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Tech/Games

Explaining ‘Life Series’ curses

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By: Julia Yang

Yet again, another ‘Life Series’ article, but this one should be interesting! In the ‘Life Series’, some members are given what fans call “curses”. Curses are what fans discover are repeating to a member in each season, like how Jimmy is always the first one out (putting aside the past 2 seasons).

These curses can get complicated and may sometimes make no sense, so I’m here to save the day and explain them all to you to the best of my abilities!

This one was explained in a past article about “fan designs”, but it’s back again for this article too: the Canary Curse. Jimmy, as spoken about above, has somehow been on a streak of being the first member out for 4 seasons in a row! It’s impressive, really.

The Canary Curse is in reference to when coal miners would bring canaries into caves to warn them of gas/oil leaks (danger) as canaries are very sensitive to gas/oil leaks and would die first before the coal miners. Jimmy, the canary, would die before all of the other members, warning them that things are soon to be in utter chaos.

In connection with the Canary Curse, Mumbo has something called the Coal Miner Curse.

Mumbo is the coal miner to Jimmy’s canary, as in every season Mumbo has been in— minus the most recent one, Mumbo has managed to die minutes after Jimmy. I really hope that makes sense because I’m not sure how else to explain this one.

Grian has the Widow’s Curse. This curse was assigned to him because Grian has always ended up betraying his close teammates or being the direct cause of their death. For example: in ‘3rd Life’, Grian and Scar, who had been allied and teaming together throughout the entire season, had a fight to the death, where Grian won, making him the winner of ‘3rd Life’. In ‘Last Life’, Grian and Mumbo had a dispute, sparking a fight. Grian, knowing full well that Mumbo was the one that he had the strongest connection to in all of his alliances, goes on to take Mumbo’s last life.

These next few ones aren’t really well known throughout the ‘Life Series’ community, as they’re not as “official” as the others, but I thought it’d be fun to include them too.

Impulse has the Winners Ticket Curse. Impulse, in more than half of the seasons, has managed to get his last life taken by the soon to be winner of the season. In ‘Last Life’, Impulse gets shot by Scott at his base, losing his last life and forcing him out of the season. Scott will then later on that same episode go on to win the whole thing. In ‘Limited Life’, Impulse, Scott, and Martyn were discussing a way to have an even deathmatch. Martyn would then go on a killing spree, killing Scott first, and Impulse second. Making Martyn the official winner of ‘Limited Life’, and rendering Impulse as second place.

“Winners Ticket Curse” as in whoever takes his last life, is almost a guaranteed season win. If I’m being totally honest, if my curse was basically the saying “so close, yet so far” I think I’d lose my mind.

Ren has the Blinded Curse. He often dies to things that he doesn’t see. This can mean a trap, an arrow to the back, an axe to the head, or a stone to the skull. Whatever it is, it’s something that he hadn’t seen.

There are many more curses to be given out to the members, some of them blessings. Of course these curses “aren’t real” but they are fun, aren’t they? They’re just things fans came up with to keep themselves entertained and keep a creative mind.

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Tech/Games

The new ‘Life Series’ season: ‘Wild Life’

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By: Julia Yang

Warning: this article will of course include spoilers for ‘Wild Life’

The ‘Life Series’ is back, and more chaotic than it’s ever been! This season, Grian brings back every member that has ever been in the series and throws them all for a loop!

‘Wild Life’ isn’t actually about animals, it’s about how everything in this series is going to be wild. Every session, a “wild card” will activate. Wild cards are the random ongoing mods, events, and/or changes. No player knows what the event is and will have to figure it out on their own— except Grian; Grian is the one who creates the wild cards. These wild cards will disappear in the next session, and a brand new one will occur. One other change is that all players start with 6 lives and red and yellow names will gain a life by killing dark green and yellow names.

Now that we have the gist of the season, let’s do a recap of sessions 1 and 2!

Session 1

In the first session, there was a change that everyone seemed to find super fun, and barely caused any deaths: players were able to change size! If someone were to crouch, they would shrink, if someone were to jump, they would grow, but only ever so slightly over time. Players could grow up to 5 blocks tall and shrink down to half a block.

The poor souls to die this session were Scar and Pearl. Funnily enough, they both died due to falling off the same mountain.

Scar died because he was in F5 mode facing himself (F5 changes a players POV) obscuring his view of what was in front of him, and was walking down the mountain. Sadly with his luck, he walks straight off the steep end and falls to his death. His death doesn’t even have anything to do with the wild card, that was literally just him.

Pearl on the other hand was shrunk down to half a block and was crouching overlooking a dangerous cavern. The mod for whatever reason thinks that players are bigger than they actually are in this circumstance and thinks she’s off of what she should be standing on, thus making her walk off the block, falling to her death.

No other deaths occur this session and I will be showing you the groups that were formed as well as each player’s death count:

Session 2

The next session happens, and the wild card is dramatically worse than the previous one. In this session there were 11 deaths. Things were bad.

The wild card this session was that players would be quickly and passively losing hunger and would need to eat anything they could, and I mean anything. Players for this session are able to eat blocks, flowers, buckets, armor, tools— anything they could pick up could go into their mouth. Even so, only a few select things would actually fill their hunger bar. For example, they could eat a grass block, but it may not fill up their hunger bar. The players had to scavenge for what would fill their hunger bar so that they didn’t die of starvation, which was a pretty hard thing to do considering the fact that this mod included every single item in the game.

Not only did they have to scavenge for what fed them, they also had to make sure that they didn’t eat anything with extreme consequences.

You see, the things they ate could also have potion effects. They could eat oak planks and get levitation, or maybe they’re a little more unfortunate and eat an iron shovel that poisons them.

A smaller more minor thing is that sometimes the things they ate would make weird and loud sound effects after consumption. There were no consequences for this.

To make things worse, what you ate that would hurt you, feed you, and benefit you would be re-rolled every, what I think is, 30 minutes. So, everything that you would have learned about your food would go to waste and you’d be back to square one. Most of the deaths this session were caused by lack of food; dying of starvation. A few of them, though, were caused by players and other unfortunate events.

Skizz, for example, ate some dirt that made him levitate up probably around 50 blocks in the air. He was over a river, so he wasn’t worried about dying or fall damage (landing in water cancels out fall damage), but he had an audience. There were 3 players watching him fly up and fall down, one of them being Tango. As Skizz was falling down into the river, Tango placed 3 dirt blocks underneath where Skizz would land and killed him. Because of this, Skizz’s group had then deemed Tango their number one enemy and would attempt to get him killed multiple times.

Tango, though, died later on due to his own mistakes. He gets word from Martyn that spruce leaves are a great current food source, so Tango headed over to a cluster of spruce trees and collected the leaves. Tango then opened his inventory to grab them and try them out, but a creeper came up right in front of him and exploded. He actually tried to shield the blast because he had a shield in his off-hand, but since the right mouse button is to eat and shield, he instead started eating what was in his hand.

Pearl was mining on her own earlier this session when she died to a creeper as well. Swimming in an underwater cave, a creeper landed right on top of her from a hole above, causing an immediate death. Just like Tango, she tried to shield, but instead consumed her diamond sword.

For the last creeper death of the session: Jimmy would die from a creeper whilst attempting to steal from the Swole Patrol (Ren and Martyn). Jimmy decided to trap Ren in his own base while Martyn was away and stole two sheep from their pen because they had stolen from him in the previous session. This would end horribly. As Jimmy is confidently walking away, speaking all cocky to Ren, a creeper came up to him and exploded both him and the stolen sheep.

Cleo died from a skeleton. As Cleo was coming home to the Final Girls, she was bombarded by a load of hostile mobs, one of them being a witch and another being the skeleton. The witch threw a potion and poisoned her, and at the same time she was taking arrow shots from the skeleton. The poison effect brought their health to half a heart, only then would the skeleton take the final shot and kill her, right beside their base.

For the final unique death of this session, Mumbo would die due to fall damage. Mumbo was testing out things to eat since the effects were just re-rolled, and ended up eating cobble slabs that brought him up 50 blocks. Levitating was of course an accident, unlike how Skizz was seemingly prepared, so there was no source of water nearby that he could get to quick enough. Mumbo fell down and died.

Those are all of the deaths that weren’t connected to starving (explaining all of the starvation deaths would take a while and usually they’re all the same), so here are the results for this session:

New episodes come out every Saturday, so don’t miss them!

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Tech/Games

Explaining all of the fan-made character designs for ‘Life Series’ and ‘Hermitcraft’

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By: Julia Yang

The ‘Life Series’, as previously stated in a past article, is a Minecraft server where the members have a certain amount of lives and must be the last one standing in order to win.

The ‘Hermitcraft SMP’ is a server where around 27 friends/YouTubers/stream-ers come together and play Minecraft. That’s basically it.

The fan artists enjoy taking aspects of the events in those series’ and seasons and input them into what they think the Minecraft skins should look like, or just have fun with it. Today I’m explaining each fan design for those who don’t know what they are or why they’re there.

First, what’s up with Jimmy and yellow feathers/wings? Most people who are fans know this already, but the yellow wings and feathers are a callout to the canary bird. The reason why fans draw Jimmy with canary wings is because they’ve all collectively decided that he has something called the “canary curse”. This curse is rooted from the fact that in every season of the ‘Life Series’ he’s the first to die. I know, “well what’s the connection to the canary?” It’s a canary because in the past, canaries were used by coal miners to tell if danger or hazard was near because there would be potential gas leaks that would kill the canary first before the miner. Jimmy is the canary of the server as he dies first, which always signifies in the server that things are going to go downhill very fast.

Grian is often drawn with rainbow parrot wings; the reason for this is actually very simple. One time Grian was being annoying in the ‘Hermitcraft SMP’ and was called a “pesky bird”. That’s about it for this one.

Another thing you may see on Grian is purple eyes and wings. This one ties back to lore and a complicated story, but to put it short, Grian is a “watcher”, hence the eyes, and the purple wings I believe just tie back to the parrot wings. Both however, people like to draw as biblically accurate angels, because why not?

BigB will sometimes be seen drawn with dog ears and tail, or very recently, as the creaking creature in the new Minecraft update. The dog ears and tail is because he was Ren’s soulmate in ‘Double Life’; Ren’s full YouTube name is RenDog, and his skin has dog ears and a tail. BigB changed his skin to match Ren (giving him ears and a tail), which fans found adorable and ran with it.

BigB is drawn as the creaking creature in Minecraft recently because in the new ‘Wild Life’ season, he lives in the Pale Garden (where the creaking resides), and fans thought it would be so cool to draw him as the terrifying creature.

Doc will be drawn with goat horns and sometimes legs, basically all the time. This is because he calls himself the G.O.A.T. Usually when people call themselves the G.O.A.T. it stands for “Greatest Of All Time”, but in Doc’s case, it stands for “Grind. Optimize. Automate. Thrive”. You see, Doc loves making automated machines, grinding for materials, and doing some of the most absurd activities like bringing the Ender Dragon to the over world just to have it as a pet.

Mumbo is sometimes drawn as a moth, this one is because of ‘Hermitcraft’ season 8. In season 8, the moon started to grow at an alarming rate, and to “calm down” the moon, Mumbo decided that he was going to never sleep. Fans then thought of Mumbo as a moth because, well, moths love their moon.

Tango is sometimes drawn with fire for hair and a tail, and this one doesn’t really have a solid reason. Tango’s skin has slicked back blonde hair that fans just interpreted as fire since it was cool, and the tail is because Tango’s skin has red eyes and used to be drawn with horns too. They used to make him into a demon/devil type creature because of his red eyes, but then Tango said at some point “just because I have red eyes doesn’t mean I’m a demon”, so fans took away the horns and made him have a tail, making him his own species of creature.

Impulse is drawn with horns and a tail, just like how Tango was, but for a very different reason. Skizz, Impulse’s friend of 20 years, nicknamed him “Impy”. Of course Impy is short for Impulse, but fans immediately thought of the type of demon “Imp” and made him an Imp. You can thank Skizz for this one.

Scar is drawn with scars on his face. I think this one is self explanatory, but I’ll explain anyway— Scar is drawn with scars on his face because of his name, and because it’s easier to differentiate between him and another player (Scar’s skin looks like a normal person otherwise).

I’ll admit, this may not be all of them, but it’s definitely the most recurring ones. Just keep in mind that if you ever see one of the members drawn with a characteristic that isn’t on their Minecraft skin, there’s always a reason for it.

Tech/Games

Breaking down all of the Minecraft ‘Life Series’ rules and general ideas

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By: Julia Yang

Before we start, what’s the ‘Life Series’?
The ‘Life Series’ is a multiplayer Minecraft series created by a YouTuber and Streamer that goes by the name Grian. Grian gathers around 15 of his friends and they all have to survive in this series for as long as they can until a winner is chosen.

‘3rd Life’

‘3rd Life’ was the first ever season of the ‘Life Series’ that Grian had created. This series was not an official ongoing thing when it came out since this was originally a test idea. The idea of ‘3rd Life’— and basically the overall idea of the ‘Life Series’, is that every player has a set of three lives.

  • If you’re on your first life, you have a green name tag and are a peaceful player.
  • If you’re on your second life, you have a yellow name tag and basically act the same as a regular green player.
  • If you lose both of those lives and end up on your third life, you gain your red name tag, become hostile, and go after other players to make them lose their remaining lives.
  • If you lose your third, and last life, you are out of the series and will no longer upload anymore episodes of the season.
  • The last player remaining wins the season.

‘Last Life’

In ‘Last life’, all players will start off by getting a randomly selected amount of lives, the minimum being two and maximum being six. Unfortunate players with two lives or less are lucky this season as this time, everyone is able to give out their own lives for the sake of other players with the command “/givelife”. For example, if later in the season I end up on my last life, I can bribe or threaten another player with more lives to lend me one of theirs to no longer be on my last life.

Another larger twist to better ensure drama is “The Boogeyman Curse”. This curse entails death and betrayal. A player will be randomly selected and be given the curse in every episode where they have to kill another player by the end of the playing session or else all of their lives will be taken and they’ll be set to their last life. When a player is the Boogeyman, all alliances and friendships tend to be thrown out the window in desperation of getting a kill and not losing their own lives. There can be multiple Boogeymen at a time. The last player standing wins.

‘Double Life’

In ‘Double Life’, the stakes are much higher than any other series. You see, in ‘Double Life’, your health bar is tied to another randomly selected player. If they take damage, you take damage. Which also means, if they die, you die.

The general rules still apply, green lives, yellow lives, and red lives all act the same, but it’s double the trouble. All you can really do is hope your “soulmate” isn’t an idiot.

The last pair standing wins.

‘Limited Life’

In ‘Limited life’, you have 24 hours to live. Just like every other life season, there are green, yellow, and red lives. In this season, if a player has 16+ hours, they’re on their green life, if they have 8-16 hours left, they’re on their yellow life, if they have less than 8 hours left they’re on their red life. When a player dies they lose 30 minutes off their time, if a player gets a kill, they gain hours.

In this series, yellow lives can kill green lives to get more time, but if they kill a non-green, they don’t get any time. Red players on the other hand can kill anyone and gain time.

This season they bring back the “Boogeyman Curse”. This time, if a Boogeyman gets a kill, they gain 1 hour and the victim gets -2 hours taken away. Thankfully, there can only be one existing Boogeyman at a time.

Last player standing wins.

‘Secret Life’

‘Secret Life’ is an extremely interesting and entertaining season. In secret life, things are of course changed up once more. Players are given 30 hearts of health, but these hearts will never regenerate. Once you lose a heart, that heart is gone forever.

The very special thing about this season is that all players will be given a secret task every episode. Once you successfully finish your task, you will walk over to the large statue at the spawn and press the succeed button. Pressing the succeed button will give you +10 hearts. If you have, let’s say, 26 hearts, you will get 4 hearts for succeeding and 6 valuable items because you cannot go over 30 hearts.

If you for whatever reason seem to not be able to finish a task or you’re up for a challenge, you can re-roll for a harder one. If you succeed at a hard task you get incredible items, if you fail, you get -10 hearts off of your health bar.

The normal tasks can range from stealing the torches out of 4 people’s bases without them knowing it’s you, or not moving when someone is looking at you. Harder tasks will be like summoning a boss, or jumping off a 100+ block tower and landing in a one block wide puddle of water.

You cannot tell other players what your task is unless the task says it’s okay to do so. If you tell your task when you weren’t allowed to, or another player manages to figure out your task and you confirm it, you have failed and will need to press the fail button.

All green, yellow, and red lives act the same behavior wise, but things have once again changed drastically. Green lives will remain the same, yellow lives however have a very special power. Yellow lives are able to investigate, stalk, and follow you to try and guess your task. If a yellow name guesses your task correctly, it is an immediate fail and you will have to press the fail button. Red lives are lethal in this season. Red lives will constantly gain tasks, once they finish a task, they immediately get another one. These tasks all have to do with causing harm or distress to other players who aren’t on their red life. When they succeed in their task, they gain +5 hearts. Failing to complete a task at the end of a session does not count as a fail for red names.

The last player standing wins.

‘Real Life’

‘Real Life’ was silly and only had one episode. This season, it’s basically a reiteration of ‘3rd Life’, but in VR. That’s it. Green lives, yellow lives, and red lives, but in VR.

One final time: the last player standing wins.

Grian plans to continue this series for as long as he can come up with his own little ideas, because obviously there’s only so many ways you can make things different in a series like this. In the recent Minecraft Championship (MCC), Grian states that he was sick for a little bit but it gave him a lot of time to think about a new ‘Life Series’ season and what he could do. So, if you missed watching all of the ones I mentioned before come out, you can look forward to the new one he’s planning to make.

Here are all of the ‘Life Series’ members’ (Minecraft) YouTube channels and names: