ectomoog - Tumblr blog

[ectomoog]

Gandalf having to stop Merry from infodumping about smoking weed to King Théoden while he and the entire army of Rohan are standing there waiting to hear why the fuck Isengard has suddenly been flooded and destroyed has to be one of the funniest moments in this whole trilogy 😭

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Watching mr beast videos when I’m sad like an addict relapsing again

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YouTube reccommendation of the day: "Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat" by Bobby Fingers, one of the most unique videos I've seen on yt, if you think you know what's going on, you don't.

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New project started 🫣 working on a Minecraft news newsletter, tentatively called "Biome Fest" - trying out some new things 😮

what it'll all come down to is like, if I like it, but it *could* be fun..

A mockup of what the general style will look like 👀

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Maybe we stop making fun of shitty blockbusters and start wondering why studios are allowed to burn $80,000,000 every year for absolutely no reason

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Some of the music on this album (including Left to Bloom) is some of the best music ever made for the Minecraft soundtrack and any hate towards Lena Raine just because she didn't try and mimic c418Daniel's approach sucks

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The Ecto Moog Vanilla Experience

Updated for 1.20.4

I’m the unwilling user of a MacBook Air, and I’m also someone with strong (picky) preferences for ✨vibes✨, and so to play Minecraft casually on my laptop, I’ve had to jump through several hoops to achieve what I would consider a good vanilla experience.

At this point though, I’ve put probably too much time and effort into it, and so I thought to justify that I’d make a beginner's guide to all the mods, resource packs and game options I use, as of February 2024 (1.20.4). 👇

I will attach a hyperlink to any resources I mention :)

Mods

Ok so to start off, yes, I technically I don't actually play true vanilla Minecraft, but the mods I have installed are all client-side, and for the purpose of improving or optimising the vanilla experience. You can find me and a list of (almost) all these mods on Modrinth.

Fabric & Modrinth (Intro)

To mod the game, I use Fabric. I know that Forge has had some… drama? recently, and I’m gonna be honest I’ve never tried Quilt (I will at some point), but Fabric is super widespread, tons of mods use it so it works just fine for me 😁. When I’m looking for mods, I really prefer to use Modrinth, just because I can follow everything and it’s a really well designed website. (I also tried their launcher but I think it needs a little work?)

As part of Fabric, I do have the Fabric API in my mods folder.

Performance & Optimisation

I use these mods are to make the game run better. Minecraft is notorious for being very poorly optimised, and these mods have been made by a ton of very talented people to fix that.

Sodium

JellySquid’s Sodium is the hot optimisation mod right now for rendering and graphical fixes. It doesn’t have the cosmetic features of Optifine, like dynamic lighting or zoom, but it’s super compatible and gives me great performance. Combined with my other mods, at a 15 chunk render distance in the overworld, I averaged around 50 fps. For a MacBook, that's not bad at all.

To accompany Sodium I've also got Indium, an add-on that provides support for the Fabric Rendering API, which is required for mods that use advanced rendering effects, and Reese's Sodium Options, which adds a better options screen for Sodium’s video settings- it looks better basically.

Lithium

Lithium is a general purpose optimisation mod that improves systems like game physics, mob AI, block ticking, etc without changing vanilla mechanics.

Starlight

Starlight rewrites the entire lighting engine to fix performance and errors. Made for bigger servers, but helpful for client users. I think this is in place of Phosphor.

Dynamic FPS

Dynamic FPS can reduce the game’s FPS when it’s just running in the background- useful for a laptop.

Some more specific optimisation mods:

Entity Culling avoids rendering entities that aren’t directly in your field of view, which is much more thorough than the vanilla approach.

Ferrite Core reduces the memory usage of Minecraft in a ton of different ways.

Immediately Fast optimises how things like entities, particles, text, GUI are rendered, by using “a custom buffer implementation which batches draw calls and uploads data to the GPU in a more efficient way.”

I'm not a programmer so I can’t really explain what Krypton does, something to do with networking stacks, but I know it optimises.. things, lowers server CPU usage and reduces memory usage. I’m barely following along with a lot of these mods.

Fabric Language Kotlin is a dependancy that enables the use of the Kotlin programming language for other Fabric mods. To be honest, I’ve forgotten what mod needs this but I don’t want to delete it, just in case.

Experience

These mods aren’t necessarily about performance, but they do enhance the game in a vanilla kind of way, in my opinion. Some of these could be up for debate but I do think they compliment the base game.

Lamb Dynamic Lights

Lamb Dynamic Lights is a simple but thorough dynamic lighting mod that adds light-emitting handheld items, dropped items and entities.

Zoomify

Zoomify is a super configurable zoom mod. Maybe this is just because of Optifine’s influence, but i think they should add zoom to the base game. At least I feel cool using it 😎

To make Zoomify work, you’ll need, YetAnotherConfigLib, a config library that fills in a couple of holes.

Better F3

Better F3… makes the F3 menu better. There’s the option to customise literally everything, you can colour code, shift and delete parts of the menu depending on your use case, it’s less insane and looks a whole lot better.

MiniHUD

MiniHUD allows you to display customisable F3 lines on the main screen, along with several client-side overlay renderers. I just use it for the mini-F3, and I have my FPS, coords and cardinal direction in the top left corner. It’s honestly more helpful than you’d assume.

MiniHUD requires MaLiLib (masa’s Litemod Library) which is a library mod for mods made by masa and others.

ModMenu

ModMenu adds an in-game menu where you can view the mods you’re running and access their details and setting menus.

Shulker Box Tool Tip

Shulker Box Tool Tip adds a preview of the inside of a Shulker box when it’s in your inventory.

Some more specific experience mods:

Bobby is a rendering mod that allows the player to render more chunks than a server’s fixed distance, by loading in previously generated chunks saved client-side. You can also render them straight from a singleplayer world file. To be honest, I don’t often run into this issue but it’s helpful to have lol.

Cloth Config API adds a config screen for mods in-game.

Iris is a mod that makes shaders super easy, and compatible with Sodium. It's down here because I don’t use shaders often, but it’s essential if you do.

A lot of these mods are subject to change as I find better or updated alternatives, and I'm always on the lookout for more 😁

Resource Packs

For vanilla Minecraft, I actually only use one resource pack, but if you’re familiar with Vanilla Tweaks, you’ll understand why this deserves its own category.

This resource pack allows you to pick which small changes you want to add, and a lot of them are really cool. Some of my favourite tweaks are:

Dark UI

Quieter Nether Portals

Circular Sun and Moon

Numbered Hotbar

Golden Crown

The other tweaks I have are: Classic Minecraft Logo, Lower Warped Nylium, Lower Snow, Lower Crimson Nylium, Lower Podzol, Lower Paths, Lower Grass, Wither Hearts, Ping Color Indicator, Borderless Glass, Lower Fire, Lower Shield, Transparent Pumpkin, Noteblock Banners, Quieter Minecarts, Variated Unpolished Stones, Variated, Terracotta, Variated Stone, Variated Logs, Variated Mushroom Blocks, Variated End Stone, Variated Gravel, Variated Mycelium, Variated Planks, Variated Bricks, Random Moss Rotation, Variated Cobblestone, Variated Grass, Random Coarse Dirt Rotation, Variated Dirt, Darker Dark Oak Leaves, Shorter Tall Grass, Circle Log Tops, Twinkling Stars, Accurate Spyglass, Unique Dyes, Animated Campfire Item, Red Iron Golem Flowers, Brown Leather, Warm Glow, Horizontal Nuggets, Different Stems, Variated Bookshelves, Connected Bookshelves.

Game Options

For the sake of the full experience, here's the important game options:

The End 😇

And that's the whole thing! A lot of this could change at any moment based on my play style, but I think this is a really well rounded experience for vanilla Minecraft. Let me know if there's anything else I should try 😁

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hi mr moog. lovingly what the fuck are you doing here

ohhh nothing good probably

probably. EVIL

evil BLOG POSTS

holy moly. .

[ectomoog]

moog, 19, he/him, australian

blog style blog

ectomoog.com

[ectomoog]

In the past few months it's really felt like the Internet Brainrot has set in so I've decided rather than continue to try and make twitter and tiktok work for me I am now done !! I will be attempting to spend my time like they did in the olden days before we could brainlessly scroll through the same 1000 posts regurgitated by chatgpt. I will probably continue to spend more time online than I should but I'll keep the blog updated with my Awesome things. For example here's a really cool podcast I listened to at work yesterday:

I am so so sick of spending my time burning a hole in my brain scrolling through rage bait and negativity and reposts and I can't believe as an adult I have to relearn how to be healthily Entertained

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How to Get Your Friends into Doctor Who (2005) - A Guide

Ok I really like Doctor Who, and of course I like introducing people to it, but oh my god do you forget how randomly terrible and/or cringy and/or uncomfortably Moffat-esque some of the episodes are, *especially* when you're watching it with someone who has no idea what to expect.

SO I made a list of ten episodes that I think would be the best loose sequence of episodes for a causal introduction to the show...

But first, some requirements:

It has to be a one-off (NO TWO-PARTERS), low commitment, etc

It can't require watching previous OR following episodes to be enjoyable

It needs to actually be good

It needs to represent Doctor Who well

In a social setting where you're showing a group of people an episode, most of these would be fine. Watching consistently with one person however, loosely follow this order, and if your person decides at any point that they want to commit to actually watching the show, skip straight back to The End of The World and watch Series 1. Ok list time...

1. Rose (S1, E01)

I think Rose is the perfect episode of Doctor Who to start on. It's campy, it's fun and weird and it sets up almost everything you need to know for the Revival Era. You get the companion, the Doctor, regular Doctor Who tropes and themes, etc. Plus, if they can't get past the Mickey bin scene, this show probably isn't for them anyway.

2. Dalek (S1, E06)

Skipping a few episodes into Series 1, Dalek is a great way to get a feel for the format of the show, and also a great and intentional introduction to the Daleks. The Doctor and the companion turn up in a mysterious place and have to battle an alien force and really unlikeable one-off side characters, the works basically. It's a fun monster-movie of an episode.

3. Vincent and The Doctor (S5,E10)

Jumping a whole five series forward, Vincent and The Doctor is a notoriously heart-wrenching historical that I think is a classic (if a little indulgent) example of Doctor-meets-famous-historical-figure. It's nice to jump to a different Doctor and a different era of the show, to get a feel for its' diversity. Although there's a few moments relevant to the greater series plot, it's contained, very pretty, very sweet, and easy to understand.

4. Midnight (S4, E10)

Midnight just feels like an essential episode to be honest. A fantastic one-off sci-fi horror/thriller, with one of David Tennant's best performances, a great introduction to the 10th Doctor. It's a shame you don't get more Donna, but I think this one would be my go-to if someone asked for the best episode to watch stand-alone, just based on how genuinely great it is.

5. Heaven Sent (S9, E11)

Jumping to Series 9 with another critically-acclaimed episode, but also one that I think is an amazing introduction to the 12th Doctor. Heaven Sent is a little unconventional, and I'm not 100% sure it should be here, but it does give Capaldi a whole episode to just act his ass off, and he completely delivers. It's artsy, mysterious and dramatic, very much the high concept sci-fi style of Moffat's later scripts, so I think an appropriate watch.

6. The Voyage of The Damned (2007 Special)

If you're not in a festive mood, try The Lodger or Demons of the Punjab instead

The Christmas episodes are too iconic not to show, and as far as Christmassy vibes, celebrity cameos and whimsical concepts go, this one is a fun one. This is David Tennant in his prime, with Kylie Minogue, a massive budget and a romp of a script.

6. Blink (S3, E10)

I mean, duh, but genuinely I think Blink is just *too good* not to include. A tense, creepy, tightly-written piece of horror TV with twists and turns and drama, it's considered the best episode of Doctor Who for a reason, and along with Midnight is an amazing stand-alone episode. It's not super conventional, but all the timey-wimey stuff is very Doctor Who.

6. The Mummy on The Orient Express (S8, E08)

If you're a Tennant stan you could swap this out for The Planet of the Dead

This one is just a fun one really. The Mummy on The Orient Express is stylish and fun, with a cool concept and a little peek into a more complex Doctor-companion relationship. With a short explanation you can get the context pretty easily, and it's a good example of your typical episode anyway.

HOWEVER if you have time, there's a bunch of two-parters you should watch instead, like The Family of Blood, The Empty Child, Silence in the Library, even Extremis.

9. The Haunting of Villa Diodati (S12, E10)

Finally some 13th Doctor rep! This one has some of the strongest writing in the Chibnall era, and is a fun horror mystery that serves as a fun introduction to Jodie Whittaker as the 13th Doctor. It has a little bit of series-wide arc, but that's okay.

10. The Church on Ruby Road (2023 Special 4)

If your person liked all those episodes but still doesn't want to watch 13 seasons of TV, just abandon ship and watch the 2023 Christmas special in preparation for Series 14 (or Season 1) in Spring 2024. The Church on Ruby Road is the beginning of the latest soft reboot of the show and has been explicitly created as a jumping on point for new fans. Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson absolutely shine in this special, it's fun and silly and in my opinion bodes very well for the next season of Doctor Who...

"in 900 years of time and space, I've never met anyone who wasn't important" - Bannakaffalatta

I hope that was a success! After all those episodes hopefully you either had a good time with whoever you were watching it with, or you've already moved onto Series 1! I'll be trying this out the best I can with my girlfriend this year, so look out, because I may be back with adjustments later...

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Eras of Carti available on Spotify

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Die Lit leak comp :)

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joji comp i made a few years ago

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Crash Corpse (Short Film)

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27-05-23

📸 rose and mitch-ellaneous