modfest 26 has begun! for those unaware, modfest is a minecraft modding event where you get a couple of weeks to make a mod for a specific version and under a specific theme - this year it's animation, affection, academia (on 26.1.1 fabric).

honestly it couldn't be better timed for me, i more or less have the house to myself for the two weeks of development and my uni break starts in a week.

(well, aside from the fact that i feel like i'm constantly crunching with my uni work but it's fiiine don't worryyyy)

what am i doing for it?

this fest i'm going to be working on two mods with my partner niko, as well as teaching him how to mod minecraft! both of these ideas were under the assumption that the theme would be 'spring' (or similar), but they still fit well enough. they are:

honey pots

a mod that lets you apply potion effects to honey!

more specifically, it will let bees pollinate nether wart - if they do, then any other flowers that are pollinated give the resulting honey bottle various different potion effects (similar to suspicious stew). we're planning to make as much as we can data-driven :3

hooke's grapple

a time-honoured modfest game jam tradition, Classic Concept With An Unnecessary Twist.

this mod will add a grappling hook of sorts, but instead of pulling you all the way to the block you aim it at, it behaves more like a spring with nonzero resting length! the mod is named after hooke's law, if that wasn't obvious.

also will have various enchantments to modify how the hook behaves, (including potentially an oblique outer wilds reference because why not)

when is it?

development has started as of publishing this post, and ends in two weeks (plus one extra for bug fixing). the public showcase server opens on may 23rd at GMT midnight! ...although that information (and more) is on the modfest website, you should check it out if you're interested

i probably won't be starting development until tomorrow (because of the aforementioned uni work) but i'm really looking forward to it :3

that's right, i've finally set up a blog! ...after like a year of saying i want to lmao :bebecyan: in fact, in the projects page of my main site i've had a reference to this blog since uh. six months ago (according to the git blame), ough!

i don't know exactly how much i'm going to be using this blog, but hopefully at least somewhat! it's nice to have a place on the internet where i can just talk about whatever for longer stretches. i'm also not usually one to post many thoughts online, so maybe this is my outlet for that! we'll see :3

some other things i wanted to mention about this blog:

typing style

you may have noticed that i'm typing in all lowercase! this is fairly normal for me, and is a habit that i've had (especially on discord and tumblr) for a Decent While. except for Emphasis, of course.

i'm not yet sure whether i will continue using this typing style for all of my posts. and tbh i'll probably end up switching between this and typing more Normally™ from post to post

how it works

as mentioned on the sidebar, this site is generated by 11ty! all of the posts are written in markdown, and obsidian is my software of choice for doing the writing. it helps that both 11ty and obsidian use relatively similar frontmatter, so i can set things like the title, short description and tags in obsidian and 11ty will read them properly. the blog is (currently) hosted on cloudflare pages - i was considering going with pages.gay like my main site, but decided against it because of not having any control over caching.

also! if you like or comment on the corresponding post on my bluesky (or maybe other platforms too, once i set them up), it'll show up below (if you allow logged out visibility)! i've set this up following this amazing tutorial by my friend Chai, using webmention.io and brid.gy to collect webmentions (because this is a static site).