Membership - TekSohpos

Hello,

I want to join The Shire because I think it is the type of server and community for which I've been looking.

I've been playing since 2010 and the first server I spent a lot of time on was amazing. It had hard working players putting lots of thought and planning into their builds and a community excited about creating and all the possibilities in minecraft. But, like most small communities it eventually died out and I've been searching for that feeling ever since. I've played a number of other servers, large ones with tons of ranks, perks, and "woohoo I'm 10 and paid $50 for diamond VIP++" type players. I've tried the challenges of anarchy, extreme terrain, flatcore, and many other types of servers. I want to join this server because it seems to be similar to my first server, just it kept growing instead of dying out.

On ever server I've built and learned something new from others. Early on I tried most of the basic things new players experiment with; houses, underground vaults, sea floor bases, towers, churches, farms, hot air balloons, geometric shapes, and so on. My IRL work is technical so I've gone down the rabbit hole of large redstone circuits, finding timing issues, complicated logic, max efficiency farms, redundant fail proof circuits and so on, but now I prefer a simpler approach and focus on the structures. I've done a lot of work with water, working out complicated build orders
to create items that at first glance appear impossible, such as a water
globe contained by only a loose spiral (this work was after alpha sponges had disappeared and before the new ones). Eventually I learned the value of terrain (oddly enough while playing flatcore). Now I really strive for terrain integration and the beauty of organic shapes, whether it's a few blocks or the plan of a city to fit an area as it exists instead of terraforming a giant square, though my skill in this area is far behind my imagination.

After a few years I wanted to build big but got bored with replicating geometric structures many times over to give impressive size, and lack the skills to hand build large structures by eye, so I've done a lot of work with offline tools to plan large structures then build them in game. At first I just found 3d models on the internet that I would convert to schematics, choose materials, clean up and light in creative, and then build (such as a three-headed Cerberus statue in netherbrick near the spawn of an old anarchy server.) But now I create everything from scratch, for example I  a couple of years ago I built some large sentry type statues with swords (tip in the ground, two hands on hilt): I first created a rigged model using MakeHuman, used other software to create the pose I wanted, converted to schematic and did extensive work to get the body shape and facial features looking better in block form using creative and mcedit, built the swords by eye, found a good low pixel font for the block letter writing on the blades, ran a mcedit filter I wrote to hollow out the models and reduce the blocks required, then built it in survival (48k blocks after hollowing). Many of those steps were repeated dozens of times to get them right. I also use Mathematica code to generate some shapes that are used in the real world but rare in Minecraft, such as 3 or 5 sided symmetries. I like the Shire server aesthetic of buildings and towns, not too modern, but not strict medieval realism with boring one and two story house towns that only have one large building.

So what would I like to do on The Shire? Honestly, I'm not really sure. Maybe start by helping out with small projects on one of the in progress builds, maybe go off by myself and do something small if I get a new idea I want to play with. Basically start small and see what happens. Eventually maybe design statues, monuments, and other structures to fit into towns if the project's lead requests something semi-specific.

I've already made this application way to long, so I'll wrap this up. I'm 30, live in the U.S., and found the server through a random reddit comment. Most of my time, other than Minecraft, is spent doing Physics, teaching Math, or with my family.