I promise, it’s a better one this time! I review a movie, name drop more Ubyssey people than normal, and make an RSS feed (because I’m so cool and amazing, right Sam Low???? My partner said that I’m “a loser who only Sam Low respects”. I need the validation).

A Minecraft Movie released this Friday

I didn’t go to see it, but I think it’d be fun to review it anyways — kinda like I’m writing a Reddit comment. I also haven’t read any reviews of it, but I did watch the trailer a while ago, and I am basing all of my takes off that. So I’m going to be wrong and off based and have cringe takes about a bunch of stuff. Let’s get into it.

Like many my age, Minecraft was a major part of my youth. In second grade, I joined an anti-Minecraft clique, without actually knowing what Minecraft was. Embarrassing, but I’m glad I got that out on something relatively harmless. Not long after, my summer days were spent piled onto a friend’s bed: controllers in hand and the TV split into three perspectives of our shared Minecraft world. My first “figure out how to make technology work” was getting a parkour map — which would go on to provide months of entertainment — from a suspicious website onto our Xbox 360 (surprisingly, without downloading any viruses!). The first game I designed was an attempt from my brother and I to simulate Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare in Minecraft. During the pandemic, Minecraft was the only space me and my friends shared when we booted up our server on Wednesday nights.

Yet, I never found myself excited for A Minecraft Movie. Granted, I suspect I am not the target audience for this movie, but in the many years since its announcement, I had grown in curiosity. Could they adapt the feeling of playing Minecraft with my friends and my brother onto this new medium?

Now, certainly no adaptation can be perfectly adherent to its source material (nor is being adherent a virtue) but there ought to be some sense of similarity deeper than the aesthetics.

A Minecraft Movie follows [CHARACTER 1] ([ACTOR 1]), [CHARACTER 2]([ACTOR 2]), [CHARACTER 3] ([ACTOR 3]), and [CHARACTER 4] ([AQUAMAN]) as they enter The Overworld — a familiar location for Minecraft players. The four struggle to understand the logic of this new world they are now trapped in before they encounter Steve (Jack Black). Steve is shares his expertise of The Overworld with the newcomers showing them familiar Minecraft mechanics such as a redstone chicken farm to using a water bucket to survive a high fall. Before the newcomers can fully learn how to interact with The Overworld, the four of them, Steve, and the village they are in is attacked by a Piglin Warband. They must each discover their unique brand of Minecraft creativity to defeat the endless forces that besiege them and discover a path back to their world

Jack Black’s performance as Steve was… energetic if nothing else. Most of his lines caused me to think of the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme, serving little purpose other than to remind the audience that, yes, this is A Minecraft Movie. Past that, I found myself unable to connect to his character beyond the high energy and jokes.

I found [CHARACTER 4] — as played by [AQUAMAN] — to be a perplexing addition. I understand the business desire not to place the weight of the supporting cast on relatively untested actors, but I feel as though were more emphasis placed on [CHARACTER 1], [CHARACTER 2], and [CHARACTER 3], the film would have been more resonant with its mostly-young audience. Plus, none of their individual stories had much time to shine given the four of them had to share time between themselves and star-of-the-show Jack Black.

Stylistically, A Minecraft Movie was strange. The main cast was live action, but the world and supporting cast (the pigeons, villagers, random sheep) were all rendered in this uncanny 3D animation. They kept the same blocky aesthetic of Minecraft, but with much more detailed textures and life-like animations. Unsettling and uncanny would be accurate descriptors for this strange composite. These animated creatures didn’t immerse me in The Overworld so much as distract me with how unnatural they were. In a fully animated movie, they would have been great, but the contrast with real humans left me uncomfortable.

A Minecraft Movie also seems to have overcorrected on the trend of near-unwatchably dark films with an overwhelmingly vibrant palate. The saturation has been cranked to 11 — emphasizing its cartoonish stylings, but causing visual fatigue, especially during any high-movement scenes.

Ultimately, I thought the film was… alright. The story itself was nothing out of the ordinary (have piglins not been the villains in three Minecraft properties so far?). Faced with the immense the challenge of adapting an open, sandbox game, I found that A Minecraft Movie failed to capture the essence of my experience with Minecraft. The film tried to highlight the importance of everyone’s individual form of creativity. Perhaps for some, watching [CHARACTER 1] finally break free of the expectation of their family to build a [BUILD] provided not just catharsis but a new way to value their own creativity. But for me, none of this was truly resonant.

If you have spent money on MineCoins, collect Minecraft plushies, or regularly play Minecraft, I suspect you will adore this movie. If for no other reason than the deluge of references, anyone with memories of Minecraft will find some good enjoyment from A Minecraft Movie — especially if seen as a group (Presidents’ group chat, you up?). A Minecraft Movie is funny, sure, but it lacks a heart (unlike Assorted Heroes: Road Trip). To me, it reads more as a corporation’s milking of their Intellectual Property for all it is worth than an artistic statement.

Other News

Oops the AMS Council Agenda RSS Feed is out

At risk of making this the permanent home of the RSS feed, I am temporarily hosting the RSS Feed at https://qsolace.github.io/ams-council-rss/feeds/agenda-feed.rss. But I’ll definitely get it a proper home at some point soon definitely 100%.

Anyways, the feed is VERY fragile since I’m just out here scraping the AMS website and trying to parse the agenda off the PDF. Which… you know. PDFs absolutely suck. And if the AMS changes how they release minutes at al (including something as small as going from an em dash to a double hyphen), things will start to get messed up :). So yay. RILEY DON’T CHANGE UP THE WEBSITE AND FUCK ME OKAY??????? (Unless you change it to make it easier to access. Like maybe HTML agenda and minutes in addition to PDF ones? For me 🥺👉👈)

So far, it’s just the Agenda RSS feed for now. A Minutes RSS feels almost pointless since it only gets updated when the minutes are like 7 months old which is super cool and a common AMS transparency W (you should like… not do that, Riley). But the Sheldon Summaries are consistent, so those may get RSSed.

I’d really like to make all the council and committee agendas, documents, and minutes searchable in one webpage, since it’s kind of a pain trying to spend 5 hours going through all of them individually because you are trying to verify an L take you remember someone having so you can include a reference to it in your joke candidate website but then you can’t find it so you just wasted 5 hours of your evening. Hypothetically. I’m sure we’ve all experienced that. Or if you tell a Ubyssey editor that you’re definitely in the meeting minutes for all the AMS Council meetings in the past year and you both spend Too Long trying to fact check that before you realize that once you stopped getting the Luxury Joanne Experience of her handing the sign in sheet directly to you, you stopped signing the guest sheet since you always got to AMS Council before literally anyone else. Also a common experience. I assume.

Anyways: Agenda Feed! Put it in your RSS Readers!

Heyyyy sammmmmm….

I’m glad someone is excited about my little AMS Council Agenda RSS feed, though I suspect it’s just you and me, bestie.

24 hours ago, I made the repository public with a cute little note in case Sam Low stumbled onto it

Lo and behold, Sam Low saw it in less time than it took me to vote in the municipal by-elections (I made the repo public at 10:03 pm, as I ought to).

(also sam please don’t judge me for my fucked up “tech stack” (very generous term) of typescript and GitHub Actions. I’m ashamed of it, okay, and honestly, I can’t justify my sins)

((Also also, Sam if you’re free this Thursday afternoon/evening and want to play a TTRPG, let me know by any of the usual channels. I’m being serious :D. Will probably be playing Draw Steel — which still a fighting monsters fantasy game like D&D — but I haven’t quite decided yet. Let me know, kay? I’ll follow up if you express interest :D))

I Really Like My Name

That’s it. I just makes me happy :). Not to toot my own horn, but I did a damn good job coming up with it. Worth the 18 months.

Poor Ian Got Absolutely Eviscerated

No More Ubussy Aisha 😭

You’ve been a staple of council for basically the entire 26 months I’ve been going, it’s not gonna be the same without you camping out on the opposite side of the MKF.

It’s been a good two years of waiting for you to get AMS food, spending hours locked out outside the Michael Kingsmill Forum being too intimidated to talk to y’all (Ubyssey is too cool and kissable for my anxiety lmao), and watching you talk your way past security guards to get into council because they didn’t respect your press passes 🫠. Council is gonna hit different. Thanks for all the good work you’ve done for this campus over the past few years :). I’m glad you’re free of AMS bullshit.

Also if Iman and Spencer are completely gone too I’m gonna be devastated. No one else has been in this shit long enough to remember the David Suzuki Pit Night for Sustainability (it turns out, most of my Barry “Bee” Buzzword jokes were just for me, my partner, Anabella, Harry, and y’all).

Also also bye Viyan too but you haven’t been a part of my AMS Council experience for as long :).

From the Web

• Girls’ Lower Mainland. Web team one million percent cooked. I hate it but it’s also absolutely amazing. Also Elena your gif is absolutely iconic :).

• The Ubyssey’s explainer to the Vancouver City Hall by-election (The Ubyssey). Maya writes about the by-election candidates. Real useful for those of you still stuck in line! (I was in line for like 3 hours. I saw Emilīja of The Ubyssey pass me at hour 1 lmao)

• New York Declares War on Traffic (Climate Town on YouTube and Nebula). Not to be a car-hating commie leftie, but places without two-ton, fume-spewing metal boxes are generally more pleasant for people not in two-ton, fume-spewing metal boxes to be around.

• These Ugly Big Box Stores are Literally Bankrupting Cities (Not Just Bikes on YouTube and Nebula). Not to be a car-hating, corporation-hating commie leftie, but if you don’t have a car, a store surrounded by a mass of parking spaces is low key not that pleasant.

• Nebula Sans (Nebula). I honestly think that it’s just kinda funny that a streaming service made a documentary about their new typeface. They also have a website to introduce the typeface!

• AMS Council RSS feed. I made a little RSS feed for AMS Council Agendas. You all should plug it in to your RSS readers. In the next few days, we’ll all find out if it works when they add the agenda for Wednesday’s meeting.

• Arcane Season 2: Original Soundtrack (Extended Edition). Listen y’all, Arcane still has such a wild grip on me. “Fantastic” is in this baby three times, my sapphic little heart is gonna die.

From the Archive

Over 60 years ago, they were still trying to get the university to build enough housing, just hundreds have become thousands (October 2, 1964):

Also I found this ad for Tampax in the same issue:

That’s All!

I’ll bet that was way less miserable to get through than the previous issue :D. Listen, I know that it was too long, atrociously edited, and about something no one gives a shit about. I’ve got to pay homage to the original every now and again :D.

Anyways, unless I get inspired by something else, I’ll probably be writing two session summaries for Darken the Skies for next issue (I’m behind again :/). Also, should I do UbysseyHumour At Home live posting of AMS Council this Wednesday???? Could be kindaaaaa fuuuuuunnnnnnnn. Since I’m pretty sure UbysseyHumour council tweets are dead :(. Who’s the new EIC gonna be I’ve gotta complain.

Until Wednesday at 10:03 pm, buzz on, my busy bees!

Violence is hot as fuck since 2025