#me with the brick under my laptop when i played minecraft

[etraytin]

First Lines of Fic Game

First-lines-of-fic meme! Tagged by @beingatoaster!

Rules: share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag ten people. If you have written fewer than ten, don’t be shy and share anyway

Whoo, it's been awhile since I did ten fic, but let me dip into the archives here. Most of what I've been writing lately is Minecraft stuff because it is kind of fun to play in a universe where all the physics are made up and the biology doesn't matter. Here we go! (I have decided to take the concept of "first lines" very liberally and go with sort of "first idea of the fic.")

Number 1: We Could Be Sleeping in the Flowers (Hermitcraft) It could be worse, Grian thought to himself as he grimly scaled the wall of his base to attach another few strands of glow lichen. He could have come down with much worse diseases.

Number 2: This Heart of Mine That's Guilty, Not Remorseful (Hermitcraft) “I’m sorry, Grumbot,” Father whispered, and Grumbot didn’t understand. In the darkness of predawn, his sensors could barely detect the small Player crouching under the screen that made up Grumbot’s “face.” Other Father did most of the maintenance on Grumbot, but he could sense the faint discomfort that was someone meddling with his interior components.

Number 3: After One or Two False Starts, I Believe We've Found Our Stride (Double Life) “So do you and Scott still have something going?” Tango asked one night.

Number 4: Do You Know How To Go To The Heaviside Layer? (Double Life) Pearl should’ve just ignored the noise from the forest. She had so much to do! Her precious doggies were well-fed for now, thanks to the meat rotting in Ren and BigB’s abandoned home, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t still time for hunting!

Number 5: Set You Sailing From My Harbor (Double Life) Grian went to Scar in the first quiet moment he could find that first day, the first moment he was sure that the implacable attention of their audience was turned elsewhere.

Number 6: Put Out All Your Strength of Arm and Heart and Brain (Double Life) Pearl woke to the sound of Tilly barking. That was odd in itself, since Tilly rarely barked, but what could be bothering her inside their own base?

Number 7: I Hope You Blink Before I Do (Double Life) Pearl told herself that being alone wasn’t so bad. It wasn’t as though she needed a partner for a simple survival world anyway. She’d done this dance a thousand times on her own.

Number 8: Brick By Brick and Heart By Heart (Hermitcraft, Third Life) The swamp was peaceful at night, Grian thought. Maybe not all swamps but this one certainly was, just a little wedge of nature left tucked between Larry the Snail and the magical village.

Number 9: Isolated Cases (The West Wing) “Does my face look flushed to you?” Josh demanded.  “Well, you’ve been yelling for the past ten minutes, so...” Donna pointed out.  Josh frowned, leaning closer to his laptop. “No, I’m being serious. Do I look flushed to you? I feel hot.” 

Number 10: Cause Problems on Purpose (The Good Place, Untitled Goose Game) It was another perfect day in the Good Place, seventy degrees and sunny, no clouds, no bugs, and no pollution. Around a thousand years ago Janet had changed the neighborhood algorithm to allow for occasional rainy days and a month here and there of perfect summer, autumn or winter, but for the most part the Good Place was a world of beautiful late spring weather.

There's a real big jump in time there between numbers 8 and 9, because I basically didn't write at all after the start of the pandemic (except that one particular fic) until spring of 2022 when the writing bug bit again. Number 1 is a WIP that has been lingering for months now since my mom had her stroke and life got real weird again for awhile, but I'm planning on finishing it up very soon. There is more writing to be done!

Let's see, I'm gonna tag @smallblueandloud and @tanoraqui and @stars-inthe-sky and anybody else who wants to take a little walk down Fic Memory lane. It's fun!

[bee-tubbo]

Okay I know I talk about mcyts and streamers a lot, but like

Can I take a second to talk about the actual game itself? My experience with it? My nostalgia..

I first found minecraft when I was about, what, 7? 8? It was about a year or so after my mum had moved out of my dad’s house after the divorce, and we were staying in this town house for three years, since one of the owners got a job in Singapore, and them and their spouse were going to live there for a few years.

The details of the house are important to me because I remember very strongly, sitting at the desk against the wall that was across the room from the dining table. I would sit at the desk, using my mum’s old laptop, and my sister would sit across the way, at the dining table, using her laptop.

See, she had been playing minecraft for awhile, I think she found it through one of her friends at school. I think I eventually started playing it because I was curious about it? Or because my sister wanted someone to play with?

So she taught me how the game worked, and I started my first world by myself. I remember it so fondly. It was a creative world(I was terrified of dying in survival, so I just played my first few weeks in creative the whole time), in a spruce biome. I had a large brick house, with very few, one-block windows. The house was way too bulky and tall, and I would never make it as a practical house today, but I loved it in my first world.

My sister built most of it for me, but as a stubborn child, I insisted on building at least this small addition onto the house, and some furnishings.

I just messed around in that house, playing pretend in a little creative world, not actually needing to cook food, or sleep, or make tools or anything. But I did, because I really enjoyed it.

I remember my sister encouraging me to switch it to survival. Promising me that it would be fine, and even if I did die, I wouldn’t loose anything, and I could just respawn back at my house.

I vividly remember this one shot of me standing right outside my house, at the corner, looking up at it, with all the spruce trees surrounding me. One look around, getting comfortable, as my sister had just switched on survival mode. I wandered around my house, still being very cautious and worried. I heard a zombie grown and almost immediately, sprinted back into my big, safe, brick house.

Eventually, I warmed up to survival mode, and started new worlds. I’d build little shacks in the middle of a field, build little bubble domes of glass under water, create long paths and circuits of railroads that lead nowhere, and had no purpose, other than me just experimenting with rails. I had this odd attraction to red stone stuff, but I was too confused to understand how it worked, and too impatient to learn after I wasn’t immediately successful at it. I had all these new fun worlds where I did so much, built random stuff, practiced different skills,

But nothing I ever did will ever stick in my memory quite like that old ugly brick house.

No biome, no matter how pretty, or useful, or optimal for survival it is, will ever have the same value to me as that spruce forest.