Lucidluminary - Lou

anyways after that minecraft movie trailer i'm tempted to change my skin back to that one based on crimson/warped duality out of spite

they called the nether "a place with no joy or creativity at all" like just tell me you're too scared to go there and thus haven't experienced

-joining in on a group of piglins hunting a hoglin, letting them keep the loot, trading with them afterwards, i find that this temporarily cures the loneliness of singleplayer

-the dance they do afterwards sometimes literally just the piglin dance, hitting shift repeatedly with them

-literally just the nether music at all

-that CRESCENDO in rubedo

-that brief minor key reprise of sweden in dead voxel hhhhhhhhhhhh

-occasional crimson roots in a soul sand valley like oh there's still some life here

-wither skull hunting and recruiting piglins to help you by luring them to the fortress with gold (+ giving them gold helmets so they don't put on the skulls) i love the ways this game lets me fight alongside piglins if i want to

-the subtle animated texture of crimson and warped stems like they feel so ALIVE with that one small detail

-seeing a nether tree growing through another one

-and an extremely tall nether tree amidst the normal height ones

-and weeping vines hanging from the ceiling

-passing by a piglin that's wearing enchanted iron boots and immediately knowing you've met and traded with this one before

-parkour challenge basalt delta

-also the particles in that biome look like snow if you turn down your render distance

-STRIDERS. Literally just striders. They're like bonded creatures to me, honorary tameable mobs, you put a saddle on the one mob in the nether that would never hurt you and then go on a journey together across the deadly lava ocean avoiding ghasts together and you can't remove the saddle now unless you kill it which you can't do because it's your ride back to the portal, once that strider is saddled it is Your strider and even if you release it into the wild you will immediately recognize it by the saddle if you see it again and in such a dangerous world you have found a companion you can always trust and idk bout you but i always bond so hard with them

-and also they're kind of cute, esp with the little waddle walk

-seeing a baby strider on top of an adult one

-literally just the fact that nether biomes have all this constant looping ambience and particles in the air that makes them feel so immersive and so alive, each biome has its own unique soundscape and ambience, can you imagine soul sand valleys without the wind and the whispers and wails

-aside note the particle effects are like the animated stems in that they're such a subtle detail but they add so much, i never really noticed them until i was netherite mining and started using them to tell which biome i'm under

-the nether was doing ambience and immersion 5 years before the Spring Drop allowed the overworld to finally catch up to it

-the adorableness of baby piglins

-esp when they ride on top of baby hoglins

-PIGSTEP. FUCKING PIGSTEP. the piglins have music and it's SUCH A BANGER i've thrown ingame parties with this music disc

-seeing warped fungus in a crimson forest or crimson fungus in a warped forest

-biome borders between the two that have all this warped foliage in the crimson forest and vice versa as they blend into each other

-nyooming across a soul sand valley with soul speed 3 boots, laughing at the skeletons and ghasts who can't land a hit on you, bonus if you add a speed potion to the mix

-doing this and realizing the subtitle says "soul escapes" and you're surrounded by blue particles and realizing you're freeing them from their imprisonment (and presumably the piglins who made this enchantment are doing the same when they use it)

-the rib and snout armor trims

-gilded blackstone it's so pretty and nice and a great building block (and you can't craft it only the piglins know how to do that)

-bastions have chiseled blackstone

-and their own exclusive banner pattern

-some of them have that gold-and-quartz decorative thing that looks like some kinda statue

-apparently part of the Bridge type of bastion is designed to resemble a piglin head with the mouth as the entrance

-getting lost in the lore implications, noticing the huge fossils and the implications of the name "warped forest" as well as the names of some of its ambience sounds and the fact that basalt comes from rapidly cooling lava irl and next thing you know you've got a whole red string theory going that edges closer and closer to cosmic horror

-ik the fossils look like ribs but one time i wondered if they might be the fingers of something unfathomably huge

-the time i encountered a baby piglin running from a zombified one so i pushed the zombified piglin off the fortress and then gave the baby piglin a gold nugget

but hey what do i know i'm just a nether enthusiast on the "romanticizing and finding beauty in the horrifying and the forsaken" website huh

(P4) Lunar Phases and Lunar Phrases, big and little bears

Hey students, here’s a pro tip: do not write an email to your prof while you’re seriously sick.

Signed, a person who somehow came up with “dear hello, I am sick and not sure if I’ll be alive to come tomorrow and I’m sorry, best slutantions, [name]”.

no but seriously I still get chills thinking about turning off my headlamp in the cave and The Hand That I Did Not Actually See, and it’s been twelve years since it happened

it’s such an unreal experience

like

you turn off your light in a cave and wave your hand in front of your face

and

you can see this shadowy thing moving in the black space where your hand is

it looks like the same shadowy thing you would see in your room at night if you waved your hand in front of your face, it’s there and vaguely hand-shaped, and your brain recognizes it as your hand because your brain is aware of where your hand is and what it is doing

But You Are Not Seeing Anything

Inside a cave, there is No Light. No matter how far your pupils spread, there is no light for them to draw in, no light to put an image on your retina.

But your brain just Fucking Assumes that because it knows where your hand is and what it is doing, clearly it can see it.

So it creates a shadowy thing for your eyes to be seeing.

Brain is like “there’s a hand there”

Eyes are like “yup sure thing brain I can totally see it”

Brain is like “nice”

but there is no hand, you cannot see the hand, you are seeing a literal actual hallucination in the cave because your brain thinks it knows best

Caves are awesome, but also terrifying. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

sOlAcE

"Curiosity Killed My Beia" A comic I did for The Spinoff's Comic of the Month

its dark outside. i'd better press 'f' to activate my 'flashlight'

I fucking hate seattle man. the liberals have built a living superstructure that towers over the city and covers the sky in rain and fog. I'm fuckin moving to the countryside

#voices of the void

openin’ the door to the microwave one second early because you don’t need all the hootin’ and hollerin’

Who do you the eyes watching in the forest belong to?

Actually nevermind, not knowing is better

What eyes? Don't tell me you failed at the very simple instruction the sign gave you!