vwoops & swoops

these things don't fulfill the inherent social functions they have in person. there is are no facial expressions you're missing if you don't look at the other person's minecraft character. there is no functional difference between standing right next to someone and standing 3-4 blocks away, you're no impeding them in any way

yet people do it anyway. they keep a few block distance between each other. they look at each other when talking, whether it's by going afk with the cursor on the other person or by tracking their idle movement

which gives us these moments where they close that distance or exaggerate the eye contact and suddenly it means something, because it's different! this thing that has no difference in game mechanics, gains meaning through the social conventions. crouching at each other and staring at each other. bumping into the other player. standing right next to a player until slightly nudging them

there is a 1/400 chance of a zombie in minecraft spawning as a baby riding a chicken, even if you are in a biome that does not naturally have chickens. these chickens eventually despawn unless you use a nametag on them, and do not lay eggs to create more chickens (there's a practical reason for this - basically to prevent the game from accidentally making an increasing number of creatures permanently stuck in the world) but they CAN be bred by the player to create ordinary chickens that do lay eggs.

I made a single-biome all coral reef world, found nametags in mineshafts, put names on them, and successfully named and bred two 1/400 chickens. the next official update is apparently going to make nametags craft-able, so I wanted to do this entire horrible task at least once manually just for posterity.