Actius

the concept of the ender void in minecraft is so interesting to me. now that i'm fully watching hermitcraft and all there's plenty of times where someone zooms in on a ship or wells' enderman farm and just. the static of it, both in like that pattern and like. it just doesn’t move. like at least the sky has shading, and if you tilt your head slightly the gradient moves, and even if its night and cloudy and you can see nothing up there, at least your brain can trick you into thinking it moves, at least there's no point you can see to prove otherwise, but like.
the void is so, so still.

we don't even have a proper reference point- the highest drop on earth, the highest you’ve encountered, still has ground at the bottom, but like
i read about TMA a bit recently, for this challenge thing- The Vast, falling into the sky, the true space in the ocean and between the stars, and when i was younger i was terrified of the world flipping over, of sitting on the roof of my house and being able to dangle my hands over the edge, of how my only choice would be to risk everything with the slowest death i could imagine as the punishment for failure, but like.
at least i could always imagine the sky changing.
little kid fears are irrational, yknow- i never thought about "thats not how gravity works" when i needed to calm myself. it was always about the idea of staring down at the stars and how pretty that might be, how i could go out to the edge of the underside of the roof and feel like flying as the wind blew.
but the void!! there's flight and shulkers and xp, and you'd really be a fool not to go- but also.
you can't really look around too much, not with endermen, so your only options are the neverchanging ground, and eventually you'll take a break, sit down or something, look up, and-

i think the fear started when i read a scene in a book i got from the library. it was supposed to be empowering, laying down in an open field and staring at the sky, and feeling like falling, feeling like flying.
i tried it, and yeah, it felt like flying.
felt like falling, too.
i live in the suburbs- there are no open plains, there is no clear field of vision some random kid could get in the few minutes their attention span still held the idea. i could still see the buildings around me, that they weren't pulling away, that the feeling of gravity’s flip was only an illusion.

chorus fruit is so strange. it's like nothing else in minecraft and i love it. the way it grows, the way it harvests, before bamboo or scaffolding came in. the end islands are so sparse, and everything there makes me tense in survival- bridging above nothing, trying to walk without ever looking the wrong way. best break was always goofing off a bit, clearing an entire island of chorus plants for more food than i could really need.
they're the tallest things on the blank islands, after all. once you clear them, there's not really going to be anything else in the corners of your vision when you decide to glance up.

maybe humans just don't have a good idea of "nothing"? sure, there's the ocean, or space, but the water is usually more about what's just out of sight, and that's not nothing.
space might be, but there's still the stars, and the planets, and everything still moving around you.
time still spinning.

i don't really play single-player minecraft, i guess. it was always so empty- maybe that's why i take prompts like "wings" and "bees" and turn them into the nature of isolation in a world of cubes. my spawns keep tending towards islands as far as my render distance reaches, and the only world i actually keep up has never really seen me leave my base. there's night, and day, but all that really changes is how large the farm is, and i don't want to destroy the terrain to build it up. i have food, and a bed, and what animals i have are enough effort to maintain that i could take care of them for the rest of time, and not really lack something to do. but it could even just be me and food, and that would work. even without food, actually, depending on the mode. just endless wandering on some islands on the ocean, or picking one that's safe enough for survival.
picking an island over the void, one that's safe enough for survival.

is it scarier that the void is so still, so unforgiving, or that we could get used to it?
chorus fruit grows fast enough that if i really wanted, my character could go days without even bothering to harvest, just snapping a stalk every so often. there'd be days they wouldn't even have to stand up, just lay there and eat if need be. if they even really recognized that days were going by, in a place with no indicator of them.
laying there.
staring up.
the void is so static.
do you see things in television static? did you? bored as a kid, the tv not working, imagining up something in the little particles on the screen.
grounded, staring at the wall, imagining whatever you want to pass the time.
staring at the ceiling above your bed, a zoom class in an indeterminate amount of time, using all my mental energy to get up, and eat, and ignore the notification on my laptop.
i was never really good at telling time, but i was always good at spending all my boredom on the static. i didn't even need to turn the tv on, really.
i just needed a blank canvas.
just the void.
is The Vast more about space, or time? the fear of gravity slipping out from under me, out of my control?
or the fear that i'd let it do so forever, if only i could rest?

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capsule or glimmer would be pretty... maybe at some point
only one of her color