Saturday 29 October 2011

Pink is a great colour!

Friday was "Wear it pink" day to raise money for Breast Cancer Campaign and there was a raffle at our work with lots of pink prizes! I can't resist a raffle so bought £5 worth of tickets (25 total) and was quite surprised to find I'd won quite a few of the prizes!


That's a bottle of pink Cava in the middle and around it pomegranate and elderflower drink, giant tube of pink Smarties, pink umbrella and a pot of body butter (???) and a shower fizzer (???) thrown in as well. Okay so even after reading the description I'm not even sure what the body butter/shower fizzer are, but I know someone who will! :) Pretty cool eh? :D

Following on from last week, yes I'm still playing Minecraft and it's quite a lot of fun building stuff!

This is my current house. A very big pit and if you want to
cross it you have to get across the retracting pistons!

As you can see the pistons come out, but also the fences
raise so once you start you can't go back! Evil huh?

Every pit/cave needs a secret door so I built a huge tunnel
all the way under the town and it came out here!

I decided it wasn't secret enough though so I built a hill on top of it and
even a waterfall doorway inside! Entrance path is where the arrow is!

Saw this from "Portal" whilst on my travels!

This was built out of blocks and was HUGE!

On a more serious note, one of the site members is going to have an cancer related
operation soon so loads of people put up individual sign posts wishing them all
the best as well as big messages as you can see! I really was quite impressed
to see so many people turning up and leaving supportive messages etc.

Okay I think that'll do for now :)

Sunday 23 October 2011

Minecraft

For ages now I've kept seeing "Minecraft" popup here and there, either on rather weird YouTube videos or people just asking me if I play it (because they think it's something I'd like). Well I never got around to it... and now I have... and OMG IT'S SO MUCH FUN! :D Basically the world you're in (and even yourself and the other creatures) are all made up blocks so whilst it does make the graphics look rather retro, it pulls it off nicely!

I started off in single player mode which is "Survival" and you have to build a house and monsters will attack so you have to mine for materials and then craft them into weapons or other such supplies (see where the name comes from?). At first I was like "OMG!", but it soon starts making sense because crafting is so easy and it's just really logical. Like for example if you want to make a pickaxe, you put two stick on top of each other to make the handle and then 3 stones across the top and boom that's it, you've made a pickaxe. A sword is one piece wooden handle and then two pieces of blade and it does the rest for you.

I built a house and put a massive pillar on the roof so I'd see remember where it was!

I went exploring and got a bit wet

I made LOTS of tunnels!

After I'd figured out the basics I thought it was time to go online (because multiplayer games are so much more fun!) so I Google'd for a minecraft server and the first one that came up was CityCraft. They have two different servers, one for just building where there are no enemies and another "Survival" server much like the single player game, but you work as a team etc. For now I'm just on the build server, but I liked playing survival so I'll probably do that at some point.

I haven't actually done a whole lot of building yet though, I've found a big area and I have an idea about what I want to do, although I'm not sure that I have the talent (or imagination) to pull it off, but we'll see. I've mostly just been exploring, marvelling at some of the constructions other people have made and just trying to assist other people with problems (yes I know I've only been playing it a day, but a lot of people haven't bothered working out anything for themselves it seems!)

I went shopping for supplies

Met Optimus Prime

Batman was here too

These shifty looking guys were checking out some buildings

Visited New York

Had a snowball fight

Finally went for a boat ride! (they don't actually move)

Quite a busy day eh? :) Oh and in less exciting news, my personalised Xmas cards have turned up and they look fantastic (okay I suppose that part is exciting) and my new washing machine turned up today and it's working perfectly (that part isn't very exciting) :)