Tonight’s open run

Note: Written before update 1.1.0 when the direction of the sunrise/set was fixed. North here is now west.

Ah, nothing like the first week after a major update drops. It’s like having a picnic next to a frog pond – so many bugs, lol.

My main annoyance is that Plug PE is totally borked after the update. There has been an update this weekend which restored some functionality like coordinates, but due to some incompatibility with 0.11.x they had to remove teleporting. Ah well. Back to taking the long way places. Didn’t much matter anyway as plug repeatedly crashed out while running game to the point where I just gave up and quit trying to run it. I do hope that gets fixed soon.

Two more bugs that are making server runs a right pain is 1) a lot of times other players spawn in what appears to be the void (really just the terrain not loading in right away) with a really jittery, shakey view of the sky. People playing tonight disconnected, reconnected, couldn’t really get on and tried again for most of the night. 😛 Also I’m apparently invisible to some users. Gonna have to ask the Reddit crew what devices they’re using, as I suspect maybe a platform issue or a skin compatibility problem or something.

Aside from those irritating bits, it was a fun and productive run. Two new folk to the server today: welcome Henry10030 and pedro! Please stop by again.

In world development news, I’ve finished as much of the Granite Line of the subway as I’m going to bother doing until I start building stuff out east. As it is, it terminates at Wacker Tower. Also looks like the Brick Line may terminate at Mt. Servermore, which is coming along both in the faces and in the “mountain” I’m terraforming around it. I’ve been taking pictures of stuff, other players, and myself doing things because yay new skin. I’ll post those soon.

Yep, just another evening in the world of Minecraft.

Comfortable in ones own skin

Busy busy busy, working on stuff. GCT is coming along and I will hopefully be able to post a batch of new pictures by the end of the weekend, after I’ve had a few hours to really go nuts with working on it.

I know I’ve mentioned that one of the main reasons I’m looking forward to 0.11.0 is that finally, FINALLY we will get to have skins.

I am a black cisfemale gamer and any game that gives me the option of being a black woman in-universe is an extra bit of win. Its interesting because I feel like the first question anyone is going to ask me is why I would want to play as myself when games are fantasy and I could escape into being not-me. I see the point, but really it comes down to representation – I think I would be more inclined to want to escape playing myself if I had more opportunities to actually play myself, if that makes any sense.

I guess long story short? Dear lord, I’m tired of being Steve, lol.

One of the things I’ve been working in in anticipation of Yay! Skins! is, in fact a skin. I’d been playing with a bunch of skin editors on my phone and found Skinseed seems to work best for me. (The app itself is buggy and riddled with ads.) Anyway since I kinda such at pixel art type stuff I found a skin I liked as a base and spent about a week tinkering with until I had something that I both really really liked and that looked like, well, me. Only, you know, boxy and pixelated. Big wide world, meet ARBT:

No prizes for guessing my favorite color.
Gold sword sold separately.

For comparison’s sake, this is what I actually look like. On a good day anyway.

Aside from hair color and glasses, reasonably accurate.

Aside from it being red yarn instead of purple and, well, glasses, I think it’s a reasonably good likeness. 🙂 I’m really happy with how the skin came out, and I can’t wait to actually play as her. Me. Whatever! I mean, sure I’ll still sound like a burly dude with a goatee when I get hit, but hey I’ll look awesome doing it. Even better, I’ll look like me doing it.