I have read a poem by Jane Kenyon named "Otherwise", and after contemplating
it for a period of time, I have come to the conclusion its lesson is that no
matter how great things are going right now, Finagle's Law is always waiting
just around the corner to turn everything horrible. The poem goes through the
day of a person in a concise manner, and whenever he does anything, he comments:
"It might have been otherwise."
This ties in to "Things Fall Apart" by Chinua Achebe to an incredible
amount: At the beginning of "Things Fall Apart", at least from a strictly linear
perspective, all's well and good for Okonkwo. Over time, however, this was no
longer the case - it did become otherwise. Not only that, but the chain of
events eventually culminated in Okonkwo commiting suicide.
Another example in "Things Fall Apart" is the religion war: at first, the
natives had a religion in which the dead became spirits of what could well be
called an underworld. However, when the white men from across the sea brought
their religion into the mix, it spread like an insiduous plague, even though at
first the strangers did nothing to actively promote their religion over the
natives'. By the time the natives realized what was happening, it was already
too late for them to fight back.
In fact, in both cases, the point at which the victim or victims realize
what's happening, it's already too late to turn the tide back again. In this,
one can easily be lured into believing nothing will ever change, seeing as it's
incredibly difficult to realize what's happening before the tipping point has
been reached.
However, this would be an incredibly foolish strategy, as letting nature
take its course is the surest way of ensuring the tipping point will be reached.
Although it's not easy, it's necessary to make sure we realize what's happening
before the tipping point has been reached. I believe that is the lesson the poem
is trying to teach us.
Thoughts on Exams
In middle school, exam week was hectic, horrifying, and generally insane. The classes were out-of-order and as far as I could tell followed approximately the same level of orderliness as a die roll. I could imagine the staff taking out a meter-sized six-sided die and flinging it as hard as they could down the hall.
However, I like my schedule to either not exist at all or follow a level of predictability. Unfortunately, due to my lack of psychic abilities, I am unable to see into the future and thus cannot predict the roll of a die. As a result, I often dreaded exam week, commenting frequently on my thoughts about the randomness of the class schedule.
Of course, the exams themselves were orderly and predictable, but there were three grades and only one was taking their exam at a time. This meant the other two were shuffled around in a way which coincided with the times of the normal schedule classes, but in an order which did not.
High school, on the other hand, whether because the die was too expensive or because the disorderliness was too taxing, has more orderly exam dates, where the seemingly obvious and sensible pattern is followed - everyone takes their exams at the same time.
An added benefit from the students' perspectives is that as the exams are spaced at one class to a day, the exams only run to roughly 10:30, at which point all of the students return home. However, this adds the extra risk that Finagle's Law will kick in and you forget your key while no one else is home.
Exams themselves have never been a problem for me. As one of my teachers would have put it, I'm the person who would sleep through the class, then ace the test. (Most of it involves applying elimination and common sense to the areas you're not already familiar with. An ability to recognize root words helps.) However, this presents an interesting challenge to me in itself - if I forget a book to read, or read it too fast, I end up having to sit in the middle of an area which by its very nature must have very few stimuli. As a result, I generally put a book in my book bag the day before the exams so I don't forget on my way out the door.
I bring the subject up because it just so happens my exam week starts tomorrow. Accordingly, I've put a befitting total of zero hours into studying for the exams, just as I always do. (I've always been very bad about my mental border between school and home. You can imagine how my ability to complete homework has been affected by this ... unfortunate habit.)
Happy testing to all you students!
However, I like my schedule to either not exist at all or follow a level of predictability. Unfortunately, due to my lack of psychic abilities, I am unable to see into the future and thus cannot predict the roll of a die. As a result, I often dreaded exam week, commenting frequently on my thoughts about the randomness of the class schedule.
Of course, the exams themselves were orderly and predictable, but there were three grades and only one was taking their exam at a time. This meant the other two were shuffled around in a way which coincided with the times of the normal schedule classes, but in an order which did not.
High school, on the other hand, whether because the die was too expensive or because the disorderliness was too taxing, has more orderly exam dates, where the seemingly obvious and sensible pattern is followed - everyone takes their exams at the same time.
An added benefit from the students' perspectives is that as the exams are spaced at one class to a day, the exams only run to roughly 10:30, at which point all of the students return home. However, this adds the extra risk that Finagle's Law will kick in and you forget your key while no one else is home.
Exams themselves have never been a problem for me. As one of my teachers would have put it, I'm the person who would sleep through the class, then ace the test. (Most of it involves applying elimination and common sense to the areas you're not already familiar with. An ability to recognize root words helps.) However, this presents an interesting challenge to me in itself - if I forget a book to read, or read it too fast, I end up having to sit in the middle of an area which by its very nature must have very few stimuli. As a result, I generally put a book in my book bag the day before the exams so I don't forget on my way out the door.
I bring the subject up because it just so happens my exam week starts tomorrow. Accordingly, I've put a befitting total of zero hours into studying for the exams, just as I always do. (I've always been very bad about my mental border between school and home. You can imagine how my ability to complete homework has been affected by this ... unfortunate habit.)
Happy testing to all you students!
Minecraft IV - The Last Stand
Due to an unfortunate incident involving large numbers of creepers and enough skeleton firepower to overrun a castle, I was forced to abandon Hope (the primary city of Last Stand) and fall back to Alpha Site, named after the Stargate colony which the best and brightest are to go to in the event of a worldwide catastophe such as a Goa'uld invasion. (However, that's another blog post completely and I won't go too in-depth with it.)
Unfortunately, no sooner had I arrived than a super-charged creeper appeared, no doubt a remnant of a thunderstorm which occupied the first few days of my stay. The creeper packed quite a punch, and Alpha Site was more or less destroyed. This meant I had to fall back to Beta Site.
• My life
(You would not believe the lengths I had to go to in order to get the pictures organized nicely. Eventually I reverted to manipulating the HTML by hand, because it doesn't take a Ph.D. in Blogspot.)
This is Hope Two, and for Last Stand it may be the only chance to ever reclaim a fighting stand for survival against the waves and waves of ever-advancing bad guys who would gladly end your creations even if it meant their lives.
Although I hope Hope Two is not overrun, forcing me to fall back ever further, I cannot dismiss the possibility after such unfortunate tragedies in the recent past. My only retreats now are Gamma Site, Delta Site, and End of Line... and I don't intend to lose more ground before the assault. The world was named Last Stand for a reason ... here, I make the last stand. Either they die, or I do.
Unfortunately, no sooner had I arrived than a super-charged creeper appeared, no doubt a remnant of a thunderstorm which occupied the first few days of my stay. The creeper packed quite a punch, and Alpha Site was more or less destroyed. This meant I had to fall back to Beta Site.
However, Beta Site was more or less the second of a chain of four fallbacks - only the first, Alpha Site, was within feasible distance of Hope to make work on it practical. This meant sites Beta, Gamma, and Delta are more or less crude huts with just enough to hopefully recover Alpha Site and from there make a stand for Hope.
Due to the nature of creepers, they have a tendency to overrun anywhere you've worked on signifigantly. This included Hope and Alpha Site, meaning my repair attempts were more or less in vain. After a near-fatal incident with a creeper in what used to be my place of residence in Hope, I fell back to Beta Site and renamed it Hope Two. (Hopefully I can revert the name once Hope is a city once more, rather than a remarkable blast crater.)
Although I would love to get some pictures for you to show the extent of the damage dealt to Hope and Alpha Site themselves, this would be nothing short of a suicide mission - there are no roads on which to walk, and the shadows of buildings make perfect breeding grounds for the nasties which have an irrevocable repulsion regarding my continued existence.
As a result, the pictures you are going to see are not nearly on the order of grandeur I had hoped to capture, but I'm afraid the impossibility of retrieving supplies from either Hope or Alpha Site makes large-scale rebuilding currently impossible. I've more or less been forced into a position from which I must start from scratch, which is an interesting truth in itself. However, at the moment I'm temporarily barred from taking daylit pictures by a storm. In the meantime, the list of notable items currently in my possession at Hope Two is as follows...
• One block of TNT • One bow and only eleven arrows to fire from it
• Enough apples to feed a man for half a year• My life
While I was typing, the rain let up - now I can show you Hope Two. Bear in mind this used to be a wooden shack with the absolute basic necessities short of punching trees down again, and that my lack of progress in the seventeen days after my arrival was mainly due to repeated attempts on my part to take back Hope.
 |  |
| The main house, along with an as-of-yet unfilled lava moat. | The apple tree farm a few second's walk away from the house. |
 |  |
| The secondary house, as well as the only viable way in or out. | A sign marking the quarry site. |
 |  |
| The quarry's rather shallow progression into the ground. | A birds-eye view of the compound. |
(You would not believe the lengths I had to go to in order to get the pictures organized nicely. Eventually I reverted to manipulating the HTML by hand, because it doesn't take a Ph.D. in Blogspot.)
This is Hope Two, and for Last Stand it may be the only chance to ever reclaim a fighting stand for survival against the waves and waves of ever-advancing bad guys who would gladly end your creations even if it meant their lives.
Although I hope Hope Two is not overrun, forcing me to fall back ever further, I cannot dismiss the possibility after such unfortunate tragedies in the recent past. My only retreats now are Gamma Site, Delta Site, and End of Line... and I don't intend to lose more ground before the assault. The world was named Last Stand for a reason ... here, I make the last stand. Either they die, or I do.
Politics
Politics is the art of keeping track of favors so you can rule the planet - or at least that's the way it looks from my perspective. Of course, the closer one gets to the point of planet-ruling, the harder it is to get up another rung, because everyone below you on the ladder is trying to pull you off.
Beyond that, politicians are too busy fighting each other to even allow logic to intervene. Sound laws are horribly, horribly corrupted by people trying to one-up one another to ascend just one more rung. It also seems strange that their ultimate goal is to become President - a job which has made everyone who takes up the mantle appear to age forty years in a mere four.
Why anyone would want a job whose description is basically "stress, stress, more stress, and heaping piles of stress" is beyond me. I also have no intentions of becoming a politician now or ever. I have better things to do with my life than run around thinking I'm the center of the Earth.
Although I may not think highly of politicians, they are a vital part of our governmental system - though I'll not comment on which part! In fact, the government is doing a very good job of defending its own interests, like any organism would - at this point, we have more than enough computer power to tally up all votes of the citizens of America directly, making the Electoral College technically obsolete.
Another thing I have a problem with is the sheep-like attitude of some voters. As my father would put it: "the Republicans have them [the sheep voters] firmly convinced two plus two equals seven." If all voters were to look at the best candidate for the job, that would be one thing, but I occasionally picture the majority of voters as wandering around saying "Hurr, I'm a Republican! Durr!" Taking and holding one opinion and never allowing anyone to tell you an argument against it seems to me a dangerous case of self-concietedness and not to be encouraged.
I'm bad at endings, so here's a picture of ABC's logo!
<random>
</random>
Beyond that, politicians are too busy fighting each other to even allow logic to intervene. Sound laws are horribly, horribly corrupted by people trying to one-up one another to ascend just one more rung. It also seems strange that their ultimate goal is to become President - a job which has made everyone who takes up the mantle appear to age forty years in a mere four.
Why anyone would want a job whose description is basically "stress, stress, more stress, and heaping piles of stress" is beyond me. I also have no intentions of becoming a politician now or ever. I have better things to do with my life than run around thinking I'm the center of the Earth.
Although I may not think highly of politicians, they are a vital part of our governmental system - though I'll not comment on which part! In fact, the government is doing a very good job of defending its own interests, like any organism would - at this point, we have more than enough computer power to tally up all votes of the citizens of America directly, making the Electoral College technically obsolete.
Another thing I have a problem with is the sheep-like attitude of some voters. As my father would put it: "the Republicans have them [the sheep voters] firmly convinced two plus two equals seven." If all voters were to look at the best candidate for the job, that would be one thing, but I occasionally picture the majority of voters as wandering around saying "Hurr, I'm a Republican! Durr!" Taking and holding one opinion and never allowing anyone to tell you an argument against it seems to me a dangerous case of self-concietedness and not to be encouraged.
I'm bad at endings, so here's a picture of ABC's logo!
<random>
 |
| Yay, randomly random randomness! |
</random>
Minecraft III
This time around, I'll try to explain it from the bottom up. I looked back at the last two and it looks like trying explaining TCP-IP to someone who doesn't know what the Internet is.
At the very bottom of what Minecraft is there is a three-dimensional grid of effectively infinite size. This grid is filled with possibly the most basic three-dimensional object save a sphere: the cube. These cubes are one meter on a side and are lined up to one another to infinity. These cubes come in four basic variaties - air, dirt, stone, and sand. All blocks a first-time player will have to deal with in their first playing hour are either one of these four, or easily definable as a sub-block of one of them.
The grid is 128 meters from top to bottom, and the surface area of the world is approximately eight times the surface of the Earth - although your computer would have run out of memory long before you got anywhere near that!
The Player can break any block with the left button of the mouse and can place a block with the right button. However, there is one exception - Bedrock cannot be broken and is therefore unobtainable and unplaceable. These blocks are used to create structures of the player's designation.
The first structure will be a very basic house created by the Player in a frantic hurry to get into safety before the first night falls and may be nothing more than a mud-hut dug into the ground. The largest first-day house I've ever successfully completed was fairly large for one day's work. (It helps to spawn in a forest.)
Chances are the Player won't be able to put windows into his house on the first day, which makes the GURRRs and UUUGHs of the zombies outside even more terrifying. What's worse is that it means the player has basically no way of knowing whether a creeper is sneaking around the house (which they love to do!) waiting for the Player to re-emerge. The Creeper makes sounds very similar to the Spider, but to an inexperienced player they may sound effectively the same. The Zombie sounds like someone moaning the word "brains..." and the zombie sounds like a windchime, but the spider and creeper both sound effectively the same - an unnerving hiss. The only real difference is that the Spider's hissing is longer and tends to change pitch halfway through, while the Creeper's is shorter and generally stays roughly the same pitch. (Note: pitch does not mean volume!)
The unexperienced Player may also find it unnecessary to hide in a hole while the night passes. They won't make that mistake a second time... unless they do in which case they won't have a house any more.
There also exists the capability to craft objects from other objects. One block of wood will turn into four plank blocks, which can be placed in a two by two square to make a workbench, essential for all tool-making...
...such as the pickaxe. Most of the objects one can craft in Minecraft are made by simply making it 'look right', as one Minecrafter puts it. For example, an axe looks like an axe on the crafting grid, as does a workbench or a pickaxe. Some things are borderline - a furnace is a cobblestone chest - but only so much detail can fit into a 3x3 area.
The furnace is another basic necessity - one needs it to get ores into a utilizable state. Some people have a room of 8000 furnaces, but I've found that to be a sign of lack of management abilities rather than a sign of wealth or progress. Personally I rarely have more than four furnaces in a single dwelling, although Last Stand - the oldest save I still have and one of my pinnacle achievements in Minecraft - probably has 8000 furnaces, seeing as there are more dwellings in it than I care to admit.
Minecraft IV, two posts from now, will take you through a small area of Last Stand. Until then, may your swords stay sharp and your creepers stay away!
At the very bottom of what Minecraft is there is a three-dimensional grid of effectively infinite size. This grid is filled with possibly the most basic three-dimensional object save a sphere: the cube. These cubes are one meter on a side and are lined up to one another to infinity. These cubes come in four basic variaties - air, dirt, stone, and sand. All blocks a first-time player will have to deal with in their first playing hour are either one of these four, or easily definable as a sub-block of one of them.
The grid is 128 meters from top to bottom, and the surface area of the world is approximately eight times the surface of the Earth - although your computer would have run out of memory long before you got anywhere near that!
The Player can break any block with the left button of the mouse and can place a block with the right button. However, there is one exception - Bedrock cannot be broken and is therefore unobtainable and unplaceable. These blocks are used to create structures of the player's designation.
The first structure will be a very basic house created by the Player in a frantic hurry to get into safety before the first night falls and may be nothing more than a mud-hut dug into the ground. The largest first-day house I've ever successfully completed was fairly large for one day's work. (It helps to spawn in a forest.)
Chances are the Player won't be able to put windows into his house on the first day, which makes the GURRRs and UUUGHs of the zombies outside even more terrifying. What's worse is that it means the player has basically no way of knowing whether a creeper is sneaking around the house (which they love to do!) waiting for the Player to re-emerge. The Creeper makes sounds very similar to the Spider, but to an inexperienced player they may sound effectively the same. The Zombie sounds like someone moaning the word "brains..." and the zombie sounds like a windchime, but the spider and creeper both sound effectively the same - an unnerving hiss. The only real difference is that the Spider's hissing is longer and tends to change pitch halfway through, while the Creeper's is shorter and generally stays roughly the same pitch. (Note: pitch does not mean volume!)
The unexperienced Player may also find it unnecessary to hide in a hole while the night passes. They won't make that mistake a second time... unless they do in which case they won't have a house any more.
There also exists the capability to craft objects from other objects. One block of wood will turn into four plank blocks, which can be placed in a two by two square to make a workbench, essential for all tool-making...
...such as the pickaxe. Most of the objects one can craft in Minecraft are made by simply making it 'look right', as one Minecrafter puts it. For example, an axe looks like an axe on the crafting grid, as does a workbench or a pickaxe. Some things are borderline - a furnace is a cobblestone chest - but only so much detail can fit into a 3x3 area.
The furnace is another basic necessity - one needs it to get ores into a utilizable state. Some people have a room of 8000 furnaces, but I've found that to be a sign of lack of management abilities rather than a sign of wealth or progress. Personally I rarely have more than four furnaces in a single dwelling, although Last Stand - the oldest save I still have and one of my pinnacle achievements in Minecraft - probably has 8000 furnaces, seeing as there are more dwellings in it than I care to admit.
Minecraft IV, two posts from now, will take you through a small area of Last Stand. Until then, may your swords stay sharp and your creepers stay away!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)