Categories Abstract, MindStyle

Travel dearly

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Worry not dear traveler, your path is mutable. But your mind must be clear to find your way.
While time is short, your anxiety serves only to lengthen the the trail. Wait, breath, and decide on the steps you need. To fret over the distance in between is the opposite of required.

While you may not get everything done this time around, and some things may not work out the way you wanted, travel dearly, and learn from your mistakes. Change them next time. Take that breath, take that moment. Remember your reasons, remember your why.

Every step you take, every tumble and fall is a story with the ability to change your course. Every mistake a chance to change, each thought a chance to scream out.

Worry not dear traveler, your path is mutable, and you are the captain of it all.

Categories Abstract

A taste of heat

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Breath
Taste the swirling air travel over your tongue, every angle of the invisible blades leaving their own distinct mark. Indescribable differences outlined in memory and yearned for with every breath. Every moment , every rush of new air opens a vision to a new world unseen by the eyes of man, and yet tainted by its tongue. A vision of the future, of what can be, of what to do!

Pulse
Stretch against the air as it cools your fevered skin, pulsing blood warming with every heartbeat. Feel how the air cascades across your skin. A whispering of the power behind it, a minuscule amount of all the intent and malice it contains. The tiniest portion of the whole able to be sensed by your slowly sharpening perception, to be defined by your skill at the task at hand.

Devour
Consume everything, learn it all! Take in every bit of that information the air unveils, take it in and know its secrets. Know what it means to see the world through your body rather than your eyes. React to the unseen, transcribe the unheard, and hide secrets where only those like you will kow to look. Take the world as it is and change it!

fall
Fear the world rushing by, the noise drowning out your beloved information, the scenery of sound. Watch your mind and keep it in check, keep pace with your surroundings. The world will fall, but if you stand still, you’ll miss the best parts.

Burn
Enjoy the taste of hot water while it lasts, fear the day when it’s replaced with the taste of dry metal. It may be your curse for now, but the day will come where it will be your favorite memory. Commit to memory your boiling skin, for if there is something to boil, you have yet to truly burn. Ashes hold no heat.

To dust
We are dust. Yearning for a drink, the thirst that no amount of liquid satiates. A yearning to do more, not enough was done. A powder in the wind, a charred brick amongst stone, cursed to be food for the world. The task was done, our purpose served. May the world be all the better for it.

Categories Minecraft

My minecraft adiction

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What is it

Minecraft, at the surface, is a simple game. You are given simple items and objects with easy to understand mechanics that, at face value, don’t do much. Much of the game play and story is left up to the player, there is no set meta or overarching style to the game that can be defined by any one person. It really is a game where every person is left to do what they want.
It’s a gameplay style that has flaws, sure. But at its core it’s designed to be open and welcoming to as many people as possible. A place for anyone to find a friend, where anyone can find meaning in the digital age.

Modding

The allure of Minecraft combined with Mojangs openness to modding allows for an even larger community with completely different styles of play than if it were just vanilla, even just on the semi-vanilla landscape. Anyone, with any mind set can find a place when it changes so drastically.
The modding community that has been enabled by Mojang has found amazing ways to push people to be creative and express themselves in the game. From simply enabling vanilla servers to hold more people with moderation tools and performance optimization (no small feat mind you) to creating whole new stories and sub games in minecraft with tools Mojang doesn’t even have. Every day its inspiring people to take on jobs in game development and design as well as giving them a taste of what they can do with it.

The community

You hear a lot about this or that games community, and it’s similar for minecraft. People will point to the community for why they enjoy the game, well, any game. But the big thing I want to point out here is how varied the communities here are. We’ve touched on how different play styles can be, so far apart that players of one style may not even know the other exists. Because of the massive number of ways you can play Minecraft and the variety of players that play, there are communities for literally everything in minecraft. All of the different styles, lifestyles, and real life niches come together to enjoy what can just be a simple game.

Emergence

Even in vanilla, just the game as Mojang releases it, shows how open ended things can be when you want it to be. This is my favorite part, and if you’ve watched my streams you have definitely heard me mention it. Emergence. The idea that an object is greater than the sum of its parts. If you look anywhere in minecraft, whether it be co-op survival, anarchy, plots, grand scale creative, or modding, this holds true for me. I see players all over the place taking the simple pieces minecraft provides and using them to make massively complex things. Farms, machines, mobility devices, traps, doors, terrain, songs, buildings all the way to entire worlds! It goes on and on. Each of these things made up of single meter by meter cubes with simple, easy to understand rules.

From my perspective, most of the minecraft world interacts via some intermediary. Something that tells it what to do or how to react. There are 4 that I can think of, inventories, redstone power, mob location, and block location/state. This generally relates to redstone mechanics, but is also true when it comes to interacting with the world by most other means such as shearing sheep or trading with villagers. There is some step in between that causes the interaction.

To simplify a bit, when every a player has to control or change the world, they to use at least one intermediary. They coexist in such a way that you can use them together to create machines that control or use all 4 to accomplish a task. Using a workstation to interact with a villager, updating a comparator with a chest inventory, locking a hopper with a redstone torch, and shearing a sheep with a dispenser, and updating an observer with a block state are examples of the 4 I listed.
Each intermediary have an effect on the world that is defined, but the block itself does not generally cause it. There are exceptions of course, and there are technically more intermediaries. I don’t have this down to an exact science, but the general idea that there exists an entire world based on such simple rules that we know inspires me every time.

But why tho

This has been rather lengthy, so lets get down to it. why do I enjoy Minecraft so much? Well, its a culmination of everything here of course. I wouldn’t write about it if it didn’t inspire me. The fact that Mojang has worked with their community from day one to build a game that fits everyone’s needs and and allows the community to help is mind boggling to me. The amount of dedication and thought that they have put into every step inspires me to do that in my own projects. To take feedback and adjust my ideals to be more open to those who support me.
This game has given me so much, inspired me, and taken me out of my darkest times. It gives me the connections and testing grounds for my career and hobbies of the future. Minecraft, for me and thousands of other players, is more than a game. It’s what we have built ourselves around as a community, as an art style, and an outlet for our whole self.

Categories Abstract

The morning of fall

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The very air reeks of rotting stone
in between tar and decrepit home
The heat but a memory lost and thrown
Every breath of wind a has a mind of its own

Watching the sun break the clouds
Every step pushed back by the slick ground
Fleeing the world as pinkish light surrounds
Feeling the sun warm the air and open new sounds

Swirling wind pushes every sense of mine
A war between body and frame of mind
The cold defined with the freedom on the line
Lift me up, cary me worries through time

Shattered leaves and broken branches
Coated in water all hopeless and senseless
Their beauty on the ground amongst the fences
Weighed down by rain awaiting the first fungus

Every breath tastes of the coming ice
A reminder the world hides its face
A season apart but still showing grace
Winters coming, a fearsome race

Categories The world screams

Of motion and meaning

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The world screams of motion and meaning, of a story told in echos and shock waves. A sound contains more meaning than the information it conveys, but rather a whole scene laid out for the mind to interpret. A voice holds more than the person and the words, but the emotion and stance of the individual. The sound of a passing car can be more than an annoyance in a busy life, but can be a terrifying wind up as it nears a life altering moment.

For me, every sound has a certain… motion to it. There really is no better way to describe it. But every time I say that I feel sound as motion chromesthesia gets brought up, and it really doesn’t feel like that at all. For me its as if instead of hearing the sound, I’m watching a pendulum swing in a predictable pattern. As sounds get introduced that pattern changes in reaction to the sound and adds more meaning to it for me. That motion, whether its my mind reacting to or interpreting the sound, is how I recognize the sound. If I hear just a part of a familiar sound, or a persons voice in the background, then my mind starts reeling with that motion, searching for where it came from. Almost like getting a song stuck in your head, but its the idea of the song, an image of it effects rather than the actual lyrics.

Every day I get caught up by the motion of that pendulum, the patterns that random sounds will make as I’m going about my business. It gets me inspired over the most mundane things, like the methodical ticking of an office printer, or the sound of air around a cars tires. Things that happen everyday, 24/7, all around the world, but to me, in that moment, has every bit as much meaning as an orchestra.

Its so hard for me to describe what the patterns look like when it comes down to it. The more I try, the more flat and bland the end result looks compared to what I see in my mind. I don’t know if it’s due to my lack of geometry knowledge or if I’m looking at it in my head from more angles than i know how to put on paper, but its so impossibly complex that I don’t know that i’ll ever be able to capture what it looks like.

That is my one dream when it comes to art, and the large scale goal of this category of writing. To get better at describing the beauty I see in the world. To show how everything leaps out in fantastical ways that overwhelm my every waking moment and make the days worth the pain.
I hope I never loose the depth and significance that this mind frame brings to my life. That I will always look at, and hear, the world around me with new eyes and ears because, sometimes, they will surprise me with their elaborate brokenness.

Categories Me and my art

The lion token

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The lion token – June 5th 2019

This drawing inspires me every time I look at it. The process going in was so vague, the idea was formless. It had a feeling and motion to it, but no image or words. I knew I wanted broad sweeping curves, radiating ridges in the center, and to have a mix of clear lines and shaded blurry lines.
That’s how most of my drawings start though, a general shape or motion in mind with an idea for what to refine later. General ideas of what to do, not much focus in mind. While I’m getting better at drawing more defined objects I think I’ll always have a love for these accident drawings. Just a doodle that turns into something beautiful.

Most don’t turn out so well, but its constant. I draw every time there is a free moment with access to a medium. Before I finally started acting on my dreams I carried around notebooks and scarps of paper everywhere because there was nothing else to capture my interest. Now its not quite so often, but when I get to it I always come out the other side better and with a clearer mind.

This one in particular means a lot to me because I was still more uncomfortable with digital art than pen and paper. Being able to get similar results out of it made me happier than I can describe. It set my drawing as a higher priority for quite a few weeks after that, making long strides in comfort along the way.

This is going to be a start of a series of posts about how my art has affected my view on life and how the view that perspective gives me day to day. I’m not what i would consider a fully fledged artists by any means, I have an eye for patterns and lines, but it inspires me every step of the way and changes me all the time.

Categories Abstract

Tears of salt

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Sweat these tears of salt
The result of many years assault
Burn through bone breathing out
Everyday a rebound, a renewed bout
Forever living a fighting scout

Running towards a daily fight
Performing at peak a mighty sight
Defeat the man ahead, break his might
Leave behind his children to sing of fright
This is the life for a scout of night

Stay hidden among the shadow
A lost fight tonight is pain tomorrow
A man taken down from behind is saved his sorrow
Every dead mans face sinking and sallow
Remorse ends the night, we scouts don’t wallow

Categories The mandates

The mandates : Introduction

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The story

Imagine the world around you being made up of infinitesimally small parts interacting by defined rules to form what you inherently know to be real. Layer upon layer of static buzzing around and making the world by emergence. Every object standing out only by its properties and definition. This is the world through the eye of a mandate. This is the world as you would see it at the smallest scale.

Mandates are normal humans that can control the world at that scale. They retain all of the flaws we have but can use the energy around them to change matter with only their will. This ability can be broken down into two parts, sight and control.

Sight:
The ability to sense the world as individual parts and understand how it interacts at every scale at a given moment in time. This grants mandates access to an immense amount of information at all times, to them everything is always exploding with new knowledge, a new key or avenue to explore and discover. However, understanding can be a curse without the power to react to it.

Control:
The ability to alter what they see once they understand it. The key to this ability lies with their sight. To take advantage of it they must know how the world works when they try to alter it. Understanding is the currency here, the more essential their understanding, the more impact this ability has.

With these two abilities they can do what science only dreams of and what we wish for in our most grandiose magic systems. Networks of energy built with defined tasks, interconnected intelligent machines, and solutions to modern everyday problems like locking the door behind you!
Just like with real life skills every mandate has a specialty. Making, defining, life, and specific materials like fire or wood are all examples of what a mandate can specialize in. The more basic and broad a specialty the more power it can have, but when a specialty is focused the mandate has more refined control over that area.

A mandates abilities are a simple tool to them. As intuitive as your arms and hands while having a scope just as vast. Easy to use and impossible to ever truly master. The use of their abilities are reflexive at times, allowing for near misses and an integrated life with them. They live with their powers, everything thing they do is with them in mind.
While they are a simple tool, their powers can do grand things with the right wielder. Each mandate has to learn how to use their powers from the world around them, they must make inferences and leaps to find new knowledge about what they can do. Their powers require an innate understanding of what they are doing at every scale before it can be done, making what they can do very limiting. Such is the power of a stupid god, without the knowledge of your task, you are trapped.

The theory

To me mandates embody the human characteristic of creation and still have the beautiful flaw of differing perspectives. Each mandate, while they have the ability to accomplish anything, has their own perspective and way of doing things. They have to go through the same processes of learning logic and understanding the world around them that we do, leading to mistakes and misunderstandings that, with the scope of their abilities, could lead to disaster.

At the end of the day the mandates are humans playing with the powers of gods, mistakes that happen can be beautiful or catastrophic.
This is where the core of this lies for me. The grand scale of what can be done with such an open magic system as well as the places it can clearly go wrong along the way entices me. Everything is fair game, any rule, any limit, any angle. Its all here and ready to be laid out.

I will keep updates about the mandates going here, more refined ideas as they come and discussion starters as well. I’ve been working at this for a few years and this was me trying to go back to what brought me to the idea in the first place.
It jumps all over the place, I know, but the idea has become so expansive over the years that its hard to find the beginning again. I still remember the first day I thought of it, and that’s what the next post in this theme will be about.

Categories Abstract

The city of clay

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The grand scale of such a place
Echos racing across this vast space
The empty sound betraying the shape
Drawn out dry while holding a great face
Standing tall and proud, facing the great escape

Each side listening to the void, hearing the steps of all
Every sound a light shone across these great halls
Sunbeams unable to make the shadows fall
Objects hued by distance, color stalled
Every solid face thrown to turmoil

The city sits still, yet to me its warping
Every massive pillar a towering reed twisting
Every building a shape of motion all but missing
To an untrained ear all is gone, a trick that’s skipping
The squares become triangles, the world all but warping
It’s shape unaware of shape, the world is but chaos forming

The wind is a monster
A most mischievous trickster
Taking minds with his whistler
Deafening the unfortunate who hear
Visions of the world lost screaming louder
Obnoxious wind, a plight on the land, our sharper

Somehow the first two paragraphs didn’t display.
I fixed it as soon as I got home, I will no longer completely edit and post from mobile.

Categories The world screams

A passion for simple knowledge

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Through me, the world screams.

Every sound and vibration in the environment around me is imperative. A key piece to what approaches, to the story that unfolds in my vicinity. Every piece of information is something that I can use, something that can start its own story or be its own work. A drawing, hours dedicated to research, a problem that I didn’t know about, or a solution to something years away.

Every moment I’m on the lookout for anything, a sponge for information as its known. Trying my best to find what is there without knowing in the first place. I’ve built my whole identity around learning and reacting to that knowledge. I’ve spent every free moment of thought cleaning up and verifying my methods to scrutinize and learn. There is always more to tear apart, always more to perfect and more distance to cover when it comes to anything knowledge based.

I don’t know everything, and that’s the amazing part to me, there is so much I’ll only ever know on the periphery, and so much else I’ll just never know exists. Even from the things I’ve spent the most time on, there are angles that I’ve never come from, avenues of thought that I may never have the opportunity to explore and that get further away from me the more I peruse others.

Every person has their own perspective that they bring into any problem, and each voice changes the solution. Those perspectives, and through those the voices, are changed by the information those minds have available to them. While everyone has their own perspective on looking for things, I love seeing how that bit of information that no one notices can change the entire outcome once its pointed out.
Think about all of those times you’ve seen a streamer struggle to find something that you plainly see and chat is silent, the obvious change is that they find what they are looking for, but the cascading changes are whats important here. The time saved now puts them in a different position for all coming actions, as well as reminding them that there are viewers looking out for them.

Another circumstance that goes a bit deeper and looks more at perspective is when your fixing a bike. An entirely new bike owner has a flat tire after just blowing them up just yesterday, he has no idea why they are going flat after he just filled them up. You have already verified that he looked over the tires and found no holes or missing or parts and he’s only ridden it twice. Looking at the bike, you see that the tire cap is missing. That’s the only thing that would hold the air back once the tire is blown up, so you ask the owner about it and they had no idea that a tire cap existed in the first place, only that you needed to attach the hose to the tire.
Now, while this is a really dumb example, its one I hope everyone can understand from the perspective of the person finding the missing tire cap. The point is that one of the two people had information the other didn’t and saw what the issue was right away. It wasn’t hidden information, and it wasn’t something that took a lot of skill or effort, but rather it was something that they knew from their interactions with the world. With their knowledge built perspective, they were able to solve the bike owners problem in a way that the bike owner never could on their own.

Through me, and every other thinking acting human being, the world screams. The world cant act, its voice and knowledge is only useful when put through the processes of conscious thought. Be that cousins thought and act on it. Take what you see around you and build on it. Take every moment and learn with a passion.