For the Seventy-Two Servants.
The Word of God did clearly speak.
The Word was once to Hebrew given.
The Word went into Egypt's land.
The Word returned by God's own hand.
And when far from the Hebrew driven,
the Word was received by the Greek.
Author: Zebulan
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Word History
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Questions for Future Me
I thought it would be somewhat interesting and maybe fun to write a series of questions for myself to answer in 10 years. (Yeah, over half of them are Minecraft questions. Silly, I know.) I’ll come back to answer the questions in this article on March 22, 2031.
Minecraft
Vanilla
Has MC-4 been fixed yet? How about MC-100000?
Surely, Java Edition data packs have the ability to add custom blocks and items now, right?
Vanilla better have lavalogging by now, and Java Edition in particular must have had snowlogging ported over from Bedrock, right? Java Edition also has waterlogging for flowing water now, right?
Mojang has continued to say no to vertical slabs, right? But what about windowlogging?
Does vanilla have buildable vehicles similar to Plato’s Transporters? What about rotating/spinning platforms like Create?
Glow squids give off actual light now, right? And surely iceologers have been added by now.
Are polar bears useful yet? Are pigs still redundant?
The second combat update was generally well-received, right?
Ray-tracing came to Java Edition, right? Is it the modern equivalent of “fancy” or “fabulous” graphics?
Quasi-connectivity was eventually removed, wasn’t it? How did Mojang soften the blow? Pushable block entities?
What did the fletching table’s functionality end up being?
Netherite and the smithing table was the start of a new branching upgrade tree for end game armor, right? I’m guessing one of the netherite alternatives involves materials from The End?
I’m guessing that The End has green-colored biomes now?
There’s a firework workstation now, right?
Mods
Did you start using behavioral mods on your singleplayer world? If so, how did that turn out?
I think Fabric might get really big after the release of 1.17. Did it ever come to equal Forge in popularity? Does Forge even still exist?
Did Modrinth overtake CurseForge as the primary mod repository?
Has OptiFine died yet? If it did, was it the CaffeineMC mods (Sodium, Lithium, Phosphor, etc.) that replaced it, or something else?
Does Quark still exist? What about the Team Abnormals mods? I don’t like their “visible source” licenses. Did that ever change? Have true open source mods taken their place?
What’s the current successor to the Too Many Items legacy called? At the moment it seems like Roughly Enough Items could be the next primary one if Fabric takes off.
Youtubers
Is your singleplayer series still going? If so, why?
Did Dream ever admit to cheating in those 1.16 speedruns?
Is Etho’s singleplayer series still going? Whatever happened to that museum/lab project?
Is Stampy still making the occasional Lovely World video?
Other
MinecraftOnline still exists right? You did finish the landscaping around the house, right? The lag is fixed now, right? Did they stack the old nether above/below the new one when updating to 1.16+? What did they do for 1.17+?
What about Crazy Fools UK? 2b2t? Hypixel?
How big was Hytale?
Does Minetest feel like a legitimate game instead of a bootleg now? Did you ever contribute to Minetest, or did you end up creating your own MC clone?
WordPress
Gutenberg Full Site Editing became popular, right?
Does Gutenberg still use a sidebar for the block inspector and/or document settings, or did it switch to popovers/modals?
Is Divi still around? Did it ever switch to using blocks? How about Oxygen, Elementor, and Beaver Builder?
Coding
Did Crank take off?
How big is Rust these days?
Does PHP have generic types yet?
Does vanilla JS have any form of typing similar to TypeScript yet?
Did the year of the Linux desktop finally happen?
How many people still use Arch, btw?
Has Audacity become better to use, or has something replaced Audacity?
LEGO
How left-wing did LEGO go? Did they start introducing LGBTXYZ characters into their themes/shows?
Did Bionicle ever come back again?
Does TTV still exist?
Is Ninjago still going? Was Seabound good? Are they still doing those 2D animated episodes, and did they ever stop looking kinda janky? Did Way of the Departed ever become canon or at least referenced in-show?
Did Monkie Kid get better with each season? Did it ever reach Ninjago-level quality?
Music
Are The Beach Boys still your favorite band?
What’s your opinion on SMiLE these days?
Did the Bicycle Rider chorus ever get a better official stereo mix? What about Child Is Father of the Man?
Did your interest in writing music ever go anywhere?
Did you learn to play the piano?
Miscellaneous
I bet Trump’s social network never took off. Did I guess correctly?
How big is Gab these days?
Did Texas secede? I have no clue whether that will happen.
Louis finally released that AGI demo, didn’t he?
How did “the project” go? You’ll know what I’m talking about.
Do you have a VR kit yet? Does it have foot-tracking so you can actually kick the rats? Do you even remember what I’m referencing? (It was on the 21st, by the way.)
Are you married yet?
Do you think writing this article was a good idea in hindsight?
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LMB Tales: Rise of the Ask Topics
Introduction
If you were a member of the (now-closed) official LEGO Message Boards (LMBs), you may recall there being a lot of “Ask (insert character name here)” topics, where the topic author would roleplay as a certain character from a LEGO theme and answer questions from fellow users. But what you may not know is that I’m the one who started that trend with my “ASK FANG-SUEI!” topic. This is the story of how that happened.
The inspiration
Before going any further, it’s important to acknowledge that I did not invent the ask-character format entirely on my own. Like many inventions, the format I created was greatly inspired by existing creations.
Back in 2011, when LEGO fully launched their Alien Conquest theme, there was a neat “Ask an Alien Page”, where users could submit questions, and each day one of them would be answered by one of the aliens in video format. (Well, more like audio with the same visual footage over and over. 😛)
An archived version of the “Ask an Alien” page on the LEGO Alien Conquest website. My memory is hazy, but I figure this must have been one of the things that inspired “ASK FANG-SUEI!”, considering I created that topic in early 2012.
I do recall one thing being a definite inspiration: shortly before creating my topic, I saw a topic in the Hero Factory subforum by legoninja0701 titled “toxic reapa chat”. Unfortunately, though I was able to find it listed among other topics in an archived version of the subforum, the topic itself doesn’t appear to have been archived.
The “toxic reapa chat” topic listed next to one of many “Ask ___” topics on April 9, 2012. Going off of memory, however, the topic was essentially just a prototype of the ask topic format. The title said it all, really: it’s a roleplay topic for chatting with the author, who pretended to be Toxic Reapa: a villain from the contemporary wave of Hero Factory sets. It had a decent number of responses, but it’s popularity wouldn’t last much longer than most other topics. Still, I liked the concept behind it, and it inspired me to try something similar.
Having recently become a big fan of the Ninjago TV series, I decided to try and put my own spin on “toxic reapa chat”, using a Ninjago character. I chose the serpentine character, Fang-Suei, probably because he was a blank slate I could inject my own personality into without contradicting canon. And thus, on February 29, 2012, “ASK FANG-SUEI!” was born. Here’s an archived version of the topic.
The topic as it appeared in November 2014. (I couldn’t find any earlier archives of the topic.) Rise of the sssssnake
The topic was an instant hit. As you can see in the archived copy, people immediately bought into the concept and came up with all sorts of interesting questions.
Since the character was just a background mook, I basically had to make up the answers to every question on the spot, though I tried to keep them consistent with each other and with the official canon.
One of my gimmicks I came up with was to add extra “s”s to some words. You know, like thisssss. I imagined the character kind of sounding like a vampire, so I’d also start various words with “v”, because vhy not.
The topic quickly grew to be more popular than I expected, reaching 176 replies by March 11. The next day, it was featured as an “Editor’s Pick” on the LEGO.com home page. This resulted in 267 new replies in a single day. The topic then remained on the home page for a whole week. It felt like my 15 minutes of fame, except it lasted way longer.
The LEGO.com home page on March 12, 2012. Archived on the Wayback Machine. 
The Ninjago subforum on March 25, 2012. Soon, I started to see clone topics with titles like “Ask Jay”, “Ask Nya”, and etc. pop up in the Ninjago subforum. And soon after, the format had spread to every other subforum. If there was a relatively popular character in a given LEGO theme, you can bet there was an ask topic for them. There were so many, that there would often be multiple ask topics for the same character!
Suffering from success
Unfortunately, the topic ended up getting so popular, it became very difficult to keep up with replies. Simultaneously, one of two things happened, but I can’t remember which:
- I got grounded from my computer, or…
- I was considering giving up my LEGO obsession during Lent
Either way, the timing could not have been more comedic. When I told my father about the topic getting so popular, he encouraged me to return to it, but by that point the backlog seemed insurmountable.
Eventually, I just gave up on trying to play catch-up with the topic. At some point I tried to reboot it with an “Ask Fang-Seui 2” topic (I can’t remember the exact title), but I quickly lost interest and got busy with other things. In total, the original topic received 2822 replies (including my own).
Hindsight in 2020
I never set out to start a massive trend, but looking back, I think I now know why it happened.
Obviously, being featured on the LEGO.com homepage had a lot to do with it. But the topic was already more popular than usual before that. And there had to be a reason for the LEGO website staff choosing my post in my particular.
On the LEGO Message Boards, roleplay was huge. Almost every subforum had its own subforum for traditional forum-based roleplay. But beyond that, even the regular subforums had plenty of themed chatroom topics that were more or less just casual forms of roleplay, e.g. “LEGO Club Food Fight Room 2” and “The Nerd Refrigerator”.
“toxic reapa chat” had the clever idea of having a roleplay chatroom based around a single character. But what my topic did was concentrate and refine that idea into a simple question-and-answer format. The purpose of a “chat” topic may feel a bit vague: what exactly are you supposed to chat about? But the title of “ASK FANG-SUEI!” immediately made it clear what kind of replies were expected, and it did so in all-caps. 😜
Not only was the new “Ask ___” format easy to understand, but it was just as easy to remix. Just swap out Fang-Suei and insert literally any LEGO character, or even multiple characters at once. And that’s exactly what people did.
It probably also helped that Ninjago was quickly becoming the most popular in-house LEGO theme, to the point where the theme was quickly brought back after its initial planned run had ended. I could not have chosen a better subforum to post in.
Legacy
The ask topics, as the official unofficial LMB Wiki calls them, became a staple of LMB culture. There were still active ask topics when the boards shut down in early 2017, 5 years after I started the trend. In fact, on the LMBs’ fan-run spiritual successor, The Brick Boards, people are still creating topics like “Another Ask the Ninja 2.0”.
As for legoninja0701, I wondered if he was still active in the LEGO community. A quick search uncovered only a Brickset profile with the same name, though it’s been inactive since April 2012. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his set collection includes Toxic Reapa.
If you ever happen to stumble upon this post, legoninja0701, I just want to say thanks. Without your “toxic reapa chat”, there would be no “ASK FANG-SUEI!”.
I feel honored to have contributed to this part of LMB history. It was definitely fun to try and come up with answers to random questions, even if it did end up overwhelming me in the end. Maybe someday, just for a bit of nostalgic fun, I’ll open a new ask topic on The Brick Boards…
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Consciousness Contradicts Materialism
A popular belief challenged
Most scientists follow the philosophy known as materialism: the belief that the physical universe is all that there is. According to materialism, everything can be reduced to particles interacting with each other. All that you are is nothing more than a bunch of particles interacting with each other according to the laws of physics.
Perhaps you think this makes perfect sense right now. But I believe materialism is actually fundamentally, logically incorrect. In fact, I know it is incorrect. It goes without saying that this is a very bold claim. If one follows scientific reasoning, then one should not make this sort of claim without hard evidence to back it up. And that is exactly what I am about to do. In this article, I shall destroy the concept of materialism with facts and logic.
Complexity and consciousness
A simple machine
Picture this: a crank connected to a gear, connected to another gear, connected to a wheel. This is a machine. A simple machine, but a machine nonetheless. It takes input through its crank, which could be considered a very basic sort of sensor. The crank “senses” input when it is turned, which causes it to turn the gears. These gears eventually give an output: a turning wheel, in this case.
This machine is extremely simple. Between the input and the output is nothing but a few gears. Actually, the gears themselves could be considered part of either the output or the input. The movement of one gear is the output of the crank, and this gear acts as a sort of rotation sensor, which then affects its output: the second gear. And that is all there is to it. It is just a bunch of parts that take an input and give an output. The machine is certainly not conscious of anything. How could it be? It is just a bunch of parts moving together.
Adding more gears only increases complexity
But what if we make the machine more complex? We could add more inputs. We could also add more gears. More outputs. We could add all sorts of mechanical parts. With some patience and some clever engineering, you could turn the simple machine into a mechanical calculator. But it is still just a machine.
Electrical is still a form of mechanical
How about using electric components instead of mechanical ones? Does that make a difference? Nope. An electric computer is still a form of mechanical calculator. We have simply traded the clunky large-scale mechanics of gears for the small-scale mechanics of electrons. My laptop, in spite of its complexity, is still a machine that takes input and produces an output with nothing but a bunch of interacting particles in the middle. It is still nothing but a machine. No consciousness.
Machine learning does not create consciousness
But what if we make the machine learn stuff? Maybe that is the key to consciousness! Well, consider this: all forms of “learning” in computers can be reduced to basic concepts of logic. If A then do B, otherwise if C and D then do E. The machine may store data from past interactions, but that data is nothing more than particles charged and arranged in a particular way. There is still nothing more to the machine than what you can observe.
Randomness does not create consciousness
How about randomness? Does that change anything? No, not really. Random input is just random input. Ultimately, the randomness is derived from the physical mechanics of how the universe works.
Complexity can not create consciousness
No matter what you do, no matter how complex your machine gets, it is still nothing more than a bunch of particles interacting with each other according the laws of the physical universe. The only thing you can do is add more complexity. But that won’t magically make your machine conscious. And besides, science does not believe in magic.
The brain is a computer
Hang on, what about the human brain? Is it different from other machines? Well, it’s certainly quite complex. It’s got a lot of stuff going on inside it. But it’s still just something that takes input and produces output, with a bunch of neurons in between. In a way, the neurons are not that different from the gears mentioned earlier. So by reason of pure logic, one can deduce that the brain cannot be the source of consciousness. After all, it is just another machine.
But wait… according to materialism, consciousness can be explained with physical phenomena. We have a problem here. The reasoning of materialism forces us to believe that consciousness must be reducible to physics, yet there is no way to explain where consciousness comes from.
Well, maybe consciousness just isn’t real, then. That seems like a sensible answer. Until of course you realize that you are conscious.
Consciousness and materialism
I am
As I write this, I look around myself. I see my hands typing on the keyboard and the laptop screen in front of me. I see a whole world all around me. But where does this picture come from? My eyes are only sending electrical signals to my brain. And once they reach the brain… uh… that’s it. At no point does the image I see in front of me exist. It’s just a bunch of particle interactions.
So how is it that I am seeing? How is it that I am hearing? How is it that I am… wait a minute…
I am. I am? How can it be that I am? How am I?
I exist. I am myself, but I am not that which I observe. Everything that I observe is not me. Clearly, my brain is the center of my connection to the physical universe, yet the brain itself can not be me, for the brain is just another part of the world I observe.
The fatal flaw of materialism
Materialism ultimately forces you to believe that there is no such thing as consciousness. But to believe that means that you are nothing but a machine. At the base level you are controlled by the physical laws of the universe. You have no free will. There is no right and wrong. There is really no you. You could jump off a cliff right now and it would not matter. Nothing matters. It is all just a bunch of particles interacting with each other, according to materialism.
And yet… that contradicts reality. The thing about humans is that we think. And if you think about it, thinking is not something that can be entirely explained with physics. Sure, the brain stores info, but that info is just a bunch of particles organized in a certain way. Particles don’t think. And your brain is nothing but a bunch of particles. As we already discovered, more particles and more complexity does not create consciousness. According to materialism, there is nothing there but the particles. And yet here I am. And there you are.
Conclusion
The spiritual is scientific
Finally, reason and logic will take you to the only possible resolution: materialism is incorrect. Logically, there must be another side to the universe that is separate from the physical, yet is able to interact with it somehow. Most people call this the spiritual. In an ironic twist, true science does not deny the existence of the spiritual, but instead confirms its existence. In hindsight, this fact is rather simple to prove. But it seems that some of the most powerful truths are simple.
Why I wrote this article
I would be a fool to think that I am the first to point this out. You can bet I won’t be the last, either. I don’t expect this article to change the minds of the mainstream scientific community. In fact, I don’t think the word “scientific” accurately describes them. If they actually followed scientific reasoning, they would have abandoned materialism long ago. Materialism is their religion, and anyone who dares to question it is labeled a crackpot.
I am writing this for the people with open minds. Those who are on the fence on whether or not the spiritual is real or not. Those who actually follow the scientific method. I fully believe that the existence of a spiritual side to the universe can be proven to exist via pure reason and logic. I hope that this article demonstrates that.
Summary
So, to summarize: materialism is incorrect because the laws of the physical universe cannot explain consciousness, and consciousness can be proven to exist by the fact that you are conscious. This proves that the universe must have a non-physical side, otherwise known as the spiritual.
Until next time, this has been Zebulan, and I thank you all for reading.
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Stuck Between a Block and a Hard Place
Introduction
WordPress is getting a new editor, and I’m getting a bit worried. The plan to introduce the new editor, Gutenberg, into core WordPress in the 5.0 update has been stirring up all sorts of emotions ranging from excitement and joy to confusion and frustration. I think most people agree that WordPress needs a new editor, but many have criticized the current state of the Gutenberg project and its management. Personally, I feel somewhat conflicted over the whole situation, both believing that Gutenberg is the future of WordPress while simultaneously feeling concerned over the management of the project. This article provides an overview of what Gutenberg is, the issues and controversy surrounding it, and my own opinion of the project.
What Gutenberg is
Project background and goals
Gutenberg is a long-term project to overhaul WordPress post and page creation, starting with the planned introduction of the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 5.0. The editor is currently available as a plugin. At the , Matt Mullenweg, co-founder and lead developer of WordPress, described the goal of the editor as follows:
The editor will endeavour to create a new page and post building experience that makes writing rich posts effortless, and has “blocks” to make it easy what today might take shortcodes, custom HTML, or “mystery meat” embed discovery.
The customizer will help out the editor at first, then shift to bring those fundamental building blocks into something that could allow customization “outside of the box” of post_content, including sidebars and possibly even an entire theme.
Phased approach
The project is being developed in phases, with the first phase resulting in the bulk of the WordPress 5.0 update. The second phase will likely come in WordPress 5.1. Quoting Mr. Mullenweg again:
Phase 1 of Gutenberg has been about upgrading the writing and editing experience of WordPress, across posts, pages, and the delightful things people do with post types. The block framework will allow us to drastically simplify the various concepts and user interfaces across WordPress, including widgets, TinyMCE magic sections, and shortcodes.
Phase 2 is about thinking outside the box, namely the post and page box, to allow Gutenberg to handle entire-site layouts. We will replace widgets with blocks, so any block will be able to be used in any registered “sidebar” for legacy themes, and we will upgrade “menus” to a navigation block.
Phase 2 will be led by @alexislloyd on the design and product side, and @youknowriad on the technical side. Please join me in welcoming these two and sharing your thoughts on Phase 2.
I’ll propose and discuss Phases 3 and 4 of Gutenberg at WordCamp US in December.
I recommend reading more about the design principles and key concepts of Gutenberg in the official handbook.
Project potential
WYSIWYG editing
Gutenberg is a project that has far-reaching and long-term potential for WordPress. Perhaps the most obvious benefit is the introduction of a more WYSIWYG editing interface. In the editor, unselected blocks should look as similar to the front-end as possible. While selected, they may optimize their appearance for editing (like a caption field appearing when you select an Image block) and reveal various other editing controls in the block toolbar and inspector. Currently, themes must specifically declare styles for the editor, since current technical restrictions (the lack of widespread browser support for Shadow DOM, for example) prevent the front-end theme styles from being used directly by the editor. The long-term hope/goal, however, is for the editor to use the same stylesheet as the front-end, once the necessary technical prerequisites are met.
Blocks everywhere
The block concept supersedes WordPress widgets, page builder widgets/modules (such as those found in Beaver Builder or Divi Builder), and some (but not all) use-cases of shortcodes and meta boxes. One of the goals is to provide a single way to add content to a page, whether that content be text, images, videos, embeds, galleries, accordions, columns, or whatever else you can think of.
One possibility is that page builder plugins could adapt to use the block APIs for their modules/widgets. These blocks could then be made independent of any particular page builder plugin, helping to avoid the issue of vendor lock-in. Page builder plugins could become more modular, with the visual interface being one plugin, the functionality extensions being another, and the blocks being yet another separate plugin, ensuring optimum compatibility with other plugins and reduced dependency on monolithic all-in-one solutions that lock you in to a particular ecosystem.
Usage outside of WordPress
Speaking of avoiding vendor lock-in, Gutenberg itself has potential even outside of WordPress. The block concept, the block APIs, and even the entire Gutenberg editor could be adapted for usage within other content management systems or even standalone applications. Actually, there is already an implementation of this: Drupal Gutenberg. There is even already an online library of blocks that can used in both WordPress and Drupal called Gutenberg Cloud.
The issues and controversy of Gutenberg
Variety of opinions
There are a variety of opinions regarding Gutenberg. Some folks dislike the concept of Gutenberg entirely, perceiving it as a flawed attempt to compete with Squarespace and Wix. Others like the concept but are disappointed with how various issues have (or have not) been handled. Additionally, some are concerned by potential backwards compatibility issues with existing sites. And then there are those who are simply confused entirely by Gutenberg. Just check out the comments on this article to see what I mean.
Overall, it is hard to tell whether the reception of the editor has been mostly positive, mostly negative, or somewhere in between. Do high active plugin installation numbers mean people are happy with the new editor? Or does it mean that people are leaving it installed because they feel forced to learn the new editor? Do installation numbers for the Classic Editor plugin signal a wide disapproval of the new editor? Or is the case simply that people are taking precautions to ensure compatibility with old plugins? Are the negative reviews of the Gutenberg plugin just a loud minority? Would a WordPress 5.0 release right now be disastrous, or are people just overreacting? The rapid development of Gutenberg throughout the year has only made this more difficult. Feedback from last year or even 6 months ago may be completely obsolete, or it may still be as relevant as ever.
ClassicPress
Believing that
WordPress was moving away from serving the business needs of its users
with the introduction of Gutenberg, Scott Bowler created a business-focused fork of WordPress called ClassicPress. Right now, the only significant difference from WordPress is the lack of Gutenberg. Because of this, the fork is currently rather redundant since the Classic Editor plugin exists and will be supported until at least . Presumably, though, the fork will develop in its own unique direction apart from WordPress as time goes on. I have no idea if this fork has any lasting power, but I suppose we shall find out within the following couple of years. (Fun fact: WordPress is itself a fork of b2/cafelog.)Usability and accessibility
General usability
Many people have expressed concern over the usability of the editor, both for the average user and for those with disabilities. WordPress plugin developer John James Jacoby cleverly used a post created in Gutenberg to demonstrate his less-than-ideal experience with the editor. WordPress Tavern founder Jeff Chandler expressed his difficulty in figuring out how to float images next to text, despite the process technically being possible in fewer steps compared to the current editor (retroactively named the classic editor).
Accessibility
Controversy
Accessibility in particular has been the source of much controversy. WordPress accessibility team lead Rian Rietveld resigned on due to how the development of Gutenberg was handled with regard to accessibility. , the WordPress accessibility team posted a Report on the Accessibility Status of Gutenberg, concluding with this statement:
The accessibility team will continue to work to support Gutenberg to the best of our ability. However, based on its current status, we cannot recommend that anybody who has a need for assistive technology allow it to be in use on any sites they need to use at this time.
As you can imagine, both the resignation and the report sparked a lot of discussion, both civil and not-so-civil. Recently, on , Matt Mullenweg wrote the following in a Gutenberg FAQ:
We’ve had some important discussions about accessibility over the past few weeks and I am grateful for those who have helped raise these questions in the community.
Accessibility has been core to WordPress from the very beginning. It’s part of why we started – the adoption of web standards and accessibility.
But where I think we fell down was with project management — specifically, we had a team of volunteers that felt like they were disconnected from the rapid development that was happening with Gutenberg. We need to improve that. In the future I don’t know if it makes sense to have accessibility as a separate kind of process from the core development. It needs to be integrated at every single stage.
Audits
Notably, WPCampus is currently seeking funding to conduct an audit of Gutenberg accessibility. Automattic will also be funding a separate study of the accessibility of not only Gutenberg, but WordPress as a whole.
Finally, Automattic will be funding an accessibility study of WordPress, Gutenberg, and an evaluation of best practices across the web, to ensure WordPress is fully accessible and setting new standards for the web overall.
Release schedule
Prior schedule
Naturally, there has been much discussion over when WordPress 5.0 should be released. A proposal in suggested . Although the Gutenberg project had already stretched on for longer than initially planned, even supporters of the project (including myself) were unhappy with this date. Yoast founder Joost de Valk posted his thoughts on the current proposal on his blog, noting his appreciation for the new editor but also his concerns regarding accessibility and stability.
Let me begin by stating that I love Gutenberg. It’s the best thing since sliced bread as far as content editing is concerned. I’m writing this post in Gutenberg. I started writing it on my iPhone. It rocks. But it also still has numerous bugs. In fact, the editor broke on me during writing this post and failed to autosave all the contents.
Mark Root-Wiley of MRW Web Design also expressed concern over the planned November release:
Various members of the WordPress community shared similar sentiments, with several pushing for a January release. As the proposed release date neared, the developers worked at an impressive speed to try and fix as many issues as possible. Ultimately, however, they could not resolve all the blocking issues in time. They tried pushing the release to the first fallback date: but soon realized they were unable to meet this date either. The first release candidate did come out on the , however.
Current schedule
The initial proposal gave as a second fallback date. Despite this, the project leads decided to drop the proposed schedule altogether. They decided that the release date should simply be dependent on the feedback received on the release candidates. Matt Mullenweg posted this explanation in his Gutenberg FAQ:
The stability and open issues in the release candidates thus far makes me optimistic we can release soon, but as before the primary driver will be the stability and quality of the underlying software. We made the mistake prior of announcing dates when lots of code was still changing, and had to delay because of regressions and bugs. Now that things aren’t changing, we’re approaching a time we can commit to a date soon.
The current release candidate is WordPress 5.0 RC3. The current plan is to release WordPress 5.0 on . Notably, this is the expected release date of PHP 7.3. WordPress 5.0 includes some fixes to make it compatible with that version of PHP. The release may be delayed if any new blocking issues are found. If such issues arise, a quick 4.9.9 release with backported PHP 7.3 fixes may be released. But at the moment, it looks like the next major WordPress update is right around the corner.
There is also a series of bi-weekly 5.0.x updates planned to come out after the initial 5.0 release. These releases will focus on fixing various minor bugs (or newly discovered major bugs) and small improvements.
My thoughts on Gutenberg
Things I like
For the most part, I really like Gutenberg. In fact, I wrote this article (and all the previous ones since ) in Gutenberg. I’ve been testing and using the editor since around this time last year. Rather than echo the obvious pros like WYSIWYG editing, contextual controls, and other stuff that everybody else talks about, this section will point out some things I am personally happy about in my own experience.
Blocks
I am a big fan of the block concept. I have always enjoyed modular, customizable systems. My favorite toy is LEGO. My favorite game is Minecraft. The block concept is a bit like those.
I even like the decision to have each paragraph be a separate block. In fact, if you prefer having all paragraphs or even all text in a single block, there is nothing stopping you from creating a custom freeform text block that does exactly that. Actually, the core Classic block already does nearly the same thing, albeit tailored for backwards compatibility needs.
I like that blocks fallback more gracefully than shortcodes. I also like that the block API provides a common format that page builder plugins could all share in a way they never could with widgets. One of the biggest issues with most existing page builder plugins is their usage of shortcodes. Trying to move to another page builder is a hassle, since the content is not directly transferable. Disabling the page builder results in a mess of unparsed shortcodes all over your site. Blocks could fix both of these problems.
Block-level HTML editing
One feature that I immediately liked was the Edit as HTML option, which let you edit the HTML of a block right there in the editor. Back in the classic editor, if you wanted to edit the HTML, you had to view the entire post markup. This meant having to find the section you were working on every time you switched back and forth. But with this new Gutenberg feature, only the block you were working on would switch to an HTML view. This made tweaking markup way easier. I had previously heard some people suggest that Gutenberg was dumbing things down at the expense of advanced users. But contrary to that idea, I found that Gutenberg made it easier for me to do advanced stuff with HTML.
Reusable blocks
One neat feature of Gutenberg is reusable blocks. You can save content and reuse it anywhere on your site, and changes sync across all instances of the block. I’ve already found a neat way to use this feature on my website. All my blog posts that I originally posted on SuperGeniusZeb.com now use this reusable block at the end:
If I ever want to update the wording of this notice, I can do it once and every post that uses it will be affected.
You can also convert an instance of a reusable block into a standard block. This allows you to use reusable blocks as templates. For example, you could create a call to action (CTA) template from existing blocks. This would allow you to quickly make a CTA and avoid building it from scratch.
I imagine that in the future, website headers and footers could be made with reusable blocks as well.
Cleaner content
Despite its faults, I often enjoy using Gutenberg. I also enjoy using Divi Builder. I have never enjoyed using the classic editor. There are a couple reasons for that, but the most prominent is that the classic editor always felt messy to me.
Things like
autophave annoyed me since I started using WordPress back in 2009. On the one hand, the automatic creation of paragraphs made sense for people using the visual mode of the editor. But I was often using the text (HTML) mode, and it made no sense to me at the time that my line breaks were being turned into paragraphs on the front-end. I couldn’t see any<p>tags; they were just being magically added behind the scenes. And how could I forget the mysteriousThe same kind of issue occurred to a lesser degree with the other ways that WordPress cleaned up HTML. You could install plugins to disable the cleanup, but it would affect either your entire site or at least your entire post. What if I wanted WordPress to sanitize my code in some cases but not in others?
When I started using Gutenberg last year, I noticed one thing very quickly. The paragraph tags were no longer invisible. I could actually see them in Code Editor mode. Additionally, it was now very clear where the start and end of a paragraph was. Semantic mistakes like lists nested in paragraphs were no longer possible. But if I wanted to do something special and avoid the automatic cleanup, there was now a Custom HTML block that I could use! Overall, Gutenberg felt both cleaner and more flexible.
Thinks I dislike
Gutenberg has improved dramatically since its first release, but there are still many things that are less than ideal. In this section I will talk about some of the things that bother me.
Writing flow issues
Issues that interrupt a person’s writing flow may be the worst kind of issue for an editor. Unfortunately, Gutenberg still has several of these kinds of issues. Of course, not all writing flow issues are as serious as others. Some are common, while some occur only in specific edge cases. Some are quirky bugs, such as this issue with HTML entities and the link interface that I found while writing this article. Others are simply oversights in the design process, such as the keyboard navigation issues of the Quote block. Personally, I am willing to put up with most of these issues for now, but I worry that others may not be so forgiving.
Nested block UX
One essential feature of Gutenberg is that blocks can be nested. This is useful for things such as columns, sections, accordions, and other advanced blocks. Unfortunately, the UX for interacting with nested blocks is far from perfect. The most notable issue is trying to select a block that contains child blocks. If the parent block is barely larger than its children, the clickable area to select the parent is often quite small. Things only get worse when you start having multiple levels of nesting.
The Block Navigation menu introduced in Gutenberg 4.1 partially resolves this issue, but I think both it and the general nested block UI can still be improved. I think that the Block Navigation menu should let you drag and drop blocks from within the menu, as well as delete them. Another improvement would be to turn the Block Navigation menu into a sidebar and use the plugin API. This would allow you to unpin the feature from the main editor bar if you never used it. (I think the Document Outline should also use the plugin API for the same reason.)
One suggestion I have heard is to expand the padding of a block in the editor when you select it or its children. I think that could definitely make interacting with nested blocks easier. I particularly like this idea since it fits in with Gutenberg’s methodology of adapting selected blocks for editing.
As Gutenberg moves further into page building territory, interaction with blocks using nesting will become more common. Hopefully, this will result in more refinement of the editor UX around nested blocks.
Release schedule
The current release date worries me somewhat. Though I personally am fine with using Gutenberg right now, I don’t think everyone is as tolerant of bugs and quirks as I am. I know a lot of small improvements and bug fixes are coming in the bi-weekly 5.0.x updates. However, it seems strange that they are planning to release 5.0 while already working on a follow-up bug fix release. To be fair, most of these 5.0.x fixes are minor issues. But there are a few things like performance enhancements and writing flow fixes that, in my opinion, belong in the initial release. I fear that releasing now could mean a lot of bad first impressions. Despite being delayed multiple times, the release still feels premature.
But maybe there is no reason to worry. People are often slow to update their software. Thanks to that and the bi-weekly 5.0.x updates, most people may never see the bugs on release day. Perhaps I just notice bugs more because I like to play around with features. It will definitely be very interesting to see the public reaction after the release of WordPress 5.0. All I know is that if I was the release lead, I would have delayed Gutenberg until at least January. Even if it wasn’t actually necessary, it might at least help ease some of the tensions in the community.
An obscure and complicated but still annoying bug which will probably not be fixed before 5.0. Conclusion
The Gutenberg project has great potential, both within WordPress and outside of it. Unfortunately, it also has a lot of controversy surrounding it. Opinions on Gutenberg vary greatly, both among its supporters and its opposition.
Is Gutenberg ready? I don’t know. I clearly find it ready enough for my own use. It’s other people I’m worried about. It is hard to tell if the complaints you see on the internet foretell a larger reaction, or if, as Mr. Mullenweg suggests, this will end up being
the most anti-climactic release in WordPress history
. Ultimately, nobody can know for sure until it actually happens. And it looks like it is about to happen.In the end, I want Gutenberg to be a success. In the long run, Gutenberg could benefit everyone who uses WordPress. I just hope it doesn’t trip and fall at the start of that run.
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How to Install Pamac on Arch Linux
The problem with
pacmanThe default package manager of Arch Linux and its derivatives,
pacman, is quite nice. Installing packages from the official repos is often quite simple once you learn a few commands.Another nice feature of Arch Linux is the AUR, which is a huge repository of community-maintained packages. The AUR has allowed me to install nearly everything on my laptop using the package manager, allowing me to benefit from simple package installation, uninstallation, and updates. On many other Linux distros, while most popular apps are in the repositories, you still wind up having to install multiple packages manually whenever you want to install something less common; keeping track of manual packages can get frustrating, as you do not get the benefits of automatic updates, and installing and uninstalling them is not the most straightforward process. The AUR is the primary reason I use Arch-based Linux distros.
However, all is not perfect. Not by default, anyway.
First of all,
pacmanis a command-line app. Of course, that is exactly what it is supposed to be, and CLI apps will always be useful in many situations (how else would you install packages when you were not using a desktop environment), but I am sure most people would agree that a CLI app is not the ideal way to install and update applications.Second,
pacmancan not directly install packages from the AUR. You have to usemakepkgto install those packages. This is also far from ideal, and is definitely not as smooth of a process as installing apps from the official repositories.Thankfully, there is a solution to both of these problems.
Meet Pamac
Pamac is a GUI front-end for
libalpm, the ALPM library. It allows you to easily browse, install, uninstall, and update packages from not only the official repos, but also the AUR. It is a fantastic application originally developed for the Arch Linux derivative, Manjaro, though it works in mainline Arch Linux and Antergos as well.Speaking of Antergos and Manjaro, both of those distros come with Pamac installed, so if you are using those distros then there is probably no reason to be reading this article. But Arch Linux itself does not have this app installed by default or even in the official repos, so you will have to install it from the AUR, and as stated earlier, this is not the simplest of procedures.
The actual installation guide
Now that I have explained why you would want Pamac, it is time to actually show you how to install it.
Install the
base-develpackage group andgitif you haven’t already.sudo pacman -Syyu base-devel gitClone the Pamac
PKGBUILDand build dependencies into a newly-created temporary folder under your home directory.git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/pamac-aur.git ~/tempfolderBuild and install Pamac.
makepkg -sic BUILDDIR="~/tempfolder"Delete the temporary folder created earlier.
rm -r ~/tempfolderAnd that is it! You have now installed Pamac. To enable AUR support, open Pamac and navigate to the options (the button next to the search), then to Preferences→AUR and enable Enable AUR support. I also recommend installing
pamac-tray-appindicatorif you are using KDE Plasma as your desktop environment to get a nice tray icon for Pamac.Useful additional resources
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Looking Back on “A Laggy Boat Ride” (SGZ Plays MC #5)
The title, the thumbnail, and the lag
“A Laggy Boat Ride” was a laggy mess. At least in its original form, anyway.
I’ll start with the title. It isn’t exactly a title that entices you to watch the episode. If anything, it deters you from watching it. It mentions the worst part of the entire video, and says nothing about the parts that are at least somewhat interesting. There isn’t even a pun in the title making fun of the lag, so it just ends up being a rather bland and generic title that tells you why you shouldn’t watch the episode, but not why you should.
Then there’s the thumbnail. I forgot to mention that episode 4 was the first episode that I made a thumbnail for. That first thumbnail was pretty basic, lacking a screenshot from the actual episode, and having nothing but some images and text copy-pasted onto a white background.
I wanted to have a consistent style for the thumbnails, but I ended up changing the style for episode 5 because I realized that white backgrounds were kind of boring. The thumbnail for episode 5 was made using the same project file, and so the logo and cropped image of my player skin were in the exact same position, but the rest of the thumbnail was changed quite a bit.
But the inconsistency or relatively cheap look of the thumbnail doesn’t bother me nearly as much as the fact that the thumbnail, like the episode title, also spotlights the lag in the episode. I thought that since the episode had so much lag in it, I might as well advertise it as a “feature” of the episode or something, but in hindsight that was a bad idea. Pointing out your flaws doesn’t fix them or make them less bad.
If I was smarter back then, I probably would have edited out the lag and used a title mentioning something about exploration, snow biomes, and/or the wolves. But for whatever reason, I didn’t edit the lag out. Perhaps it was because my current video editor at the time (VSDC Free Video Editor) crashed constantly, or because I was lazy, or because I was inexperienced, or perhaps all of the above.
As for what caused the lag in the first place, I think it was a combination of my hard drive being almost entirely full and my recording software (Fraps) being very resource-intensive. My hypothesis is that because my hard drive was so close to being full and fragmented, the free space was scattered in small pieces throughout the drive, and so recording a video meant the hard drive had to keep jumping from place to place to keep up. And it wasn’t just small video files… Fraps made large AVI files, and even though I turned down the quality settings when I recorded the episode, the files were still pretty big. At the same time, when I would load in some chunks of the world or generate new ones, that would require reading from another part of the hard drive, so Fraps and Minecraft were battling for both CPU and hard drive usage.
These days, I’ve cleaned out a lot of space on my hard drive by moving my videos onto external drives and cloud storage. I have also discovered that recording video onto an external hard drive seems to help by freeing up the internal drive to be used by the game. Additionally, when recording on Windows 10, I currently use the built-in Xbox Game DVR to record videos, which seems to be far less resource-heavy, in part due to the fact that it outputs compressed MP4 files whereas Fraps made near-lossless AVI files.
(As a side note, I really wouldn’t recommend using either Fraps or VSDC Free Video Editor if you want to make videos. OBS Studio is better for recording and is also libre and cross-platform. The Windows 10 Xbox Game DVR also works well as a simple solution. And as for editing, I would recommend Kdenlive. I don’t know if VSDC still crashes as much as it used to, but Kdenlive has more features and has the bonus of also being libre and cross-platform, unlike VSDC.)
The episode itself
So far, I’ve only talked about the lag and title and thumbnail that advertised it. But what about the rest of the episode? Is there some good content left if you take out all the lag?
Wheeeee! Unfortunately, even without the lag, the episode is still pretty boring. The entire segment in the caves feels kind of pointless and takes up far too much time. Messing around outside with the endermen is kind of fun to watch, and getting my first ender pearl is kind of significant, but it’s still a segment where not much happens. The boat ride really should have been sped-up or I should have at least been talking about something interesting during it.
The part of the episode where I find the snow biome is probably the most interesting part of the entire episode. It has me exploring a new area unlike anything seen before in the series, and I find my first sugar cane and my first wolves there. I even get the “Cow Tipper” achievement. Actually, that might have been my first cow, but I haven’t checked the previous episodes so I’m not sure.
Unfortunately, the best part of the episode is followed by the worst part: the boat ride back home that inspired the title. I really should have cut this part out. Since I already showed my trip to the snowy region, I didn’t have to show my trip back especially after the footage turned out to be so frustrating and boring to watch. If I had just cut out this one segment or ended the episode while I was at the snowy region, then the episode would have a different title and would have finished on a high note.
Overall, episode 5 lacks in the area of interesting content, with most of the episode just being stuff that’s already been done in a previous episode. I already did cave exploration in the previous episodes, and this episode spends a long time underground and hardly shows anything new. I already fought mobs in previous episodes, and this episode just shows me doing that again, but with endermen. When I finally do something new in the form of riding a boat and exploring, I don’t utilize the time spent in that activity as well as I could, and then I waste time with pointless footage of riding back home, only this time with high amounts of lag.
Ironically, there’s an apology for the audio quality in the episode at the end of the intro, and yet upon rewatch, I think the audio quality in this episode is completely fine… compared to the previous 4 episodes, anyway. If anything, there should have been an apology for the lag in this episode or an apology for the audio in episode 4, which had bird noises or something in the background.
As I expected, episode 5 unfortunately breaks the trend of increasing quality throughout the previous 4 episodes. Overall, I would rank it as the second worst episode, with only episode 1 being worse. Very little happens in the episode, and what does happen doesn’t have much effect on the next episode. You could probably skip this episode and you would hardly miss anything.
The re-edit
But what about the re-edit? Was I able to salvage something decent out of this mess? Much to my surprise, yes! After cutting out all the lag and the majority of the cave segment, as well as speeding up the boat ride and making the usual polish cuts, I ended up with a fairly decent video that I’d say is pretty watchable. It’s not as good as the re-edits of episodes 3 and 4, but it’s a huge improvement over the original version of episode 5.
In total, I cut the episode down from a length of to ; that’s a decrease of . The original version of episode 5 was already the shortest one I had made, and the re-edited version is similarly the shortest of the re-edits so far. Although not much happens in the episode, you only spend watching the re-edited version, so it doesn’t take up that much of your time and the lack of content is more forgivable.
I probably could have cut it down even further down to below 10 minutes, but I was a bit worried that if I kept cutting it down, there would hardly be enough left to call it an episode. Unfortunately there’s not much interesting content in the episode, so I can’t just cut out everything that isn’t really exciting. If I did, then there probably wouldn’t be anything left. So instead, I tried to just make the episode feel like it was continually moving forward and not dragging on with nothing happening. I think this has the effect of making everything feel a bit more interesting and fresh.
One thing I noticed while rewatching the episode and preparing for the re-edit was that, while in the caves, I mentioned the weird liquid physics in Minecraft and how it was unlikely that they would ever change due to the risk of breaking contraptions. Of course, if you’ve been keeping track of recent Minecraft news, you will have heard about how the developers had considered changing water mechanics in the upcoming Update Aquatic, but backed down due to not wanting to break existing builds and contraptions. I thought it was kind of funny how my statement from was unintentionally relevant to recent events, so I decided to keep that part of the caving segment and add a little joke about the canceled change to water mechanics.
Another observation from re-editing this and other episodes: the Minecraft soundtrack sounds pretty cool sped-up, and speeding up footage sometimes makes it a whole lot funnier. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I think crashing my boat into the ice on the edge of the snow biome is a lot funnier sped-up, and my silly little
Wheeeee!
while running on the ice sounds even sillier. And of course, it has the bonus of making the footage take up less time and making the episode shorter, so that’s neat.Overall, I’m definitely pleased with how the re-edit of episode 5 turned out. It’s still not that great, but it’s such an improvement over the original and I was expecting worse, so I’m happy.
Conclusion
The original version of “A Laggy Boat Ride” is pretty bad, but the re-edit turned out surprisingly well. I still wish it could be better, and the episode could probably be skipped, but I’m happy that I was able to improve it as much as I did in the re-edit.
Although episode 5 wasn’t that interesting and not much happens, the episode that comes immediately afterwards is the complete opposite… it’s very interesting and some really important and unusual stuff happens. I’m really looking forward to rewatching episode 6… and I think re-editing it will be quite fun as well.
But until then, this has been SuperGeniusZeb, and I thank you all for reading!
Watch the original version of “A Laggy Boat Ride” on LBRY and YouTube!
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What I Use to Make My Videos – 2018 Edition
, I wrote a blog post about what I used to make my videos. But now that article is outdated, since I’ve changed a lot of the software and some of the equipment I use. So here’s an updated version of that article. If you’re looking to start making videos and were wondering how I did it, then here you go…
Equipment
I’m still using the same laptop that I was back in . It’s a Samsung NP350V5C-A01US laptop. Its specs are as follows:
- CPU: Intel Core i5-3210M 2.5 GHz 64-bit processor
- RAM: 6 GB DDR3 SDRAM
- Storage: 750 GB hard disk drive
- Screen resolution: 1366×768
The headset I was wearing broke, so I’m now using just earbuds and a YouMic lapel microphone, which has allowed me to record decent-enough audio.
For video storage, I’m currently using OneDrive cloud storage, though I would like to switch to a self-hosted server at some point – partially to not be dependent on Microsoft (and Google), and partially because I want to be able to make my videos available on DTube permanently without having to pay others to host my videos on their nodes.
Software
Operating system
My primary and favorite OS on my computer is Linux (or GNU+Linux, whatever you want to call it). My distro is Arch Linux, which I chose partially because I wanted a challenge for installing it, partially because I wanted to learn more about Linux, and partially because of the AUR (Arch User Repository).
Recording
When it comes to microphone audio recording on Linux, one neat feature I’ve discovered is that PulseAudio has an echo-cancelation module you can turn on. At least in my experience, this feature works great, and by using it and some tweaked settings in OBS, I’ve been able to get some surprisingly good audio out of my mic when recording on Linux. (My most-recent, and unfortunately also only example of this audio quality so far is “Looking Back on 2017”.)
And speaking of OBS (Open Broadcaster Software), that’s my main video/audio recording tool on Linux. It’s a rather fantastic app for both recording and livestreaming. Unfortunately, I can’t actually use it to record most of my gameplay videos – not because of a fault in the software, but rather because of my mediocre hardware.
My laptop lacks a dedicated graphics card, and so I only have integrated graphics (Intel HD Graphics 4000) provided by the processor. So how do I record my videos? Well, the processor has a feature called Quick Sync Video, which allows for quick video processing, but unfortunately there’s not much support for the feature on Linux. So in order to record videos with a decent framerate while playing a resource-intensive game like Minecraft, I have to use the other operating system installed on my laptop: Windows 10.
On Windows 10, I usually just use the built-in Xbox Game DVR feature to record gaming videos. It works well enough for most cases, though sometimes it can be a bit confusing and/or tricky to know when I have started recording since the game bar doesn’t appear while playing Minecraft in fullscreen mode.
Editing
After recording all the footage for a video, it’s time to edit it. I use Kdenlive as my video editor, since it’s both kinds of free (libre and gratis), surprisingly powerful, and it runs on Linux (and Windows), unlike my previous two video editors. For music in my videos I usually use Kevin MacLeod music, since he licenses his music under the open/libre Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. I usually export my videos in WebM format using the open VP9 codec, though I hope to start using AV1 in the future once that format is completed and support for it becomes more widespread.
When making video thumbnails, I use the built-in screenshot function of VLC Media Player to capture frames from my videos, and I use GIMP to edit them and create the thumbnails for my videos. For a series, I just re-use the same project file for the thumbnail of every episode and modify it to use the screenshot, title, and episode number of the one I’m currently working on. I then export the result as a PNG image, and that’s it!
Conclusion
Overall, I think my setup has improved from the last time I posted about it. I wish I had a laptop with more graphical power, and I also wish I had proper headphones and a better mic, but in terms of software, I’m quite satisfied with what I’m using right now. I would definitely recommend using OBS, Kdenlive, and GIMP if you’re wanting to do video production. I wish I had been using these tools when I first started making videos.
For now, that’s all there is to say about the tools I use to make my videos, but after the next 2 years have passed, I’ll probably end up doing another one of these posts, in which case I’ll add a link to it here. I hope this post has been helpful and informative to you!
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Looking Back on “From Wood to Stone” (SGZ Plays MC #4)
Yeah! It’s been a good episode.
Those were the words I spoke near the end of the 4th episode of SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft. I felt that I had accomplished a lot in the footage I had recorded, which would make for a good episode. Looking back, I think I was right… in comparison to the previous 3 episodes, anyway.
Pointless Caption “From Wood to Stone” has more interesting content in it than any of the previous episodes. There is a bit of game progression, a lot of mob combat, a building timelapse (which I was still mistakenly calling a “montage” at the time), and some cave exploration all in a single episode.
Unfortunately, the episode has a lot of boring moments in between the interesting parts. Getting the sheep takes up way too much time, there’s a lot of moments where I talk about something I plan to do while doing pretty much nothing on-screen, and there’s plenty of other footage that should have been cut up.
Even the interesting parts aren’t really that interesting. Building a pen for animals should have just been a quick timelapse or not shown at all. Mob combat is neat, but it gets repetitive quickly. Exploring the cave is probably the most interesting part, but I hardly spend any time actually exploring, with a lot of time being taken up by me digging tunnels trying to find the source of hostile mob noises.
While watching this episode, I also noticed that I was still trailing off some of my sentences and talking too quietly. And also like previous episodes, I barely though through what I was going to say when I started recording, and so a lot of my explanations of my plans come out messy and take up more time than they should. And of course, my microphone quality isn’t the greatest to begin with, so it can be a bit confusing and frustrating when I’m talking about something.
On top of those audio issues, I noticed that there was quite a bit of background noise. When I started watching the episode while preparing to make a re-edit, I heard what sounded like birds in the background. At first, I was a bit confused, as this didn’t seem to have been in the previous episodes.
Then, as the episode continued, I heard myself mention that my laptop battery had almost run out of battery power and that I had been recording outside. So most likely, those were actual bird (or some other outside animal) noises. Why was I outside? Well, this piece of dialogue from myself also reminded me that I had recorded this episode while at my grandparents’ house. They had a porch outside with a table where I decided to put my laptop and record this episode in order to not have a bunch of background noise in my video or cause a bunch of noise inside the house myself. Yeah, it’s a little ironic that I ended up with background noise while trying to avoid background noise, but trust me, it would have been a lot worse if I had recorded the episode inside.
I was still trying to keep a weekly upload schedule at the time… these days I wouldn’t bother trying to record an episode outside of my home, and I probably wouldn’t do it outside, either… especially now that I know that it would lead to bird noises in the background audio. (Though I actually kind of like the bird noises in this episode. It almost seems like intentional ambient background sounds in the game, which makes me kind of wish Minecraft had ambient noises like that.)
On another note, I think this episode is quite significant in the history of the series. As the title of the episode hints, I change the look of my house from wood planks to stone bricks, which combined with the start of the upwards tunnel to the next room, set the style that the house still uses to this day. Additionally, the area that would later become my main storage room is mostly mined out.
The pointless sign is also first placed in this episode. That little sign, with a message that tends to change a lot, was one of my early intentional “quirks” I decided to throw into the series. I thought it would be fun to just have a sign with random messages every episode (or couple of episodes), which in hindsight is almost the series equivalent to the yellow splash text on the title screen of Minecraft.
Is this the best of the original versions of the SuperGeniusZeb Plays Minecraft episodes so far? On the one hand, I feel like I wasted a bit more time in episode 4 than the episode prior, but the interesting parts of episode 4 are more interesting, so overall, I think episode 4 is better.
On top of that, I think that the re-edited version of episode 4 is definitely the best of the re-edits so far. With episode 4 having more good content to begin with, cutting out all the boring parts resulted in the final product being the most enjoyable episode yet. In total, I cut out from what was originally an episode with a duration of , resulting in a re-edit with a length.
So what did I cut out? First of all, the section in which I get sheep was greatly reduced in duration. The entire sequence of me building the sheep pen was cut out, and the task of finding and leading the sheep was reduced to a few clips.
Then, after cutting out some unnecessary footage where I harvest some crops and state the obvious (I want pigs more than sheep but don’t have carrots), I cut up the outside mob fighting sequence to get rid of slow moments and make it feel a bit more fast-paced. While creating the re-edit, I was considering just cutting out that entire section of the episode, since it might feel repetitive or uninteresting. I was just fighting basic mobs with little real threat after all… I was so close to my house and world spawn point that I could easily have retrieved any items I dropped upon death. However, in the end I decided to keep most of this part of the episode since it shows my progression from being wary of fighting mobs at all in the first episode to being able to easily defeat several mobs and feeling much more confident in this one.
That’s not to say I wasn’t still a bit too cautious, however, as shown later in the cave where I get scared by only a couple of mobs, assume that there must be a zombie spawner (I wish!), and end up not doing much actual cave exploration. I find it to be a bit ironic, knowing that in fairly recent episodes, I’ve made some big mistakes by being too confident.
Fun fact: during the end of the outside mob fight, you can actually see the enderman placing the grass block on top of my house if you slow down the video and watch closely.
The building
montagetimelapse from which the episode gets its name has also been modified in the re-edit. In the original episode, there was a pause in the middle of the timelapse where I showed what the house looked like with all the wood planks removed. I decided this little diversion was unnecessary and I merged the two timelapses into one timelapse, removing the original audio track with background music and replacing it with the same background music, not because I wanted to be redundantly redundant, but because otherwise there would be an awkward cut in the timelapse music where it started over. Just by luck, the re-edited music track lined up perfectly with the modified timelapse, allowing me to cut off the music at a point that feels really natural. In my opinion, this was the first timelapse in the series that was worth recording, and the re-edit made it even better. I’m glad that this time I chose an episode title that was derived from a good part of the episode, not a boring one like episode 2.After the building timelapse, there was another section of the episode where I fought some mobs at nighttime, but I decided to cut this out in the re-edit since I had already done this earlier and it broke the flow of the episode by having me say I’ll go make some more stone bricks and then proceed to spend a bunch of time fighting mobs before finally doing that and getting back to building.
Finally, I cut out some footage of me discussing how I was mining out the storage room (I’m not really sure why I even recorded that dialogue in the first place), and got rid of the majority of the search for the mob noises, which was pretty dull since it was just me mining tunnels in various directions to try and find something. It’s another one of those things that, if I had made the episode today, I probably wouldn’t have even recorded, and definitely would have cut out in the first edit.
The re-edit also contains a bunch of smaller “polish” edits where I would cut out a couple seconds here and there… too many and too insignificant to mention on their own. But together, I think they help to keep the episode moving and slice off a bit more time.
Overall, I’m quite pleased with how the re-edit of this episode turned out. Now I’m curious about what rewatching and re-editing episode 5 will be like. An episode with a title of “The Laggy Boat Ride” implies lag, obviously. From what I can remember, there’s definitely a lot of lag during the boat ride, but I don’t recall if there’s lag during the rest of the episode or not. Lag makes for poor video quality and usually not very good content, so I’m worried that this episode won’t end up nearly as good in its re-edit as episode 4.
Will the trend of increasing episode quality continue? Or will episode 5 have too many problems to fix? Find out next time, in the next interesting but probably not exciting “Looking Back” blog post… same Zeb-channel, but probably not the same Zeb-time! This has been SuperGeniusZeb, and I thank you all for reading.
Watch the original version of “From Wood to Stone” on LBRY and YouTube!