Category: Integrated

Seeds and Butterfly Lifecycles

My mom started a hobby a long time ago of planting the milkweed plant that attracts Monarch butterflies. Every year she purchased more plants and planted them on the path in the backyard. After we had children, I started collecting the seeds of these plants. When I planted these seeds, I completed a loop and now have an endless supply of seeds that attract Monarch butterflies.

In turn, these plants support the procreation of Monarch butterflies and increase the number of these amazing creatures on our planet. This in turn increases the number of pollinating insects on our planet, which I should not have to tell you is a good thing.

Minecraft Prelude

My son loves Minecraft, just like most 8-year-olds in 2024. I had heard about the game but didn’t understand how great it was until I went back to school to study Instructional Design. The power of Minecraft is that no matter what mode you are in, be it creative or survival, the game is based on you creating items from raw materials.

The Threat of Death Creates a Loop

Creative mode is much more open and the options are endless, but as my son has shared with me, survival mode is more challenging and proves you know how to play the game. You can’t die in creative mode, but in survival mode, you can.

When your character dies and is born again in a game you have closed a loop. Without that loop, the game is less interesting and less challenging, and as my son explained playing in creative is less impressive. It is more impressive to see a player do something amazing in survival mode because it displays that they really know how to play the game.

Minecraft as More than a Game

Now, for the uninitiated who do not live around children or who have never entered the Minecraft world, I want to open this up a bit. Yes, Minecraft is a video game that can be played alone or socially online. Yes, you can play in survival mode where you have to gather all of your resources and can be killed by “mobs” (that is what you call enemies in the Minecraft Universe).

Here is the part you might not be aware of. The new generation watches others play Minecraft on YouTube more than they play the game themselves. My 5-year-old and 8-year-old know more about Minecraft than I knew about anything when I was that age. Creators are now using Modified versions of Minecraft to create Television Shows. When my daughter was 4 years old she said, “I like that show (Mikey and JJ), I like watching that more than Disney.” This was completely unprompted and it really caught my attention. I mean, better than Disney? really?

Yes, because it is interactive. The players in this show are doing things that the audience can do because the audience is made up of users! Instead of watching your older sister play the game, you can curate playlists on YouTube of your favorite designer crafting things that interest you.

The Metaverse Has Arrived

Many people think that the Metaverse is a string theory abstraction that only high-level mathematicians believe in. If you are thinking of the Metaverse proposed by comic books and action movies then those people are maybe right, possibly. There is, however, another way to perceive the metaverse, a way where it definitely exits, and that is the worlds that we create in online games. We often reserve statements about the metaverse to augmented reality (think Pokemon Go) or even virtual reality (see image below), but on-screen games can be included as well because they are worlds rendered in a virtual “3D” space.

The network of online worlds created by the Minecraft community alone is nearly unimaginable, and that is just on the Minecraft platform. (I tried looking this up but only found that a block in Minecraft is equivalent to a meter, so if you find this let me know!) As interesting as the metaverse is, it is not a place in the real world, and I do not want my kids to live in a mental space where all that they know and love is based on imaginary objects. When you close a loop in the metaverse it does not connect to a loop in the real world. This imaginary universe of unbridled creation and design is beautiful, and part of me wishes I had something like that instead of the locked-down side scrollers of the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). There is another part of me that is very glad I did not grow up in the age of Meta-connection.

Pre-Metaverse Games

I had Super Mario Bros., Metroid, and Megaman, and these were fun games, and they were hard games. It was their difficulty that made them compelling. When you died you didn’t just lose items and go back to the building, you had to start the game over. There was no save and this made the gaming experience different. Indeed, they were not connected to the internet so the term Metaverse might not apply to them.

What makes Minecraft compelling is not as much of the difficulty but the novelty of creation, the beauty of the design, and the sublime ways we can interact with these worlds almost seamlessly. I want my children to benefit from these mind-enhancing experiences, but I also want them to have a solid grasp of the real world. So, when I had a hands-on project in the back yard I told my son, “This will be like Minecraft, but in the real world.”

One way of looking at what I did here is that I was closing the loop. I connected the design ideas of Minecraft with playing with dirt in the backyard. They are very different in many ways, but one could argue that they are more similar than different. Closing the loop is about integrating all the aspects of our lives and effectively transferring skills from one part of ourselves to another. Digging in real dirt has different challenges than digging in the Minecraft Metaverse. You can’t dig straight down to solid bedrock in several minutes no matter what your shovel is made of. (Not even an enchanted diamond shovel will help you in the real world.)

My first idea was to dig out the area of our backyard in the far back. We have a rough makeshift firepit that I threw together with blocks that I found digging around our various beds and gardens of our 1-acre lot. My plan was originally to dig out a half-circle from the berm right next to the fire pit so that people could effectively sit on all sides of the pit. (I soon realized that this plan would not work because I had the current make-shift pit on an easement and I don’t want a permanent firepit in a space where the sewer company may dig, but that is a story for another post.)

Where to Throw the Extra Dirt?

The original question was where should I place the dirt I have removed? The answer was to place the dirt on another part of the berm that stretches across the back property line of our yard to make a ramp that we could ride bikes on. This idea of taking dirt from one project and placing it in a way that benefits another project was to me “CLOSING THE LOOP”. Instead of placing the dirt where it did not benefit another project I was benefiting two projects with minimal additional work.

Fires of Wood

The fact that this project is for a fire pit offers another example of closing the loop. We purchased the house right next door to my parents, so between the two families, we have roughly 2 acres of land, with a LOT of trees. So there is a limited supply of good hardwood for our indoor fireplaces, but an almost endless supply of wood to burn.

This is why I cobbled together this rough fire pit, to burn off the extra wood. We could pay someone to haul away the wood, but instead, we burn the wood off ourselves. This gives us a nice place to sit in the backyard (and pretend we are camping), but it also gives us free fertilizer for the yard.

The ashes from the fire, also called “pot ash”, are very rich in phosphorus, which is a vital nutrient for the roots of all plants. So keeping the wood, burning it, and laying it in my yard completes that cycle, it closes the loop.