Top 6 Greatest Minecraft Creations

I'm not sure if there's not much point in making this post because I'm guessing that at most only about eight or so people I know would read this and find it interesting. So to those eight people, this post is made just for you. I hope you like it.

#6 Halnicholas' USS Enterprise

The reason I put this up first is because it was the first Minecraft creation that left my mouth hanging open because it was so huge (safe). This was made when Minecraft was still in Alpha (though the creation is made in Classic) so this was before people had crazy mods and stuff to design massive epic structures. I think this was the first project of its scale ever made. An early milestone of Minecraft creations.

#5 Minecraft Cathedral by 'Sunflower'

Original forum thread and more images here. (I think the server on which this is built is still open to public).

The guy who built this (I'm guessing it was a dude) writes that he is a 'field expert in historical architectural theory and design' and that this cathedral takes inspiration from 'from Chartres, Amiens, Rouen, and Notre Dame de' Paris, and my experience studying and designing churches in real life'. This is quite a believable claim, looking at how intricately detailed both the interior and exterior of this cathedral is. It's worthy of note that this is designed using the original Minecraft texture pack, which is quite impressive considering its limited colour palette and tones compared to say, Painterly.

#4 Kiershar's Sky Monster Trap



There are two ways to play Minecraft: Creative and Survival. While Creative creations are generally much more interesting and impressive, there's something to be said for Kiershar's survival creations. Doing everything legitly with no mods on single player, he makes all kinds of clever and amazing traps for mobs and other players. This sky monster trap is the most impressive creation he's made so far though his devious traps to ensnare unwitting players are also definitely worth a look.

#3 FVDisco's Temple of Notch



Of all the Minecraft creations I've seen, this guy's creations, without a doubt, have got the most style. What sets this guy apart is his quirky and unique sense of design. He uses his own texture pack named 'OCD' which is changes all the textures to solid colours, straight lines and 90 degree angles. All his creations are compulsively neat, smartly presented and for lack of a better word, very, very groovy. If Minecraft creations were computer products, this guy would be Apple.

The video above is a prime example of why he's so cool. On my first viewing when the Notch statue opened its eyes I shat myself.

#2



Because every list needs a troll entry.

#1 The Voxel Box


It's not really right that I'm putting everything made by the Voxel Box server as one listing because really, this could be a list of top 5 Voxel Box creations. This is a very dedicated community of creative builders who build pretty much everything from towns, theme parks and crazy redstone devices. Their stated goal is to 'push the limits of what Minecraft can deliver to builders and players'. They also recently released an adventure map which is really amazing. It uses a mod that adds in custom sounds for atmospheric music and voiceovers.









And I just realised that this post completely contradicts the first sentence of my previous post.

The Thin Red Line

I've managed to pick up movie watching again as a slightly more constructive study-reward habit than Minecraft. I'm really glad I did because the three movies I've watched in the past week or so are some of the best I've seen all year (which doesn't really mean anything because I don't see movies in the same year they're released). Those movies are Minority Report, Being John Malkovich and The Thin Red Line. I just finished watching The Thin Red Line ten minutes ago so I'll write a few things. I'm typing this on my iPod so I won't write a lot.

The Thin Red Line is a movie portraying the Pacific theatre of World War II. It came out around the same time as Saving Private Ryan did and it's quite tempting to make comparisons. I'd say that this movie is more ambitious than Spielberg's in that it tries to encapsulate more completely what war is about. Whereas Saving Private Ryan told a story about one particular group of men on a mission, this movie dwells on a larger ensemble of characters and often alternates between different perspectives.

Often you judge a war movie by how horrific and gritty it is. While this movie certainly does do this, more amazing is how much of a sense of loss you feel after each violent episode. Terrence Malick (director) has this trademark where he likes to break down the events into a montage while the protagonist voices philosophical questions like 'Where did our evil come from?' and 'Who is killing us?'. Sometimes the film gets very reflective and you're at a loss at what it's trying to say. There are times when the film lingers on images that are beautiful but kind of come out of nowhere. I think they are there to prolong the mood of a scene in order to signal to us that something profound lies underneath. There is one character, Private Whit (I think) who is the closest thing we get to a protagonist and his belief that there is goodness in humanity that is being carelessly discarded becomes an important theme in the film.

Well anyway this was a great movie and I'm glad I decided to see it. Its quite unlike any other war movie I've seen.

(500) Days of Summer

Right at the beginning of (500) Days of Summer, a deep-voiced narrator tells us what the movie will be about:

'This is a story of boy meets girl. But you should know upfront, this is not a love story.'

The movie is about a guy called Tom who falls in love with Summer, dates her, gets dumped by her and spends the rest of the movie trying to get over it.

The reason for the popularity of this movie, I believe, is how easy it is to relate to. A lot of guys could empathise with the idea of loving a girl so much but being mystified at how she can’t return it. The other reason is that it deals with this feeling gracefully in a very light-hearted and enjoyable way. I wish that if I was put in the same situation as Tom, I could be just as witty and likeable.

It's a great movie because it takes an approach to the feeling of heartbreak that is humorous but true to the feelings involved. Tom's anguish appears genuine but the film takes every chance to make light of his situation. The balance between drama and comedy is helped a lot by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance which is really great.

There is also a lot of exciting editing in this film. The director (Marc Webb, who previously directed music videos) stated that he wanted this film to be like a 'pop song in movie form' and we see this in the use of split-screens, the narrating voice-over and the non-chronological sequence held together by 'Day X'- type title cards. It's all designed to be choppy, exciting and highly palatable to a modern audience. In fact, I think Webb is a bit critical about the relevance of 'serious art' for being so esoteric and inaccessible to most of society. My evidence is a scene in a modern art gallery, and a short montage of scenes parodying some Ingmar Bergmann films.

The cinematography's great too. I can’t describe it technically but it has a nostalgic tone to it and alternates between very warm and very cool. On IMDb it says that the bluish tones are there to bring out Zooey Deschanel’s pretty pretty eyes, which is nice.

If I had a choice of the kinds of movies I'd like to see more of, it'd be movies like these. Not necessarily important or challenging movies, but clever enjoyable movies that tell important truths through lives not very different to our own.

(Normally I should be posting this on the other blog, though since both are inactive right now I'd thought I'd revive this one first. And also because people asked for this on this blog.)

Last Day of School

Today was the actual last day of school. Well technically it was yesterday because we went to the beach today but whatever.

Over the past week, I have been ticking off all the lasts that I had. Last math period, last english period, last free, last recess, last lunch, last bus ride to and from school etc. etc. and I realised that there was absolutely nothing special about any of them, apart from the fact that we did nothing. In fact, I would probably say that my last free period was one of the most boring I had in a while. I guess what I'm trying to say is that all the days we have are basically the same and even something special like graduation doesn't change that. I imagine that the day I die would also be quite unremarkable.

Going through graduation sort of reminds me of the episode of The Office when Steve Carell left. I watched it again yesterday.

That is all.

Leaving School

If somebody had asked me a few months ago what I felt about leaving school, I would have replied that I was feeling pretty pleased about it. I would have explained that the HSC was like a great mental sponge, soaking up all the energy out of my body. I looked to the future as some vague dot in the distance where I would study things that I needed in life and work hard for reasons that made a lot more sense. It confused me when I saw the previous batch of Year 12s were so nostalgic and told us to treasure our days of school. They must be institutionalised, I thought. Like in The Shawshank Redemption how Red has been in prison for so many years that he doesn't know how to live freely once he is finally released.

Now that the future is a little more than a dot in the distance, I feel a bit more trepidation about leaving school. In a way, I guess I've been institutionalised (I'm only using this word half-seriously) too. What I mean to say is that in school you're stuck in a little bubble but in a way that's good because that's all you have to deal with. Once the bubble pops, you have to look after yourself in a much bigger place. I do look forward to making my own choices and deciding what kind of a person I want to be. But still, I worry that I will be burdened by choices rather than freed.

Also, only with the end so near do I realise that I'll really miss everybody. Once it's all over, it will certainly be strange no longer seeing so many familiar faces every day. There's still the formal and everyone will probably still maintain their networks of friendships but without the routine of school and being stuck with each other, things will be different.

Though I've had a change of heart about leaving school, I certainly have not forgotten the bad things about being in Year 12. I don't think I've ever experienced anything as stressful as the week before the English exam in Term 1. And there's still the HSC in 4 weeks. But I guess what I mean to say is that being a member of our year group has become a big part of who I am and it won't be easy to see the end of that.

Devolution

I've been wondering whether or not we've come to a point in our evolution where we now are actually undoing all of the hard work that billions of years of human evolution has done.

As most of you would know, the concept of evolution is so that a species can reach perfection in adapting to its habitat. Humans have obviously been very good at this since we are now probably the dominant species on the planet. But I think now, because of all this scientific progress we're making, our genes are actually becoming worse. If you think about it all this medical innovation is actually ruining our gene pool because it means that people with hereditary diseases aren't dieing out but are instead able to continue to breed and pass on their genes. Also stuff like adaptability to the environment has probably been diminished because we can build our own homes and make our own climate to suit us.

Also, our social preferences are probably ruining our gene pool too. Note how now we not only select our mates based upon physical characteristics (traits which are actually hereditary), as a society we also covet other stuff like personality (which is probably not hereditary). This would probably mean ugly people like me would never be born but I seriously wouldn't mind if there were a few more Miranda Kerr's out there. The male preference for women with less hair on their bodies (I think men like hair on the head more), is also counter-evolutionary because hair is meant to keep our bodies warm, although I guess we don't really need it now since we have clothes, but still it reduces our adaptability. I also believe that women are also trending towards the less hairy male but I'm not too sure, and if this continues we will all probably end up being hairless.

What I'm trying to say is that if some alien life force came and managed to take away all our clothing and any means of producing more clothing, we would be pretty screwed. On the other hand, if evolution was allowed to continue normally, we, as very hairy Miranda Kerrs, would stand a much better chance of survival.

That is all.

I've been thinking hard recently.

A few days ago after reading his blog I asked Jeffery on Formspring what he thought about determinism. I first learnt about determinism a few months ago from watching Waking Life (which I found about from Roger) and the idea seemed so amazing to me that I've thought about it a lot ever since. I now know that what I thought was determinism could be more accurately described as deterministic fatalism. That sounds a bit complicated but you can basically summarise it as this: if the laws of nature precisely govern the behaviour of every little particle in the universe, then everything that ever happens in the future can only follow one set path.

I had difficulty getting my head around this idea. It's not so hard to imagine that things like the orbit of the Earth, the death of a star, the formation of a galaxy are all predetermined events brought on by pre-existing conditions. But it gets harder when you realise that our minds are also made of the same particles as anything else in the world. So everything we think about, everything we do is not guided by our free will but rather the Laws of Nature being carried out within the particles of our mind. It's such a drastic conclusion but I can't think of any way that it's not true.

Accepting this belief of determinism, it then becomes quite hard to contemplate the implications of it. Should we resign to the futility of human will and forgo responsibility for our decisions? Technically, you don't even get to make that decision because that's predetermined too. But in real life when you make a decision, it still feels like you're making a choice and that you're in control of what you're doing. Free will may be an illusion, but it's certainly a very good one. People seem to make decisions everyday that affect the course of their lives. Everybody still needs to be held accountable for their actions and their decisions if society is to function. It seems that for all discussion of ethics, politics and practical real world issues, a fatalistic viewpoint while logically valid, is quite dangerous for the attitude of defeatism it implies.

Perhaps more profound are the consequences of these beliefs on things like spirituality. When one imagines the universe and consequently everybody within it to simply be a jumble of particles forced to follow a set sequence of interactions then that leaves pretty much no room for concepts like the human soul. I think this is a different topic altogether but thinking about this made me realise that the attributes that make up what we believe to be the 'human soul' like our personalities, memories, thoughts and beliefs are really just a specific arrangement of neurons. These things that we believe to be immaterial and maybe even persistent after death are in fact physical things that exist within our skull and decompose when we die. For this reason, I believe that there is no afterlife.

Anyway, this post was initially intended to be just about my fatalistic beliefs but it diverged a bit at the end. The reason I wrote about this stuff is that Jeffery lent me his course book thing from the philosophy course he did last year on the module 'Time and Cause'. This was meant to be a kind of introduction about why I'm interested in philosophy before I started writing about what I thought about the book Jeffery lent me but it turned out quite long. I'm halfway through the book Jeffery lent me and I'll blog about it sometime soon. It's titled 'Time and Cause'.