constructions.

I like exploring the overworld so I like having a bunch of tamed wolves with me. They'll attack skeletons on their own, and any mob (except creepers) that attacks you. Really handy early on when you have wimpy armor and weapons. Also good any time when you're low on health.. you can just hit a mob and then back off and your wolves will take care of the rest for you. They need meat to restore their health, but will happily accept zombie flesh so pretty easy to take care of. Beyond that you might want to watch this guy's mc survival-mode let's play episodes... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yQqNCOYfJo&list=PLbFBnggbJ1rnaXljgzhGm0p_Co9kwfs3t Pretty fast-paced, based on vanilla 1.13, and full of little tips & tricks.

Find a plains biome and just wander around shearing everything in sight. I did that just recently and wound up with about 5 stacks* of wool in various colors in only an hour or so of play. Used up one set of shears completely. Especially with large biomes you can do a circuit. Just find out where the groups of sheep are and visit them one after the other, starting back at the beginning when you're done. By then the first sheep you sheared will have regrown their wool and you can keep going until you have as much wool as you need. I've become the master of the drive-by shear. *No sheep were harmed in the making of said stacks.

Tracking where the user is looking, called "foveal tracking" would also help in non-game applications like telepresence. One of the big complaints about things like using a webcam for teleconferencing is that the users never seem to be making eye contact with each other. In a typical setup with a webcam mounted above or next to your screen, if you're looking at your screen then to the other member(s) of the conference it looks like you're staring somewhere else and not paying attention. To make it look like you're actually looking at the other members you would have to look at your camera lens, which of course means you're NOT looking at the image of the speaker (or powerpoint slide, etc.). Actors are trained to look AT the camera for this very reason, to connect with the viewing audience. There have actually been attempts to build video cameras into the center of screens to help with this effect. That doesn't work well for a variety of reasons. This doesn't get much better in current VR setups either. They can tell where the head is and where it is pointed, then render that information into the scene correctly, but that's not quite enough. Your avatar in a VR meeting room might have a head and eyes, but typically the eyes are rendered to appear as if the user is looking straight ahead. This tends to give everyone a sort of fixed-stare look, and make VR meeting rooms seem full of creepy zombie-like people who can only stare straight ahead. FV is an active area of research for the VR crowd for performance reasons as well. VR requires high resolutions and 90 FPS is the *minimum* if you don't want to risk bad effects like motion sickness. That's a lot of pixels updated very rapidly, but you really don't need to render at full resolution over the whole screen. Your eyes can only appreciate that level of detail in the relatively small area of the screen that you're actually looking at. As you move away from that area out towards your peripheral vision the level of detail required drops drastically, at least in terms of resolution. If the computer could somehow know where the user is looking then it could spend a lot of time updating only those pixels in the part of the screen that is currently being looked at and spend less time on the rest. That could cut down on the overall processing requirements, which in turn can help with things like weight of the headset, increasing battery life, increasing screen size for larger field of view, etc. If you have foveal tracking then that not only has the benefits of lowering the compute requirements for rendering the frame/scene, but if the computer knows where your eyes are pointing as well as where your head is pointing then it can also render the eyes pointing independently of the head. Suddenly that VR meeting room seems filled with actual people who appear to make eye contact and actually be paying attention, instead of just a bunch of zombies.

Same here. Anything pasta-y really. If it is noodly I'll probably eat way too much of it. Maybe I should be a Pastafarian?

The map generation algo has been reverse-engineered. If you know the world seed you can plug it in to someplace like chunkbase and go "exploring" that way. Once you know where to go it is just a matter of getting there in-game. I don't usually do that myself because I like the process of exploring in-game, but it is an option if you get really stuck. Sometimes I'll do it if I've been exploring for a long time and still can't find what I'm looking for. I often don't do the map thing either, since that requires redstone and deep mining seems too much like grinding for my tastes. (I know, It is called "minecraft". What can I say?) Usually I just craft up a bunch of torches as soon as I get a stack of charcoal and go blaze a trail. I'm a master of the 3x3 mud hut build. The only other way I know of to get redstone is from witch drops, and I'll make a map if I happen to get some redstone that way, but witches are rare and usually more trouble than they're worth to hunt until I can get a decently enchanted bow. By then I've usually already explored quite a bit and don't really need the map. I have to admit that a nice big map of the area around the world spawn point does look good on the wall back at home base though. For its time it was awesome, and Notch was one of my most favorite people for a long time. There's so much more to the game than first meets the eye. Yeah, there's games that look better visually. There's so much depth and multi-dimensional play-ability, especially in the multiplayer aspect, to MC however. It doesn't matter what age or gamer level distribution you have in your group, there's something for everyone. Kids can play with their parents in creative mode. Even in survival, people that don't like fighting mobs can craft and build away to their hearts' content in areas cleared and made safe and supplied by people who don't mind that sort of thing. For the hard-core gamers.. well, there's a mode for those people too. There's so many different ways to play with MC that pretty much everyone is bound to find some play style that suits them. I'm less thrilled that MSFT now owns the franchise, and I think that's where at least some of the animosity comes from. So far they haven't broken the main game though, or tried their typical embrace-extend-extinguish tactics. Even now 1.13 still works perfectly well on my linux system - albeit still requiring Sun/Oracle's ancient java 8 - and there's a thriving market for 3rd-party servers. With Bedrock they've covered most of the console and mobile userbase, even including cross-platform playability. (Though I do wish that they would somehow enable cross-play between PCs and console/mobile.) Realms is a super easy way to allow people to play together online, even for novice computer users. The updates have even enhanced the game. That's good enough for me. I don't need photo-realistic rendering to have fun. In fact, about the only big technical feature request that I'd have them add would be a good in-game voice-chat system that actually rendered the sound according to the environment along with the visuals. I've tried out mc in a VR setup and I think having that feature in a VR minecraft would take things to the next level. Again.

Finally found a swamp biome! I've been looking for a swamp so I can make slime blocks and leads for a couple weeks now. We're playing with large biomes in a survival game and it really makes gathering the raw material challenging sometimes. Fun - I like exploring, especially with so much new content in the game to discover - but time consuming. Still looking for a jungle too... so I can make cookies.

Not in the immediate future, and not as a consumer item even when it does get here. At least not at first. There are already medical devices like cochlear and retinal implants that interface with nerves in primitive ways. There's also experimental devices that can do things like read your general emotional state, or be used to control "peripheral" devices like robotic arms and legs, or a motorized wheelchair, or operate a keyboard/mouse to use a computer. There's also been experiments with hippocampal prosthesis. (The hippocampus is the brain structure that is associated with the autonomic nervous system, emotion, and especially memory.) So far most of these are implanted devices because the further you place the sensor from the nerve the harder it is to get a clean signal, and the harder it is to deliver a signal to where you want it. A lot of that (though not all by any means) can be overcome with better signal processing, and computers are getting better all the time. We're still a long way - several decades I'd say - from being able to just put on a headset and go full-dive into a game however. In another decade or so you might be able to get brain implant that allows you to connect an external device to accomplish the same thing, but it'll be expensive and not without risk. Not something you would likely do casually, like so you can play a game. I think the biggest impediment to this sort of thing now is that we just don't know how the brain works in enough detail to implement this sort of device. We've only in the last few years even been able to start getting the kind of data that lets us start figuring this stuff out. It is going to take a while to figure it all out, then some more time to figure out how to do something like a Nerve Gear safely. That said, existing VR gear is already pretty good, and getting better. It isn't "full-dive" by any stretch, but it is good enough to bypass the cerebellum and fool the deeper parts of your brain in certain ways that really facilitate presence and suspension of disbelief, which is really all you're after in a gaming context. You can easily make people fall over or get motion sick with today's gear. Even though they know it isn't real, the automatic parts of peoples' brains get the signal and reflexively respond without waiting for confirmation from the cortex. If done right this sort of thing is very cool. If not, well, I'm waiting for the VR version of "nintendo thumb" to be announced. (In fact, a lot of VR research these days is being focused on how to avoid doing those sorts of things unintentionally.)

Made with 100% genuine wool from a pink sheep. None of this dyed-after-the-fact stuff. Accept no imitations! X

Hello, and welcome!

Behold, the legendary PINK SHEEP in its native habitat... Next week... Herobrine! (Assuming they haven't removed him in 1.13. )

I don't think it is a good idea to put toxic substances in my body, even for recreational purposes. Part of it is my dad. He smoked, drank, and ultimately died of throat cancer. Good example of what NOT to do. I've also seen some of my friends really screw up their lives with various drugs, including alcohol. Even before all of those examples however I wasn't big on drinking. Yeah, when I was young and stupid I did experiment a bunch. Pretty quickly though I decided that things like drinking, especially to excess, are just not a good idea. It isn't like I never drink, and I never liked the people who say that those who drink are bad people just because they drink*, but to me alcohol is just like tobacco, mj, and all the other drugs. Just not worth it. Not worth the risk. Not worth the expense. Not worth the wasted** time, both the high-time and the recovery time. I have better things to do with my life. (*though you might be a bad person if you do bad things while drunk or on drugs and, knowing that, don't stop drinking/doing drugs.) (**no pun intended )

Least favorite.. aside from summon-only mobs like Ender Dragons or withers? Least favorite is probably things like phantoms, and ghasts, because they can fly. Easiest is probably skeletons, especially with a pack of dogs/wolves, but zombies are almost as easy and have (slightly) better drops. It really depends on what I'm equipped with/ready for though. Attacking a blaze is kind of tough unless you have snowballs for instance. Getting surprised by a creeper is always bad, but hunting them with a bow or an axe is easy. It just depends.

Tamed wolves... love having them around when I'm out mob-hunting, but sometimes they're just too in-my-face when I'm trying to build stuff!

That's why I like sandbox games like MC where you can build stuff according to your own plan. Not that we actually have a plan. But yes, we do have fun.