Carpet Cleaning

The shack we live in is pretty small with just 64 square meters (700 square feet) of living space. The paramour and I both have pack-rat tendencies so most of that space is occupied. That makes it a royal pain to clean the carpet and the net result is that in the 14 or so years that we've lived here we've never done it. The carpet does get vacuumed from time to time, but given that we share the space with six cats, vacuuming will only get you by for so long.

The pong has gotten bad enough that we finally bit the bullet and over the past two days have cleaned the carpets in the living room and one of the bedrooms. That just leaves the second bedroom but cleaning it will have to wait until the archeological dig is finished. Did you know that primitive programmers used to display their code on a solid material called paper?

As you might expect, the water coming out of the carpet was pretty dirty. After cleaning the heavily traveled area in front of the human and cat doors the water was the colour of mud, and damned near the consistency, too.

Fortunately, both the paramour and I have been slowly getting rid of some of the crap that we never use, so while a lot of boxes and furniture had to be shuffled around (multiple times), it was a less daunting effort than it would have been even a year ago. Hopefully that means that we won't wait another 14 years before cleaning it again.

Figuring Out How To Figure Something Out

Yesterday I uploaded the fifth episode in my series of Minecraft videos. It's here if you want to take a look.

The central conceit of the series is that I am a newbie who is playing the game for the first time. Knowing only the rudimentary mechanics of the game, such as how to move, I must discover the game's secrets for myself. Since I've actually been playing the game for over a year this involves a degree of acting on my part. I'm quite open about that, BTW. I let people know in the very first video that I'm not an actual newbie, I'm just trying to recreate the newbie experience.

For the most part I can draw on my own memories of how I figured things out and adapt them to the specific circumstances of the series. However there are a few bits of knowledge for which I cannot do that because I never did figure them out for myself. When I first got interested in Minecraft and started to read up on it, I came across recommendations that I watch a short video about how to survive my first night. That video taught me a few basics like how to harvest wood without any tools, how to make a crafting table and, most importantly, how to make a torch.

The recipe for a torch - a wooden stick with a piece of coal or charcoal at the end - is not, to my mind, obvious since in the real world torches aren't made that way. They're made by dipping strips of absorbent material, like cloth, in a flammable liquid like oil, tar or pitch, then wrapping that around the end of a stick and igniting it.

Now it's impossible for Minecraft to contain within it every material and artifact that we have in the real world. There's no oil, tar or pitch in the game, and no cloth per se. Instead, Minecraft uses a symbolic language of sorts. For example, coal takes on role of a generic source of fuel for flame as well as the instrument of its own ignition. Unfortunately, a torch is the first time a new player really runs into that sort of symbolism which creates a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. In order to figure out the recipe for a torch you need to know that Minecraft uses materials symbolically, but in order to find that out you need to have seen the recipe for a torch.

In episode 5 I finally reached the point where I could no longer get along without a portable light source. I had to figure out how to create a candle or lamp or lantern or torch (or which only the torch is possible in the game). Without memories of how I first discovered the recipe, I had to imagine what my thought processes would have been had I not already known the recipe. It took three takes to get it right.

In the first take my logic quickly led me off on the wrong path. Even worse, the predicates I'd built up were such that it would be impossible for me to end up with the correct recipe except through blind luck. I killed off that recording and tried again.

In the second take I did manage to get to the torch recipe, but I felt like I had to take a shower afterward. It was all too contrived, too perfect. Like a highschooler mulling over the curious precession of Mercury's perihelion and by gosh developing the Theory of General Relativity to explain it. It was possible but incredibly unlikely. I deleted that one, too, and tried again.

The third take worked out much better and that's the one I went with. There's still an element of serendipity to it, but I think every Minecraft player has had a few such serendipitous discoveries, so it's not too unbelievable. Or at least it didn't feel so to me.

The torch recipe was the last bit of information from that introductory video for which I'd not yet found a reasonable way to "discover". Now that that's behind me the sailing should be smoother for while as I'll be able to use my memories of how I found the answers. Eventually the recipes in Minecraft became sufficiently abstract that I was no longer able to work many of them out for myself and I started using the Wiki like everyone else, but when the series gets to that point I'll end it. If you happen to be one of my handful of fans, have no fear for I already have an idea for my next series.