I love minecraft, over the 12 years i have been playing it, i don't think i have had more then a months break from it. And i don't think i've gone even a day without consuming content from the community. The game has certainly changed from what it was;

AND THAT'S A GOOD THING!

I have been seeing more and more people complaining about modern minecraft; too many blocks, too many things to do, too different from what it was.
And that's fine, i don't mind people having those views, what i do mind is them Constantly treating them as fact!

So i am going to talk about the good things about modern minecraft that i love:

• So many blocks! I love so many blocks!
      A recent video essay i watched said this:
     

  The question i always asked myself was "what can i make with these blocks?" the more that was added the more the question became "what blocks will i use to build this?"

   
      and to that i say? so? you have the power to restrict block types, or experement with including more then you usually do. BdoubleO100 is amazing at this, in a recent hermitcraft episode^[1] he mixed 15 different blocks into a single wall, not including detailing, and it looks like one of the most cohesive and unified walls i have ever seen in minecraft! you do not have to use the new blocks, often at the begining of a world you can't, and that is fun! but choice is also fun and you have the choice on whether to use them or not. Minecraft is full of wonderful and creative blocks and you should try them out, because you just

i added a kudos button to my posts, so you can tell me if you liked them, i think its very cool and just something fun c:

I have been exploring the small web recently, and i wanted to share my journey because an important aspect of both the old and small web is linking to other sites!

erich-friedman.github.io, A personal site of one Erich Friedman, he does a lot of different things and they are all things he is interested in. you may have heard it from his shape packing page!

search.marginalia.nu, A small web search engine! a big part of my current small web exploration

learnxinyminutes.com, A website that teaches you a bunch of tech tools and in a bunch of languages

neocities.org, While not exactly a small web site, and is relatively well known, it hosts a lot of sites that are on the small web and does so for free! on of the most important sites of the current internet imo.

neal.fun, Again a well known small-web site, it has a bunch of different little games but my personal favorite page is his exploration of dark patterns!

how-i-experience-web-today.com, In the same vein as neils dark patterns page, this explores how bloated the main web has become, and my experience seeing the mainweb become what it is, is why small web is important to me!

if you want to join the small web, i suggest making a website on neocities, and making it by hand. i find the joy in creating websites is the same in painting, sure i could have a computer do it for me but the process is as important as the result for me! I plan to eventually make a guide in a style that i think actually works, giving you the pieces rather

A. Daily Affirmations

a. How fortunate i am that in this life i am one who has been allowed to creat fun with minecraft.
b. It is my Responsability to create peace, beauty and love with minecraft.

B. I Will Be Kind to Myself

a. IT IS ONLY GAME
b. No matter the level of my minecraft experience, how good or bad i think i am, i tis only minecraft and i am a beautiful person
c. I will not compare myself with my fellow players, if they make amazing builds i will enjoy it and be thankful and proud that i am a member of this community.
d. There will always be someone more minecraft skills than my own as there will always be those with less

C. Reasons to Play Minecraft

a. To contribute to the world's spiritual growth.
b. To contribute to my own self discovery and spiritual growth.
c. To pay homage to all great minecrafters, past and present who have added beauty to the world.

D. Rid yourself of the following reasons to play minecraft

a. To be the best
b. To be "Hip"
c. To hurt others
d. To get rich or famous

So, i do commissions in several media forms, and i usually charge an estimate based on hourly pay. 
For art, thats very easy, as krita happily records time worked on a project! 

However, i also program, and that doesn't really have a built in timer. so yesterday i buckled down and built one!

Worklog

Worklog is a simple cli program that logs your time worked, with five simple commands. init start stop milestone and list. One of the big design ethos i decided on for the program is i wanted the log file itself to be human readable, partly because i believe that most software should store data agnostically to the software that created it, and also because i wished to have an easy time to edit it so that i could correct issues.
As a result, the work log can look like this^*:

Thu 01 Jun 2023 17:41:03 AEDT / 05:00:00
---
Thu 27 Jul 2023 17:41:03 AEDT / 03:00:00
---
Fri 06 Oct 2023 17:41:03 AEDT / 00:15:00
Fri 06 Oct 2023 18:41:03 AEDT / 00:20:00
---
Wed 18 Oct 2023 17:47:21 AEDT / 00:10:00

^* This log was created after the project it is logging was completed, so the times are genetic and innacurate

Each line either has a date and duration, split by a forward slash, or three dashes representing a milestone.
Milestones, I decided, were to be a way to have subtotals of time in your project, for example running worklog list with the above worklog provides this output:

05:00:00
03:00:00
00:35:00
00:10:00
———
total:
08:45:00

This allows me to, for example, return to the same project on multiple

Waste Eater

Author: cain

Year: 2023

Link To Game

Waste eaters is a very unique game that really speaks to my feelings.

Through it's controlled pacing, it's slow dialogue, and it's simple graphics it evokes really strong emotions about purposelessness.
The art style and sound design are beautiful, especially as a pixel artist myself. You won't find any music in this game, its not that kind of game.

The concepts of body horror, of transhumanism, and of being treated as lesser for it all speak to me on a fundamental level as a disabled nonbinary not quite human creature. While in the story of Waste Eater these are by choice, these were not by choice for me, and yet there is still interesting collisions and matching between these two concepts.

In Waste Eater, the character you play has taken upon themself, along with many others, a last ditch attempt to save the world. And no one thought it would work, and yet it did. I also have made last ditch attempts that worked, and i have also struggled in the results of them even if they worked.
Cenno is my last ditch attempt. It bars me from getting well paying work, it is not enough to live on, and yet like in Waste Eater, it worked. I am alive, it is better then the alternitve, its a net positive. And yet it is still a painful thing. I am still suffering, I am still poor, but i often have to face the thought "I should be glad."
In the end, i don't have to be. I'm allowed to be mad, angry, to want to live. Waste Eater expresses these

Inspired by my friend the rats, i have created a theming system for my site!
Currently i just have the default, "starscape" theme, and a y2k theme,  but i may add more in the future!

(you can click the dashed box in the nav menu to change the theme!)

I have done this using the magic of CSS and JavaScript. While i'd love to do it without js completely thats just not possible :'c

I wrote up some code to demonstrate how this might be done, it is as follows:

html:

<body theme="">
  <div>
  <label for=theme>theme:</label>
  <select id=theme onchange="document.body.setAttribute('theme',this.value);localStorage.setItem('theme', this.value)">
    <option value=red> red </option>
    <option value=green> green </option>
    <option value=blue> blue </option>
  </select>
  </div>
</body>

css:

body[theme=red]{
  background: pink;
}
body[theme=green]{
  background: aquamarine;
}
body[theme=blue]{
  background: skyblue;
}
html, body{
  height: 100%;
  padding: 0;
  margin: 0;
  transition-duration: 0.2s;
}
body{
  display: flex;
  justify-content:center;align-items:center;
}

div {
  background-color: white;
  padding: 3ch;
  border-radius: 1ch;
}

and javascript:

window.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => {
  let theme = localStorage.getItem("theme")
  document.body.setAttribute('theme', theme ?? "red")
  document.querySelector("#theme").value = theme ?? "red";
})

This results in the following:

Refresh Example Page

if you have any more ideas for themes, let me know! this was really fun to do, and thanks again to my friends the rats

There have been some recent developments in minecraft redstone, that is that we can now automate jukeboxes. This at a glance seems cool but i believe it is going to lead to a revolution in redstone computing.

Previously, we could only store 4 bits per inventory slot, using shulkerboxes. this was done by filling shulkerboxes with certain amounts of items in order to have them output certain signals, from 1-16 1-15, with a dummy item (such as a shovel) acting as a 0. this allowed us to store 108 bits in a single chest, or 75 chests for a single kilobyte.
Now we can store 108 bits in a single shulkerbox, by using music discs. as when played in a jukebox they can output signals 1-16 1-15. this is massive, as it allows us to use shulkerboxes as containers rather then nibbles^[1], allowing us to compact our data down by 27x. that's 2916 bits per chest, or 3 chests per kilobyte.

Along with this increase in data density, we also have an increase in read and write speed! read speed has increased to 20 bps from 5 bps ^[2]. write speed i have not calculated but i imagine it can be faster then hopper speed (10 bps) using instant dropper lines, which at that point it would only be a matter how how fast you can request data to be written.

with all of these changes, im expecting to see a boom in redstone computing soon! and i can say i am Very excited!

Today marks the day that i have fully repaired my pebble steel!
It took some time, and i didn't take photos because i did it for me not for the content.

When i got my pebble, the first thing i did was learnt to make a watch face! C is a somewhat known language to me but im def still learning, so there were a few weird mishaps. but i defintely have to thank the rebble discord for helping me learn!
My watch face took a few days, and im still tweaking it, however it is so fun to learn a newish language, and solve problems, so i can wear my own art!

as well as that, i have also done some hardware repairs to the watch! this previous wensday i went to a watch shop, and had them replace the old screws (torx t3) as one was stripped and needed removal and replacement, after that i opened it up, careful not to pull the vibration motor off, and stuck some folded up paper in the back. this was to reduce screen taring while i waited on my replacement zebra strip to arrive.
Today that part arrived, so i opened up my watch again and took the whole thing apart! the hardest part was probably slipping the new zebra strip into place, as it was thicker then the original (which was intentional), however i managed to squeeze it back into the motherboard and return everything to its regular place.

I still have a piece of paper with one fold in the back, down from 6 before repairs, just to make certain screen taring remains a thing of the past.

I'm not sure what i will do in future with this watch

As you may have noticed if you have looked at this page before now, i updated my blog somewhat! now you can see a fair bit of the post!

this was inspired by my friend rats, who has been starting to post to their own site too! it made me happy and i decided i want to post my longer form things that aren't structured articles, like this.

Later, i plan to talk some about my journey with my new pebble steel, both in software which i am experienced in, and hardware which i am not. i have already done some bodge repairs, while i wait for parts to arrive, but i hope it will be good in the future!