Month: July 2026

My earliest childhood memory of television is sitting in my bedroom watching an old square tiny black and white tv set watching Saturday morning cartoons. I barely remember all of them but I have fuzzy memories of a few shows I watched on that set. Scooby and Scrappy Doo, Heathcliff, Transformers and a show that I never saw after that day but I had one of the toys, Popples.

I ended up watching a lot of cartoons as a kid just like every other kid did. However it didn’t take long for me to realize I was having more engagement with what was on screen when it was live action stuff. I preferred the long forgoten 3-2-1 Contct, Today’s Special, Captain Kangaroo, Sesame Street, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego and so on.

I did watch cartoons too of course. Every Saturday morning they were on the TV. This was a mixture of that’s just what was on and I had 3 sisters who also had a say in what we watched. My two younger sisters were super into cartoons while my older sister always acted like they were beneath her.

Obviously I got into a few shows. Especially those that had toylines to go with them. I guess somehow, maybe this was their design idk, but I had this mentality that if a cartoon didn’t have toys it didn’t count or wasn’t a real cartoon.

My first attempt at giving childhood cartoons a second chance was when I got heavy into collecting Transformers toys. I picked up a full set of the G1 cartoon on VHS. I grabbed a few random cartoons I rememebered off the file sharing programs of the time and tried to watch a few. I quickly felt a sense of I don’t know weirdness. I don’t know how to explain it but it was a mixture of nostalgia, longing for those days and I think I am too old for this. So I deleted all of them and decided to focus on getting all of the various Transformers cartoons I could.

At that time the only Transformers cartoons were the original, the Beast era, 2001 RID Car Robots and the currently airing on tv at the time Armada. Then I discovered the Japaense anime ones and had to grab them too. This took me down a brief rabbit hole thinking if regular cartoons were beneath me maybe I could give anime a try. Long story short, nope.

Then a couple of years ago, right before the Pandemic started, I got fully back into collecting toys. After a while I started watching toy channels on Youtube and this inevitably took me down the path of cartoons based on those toys. Not long after building a sizable collection of toys from my childhood I stumbled upon a random post on Bluesky. Someone I followed who is heavy into retro video games and toys shared a website that recreated actual old school over the air TV broadcasts. As I sat there flipping channels on a virtual CRT, complete with static transitions as you changed channels, this took me back in time and I loved it.

It only took a couple of days of time travel before I started getting the itch to revisit some of those cartoons based on toys I had as a kid or was starting to collect. This kicked off a heavy round of grabbing every cartoon I knew that had a toyline associated with it. After a while I expanded my animation quest to pick up some adult stuff like Futurama and Daria.

It didn’t take long before the combination of toy collecting and accompanying Youtube channels, the time travel TV simulator, and watching random episodes of those Transformers, GI Joe, TMNT and He Man shows, I began to soften up. I started going from a hardass who felt strongly that cartoons were for kids and not my thing. I had that attitude even when I was a kid.

I haven’t gotten to the point where I can say yay cartoons are hip. I don’t know if I ever will get to that point. Anyways I am here at the point where I have at least softened up enough to expand my exploration of stuff I barely remembered to a few things I knew about I eventually got to where I am now. Fully enjoying watching all of the cartoons from yesteryear. I feel like I can settle into a strong appreciation of these shows. I never had a problem with animation or the work that goes into making a cartoon. I just had this strange sense of these are not for me.

Today I am back in the regular habit of enjoying those old school Saturday morning cartoons. I have even gone back to eating sugary cereals. Yes I know it is a middle aged situation of me trying to revisit and hold onto my youth. Still, at this point in my life this is where I want to be, for now.

I have been playing various different versions of Minecraft since mid-2015. I originally started with PS4 Console Edition, Wii U Nintendo Edition and Windows 10 Edition and Java Edition all at the same time. I then picked up Minecraft Pocket Edition on my iPhone I had at the time before buying it again for Android later. Since that time all console editions, Pocket Edition and Windows 10 Edition have all been folded into the unified Bedrock edition while Java Edition has remained it’s own separate thing this whole time.

It goes without saying I love Minecraft. I have a dedicated Minecraft youtube channel where I make my own Minecraft content. I also watch Minecraft videos, lets plays, tutorials, SMPs and Live Streams constantly. Here is the thing. I do not have a single version of Minecraft that I play nor do I have a single type of Minecraft that I play. I regularly spend countless hours in various creative worlds, survival worlds, one blocks, skyblocks, dessert islands, superflats etc. I have tried so many different ways of playing Minecraft I could never realistically list them all. I was even briefly a member of an online Youtuber SMP series with other Minecrafters.

Similarly to how deeply invested I am into exploring as many variations of Minecraft as I can I ahve also explored the various variations and editions of Dungeons and Dragons over the many decades I have been playing that game as well. I bring that up because there are many similarities in the variations of these two completely unrelated games. But at the end of the day no matter which ruleset you use, D&D is D&D. Minecraft is the same. Each edition, update and mod/addon alters some fundamental aspect of the game but the core base gameplay is always the same.

I want to talk about the different versions of Minecraft I have played with what I like about each one. First I am here to tell you there is no superior version of Minecraft. Java and Bedrock each have their own strengths and weaknesses while both being EQUALLY valid ways to play the worlds greatest video game ever invented.

I will start with the PC editions. Windows 10 came first and was a weird bridge between Pocket Edition and Console Edition. It was kinda depressing when it was supplanted by the Bedrock Edition which, I despised at first. Windows 10 Edition fundamentally played like Pocket Edition but it also had features carried over from Console Edition so it was a really fun way to play Minecraft. It was more similar to Console Edition than Bedrock currently is but it was also more similar to what Bedrock became than Console Edition was which is kinda hard to explain.

The same day I created my first Windows 10 world I also created my first Java edition world. I actually wanted to try Java first because I had already been playing Console Edition for a while and wanted to see how the original game compared. Back then I never, and I mean regardless of edition I NEVER played survival. I exclusively played in Creative Mode for the first 2 YEARS I played the game. It took me a very long time before I even gave survival an honest chance.

At the time, and even today, my initial impression was Java sucked. Why? Not because of the UI or the technical bits of the game, it was still basically Minecraft but as I played exclusively in Creative Mode I hated the floaty block placment while flying and how you can’t have smooth block placement in a row. It made building in creative so painfully frustrating that I deleted my world after a day of trying it. It took years before mods came out that made Java playable in creative for me.

Wii U Nintendo Edition was basically Console Edition but with some Nintendo specific features that made it definitely unique while playing on the Wii U. Granted I was fully invested in the Wii U more than the average gamer, I still preferred to play Minecraft on PS4 or Windows over Wii U cuz while the Nintendo content was neat, the performance rendered the game basically unplayable. It was NOT at all optimized for the poor underpowered Wii U.

The first time I booted up Pocket Edition on my iPhone I barely gave it ten minutes before removing the app from my phone. Due to my insatiable Minecraft addiction I did replace it with the Android version later but by then it had already become Bedrock edition so I don’t really have any substantial experience with legacy pocket edition.

PS4 Console Edition was my preferred method of playing Minecraft for over ten years. In fact that SMP multiplayer content creator server I joined explusively played on Bedrock so I was using my PS4 until it died on me earlier this year. I have since adjusted to regularly playing Java and a frustrating hacked Bedrock cuz I am on Linux now instead of Windows. I will say that if I could recover my PS4 and go back to my favored way of playing I would abandon all PC versions in a heartbeat. PS4 is my preffered version of the game. I did eventually lose Legacy Console edition cuz my disc broke and I couldn’t wait to scrounge a used copy of ebay so snagged the digital Bedrock version right away so I have spent more time playing Ps4 Bedrock than any other version. To me, that IS Minecraft.

When did I go from Creative only to trying Survival? It was about 2 years after I bought the game originally. I gave it a try a couple of times but I died way too often and had no idea how to play so gave up. I had to watch some How to Play Minecraft Youtube videos just to figure out the absolute basics. Even then I resolved to play survival mode on Peaceful difficulty for several months before I even slowly started giving Easy  a try. today I can play long term survival worlds on Hard and I could survive for a Minecraft week in Hard Core. I have gotten much better at the game but even then I still usually play with Keep Inventory on just because I hate dying in the game and I die a LOT in the damn game.

Even before I tried Skyblock Survival I was playing that in Creative Mode first too. I just love building things in Minecraft and the fun for me is altering the base world to see how creative I can get not with limited resources but with the lack of terrain getting in the way. This is why I started getting really into playing Survival mode in Superflat worlds because I spent so much time in Creative mode in Superflat that it just became what I think of when I think Minecraft.

What I have come to enjoy the most with Minecraft over the years is exactly how flexible the game truly is. It’s just one of those rare perfect games that can literally be just about anything you want it to be. Even all these years I’ve gotten better at survival mode, exploring different ways to play and building fun things in Creative Mode, there’s so much to the game I’ve never even explored. A big part of Minecraft that I rarely do anything with is the redstone. That alone makes anything one wants to do in the game entirely possible.