A Minecraft Photo Essay

Like most friend groups my age, I’m in My friends and I have a Minecraft server. We reset it every so often, so our imaginations can run wild anew. We mine, we lay out bases, we build grand locations. I find it interesting how our castles and forts and homesteads tend to be wildly different. {NAME REDACTED 1} tends to build castles, blow them up, and leave them to rot and haunt like a ghost in the Scottish Highlands. {NAME REDACTED 2} builds large fortifications that rest on big fuck-off-hole-in-the-ground-mines that he’s dug. My imagination tends to run to the... modern. 

This is my current home base, a modernist structure straight out of Ikea. 

Here’s another structure I’m building. 

A brutalist inspired library. 

Clearly, I have a style of Architecture that I like. And It isn’t just because I think it’s easier to build in modern / postmodern styles. I kinda like the juxtaposition of the giant, looming structures bursting out of the naturalism in the forest. 

And for reference, here’s what the typical Minecraft world generates as homes and villages. 

Notice the paths in these two pictures. They’re dirt passageways, only existing between houses in these villages. For comparison, the rest of the world that is generated in our server exists without connections. 

Oh wait. You can see one of my bridges over there. 

I have been building a lot of bridges and walkways... I’m kind of obsessed with them. They look neat, don’t they?

Cutting through a lot of ground to build them. 

Almost like an industrial strip mine... 

And this got me thinking. Specifically it got me thinking about Robert Moses. While most people might be familiar with the epic Robert Caro biography The Power Broker, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking of a 2022 play about Robert Moses by David Hare called Straight Line Crazy. I haven’t seen it (read the script) but it’s title refers to Moses’ tendency to bulldoze existing properties and natural areas to build his bridges. Of course, it only makes sense that I connect each of my friend’s islands. 

Part of the fun of Minecraft is in the exploration, and the moment we start mapping out the world we’re in, that element of fun starts to wane. I wonder - and I haven’t heard otherwise from my friends, if while these bridges make traveling easier, they still ruin the fun of the exploration. Of course the other part of the fun of Minecraft is in the building. 

Now I’m not calling myself Robert Moses here. I’m just saying that noticed some similarities while I was working in this server. I’m tying together a world, taking it from a naturalistic paradise to an explicitly modernist world, regardless of the cost to the biome. I’ve even named parts of the world, officially declaring my ownership over it with complete disregard of what the land might already be called. 

But of course... That’s what you’re supposed to *do* in Minecraft. That’s the game’s purpose, stripping the earth of resources and building a fantasy land to the best of your imagination and skill. I guess it’s better than hurting the real world... but I wonder what ecological impact me playing Minecraft actually has, just in energy usage. Is it worth worrying about? I don’t know. Is it worth considering? Sure. 

In closing, I want to point to one of my favorite building projects from this server. This time, it’s a tunnel on the neutral island seen in the above picture. 

It’s meant to be a nice little refuge for all of us, someplace where we go back to nature and have a rest. That’s what the server is in real life, a nice little retreat from the real world. I think it’s funny that I needed to build a retreat inside the game.

Unwindin: Life Update and Movie Reviews

I'm tempted to say I didn't get anything done this week, but that just isn't true. I finished a fair amount of tasks, but they weren’t the things I usually accomplish. Didn't get much reading done, but I had an interview last Wednesday. (I’ll keep you posted on that, here’s hoping.) I feel like I’m focusing in different directions and that isn't exactly a bad thing. After all, at the end of May I set some goals that were bound to push me out of my comfort zone. 

I really hope that means I’ll be able to read as much as I am. The book club I’m in is helping (his guys, if you read this) but I’ve recently found myself refocusing on watching movies. I attribute this to the workshop I’m taking with a friend on critical theory for film, television and (most importantly) literature. It’s early days in the shop yet, but I can feel my brain slowly rewiring to appreciate media in a new light. That’s why I’m taking the workshop after all, and I really. In the past couple of years I’ve felt my attention span drop precipitously, and I wanted to take this class as a way to combat the urge to second screen TV, or to grow my attention span for reading. I like audiobooks, but I really need to get back to reading books and e books on my own. 

So here’s to that. I’m getting back into movies with another friend, for similar reasons. I want to regain my appreciation for film that used to have. That’s honestly why I’m looking forward to watching The Odyssey next weekend. I love going to the movies. 

The last movie I saw in theaters was The Death of Robin Hood. Interesting movie; consider this a mini-review. I’ll start out by saying that this film had the worst marketing campaign for what it actually ended up being. Watching the trailers, you’d imagine that this film would be a action-heavy, John Wick-style thriller with a cynical edge. The trailers and posters boasted incredible violence and the tagline “HE WAS NO HERO” so I wasn’t expecting much. 

I was tricked. You see, I was informed by a friend that some of the original Robin Hood legends didn’t really have the folk heroism that is ubiquitously associated with the character now. I haven’t read them, I probably should. But that frame’s the movie’s take on Robin Hood less as cynical revisionism and more... depressingly real? 

The story starts with Robin Hood as an outlaw, and a particularly brutal one at that. After being nigh-mortally wounded while helping his friend John Little take revenge on the people who chased him from his farm, Robin is left in the care of a mysterious prioress at an isolated abbey, and must contend with his mortality and his violent past. Yeah, that premise isn’t as cynical as it seems. Honestly, it more resembles an Igmar Bergman movie than action thriller with it’s hallucinatory dream sequences, existentialist themes of death, redemption and forgiveness, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s less allegorical than an Igmar Bergman film, certainly paced like one, but there are a few interesting moments of symbolism. 

I say it’s paced like a Bergman film and that might be it’s biggest fault for some audiences. It’s seriously slow. That’s both good and bad to my mind. I appreciate the intensity behind the deliberate pace but sometimes you’d wish some scenes would move faster. For instance, the opening fight scenes are long takes, drawing out the blood and viscera in a really uncomfortable way. That works, it’s an effective way to Glue your audience to their seats. However, the pace of a second battle a short while later is so languid you almost don’t even know tension is building until the shocking climax. (Side note, this movie has the best hand-mangling scene ever filmed, for whatever THAT’S worth.) So when the story transitions the Abbey, it ends up feeling like it’s running at the same pace. That’s fine for the later half of the movie, building tension as several characters cross paths through blood feuds and the hand of fate. You might wish the climax would pick up the pace a little, but I thought it was appropriate. 

Ultimately, it’s a good movie to watch and mull over your own mortality (in a good way.) The cast is great; Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, Noah Jupe and Faith Delaney are an excellent supporting cast. Hugh Jackman is a decent Robin Hood, brimming with both simmering anger and weary regret. Jodie Comer delivers a wonderful exercise in restrained anger as the Abbey’s Prioress, Robin’s foil for most of the movie. 

I think The Death of Robin Hood is still in theaters somewhere. Highly recommend. 

Why Do I Write?

Didn't make a post last week, sorry. I had been working on this post for a while, and it just didn't come together in time. 

Anyways, this is the sequel to the post I made about George Orwell a few weeks back. Enjoy. 

******

The one issue I have with questioning why I write is I feel almost too young to answer. 

If I were to track my development as a writer, I would reproduce a similar path to authors who discovered the magic of language while in school. The only significant difference is my parents decided that homeschooling was the best education for me and my siblings. In first grade we had memory / literacy exercises that consisted of hearing bible stories and then retelling them, with the goal being (I suppose) to improve memory, attention spans, diction and handwriting. But in these exercises I always found myself adding small creative sparks whenever the story I had heard didn’t seem complete. After all, Genesis doesn’t explain how long it took Noah to herd animals onto the ark, and Daniel needed to do something while he was in the lion’s den. These lacking details seemed grievous oversights to my young mind, and I filled in the gaps rather gleefully. 

My Mother swears these incidents are where she knew that I would end up a writer, and I can’t disagree. After all, this is where I first encountered storytelling on a personal level. These exercises inducted me into the grand tradition of oral storytelling at a very amateur level. Rather fitting as the books of the bible were no doubt handed down through oral tradition before being formally written. 

In the following years I enjoyed reading and creative writing exercises much more than factual writing. I never really liked writing essays or researching papers, at least not until later in high school when I began to feel the euphoria of completing a paper for its own sake, not just for the temporary high of completing an assignment. I was genuinely surprised when that euphoria stuck around as I entered college, and several long research papers I finished added to that high. In time I chose Journalism as a major as it forced me to write on a regular basis and still maintain a creative verve to my writing. 

That brings me, more or less, to the modern day. At this stage in my career I haven’t produced much, a handful of essays, a few short stories worth a damn and two novels no one will ever read. But, the pull of storytelling still looms large, and I still call myself a writer. 

So much for my development into a writer. I still have yet to answer the question “Why do I write?” 

In sitting down to throw some ideas together for this essay, I wondered exactly how common the impulse to be a writer is. I would think that most people have had the desire to capture something they’ve lived through, be that the emotions after a brilliant sunset, or a funny conversation between friends, or to throw ideas wildly together in hopes of producing 350 pages of text. And then I wonder, if most people have had those impulses but don’t act on them, how many have felt the call of the pen and been compelled to try again and again? 

Being a writer isn’t about putting words together into rough shape and calling it a day, after all. It’s about getting the right words in the right order, which requires scrupulous drafting and redrafting and then coming back for seconds, thirds and fourths. For those who haven’t had the call, that sounds either psychotic, masochistic, or plain old difficult. 

And yet, you don’t need me to point out the thousands of people the world over, the millions of people through history, and the billions of books, scripts, essays, pamphlets, comics and games that these lucky few million have produced. They can’t all be masochists. 

Ask yourself right now why you do anything, and you’ll probably come up with a variety of good reasons for your actions. But I would wager you might struggle to find a single satisfactory motivation for why you do what you do. For instance, George Orwell outlined four primary motivations for writers in his essay “Why I Write1”; the Egotistical impulse, the Aesthetic impulse, the Historical impulse and the Political impulse. When I ask myself “Why do I write?” I can think of a few more responses: (Being of a fanciful bent, I’ve applied George Orwell’s four motivations to each of my responses in parentheticals.)

• I don’t know what else to do with myself (Ego / Historical)
• Because I want to see my name in print (Ego)
• I wouldn’t be happy doing anything else  (Ego / Historical)
• I see it as a form of meditation or prayer (Aesthetic / Historical)
• It’s my only form of control over an uncaring and chaotic world, and I want to effect change on that world. (Political)
• For the sheer, unadulterated pleasure I take in the magic of creation (Ego / Aesthetic)
• Because I am lonely (Ego)
• Because it’s what I believe I should do (Ego)
• Because I love language and want to explore it’s possibilities (Aesthetic)
• Because I am fanciful and want others to share in my delusions (Ego / Historical)
• Because I am a hopeless romantic and want others to share in my joy (Ego / Aesthetic)
• Because I am neither theologian nor scientist (Aesthetic / Historical / Political)
• Because the written word is intrinsic to my nature (Aesthetic)
• Because I resent the crass simulacrum of creativity which are being pushed by creatively-bankrupt, profit-driven, emotionally-stunted automata through large language models (Aesthetic / Historical / Political)
• Fictions excite me, and I want to find the truth inside of fiction (Aesthetic / Historical / Political)
• Because there is truth and validity to my perspective on the universe we all share, and I must express that truth or perish.  (Aesthetic / Historical / Political)

Decent responses, perhaps, but you’ll note precious few good reasons and hardly anything you’d call an intrinsic motivation, save perhaps the penultimate response.

Perhaps a reason is all I need, but something in me rebels at that idea. I feel the call of writing like a primal, bodily urge, surely no reason is sufficient to explain that... 

I am struck with an incongruity in Orwell’s analysis. Logical and clear as it is, he appears to take his role as a writer as a given, declaring from his first paragraph, “From a very early age, perhaps the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer.” And yet, when he addresses his motives, he never really asks why he knew he should be a writer, merely relating his development as a writer from child to adult as if it were innate to him. Perhaps it was. 

I have the same fault; from this essay you could take it as read that I knew I would be a writer merely for inventing details while retelling Bible stories. That is obviously insufficient, and I know my innate desires pull me specifically to storytelling. I could tell stories in any number of art forms - photography, filmmaking, sculpting or architecture - but I am not compelled to any of these as strongly as I am to writing. So, I must ask myself again, why am I a writer? 

Let’s ask something else first. What is writing? 

Is it a functional exercise of language? The necessary action of thoughtful communication? Is it a form of self-reflection? The creation of identity? The exercise of will upon consciousness? The recording of human experience and emotion? Is it sensory seduction and instruction? Is it literal magic, as some authors have suggested? Is it the alchemical breakdown of reality, parsing what we see until we can understand, describe and use that to create something new? 

Yes. Yes to all of the above. 

What, then, is a writer? I feel that answer is somewhat simpler. A writer is someone who sits their ass at a desk and strings words together to purposefully engage with reality. It is insanity, and only sufficient motivation for this insanity is pure love of the craft. 

Quite simply, I love writing, and if that sounds insufficient, well, I just don’t have a better response. Does that make me insane? Maybe. Does that make me a masochist? God only knows. All I know is I have plenty of reasons to tell stories, but for a reason I don’t yet know, I love language, and I love writing. I don’t think there needs to be a deeper reason than that. 

And if there does… I guess I’ll have to keep writing to figure it out.

Sources: 

Orwell, George. “Why I Write.” The Orwell Foundation, Gangrel, 1946, www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/why-i-write/. Accessed 20 June 2026