Just In Time!

Well, at least I was able to keep one of my resolutions! Sorry for the very late post, but I've been busy -- and procrastinating, of course.

So, in recent news, I got bored of writing The Hobbit, but there's some other stuff that I'm doing instead! My Pokemon map has been a bit neglected due to the fact that my Vanilla Prison Singleplayer map and a lot of server stuff is taking up all of my time. The map is an original concept, and I've got quite far! So far I've done A-G and S-T, with U-Z being planned. It uses a lot of concepts that I have worked on that involves the /setblock command -- of course, when 1.8 is released, most of the work will be invalidated because of the /clone command that's being added, which is a bummer. More on that some other time.

As usual, I've been involved in multiple projects at once, so there's quite a bit to talk about. Firstly, there is a Prison Server that I'm helping an online friend of mine make. The IP will come as soon as we're in Beta! It's really good so far, and we've done quite a few of the blocks! We're pretty much set up for Beta, but PrisonMine messed up and we have to work on that. Once we're done for that, we should be ready for Beta so that you guys can play with us!

I have obtained my own server and I am experimenting with a little idea that I'm not sure whether or not I can make work. I probably can, but it'll take quite a while of working on -- or I could just wait until 1.8. Yeah, I'll probably do that. You'll have to wait to see what it is! Once I've got it in Beta and I've got MCProHosting to give me the damn Sub-Domain that I bought, then the IP will be up on this and my Youtube!

Speaking of YouTube, I've done some recording and I've got quite a few videos going! I quickly tired of the SSP, so I'm doing other stuff right now. I'm thinking of starting some factions... Also, I'm going to try to record some of my favorite game -- Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga! I honestly love Minecraft and Pokemon, but ML:SSS will always be the best game ever! If you've ever played it, you'll know why!

So, that's gonna be all for now! I'll probably post tomorrow and get March over with -- so you most likely won't have to wait long for a follow-up post!

See you guys later!
-Shymain

Happy New Years!

Hello, and happy New Year to all!

Sorry for the delay in posting, hopefully this long post will make up for the wait!

So, it's new years, and, among other things, I have made a list of New Years Resolutions, which I am going to attempt to keep - and if I do, it will be the first year that I've kept all my resolutions!

Firstly on the list, I am going to attempt to finish writing out the first chapter of The Hobbit in the dwarvish runes used in the book of The Hobbit. Funnily enough, the directors of The Hobbit movies decided to not use the dwarvish runes from The Hobbit, but the more commonly known runes called Cirth. The reason why the dwarvish runes are less commonly known is because Cirth is actualy decoded by Tolkein for you in one of the appendixes of The Return of The King, but I decoded the dwarvish runes myself, which most people wouldn't even think of doing.

Back on track, my second resolution will be to learn Cirth, since I never got around to that, and it would be fun to decode all of the text in the Hobbit movies (the second of which I watched yesterday, coincidentally), and because Cirth is also used in the Lord of the Rings books. In case you hadn't noticed, I love cryptology because decoding languages is almost like a riddle or a mystery, and I love all three of those things because of the logic required for them.

Thirdly, I will create a custom font that changes letters into their respective Dwarvish runes, and copy/paste the whole of The Hobbit into a word document and apply the font to it. Technically it wouldn't work, because I don't think fonts change the spacebar, and I would have to replace each space with a dot manually, which would take forever.

Fourthly, I will complete my Pokemon arena map.

Finally, and most importantly, I will attempt to -- no, I will post at least once a month on this blog. Hopefully I will post more, but when school starts up again, I probably won't have much time. No, I actually will have plenty of time, but nothing much to post about, unless I think of some cool thing that I want to share, since I can only play games on the weekend during school.

So, yeah, I've got a bit of a list, and hopefully I will be able to keep it!

On a different track, I have successfully created a Youtube channel which can be found at youtube.com/shymain, and I have made a number of videos, the majority of them being sprint parkour videos. It would be awesome if you guys checked that out!

Now, I really haven't done much work at all on my Pokemon map since my last blogpost, but I've got an idea of a way to create a boss battle now! I've been learning about advanced commands that can be used in command blocks, such as /summon, and I'm thinking of implementing that in my Pokemon map! Basically, it's just a bunch of syntax which is hard to memorize, but once you get the hang of it, it's extremely useful.

Oh, and a lot of that syntax can be used in /give, which enables you to get super-powerful weapons, such as swords with looting 5000 (not a good idea, it will lag your Minecraft client like all hell set loose), or armour with protection 1000 for virtual invincibility!

And you can use those enchantments to specify enchanted gear on mobs created with /summon, creating an über-strong mob, which totally improves arena maps!

Well, that's all for now! Thanks for reading, and be sure to subscribe to me at youtube.com/shymain!

Presents and Amendments

Yes, yes, I know I promised to post yesterday, but a lot of stuff complicated that promise, so I mentally amended the promise so that I would post again sometime this week, not yesterday. So, sorry about the delay, but hopefully I'll be able to make this post long enough to make up for it!

So, first on the list, my birthday. I had what was probably the best birthday that I've had in five years -- because I got a chance to talk to my best friend, Jaron, for the first time since July! True, it was over Skype, but Skype is still a lot better than nothing!

We played a lot of Minecraft together, so here's what we did:

First off, since he's an Admin on the server that we were playing on, we were able to have a dual birthday celebration -- oh, did I forget to mention his birthday's the 1st of December, ten days apart from mine?

We also ran around doing nonsensical things for no reason for a time while simultaneously catching up on each other's lives for the past couple months. He showed me his bank, I showed him my awesome house with all of the epic loot that I got legit, and stored some of it in his bank.

Oh yeah, you should visit his twitch channel at http://www.twitch.tv/dafireybeast! He did some live streaming with me, I believe, and it shows some of the stuff that we did together. Back to that.

So, we each started to build towns -- him in creative, me in survival -- and we had tremendous fun just talking nonsense and building! Most of the time we were online alone, without any other players on. The only reason I got the chance to talk with him was a massive snowstorm on his end, and it was the most enormous stroke of luck for me.

So, I've sort of formed a pre-plan for a 'randomiser' for the singleplayer arena of the Pokémon map that works off of the purchasing scheme that sethbling thought of involving throwing an item, but with a dispenser to randomize the options of arenas. Of course, the locks and stuff might be a bit complicated, but I'll probably be able to use the /setblock command to enable the luxury of working with plenty of space.

I've finished the Cyndaquil singleplayer stuff, so that's quite a bit of progress. I was able to theme the arena on the nether, and Jaron agrees that it's very realistic. He was able to see through Skype's screen sharing function.

I'm thinking of starting a YouTube channel, and I've recorded two episodes of SSP and I'm editing it while preparing a second survival world with an extra rule, which you can find out about if you watch it when it comes out.

So, yeah. I got Pokémon X, but since I have an American 3DS and we bought the game in SA, they're not compatible, so that's a bit annoying...

Well, overall my birthday was awesome, especially because of my Skype call with Jaron.

Well, that's the second post this week! Hope you enjoyed!

Procrastination and Custom Maps!

First things first: wow. Just wow. I am SO SORRY for not posting for three months! See, the substantial amounts I post cause me to, um, not post and stuff, and anyways, I didn't promise anything...

In other words, I'm a massive procrastinator and life got in the way. For example, the things I am currently procrastinating include my birthday plans (my birthday is tomorrow), an awesome Pokémon-based Minecraft map (more about that later), a number of projects I would like to start on, some of them on the computer, some of them in the real world, and my book.

So, as I said, my birthday is tomorrow, so, as a special gift, I'll try to make a post two days in a row! (Today and Tomorrow) I'm actually not that excited this year, for some reason... Turning 14 just doesn't feel like a big deal. I mean, yay, it's my birthday, yippee, let's have some cake, yada yada, etc. just feels sort of childish. For my birthday, I just want to RELAX.

As I'm writing this, I'm at a holiday camp that I'm helping out with, so I'm effectively taking a holiday from this holiday camp. From helping to run it, that is, because the camp is for the younger kids. Basically, it's themed on Lego and 'building each other up', which is 50% cool. You can guess which half is the cool half.

I mean, they're singing songs with lyrics such as 'Encourage one another and build each other up, lalalalalalala' . Really? What nutcase tries to get kids from Grade 4+ to sing songs that are designed for toddlers?

Wait, I already know the answer to that – a bunch of mothers from our church. Including my mom. And, of course, they spent a ton of time printing out about three hundred posters, and about 40 people came, the majority of them from our church. Oh, and guess who printed them all out and cut them out, etc. etc.? Yours truly, of course.

So, next on the list is reasons that I ended up procrastinating so much. First off, my grades were dropping from As and Bs, so I decided to quit Serebii, because I was addicted to it previously, and there really wasn't much incentive to go online afterwards. It did help my grades a lot, though.

Then I had Exams, and at that point I was buried under homework and studying, so there was obviously no time to blog at that point. When exams were done, I needed a break, so I started listening to a lot of music and sleeping a lot more because I was tired.

Then I had Term 1 Control Tests – which is stupid because it was only Term 4. My school is just weird like that. Then again, seeing as my school gets top academic results, it might not be that bad of an idea.

But now it's the holidays, and I'm FINALLY free from school! I really don't dislike school, but I don't especially enjoy my time at school either, so holidays are always welcome.

I believe that I said that I would talk more about that Pokémon-themed map, so onto that!

The general idea is that you are the Pokémon in this game. My favorite generation of starters is Gen. II, so I've given the option to be either Chikorita, Cyndaquil or Totodile. The map is compatible for 1-3 players, and works in singleplayer mode and multiplayer mode.

In singleplayer, you basically run around a mob arena themed on your Pokémon, kill them and level up. Not only do you get experience from killing mobs, but I've set a scoreboard objective that acts as a point system for 'evolving', which is basically getting a better kit.

You can use experience to enchant, fix and rename items in your home (which coincidentally looks like a Pokèball), which makes it easier to kill the mobs (or the other players in multiplayer, more on that later), making it easier to get experience, etc. etc. etc.

I'm also considering the option to play in multiple arenas, but that'll require a bit more thought and planning than I'd like, including a mechanism for a cycle between multiple arenas, and some serious World Editing on MCEdit, which isn't that desirable.

Then we have multiplayer. As I said before, up to three players can participate, each one a different Pokémon, and I'm seriously considering adding more Pokémon than just the starters so that more people can play at once – of course, I'll have to finish Cyndaquil and Totodile, and we'll have a heck of a lot of work to do on the multiplayer arenas.

Now that we've brought it up, I might as well finish it: multiplayer arenas. It's basically just what it sounds like, arenas for multiplayer. They should be about the same size as the singleplayer arenas, but with a division so that each player can have their own themed arena section – lava and netherrack for Cyndaquil, water and lilypads for Totodile, and grassy plains with a single tree for Chikorita.

Oh, while we're on themes, for singleplayer, we have grassy plains with a couple of trees for Chikorita, a Nether themed arena (no lava) for Cyndaquil, and a lake with some dirt around the edges and some lilypads for Totodile.

Anyways, in multiplayer there will be a button that gives each player a boost – such as speed, fire resistance or jumping – for about five seconds, so as to work better in the other player's territory.

I think that's about all you'll need to know for now about the map! Oh, and just a quick hint: you can tame the wolves that spawn in the singleplayer arenas. They might come in helpful!

So, that's about it for now! I've got to save all other topics that I've thought of for tomorrow's post! Oh, and I'm really sorry, once again, about the lack of posts, and I'll hopefully be able to post more often now that it' style holidays!

It's been good to blog again, and thanks for listening to my musings and ramblings!

Small Things and X/Y Thoughts

Hey, all!

I would just like to quickly tell you to read my friend, Cassafrass1999's fanfiction! It is called Destiny  Bonds, and is an extremely cool PMD fic. Read it here!

Well, I was thinking about the mind again... And we all know how dangerous that can be!

I was wondering why small things can make such a big difference in our lives. Like, I get a six week holiday in America, but then when I get home, a three day weekend seems like a huge deal to me. Really, it does! I mean, six weeks is so much more than just an extra day, isn't it?

Of course, it could just be that I'm so used to having no jobs/responsibilities that my mind gets excited that I can get back into that habit again, even if I do schoolwork, and the habit is only for three days.

The funny thing is that, for the most part, I really enjoy school. I love my English, Physics, Biology, History, Geography, and, surprisingly, Art classes, and all of the rest of the classes are decent, at least. Maths is the only boring one, and that's not because I'm bad at Maths, which I'm not, but because the Maths work is extremely repetitive.

I guess it must be my brain being happy to take a break from school, because I actually use it quite often there, but not in ways that I would prefer to use it. I would prefer to be working on my story, or pondering random things in life, or debating, or playing chess, or something that seems, you know, more worthwhile.

Because, as juvenile as this sounds, I really don't see where I'm going to use most of this stuff. It's actually gotten to the point that my head is so full of stuff that I find it difficult to learn much of anything – apart from Pokèmon names and facts, that is.

On the topic of Pokèmon, everyone else saw the news about the Shiny Sylveon, correct? I think it's so cool that it looks like that! That guy is, like, one of the luckiest Pokèmon players, but at the same time, he got extremely unlucky because he had to lose his Pokèmon at the end of the demo.

So, it's definitely worth having a Shiny Eevee just for Shiny Sylveon IMO. Funny, Eevee was already an extremely desired Shiny, but now it's even more so. It's like MegaEvos, which make wanted Pokèmon wanted even more.

Come to think of it, I wonder if the MegaEvos are compatible with Shiny Pokèmon? It would be cool to see a Shiny MegaEvo. Like, Shiny MegaMewtwo, for one, would be extremely cool, don't you think?

Well, that's enough pondering, so that's all!

Breeding Part 2 + 250 Views!

Well, we've reached 250 posts, and as promised, I have posted the new background! Thanks a ton to everyone who reads this, and a special shout out to TestTales for being my first commenter!

I really have a lot of nostalgia centered around the Pokèmon franchise, especially the games. In fact, with some Pokèmon, I have special connections– well, a special connection with a Pokèmon, at least.

It should be a Magneton that I have a connection with, but instead, it's Metagross.

See, when I was younger, I had Ruby as my first game, and shortly afterwards, my dad got Emerald. We both would sit around for hours on end playing our respective games, while talking and comparing Pokèmon and he asked me for help. Well, at one point we both acquired Magnemites, and we raised them together, leveling them slowly, but surely. He was usually ahead of me, but at times I would pull ahead of him.

Well, it came to pass that he lost interest in Pokèmon, and his Emerald was passed on to me, but I continued training my Magnemite, now a Magneton. Eventually it reached Level 100, and became my first Level 100. I would use it more that my legendaries, it could K.O. anyone's team (that I played), and it could easily withstand a Explosion!

Of course, something always goes wrong. Foolishly, I let my sister play on my Sapphire, which now contained my Magneton, as well as my Kyogre, and she ended up deleting my save file. At that time, I felt like killing her, but I eventually got over it.

So I played my Ruby and Emerald to my heart's content.

Then one day I restarted my Emerald.

I played and played, and at one point, moved my Metagross, christened Bad Daddy, from my Ruby to my Emerald. I eventually discovered the cloning glitch, and cloned him endless times. So, I now have Metagross on Ruby, Emerald, Diamond and Black 2.

I was thinking about TestTale's theory that Pokèmon actually don't reproduce like creatures in the human world, thinking that it was incorrect because of a comment that the Day-Care couple make, but then I realized that they said that they found it, not that they saw it happening!

So, in the actual creation of the eggs, how does that happen? Is it possible that something like DNA could actually just join together outside of the body? Or maybe the Day-Care couple have some machine that they use to do that...

That's actually an interesting idea! It would explain how Pokèmon don't just reproduce anywhere, but just in the daycare– and it would explain why, in the games, you never see your Pokèmon in the Day-Care center with the other Pokèmon...

Another thing that it would explain is why there are egg groups– some of the Pokèmon have incompatible DNA with others, and some of them are in two egg groups because they have similar DNA to members of both of them.

And that explains unbreedable Pokèmon, because they are either synthetic or would overload the machine with Legendary power, destroying it, and the Day-care couple wouldn't want to risk that, now would they?

Well, that's all for now!

-Shymain

Breeding is CRAAAAAZY!

Hey, guys!

Yeah, I just felt like posting again, so, without any further ado, let us start!

I thought of something really funny about Pokèmon games today– you know how when you're battling a wild Pokèmon that you can see it's gender? Well, how is that possible? I mean, does the Pokèmon let you walk over and check 'under the hood' to see if it's male or female? And, for that matter, how would you even know what's what? Each different species would have it's own way of sexual reproduction, wouldn't it?

Or rather, since there are breeding groups, would all the Pokèmon in each group have the same method of reproduction? I guess that's feasible. And that would explain how you can tell which is which.

Of course, then it gets more complicated because some Pokèmon have two different breeding groups. And at his point, it becomes so complicated that it's not even worth discussing.

Well, back to the original question, I think that it's possible that the Pokedex is able to recognize subtle differences between genders, and would be able to tell that way. That's probably it, as gender differences have been in the games for the last couple Generations.

So, anyways, I'm making a new background which, when it's done, will be posted– if we're up to 250 views! We've had quite a few views, so thank you to all who're reading this!

I'm living down in South Africa, where Pokèmon's out of style, so it came to me as a real surprise when I discovered that someone else in my class liked Pokèmon! He's apparently played Gens 3-5 and has most of the legendaries.

I'm glad to have a 3DS, as I don't have to rush to get a 3DS before X/Y comes out, like some people online are. I mean, it's annoying that you have to get a device for the reason of purchasing a sole game. I had a DS before Diamond/Pearl, and I got a GBASP when Ruby/Sapphire had just came out.

Well, that's all for today!

-Shymain