I got three too!

catfishing.net

#685 - 3/10

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They did look more like pimples than pools, yeah. I am glad they changed them.

Sulfur cubes have triggered one of the biggest renaissances in technical Minecraft, and the update isn’t even out yet. How can you seriously say nobody is using them as intended?

They add new gameplay systems and fundamental mechanics all the time, including entirely new weapon types, a new tier of tools, weapons and armour kn the form of Netherite, the ability to leash entities together which changed technical Minecraft entirely, a new type of ‘wireless redstone’ triggered by sound events in the form of Skulk Sensors, and entities that can interact with redstone literally last week.

They’re also moving the entire game to Vulkan right now, and datapacks are basically a vanilla modding API now. The game’s changing rapidly.

I don’t get why people want Mojang to fundamentally change the game into something it is not, or turning it into some kind of RPG, breaking backwards compatibility and risking upsetting large sections of the community. The game is perfectly fine as it is and I am happy about the exact kinds of updates they’ve been making to it.

I feel like a lot of the criticisms against the game updates come from people parroting common YouTuber’s claims or folks who basically gave up playing ten years ago in their childhood and now mourn their childhood wonder, not people who actually experienced the updates or who play the game regularly. “Why not add seasons or something” can only really come from an armchair fan who hasn’t played the game in a decade, since it ignores entirely how that would fundamentally change every mechanic most builds depend upon, including observer-based machines, anything working with leaf decay, natural builds integrated into the environment, art pieces. Such an update would absolutely skewer the active community.

I will never understand why people think it makes them look cool to be so full of vitriol about fun updates to a really good game. Is life not more enjoyable if you let yourself enjoy things?

That sounds like such an oddly specific interaction and I kinda love it.

To be fair, there’s the Red Sea on the other side, that connects a lot of the oil-producing countries to the sea too.

The Encyclopedia Britannica has a great article covering this exact question:

https://www.britannica.com/place/Strait-of-Hormuz

Long story short, the strait is not just the only access point to Kuwait, but also a chokepoint to almost all of Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and so on.

There is of course the Red Sea, that too allows sea access to some of the countries mentioned above, but that features its own chokepoint strait, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. That strait is already a conflict zone because of the Houthi conflict. It’s also closer to Israel, and it’s partly under Iran’s control too.

And there’s too little infrastructure on that side to divert enough oil from the countries in question compared to the Hormuz side.

I loathe JKR as much as anyone else, but I do wonder why the whole “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” thing seems to end exactly at Harry Potter and nowhere else.

No trans person I know who goes nuclear about everything related to consuming or discussion Harry Potter has any issues with the endless promotion of ‘approved’ products and companies that are often even an integral part of online ‘trans culture’, like…

• Instagram/WhatsApp/Facebook/YouTube et cetera (pro-queerphobia, pro-fascist corporations actively funding and supporting alt-right movements across the world and helping alt-right actors make databases of queer people)
• Discord (surveillance company working with ICE, handing over trans folks’ personal information to the cops, the age verification scandal et cetera)
• Minecraft (created by alt-right figurehead Notch, owned and operated by notoriously evil company Microsoft)
• World of Warcraft (Blizzard, notoriously anti-union, pro-sexual harassment corporation)
• … and so on.

Of course not all of these are directly equivalent to JKR and HP in terms of tangible impact on trans people specifically, but the scale is definitely off. Why do folks cut off friends for discussing Harry Potter fanfiction but not for ordering a skirt on Amazon or encouraging vulnerable trans folks to hand their data to Discord?

The older I get, the more it seems like a teenage in-group out-group peer pressure thing than a real world view. Hating on Harry Potter signals you’re a good person, and that gives one a feeling of belonging in the community and having an identity that stands for something. It’s more of a rebellion thing than anything. At the same time, being a ‘Discord trans girl’ has an ‘uwu cute’ aesthetic and therefore must be good and desirable, no matter the implications.

It’s a vibes-based world view.

Of course JKR is evil and I want her prosecuted for what she’s been doing to hurt us. I just think shaming random people for enjoying Harry Potter is ineffectual and hypocritical when practically nothing else is so heavily policed; and while ‘mainstream trans culture’ online promotes and supports so many other evil companies and their products.

Is that one still active? The most recent posts I can see are two months old.

I totally want to get it now.

Why moderate when you can embrace the woosh?

My father is declining, my father’s declining, my fathers are declining, my fathers’ declining.

Aye, 'tis my father’s declension.

Perhaps they just did not share their hobbies and interests with you at the time. Were any of them actually close friends with you?

None of the girls and women I know who are into gaming are really ‘obvious’ about it to strangers, partly because of the stigma and the resulting interactions you’d get, and partly because there just isn’t too much to talk about that you can’t already talk about online in your communities. Especially if most reactions to your gaming hobby you’d get from boys would be ridicule, weird creepiness and/or condescension. We usually kept it to ourselves.

Besides, if they played games like The Sims, it’s pretty obvious they were really into gaming. Sims is an incredibly complex and time-consuming hobby for most people – modding, worldbuilding projects, family legacies that take hundreds of hours of playtime. I know not a single Sims-playing woman who is not at least temporarily obsessed with that game, hasn’t modded it to shreds and hasn’t spent a three-digit amount of money on its expansions.

I’d say that the average Need for Speed gamer is a much more casual gamer than a Sims player. But because the latter are mostly women, we were treated with the same condescending “it’s a kid’s toy” type attitude boys actually thought we had toward their games.

I went back to using in-game communication and social features and I can’t believe we stopped doing it. It is so much more immersive to hang out in, say, a guild hall to chat with whoever happens to be online, than to be available 24/7 in an outside app.

11:52

I would also want to add that many of these terms are regional and subculture-specific.

In the specific part of Germany I grew up in, a ‘joint’ was any smokable rolled cigarette-like object with cannabis in it. Nobody used any more specific words like ‘blunt’.

Then talking to people one town over, they looked at you as if you were from the moon if you called anything a ‘joint’ that didn’t have tobacco in it. To them, a ‘joint’ was exclusively a mix of cannabis and tobacco, and a ‘blunt’ was cannabis-only.

Then there’s people who add weed to pre-bought cigarettes, people who insist on using leaves, filters and no filters, tobacco or no tobacco, and so on. Most of these terms are really regional.

I was not aware people play Minecraft on pre-made maps? At least outside of adventure maps.

The plot thickens.

I came here to suggest Urbek City Builder too. It could be right up their alley.