My guitar practice has gotten into a better rhythm than last time I talked about it. I’m not sure I’m practicing more, but I’m enjoying it more and feeling I’m getting more out of it. Basically, I’ve realized that I wasn’t getting as much as I could have out of the game’s “Recommended” list in Learn a Song mode – I’d been going through the songs there in a relatively superficial fashion, going quickly from one to the next. Which is fine to spend some of my time doing, but that’s what the game’s “Nonstop Mode” is for: a good way to spend 20–30 minutes, but not the best way to spend the majority of my practice time.

So now, when I’m going through the recommended songs, I dig into individual songs more. (At least most of the time.) Instead of playing through a song once, now my most typical experience is to play a song twice, dropping into Riff Repeater mode in some sections the second time, maybe spending 15 minutes on the song? And I’m liking that a lot more: it’s transformed the experience from “play a song badly and feel dissatisfied” to one where I feel like I’m getting better in some small way on each song I try.

I’m also doing one exercise that Joan suggested, though it’s too early to see results for that. And I’m not doing Session Mode as much, which is fine; I’ll come back to that later, but it’s okay for me to take a break now. I’m also not currently focusing too much on my favorite songs, but I imagine I’ll come back to that at some point as well, too.

Pictures from the April VGHVI Minecraft session:

I returned to the tunnel that I’d dug last month:

Returning to the tunnel

Lava in a mine

The previous end of the tunnel (I think)

And then I kept on going; after not too long, I hit some water:

Water floods the corridor

Getting a good look at the underground river

Building a glass passage under the river

I built a glass passage under that river and kept going. Eventually, I decided to dig up to see where I was; and again I hit water, this time flooding down from the surface. I didn’t take many pictures in the thick of things, unfortunately, but eventually I managed to block that off, I went sideways a bit and then dug up:

Digging up to the surface

My original chimney went into a lake, as it turned out, but fortunately I got lucky and my second one didn’t hit water. With a bit of work, I managed to build a glass enclosure around where my original chimney hit the lake bottom, so then both chimneys worked:

A chimney in the middle of the water

Looking around

After that, I went back to the city. We had a new participant, Tom; he was building a colored tower, so I took some pictures of that:

Tom’s colored tower

Working on the tower

Looking down into the center of the tower

And Miranda was continuing to improve the village that we’d discovered maybe half a year ago:

Returning to the village

Inside the library, with one of the villagers keeping track of me

Out on the dock

A villager is stuck

The building on the other side of the dock

A view from the roof

Starting to extend one of the buildings

Then I traveled back to the city (encountering one interesting glitch along the way), and took pictures of the tower that Pat had finished:

A cube of lava and tunnels in the water

Pat’s finished tower

The top of the tower

A view from higher up