742 Evergreen Terrace, Springfield, Minecraftia

Block with Greatness

My first night in Minecraft was spent by the soft, warm light of cooking sand, squatted in a hand-forged hole in the side of a hill. Over the coming days, this hill was slowly leveled and in its place sprung up a home of most stirdy brick. Already, life was quite comfortable, and I knew the next thing I wanted to do was start a large building project, as was the style at the time.

Lollipop Lane

I chose this subject because, it being a symbol of something I have great passion for, I figured I'd be less likely to become disenchanted and abandon the build. Plus, I could do a bunch of fun quotes and stuff.

"That should do it."

A perfectly cromulent quote.

The first step was to decide on a place to set up and turn it into a large area of flat grassland, and what better construction site than my own front yard? As I set to work steam rolling the neighbourhood, I found I suddenly had a lot of mind-numbingly repetitive time to contemplate the future. I figured I was gonna need a lot of wool down the line to dye pink, so I started making a habit of punching every white sheep I could see, as well as brown and light gray ones for the roof and driveway, respectively.

A Car Hole

Most of the land I wanted to clear out consisted of hills that didn't stray too far from sea level, but there was one mountain, which I sliced down the middle, completely mining away one half, and making a huge natural staircase from the other.

"My doctor says I have the wrists of an 80-year-old."

Soon enough it was time to place blocks. Taking in my hand more stacks of white wool than was probably ever necessary, I set to work, using the screencap included above as a reference image.

"Lisa's window is the next one."

Naturally, a lot of time at this point was spent standing around thinking, plotting and planning, placing blocks and taking them back again, seeing how things looked and staring at empty spaces to try and figure out the best possible design. This was definitely the most fun part of the project, by far the most involving, and is pretty much what makes any Minecraft build worth doing. Hence the Creative mode eventually making it into the full game.

"That's okay, the box is empty."

Once it was all done up in white wool the house looked a lot like one of Doc Brown's unpainted models. The only difference being that I had all the time in the world to paint it. And painting it meant lots of roses. Also bonemeal.

Bare Backside

At first I was going exploring for roses and using bonemeal to make pink dye, but before long, version 1.6 came about and suddenly I could grow my own roses where ever I pleased. And with that, Skeleton hunting by night became a long-term quest, while my days were spend scrounging up some clay, frying up some cactus, and keeping on the lookout for those brown and gray sheep.

"Remember, you can always find east by staring directly at the sun."

Once I got some pink dye going, I started taking out the white wall blocks and pinking them up, but then I realised I could get up to 4 wool from a single piece of dye by colouring and shearing sheep. So most of the white wool I'd already gathered ended up going in the incinerator.

The incinerator (on the right).

Eventually the only thing left to colour was the roof. By this point about 1% of the job had been done using brown sheep, but I was going to need a better method. Unfortunately, there wasn't one around, so I decided to put the build on hold until a more efficient method of gathering brown wool was implemented, whether it be wool regrowth on sheep, animal breeding, or a way of farming cocoa beans.

"We need some more vanilla, chocolate and strawberry ice-cream!"

A little while later, 1.9 prerelease 2 became available, and as it turned out, sheep breeding was the way of the future. However, it turned out all sheep were born with white wool, so it was back to waiting, for the moment. It wasn't until the sixth 1.9 prerelease that I was delighted to hear that baby sheep had been updated to inherit the wool colour of one of their parents.

The Simpsons' House in Minecraft

I immediately started trying to round up a pair of brown sheep, which didn't take as long as I was expecting. Miraculously enough, two spawned together around the back of the Simpsons house. Since I was still in 1.8, I couldn't use wheat to lead them around, so I quickly captured them in a ring of fence and then, with some difficulty (those passive mobs are wily buggers), funnelled them into a pen closer to my home.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E

And so MineCon went down in Vegas, and at last the official release of Minecraft was here. I started a wheat farm and set to work breeding up a storm. The end was in sight now, but I soon learned that wheat grows very slowly. And here I thought my days of Skeleton hunting were over.

And that's the end of the story.

"Just don't look! Just don't look!"

Always the Last to Know (About My Own Affair)

More than the frustrating car chases, the poorly thought out interrogation system, or having to comb every inch of the environment waiting for the music to chime, the thing that annoyed me the most about L.A. Noire was the fact that Cole Phelps cheated on his wife and didn't tell me.
 I strongly believe that video games have the greatest potential for storytelling of any medium today, except, perhaps, for novels. With settings and themes as varied as any other medium, and little to no limits or guidelines on things like length, stories in video games can range from the latest wartime FPS to the most twisty-turny, convoluted JRPG you can think of.
 Now here's the part that's relevant to L.A. Noire. If you're going to tell your story through a video game, you need to take into account a very unique narrative element that you won't find anywhere else: the fact that you are the protagonist. From Pac-Man to Skyrim, video games are about assuming a role. Whether the main character is an empty shell for the player to occupy (Gordon Freeman) or a fleshed out individual with their own personality (Niko Bellic), the protagonist is always embodied by the player. It is for this reason that you ought to be privy to all your character's actions from the time the game starts onwards. Unfortunately, Team Bondi seems to disagree.
 In any other medium, the main character is their own entity separate from the audience. They are free to partake in events offscreen that may be revealed at a later time, usually lending to a twist. But since a video game actively places you in the lead role, withholding information that your character learns after the game starts is like keeping a secret from yourself.
 Even if a game's story is extremely linear and I have no control over my character's plot-related actions, I still want to be there when they happen, and to know why I'm doing them. I have no idea why Cole had an affair. Had he fallen out of love with his wife? Did he find some reason not to trust her any longer? Or was he simply smitten by Elsa? Maybe if they had shown that Cole and his wife were becoming distant or something, I would have at least understood where he was coming from.
 The other thing that I wanted answered was how long the affair had been going on for. Did it only happen once? Or had it been going on since that first time Cole visited the jazz club by himself? This leads me to the cutscene where Cole shows up at Elsa's home. I suppose it was designed as a hint at what was going on, but I certainly didn't think it would go where it did, especially since there had been no indication that Cole would ever want to betray his wife.
 Basically, as I've said, the last thing I want to see in a video game's story is ambiguity or omission of my player character's actions. I think this story would have worked better if it were anything but a video game.

We're Gonna Skip and Hold Hands

27. Big Brother

Why is there reality TV? Jersey Shore of all things has just started showing on 7mate. The promos boast hot tub promiscuity and general trashiness. Somehow I don't think this is what they had in mind when television was being invented. Part of me wants to talk at length about reality shows and why I do and don't like Big Brother, but another, more reasonable part just wants to say that The Mole is awesome and then never think on the subject again. So I will. The Mole is awesome.
 About the strip: I'm really happy with how the staging turned out. The view of the action is from the PoV of the diary room camera, which allows for some interesting shots of the character as he moves around in a static frame. This along with the BB watermark in the corner sets up the final panel, which is inspired by all those wonderful Simpsons stand by cards, particularly this one.
 The more I think about this premise, the more absurd it seems. Somehow this guy has made it onto Big Brother without ever realising he would be constantly filmed. Also, the diary room camera is the only one in the entire house that isn't hidden in any way, so it doesn't even make sense that he takes a little while to notice it. However, one thing's for sure: Greg is not loving himself sick.

Make It Up as We Go Along

25. IMDb's Lost Board

Back when Lost was still going on, I used to spend a huge amount of time on IMDb browsing the show's message board. As is the case with most forums, it didn't take long for an extremely tight-knit clique to form, and with it came a veritable laundry list of in-jokes and memes. One day I went to the (dead as it'll ever be) Via Domus board on GameFAQs and started posting a bunch of those memes in a thread. As of today, the thread is 338 posts long and locked because I ended up forgetting to bump it often enough.
 Why this ever became a Masterpiece, I don't know. It certainly doesn't meet my current quality standards, but I'm not about to go and change the numbers on all the ones after it, so here it is. In an attempt to compensate, I'm including the next Masterpiece in this same post.

26. LOST is Lost

These two Masterpieces kind of go hand in hand, anyway; this one is also inspired by the Lost board on IMDb. I suspect that the particular thread I ripped this dialogue from might have just been someone trolling, but people say similarly stupid things pretty much constantly on this here innernet of ours, and it still captured everything I was looking for. It even had that horribly tortured pun I've come to loathe so much.

Well There's Your Problem

24. MythBusters

I really love MythBusters. It's interesting, entertaining and generally a whole lot of fun. But there is this one flaw that I fear will irk me until the end of time. They go into that one room with a whole bunch of crazy crap on the walls, and start asking each other questions and acting ("acting" being used quite loosely here) like they don't know the answers. When they're out in the field actually doing something, they'll explain things to the camera almost constantly, and it's great. But then they (particularly the Build Team) always return to the Acting Room for one last review of their results.
 I don't know that there's much more I can say here without echoing the strip, except that I miss the original Buster.

Mais Oui? Mais Oui!

23. The Internet Adventure #3

 Two Guys Walk Into the In'ernet...

Episode 3: Lost in Translation

The first site on my Favourites list, and I apparently wasted no time in expressing my fondness for Tim Buckley's work, with no hint of irony or a joke of any kind. Perhaps not the best tactic for keeping people reading, but I still wouldn't take it out because, regardless of what some people think of Tim personally, his work has been a pretty huge inspiration to me, second only to that of Matt Groening.
 The other thing in this strip that I'm not 100% sure was a good idea is the curious Doorway of Unexplainedness, which pops up out of nowhere for no reason and somehow acts as a portal between webpages. The original plan was for Red & Yellow to literally go into my Favourites list as a means of hopping between websites, but I guess I decided it would be too much fuss to put together, so I came up with these Lanes Between-esque corridors which Red & Yellow immediately accept and trust without question. Then I was going to actually show them walking through these corridors, with various choice webpages projected on the walls, which I also decided would be too much hassle to put together, and scrapped it. In later episodes, the characters tend to travel via actual links anyway.
 And then, I was pretty much burnt out on the whole idea. With no direction and few ideas, there was pretty much no motivation to spend time working on it. I realised I needed a story. Of course, that meant writing one. Throughout that year I did come up with a few ideas, such as having a character from some famous web series play the villain (Dr Octogonapus, for example), having him kind of lurk in the shadows while Red & Yellow visit a TV Tropes page about villains, and emerging into view after they leave.
 Another idea was to have Red & Yellow find a time machine (also on TV Tropes) to go back in time where I could use screenshots from the Wayback Machine to have them explore the internet's roots. But with no actual conflict or goal to drive any of the characters' actions, I couldn't make a plot come together, and there was nothing to really get me excited about putting this beast back into motion. Until one night, sitting on the floor with my new puppy...