Castle Magus

Full headline, because Dreamwidth still sucks: "Minecraft players go full propaganda mode as petition demanding the end of the 'mob vote' draws 300,000 signatures in just a few days"

Honestly, between that headline and the article itself, that seems like a hell of a lot of words just to say "Minecraft has apparently gotten objectively worse since Microsoft bought Mojang." Or, at least, it hasn't gotten demonstrably better in any way. (Remember the days, though, when a video game would just get released and that was it? When they didn't have to be perpetually updated ad infinitum after release or else risk the wrath of gamers labeling them as "abandoned" or "dead"? Yeah, I miss those days.)

That said, maybe Mojang/Microsoft could probably put more effort into Minecraft itself, if only they'd stop wasting time with all the "franchising" attempts, i.e. releasing all those not-Minecraft spinoff games that are Minecraft in name only, at best, and all the merchandising and ventures into other media like books and movies and shit like that.

None of this actually matters to me, except to mock it, as aside from maybe five minutes or so last year after "upgrading" from the Java version to the "Bedrock" version or whatever the fuck, I haven't touched Minecraft at all in probably at least ten years by this point.

The full headline here, brought to you by the substandard Dreamwidth subject field length: "Minecraft movie starring Jason Momoa, by Napoleon Dynamite director, will supposedly start shooting this year"

What the fuck? This is still a thing? o_O

Heard this on the radio when I was out a little while ago.

I'll just say this, if I ever wanted to play Minecraft on a public server again, which I don't, but if I did, that Autcraft thing sounds about my speed, at least as far as interactions with random people go. Because to hell with playing with general public assholes like the ones described in that NPR story. That said, given that they have specific guidelines about what to do if you're griefed, apparently even that isn't completely safe.

But if I were going to play Minecraft again at all, which I probably won't at least not any time soon, if ever, I'd probably rather just do it altogether solo/singleplayer, as usual. *shrug*

"Hi. In today's episode, we discuss water and how everyone needs it but not everyone gets it, and like, I dunno, maybe that's bad."

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Three consecutive videos that have involved Warmbo. Yes, Cody, Warmbo is indeed a "total waste of time." *weary sigh*

Also, could've done without Scott Bug (aka Cody doing A Bit™) showing up again, too. *weary sigh*

Anyway, this was episode #<insert really huge number here> of "The world is fucked. Good night. Goodbye."

Lately, it feels like I'm hearing more news about NFT scams than I am non-scam-related NFT news. It's at, like, a 20-1 ratio, at least. But then, all NFT bullshit is a scam at the end of the day, so I guess that shouldn't be too surprising. At first, whenever I heard about a "rug pull" or whatever, I might have felt the tiniest bit of sympathy for those who lost money on this shit, but at this point, honestly, I'm starting to feel nothing but schadenfreude directed at the morons who keep buying into the increasingly blatant, obvious scams in the first place. It's like the tech bro equivalent of being a stupid, gullible Trump supporter.[1]

Anything and everything associated with "Web 3.0" (or, at least, this iteration of it, as conceived of by crypto-bros) can eat my ass, entire.

[1] - In other words, just "a Trump supporter," because adding on "stupid" and "gullible" to that is completely redundant.

Heh.

The Minecraft reference is mostly lost on me, since I haven't played it in years, but I get the gist of it well enough, and I agree. Blizzard has been shit for over a decade now.

"A parent is hit with backlash after deleting their son's Minecraft world that he spent one year creating."

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I think it would depend on what the kid was doing. Oversleeping, as in what this kid actually did? No, deleting a Minecraft world he'd spent a year on is absolutely too harsh a punishment. In this particular case, yeah, I'd say the parent was definitely the asshole. Taking away his computer privileges for a while is totally fine, though, I'd say.

On the other hand, if the kid had been doing shit like habitually throwing rocks through windows or smashing out car headlights with a baseball bat or other such egregious asshole things, I'd say having his Minecraft world deleted would probably be getting off super light. But even that... I don't think the punishment should be something that is irreversible. While it would still be kind of an asshole thing to do, I think I'd be mostly okay with the whole "tell the kid you deleted the Minecraft world, but actually have a saved backup to restore later, when the kid is no longer misbehaving" thing. That, at least, would only be a temporary scare, and not a "potentially traumatized for life" thing.

I liked Ian's comparison with LEGO building. Killing a Minecraft world would indeed be like going in and smashing a bunch of LEGO sculptures that the kid had been working on for a year, just because he was oversleeping. Or what if the kid liked to write or draw or make model airplanes or whatever? Would the parent just go in and delete or burn up the kids stories or journals or artworks or models or whatever as a punishment? I have to say that if anyone came in and destroyed the stuff I'd been writing (whether it was the pencil-and-paper journals I've been keeping since 2014, or, hell, even the online shit I've been doing since 2005 or so, or the novel I'm [air quotes] currently working on [/air quotes] or whatever), I think I may well be induced to literal murder at that point. ¬_¬

More shitbags doing shitbag things, I guess.

Doesn't affect me because 1) I haven't played Minecraft in years, even before Mojank sold out to Micro$hit, 2) I never played the Pocket Edition to begin with, and 3) I never signed up for this Lifeboat thing (or, for that matter, even heard of it prior to this story), but still... stories about hacking crap like this never fails to make me at least a little bit pissed off, no matter what.

To repeat: "Free-ish for the first week." Their words, not mine. After that week (which is already over, anyway, as of today), they'll cost $2.99. And apparently, they "couldn't" give it away completely for free on some platforms even during that week, due to arbitrary bullshit.

Note that this isn't just for the console and mobile versions, but also for the new "improved" Windows 10 version. I don't know if they're charging for this horseshit on the original version of Minecraft (or if it's even available for that at all), but this right here, friends and neighbors, is the future (and, indeed, the present) of Minecraft, now that it's in the hands of Micro$hit. But then, it wasn't like Micro$hit wasn't already charging for asinine crap like this in Minecraft even before they bought MojangMojang was sold out to them.

But don't worry, they make a big show about how some (but apparently not all) of that shit will be "free forever," like they're extending a boon from on high to the great unwashed or something.

Oh, and I'm still waiting for a severe 75%-or-greater discount to hit Minecraft Story Mode itself on Steam before I even remotely consider trying it. I mean, I like TellTale and all, but still.

(Sadly, DoNotLink seems to be down for good, so I used archive.today instead, though I don't know if that's quite the same thing? Maybe it's even better, in a way, since it apparently also blocks ad revenue to the site in question, instead of merely preventing increased search engine standing, which was apparently all that donotlink did? In any case, I hate to give Mojang any traffic at all these days, if I can avoid it. The original link is still there in the archive.today thing, if you really must visit the site on your own.)