Author: Editor

Minecraft Parkour

Recently I have been making parkour maps in Minecraft. I will link the file when I have finished a good map.

Right now my favourite Minecraft parkour jump is the “triple neo”. It’s a jump where you have to jump around 3 blocks. It’s quite hard but I’m getting okay at it. I can do it in around 10 tries so as a percentage it’s 10% chance usually when I try doing it.

Also I’ve been making a parkour course on Hypixel Housing. It’s quite hard because it’s version 1.8 blocks but still you can make a basic parkour course. I really like using ladders in 1.8 parkour because it makes the parkour more challenging.

I like Hypixel Housing parkour maps where the jump are easy to understand and are not confusing. eg. I don’t like carpeted slime blocks or hidden ladders and barrier blocks in super random places. I don’t like it when people don’t have check points but I don’t mind if the parkour course is short.

 

Playing Japanese Drums For The First Time

Yesterday I went to a Japanese Drumming Lesson with my sister. We went with our friend Risa and her three children.

It was my first time and I didn’t even know there were different types of Japanese drums. Some of them are small drums that are for getting everyone in the same rhythm and there are big ones for the main sound.

The teacher gave each of us individual drums to play. The drum sticks were short and thick. After trying our drums out we went round and played the drums that other people were using. I really like the smaller drums because the sound is less hollow. There were a few elderly people and all had a lot of energy and were playing the drums very hard and fast and I was quite surprised. The teacher showed us how to play the drums by moving our hands in a circular motion.

The teacher taught us how to play with a group with all of us playing at the same time. It was hard for some of the children but most of them were quite good.

It was a really fun first-time experience and I would really like to go to another one of the lessons again.

Showa Memorial Park

I went to Showa Memorial Park in Tachikawa with my family. It’s a extremely big park in a suburb of Tokyo.It had been a long time since I had been there. When we first got into the park were given a free Uber Eats balloon but my sister gave it to a young boy who had just popped his one.

We then went to check a bicycle rental place but there were no tandem bikes so we went for a walk. When we finally got a tandem bike at another rental place. we cycled to a garden area with lots of flowers and sakura(Cherry Blossom). I went on the tandem bike with my sister but it was very heavy and hard to steer. The basket on the bike was attached to the front stem, not the handle bars. It felt really weird on the bike because it didn’t turn with it.

We had dinner in Ikea, I had salmon and ketchup rice.

Joining the Yokohama Spring Homeless Patrol

Yesterday I joined a volunteer group called “Yokohama Spring Homeless Patrol” for the first time.

My dad’s friend, Elena, is an early co-founder of the group. Elena looked after me a lot when my dad was in hospital. And I hadn’t seen for quite a while so I was very happy to see her.

Patrick Curtin and Elena started this group about one and a half years ago. They get food and beverage donations and give them to the unprivileged  and homeless people of Yokohama(City in Japan).

When Elena and I got to Kannai station in Yokohama at 17:35 we met Patrick, the founder of the group. There were a few people that came to the patrol meet up for the first time. They were all very talkative and kind. There were 14 of us altogether.

We were split into groups to give out food and drinks. I was in charge of handing out some Cherry Coke and some vegetable juice drinks. There were around 100 people queuing for the food and drinks. They were very patient and I was amazed. Some of them had been waiting there for  over 3 hours to be the first to get the food and drinks. This is because sometimes there is not enough food and drink for everyone.

After that we went into the station to meet some people living in cardboard boxes. We handed out crackers and chocolate biscuits.

It was basically what I had expected except that almost all the volunteers were non-Japanese. I wonder why there weren’t many Japanese people helping other homeless Japanese people.

It was a very good experience and I would love to join more of these events. They do these twice a month on Saturdays. Why don’t join or donate some time?

You can get more information about this group, the people in it and see some photos here:
https://www.facebook.com/mutualaidsolidarity/

Minecraft SMPs

I’ve recently been playing Minecraft SMPs a lot more than before.

SMP stands for “Survival Multiplayer”. It’s a type of Minecraft Servers where it is based around playing Minecraft survival mode together.

There are many types of SMPs but the ones I play the most I own and run on Exaroton. I try to keep people from fighting but my friends just keep fighting so it’s very hard. So that’s why I decided to turn on KeepInventory so that after we die the person that killed us can’t take our stuff. But the problem with that is that if you die from a natural cause like falling off a cliff or fighting a monster then you keep your stuff which is half considered cheating in the Minecraft Survival Community.

The other setting I changed in game rules is MobGriefing. The reason is because a lot of the members of my servers don’t fill up the creeper holes and also don’t keep the landscape clean.

Some SMPs are public where anyone can join with the IP address and usually griefing is not allowed and you can only build on your plot of land. There are also annoying plug-ins that let you teleport to anyone from anywhere.

Even though there are these annoying restrictions there are some servers with no rules. For example the popular Minecraft Survival Server 2b2t has nearly no rules. You can Hack, there are no chat restrictions and you can kill anyone. The only rule on this server is that you can’t cause a lot of lag and crash the server.

One of the most famous Minecraft SMPs out there is HermitCraft. They mostly focused on building and redstone. They are currently on Season 9. The SMP has been going on for more than 10 years. Some of the people from the MindCrack SMP joined HermitCraft as well. On average HermitCraft is inviting only one member every couple of years. It is a private whitelisted server and it’s extremely rare to be invited to join it. The members of HermitCraft are arguably the best Minecraft players and are very committed and enjoy playing vanilla(No mods, original and plain) Minecraft a lot.

I think the most important thing about SMPs are to keep the SMP in good condition and not abandon it. You need to think about what kind of an SMP it is and what kind of people should be in it. For example if it is based around war and fighting, you shouldn’t invite people that want to peacefully build and play the game. And if the SMP is based around building and having fun then you shouldn’t invite people that want to have wars and destroy what you have built. The hardest thing is to choose who should be in it. If you have the wrong people then it will never work out. And if you don’t have enough people then it was stay dull, grim and lifeless.

Minecraft Mods

Have you ever heard about Minecraft Mods?

I’ve been using a lot of mods when I play Minecraft recently. Mod is short for “modification”, they are pieces of code you install using using software such as Forge or Fabric. The main difference between them is that Forge can handle heavy mods that are very big(usually over 500mb) and Fabric is lighter and is used for mods that don’t require much power. You use them to add or change something in Minecraft.

The mods I use the most are: Optifine, Iris/Oculus, Sodium/Rubidium.
These are all performance and UI based mods that make the game less laggier and easier to play.
The mods I use for fun are like the Mustard Virus Mod pack by Forge Labs, Arcticraft by Forge Labs, Parasites by Forge Labs and Medieval Minecraft by Forge Labs .

The Mustard Virus is a modpack where you have to survive a zombie apocalypse where there are over 200 zombies everywhere and they can see you from up to 2 miles.

Arcticraft is a mod pack where you are in the Canadian Arctic and you have to find water and food to survive. The main mod in this mod pack is “Tough As Nails” Where it adds temperature and thirst which makes Minecraft a lot more challenging and hard to play. I’ve played it a couple of times but in the end I either die of hypothermia or thirst.

The Parasites mod pack is one of the best because it infects animals, villagers and even monsters. It spreads rapidly through your world and the ground and becomes a mushy, gross green swamp if you do not maintain the ground. The scariest monster of the parasites is a weird flower-type creature that comes out of the ground and eats you. To survive this modpack I usually make a tower and dig deep underground for emergency escapes.

My favourite mod pack is Medieval Minecraft because it adds fun bosses and dungeons to the game. You will find watchtowers, villages and even castles throughout the world. The hardest thing about it is that you need really strong armour to go against the knights of the castles and villages. It also adds very dangerous animals like the Crocodile Snapping Turtle, the Crocodile which kills you in swamps using barrel rolls and these huge birds that have knife-like claws and shoot them at you. The funniest thing when playing it is that you sometimes find these tiny trader goblins that can give you really good tools if you give them diamonds. They also smelt iron for you so you don’t have to use a furnace.

The other kind of mods except for these is Shaders. Shaders adds shading to Minecraft so it looks extremely realistic. It adds depth and shadow to everything there is. The shaders I use for Minecraft are:
For SMPs: Silders Medium
For Hypixel mini-games and PVP based games: Silders Light
For the Replay Mod: Continuum Shaders

What mods would you recommend? Please leave a comment down below.

Tokyo Game Show 2022

I went to Kaihin Makuhari in Chiba City for the Tokyo Game Show with my dad. It took 2 hours to get there. When we got there it was a Friday so there weren’t that many people there. We went to a curry restaurant for lunch and we both had the buffet. The food was quite good and I ate a lot.

Then we went to queue for the Tokyo Game Show. The queue was quite long but we got there early so it didn’t take longer than 20 minutes. After queuing for a while there was a bag check for security. We opened our bags and there was a rough check and the security staff didn’t look that well. After that we showed out tickets but my mum had put HER name instead of MY name on the ticket so we thought we couldn’t get in. As we got closer I got more and more nervous. When they did check the ticket they didn’t worry about the name so that was quite lucky.

When we entered TGS my dad was so shocked at how big it was. First, we just walked around getting some free bags, pens and notebooks. When we took in the whole place we looked at some booths. There were lots of famous companies like Sega and Konami and FaceBook Meta Quest.

When we went to the Sega booth there was a new samurai game. It was called: Like a Dragon: Ishin! 

and it was an adventure/quest game where you fight people and go to shops and explore Japan in the 1880s.

We didn’t try the Meta Quest because of the super-long queue. It was an Among Us game in 3d. There was a model of the emergency button from Among Us as well.

The show finished at 6pm. We bought some dinner at a Family Mart convenience store.

We had some Mc Shakes at a Mc’Donalds and I had a sweet potato flavoured one.

We stayed at a business hotel. It was 3 stops away from Kaihin-Makuhari, at Inage-Kaigan.

The second day was a full day so we played a lot more.

We put our stuff in a locker in Makuhari Messe. My dad used a pasmo card and it was 300 yen approx: $2/£1.8. It had an interface that talked to you and told you how to use it. My dad got a code on a receipt to unlock our locker later.

We played Wanted: Dead in an American diner. There was no food but you could sit and play there game. It was hard to aim and I don’t like TPS games so it was a 6/10.

I played an indie Pinball game called Infinity Pinball. It was quite fun but a bit hard. My dad talked to one of the translators for the game.

We went to a Gaming Chair section with a lot of gaming chairs. There were a few that I liked and a few that I didn’t. Most of them where red or black but some were green or pink. After looking at some gaming chairs I tried out some RealForce keyboard and mice. They were quiet and didn’t make a nice sound. I prefer custom linear keyboards. Some tactiles are nice but they don’t sound as good as linear ones. Tactiles are easier to lubricate because even without being perfect they sound quite good and when you press them they click smoothly and are good for accurate typing.

For lunch I had Tonkotsu Ramen from a cafeteria. I quite liked it and the soup was quite good as well.

The Indie Games area was my dad’s favourite section. He really liked how you could actually talk to the people who made the game. He played a Japanese learning game called “So to speak” where you go round cities and towns learning new Japanese words. It was a bit complicated but was easy enough for a normal foreigner learning Japanese.

I played a skiing game where you control it with the gyro sensor in the Nintendo Switch Joy-Cons. It was quite hard because the controls weren’t very good. You put on a harness on your shoulders and the controllers fit into that.

The Steam Deck was my favourite thing because you could play a lot of games. I played Stay and StarDew Vally. I liked both of them very much. Stray was a game where you are a stray cat and explore a little city. It had some puzzles and parkour. The graphics were really amazing so I loved it. StarDew Valley was very fun as well. I made a little farm and gathered some wood, stone and some grass. It was my first time to play it but I can easily play it for hours. The Steam Deck itself was really good. You could play a lot of pc games like Apex Legends and Cyber Punk 2077

I looked at the Asus ROG gaming gear. It was okay but I prefer Roccat or Razer. I played Apex Legends and Valorant but it was very hard because it was my first time to play it on pc.

There were a few Competition/Giveaways at TGS like a Steam Deck giveaway and some others. I only registered for the Steam Deck one but there where many others.

At the Monster Energy x Apex Legends booth you could get free Monster Energy drink. I got free Monster Energy drinks both days. I don’t love the taste but it was still pretty good.

After that we went on the train home.

Tokyo Maker Faire 2022

I went to Tokyo Maker Faire in Odaiba. It is a faire for makers. There are over 200 booths in a huge room. It’s held at a convention centre called Tokyo Big Sight.

The first thing I tried was a snow boarding game which was very hard. You balanced on a board with sensors in the board. You leaned on it to steer the board. But, there was and input lag so It was very hard to control. It took around 2 seconds for it to realise that I was leaning.

I also tried a game where you go through challenges with a robot camera. It was on a laptop with a robot that you control. There were many levels and I played 3 of them. You could also build with blocks and slopes where you chose the X, Y, Z lengths.

I tried finger boarding. I played it on a round rotating track. You play it with 2 fingers on the middle of the tiny skate board. It was very hard and the skate board kept slipping out of my fingers.

My favourite booth was the Minecraft VR. It was a game where you fight COVID-19 with a laser gun. It was so hard to control on the Oculus Quest 2. In the end I couldn’t do anything but it was ok.

I went to the food court for lunch and had a beef burger and chicken. I had a Barbados Cherry Soda as well. Before we went home I got a Ramune MC’Shake. Ramune is a Japanese soft drink that tastes like a bubble gum lemonade. But my MilkShake was creamy.

Japanese Vending Machines

In Japan we have vending machines everywhere. In a park, a shopping mall, in a train station, anywhere and everywhere.

Some of the drinks we have are: Water, Red Bull, Coke Cola, Monster Energy, Calpis, Flavoured water, Aquarius, Beer, Tea or Coffee.

In Japan a can(350ml) of drink eg. Coke is 130 yen. If you get a PET bottle(500ml) it’s 160 yen.

In some drinks machines in Japan there is a lottery where when you buy any drink you have a chance of winning a free drink from the machine. You have to get the same number 4 times in a row eg. 1111 or 2222 or 3333. Yesterday me and my dad won the lottery:

 

 

 

 

Also in Japan at some drinks machines you get free drinks when there’s an earthquake.

Here is a photo of some Red Bull and Mets Coke. Mets coke is tastes just like Coke Cola but fizzier. I like both of them but prefer the Mets Coke.

Some drink machines that sell coffee and hot chocolate give you a paper cup with the drink in it. You can add things to your drink like caramel, cream, extra coffee or more milk. But they take 60 seconds to make the drink even tho normal one are instant.

 

An accident on a train

Recently, when I was coming back on a train from my Ninjutsu class, a women fainted. She collapsed on to my dad who was sitting behind her and she slid onto the floor.

My dad picked her up and asked someone to press the “Emergency Button” to stop the train at the next station.

At the next train station she was put in a wheelchair and taken away by the train staff. After that the train started again and the announcer apologised for running 2 minutes late. Have you ever experienced an emergency on a train?

In Tokyo not many people have cars so we use trains a lot. Some of the train companies are: Japan Rail, Tokyu and Odakyu.
But there are many others and some are subways. And in Japan we use train cards where you charge them with money, they are called Pasmo, Suica etc. They are a bit like the Oyster card in England.