Pictures from the September VGHVI Minecraft session:

Miranda decided to turn the upstairs room that wasn’t a stable into a greenhouse. We didn’t want to put glass everywhere, but we put glass at the end:

Replacing the wall at the end with glass

Outside view of the glass

Then she started planting:

Starting work on the bed for the plants

The first version of the plant bed is complete

The first plants are added

That was a single-row version, but she expanded it to two rows with water between:

Adding water for the plants

Two rows of plants

Flowers at the end

It took a while for the pumpkin and melon to grow

Roger, meanwhile, was hard at work at his cathedral; that thing is going to be massive.

Roger working in the snow

An arch of the cathedral

Chipping excess blocks away from the arch

And Dan was working on his huge glass structure in a bay:

The glass continues to grow

Inside the glass

Miranda and I thought it would be a good place play hide and seek, at least at night

Closeup view of lava

Daytime view

I mostly just wandered around; the only building I did was helping with getting the glass front of the greenhouse in place.

Staying out of the snow

A loading error

Saying hello to my horse

Dan wandered by our house and Miranda made a stable for him, so he tamed a horse as well:

Dan taming a horse

Success!

Horse armor

It’s been a month since I gave a guitar status update, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been playing Rocksmith: it’s just that I didn’t have anything particular to write about. (Though there was one weekend day where I didn’t practice guitar because we spent the afternoon singing in Rock Band 3 instead.) I was basically just going through the new DLC that I downloaded; some was quite good (the songs from The Strokes and My Chemical Romance in particular), some was pretty boring to play (funk is nice to listen to and probably fun enough on bass but not so great on guitar), and Love Hurts was fascinating enough that I think I’ll write about it on my main blog.

But now I’ve finally played those enough that the game has decided to go back to the regular rotation. I’ve already started being a little more selective in what to play, ejecting songs from events if I don’t think I’ll enjoy / learn much from them, and I plan to do that more. And I plan to get back to practicing specific songs (and even sections of songs) instead of just going through events.

And I might learn a few more songs outside of the game: in particular, I’m thinking this arrangement of Itsumo Nando Demo might be worth learning.

Of course, it doesn’t make much sense to talk too much about my plans, because Rocksmith 2014 will comes out in just over two weeks, and once that’s out I’ll be spending my weekends diving into what’s new there…

It’s a three day weekend, and I played Rocksmith all three days. I’d downloaded a fair number of new songs this week: three-packs from The Strokes and My Chemical Romance, and several individual songs from other artists, something like 12 in total? And I’m definitely glad I had something new to play, I enjoyed the new songs more than I expected, and in particular those two three-packs were both good choices.

Some of the individual songs were a little boring, though (actually, if I’m remembering correctly, one of the songs from The Strokes fell into that bucket, too), so the flip side is that there’s a reason why I hadn’t bought these songs until now: I’m sure that there’s other DLC that I would enjoy if I gave it a try, but my success ratio is getting lower. So I doubt I’ll buy any more DLC until Rocksmith 2014 comes out; but I’m really looking forward to that, partly to get a lot of new songs and partly because I hope the game experience will improve somewhat.

I spent most of the August Minecraft session wandering around the cavern underneath the house. I was lost a fair amount of that time, but I did at least find a path from the stairs to the closest exit:

At the bottom of the stairs

Step 1 of the path

Step 2 of the path

Step 3 of the path

Step 4 of the path

Step 5 of the path

At the exit

And some random pictures from my other wandering:

Signs that we’d explored the cavern before

A bat flying around

Some cows near another exit

A random city picture

Watching the sunset from the alcove

Roger was working on his cathedral; I took my horse on a trip to visit him.

Roger contemplates the cathedral

My horse contemplates the cathedral

Roger decided the cathedral was too short, so he extended its base:

Extending the cathedral

A closer view of the extension

The wall between the pillars has been torn down

That cathedral is really large, it wouldn’t surprise me if he’ll be putting on the finishing touches a year from now.

While I was out with my horse, Miranda was making improvements in the stable:

More stalls, and some hay bales

She also put in a sofa in the alcove for better viewing:

Sofa in the alcove

Watching the sunset from the alcove

She wasn’t there for the first half of the session, though, so she didn’t get as much done as she normally does; I think next she wants to work on the other upstairs room, but she hasn’t worked out the details yet.

Contemplating her next steps

We’re done with summer visitors, so I got back to Rocksmith this weekend. Which started off by throwing more Rush at me: YYZ and Red Barchetta this time. And a couple of other songs, too, maybe My Sharona and I Miss You? Pretty tough group; I had a target of 90,000 on most but not all of them. And I hit my target on some and missed it on some, but on the whole I felt like I was doing better than the last time I saw those songs, and I got a little better at them while practicing that day.

Then, that evening, instead of watching Deep Space 9, Miranda was in the mood for playing Rock Band 3. So we did that, for the first time in a while, and it was (of course) super fun! Miranda on vocals, me on (fake) guitar, Liesl on (fake) bass, except that one song in I pulled out the mic stands, and Liesl and I ended up singing along as well. (And doing better than we used to do when playing + singing in that song.) Really glad we did that. And Miranda is a Rush fan, so we ended up continuing that theme, singing another couple of Rush songs.

I can’t remember what I played on Rocksmith on Sunday (I should have written this up then!), but it was back to a noticeably easier level. So I went through the event rather more quickly, and then went through my current standard-ish set of songs.

Good weekend, glad to be getting back in the groove.

We had guests in town last weekend and we will guests them in town next weekend, but this weekend was free, so I made sure to practice guitar both days. And the setlist that Rocksmith gave me on Sunday was unexpectedly interesting: it was Anna Molly, Limelight, Do You Remember, Message in a Bottle, The End of the World, Tom Sawyer, and Play with Fire.

A couple of those were straightforward, but the rest weren’t. I’d been practicing the main arpeggio section in Tom Sawyer for the last month or two, but I hadn’t gone through the song in that time, so it was good timing for me to take another swing. Went well enough, but clearly I have quite a bit more room for improvement in that song; I think I’m going to switch over to practicing the whole thing.

And then I had to deal with Limelight; before I memorized the arpeggio section in Subdivisions, I hadn’t realized just how frequently Rush uses the same idiosyncratic chords and just how much they like Bs, but now I know!

Message in a Bottle was a good sign of my increasing dexterity: I already was able to play the arpeggios at the start, but it had been a stretch in the past. And it was a little bit of a stretch when I first tried the song this time, but not so much even then, and after going through it a couple of times, I was getting to where I could at least see what it would be like to play it comfortably. So my left hand is getting better; more of a surprise was how it felt to go through Play with Fire, my right hand was a lot more confident when jumping to the top three strings. I’m still not able to play that piece as solidly as I’d like (I still can’t even reach 90,000 points on it), but clear signs of improvement.

Nice to see that the practice is paying off.

I didn’t do any building this time: I was exploring the caverns under the new house. Which were huge, and which had been explored before, it was just years ago! I immediately got lost this time; eventually I found my way out, and later I found an exit near the stairs to the house, but I still have a lot of work ahead of me before I understand the whole system.

What few pictures I did take:

An alcove full of mushrooms

Looking up in one of the huge caverns

A waterfall in another of the huge caverns

The first exit I found

Another exit. (I think this is the one closer to the house.)

Dan continued to work on his glass platform above the bay; I’m not sure how much he added, I didn’t get a lot of pictures of that, either.

This is actually a picture I took a month earlier but then lost in iCloud, but it’s pretty so I’ll stick it in here

Glass covering most of the bay

A closeup of the lava under the glass

As is frequently the case, Miranda was the most active of us, but she wasn’t building much: instead, she was exploring the fact that the latest Minecraft update added horses!

A horse!

Horses need a wider door

I get a horse, too. 🙂

Gold horse armor

I’m trying to tame my horse

It is not going so well

Success!

Riding across the snow

A donkey attached to a hitching post

Anvilania…

Miranda still has dogs, too

I practiced guitar both Saturday and Sunday this weekend; good stuff. A pleasant selection of songs in the events, generally hard enough for me to enjoy playing them without requiring too many attempts. And then I went through various of the songs that are either my favorites or ones that I’m working on; I added Sweet Home Alabama to the latter set, and I continue to think it’s a good choice.

Probably no guitar next weekend, we’ll have guests in town.

I played guitar with coworkers again this week (plus one friend of coworkers); again it was a lot of fun. I spent one of the songs (Hey Hey, My My) improvising, mostly reminding myself how minor scales work; no idea how it sounded to other people, but I enjoyed it. And we did Boys Don’t Cry again, where I played the regular part, and then we went through a song that the other people playing had written years ago; I learned the chords for that one. All good stuff.

I was too busy with on-call stuff for work yesterday to be able to play Rocksmith, but I had a good session today. Sweet Home Alabama seems like another song that would be good for me to add to the regular practice rotation: some plucking that’s just barely too fast for me and some two-note chords with a little more moving around and stretching than normal.

The other thing I noticed this week is that I’m getting better at Something Bigger, Something Brighter: I’ve been working on the arpeggios for that offline more recently over the last month, and it feels to me like I’m significantly faster than I used to be; I haven’t compared it against Rock Band 3 or a recording of the song, but I think I’m at full speed now, albeit with rough patches? So yay for improving after repeated practice.

The June VGHVI Minecraft session was a continuation of our large ongoing projects. Miranda and I moved on to the next area of the large house we’re building; she built some bedrooms on the other side of the hallway on the main floor.

Bedroom doors on the right side of the hallway

Starting work on one of the bedrooms

A finished bedroom interior

A hot tub in back of the room

I decided to see how much space there was for a floor above the main floor. (While keeping to my restriction of basically leaving the shape of the mountain intact.) It turns out that there was, so I hollowed out some rooms; I’m not sure what will go in them, Miranda does better at that than I do.

A long room upstairs

The upper window is the same one from the previous picture

A large upstairs back room, on the opposite side of the stairs

The outside door to that back room

An entrance area in the middle of upstairs

That upstairs entrance door, viewed from the outside

The outside view of the original entrance and the upstairs entrance area above it

A pillar above the stair area in the middle of the upstairs floor

Dan kept on working on the structure he was building in a bay:

Lots of glass above the bay

And lots of chickens in one area of that glass

Dawn breaks over the bay

A nice view of the pit under the train tracks, seen when flying back from the bay

Roger, meanwhile, kept on working on his cathedral; it’s going to be pretty amazing when it’s done.

The back edge of the cathedral

Inside the cathedral

One of the side windows

Underneath the cathedral

The front doors

Roger contemplates what to do next