#minecraft #videogame #roleplaying #storytelling #narrative #ongoing #series #building #crafting #mining #farming #EndermanRanch

So after a decade, it's probably my last year of being a daily player of Minecraft, because my fiftysomething mind has started gravitating more and more to Cities: Skylines over the last year for its added complexity in “universe creation,” to the point where I'm actively saving as we speak for my first-ever gaming computer (which I will be building myself, at the insistence of my friend Carrie's 18-year-old twin sons, who have each done so as teenagers themselves). So while I slowly put together the several thousand dollars I'll need for that (and patiently wait to get my hands on a high-end graphics card, which are impossible to find these days), I wanted to play at least one more campaign of Minecraft and also document it here at my blog, also in anticipation of doing so in a more thorough and interesting way once I start playing Cities: Skylines, and begin building more photorealistic communities that work with a much bigger gaming engine and thus have much more potential for interesting storytelling.

In this campaign, I'm an eccentric adventurer, who has set up an HQ for myself out in the middle of nowhere, in anticipation of far-off travels from here to go collect exotic resources from jungles, Caribbean reefs, painted deserts, icy tundras and more [1]. As I set up farm fields at home for growing all these things in bulk and selling to local villages, I will begin automating the process more and more, inventing my own version of the Industrial Age to build redstone machines for mass production, harvesting and processing of vast acres of produce. (Although note that I will not be building automated slaughterhouses for animals, or sex-slave “breeding farms” for villagers; even as a game, I find it disturbing to think of living creatures as soul-dead “content units,” so I don't like building those kinds of automated redstone machines even in a fictional universe.)

At the same time, I will be building little mini-biospheres around my estate to mimic the look and feel of the various exotic locations I visit for my career; the idea is that, as a full-time adventurer, I'm highly fond of these locations, so I “bring a bit of it home” with me anytime I come back from a trip. This will essentially give me an excuse this summer, autumn and winter to build a bunch of cool-looking ideas I'm always coming across over at YouTube (which, by the way, is an excellent location for Cities: Skylines roleplaying videos as well). I did some of these in my previous campaign, so might be bringing them back to this one — a Japanese pagoda with bamboo forest lit by iron lanterns strung on tall poles, a Frederick Law Omstead unstructured lagoon with live coral, kelp and sea lanterns — and some were planned but never constructed, so I'll definitely be getting to those — a pumpkin patch, a Zen sand garden, a combination apiary-greenhouse.

And then finally, a possible late-stage addition to the campaign if I start getting bored is that, elderly and rich, I become more and more obsessed with a doomsday cult that's built up around the strange “Endermen” all us farmers have seen with our own eyes out on the far edges of our fields at twilight and daybreak. So the name of my entire estate would be “Enderman Ranch,” and I would build in references to it wherever I could; as banners to hang over the walkways, blocks to work into building cornerstones, maybe a big gateway as you approach it from the water. And if I get really bored, I can build one last insanely grand architectural folly that I financed with my now billions of dollars at the end of my life, a sort of combination lighthouse, imposing religious structure and Modernist sculpture, all based around a 100-block-tall abstract construction of an Enderman.

So, not much to show as of the moment, other than starting the campaign itself, spending a few days hiking around and building temporary shelters, and eventually finding a space to call home. Here above, we're looking south, off into a large body of water and then a mountain range in the distance. Just poking above the water's surface in the background is a sunken pirate ship, which means that I'll find all the other Caribbean accouchements just beyond, while this large island in the middle of the cove would make a nice location for the eventual Enderman Death Temple if I ever build it. Most importantly, this will be the launch site for many of my exotic trips, because travel by boat is insanely faster than by foot, so it's your planet's oceans and seas that mostly let you travel in realistic timeframes to any other type of biome you may want to visit.

Here we're looking north into where I'll build the ranch itself. I'll essentially cut down every tree you see here, then flatten the earth as I go, and eventually build infrastructure and then the small village that will comprise my entire estate. I'm doing so under the same justification as many of the actual people in the 1600s who first moved into wilderness spaces and did this themselves — hey, there's so much untamed stuff still around, my little bit won't possibly hurt. Plus it's suffice to say that the lone settler humans who were around in these environments then were very much the underdogs as far as survival — don't forget, one of my burdens even here in the game is to create a community that can be traveled at night without death from wandering or magically generated monsters — so I feel a little “civilization-building” clear-cutting justification can be excused in this case. So in that spirit, in this particular campaign I won't be building a self-sustaining orchard like I usually do, since I'll have more than enough natural wood to last me a long, long time.

And then here's looking west and east, which is essentially more of the same, although notice the horses in the far background, one of the reasons I chose this place as my stopping point during my nomadic first days in this universe. I try to tame and saddle [2] a horse in Minecraft as soon as I can, because it's just so much faster to get around a large flat space using one than it is to walk, which is crucial when you're planning on having a large estate like mine. Yes, those are ice spikes you're seeing in the background! But there are no structures or mobs to be found in that biome, no trees and no grass, so there's not actually much reason to visit other than to build a platform on top of one and maybe a Ra's Al Ghul winter version of the Enderman Death Temple. We'll see, anyway.

So, there's the next...um, nine months of my life? Until maybe February 2022, when I maybe will have enough money saved up to bite the bullet and build my own gaming PC? And then start OBSESSIVELY PLAYING CITIES: SKYLINES? Hmm, we'll see! As always, more updates here at my Write.as blog, as I start gearing up this summer to finally build out my long dormant jasonpettus.com over at my un-setup WordPress space.

[1] I feel that most people probably play Minecraft the way we all used to play Monopoly during my childhood in the 1970s, with a series of “house rules” that essentially let everyone involved “cheat” a little from the official rules. One of my house rules is that teleportation exists, which is basically the way I justify using the “TP” cheat command within a strict roleplaying survival world, but I build persistent rules about using it. I have to first visit the space on foot (or, you know, by horse or boat); I then have to build a “teleportation platform” consisting of eight blocks of polished diorite surrounding a center block of redstone; and I can then only TP from one platform to another, not anywhere else or under any other circumstances. That said, this lets me sort of have my cake in Minecraft and eat it too; I have all the fun of exploring by foot to find various exotic biomes and the villages I'll eventually be trading with; but once I visit all of them once, I can just build me a little TP platform then instantly come back whenever I want. This will also let me trade with a dozen villages like a legitimate manufacturing tycoon, so that I can do a quick turnover of my industrialized farming produce and build up all those villagers into “master” levels, so that they'll produce things for me like diamond armor, golden carrots, enchanted arrows, enchanted books, enchanted tools and weapons, enchanted bottles of XP, and pillars of quartz.

[2] Another “house rule” for me is that I've built my own datapack, which is essentially the old owner Mojang's way to let players very quickly and easily build these exact kinds of house rules for themselves, written in plain old JavaScript Object Notation (or JSON), which like HTML is considered one of the simplest “programming languages” that exist. So I in late middle-age, for one notorious example, am not a big fan of the combat aspects of Minecraft, and prefer to stick to building, farming and planning; but there's a whole lot of stuff you can't build in Minecraft except with raw materials you can only get through combat, often in scary mystical locations with ominous names like THE END and THE NETHER. So I've built my own wrinkle to my roleplaying universe in which redstone can be used not only for electricity and circuits, but as a “magic ring” of eight pieces you can put in a circle in a crafting table and then insert ordinary things to make them extraordinary, the kinds of stuff you usually have to gain through combat or that otherwise have a strange random history of being way too unusually hard to obtain even though they should realistically be easy enough to craft.

So a ring of redstone surrounding a block of TNT makes a blaze rod in my world, for making into brewing stands and the potions you make in these brewing stands; swap in a piece of string to get a horse lead, or a piece of leather for a saddle, which are both ridiculously hard to naturally find and unable to be naturally crafted; or a piece of wheat for a piece of netherwart; or a poisonous potato to make black dye; or cobwebs into string. Is it “cheating?” Technically, yes it is. Does it make the game more fun for me as a result? Yes it does! Will new owners Microsoft get rid of this ability when they finally phase out the Java-programmed legacy version from Mojang for good? Um, maybe. (The “Bedrock” version, which now fuels all the mobile versions, console versions, and the official Microsoft laptop version, is built in C++. The company has just started making the first overtures towards the idea of finally shutting down the Java version for good, but there's been no timeline and nothing official said.) We'll see, I suppose. But for now, I continue to use my “Combat Hater Datapack” guilt-free.

#Deaf #community #culture #history #anger #politics #StupidHearieTourist #Chicago #ASL #signlanguage #SwitchedAtBirth #DisneyFamily #TV #series #Netflix #LizzyWeiss #writinglesson #characterization #SeanBerdy #EbayShipper #EmmettAndBayForever

[WARNING: Spoilers abound today for the Disney Family TV show Switched at Birth. Put off reading this until later if you're in the middle of watching it yourself.]

So did you hear? At the age of 50, I'm in the middle of learning American Sign Language (ASL) for the very first time this year! Longtime readers will of course be familiar with the saga regarding my hearing: how I had my left eardrum surgically removed in the year 2000, due to an infection known as a cholesteatoma, effectively turning me completely deaf in one ear; and how the hearing in my right ear has been slowly degenerating in middle-age, mostly because of too much punk rock in my youth. Even with my cutting-edge $5,000 hearing aid system (four mics in my ears, an external fifth mic that the other person can wear, the whole thing Bluetooth-enabled), I'm still at the point now where I can essentially no longer hold a conversation inside a bar, and am getting closer and closer to no longer being able to do so even inside a coffeehouse.

When I did my annual big-picture overview of my life for my 50th birthday a few weeks ago, I realized with some alarm just how much my social life has shrank away in the last decade to almost nothing, which I lament because I used to love meeting and talking to random new strangers so much in my twenties and thirties. So for me, learning ASL is not some interesting new hobby or experiment, but literally an attempt to completely shift my life into a whole new group of friends and lovers, now among the estimated 20,000 people in the Chicago metro area who can converse in ASL, and by extension the approximate half a million who can do so nationally. And so in this regard, I'm not only learning the language right now, but also taking a deep dive into the culture and history of what's known as the “Deaf community” with a capital “D,” as opposed to lowercase “deaf” which simply indicates a person with hearing loss, but who hasn't made this hearing loss a core part of their identity as a human being.

It's a complicated subject that deserves its own journal entry later this year; but the most basic, fundamental tenet of the Deaf community is that they don't see their lack of hearing as a disability or handicap — that is, something that deserves pity and that permanently limits them from fully participating in human society — but rather the way that you and I might see, for example, high blood pressure — a simple imperfection that can be easily compensated for, using a combination of lifestyle, technology, and shifting social mores. This is just the start of the Deaf rabbithole, and please be aware that this simple recap doesn't do it justice — for one good example, most Deaf people don't just see their Deafness as a “lack of a problem,” but rather as an asset that provides benefits that hearing people don't have, the argument being that Deaf people's relationships are more powerful and intimate, that they have a greater sense of their surroundings than most hearing people do, better concentration, a bigger curiosity about the world, more tolerance and empathy, purer political beliefs, etc.

Or for a more troubling example, another hallmark of the Deaf community is that they're extremely quick to anger, and tend to lash out at hearing people for making mistakes no matter how innocuous. This can be baffling to hearing people at first, until you take a deep look at history and realize that Deaf people have been treated way more appallingly than you ever knew, and that this horrible behavior has lasted until way more recently than you would ever guess. For example, the Supreme Court didn't recognize ASL as an official language until all the way in 1989, which means that as recently as the George Bush administration, it was perfectly legal for police to arrest a deaf person then refuse to provide them with an ASL interpreter during interrogation, or for the court to provide one during their trial. So if you one day make a remark to a Deaf person that seems perfectly innocent to you (for example, “I think sign language is so beautiful!”), and that Deaf person jumps all over you (“IT ISN'T MY JOB TO ENTERTAIN YOU, HEARIE”), be aware that there's several centuries of human-rights abuses that justify that quick and seemingly irrational anger (in this case, for example, the fact that from the 1920s to '70s, the official position of the US government was that ASL was actually a form of theater but not language, beautiful to look at but that essentially forces deaf people to talk in caveman pantomime, and that will never be able to express nuanced and sophisticated intellectual thought like English does, a theory that was disproved only after being recognized as a legitimate language worthy of academic study).

So before I start attending my first Deaf social events beginning next month, I'm trying to learn as much as possible about the norms of the Deaf community, so that I don't make a bunch of beginner mistakes and get dismissed as some “stupid hearie tourist” before I can ever go deeper into the community. And that's where the Disney Family teen soap opera Switched at Birth comes in, created by TV veteran Lizzy Weiss (who you may know from her cultishly loved surfing movie Blue Crush), which ran for 103 episodes from 2011 to 2017 and can now be found in its entirety on Netflix, which is rapidly bringing it a whole new audience in reruns. The central gimmick behind the show is that two couples in Kansas City (one rich and white, the other poor and Latinx) have their babies accidentally switched at the hospital after birth, which the families don't learn about until the girls are 15, leading to all kinds of chaos and eventually the Latinx family moving into the poolhouse of the rich family's McMansion compound so that everyone can finally get to know everyone else better.

What's gotten it so much attention, though, is that Daphne, the red-headed white girl who grew up with a Latina single mom, got meningitis when she was an infant, and is now functionally deaf; and so not only does ASL play a huge role in this show, as everyone around her slowly learns to sign so that they can communicate with her, but an entire half of the show's milieu is set at the Deaf school that Daphne attends, and the producers made the unprecedented step of hiring actual Deaf actors to play all the roles. This then infuses the series with all kinds of trendy issues that come directly from Deaf culture, a way to enrich and deepen the world that surrounds the family mechanics that lay at the show's heart, and has turned out to be a fascinating way for those of us in the hearing world to understand many of the issues that the Deaf community grapple with, from discrimination in the workplace to the pleasures and pain of a Deaf person dating a hearing one, the controversy within that community over cochlear implants, the perils Deaf people face when, say, confronted by the police, dealing with the myth of lip-reading (that is, the myth that lip-reading is an actual realistic alternative for Deaf people), and a lot more.

This is why I started watching the show, to learn more about Deaf issues and to practice my ASL; so imagine my surprise when it also turned out to be one of the smarter, more subversive shows I've seen in a long time, with a much bigger embrace of darkness and sexuality than you would ever expect from a series endorsed by Disney. And I don't say this lightly, as a childless middle-ager who's spent his entire adult professional life in the indie arts, and whose usual viewing habits skew much more along the lines of shows like Mr. Robot and Black Mirror and Lodge 49. The secret here, and what makes Weiss such a brilliant showrunner, is that she started on day one with super-complex characters to populate her universe, which then over six years allowed her to take these characters in all kinds of unexpected directions and let them do all kinds of fascinating things, while still making it all feel organic and natural and unforced, turning the show into something riveting and at all times surprising.

Take for example the teen girls at the center of the show, the aforementioned Daphne (played by Katie Leclerc) and also Bay (Vanessa Marano), the half-Puerto-Rican, half-French girl who grew up in the lily-white Kennish family. Weiss and company show that some of the girls' personality traits come from straight DNA — for example, Daphne's natural talent for sports (which mirrors her biological dad's time as a Major League Baseball player), or Bay's natural talent for art (which mirrors her biological mom's similar talent) — but they also demonstrate that some of the girls' traits come from their upbringing — Daphne is much more fiercely confrontational and unafraid of danger than she probably would've been if growing up in the posh suburbs, while Bay has an appreciation for refinement and talent for negotiation that clearly comes from her adopted family. It results in a delicious frisson between nature and nurture when it comes to the two, giving Weiss and co. ample opportunities to send either careening off in unexpected directions^, but in a way that it never feels forced or unnatural.

[^One of my favorite moments, for example, was when Daphne had a meltdown after the unexpected death of her adopted father near the end of season 3, and the notorious goodie-good ends up doing cocaine and having sex with a Latino gang leader from her old neighborhood, among other delightfully transgressive behavior. I tweeted about this at the time, and Weiss actually responded, reminding us that her behavior came from a place of grief and that there was a heavy price for her to pay for it in season 4, which I agree with; but still, I love the idea of Daphne in her forties, having too much to drink at a suburban dinner party one night and blabbing all about that summer she did cocaine and had sex with gangsters, which would instantly make her the coolest mom that suburb had ever known.]

This can all be applied to the show overall as well, from Lea Thompson's mousy soccer mom who eventually becomes a bestselling author of steamy “herotica,” to Constance Marie's journey from a home-based hairdresser to the owner of an interior design firm. But perhaps my favorite aspect of all about Switched at Birth is the breakthrough performance by Sean Berdy, who might possibly go down in history as the world's very first deaf teenage heartthrob, a designation I'm sure he's grappling with now but that I bet he'll look back on with fond amusement when older. He plays the rebellious, motorcycle-driving Emmett, who starts the show as Daphne's best friend but then eventually gets into a tumultuous on-and-off epic romance with Bay, the details of which turned me for the very first time in my life into a non-ironic, unapologetic teen-girlesque 'shipper. (Goddamnit, Bay and Emmett, why can't the two of you just fucking love each other like you both know you want???!!!!?????!!!!11!!!1!!!)

Emmett serves as our stand-in for the Deaf community at large, personifying many of the political and social issues that that community grapples with (at one point he's beaten by the police for not being able to hear their demands to put down a wrench he's holding; he starts the show angrily declaring that he will never date a hearie or talk out loud, just to eventually do both; he emotionally grapples with his divorced dad's decision to get a cochlear implant), and Berdy brings a cool, firm finesse to it all, an impressive performance that hopefully bodes well for his future in Hollywood. (This is not to mention that he's hilarious in real life, away from the show — for example, to see one of the fastest and wittiest ASL conversations ever recorded, check out this improvised talk he once did with his TV mom Marlee Matlin, in which he riffs comedically on her 1987 Oscar win for Children of a Lesser God, and as a surprise whips out a cheesecake photo Matlin did in her twenties for a lad magazine.)

I'll undoubtedly have a lot more to say about my adventures this year into ASL and the Chicago Deaf community, and of course I hope you'll follow along for the latest (and also feel free to drop me a line at ilikejason@gmail.com to let me know your own thoughts — this goes for you as well, Ms. Weiss, if you'd like to send along any corrections or clarifications to this essay). But for now, if you have Netflix and haven't watched Switched at Birth yet, I don't know what you're waiting for, a mind-expanding Peabody Award winner that just also happens to be one of the most entertaining shows you'll watch this year. I thank everyone involved for the care and consideration they put into making it, and I'm excited to see what Weiss and co. have in mind next.

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