#btw I do draw etho a lot but like some times it's not the most interesting etho I drew so I don't post him | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mossfeathers · 10 months

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uhh welcome to my blog

🪴 Hey! I'm Moss, artist of some sort and occasional writer! My blog's kind of a mess right now and I don't really feel like making it look neat so we stay messy. Any pronouns (he/she/they + neos maybe) and a minor (-18)!

🪴 WarriorHeroic on AO3 and mossfeathers on twitter (inactive) + youtube

🪴I use a few original duo names: Snowball = Bigb + Etho, Sweethearts = Grian + Bigb, Snowhearts = Bigb + Etho + Grian (idea by snowhearts anon)

🍉 STAND WITH PALESTINE

🪴 Mostly MCYT (hermitcraft, empires, life series, itty bit of sdmp NO DTEAM), but I also like TMA(GP), Be More Chill, The Crane Wives, and Mob Psycho 100!!

🪴 lots of characters are girls to me. ask me about my transfem headcanons <3

🪴 Doodle or writing requests are open!! Since i'm very inconsistent with my motivation they can take a while (up to a few months) but I will do them at some point. If you request a ship I won't do explicit /r but I'll draw them together.

🪴If we're mutuals (doesn't matter how much we've talked) shoot me a DM for my discord!!

🪴 DNI/DNF (do not interact/do not follow) homophobe, transphobe, racist, nazis, anti-semite, generally discriminatory, pro-Israel, pro/irlshippers, zoophile, MAPS, if you support or tolerate any of these things or things of a similar manner, wilbur soot/dteam defenders ❤️, general dni criteria (i think that includes the stuff i listed though)

🪴 I am not comfortable with NSFW jokes made about me under any circumstance! If we are talking in DMs, I am not comfortable with NSFW jokes/comments about characters either. Even if it is in a joking manner.

🪴 Feel free to use my art for pfps, edits, and other projects with credit (in bio or pinned post if for pfp/banner, either ask me for a watermarked version or just put my @ on the image for any other things)

🪴 (MCYT) Most shipping reblogs and all shipping posts should be tagged w the correct mcyt tag (hermtshipping or trafficshipping), I ship stuff if I think it's funny [NEVER REAL LIFE CREATORS, ONLY CHARACTERS]

🪴 My tags: '#moss draws art' for my art, '#moss writing' for my writing, '#moss ask answers' for ask answers, '#moss saves stuff' for posts I want to save, 'moss chitchat' for my textposts, "🪼 anon" for asks from 🪼 anon, 'snowhearts anon' for asks from snowheart anon (introduced idea of snowhearts to me), '#sweethearts siren au' for all my posts about my life series/hc siren au, '#moss makes cranes' for my original Crane Lives drawings (credit to cherrifire for the original idea!!!)

follow @jalo-parker btw hes so talented and fun literally one of the best people i know plus im using his art as my banner rn. simply the most awesome of our time.

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acerace · 3 years

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...you have opened my eyes to a vast universe of VintageBeef lore that I was unaware of. I knew about the New Hermit Order, of course, and the UHC invention, and I've watched a few of his CTM things but -- I will take all the info and lore you feel like giving out because Beef is amazing and my knowledge is so small.

Vintagebeef my beloved <3

So the thing is, right, until about 2016 I only watched two (2) youtubers- Vintagebeef for Minecraft and aDrive for Pokemon (and funnily enough both of them are named Dan irl). So I've watched most of Beef's videos over the years and have a general knowledge of most of his stuff, except because it's been like a decade I don't remember where most of the lore comes from XD

The thing with him is that he doesn't do Lore tm the way other mcyters often do lore- he doesn't have an extensive RP series to draw from like Grian, doesn't have a solo world with steadily increasing amounts of lore like Etho or Zisteau, and while he's played on SMPs and been involved in storylines before it's not really the focus of his episodes unlike with Evo or Legacy or Empires

So where does that leave us?

IRL, Beef always has multiple series running at the same time. Often he's playing on an smp while doing a singleplayer, often modded, series as well as a CTM or modpack with a group of friends. For example, right now he's playing on Hermitcraft, doing weekly Pixelmon and Building a Zoo episodes, and a CTM map with Slip. And to me, this translates to one thing: Beef is an adventurer. He travels frequently- he explores a world and when he decides he's done, he leaves for the next one. That's the basis of my personal interpretation of his series and his character for my writing.

Ok so reading this back, this got extremely long and didn't explain much in the way of lore, somehow? If anyone has any additions to add please do so, I am very definitely leaving out a lot and would love to see what other lore people remember and are using for Beef! I didn’t include the Hermitcraft stuff since my memory of season 4 is blurry (his base was themed after the Martian, that much I know, and he and Iskall were buddies :D) and most of the s5 NHO lore is best watched from Bdub’s perspective from what I remember, and the only s6 stuff is a single line in Hermitgang and then the Area 77 arc with its possibility of an NHO reunion which we did not get rip. And s7 of course had the cloning machine and also the Podzol Party as the main lore. So all the original rambling is still below the cut though it is very long, and I'm gonna bullet point the main stuff here instead:

Actual canonical things:

Invented UHC and was the only survivor of the first ever uhc (Mindcrack UHC s1)

Married to an ender dragon (one of the UHCs I think), later father to a different dragon (Mindcrack season 3? I think?)

Might not have legs if you choose to take that joke as canon (Mindcrack s2)

Was a wizard (RAD)

is a zookeeper (Building a Zoo)

Had a wife and kids (Sims in Minecraft)

Part of the Trial of the B Team court case (Mindcrack)

NHO founder, founder of the Podzol Party (Hermitcraft)

Created a cloning machine that sort of works (Hermitcraft)

Played the Forest which is I believe the first time he and Keralis played together (look up the trigger warnings for this one, it's a horror game)

Was the creator/owner of Sourceblock SMP (featuring some familiar faces if you know Legacy, Empires, or MCC) and there is literal magic from a mysterious sourceblock of water that teleports people and summons mobs and probably more stuff that I haven't seen yet since I'm still watching it myself

Things you can infer:

Good with animals (Life in the Woods, Pixelmon, Ark)

Is a car nerd (irl and all of the car games he's played)

Is a highly experienced adventurer who has traveled through dozens of worlds both vanilla and modded, across multiple dimensions (Twilight Forest, the Aether, the Betweenlands, Limbo), completed dozens of monuments, fought in blood sports, survived apocalypse after apocalypse, tamed dinosaurs, and played a lot of prop hunt and golf with your friends

If you're looking for what to watch for lore purposes, I'd say the Mindcrack UHCs and Team Canada's RAD series are pretty good, definitely Sourceblock and HC s5, plus the Diversity CTM maps and Ruins of the Mindcrackers maybe? And Mindcrack Prank Wars for the chaos and the origin of Team Canada. And if you can handle horror than the Forest is fun and if you don't do horror you can watch the Pojkband play golf or prop hunt they're hilarious I love them sm I want a Pojkband reunion So Bad

Beef's first series was a singleplayer series in beta 1.4_01 though he had played the game extensively before that, and was a big fan of Guude, having watched his own Minecraft videos. The series was functionally a hardcore one where if he died Beef would delete the world and start again! I haven't actually Watched this series so idk if he died or how often lmao. When Guude made Mindcrack, which was btw one of the very first Minecraft SMPs, he also hosted a competition for people to join, and Beef submitted a video (which is still viewable on his channel I believe!) and won, and was added to Mindcrack in season 2 :D (fun fact, Guude said that even if Beef hadn’t won he would have added him anyway)

Two running jokes emerged from Mindcrack- pulling a Vintagebeef and Beef doesn't have legs. The first is a reference to Beef dying of fall damage (I believe the exact instance was him trying to jump into his swimming pool and failing spectacularly) and after the incident, every time someone died of fall damage they were pulling a Vintagebeef. The second joke comes from Guude, who joked that the reason Beef wasn't going to a convention was because he didn't have legs, and then he pranked Beef's base by building a giant pair of legs at the entrance to his castle so you had to walk between them to get into the base. This joke has long since died and both Beef and Guude feel pretty bad about it iirc because there were people who genuinely thought Beef was disabled and were emailing him supportive messages and stuff oops. So if you go looking on the Salad or find old Mindcrack fics, you might see references to Beef having prosthetic legs!

Mindcrack also brought about the creation of several Player groups- Team Nancy Drew, Team Canada, and GOB to name a few relevant to Beef. Team Nancy Drew consists of Beef, Pauseunpause, Guude, and Baj, who formed to investigate a prank on one of the members but I forget who. They're named Nancy Drew after the detective! Team Canada also formed in retaliation to pranks, with it consisting of Beef, Etho, and Pause, the three Canadian members on the server (not including Adlington who moved to Canada but never joined the group). There was also a Team America who pranked them with American flags everywhere. GOB is Guude, OMGChad, and Beef, who played stuff like the Ragecraft, Pantheon, and Monstrosity ctms together but that's way down the line lol

Team Nancy Drew is also notable for inventing UHC. It was Beef's brainchild but it was the four of them who first played it! The first UHC had the four of them working to kill the dragon with no natural regen, with everyone dying but Beef, who "won" the UHC. The second uhc was still dragon focused and iirc is where Beef married the dragon? Memories are hazy but they do kill the dragon in this one I think. UHC was then revamped as a pvp event and became a regular Mindcrack game every few months, featuring most of the Mindcrackers and several special guests, including Dinnerbone, who as we know Thanos-snapped Doc's arm out of existence as a result of Doc killing him in one of them

In one of the seasons of Mindcrack, Beef invited swedish Mindcracker and good friend Anderzel to go caving with him and invented ABBA Rules caving, where the winner takes it all. ABBA Rules is a game where each ore (and also dungeon loot like nametags) is assigned a point value and the person with the most points at the end wins and gets to keep all the stuff collected from the game.

In Mindcrack season 3?, Beef punched the ender dragon in an... awkward area, so when the dragon died and left the egg behind, Guude said Beef was the father of the egg XD I don't remember if I watched s3 so I have no idea if anything Happened with this concept but *history of the world voice* you could make lore out of this!

So Team Canada has played a Lot of CTM maps (which fun fact were pretty much invented by another Mindcrack member, Vechs, with his Super Hostile series! Super Hostile has a bunch of things called "Zistonian", which are references to another Mindcrack member Zisteau, who has a very wild singleplayer series with even wilder lore but I digress). In Ruins of the Mindcrackers, they had a running joke that Beef was Etho and Pause's mom, which is a joke we can leave in the past actually /lh. They also played all the Diversity maps, Sky Factory, Terra Restore, Uncharted Territory uhhh and a couple more ctms and adventure maps! Each map kinda has its own story so in Diversity 3 for example they were trapped in a simulation? I think? Team Canada also recently played the Roguelike Adventures and Dungeons modpack, aka RAD, in which Beef was a wizard with a magic staff that could do anything from summon lightning to control hostile mobs.

Sourceblock SMP is a vanilla survival 1.14 series that ran for one season and the series starts with each of the Players being drawn to a strange sparkling water source that, once they touch it, brings them to the Sourceblock world. It also summons a giant zombie at one point. There's probably more lore for this series but like I said I haven't watched it all the way through yet

He has a Patreon server called VintageCraft and has done a series or two on there as well, and played a few UHCs with them, so lore that how you will!

Beef also played a few popular mods, notably Pixelmon, Life in the Woods, and Feed the Beast, with LitW being singleplayer and the other multiplayer. He's also recently played the Zoo and Wild Animals mod a lot. He did a short series with the Minecraft Comes Alive mod where he married one of the villagers and had two children, so that's canon now :D he’s played a Lot of Pixelmon starting when the mod first came out iirc (he chose Turtwig in his first series and built a Grass gym, then made a Normal gym in another series in uhh 2016) and he still plays to this day. Quite a few Hermits played on his Pixelmon servers with him, like Wels, Etho, Iskall, Stress, Slip, Zueljin, and also Guude and Phedran (a Mindcrack adjacent player and creator of the LitW modpack) and a few Mindcrackers on the older servers

Mindcrack and friends played a lot of other games too- 7 Days to Die, Ark Survival Evolved, Unturned, to name a few, so you can pull a lot of lore out of these as well. Speaking of friends and non-Minecraft games, Beef teamed up with Pause, Keralis, and Slip (a former Hermit) to play the horror game the Forest, which saw them stuck on an island trying to survive against terrifying mutated human... things. They played it a few times as the game updated but as afaik it's the first time Beef played with Keralis and possibly Slip and since the game starts with the Player's airplane crashing, that could totally be how Beef first met them in-universe

I... think? that’s everything I mentioned in the tags? There is probably way more stuff I’ve forgotten that stems from inside jokes and things that happen within each series, but I hope that was a) helpful and b) at least somewhat comprehensible lmao

#hermitcraft #mindcrack #vintagebeef #mcyt #long post #asks #redwinterrises #that was so many words #kudos to anyone who reads the whole thing lmao

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peterdiamandis · 7 years

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Success = Experimentation

Today’s most successful companies, the ones that are “crushing it,” started as a series of crazy ideas, followed by experiments to test just how viable those ideas might be.

Experimentation is a crucial mechanism for driving breakthroughs in any organization.

If you want to create a successful, hyper-growth company, you've got to focus on empowering your teams to rapidly experiment.

Over the years I have had the pleasure of sitting down with wizards of experimentation, including Jeff Holden, Uber’s Chief Product Officer; Astro Teller, CEO of X; and Jake Knapp, Design Partner at Google Ventures.

Through my conversations I have compiled a suite of best practices for running great experiments and building a culture of experimentation at your company.

In this blog we will discuss:

Building a culture of experimentation

Running effective experiments

Google Ventures design sprints

Building a Culture of Experimentation

The only constant is change, and the rate of change is increasing.

Ultimately, standing still equals death, and the only way to succeed is to be constantly experimenting and innovating (think of it as Darwinian evolution in hyperspeed).

Hyper-growth and experimentation are very closely linked.

Jeff Bezos likes to say, "Our success at Amazon is a function of how many experiments we do per year, per month, per week, per day…"

Jeff Holden, who has built experimental engines at Amazon, Groupon, and Uber, agrees: "The philosophy is you have to build your company to be a big experimental engine and it has to start right at the beginning."

It's not easy to just "retrofit" your company with that engine later – it's a cultural shift. You have to be in the mindset of constantly testing crazy ideas, new business models, new products and new processes.

At Amazon, in the early days, they created a standard experimental platform that was available to almost everyone – meaning, if somebody wanted to test a new button or new feature on the website, they could.

The problem was that many of these experiments were useless.

Jeff Holden continues, "They had no chance of yielding any value. There wasn't any point to them. We were just kind of curious. We were just running a lot of experiments -- which have a cost, by the way -- and were taking up experimental slots [so others couldn't experiment], and things started colliding with each other."

Their solution was to create an 'Experiments Group' – if you wanted to do an experiment, you had to run it through this group.

The first question the group would ask was: What's your hypothesis?

The second question: What's the value proposition to our company?

"If you couldn't articulate your hypothesis crisply, or your hypothesis didn't matter for Amazon or Uber or Groupon, then they must not do that experiment. Oftentimes you'll send folks back to the drawing board or ask them to recast the experiment. The company learned, and we got much better."

Finally, "You have to be able to interpret the experimental results really well. It's statistics. Know the difference between statistically significant and insignificant results."

Uber, for example, runs thousands of experiments per month to test different features. They A/B test key features that are core to the business and choose the one that performs best.

"Build a team inside your organization that has an experimental ethos, and make sure that the experiment, value proposition, and hypothesis are really thought through before you invest the time and energy to actually do them."

In general, only hire people who are familiar with the experimentation/data-driven mindset and set the stage for experimentation in the beginning.

How to Launch Good Experiments

Astro Teller, Chief of Moonshots, explains that the following three principles describe a good experiment:

Principle 1: Any experiment where you already know the outcome is a BAD experiment.

Principle 2: Any experiment when the outcome will not change what you are doing is also a BAD experiment.

Principle 3: Everything else (especially where the input and output are quantifiable) is a GOOD experiment.

Seems simple enough, right?

You must ask the kind of questions to which you don't currently know the answer, but if you did, you’d change the way you operate.

If you already know the answer, or if you are testing an insignificant detail that doesn’t matter, you’ll just be wasting time and money.

To get good questions/experiments, you must create a culture that incentivizes asking good questions and designing good experiments.

Astro describes a very unique approach to doing just this:

“At X, we set up a ‘Get Weirder Award.’ The whole point of the Get Weirder Award was to focus the team on experiments and to drive home they needed to think in terms of experiments.”

Teams would be challenged to ask “weird” questions – to put forth crazy ideas around framing problems differently and to design experiments that really push the limits.

Critically, Astro only gives out the Get Weirder Award after the experiments are run.

“If you give out the award after they’ve run the experiment, independent of the results, then people start to really feel that you don't actually care about the outcome. You care about the quality of the question. So every two weeks, we would give out an award for the best experiment.”

Doing so constantly (and viscerally) reinforced the behavior of asking good questions – accordingly, at X, they’ve built a culture around celebrating the questions themselves.

Google Ventures: Design Sprint

A Sprint, invented by my friends Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky of Google Ventures, is a fantastic tool for rapid experimentation in your company.

I have leveraged the Sprint process across all of my companies.

Participating in a Sprint orients the entire team and aims their efforts at hitting clearly defined goals.

Sprints are useful starting points when kicking off a new feature, workflow, product, business or solving problems with an existing product.

Here are the five phases of a Sprint, typically done sequentially over the course of five days, that you can try with you team:

Day 1: Understand: Develop a common understanding of the working context, including the problem, the business, the customer, the value proposition and how success will be determined. By the end of this phase, you should also aim to identify some of your biggest risks and start to make plans to mitigate them. Common understanding will empower everyone’s decisionmaking and contributions to the project. Understanding your risks enables you to stay risk-averse and avoid investing time and money on things that rely on unknowns or assumptions.

Day 2: Diverge: Generate insights and potential solutions to your customer’s problems. Explore as many ways of solving the problems as possible, regardless of how realistic, feasible, or viable they may or may not be. The opportunity this phase generates enables you to evaluate and rationally eliminate options and identify potentially viable solutions to move forward with. This phase is also crucial to innovation and marketplace differentiation.

Day 3: Converge: Take all of the possibilities exposed during phases 1 and 2, eliminate the wild and currently unfeasible ideas and hone in on the ideas you feel best about. These ideas will guide the implementation of a prototype in phase 4 that will be tested with existing or potential customers. Not every idea is actionable or feasible, and only some will fit the situation and problem context. Exploring many alternative solutions helps provide confidence that you are heading in the right direction.

Day 4: Prototype: Build a prototype that can be tested with existing or potential customers. Design the prototype to learn about specific unknowns and assumptions. Determine its medium by time constraints and learning goals. Paper, Keynote, and simple HTML/CSS are all good prototyping tools for software products and 3D printing for hardware. The prototype storyboard and the first three phases of the Sprint should make prototype-building fairly straightforward. There shouldn’t be much uncertainty around what must be done. A prototype is a very low-cost way of gaining valuable insights about what the product needs to be. Once you know what works and what doesn’t, you can confidently invest time and money on more permanent implementation.

Day 5: Test & Learn: Test the prototype with existing or potential customers. It is important to test with existing or potential customers, because they are the ones for whom you want your product to work and be valuable. Their experiences with the problem and knowledge of the context have influence on their interaction with your product that non-customers won’t have. Your customers will show you the product they need. Testing your ideas helps you learn more about things you previously knew little about and gives you a much clearer understanding of which directions you should move towards next. It can also help you course-correct and avoid building the wrong product.

Sprints offer a path to solve big problems, test new ideas, and accelerate the decisionmaking process. BTW, you can learn a lot more about the Sprint Process here: http://www.gv.com/sprint/.

Happy experimenting!

Interested in Joining Me? (two options)...

A360 Executive Mastermind: This is the sort of conversation I explore at my Executive Mastermind group called Abundance 360.

The program is highly selective, for 360 abundance- and exponentially minded CEOs (running $10M to $10B companies).

If you’d like to be considered, apply here. Share this with your friends, especially if they are interested in any of the areas outlined above.

A360 Digital Mastermind: I’ve also created a Digital/Online Community of bold, abundance-minded entrepreneurs called Abundance 360 Digital (A360D).

A360D is my ‘onramp’ for exponential entrepreneurs – those who want to get involved and play at a higher level. Click Here to Learn More.

P.S. Every week I send out a "Tech Blog" like this one. If you want to sign up, go to Diamandis.com and sign up for this and Abundance Insider.

P.P.S. My dear friend Dan Sullivan and I have a podcast called Exponential Wisdom. Our conversations focus on the exponential technologies creating abundance, the human-technology collaboration, and entrepreneurship. Head here to listen and subscribe: a360.com/podcast

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