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7grandmel · 10 days

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Todays rip: 19/04/2024

i love(d) you

Season 6 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume FF Also on: Now That's What I Call Quality! 3

Ripped by vvsvlogs

youtube

Requested by oetaboy and an anonymous reader! @oetaboy (Ask Box)

I'm sure this rip's been a long time coming for many - I know it has for me. I've had i love(d) you sitting in my drafts as far back as in March, but truthfully it's...daunting, to write about. Requested by two readers. Close to 200 thousand views on YouTube, and recently featured prominently in popular Clone Hero YouTuber Acai's "The Quality of SiIvaGunner" series. And the rip itself being an emotional gutpunch in a season filled with them, from a ripper who's already gutpunched me plenty with Wham! Into Dreams and The Paragoomba and the Wiggler. vvsvlogs, Vivi, I ask this with the most sincere gratitude possible - why must you do this to me?

Minecraft as a game has its emotional hooks in at least two generations of people - that much I think we're all aware of. A sandbox filled with endless possibilities, community, friends, individual stories of survival or of great creative endeavors, all wrapped in C418's hauntingly beautiful score, one I've discussed many times before with Fell From a High Place (Reprise), M-O-O-G City and Every Mob Wants To Rule My World. All of these rips are beautiful, yet they're all aiming to play with Minecraft's sound in some way - the former two rips are arrangement of its music with other games' instrumentation, and the latter rip is a melodyswap playing Everybody Wants To Rule The World. They all play on my senses in their own ways, they're all rightfully impressive - but nothing hits quite the same as Minecraft's own music, on its own terms. i love(d) you isn't aiming to impress or amaze - but it lands a full-on critical hit on one's heart through leveraging everything that's kept Subwoofer Lullaby alive for so many years.

I've talked plenty about my musical illiteracy, and so I hope it doesn't come as a surprise that I've never really listened to world-renowed singer Billie Eilish. She's been on the radio, I've heard Bad Guy, but it was never a name I gave much more thought beyond seeing her discussed online from time to time. You can imagine the absolute awe I was in when I clicked on i love(d) you when it first went up, already expecting an emotional hit due to the Minecraft song used, only to get goosebumps from Eilish's vocals alone. i love you is the penultimate song from Eilish's debut studio album, the very same that Bad Guy was featured on - yet compared to that track's bass-heavy, almost seductive energy, i love you feels remarkably personal, with little more than an acoustic guitar and piano accompanying the openly emotional vocal performance. It's sincere in a way I don't hear enough music be, as if a diary translated into song, much the same emotion that Because I Love You conveyed yet with even greater magnitude due to the vocals in play.

i love(d) you, uploaded for 2022's valentines day, wields both of these forms of love - the connections many of us have to one of the most impactful games ever made, and the unfiltered emotion of i love you - to create something unabashedly beautiful. Mashups aren't a novel concept, mashups are nothing new - yet one glance at the comments tells me that I'm not alone in finding this rip in particular to have struck an incredibly sensitive nerve. Because there's a beauty to Minecraft that I think many of us oft forget about. It's a game that we all cherish, yet also one that's very easy to have left behind: we have adult responsibilities, we have school, we have other, shorter, more concise games, we have social media, we have friends, we have blogs...the solemn beauty of playing the game itself is, for many viewers like myself, not much more than a memory, something that can feel ever so difficult to recreate without feeling as if something's wrong.

We...I'm...not a kid anymore.

There was nothing about i love(d) you's concept that necessitated it to be more than just the mashup. There rip had no need for visuals that'd help convey the edit like with Plantasia 2 or Luna, mi Amor, no need to tickle the funnybone like with SUNGORE or the hundreds of other YTPMV rips on the channel. Yet, halfway through the rip, to the tune of Eilish's soothingly reverberating vocals, the background begins to change, not to a bit, not to a reference nor easter egg...but to Minecraft. To where all of this attachment began - to a far-off view of the game's beautiful landscapes as the sun begins to rises. That digital world that looks different for every player, yet the same in everyone's hearts - that place that, no matter how many years pass, how long its been since we last played, we all love. Its impact different to everyone, yet the feeling unanimous. It drives home how well the mashup works not just as a mixture of two deeply emotional songs, but as music tied to a shared experience: all of our Minecraft worlds looked different, all of our personal lives look different, but we've all played the game, and we've all had affection for it.

Every moment I spend thinking about this rip aches in some way. It's been well past two years since it was first uploaded, yet it continues to follow me as the years go on, my mouse drawn to it any time it reappears in my recommendations. In being featured on 2024's Now That's What I Call Quality! 3, I think the team holds much the same sentiment - even as the months pass, i love(d) you is the kind of rip that'll never fall out of favor, never stop meaning things to people. And realizing that it was made by vvsvlogs, the very same vvsvlogs who's already made me far too emotionally vulnerable on here twice before, has only made it mean that extra bit more to me.

I'm not a kid anymore. I know that. But I'll always be grateful to SiIvaGunner, the people behind it, and those who follow it along with me, for being able to bring me back to that state of mind when I least expect it.

Thank you.

#todays siivagunner #season 6 #siivagunner #siiva #vvsvlogs #rip visuals #minecraft #minecraft music #c418 #subwoofer lullaby #minecraft alpha #minecraft beta #minecraft art #mojang #mineblr #billie eilish #acoustic #when we all fall asleep where do we go #Youtube

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jack-pseudonym · 2 months

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A Love Letter to Herobrine

So, fun fact: that screenshot that I'm using as the thumbnail is not the origin of Herobrine as a piece of Minecraft mythology. This image was first posted on 4chan around August 31st, 2010, and the character had been floating around the Minecraft forum for a while before that.

The earliest description of a character resembling Herobrine was posted around July on a general creepypasta thread. The Minecraft wiki calls this story "White Eyes." It was posted by a user named Flaky and you can read it here. The post doesn't feature the iconic Herobrine design, but it's the origin of a lot of the beats that keep coming up in Minecraft horror stories.

To summarize real quick: a Minecraft Alpha player is so creeped out by the weird noises and phenomena in a cave under their base that they seal it up and move elsewhere. Eventually they discover a dungeon with a single broken music disc inside, which causes the cave noises to return louder than before. To play the disc, they need resources from their old storage room built directly above the cursed cave. When they return to their base, the player has an encounter with a pair of glowing white eyes. Eventually they go creepypasta-insane from listening to the music disc and (I think) die.

The contents of this post are not as important as the fact that the author provides us with a screenshot of the cave, which should be right next to the famous Herobrine image in the history books.

(If you're not seeing it, check the bottom left.)

The next Herobrine sighting is the famous one. It's pretty much a compilation of all the ideas about the character that were floating around the Minecraft forum at the time. The main thing it introduces to the canon is the idea that the "Herobrine" account was owned by the deceased brother of famous Minecraft dev Hatsune Miku. The obvious implication is that Herobrine is his ghost. It also gives us the classic "fog hill" image, of course.

The third "canon" sighting was concocted by an early Minecraft streamer named Copeland. This is the highest effort of the three and probably the first Herobrine Sighting Video ever recorded. The first thing Copeland did was edit Herobrine into a few wide screenshots of his base to create hype for the stream. This resulted in the third member of the triumvirate of famous Herobrine screenshots, and honestly maybe the creepiest.

In order to get Herobrine on video, Copeland changed the texture of a painting. He went live shortly after, playing like normal for a while before “encountering Herobrine” in a dimly-lit room, screaming, running out of the room, and turning the game off. He continued to stream for a bit after that before declaring he would delete the world.

Why is Minecraft scary?

It's important to keep in mind that Minecraft at this point had exactly one full-time developer and no marketing department. The only reason a given thing was added to this version of Minecraft was that the developer thought it sounded interesting. This had two major effects on the state of the game that enhanced its creepypasta factor substantially.

One: the game is very bare-bones. Minecraft Alpha's infinite replayability comes from its core concept rather than a depth of additional features. Even some basic quality-of life fixes like the ability to stack most food items are absent from this version of the game. This resulted in the features that were present being scrutinously analyzed and theorized about by hundreds of people at a time on the forums, because once you had diamond armor and a big house there wasn't much else to do except dig into mechanics.

Two: many of those mechanics and features that did exist in Alpha were bizarre, and several of them seem like the developer was going out of their way to create a creepy atmosphere. Let's take a look at the mechanics I'm talking about and examine how each of them contributed to the Herobrine mythology.

Fog and light

One thing the White Eyes story and the famous Herobrine post have in common is a focus on low view distance. The second post even specifically mentions that they were playing with their render distance set very low since their computer didn’t have the specs to run anything higher, which most people in the 2010 indie gaming community could probably relate to.

This is relevant because Minecraft cuts off your view distance really sharply. If your render distance is set close to you, everything beyond the cutoff disappears into a thick bank of fog. This is probably best illustrated by looking at the same hill from the famous screenshot with a higher render distance.

In the Herobrine screenshot, this entire back half of the hill is completely cut off. Literally anything could be inside the fog and it would be totally invisible until you got within a few dozen blocks.

On top of that, this hard cutoff of visibility happens the same way with darkness. Walking just a few blocks into a cave leaves you completely unable to see anything until you place a torch. And, of course, if that torch were to be somehow removed, you would be instantly plunged into pitch blackness. Just look at the White Eyes screenshot up above.

The simplistic lighting engine of Minecraft Alpha is obviously not intended to make the game scarier. That said, as someone who’s become totally accustomed to modern Minecraft’s smooth lighting mechanics, it’s really remarkable how much more eerie the game is when you’re consistently forced to walk into total darkness and thick fog to get anything done. Without smooth lighting, when night starts to fall it looks like an enormous shadow passing over the whole world.

If you've heard of the classic Internet creepypasta Ted the Caver, there's a bit where Ted is stuck inside a similarly cursed cave with no light. Earlier in the story, the writer points out that darkness in caves is different from darkness above ground - there is straight-up no light to see with. Your eyes never adjust. Something could be literally inches from from his face and he would never see it. These older versions of Minecraft feel like that.

(If you want to experience the horrors yourself in the modern day, turn smooth lighting off, brightness down to Moody, and crank your render distance down. I seriously recommend it.)

Dungeons

Dungeons are the only place in this version of Minecraft where you can find naturally generated cobblestone. The normal way to get cobblestone is to mine stone and place it back down, and it was the go-to strong building block for quite a while. This gives dungeons the distinct feeling of having been built by someone.

But this is contrasted with the monster spawner, which is one of the most alien blocks in the game. It’s not obtainable in survival mode in any way, it’s destroyed if you try to pick it up, and the floating image of a monster inside the cage is still probably the least blocky thing in the game.

Dungeons are also extremely rare for some reason. You could easily spend weeks in the same survival world and never find one, especially if you didn't enjoy caving for the sake of it once you had all the diamonds you needed.

All this is to say that if you were a Minecraft player in 2010 who’d never encountered one, someone on the forum describing finding a dungeon would sound exactly like the intro to any other creepypasta you'd read recently, right up until it happened to you. It's hard to convince your subconscious that an eerie forum story is completely fictional when things like dungeons are real.

Music discs

Okay, I've been writing about the eerie side of Minecraft for like a thousand words, and I somehow haven't brought this up yet. We need to talk about Discs 11 and 13.

The vast majority of music discs in Minecraft are electronic music tracks composed by German musician C418. They’re basically lo-fi beats to relax / play Minecraft to. There are two considerable exceptions to this genre. Let’s talk about 11 first.

The first thing you’ll notice about it is that the colored portion is black and the outside of the disc is cracked and broken, which is one of the most creepypasta things to ever be in a real game. And then, when you pop it into the jukebox and turn it on, instead of lo-fi electronic beats, you get this.

The track opens with heavy breathing and footsteps on stone, as the recorder of the disc runs through what is pretty clearly a cave. They sound terrified of something, but after a few seconds they stop and catch their breath. Soon, though, there’s a sound like faraway music and the recorder breaks into a run, faster this time, terrified again. The speed of the footsteps increases until the sound changes from stone to dirt, a sign that they’re almost at the surface, until there’s something that sounds like a growl and the sound abruptly cuts off. The last few seconds of the recording are static.

This is probably the most overtly horror-themed Minecraft ever gets, and this disc features heavily in a lot of Minecraft creepypasta. It makes sense. In the middle of an album of chill, electronic music, there’s one disc that’s a found footage horror short film, complete with the person holding the recorder meeting with some fate at the end. Imagine you’re going through your friend’s old VHS collection and there’s a copy of The Poughkeepsie Tapes in the middle of it with no explanation.

Also, this is the only time there’s any real physical evidence of another person existing in this world. Villages weren’t added until the release of Beta months later, and even then, this doesn’t sound like a villager. It sounds like us.

Disc 13 is less infamous by comparison, but it’s still jarring compared to the rest of the soundtrack. 13 consists mostly of slow, reverberating ringing sounds, and at this point I’m going to bring in the last weird Minecraft feature, because they sound like cave noises.

Cave noises are maybe even more infamous among the community than disc 11 as “the thing that makes Minecraft scary.” The most common of these noises are either relatively realistic, like wind or something, or eerie but obviously musical, like part of the soundtrack. Every so often, though, you’ll get one that sounds like footsteps, or the sound of a minecart traveling down a distant track. There’s obviously nothing actually there, but it’s another piece of evidence that even if you’re the only person in this world, there are things here that you didn’t make. This is not helped by the fact that the criteria for a cave noise occurring include darkness.

Conclusion 1

If you take all of these things together - the fog, the darkness, the weird signs that you’re not necessarily alone in this world - it’s easy to see where the sheer amount of creepypasta about this game comes from. It would not be unbelievable in 2010 that something like Herobrine could actually be in the game, and even if you were an adult and didn’t buy that he literally existed, Minecraft Alpha is still a nearly perfect game for scaring the shit out of yourself after just having read a bunch of horror stories.

(I know this because I scared the shit out of myself several times while revisiting Minecraft Alpha for this essay.)

Why Herobrine?

Surprise! There's more.

So we know where the Herobrine story comes from: a bunch of people playing an old, weird sandbox game that - intentionally or by accident - also functions surprisingly well as a survival horror game, and scaring themselves because it’s fun.

Now I want to talk about why the Herobrine story specifically resonated so hard with people that it still exists while hundreds of others have been basically forgotten. Keep in mind, the White Eyes story originated on a thread for a completely different creepypasta that no one has ever heard of. So what’s special about Herobrine?

To start with, we need to take a look at the specifics of Herobrine that set it apart from other creepypasta characters. The Minecraft wiki has a definition of “canonical” Herobrine that includes the first forum posts and images, like the famous 4chan post, as well as the Copeland streams. These are, quote, “fundamental to the creation and popularization of the character.” So let’s look at the commonalities between them.

Herobrine apologism

The most interesting thing these stories have in common, especially compared to more modern Herobrine, is a complete lack of aggression from Herobrine in game. The narrator of White Eyes does go crazy and maybe die, but that happens due to influence from Disc 11. The actual entity with the white eyes only appears once, and it never personally acts on the player.

In the original 4chan post, Herobrine is explicitly stated to run away and disappear if the player tries to approach and get a clearer look at him. The Copeland saga begins with Herobrine watching him in the corner of a screenshot, and even during the close encounter Herobrine doesn’t chase him out of the house or even follow him. He just stands there.

Just looking at the original Herobrine canon, there’s almost no reason to even conclude he’s malevolent at all.

So if Herobrine isn’t out to get you in the original canon, what does he do? Aside from watching you from the edge of your vision, there are a few consistent things to watch out for in the oldest videos. The most famous Herobrine signs are pyramids made of sand, trees with the leaves removed, and tunnels to nowhere, almost always lit with redstone torches.

The thing that strikes me about these signs is that they’re almost player-like, except with no internal logic to them. Building structures, cutting down trees, and digging tunnels are core to the gameplay loop of Minecraft, except in the Herobrine versions there’s no productivity. The pyramids are uninhabitable and the tunnels are never deep enough to find ore. It’s like what someone would do if they knew what you were supposed to do in Minecraft, but couldn’t understand why.

By far the most common explanation for the origin of Herobrine is that he’s a ghost. The most famous herobrine story says that he’s the dead brother of Hatsune Miku, and that part of the mythos is considered basically canon now. Even if you don’t like that element (can you tell I don’t?), a lot of posts from this time period describe him as the ghost of a miner. This is probably because the game literally has inexplicable mining sounds programmed into its caves. Either way, it’s hard to avoid the idea that Herobrine used to be a normal guy. Someone who lived in this empty world before you did.

"REAL HEROBRINE SIGHTING 100% PROOF"

There’s a Youtube playlist that I come back to a lot. It’s called “The Oldest Herobrine Sightings Ever (In Order!)” Most of the videos are either clearly faked, made by a 9-year-old, or clearly faked by a 9-year-old, but they still have a vibe to them that totally captivated me when I was younger and half buying into it.

They still give me a similar feeling years later, which is obviously partially due to nostalgia, but I don’t think the feeling is actually the exact same. It’s not quite nostalgia, and it’s not the the fear-slash-fascination I felt in 2012, glued to these videos while ready to run out of the room at any time in case something too scary happened. It’s closer to a good kind of melancholy.

And if you go back to The Oldest Herobrine Sightings Ever with the idea of feeling some empathy for him, it makes them hit a lot harder than if you just assume he's a murder ghost who’s coming to get you. I know I’m pretty far into Death of the Author territory at this point; I’m projecting an amount of emotional complexity onto fake cryptid sightings made by internet babies that almost definitely wasn’t there to begin with, but that doesn’t make this reading of the story any less impactful to me.

In order to make this point of view more believable, I’ve cherrypicked a video from the playlist for us to look at. The video is, naturally, called “REAL HEROBRINE SIGHTING 100% PROOF” by CreeperAssassin87. It's only five minutes long and I recommend watching it so you can determine for yourself if I'm making shit up.

In the video, CreeperAssassin heads out of their (pretty impressive) base only to find themselves face-to-face with the man himself. What happens next is probably the best example of my point in the whole playlist, but if you watch the other videos closely you can notice this pattern.

CreeperAssassin says very confidently that Herobrine started “chasing” them, but look at what he’s actually doing. He’s not running at the player or even really looking at the screen, and he’s not armed with anything more dangerous than a pickaxe. Remember, at this point in history, Herobrine wasn’t believed to have any magic powers to attack you with either. There’s nothing actually threatening going on here.

After that jumpscare, CreeperAssassin naturally spends the rest of the video running away and hiding, with Herobrine following close behind. My favorite part comes after the player has sealed themselves inside the wall of the castle. Herobrine breaks in, and once he has CreeperAssassin completely cornered...

...he doesn’t do anything. He just stands there and stares. The narration claims to have “luckly escaped” [sic], but I genuinely find it hard to see any malice in his behavior here.

One of the last appearances of Herobrine in the video is him watching CreeperAssassin through the window of their base after they block off the door. At this point, the video has firmly established that he's able to break blocks, and CreeperAssassin is completely cornered again. If he wanted to harm the player, he could do it easily. But once he's shut out, he just resigns himself to it.

Again, this video is probably the strongest example, but this observation holds pretty well for the vast majority of Herobrine sightings from this time period. If you shift your perspective a little bit, his behavior is not far off from what a normal person might do if they encountered another player for the first time.

Oh, hello. Who are you? It's nice to finally meet someone else. I thought I was alone out here.

Of course, nearly everyone he meets runs away and shuts him out. Eventually most of them either abandon their haunted worlds or delete them entirely.

Conclusion 2

For a lot of people on the Minecraft forums in 2010, Herobrine may have been an introduction to stories like this. I obviously doubt that a tragedy about a ghost doomed to wander alone forever was what any of the people involved here intended to make. That said, those emotions are still present, and strongly enough that they inspired me to write this entire thing.

I believe this contrast between the fear created by reading a scary story about an eerie game and the inherent sadness of the Herobrine figure is what made this story stand the test of time. Compare Herobrine with his more one-dimensionally hostile imitators, and then compare him with other creepypasta hall-of-famers like Ben Drowned. All the greatest urban legends make you feel something more complex than "afraid."

One last thing that I thought made a really good anecdote to conclude this vibes-based essay.

One of the most successful post-canon additions to the Herobrine lore is the idea of a Herobrine spawner, a structure you can build that will let him in to your world. The materials needed to do this are pretty consistent between stories, involving a base made of gold, redstone torches, sometimes some mossy cobblestone, and a netherrack pillar on top. Lighting the netherrack on fire is what activates the structure.

(There are some pretty obvious parallels here with real-life rituals meant to summon ghosts or spirits, especially the lighting of a fire.)

The origin of this structure, as far as I can tell, dates back to one of the first ever mods meant to add Herobrine to the game, a server plugin released in 2010. This plugin not only introduced the spawner, but Herobrine’s behavior in it is really interesting. He’s much more docile in this plugin than in the substantially more famous Herobrine Mod released the following year, where he directly attacks the player and summons zombies and whatnot.

The keystone here is the name of the plugin, the file you have to download to let him into your world. It’s not called “Him,” or “WakeUp,” or “WhiteEyes.”

It’s called “iLoveYou.”

#pseudoessay #minecraft #minecraft alpha #herobrine #creepypasta #migrated from old website #long post

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edwardos · 5 months

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#The Yogscast #crying cat #Minecraft Alpha #sadness #legendary series #Anniversary #Minecraft Survival #Minecraft Survival Multiplayer #Shadow of Israphel #Simon and Lewis #Where Shadow of Israphel and the best Minecraft story series began

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careeoki · 6 months

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1.14 programmer art

#art #minecraft #minecraft resourcepack #minecraft texture pack #minecraft art #minecraft programmer art #minecraft beta #minecraft alpha #old minecraft

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burgerfan76 · 4 days

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i heart drawing hackers / creepypastas as people who haven't done jackshit <3

#herobrine #minecraft #minecraft fanart #minecraft fandom #minecraft alpha #babygirl #fuck i hate tags dude

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dirt-piper · 4 months

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Removing a Block.

From NSSS, to be specific.

Previously, most of the delays and pauses in NSSS's development were caused by other responsibilities - college, work, health, etc.

However, while these things are still contributing somewhat to NSSS's slow development pace, there is a new (and pernicious) factor that has been preventing me from so much as opening eclipse to work on the game.

Writer's block.

For the longest time I didn't even know why I had it, or even that I had it. I would keep opening eclipse, loading up some class file that I knew needed tweaking, and just... stare. I knew, essentially, what I needed to do. I knew how I would do it. But, for some reason, I just didn't do it. After a while I couldn't even get to the point of opening eclipse anymore. I attributed this to general busy-ness - I volunteer a lot of man-hours to a computer history museum, and this eats up quite a bit of my free time.

But then, when I took breaks from the volunteer work, and had all the time I needed to dig in to NSSS, I still just... couldn't.

What made this most frustrating was that NSSS still constantly occupied my thoughts - what I'd change, what I'd add, how this should look, how that should sound, how the launcher should work, what will be in the update after the update after next - all the time. My head was constantly bursting with ideas, but I just couldn't find the motivation to actually make them materialize.

Maybe it was because 1.1.12 was in feature freeze, and I was still banging my head against the cloud logic... but that didn't explain nearly enough.

Anyways, a user who had been playing NSSS since it was barely even 6 months old had reached out to me several months ago about possibly making some original music for the game. We chatted a bit about the general feel/tone/instrumentation said music should have, and then parted ways. This was about 10 months ago.

Well, last week they shot me a DM with one of the tracks they had been working on. NSSS was at the very bottom of my mind that day, but I decided to listen to it anyways.

The song was perfect. It was melancholy, soothing, and exciting, it sounded just like "minecraft alpha", it felt familiar and yet brand new, and it was exactly what I felt NSSS should have. And, as I wrote out my full thoughts to them as feedback (I'll spare you the full 10 paragraphs I wrote), it finally clicked for me why I wanted to make NSSS in the first place.

Previously, I always thought I had wanted to make NSSS because I wanted to fulfill my childhood fantasies, or to make a better minecraft than minecraft, or to polish the game as it was in 2010 and move it in a different direction.

But these are all closer to whats than whys.

Imagine returning to your family home and walking into your room and seeing it, not the way you left it, but exactly as it was when you were in elementary school, and there are toys strewn about the floor that you didn't even remember you had until that instant when you saw them again, and everything that was going through your mind, every tiny short-term memory that was in your head that day - what you ate for lunch, what you had to do at school the next day, what time Spongebob was gonna be on - are all just dumped right into the front of your conscious mind as if they'd never left.

But you're an adult. You're a different person. You can look at these things with a different perspective, see things that kid you never possibly could have. And that's never happened before. Like you've been handed a key to your own memories and told "go wild."

The past has been made brand new again. These aren't just dusty old memories that bounce around in your head, slowly getting distorted and thinned out over time. It's the very context that made those memories in the first place, and you're free to keep going from there, knowing what you know now, being the person that you are now.

This, above everything else, is what I have always wanted from NSSS. It's the mentality that has driven me to be so interested in history, period - it's why I volunteer at the museum, it's why I spent nearly a decade of my life archiving media from a certain other block game, and it's why I insist on using antiquated, obsolete tech for what it was intended for, rather than just letting it sit on a shelf looking pretty. I want to make the past brand new again.

After all, 'the past' is just a funny name we use to refer to the parts of the present that have already happened. There's no reason why it can't happen all over again.

To some extent, this is not an uncommon view - the term 'Nostalgia' exists for a reason. But 'Nostalgia', in my opinion, has the connotation of a biased, selective view of the past. It cherry-picks bits and pieces, either because they were remembered more positively, or because they are cheaper or easier to reproduce. A P.T. Cruiser may have 'vintage-y' styling, but it does not make the past brand new - it's too distorted and half-assed.

A few weeks ago I was hanging out with some friends when someone pointed out that Good Burger had gotten a sequel. I had never seen the original before, so we all watched it. Despite having never seen the film, everything about it - the set design, the acting, the fashion, the soundtrack - were extremely familiar to me, as though I had seen it a hundred thousand times before, but it was still brand new to me. And I enjoyed it! It was a goofy, somewhat contrived 90's movie with an only-somewhat-leaky plot and memorable characters.

Then, immediately after, we watched Good Burger 2 and I felt almost nothing. Part of that was because I frankly thought the film kinda sucked - the lessons Dexter learnt in the first film having been ultimately forgotten served to detract from his original character arc, for one - but the original movie was no paragon of writing either, so why did it get such a free pass from me?

Good Burger, despite my never having seen it before, managed to still seem familiar to me because, as a movie made in 1997, it had all the key qualities to slot right in as a movie I plausibly could have watched hundreds of times as a child. Good Burger 2, though clearly intended to capitalize on the 'nostalgia' that other people my age would have had for the original, completely missed the ball in that regard. It was no longer familiar, and thus, every other flaw in the writing, plot, etc. no longer got a free pass from me. It was no longer a 1997 movie with a 1997 movie's plot, it was a 2022 movie with half of a 1997 movie's plot and half of a 2022 movie's plot - it was half-assed. It, like a P.T. Cruiser, couldn't decide whether to be from the past or from the present and ended up in a weird, uncanny worst-of-both-worlds.

I've always been keen to be true to the historical context of whatever historic artifact I'm using - whether it be a typewriter, SGI workstation, palm pilot, or, in NSSS's case, an indie game from 2010 written in Java. It's why I develop NSSS using period tools and constraints - I use an old version of eclipse, maintain strict compliance with Java 5 (which came out in 2004), optimize the game for hardware that is now 20+ years old, built the entire website in .jsp, modeled the wiki after minepedia as it was in September of 2010, etc.

Because I'm not just doing this all to nostalgia-trip, I'm doing this to drag the past back into the present for us all to experience again. It's not going to be exactly as it was in 2010 - I do still want NSSS to be its own thing beyond just minecraft alpha 1.1.2_01 with bugfixes and QoL improvements - but it will be both familiar and new. It will have been made exactly as it would (and could) have been made back in 2010. And you can sit down and play it, and feel just as you did 14 years ago, not just in that you're playing the game as it was back then, but that you're playing a new game just as it was new back then.

As I put it in the discord server last year:

"I want to see someone who first played minecraft 13 years ago, back when they were young and wide-eyed and had never seen a game like it before, someone who got addicted and spent a solid week doing nothing but eat sleep & play, someone who almost pissed themself with fear the first time they got eviscerated by a creeper, someone who woke up their parents in the middle of the night shouting with glee when they found their first diamond, someone who fell in love with the game as it was then and stuck with it as it grew with them, changing and evolving and morphing just as they did, through beta and release and their highschool graduation and their first car and the combat update and the nether update and their first apartment when they finally let minecraft sit dormant on their PC for over a year, when they just lost the last remnants of the spark they had, and they don't even care enough to know why they fell out of love -

I want that person to play NSSS, shake off the cobwebs in their brain as they try to pull out the memories that have become faded and warped with time, just enough that they've forgotten just what this game did to them when they were younger, just enough that they expect the same old experience that they've grown more and more unenthused about over the years -

And I want them to get eviscerated by a creeper for the first time in 8 years and fucking shit their pants."

-DirtPiper

#minecraft #minecraft alpha #nsss #not so seecret saturday #nostalgia #good burger 2 #minecraft nsss #what do tags even do anyways

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