You know, a Minecraft Movie could have been a literal masterpiece if you had the right mindset to do it, and I'm not joking. I feel like nowadays studios are afraid of being genuine like a teen is afraid of being genuine. If a movie suddenly gets too excited about something, it needs to put it down so it doesn't sound "lame" or "cringe". You cannot be honest, and you cannot show love or absurdity without pointing out that it's stupid because you think OTHERS will believe it's stupid. So please bear with me:
Currently we have only a teaser trailer, it looks bad, it puts itself down, it's afraid of being genuine, it somehow managed to whitewash Steve (again), and I doubt that it will use things like the End Poem or how it feels to play Minecraft for its themes and story. I hope that I'm wrong, but I'm very cynical. So, let's think about it together.
Minecraft Movie. I saw a post suggesting stop-motion animation for it, and, honestly, it feels perfect, just like stylized 3D animation. Live action actors do not work with how Minecraft looks, and that's okay. Let's do an animated movie.
The plot. There's so, so many possibilities, but the beauty of making a Minecraft animated movie is that you won't ever be able to tackle all the possibilities it brings to the table. The community has made so many stories for the game, so we might as well just think of an "official" movie as a homage to the game and its community. We are adapting the way Minecraft feels.
End Poem, one of the most beautiful things I have ever read. Let's take that and put it in the movie, simple as that. You can only find it by defeating the Ender Dragon, so this will be how our movie ends. If we want it to end like this, then the objective of our protagonists must be to defeat the dragon.
Let's have Steve as our protagonist - not a whitewashed version, just Steve with his actual skin color left just the way it is. He'll represent us as players for our hypothetical movie. Have him wake up in an unknown world, not knowing why he's there. Just like how the game was all the way back in 2009, he's alone in a very lonely and foggy world. We follow him trying to look for other people, and then he has to survive his first night. This first part is both whimsical and a bit scary, because that's how many players felt when they first started it when they were kids, aallllll the way back.
Steve survives his first night. He's horrified, and then he realizes that he'll have to do it again. He doesn't know the "rules" of this world, but he's figuring them out, and the idea of "rules" and "what to do" will be important. Because, at its core, Minecraft doesn't have that many rules. It has no actual objective. You can do whatever you want, and this will be very (very) important.
Steve ends up building a small base with wood. Survives a bit more, and then, someway, somehow, he finds Alex. While he's more careful around things and very thoughtful on how and what to build, Alex is more of an adventurer, following the little tidbits of personality we see from them during Minecraft trailers. They're happy to know that they aren't alone, and we follow them build a very strong friendship and teach each other new things, just like how it is playing Minecraft in real life. They find a village, and find out that maybe they can leave this world, or at least find some answers, if they defeat the Ender Dragon.
From there, we have a good objective. The two continue progressing, and their base ends up becoming a castle, because who didn't want to build a castle when they were kids? And the world seems progressively more alive thanks to their interference on it, thanks to them helping the villagers, thanks to them being the players that they are. If you want more conflict, just add the pillagers as well.
Eventually, Steve and Alex have an argument about their points of view. They both want to know what's going on, but their way of doing things are different, and they care a LOT about each other, they're best friends, but who is doing things the "right" way? I don't like the idea of them separating because that happens in way too many movies. I want to see these two stick together, but their insistence on trying to do it "correctly" ends up putting them in a lot of trouble because they can't cooperate anymore. Y'know. How people fight and argue about a "correct" way of playing the game. How we as players miss old Minecraft - or do we? Do we miss the simplicity of older times, or do we miss our childhood creativity and willigness to do whatever comes to mind?
Anyways. A good alternative to this conflict would be either Alex or Steve - I'm leaning more towards Steve - being hesitant at completing the End Portal. He doesn't want to end his "dream", he doesn't want answers or to escape this world (aka leave good memories behind), he wants to stay there, but Alex knows that they can't be like this forever, even if she wants to stay. Regardless, they eventually come to a mutual understanding, and, TOGETHER, they go and fight the Ender Dragon. They win, and then the End Poem happens.
The fight against the dragon wasn't the ending; the realization that there are, indeed, no rules to put them down, or that they HAVE to leave everything behind, is the ending. They hear the poem while sitting next to each other. The world changed because of them, and sometimes it was for the worse, and sometimes it was for the better, but it did become much kinder, and they weren't alone. They don't HAVE to be. Just like how it actually happened in the actual game, through the 15 YEARS since it started to exist, and oh my God it's been 15 years already?! Oh my God-
Anyways. Movie ends with Alex and Steve having a lighthearted argument over what to build next. Steve wants another castle, Alex says that she has amazing ideas for something she's calling a "mob farm", and "trust me, it'll make our lives SO MUCH easier". And they're just being silly, because there are no rules.
Anyways thanks for reading this post, feel free to add your own things to it! Just had to get it out of my chest.
What's your favorite way to relax?
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"you're the writer, you control how the story goes" no not really. i wrote the first sentence and then my characters said "WE WILL TAKE IT FROM HERE" and promptly swerved into an electrical fence.
Climate denial may be on the decline, but a phenomenon at least as injurious to the cause of climate protection has blossomed beside it: doomism, or the belief that there’s no way to halt the Earth’s ascendant temperatures. Burgeoning ranks of doomers throw up their hands, crying that it’s too late, too hard, too costly to save humanity from near-future extinction.
There are numerous strands of doomism. The followers of ecologist Guy McPherson, for example, gravitate to wild conspiracy theories that claim humanity won’t last another decade. Many young people, understandably overwhelmed by negative climate headlines and TikTok videos, are convinced that all engagement is for naught. Even the Guardian, which boasts superlative climate coverage, sometimes publishes alarmist articles and headlines that exaggerate grim climate projections.
This gloom-and-doomism robs people of the agency and incentive to participate in a solution to the climate crisis. As a writer on climate and energy, I am convinced that we have everything we require to go carbon neutral by 2050: the science, the technology, the policy proposals, and the money, as well as an international agreement in which nearly 200 countries have pledged to contain the crisis. We don’t need a miracle or exorbitantly expensive nuclear energy to stave off the worst. The Gordian knot before us is figuring out how to use the resources we already have in order to make that happen.
One particularly insidious form of doomism is exhibited in Kohei Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, originally published in 2020 and translated from Japanese into English this year. In his unlikely international bestseller, Saito, a Marxist philosopher, puts forth the familiar thesis that economic growth and decarbonization are inherently at odds. He goes further, though, and speculates that the climate crisis can only be curbed in a classless, commons-based society. Capitalism, he writes, seeks to “use all the world’s resources and labor power, opening new markets and never passing up even the slightest chance to make more money.”
Capitalism’s record is indeed damning. The United States and Europe are responsible for the lion’s share of the world’s emissions since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, yet the global south suffers most egregiously from climate breakdown. Today, the richest tenth of the world’s population—living overwhelmingly in the global north and China—is responsible for half of global emissions. If the super-rich alone cut their footprints down to the size of the average European, global emissions would fall by a third, Saito writes.
Saito’s self-stated goals aren’t that distinct from mine: a more egalitarian, sustainable, and just society. One doesn’t have to be an orthodox Marxist to find the gaping disparities in global income grotesque or to see the restructuring of the economy as a way to address both climate breakdown and social injustice. But his central argument—that climate justice can’t happen within a market economy of any kind—is flawed. In fact, it serves next to no purpose because more-radical-than-thou theories remove it from the nuts-and-bolts debate about the way forward.
We already possess a host of mechanisms and policies that can redistribute the burdens of climate breakdown and forge a path to climate neutrality. They include carbon pricing, wealth and global transaction taxes, debt cancellation, climate reparations, and disaster risk reduction, among others. Economies regulated by these policies are a distant cry from neoliberal capitalism—and some, particularly in Europe, have already chalked up marked accomplishments in reducing emissions.
Saito himself acknowledges that between 2000 and 2013, Britain’s GDP increased by 27 percent while emissions fell by 9 percent and that Germany and Denmark also logged decoupling. He writes off this trend as exclusively the upshot of economic stagnation following the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy in 2008. However, U.K. emissions have continued to fall, plummeting from 959 million to 582 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent between 2007 and 2020. The secret to Britain’s success, which Saito doesn’t mention, was the creation of a booming wind power sector and trailblazing carbon pricing system that forced coal-fired plants out of the market practically overnight. Nor does Saito consider that from 1990 to 2022, the European Union reduced its emissions by 31 percent while its economy grew by 66 percent.
Climate protection has to make strides where it can, when it can, and experts acknowledge that it’s hard to change consumption patterns—let alone entire economic systems—rapidly. Progress means scaling back the most harmful types of consumption and energy production. It is possible to do this in stages, but it needs to be implemented much faster than the current plodding pace.
This is why Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet by Hannah Ritchie, a data scientist at the University of Oxford, is infinitely more pertinent to the public discourse on climate than Saito’s esoteric work. Ritchie’s book is a noble attempt to illustrate that environmental protection to date boasts impressive feats that can be built on, even as the world faces what she concedes is an epic battle to contain greenhouse gases.
Ritchie underscores two environmental afflictions that humankind solved through a mixture of science, smart policy, and international cooperation: acid rain and ozone depletion. I’m old enough to remember the mid-1980s, when factories and power plants spewed out sulfurous and nitric emissions and acid rain blighted forests from the northeastern United States to Eastern Europe. Acidic precipitation in the Adirondacks, my stomping grounds at the time, decimated pine forests and mountain lakes, leaving ghostly swaths of dead timber. Then, scientists pinpointed the industries responsible, and policymakers designed a cap-and-trade system that put a price on their emissions, which forced industry into action; for example, power plants had to fit scrubbers on their flue stacks. The harmful pollutants dropped by 80 percent by the end of the decade, and forests grew back.
The campaign to reverse the thinning of the ozone layer also bore fruit. An international team of scientists deduced that man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) in fridges, freezers, air conditioners, and aerosol cans were to blame. Despite fierce industry pushback, more than 40 countries came together in Montreal in 1987 to introduce a staggered ban on CFCs. Since then, more countries joined the Montreal Protocol, and CFCs are now largely a relic of the past. As Ritchie points out, this was the first international pact of any kind to win the participation of every nation in the world.
While these cases instill inspiration, Ritchie’s assessment of our current crisis is a little too pat and can veer into the Panglossian. The climate crisis is many sizes larger in scope than the scourges of the 1980s, and its antidote—to Saito’s credit—entails revamping society and economy on a global scale, though not with the absolutist end goal of degrowth communism.
Ritchie doesn’t quite acknowledge that a thoroughgoing restructuring is necessary. Although she does not invoke the term, she is an acolyte of “green growth.” She maintains that tweaks to the world’s current economic system can improve the living standards of the world’s poorest, maintain the global north’s level of comfort, and achieve global net zero by 2050. “Economic growth is not incompatible with reducing our environmental impact,” she writes. For her, the big question is whether the world can decouple growth and emissions in time to stave off the darkest scenarios.
Ritchie approaches today’s environmental disasters—air pollution, deforestation, carbon-intensive food production, biodiversity loss, ocean plastics, and overfishing—as problems solvable in ways similar to the crises of the 1980s. Like CFCs and acid rain, so too can major pollutants such as black carbon and carbon monoxide be reined in. Ritchie writes that the “solution to air pollution … follows just one basic principle: stop burning stuff.” As she points out, smart policy has already enhanced air quality in cities such as Beijing (Warsaw, too, as a recent visit convinced me), and renewable energy is now the cheapest form of power globally. What we have to do, she argues, is roll renewables out en masse.
The devil is in making it happen. Ritchie admits that environmental reforms must be accelerated many times over, but she doesn’t address how to achieve this or how to counter growing pushback against green policies. Just consider the mass demonstrations across Europe in recent months as farmers have revolted against the very measures for which Ritchie (correctly) advocates, such as cutting subsidies to diesel gas, requiring crop rotation, eliminating toxic pesticides, and phasing down meat production. Already, the farmers’ vehemence has led the EU to dilute important legislation on agriculture, deforestation, and biodiversity.
Ritchie’s admonishes us to walk more, take public transit, and eat less beef. Undertaken individually, this won’t change anything. But she acknowledges that sound policy is key—chiefly, economic incentives to steer markets and consumer behavior. Getting the right parties into office, she writes, should be voters’ priority.
Yet the parties fully behind Ritchie’s agenda tend to be the Green parties, which are largely in Northern Europe and usually garner little more than 10 percent of the vote. Throughout Europe, environmentalism is badmouthed by center-right and far-right politicos, many of whom lead or participate in governments, as in Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Serbia, Slovakia, and Sweden. And while she argues that all major economies must adopt carbon pricing like the EU’s cap-and-trade system, she doesn’t address how to get the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, to introduce this nationwide or even expand its two carbon markets currently operating regionally—one encompassing 12 states on the East Coast, the other in California.
History shows that the best way to make progress in the battle to rescue our planet is to work with what we have and build on it. The EU has a record of exceeding and revising its emissions reduction targets. In the 1990s, the bloc had the modest goal of sinking greenhouse gases to 8 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12; by 2012, it had slashed them by an estimated 18 percent. More recently, the 2021 European Climate Law adjusted the bloc’s target for reducing net greenhouse gas emissions from 40 percent to at least 55 percent by 2030, and the European Commission is considering setting the 2040 target to 90 percent below 1990 levels.
This process can’t be exclusively top down. By far the best way for everyday citizens to counter climate doomism is to become active beyond individual lifestyle choices—whether that’s by bettering neighborhood recycling programs, investing in clean tech equities, or becoming involved in innovative clean energy projects.
Take, for example, “community energy,” which Saito considers briefly and Ritchie misses entirely. In the 1980s, Northern Europeans started to cobble together do-it-yourself cooperatives, in which citizens pooled money to set up renewable energy generation facilities. Many of the now more than 9,000 collectives across the EU are relatively small—the idea is to stay local and decentralized—but larger co-ops illustrate that this kind of enterprise can function at scale. For example, Belgium’s Ecopower, which forgoes profit and reinvests in new energy efficiency and renewables projects, provides 65,000 members with zero-carbon energy at a reduced price.
Grassroots groups and municipalities are now investing in nonprofit clean energy generation in the United States, particularly in California and Minnesota. This takes many forms, including solar fields; small wind parks; electricity grids; and rooftop photovoltaic arrays bolted to schools, parking lots, and other public buildings. Just as important as co-ownership—in contrast to mega-companies’ domination of the fossil fuel market—is democratic decision-making. These start-ups, usually undertaken by ordinary citizens, pry the means of generation out of the hands of the big utilities, which only grudgingly alter their business models.
Around the world, the transition is in progress—and ideally, could involve all of us. The armchair prophets of doom should either join in or, at the least, sit on the sidelines quietly. The last thing we need is more people sowing desperation and angst. They play straight into the court of the fossil fuel industry.
Formal dress event 👔
I love how literally every version of the Princess could be interpreted as a piece of the Shifting Mound and, no matter how weird our relationship with her gets, it’s still applicable to our relationship with her as a whole.
Smitten and Damsel show how the Long Quiet and the Shifting Mound are star crossed lovers.
Skeptic and Prisoner reflect their inability to escape without working together. They are both Prisoners, even if only one is wearing a shackle.
Hunted and Beast present them both as archaic forces of nature that must change and adapt. As death, Beast is an offensive predator, and as life, Hunted is defensive prey.
Stubborn and Adversary demonstrate that the two gods are true equals in every sense, and that death means nothing to them in the end as long as they have each other.
Cheated and Razor show how conflict is in their nature, and that no matter how much violence the Shifting Mound dishes out, the Long Quiet is always strong enough to stand against her.
Broken and Tower show the contrast of Shifty’s embrace of her godhood vs the internal conflict of the Long Quiet, as well as the desire to embrace her for everything she is regardless of her flaws. Perhaps, in a twisted way, Broken shows an embrace of our godhood as a whole…
Cold and Spectre demonstrate the dynamic set by the Construct: a killer and his victim, as well as showing the true power of the Long Quiet, and showing that, underneath the struggle and conflict, LQ could end this all disturbingly quickly if convinced to.
Paranoid and Nightmare show the fear that infects the dynamic of the two gods, like Paranoid’s fear of the Nightmare and the Nightmare’s fear of sharing her heart, along with the desire to know the other but the inability to do so organically.
Opportunist and Witch, like Stubborn and Adversary, show the equality of their relationship, but rather than one built out of mutual respect, its mutual animosity fostered by the artificial tension of the construct. It’s the opposite of Skeptic and Prisoner, as, rather than realizing they can escape together through mutual trust, they both try to win against the other when it’s not a winning game.
Contrarian and Stranger show the inherent contradictions in the Gods’ natures; like Shifty says, aspects of who they are contradict themselves, and nothing can exist without contrast and change.
When Sally Abed and Alon-Lee Green flew from Israel to New York last week, they found a version of the United States they’d never seen before: split by the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis, with fractures tearing at the worlds of art, business, books, academia and even food.
Ms. Abed, a Palestinian citizen of Israel, said the situation felt so toxic that they feared their 10-day trip to talk about the ways Palestinians and Jews can work together would only lead to attacks from all sides.
Instead, in New York, Washington and Boston, they found packed auditoriums and eager audiences in community centers, synagogues, libraries and the offices of politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Their days have started at 6 a.m. and ended after midnight.
Their quest can be lonely, standing in the face of intense grief and anger — over Hamas’s attacks against Israelis on Oct. 7, and Israel’s retaliatory campaign in the Gaza Strip — and factions that have spent decades staking out positions against each other.
But the staff of their organization, Standing Together, is trying to teach Americans — anyone who will listen, really — about their lived reality and the only path they see moving forward. They describe that path as one that cannot be boiled down to a hashtag: one in which millions of Israelis and Palestinians would remain on the land they each call home, and one that would require enough popular political will to demand peace.
“We’re trying to play a different game in Israel and Palestine,” Mr. Green said on Nov. 9 to a group of people organized by a group in Brooklyn, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice. “And this game is very simple. It says that both Jewish people and Palestinians are going to stay on this land. No one is going anywhere.”
“We need to start working from this point,” he said, receiving a wave of nods.
It’s a message that has not been prominently heard or seen in many American protests and rallies. Most events have taken place under an Israeli or Palestinian flag, focusing on one people’s pain, struggle or victimhood.
That type of narrow approach can erase everything around it, said Cara Raich, a conflict adviser based in New York.
“As with most conflicts one feels deeply and personally, a binary choice often offers the simple comfort of pro and con, or right and wrong,” she said. “The magnetic power of false binaries sucks everything that it touches into that paradigm.”
For that reason, the conversations Mr. Green and Ms. Abed came to have with Americans have, at least for their audiences they draw, been something of a spiritual salve. In dozens of talks up and down the East Coast, the two activists have described a desperate need for new Israeli and Palestinian leadership, including leaders willing to work together.
They have called Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip, both “the enemy of the Palestinian people” and a “fertilizer for radical Jewish extremism.” And they have voiced a frustration over what they see as a war for the moral high ground, happening outside of Israel and mostly over social media, that denies their experiences.
Libby Lenkinski, a vice president at the New Israel Fund, an organization that funds and supports Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, has had a front-row seat as a moderator. She said she has seen a “palpable sense of relief” among attendees who audibly exhale or place hands over their hearts. The message is so resonant, she said, because of it offers a different kind of simplicity than choosing one of two sides.
“This isn’t, ‘Kumbaya, let’s all hold hands and love each other,’” Ms. Lenkinski said. “It’s: ‘There’s actually no way that one side is going to win. Our futures are intertwined and the only way that we can keep ourselves alive is by keeping each other alive.’”
On Sunday, a group of Israeli peace activists in New York City organized a vigil with that sentiment in mind. The demonstration called for both a cease-fire in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza and the release of more than 200 hostages held by Palestinian militants. All were welcome, flags and signs were not.
Some 200 attendees gathered to mourn and read testimonies and texts from people in Israel and Gaza.
Tamar Glezerman, one of the organizers, said she had protested in support of a cease-fire before, and does not “find myself in protests that don’t include the demand for an urgent stop to the bloodshed.”
“But at the same time,” she said, “I feel that, on a very personal level, I am being demanded to omit the humanity of my loved ones, those who have died on Oct. 7 and those who have friends and families among the kidnapped, in order to attend most of the protests demanding a cease-fire.”
She said that those demonstrations “have by and large completely omitted these civilians, for either ideological or strategic reasons, as if empathy for brutalized civilians was ever a zero-sum game. As if one war crime could ever justify another. As if acknowledgment means historical symmetry.”
Ms. Abed and Mr. Green were in Washington during that vigil, meeting with a range of Democratic politicians. They said that, sometimes, they struggled to get to the car for their next meeting because people swarmed to ask what more they could do to help.
Friendship has helped carry the pair on, they said, even as exhaustion has weighed them down.
They did not sleep much back home, and they have not slept much since arriving in the states. Mr. Green said he’s afraid to stop working. Ms. Abed worries that he’s not giving himself the space to fall apart, at least a little bit.
Midsentence, Mr. Green gasped. “A goose!” he screamed — Ms. Abed echoed, “a goose!” They laughed and gawked, getting closer to the bird. There are not many geese in Israel.
But it was not quite a wild-goose chase. They were summoned on to their next meeting, one with students, staff members and faculty at M.I.T. “So many people tell us ‘You are our only hope,’” Ms. Abed said. “It’s like, we’re your only hope?”
Mr. Green said that, despite the loneliness they often felt, they had no choice but to keep trying.
“We have only one home,” he said. “She’s Palestinian and I’m Jewish, but the only home we both have is the same home.”
" The key " Milky Way. Rocca Calascio Castle. Abruzzo , Italy .
I keep toying with writing this, because words are hard and I'm not sure how to fully articulate this thought.
However, it's something I've sensed very deeply and I think it's important to start trying to talk about.
Much has been said about how traumatic Oct. 7th was for Israelis and really Jews the world over, and lots has been said about why that was - from the fact that it happened on what was supposed to be a joyous holiday, the fact that this violence was as barbarous and sadistic as it was, the fact that it drew on deep historical wells of intergenerational trauma, to the fact that it was met with immediate denial, betrayal, and even celebration from supposedly progressive goyim - but something I have not seen much discussion on is how that ongoing denialism and even celebration of the carnage made sure that the trauma stuck.
See the thing is that one of the best predictors of favorable recovery outcomes from trauma is the support the victim receives, especially in the immediate aftermath. Victims with strong support networks, who are believed and whose grievances are taken seriously, recover much faster and much more holistically even from objectively worse traumas than victims who lack support and/or whose traumatic experiences are denied or dismissed. Seems obvious enough, right? That's why advocates for survivors exhort communities to listen to survivors and victims, and to hold space for them. We know what happens when that support is denied.
In some ways, the Jewish people is like a horrible case study in what happens when that denial of support happens - not just on a large scale, but over the course of time through numerous generations. In every generation they come for us, and every generation has the opportunity to step up. And so far, every generation has failed the task. (There are of course, some wonderful individuals who do step up; however they are the exception that proves the rule.)
The sadistic celebration of atrocities committed against Israelis and the denialism were not just unpleasant side concerns - these were active components of the violence.
The bottom line is this: if you deny the atrocities of Oct. 7th and the ongoing hostage crisis or try to excuse or downplay them, you are actively participating in violence against us.
And yes, of course these atrocities do not justify atrocities in return. Yes, of course confirming facts is important. But I think a big part of why we can't "just move on" to talk about other atrocities is because you people have never acknowledged our pain or let us grieve or be human. Not once. And the longer that goes on, the deeper the wound and the longer the road to healing from this trauma gets.