Minecraft

I’ve loved to play Minecraft for over ten years, and even though this decade’s phase of social obnoxity I fear had rendered its online community into the Deccan Traps and even slightly affected its own social media a little too much for me (including compressing the Minecraft Lives I used to watch every year), it is still a popular and beloved game around the world that I find fun. A month ago I built this Tyrannosaurus rex in creative mode, inspired by "AxoNNNessJ"’s fantastic tutorials on YouTube, but made out of a different assortment of blocks (mainly deepslate) to represent how I personally imagine the dinosaur would’ve looked like when it was alive. It is worth noting that I have also recently customised the game with some mods and resource packs, such as Nostalgic Tweaks by "Adrenix" and the built-in Programmer Art (as well as unofficial "add-ons" to expand upon it to newer textures) for a more retro aesthetic that isn’t just for the nostalgia, but one I personally find fitting the pixelated game more, and if I could manage further, even make it akin to a fifth-gen 3D video game out of the ‘90s, like Carnivores or Super Mario 64. Another mod I’ve been using is the popular Biomes o’ Plenty, which among its great menagerie of biomes has some right out of the Cretaceous period, such as floodplains and volcanoes, where I’d duplicate the tyrannosaur build with structure blocks for the scenic screenshots seen above. Some might recommend me those indie amateur "vanilla+" dinosaur mods that had upsurged in recent years (such as Alex’s Caves), but although they are detailed they are outlets of the toxic teenage community (particularly Twitter, and many Twitter-like Minecraft modding Discord servers that I’ve now left) I don’t like that I’ve found more often than not rather cliché to each other with the exaggerated concepts of said community. Although I haven’t enjoyed last year’s Minecraft Live too much, I have been playing around with the new updates (which are now planned and released differently as occasional "drops" and aren’t just yearly) since those it had announced. Currently, one such update is in the works that seems to be improving the atmosphere and nature of the game, and I’ve been trying out the new snapshots. Cows, pigs, and chickens are getting new climate-respective skin variants, new sorts of foliage from leaf litter to cactus flowers are livening up the game’s biomes, deserts have new wind ambience, wolves have got different sets of sounds of varying personality, fireflies have been added as particles of a special "firefly bush," and more. It is looking to be an exciting update (although I just hope they won’t make the reworked chickens crow) I have been waiting for a long time, and although I was a bit bewildered at the new "drop" system at first, the updates are actually as good if not better than before and their seasonal releases make them even more exciting. As for the drops that have released (such as the one with the Pale Garden and the Creaking), I unfortunately can’t play them in my normal customised modpack yet because not all of them (like Nostalgic Tweaks) have been updated over 1.21, but time will pass for them to update as it seems.