Hey all of you wonderful people! Yes, I'm not dead, though the website may make you think so, but I've been really busy. It's been over a full two years since the last update, so it's time for another one. Important thing: I'm now DarkBrave, not longer DarkBrave_ since the Minecraft username became available. Anyway, let's get into this, with the same categories as last time, plus a few extra.

So first off: the website itself. The new title bar is cool, and helps make the site look very clean and cool. Also, there's a cool static in the background with a more dark overlay as well. Also, I've been planning to add a ramblings section for a while now, and I'm glad I finally made it. Expect more random things there like product reviews and memories I have. The first one about the Apple Watch is already up now! Think of it as a public diary, but actually worth reading, and I hope you all enjoy it.

LightningCore is dead. Hate to say it, but it just is dead now. DarkBrave is where I'm going to put that stuff now, since I don't care about doing YouTube the "right" way anymore. I'm leaving the intro video up for my archivist brain, but don't expect the video's promises to hold true. Instead, I made a podcast with some friends about a few months after that last update. It's called We're All Video Game Nerds, and has four episodes. It's about Nintendo games and just general fun games we enjoy. Nothing has been recorded in the past year and two thirds, but we are planning a revival episode every once in a while. Other than that, it's mostly pretty boring.

I've got to split Minecraft up into two parts: my own worlds and FishCraft. For my own worlds, I pretty much discontinued the Redstone Testing World since I don't do much of that anymore. It's still around, just not used very much. I was able to locate my old Free Build World from before the Vault Corruption and have built a lot on it. I haven't actually done much on it, but in 2021 I did daily livestreams on it between Christmas and New Years. On the second day of 2022, I did a collab with Choo and Mio where we messed around. It's by far the best content on my channel so far.

FishCraft had a lot of work done on it. The plan in the old update for FishCraft 2 did hold true in January 2022, except DarkPhoenixx became only involved in occasional events. He just doesn't like the game that much, and that's okay in my books. We've moved away from Realms onto a dedicated Oracle Cloud server for the host, and it's way better. This lets us have a Modded server that was great for quite a while on it. Creative has a lot of cool things, watching WWDC22 and Zack Freedman while building the aquarium, stadium, laboratory, (my favorite build maybe ever on a server) and Redstone computers was a lot of fun. Survival was very cool, and if you want to watch that unfold, just watch my video streams on YouTube. It's too much to say here, you just gotta watch it. You may notice I'm referring to FishCraft in past tense, and that's for a reason. To be honest, it's been mostly dead since 2022, mostly since that's when we banned the troublemaker! It wouldn't be a DarkBrave server without it being blown up! Nothing at all has happened since then, and that has resulted in a lack of activity since then online.

So actually you may notice I said Zack Freedman earlier. Yes, I got a 3D printer in late 2022. It's an Ender 3 V2 Neo and has taken over my life. From Freedman's Gridfinity modular storage that I love to Fort Rocks, there's a lot of fun to be had. There were some issues at first with the firmware, but Octoprint and MRISOC has resolved that. Check out my models on Printables if you want to see what I've been designing with my new Fusion360 skills I've learned. Yes, I now know CAD software, kill me, but at least Fusion 360 is free with a student license!

I got a used 3DS in early 2022 and am absolutely loving it. I've spent so many hours in public transit on it, so I don't want to open the Activity Log to check. Of course I homebrewed it to dump my cartridges and play custom games! Before you say it, piracy is a crime, so I'm not doing that, only dumping games I own a physical or digital copy of. My Switch library has a few new titles, nothing crazy. Oh yeah, I also became addicted to Zelda during this past summer. It's been so much fun just playing Tears of the Kingdom, especially with friends on trips. There's so many hidden details and mechanics I could send days talking about, so I should make a rambling on it.

As for the computer, nothing major to say. Sorry, all I did was get an old M.2 drive from the PlayStation 5 in my computer. Also, I now fully dualboot Arch and Windows 11 now. (Bring Fusion 360 to Linux, Autodesk!) There's honestly not that much to talk about in terms of my computer and technology in the past few years excluding what I've already been talking about during this update. But that's it for my this update, so I think that covers it all for now my friends, so expect another hopefully in the next two years. I bet GTA 6 is going to come out before then.... Do expect more frequent ramblings from now on, (RSS anybody? Smash the feed subscribe button?) and have a great day, and hopefully great life!

Wow, it's been FOREVER since the last "update" on the website, which was on December 22, 2020. I even said they would become bi-weekly, but you can probably tell that never happened. But today, I thought I'd actually start those updates back up, and a new one will come out on every other weekend (hopefully.) On to what I've actually been doing now.

You may have noticed the new look for this website, which also means the "No CSS" splash text is outdated. I've been working a bit over the past month or so to make this website more than text on a white background. There's now a background behind the content, which is actually my logo without the text part, and it also has a gray translucent overlay to make it look nicer. I also added padding around the website to make it a bit nicer, as according to DarkPhoenixx it looked too much like a big wall of text, which is technically still is, but it looks better. I also added some fonts to the site, so yeah. Eventually the "Projects" section will have photos and descriptions, but I'm not too worried about that right now.

I've now created a new channel called LightningCore, my reason for this is so that I can make higher-quality edited videos and even work on others. I even made a special set in Minecraft to film it in that includes a: throne, desk, bookshelves, tv, coffee table with chairs, bedroom with bed and shelves, and a filming room (ironic) with green screen and camera. Pretty cool if you ask me.

On FishCraft, my base got blown up (again,) for crazy reasons that are too complicated to explain here. Luckily DarkPhoenixx agreed to do a rollback of the world, so the drama is basically over. I got a riptide trident and added a rooftop pool to my base, so everyone can have a party and launch ourselves into the air. Due to 1.18 we are planning FishCraft 2 Electric Boogaloo, which will have numerous improvements to prevent conflict, and other really cool features like custom plugins and datapacks. DarkPhoenixx will become the social admin, aka the person who manages the bans/kicks, events, and rules/laws. I will become the technical admin and manage the server its self.

There is one sad thing that happened, the Vault got corrupted so most of my original quality videos and old logos were lost, along with my virtual machines and free software collection, not to mention the sheer amount of unreleased code. I was able to recover my Minecraft and KSP save data from a backup from February, but you know not much happened between now and then. Oh yeah, and I started dualbooting Windows and Linux, originally using Ubuntu, then Kubuntu, then later adding Arch Linux and Fedora, however I'm removing Fedora now. That's really it for the really overdue half a year later post, so I'll see you in two weeks for the next update!