Howdy!
It’s been a busy week for me—and thanks to y’all, an incredibly successful one!
Let’s start with a few of those successes!
Successes of the week
Mercy Road, 24-hour charity D&D stream, raised over $8000 for Child’s Play!
Y’all are amazingly generous, and I cannot express enough how much I appreciate your support for this weekend’s charity D&D game benefitting Child’s Play!
Saucefire ran a great game, and I was fortunate to play with an incredibly fun party.
If you missed the game live, please enjoy the video-on-demand here:
Babilar’s Earth Day Parade
Thanks so much to the Babilar crew for hosting the final build contest in our S8 parade float build contest series!
The barges, ships, and sea-life y’all constructed were beautiful!
Congratulations on first place go to MantuaMaker2 (AKA Grace)! Check out her build, and many others in the VOD below:
My Music City Multi-Con footage featured as evidence in video by creator being sued for defamation by Billy Mitchell
Okay, this is a weird one. I’ve seen the documentary King of Kong a few times, but I never expected my work to be mixed up in that world.
King of Kong documentary subject Billy Mitchell is suing YouTube uploader Karl Jobst for defamation, and my video of Mitchell playing Pac-Man at Music City Multi-Con is being used as evidence that Mitchell lies to crowds?!
You can watch the whole thing if you like, but my small contribution starts at 13:55
New Discord Channel #spam-servers-you-operate
We have a lot of folks in our community who create cool spaces to hang out and play games.
If you’re running any sort of server you’d like to welcome other community members to join you on, feel free to post information about how folks can join via our latest Discord channel #spam-servers-you-operate.
Please note that this is intended to be a place to showcase leadership of our community members elsewhere, and not intended as a place to post links to popular Minecraft servers you don’t operate. Thanks!
Windows re-installed on production desktop
Thanks to everyone for your help with test streams this week!
It seems like my Windows re-install was successful at obliterating whatever weird conflict was causing my graphics driver to frequently crash.
I’m planning to build out better hardware redundancy in the back half of the year to ensure future flukes like this don’t derail my production schedule as significantly. Thanks for your patience!
Inquiries
“Will the Q&A portion of the weekly [project management] meetings be on hold completely until the April 24th meeting or will Q&A be simply limited to clarification on Agenda topics in the weekly meeting?” asks Kindalas
Questions pertaining to agenda items will be answered as they arise.
Removing the Q&A segment is intended to avoid scope-creep of project management calls into subjects that would be better addressed on the agendas of other meetings.
Please raise concerns about those subject in the appropriate Discord channel for each. If you aren’t sure which to take them to, Tommy and I will be using #sustainable-growth as a bit of a catch-all until we can refine our process.
Community Meetings
Experimental Server meeting to be re-scheduled due to low attendance
NJ and I will select a new date to be announced in the next newsletter.
Upcoming Meeting Agendas
Thanks to our Community Liaison, ThatTommyBoii for helping compile feedback and suggestions from the community into agendas for upcoming meetings!
Experimental Server – TBD pending rescheduling
- seanard suggests the BlazeandCave advancement pack
- Maahes suggests the Decorative Blocks mod
- Mr. Hardluck suggests the Hats Plus mod
- Maahes suggests the Crazy Features datapack, specifically for the bendy pistons.
Quarterly Meeting – April 24th at 11am US Central
- Meep suggests consideration of content accessibility.
- Captions for screenshots with important information
- Audio descriptions for videos
- Transcriptions of meetings
- netcropolis suggests consideration of how to ensure roles usually covered by volunteers in similar communities are filled properly here
- Mr. Hardluck suggests more community game nights such as UHCs, Mario Kart, Among Us, pinball challenges, etc.
Broad Server Meeting (Aviva Meeting) – April 24th at Noon US Central
- Aviva suggests Joe hear why folks play on the servers and why they take part in the community to help him better understand the community and their goals
- Netcropolis and surfrock suggest hiring and setting clear responsibilities for server operators and administrators
- Em suggests create better feedback mechanisms such as polls for specific items under consideration
- misterlantz and Em suggest clearer communication about differentiation between the servers and pre-launch opportunities for community feedback
- ZedrikCayne suggests clearer warning labels on Joe’s weird art ideas
- Sami suggests better communication around encouraging community members to create their own server
Vanillish Survival – Meeting on May 14th at Noon US Central
- Joe presents state of project
- TBD launch date
- Server operator role
- Server defaults at launch
- Keep inventory: on
- Mob griefing: off
- Sleep percentage: single player sleep
- No community requests or suggestions made yet. Please submit those in #tbd-vanillish-next
Everstorm Server Obituaries
CurtisDoesADig died as he lived: starving, and in between a skeleton and a hard place.
Videos last week
We met up with Scar and Cub for some fun, plus we managed to capture a major server configuration change live on film!
Upcoming Travel & Conventions
Here’s a few events I’ll definitely be attending. I hope some of y’all can make it!
- PlayOnCon: July 7–10, 2022 in Birmingham, AL
- Pinball Expo 2022: October 21–23rd, 2022 in Schaumburg, IL
- Music City Multi-con: October 28–30th, 2022 in Lebanon, TN
So long and thanks!
I feel if I thanked everyone this week, I’d just end up repeating the entire Successes segment of this newsletter again!
Even so, I do want to credit our Community Liaison ThatTommyBoii for help with this newsletter. Thanks, Tommy.
Until next time y’all, this is Joe Hills from Nashville, TN. Keep adventuring!