The Black Toyota of Gondor

content:

Void Cube Videos

These first 2 videos are Rubik’s cube tutorials, particularly for the Void Cube. It’s identical to the normal Rubik’s cube except it lacks all of its centres. The solution is actually the exact same as solving a normal cube except that it’s 5 times slower because lacking a core makes the resulting design much stiffer.

The only catch is that lacking the centres causes a problem called “parity”, a seemingly random occurrence where you can’t solve the cube through normal means, and you must use a :different algorithm to solve the parity before continuing the normal solution. Parities also occur in 4x4x4 cubes, and probably every cube that has something wacky going on with the centres.

:Video by Noah Richardson

:Video by ElevatorRubiksFan Belcher

:x different algorithm

M U M U M U' M U' M U2 M U' M U' is the algorithm taught in the first video for solving one of the parities that can occur in the void cube. Riveting stuff.

7 Things To Help You Not Get Bored Of Your Minecraft World

:Video by Tizztom

Interestingly, this video has been unlisted! I added it while it was still fully public. I wonder when it got unlisted. What’s even more interesting is that just 2 weeks ago, this channel posted it’s final video, in which the guy is ending this chapter of his life (becoming a father!) and moving his priorities to a more popular channel and a brand new Minecraft channel. The march of time is relentless and inevitable.

1. Terraforming: simple things like digging out a blockage in a river, or creating your own custom biomes and so on. I have a friend who has undertaken a massive terraforming job, clearing out a massive square of land around his base into a flat playing ground.

2. Experimenting with blocks: creating a block pallete and seeing what interesting textures and surfaces you can create. The example given was a wall made out of bone blocks with oak logs acting as supporting pillars.

3. Having multiple builds: is this about Minecraft or personal software projects? One piece of advice mentioned here is “never copy people” - damn, this really is about personal software projects.

4. Playing with friends

5. Increasing your difficulty

6. “Never farm or mine” project: to automate things to a point that you never need to go caving or manually farm things yourself.

7. Trying redstone

10 AWESOME Movie Themes by John Williams

:Video by Sheet Music Boss

It takes a lot of skill to transition from one song to completely different song (tempo, key, style, etc). They were pretty top notch in this video.

⚔️ The Lord of The Rings | Real Scale in 3D ⚔️

:Video by MetaBallStudios

A typical size comparison video starting from the smallest, the One Ring, to the monstrosity that is Barad-dur. A nice watch, but many comments drew intense attention to the car used for visual scale in Minas Tirith:

My favourite comment went along the lines of, “Ahh, Minas Tirith. Famous for its black Toyota by the Tree.”

Panic! At The Disco - Pray For The Wicked - Ultimate Piano Mashup

:Video by TutorialsByHugo

I hadn’t listened to Panic at the Disco in a long while (except for House of Memories and High Hopes, which have been twiddling their thumbs all lonely-like in my Spotify playlists). But watching this video made me realise how many great songs I should be listening to more often. And again, the transitions between songs are impeccable. It goes on for a long time though - 12 minutes.

6 videos in this post

And with me still adding videos to the other end of the queue, I have 1470 videos left to trawl through. That’s 245 posts to go, and if I get through 1 post a week (a hopeless ideal) I’ll be done in 35 weeks, which for context is just under the human gestation period.

I’m making good progress, then.