The perils of a Minecraft addict

Something funny happened a few weeks ago: I got addicted to the ugliest computer game that has been released in the past few years. The damn thing is ugly. And that’s how it gets you.

After a friend keeps bugging you to check it out, you take a look at it. First reaction? It’s fugly, but you still decide to click around a little bit.

The next thing you know, it’s 4:45 AM ON A WEEKDAY and you are desperately building up defenses trying to fend off the critters that come out whenever the game switches to night time. The worst thing is that this cycle is very repeatable, everywhere I look I find people that got sucked in the exact way. You are not truly addicted to a game until you skip naps or real sleep in order to play it.

Alex Esoterica calls it a “sickness.” Here’s an example of one of my very first rudimentary structures:

That started as a wall in front of a hole in a mountain. Then I added a roof, then a second floor, and then it got crazy:

Notice how the damn thing is now taller than some of the clouds, and I actually dug underneath and built a whole atrium. The lake? It has a glass dam. I thought that by then I had it out of my system, but I was wrong:

This was generated with the Minecraft Topographic Survey tool, it shows my tower and the area behind it. Notice the elevated walkways with glass handrails, and a frickin pyramid. And then it got even crazier:

I dug around the pyramid and built DOWNWARDS, plus the transportation network now reaches the pyramid (and many more points on the map), plus two more buildings. And a diverted waterfall, which now rides a glass viaduct.

And these are only the things you can see from the outside. I am not even showing you the mines that reach down to the very bottom of the map.

So yes, a sickness it is.

On sleep deprivation and Incan Monkey Gods

From: Dilbert comic strip for 08/03/1992 from the official Dilbert comic strips archive. I was trying to show this strip to a coworker who is dangerously toying with the harsh mistress that is Insomnia. What shocked me is how quickly I was able to look up the strip, which was published when he was just 11 years old, and two weeks before my just-out-of-college ass shipped out to US Army Basic Training.

The Black Hole

If this was a minigolf hole, you can't reach B from A. Ever. If this was a room lined with mirrors, and you lit a candle at point A, you can't see it from B, not even reflected. Update: I guess I didn't explain this all the way through. You can't reach B from A with just one stroke, there's no direct line between them, and there is no way to bounce the ball (assuming perfect conditions). Thanks to Ben for pointing this obvious error.

Add custom speed settings to your ifit map workout

Ifit.com allows you to build a workout walk/race/bike route simply by clicking on a Google Maps interface. You can then use a compatible ifit-enabled workout machine to recreate the route automatically. The problem is that the user interface still isn't final, so there are features in place that aren't exactly obvious. For example, if you create a workout your machine starts at 1 MPH, because that's the default. But how to set it to start at say, 3 MPH? Easy, just switch from map view to graph view: That button switches from the Google Maps interface to a chart that allows you to visualize and control effort: You can't change the elevation, this is fixed due to the geography that you selected. But you can drag the yellow (speed line) to change the speed of your device. What if you want to have segments at different speeds? Easy, just click and drag and it will break the line, and you can drag each segment of the line independently: ...

The Insomniac Coder

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