At last, a new chapter!

Hey there, everyone!

I'm really sorry about the delay. Several things happened recently that really screwed up my writing.

First, I moved house, and the 'Net took TEN SODDING DAYS to be hooked up. No Internet, no Google Documents. Woo yay.

Second... Minecraft.

Seriously. I know of Minecraft but I'd never played it. I appreciated the aesthetic, I know what a Creeper is, I'm impressed by some of the constructions and so on, but I was never interested enough to try it. I got it for my 360 back in May, played the tutorial, didn't buy it, didn't see what all the fuss was about.

Then I saw a YouTube review of it and thought, why not, I have the trial on the ol' XBox, let's give it another go. I punched trees and made planks and finished the little house and hid inside during the night, and the next morning, I went outside and started digging down for the hell of it.

And I got it. I could dig and explore and make anything.

I forgot about the XBox version. I jumped straight on the laptop and threw money at Mojang. I lost two full days. And then I moved and I couldn't use GDocs, but I sure could build and dig and craft and kill monsters and oh cool this gold deposit is huge and...

And now I've uninstalled it and deleted all the houses and castles I've built, because it's addictive as hell but it's too much like backbreakingly-hard work to really be fun. You get nothing out of it other than a thing you spent 200 hours building that doesn't really exist anyway.

So anyway, here's the new chapter, and here's the complete table of contents (yes, it's nearly over):

Chapter 18 - Magical Mystery Tour
Chapter 19 - To Hell And Back
Chapter 20 - Sun And Moon
Chapter 21 - Final Flight
Chapter 22 - Second Millennial
Epilogue - Eternal

Comments

[Frostbytten]

Good Morning, good sir!
Have a gif of an awesome guy:
i.chzbgr.com/completestore/2011/12/15/57e8f366-339a-48eb-86a0-6f722579d0ec.gif

[Enter Madness]

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Smayds]

Jeez, you guys are fast

[Frostbytten]

I got it fast.

[CDR]

Minecraft, its all like;
Herp de derp de derp .... hmmm ... la de da de da .... HOLY FUCKING SHIT I BE ALL UP IN YO GRILL BITCHES!!!!!!!!!!

[Cedric Bale]

that doesn't really exist anyway.

I had to resist the urge to wax philosophical.

[Edit]
Also, relevant:
[youtube=Klc728qggic]

[Cyclone12]

Do not, I repeat DO NOT, host/have your friends host a server and get your friends to play the game, it could be weeks till you resurface in that case.

Also, Minecraft is old hat these days, the cool kids play Tekkit! Aka, lets take the existing Minecraft time sink and make it bigger!

[Jiopaba]

468983 Tekkittttttt~~~

A friend of mine recently got a brand new laptop and he's turning his old desktop into a permanent server. When he hosted it intermittently months back it would slurp hours and hours out of my day. Being a close friend I would get roped into helping with all the megaprojects and whatnot. "We're making a city in the sky! Go collect forty thousand sandstone please."

And I'd do it because the engineering involved in doing it quickly is so mind-bogglingly interesting. There's like ten different ways to go about it beyond just mining up several deserts by hand. (Not counting Equivalent Exchange, which we turn off solely because it cuts all the tedium out of building cool stuff. It's not as much fun to have an obsidian castle to us when you didn't actually mine up four thousand pieces of cooled lava to make it.)

God dammit... I need to go yell at him to hurry that up. I don't care about Permissions files, I just want to build things~

[PoweredByTea]

470275

Set up a cobble gen that feeds into a macerator that feeds into an autocrafting table that makes sandstone. Then sit back in a deck chair and relax.

Yeah, EE is completely broken. What's the point of building all these fancy machines to mass produce the various block types if EE just gives you everything for (basically) free?

[Jiopaba]

478227

Yeah... my only complaint in that regard was that I was the member of the group who really focused on Equivalent Exchange. I would set up huge arrays of EE gear and master its use, spending hours tracking down all the neat recipes to throw into my board and studying all the different ways I could use the tools. While one friend was building a massive palace in the Nether, and another was mowing the landscape flat with massive wheeled engines of railroady destruction, I was constructing Yggdrassil the World Tree and relocating my base to it.

Then it was unanimously decided that EE was too cheap to continue using fairly. So everyone had countless hours of skillful use with the various high end mechanisms of tekkit and our other added mods, except me. I spent hours developing a skillset that was suddenly completely useless. I caught up and even overtook them in some regards eventually, but they were still kind of dicks about it.

Carefully helping them each set up a nuclear reactor and then sneaking back later and stealing all their coolant cells? Too sweet. Too sweet by far. And in the end everyone was thrilled anyway, cuz' regardless of the fact that I just obliterated their bases, they now had massive underground spheres to restart construction in.

Ah... dammit, I need to go bug the host about when the server's going to be up again. I don't want to start investing hours and hours into a singleplayer game when I could be playing with friends if I just waited another week.

Minecraft is great. You get all sorts of neat stories like that.

[xTSGx]

Chapter 18 - Magical Mystery Tour

The irony is almost too much to bare.

[LittleSallyDigby]

And now I've uninstalled it and deleted all the houses and castles I've built, because it's addictive as hell but it's too much like backbreakingly-hard work to really be fun. You get nothing out of it other than a thing you spent 200 hours building that doesn't really exist anyway.

Didn't the GDocs debacle teach you that the same is true of writing, though?