Hi hello everyone…. or no one it is hard for me to guess if anyone will read this. Either way I will write it down for my own sake. It is mostly about my life so probably not very interesting for others but feel free to read along.

It’s been quite a while since I really played Minecraft, nevertheless I think I learned a lot about life from this game and this still guides me in making choices today. In fact, I’m at a special point in my life right now. I’m in the second year of my masters and thinking about what thesis topic to choose. I find this a hard choice and I’m well aware that after thesis working life starts and there is no way back to being a student, ideally thesis will be something that’s fun and sets me up for a job in the same field. Now for making this choice there are a million considerations but before getting into those I want to talk about Minecraft and how it influenced my thought process for making choices.

I’ve tried a lot of hobbies in my life. Usually, I didn’t come up with something myself I’m not that creative. I mainly got things from my brother or from friends. I was never specifically good at any of these things and only get better slowly over time. For most I didn’t invest the time necessary to become good at it based on the amount of talent I have. An exception to this is Minecraft.

When I first started playing Minecraft (after my brother introduced my to it) I was terrible. Survival was never for me I would just die from zombies. Creative on the other hand was more successful I, liked making things, unfortunately I had no talent for it whatsoever and for the first year or so I only made wooden plank boxes. I still remember that one day my brother showed me some “pimp my minecraft” videos. After watching these at the age of 12 I realized that I could do better and my building style rapidly improved. After that I mostly played on a survival server with my best friend -shoutout to 8257pqoscsg- and we made a big brick castle here. Later I joined a few classmates from school at a creative Minecraft server (chunkycraft). At this server I once again saw that the things other people were doing were much better than mine which helped me to improve. I spent a lot of time here and even made some friends who I kept contact with for several years after. Sadly, the server was not very active at the time and I didn’t spend much time with the more skilled older players.

After some drama at this server, I ended up doing “commissions” for a random teenager. I never actually got paid for these, but it motivated me to learn tools like world edit and voxel sniper. Sadly, there were no experienced artists here and the style we used was mostly slab spamming, which was quite popular at the time. Somehow, I met a guy here who had his own private server where I build a fun project together with 88257pqoscsg. Finally, I made my own offline server where I practiced my terraforming skills with the Voxel wiki at hand.

By this time, I was around 15 and an active member of Planet Minecraft. I had just moved to a new high school where I had a lot of school work no friends and not so much spare time. If nothing had happened at this time, I probably would have left Minecraft. Luckily, my life improved in several ways, I made some great friends at school, and I somehow ended up on the creative server “Dawn creative” hosted by the people from what’s now called ShapeScape. This was really a positive turn for me and while playing here I learned so much. I finally had the basic knowledge of voxel sniper and world edit to freely build, moreover I saw things on planetminecraft and took inspiration from this, finally I learned so much from the people around me on this server.

This was the last and best year of high school for me. I think the study load became less and I finally had a nice group of friends to sit with during lunch. I also was extremely happy with the amazing friends I made from playing Minecraft (shoutout to Lumberjack_11) and things were going well. Nothing lasts forever and Dawn creative closed. I could still play on Aliquam a great server from a friend, but I never really got back into Minecraft the same way. This was probably also due to the fact that college and traveling there for 2 hours took a lot of my time and the relationship with a really nice girl who I met through Minecraft ended. Moreover, the group we played with on Dawn all had different things to do in life. Despite this I still held contact Lumberjack_11 and his friends.

Anyway the point I want to make is that my Minecraft journey started when I was around 11 and virtually ended when I was 17 (I’m 24 now). I was terrible when I started and I never really became great, however I did improve over time. What I learned from this journey is mostly that in order to become better I needed lot’s of time to practice, friends, and also good examples and knowledgeable people who help. Without these things I don’t think I would ever have become decent at building. If I look back at my projects, I think there is still a lot for me to learn and I should have learned more from the methods skilled people use. For example, I never really used reference pictures which probably would have made my life a 100 times easier.

However, this post is not really about Minecraft, I mean it is, but it is not. The process of learning things is everywhere. If you have no talent like me, it often takes many years of practice and looking at more skilled individuals to get decent. Moreover, I noticed that some skills you learn are also useful in different fields, but others are not applicable. For example, how you learn is applicable, if you manage a team those managing skills are proabably also applicable in other fields. Most practical skills like how to use voxel sniper are however hardly transferable to a different field.

For my bachelors I studied mechanical engineering and for my masters materials science. These are extremely broad fields, and they form a good basis but whatever field I enter I will essentially have to spend another 5 or 10 years there to become decent. Don’t get me wrong I like learning It’s just that I also want to become good at something. Moreover, from my Minecraft journey I learned that in order to become knowledgeable in a field I need encouraging people but ideally also people who are among the best and who are willing to share their expertise. Of course, this also requires of me that I’m at a level where I have the basic knowledge and skills to learn these things

So, with that discussed let’s get back to the problem at hand Thesis and then a job.

Essentially, I should choose a topic that I like, ideally has an economic future, which has peers who I can talk with and some of knowledgeable who share their knowledge. This topic should also be proper for someone with my background.

For now, I have to choose whether I should go for an available project at my faculty, a different faculty, a collaboration with a company, or propose my own project. Each option has some pros and cons. Proposing my own project will allow a lot of freedom of choice but also cause some dissonance with earlier statements about needs for success. The details of this problem are for me to worry about yet I thought it would be nice to share considerations for making choices based on playing this block game.

Then again perhaps I'm overthinking and I should just go with whatever presents itself, in the end that's how I also ended up with minecraft. Maybe I should also spend my time on the present instead of dwelling on the past. I actually planned to finish a mural in my study room today and writing this ramble took a good portion of the time planned for that hahaha. If I finish the mural I might post it on my google site though: sites.google.com/view/t-jorna/gallery



I highly doubt anyone will read this but if you see this and you are one of my old Minecraft or PMC friends. Please know that I’m doing relatively well and I’m very thankful to you and everyone for helping me through high school and being part of some of my best memories. I really hope that someday in my life I can be a part again of such an amazing community in whatever field I end up.
Also yes today I went down memory lane along the old legends like the voxelbox, circleight and mcme.