Skip to main content

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:

2010-09-25_001134

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:

2010-09-26_233140

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:

2010-09-27_233743

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:

2010-10-03_184945

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.

Related articles by Zemanta

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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.
Post a Comment
Read more

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: ...
1 comment
Read more

All the President's men: Obama enjoys 20-MAN motorcade and splashes $1.5m on Hawaiian holiday | Mail Online

All the President's men: Obama enjoys 20-MAN motorcade and splashes $1.5m on Hawaiian holiday | Mail Online This is just silly. If you are the President of the United States, and you want to impress your childhood friends, why go through the trouble of flying down to meet them? Especially since the country is having a rough time lately, that's a lot of money! Here's how I would had done it: Find the next "VIP" government flight between Hawaii and DC that still had two seats left. Put the two guys on that flight, if anyone asks about them they are "under Presidential Orders." When they get to DC, pick them up in a Secret Service Yukon and drive them to either Blair House or the White House, where they'll stay as guests for a weekend or whatever. Plus they get to hang out with their buddy who happens to be the President of the United States. And all of this at very little cost to the taxpayer, since the VIP flights would had happened regardless, the fr...
3 comments
Read more