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accomplishment - i made a crafting table within a few minutes (ok, not that advanced for those of you who have alredy built houses and are starting farms, oh my! but an improvement for me, small steps..) I toggle back and forth between the game and the wiki to look up exactly what i can do with the new resources i'm encountering. like tonight i learned that the poppies and dandelions i had can be used for dye and that 3 wooden planks make a bowl which can hold mushroom stew, which i can make with the 'shrooms i also gathered! cool. 

question - what is dye useful for ... ? why can't you deconstruct objects into their constituent materials, like breaking a ladder or bowl back apart to get raw wood? i still can't figure out how to kill/pick up meat from animals .. i hit them several times and they turn red but then just run off ... my inner vegetarian refusing to conform, maybe? 

struggle - i'm getting a little bored and discouraged because i feel like im wandering with my main goal as just finding different resources and figuring out what to do with them. but where are people finding coal and all these other kinds of things?? trying to keep motivated and remind myself things usually get more fun as you advance more ... how does this work for other novice MC players, though (not in a class setting) - do they have a more commual aspect to their development? i'm really inspired by the examples of others in our class working together, so that is hopeful! 

observation - i feel guilty in some ways playing this game. i felt too self conscious to do so while in the library and surrouned by others, so i wanted until i got home to my room. my friends just came in, though, and were in very low spirits about the state of their work, theses, stress, etc .. i share in all those same stressors! but i felt kind of odd when they asked what i was up to and responded that i'm playing MC/video games .. it's tricky to explain and help others to understand, just like i experiened when we were reading hunger games/with this course in general, like we discussed in the mid-course feedback. but then i just read some of the other posts and am reminded of what a cool and cutting edge thing we are doing here, building this community and knowledge base, so now i feel fine again :) every time i play i also always think of the hunger games! can't get it off my mind .. the aspects of physical survival, crafting, ingenuity, nature, building alliances ... it would lend itself so well to a HG lesson of some sort. i also really like the game's potential for exploring ethics and relationship skills, like some others were saying about cooperation, sharing, trading resources, etc. - it feels like an extremely resource if only we/educators (excuse the pun) know how to mine it! :)