Religion

I want to tell you about my opinion on religion.

I believe in a God, in an allmighty being. How to call this being doesn't matter to me, be it God(s), Allah, Jehovah, Zeus and Hades (and an entire parade of other characters), Mystical power(s) of Nature or whatever name you want to give it...
I call It for convenience God.

But I admit I do not (and can not) know for sure what It is, or even if It's aware of us.

To clarify this I've heard a very good comparison:
So you have the 3 dimensions. you can observe these 3 dimensions, move in them, feel everything that's in those 3 dimensions and manipulate it with the right tools.
Now, if you think logically the next dimension is time (as I said in an earlier post). None of us (beings in these 3 dimensions) have control over Time. We know it's there, we know it goes on, we can name it and imagine grasping it, but we can't control it.
Now imagine a being that HAS control over time. It lives within these 4 dimensions and can  observe it,  move in it and manipulate it. This being is everywhere, knows everything and can observe the limits of our 3 dimensional space.
This being would be God.
This being may also be not only in his kind.
But we don't know all of this because we're like the Flatlanders looking at the 3rd dimension.

Remember Flatland?
The world where everything is two-dimensional.
Where two-dimensional beings reside, live, die, ... are.
We can kinda imagine something like it, because we can represent it by taking a sheet of paper and draw something two-dimensional on it.
But still, these Flatlanders...
We've never seen them and we don't know if we ever change things in that Flatland they live in.

And that may be the same with the 4th dimensional beings... They may have the freedom over Time, but they may have no idea if and how they influence us...

Or they may, we can't know...

But anyway, back to religion.

As I'm raised as a Christian (Greco-Catholic I think, it's hard if you have eastern European roots) I know and accept Christian faith as my own. Yet I do not judge others based on religion or from the point of view of the religion.
As my friends tend to be quite various in their belief: Mostly atheïst, a few Muslim, some Christian and even a Jehova's Witness, all in one group of friends. Yes, we do have differences in opinion and we acknowledge them, but we won't fight each other just to get the others to believe something else.
This is how I would see the perfect community.

But then again. We aren't more than people, we have flaws and that's why the Perfect Community will never exist on a bigger scale.
These imperfection is also why I don't believe in the Church as an institution. Going to church isn't that important for me, actually believing is harder and gives you more...

On a side note: I don't quite believe the "God creating us after his image". I think this is humanity giving God a relatable figure, as we tend to personificate quite a few things...

I see believing or not believing as a matter of opinion. It's completely personal and it shouldn't be used to attack and kill others because they tend to disagree with your belief/opinion. Just accept that other people may tend to disagree with you...

Heh, turns out my opinion on religion is that it's an opinion.

Phew, I think this post deserves the label "long"...
If you tend to disagree with things I said you may use the comments to tell me what you didn't like about it...


-ThOR

P.S.: Let's add something:

tl;dr: I believe and that's an opinion. Face it.

Weekly TWP article dump

And another TWP article dump:

Snapshot 12w04a

Lots of new content in this snapshot:
- Cats have been added. More on this later.
- Newly generated structure: Desert wells. Not much information is found about this, other than than they can be found in deserts and that they're made of sandstone...
- Dispenser and normal sapling textures have been changed.
- Mobs in general have the new AI and will no longer try to jump over fences.
- skeletons and zombies will flee to darkness or jump in water once morning comes.
- Players going through vines are slowed down.
- New items are added: fire charge (works like flint and tinder, but only one time use, can be shot by the dispencer resulting in a blaze fireball, cna be crafted by combining coal, gunpowder and blaze powder), Jungle sapling, Bottle o'Enchanting (only in creative, will spawn random experience orbs when thrown...) and Spawn Ocelot egg (only in creative, will spawn a wild cat).
and something that's been changed in almost every snapshot: the language files have been updated. Chatting in Korean should be a lot easier now...

But there are some bug with this version:
- Because of the AI mobs seem to behave very strangely (spin in circles) when standing on beds of enchantment tables.
- Ocelots may get stuck in fences if they run into them.
- Zombies may stand still and only track you with their eyes
- A thrown Bottle o' Enchanting will not appear in SMP.
- Apparently someone (unauthorised) got into the language files and changed "Single Player" to "You are a NIGGER" in the Afrikaans language...

Other than that the game is fully playable as always. If you want to check it out: Client and server are up for download.

TheOtherRetard, news reporter.


Cats!

The latest snapshot introduces a new mob to the jungles: Ocelots, or wild cats. They are specific for Jungles, so you won't find them in any other biomes.
They are the second mob that is tameable (with fish this time) but it won't help running after them rightclicking, hoping to tame them.
They are the first mobs that can actually sprint (instead of just walking) and they have a very interesting AI: whenever you look around or move too fast they will run away and hide, making them hard to spot sometimes. (Note: they actually hide: if they flee from you they may actually jump behind a block where you can't see them and stay out of sight)
Taming one requires some patience: You have to stand still holding a fish, the wild cat will slowly get closer and only when they stand completely still near you you can tame them. Doing anything else will either shoo them away or will not result in a tamed cat.

Once you've tamed a cat it won't run away anymore and will change it's skin into one of 3 preset skins: a ginger (most common), a black and white (based on Jeb's cat Newton) or a siamese cat. Tamed cats will follow the player around, but not as strictly as wolves do. They also will get distracted by chickens and will kill them. Their kittens are pretty much the only baby mobs that don't have a giant head, so they're even more special to see.

Another trivia: They don't have any sounds yet. No random utterances, no hurt sounds (Yes, I did do some experimentation. No, I'm not proud of it, they were adorably staring at me while burning to death...)

As far as I've seen they don't attack anything besides chickens, so they're unless you have a chicken infestation they're pretty much useless. But yet so adorable...

TheOtherRetard, news reporter, cat person.


Minecraft News

So, weekly snapshots are regular as Coca Cola, what's in other news?

Minecraft Lego is closer to reality. The idea has been accepted by the Lego jury and will go to the development stage, the longest of all. No screenshots or photo's have been released yet, but we'll keep you updated once something appears.

Through Twitter someone has brought up the idea of slimes spawning in the jungle, on which Jeb replied the idea has already crossed his mind, so this may be a future addition to the game. Nothing is for sure, but a bit more content to the jungle biome wouldn't hurt.

Notch has released a poll to ask us if we would like to have some info on our way of playing logged. This would be anonymously (of course) and will log general info such as current game mode (single player, multiplayer), operating system (Windows? Mac?), how long you’ve been playing for (how long a game session is), and whether or not you’re playing the downloaded game, or the applet on the webpage. This would be send to the Minecraft.net database once every 10 minutes, so there would be almost realtime feedback.
The poll indicates a 84% liking the idea (out of more than 100,000 votes), so this may be implemented some time soon.

To anyone who had problems with Minecraft or any Mojang related issue: The web support guys have set up a Mojang help page. The page consists of a list of FAQ's that you can search either by topic or type in some keywords and it will give you the most relevant article. They keep monitoring the page and once they get questions that can't be answered with the current articles they'll add more so it will be answered.

That's about it for this week. Enjoy your Minecraft and we hope to see you next week.

TheOtherRetard, news reporter.

Now trying to schedule it. If you read this on Monday it worked, if you're reading this earlier (writing this on saturday) I failed somewhere...

-ThOR

Weekly Pickaxe articles 14/01

And my most recent articles, as promised, a day after official release of the Weekly Pickaxe.

Minecraft Update 1.1

Finally, an official Minecraft update has appeared. Everything that was in the snapshots has now been added to Vanilla with some extra's and some bugfixes. Let me sum them up:

- Bow enchantments (more on that in Bow Enchantments)
- Flaming arrows will set mobs on fire
- Cheaper Golden Apple recipe (surround an apple with gold nuggets)
- Leaves of normal trees now have a slight chance of dropping Red Apples
- 56 language translations
- Flat world option added, for super flat creative worlds.
- Slightly smoothed color transitions between biomes (No more hard edges on swamp biomes)
- Improved world generation (more hilly landscapes, beaches, ...
- Reduced brewing time to 20 seconds
- Added spawn eggs to creative (the colors of the eggs even look like the mobs)
- Added world type options (currently only super-flat and default)
- Removed collision box from ladders
- Adjusted the collision box on fence gates
- Fence gates react to redstone.
- Sheep eat grass and regain their wool
- Walking on farmland will not trample it, only falling will
- Pumpkins and melons do not need tilled land anymore to grow onto, dirt is fine enough
- Magma Cubes drop magma cream now
- NPC villages now spawn treasure chests in blacksmith shops
- New server settings in Server.properties: level-type, spawn-npcs, generate-structures

But a new update also means mods need to update. Just give the modders some time. No one can predict how fast they will update, just keep in mind modders are also human...

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Bow Enchantments

New thing in the latest Minecraft Update: Bow enchantments! Never mentioned, few times requested, but in the update anyway.
There are 4 enchantments available for the bow: Power, Punch, Infinity and Flame. The names sound pretty obvious, but I'll explain what they do anyway.
Power is simple: arrows shot with this bow deal extra damage. There are 5 levels of this enchantment and a fully charges shot with Power V will one-shot kill any passive mob.
Punch adds knockback to mobs, maxed at level III.
Infinity is maybe the most interesting of all bow enchantments: As long as you have at least one arrow in your inventory you will be shooting infinite arrows. Arrows shot this way are unretrievable, so you can't use them to farm arrows, but hey, you'll have infinite arrows. Only one level available because you can't have more than infinite arrows.
And the last one, Flame, is applied to any flaming arrow in game, so if you shoot an arrow (or a dispencer shoots it) through lava it will automatically receive this enchantment. It's effect is pretty clear: whatever mob the arrow hits will be set on fire. This should be tested on the Enderdragon. This enchantment also has just one level.

After doing some tests on my own (with SSP commands) I concluded it is possible to have a bow with all enchantments in one, you just have to be lucky enough to get it. I got lots of bows with only Power or Punch, got one with Flame and got one with Power V, Infinity I and Punch II... One shot kills on most mobs (zombies need a finishing shot and Endermen are just a genuine Pain In The You-Know-Where) and unlimited arrows as long as the bow isn't broken... I enjoyed myself...

So there you go. Everything on the new bow mechanics.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter


Minecraft News

So, with the new update all previous snapshots became Vanilla. Now you can spawn mobs with their respective eggs, you can enchant bows and you can't bump into ladders anymore.

Minecraft Pocked Edition will receive an update in early february (february 8th according to Daniel Kaplan) which will include mobs and new blocks. Minceraft Pocket Edition will be going more survival than creative, unlike what the original idea was.

On Minecraft Merchandise: There is already lots of stuff for sale, but there might be added a soon-to-be-released Creeper Plushie (https://twitter.com/notch/status/156007083370745856). the picture is of a test product (with santa hat added) that Notch borrowed from the office. And by borrow he meant steal.

That's about it for general news for this week.
Don't forget to check us next week and see ya until then.

The_Other_Retard, News Reporter.

That's about it...
You'll see when I post more.

-ThOR