Hello, Ezra here, and I want to point out it doesn’t have to be cake. It can be clouds or sparkles or theme parks or something.

I feel I should explain. In a matter of weeks Hannah and I will get our brand-new, super-cool server. Hannah and I are in the process of a small, Minecraft-server oriented political debate of our own in order to have it recognized for me to have a large but finite area of our server in which I and I alone rule and can use commands as long as my rule and command use does not directly influence the outside world of Minecraftia, yada yada yada. I drew up an agreement that went on and on like that in an attempt to do everything necessary to keep Hannah happy and still leave some loopholes for myself (don’t tell Hannah). But she hasn’t agreed to it yet.

Of course, it was well after I gave her the agreement that it finally occurred to my to my slow little brain that if I wanted to use commands on the server and Hannah didn’t, and it was our server, then that would put us at an impasse. Now, some people might think that that would just mean that there would be no commands on our server, but that’s just what Hannah wants and my opinion is as valuable as hers and I do want commands. So the most likely thing that would happen is that we would remain at an impasse and not negotiate the building of a finite area to be ruled by me and my commands alone.

Which would allow me to do anything I wanted. I wouldn’t be confined or restricted. Hannah would do anything she wanted- which isn’t very much considering she doesn’t want to use commands- and I could do anything I wanted. And my plans for the server are far more ambitious.

So now I sit, thinking of how much I could do if Hannah and me were at an impasse over the rules of the server while the agreement that I made (that I have to follow to the word if she agrees to it) sits in her room, gathering dust, while she stalls to agree to it. And if she does agree to it- which I’m sure she will before we get our server- then my options on what I can do with commands on our server are dramatically decreased.

So, obsessive rant aside, the long and short is that when we get the server I will build a giant kingdom in which to rule with the power of commands. And I was thinking I would have it divided into themes, like the realms were in The Lego Movie.

I was thinking my kingdom could have three to five different themes ranging from “light and happy” to “dark and scary” to “kinda just normal”. Say, if I were to have five themes, I might have themes like “Cake Land”, “Rainbow Amusement Park”, “Medieval/modern crossover country”, “Space Simulation” and “Dark Scary Forest”. That was two light happy themes, two in-between themes and one dark scary theme. Come to think of it, I think I’ll definitely keep the “medieval/modern cross” theme and build a big castle for myself in it.

But that still leaves two to four themes left to decide, and I want you guys to help me! I need more light, dark and normal(ish) themes to put in my realm. So tell me any themes you can think of that fit those categories in the comments below and they might be put in my kingdom!

See you soon!

Ezra

The title got your attention, huh?

Hello, Ezra here, and today I want to discuss something that is every bit as important as the title implies, and that is what I name my pig.

You see, a short while after me and Hannah move to Costa Rica, we are going to start a farm on which our two personal pet pigs will live,which we will acquire because after a certain unnamed family member who is definitely not Hannah had a nervous breakdown over moving. This unnamed family member only completely calmed down after being given reassurances, several talks, several days and the promise of a quad, a surfboard and a pig upon arriving. Of course, I, who was originally skeptical of the moving plan but was convinced it was a good idea by the time that the breakdown occurred, was of the opinion that I should ALSO get a pig and stuff. So when we move, we are going to have a family quad and personal surfboards and pigs.

So the question remains- what should I name my pig?

I was thinking that I might name it Reuben- which is not a particularly GOOD name or anything but happens to be the name of the coolest pig I know. In fact, Reuben’s coolness among pigs is only challenged by George, the Minecraft pig hailing from Element Animation’s youtube series called An Egg’s Guide To Minecraft.

George becomes more animated, develops more character and plays a bigger role to the story in episode 15, which was made about a year after part 14.

Reuben is also a Minecraft pig. He can be found in the video game Minecraft Story Mode (which is actually a game unto itself and is not a part of Minecraft). I may be king of biased as I watch a lot of his videos, but I think that Reuben is best showcased in the Let’s-play video made by Dan from The Diamond Minecart.

I don’t want to spoil it, but much like George, Reuben’s usefulness to the plot is greatly enhanced in later episodes of DanTDM’s Minecraft Story Mode series.

So I think I will name my pig Reuben, but if you have any name ideas then please tell us in the comments below and I will consider using it as my pig’s name, and if any of your friend’s have good pig-name-ideas then please direct them to quewhatnow.com so they can have a vote too. We’ll see who will get to name the pig in a few weeks!

And by the way, in case you didn’t get it; when I said “a-pig-alyptic” in the title I was playing off the word “apocalyptic”, but we were… talking about pigs… so I slotted it… in… Oh, never mind.

More posts coming soon!

Ezra

Hello, Ezra here, and today I would just like to say that I have discovered a rather cool website called Xkcd. It is run by a guy named Randall Munroe and it is amazing.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the Earth stopped spinning, or what would happen if you lost all you DNA, or how much force power Yoda can output or anything like that, but there was no way to find out the answer? (Yes. That has totally happened to me.)

Well, if you have, then your prayers are about to be answered! Just submit your question to Xkcd, and Randall Munroe, The man who (according to his book entitled What If? in which he finds “serious scientific answers to absurd hypothetical questions”) used to work for NASA as a roboticist before leaving to draw internet comics full time. Obviously this guy is awesome.

Here are a few of his cartoons;

And there’s many other hilarious ones. But that’s kind of besides the point because we were talking about how he can answer your ridiculous, unanswerable questions.

You know how I gave the question of  how powerful Yoda is in the force as an example of the kind of questions Randal might answer? Well in his book What If? he answers that question, which was emailed to him by someone who was curious. Randal then decided that Yoda lifting the X-wing out of the swamp of Dagobah  was Yoda’s greatest display of power in the original trilogy, estimated the weight of the X-wing by scaling down from the weight-to-size ratio of an F-22 to 12,000 pounds and timed the scene with a stopwatch to determine that the front strut (which he estimated to be 1.4 meters long based on a scene in A New Hope where a crew member squeezes past it) of the X-wing rose out of the water in three and a half seconds, telling him that it was rising at 0.39 m/s.

He then surfed the web and learned from wookiepedia the the surface gravity of Dagobah is 0.9g, and with all this information he deduced that Yoda exerted 19.2kW lifting the X-wing out of the swamp.

Having read the book, I can tell you that this is one of his less impressive answers. He is really and truly brilliant.

I think that’s all for today! If you want to see some of this for yourself or submit a question then search Google for “xkcd” and click on the result under “xkcd: Superbowl Context” entitled “What If?”.

More blogs coming soon!

Ezra

Hello, Ezra here, and today I will be telling you how to give yourself super powers, how to be nasty to your friends and enemies and how to make your pets INVINCIBLE! in Minecraft.

All these things can be done with just one command: the /effect command, possibly my favorite stand-alone command. I will show you how to make it work.

1: make sure you are in a creative world or have cheats turned on. Once loaded, press “t” in order to access your chat bar. Write “/effect” into the chat bar (without the quotations).

2: make sure you know who you want to effect. to effect yourself, type “@p”. To effect a specific person, write their name. Like this: “/effect Ratchet2000”. To effect a certain creature, like your pet, type what entity they are and their name. Like this: “/effect @e[type=Villager,name=Gary]”. if you want to effect all players type “@a” and if you want to effect all the living things in the world type “@e”. To effect stuff within a certain radius of you (including you), type “@e[r=5]” or “@a[r=7]” or whatever. For the sake of demonstration, I’m going to say that I wanted to effect myself and type “/effect @p”.

3: decide what you want to effect yourself with. Each effect is identified as a number. Here is an index for them:

“/effect @p 1” will give you speed.

“/effect @p 2” will give you slowness.

“/effect @p 3” will give you haste. (If you don’t know what haste is, look it up.)

“/effect @p 4” will give you miner’s fatigue.

“/effect @p 5” will give you strength.

“/effect @p 6” will give you

“/effect @p 7” will give you

“/effect @p 8” will give you jump boost. When reading step 5, note that you shouldn’t put the strength to below 70.

“/effect @p 9” will give you nausea. This one is REALLY good for trolling your friends without hurting them.

“/effect @p 10” will give you regeneration. Effecting yourself with this is step one to becoming INVINCIBLE!

“/effect @p 11” will give you resistance. This is step 2 to becoming INVINCIBLE!

“/effect @p 12” will give you fire resistance.

“/effect @p 13” will give you water breathing.

“/effect @p 14” will give you invisibility.

“/effect @p 15” will give you blindness. Again- good for trolling.

“/effect @p 16” will give you night vision. I enjoy giving myself this whenever I can.

“/effect @p 17” will give you hunger.

“/effect @p 18” will give you weakness.

“/effect @p 19” will give you poison.

“/effect @p 20” will give you Wither.

“/effect @p 21” will give you health boost.

“/effect @p 22” will give you absorption.

“/effect @p 23” will give you saturation.

more effects will come in the 1.9 update for Minecraft.

4: now it’s time to specify how long I want an effect to last. This is measured in seconds, going from 0 (instant and non-lasting) to 9999 (9999 seconds. Obviously.). If you type that you want it to last for 10000 seconds, most of the time it will just keep the effect on you until you either die or take it off. for example, if I gave myself speed for 10000 seconds and then gave myself speed for one second, then the speed would go away after one second. DO NOT TRY THIS ON A MULTIPLAYER WORLD. If you effect yourself with something for 10000 seconds on a multiplayer server, you have it until you die. in case of an emergency, type “/kill” to kill yourself. For the sake of our demonstration, lets say I gave myself strength for 10000 seconds. It is typed like this: “/effect @p 5 10000”.

5: Now decide how MUCH of an effect you want. For example; a normal strength potion makes your melee attacks %130 stronger. I’m not sure, but I think that means if you effect yourself with strength times 1, your attacks will be %130 stronger. If you effect yourself with strength the maximum amount of times possible (255 times)…. It’s formidable. Let’s say I wanted strength times 255. I’d type out this: “/effect @p 5 10000 255”.

6: The last and easiest step. Type “True” on the end if you don’t want bubbles to come out of you and don’t bother if you do want bubbles. If I don’t want bubbles, then the finished command should look like this: “/effect @p 5 10000 255 True”. Then you just press enter.

P.S. How to become INVINCIBLE!

To become INVINCIBLE!, follow the instructions above with these commands;

/effect @p 10 10000 255 True

/effect @p 11 10000 255 True

I hope this comes in handy for you Minecrafters out there!

Ezra