My name is Absolem Jackdaw.
If you were to look up my actual name, you would find nothing of interest.
Google Absolem Jackdaw, however, and you will find all of my achievements on multiple pages.
- A youtube page with my own mod reviews to help the community understand what my mods are made of.
- A twitter page dating back to 2013 when I was two years into starting my adventure into the world of programming.
- My Curseforge Page, the staple of the collection of my work.
- My DeviantArt profile, a page where I show of my artistic prowess
- My GitHub pages, where you can find this very website
- GitHub references to my repositories
- A peek into my private life with the Honda Shadow Forums, where I share my findings repairing Honda motorcycles. (but I mostly ask questions)
- Cooperation legacy: LadySnake with whom I worked together for a while until their mod surpassed both my free time AND capability
- Cooperation two-point-oh: Darkhax is a person who I consider one of my best friends. He can ask me anything anytime and my answer will never be no. Our friendship has been molded into the internet. We're there. He and me. In a google search result. Together.
- The V4 forums! Throwback to me loving motorcycles 'till this day.
- Legacy three-point-oh: One of my mods got ported by a fan. My name is on that website. I'm there. Work I have made got ported by a fan. It's on Google now.
There's even scam sites citing my work to try and entice unsuspecting people to install viruses on their PCs! I mean, that's not good... but it means that I'm important enough to be used as bait? yay ?
Ego aside, here's a little bit about myself by myself :
I have been trying to figure out who I am and what my purpose is for a while.
I've enjoyed a great upbringing but I didn't come out unscathed.
I have been diagnosed with ADHD at 31 and there are suspicions of autism. I have no fear of these.
Over time I have been able to learn to live with them to my own rhythm. The issues build up when the outside is concerned.
We're on our way to try and become our best selves.
For those who wonder where the nickname comes from, here's the explanation:
Absolem is a derivative of the etymology of my birth-given name. It's the only handle I like so far. I've went trough a handful of handles over the years, but none of them resounded with me. They were bound by definitions of myself that people gave me. Absolem is my own name, just a little bit encrypted.
The jackdaw part comes from my favourite bird. It's tattooed on my chest today.
One of my friends asked me : "A jackdaw? Really? They're scavengers!"
It's not about that though, it's what the bird represents.
I'll never forget the day my parents dropped me and my brothers off at my grandparents. We stayed the night, and the next morning me and my grandpa were looking out the window.
I loved the man. I still do. He had so much knowledge about nature, and I still love that today.
It was a winter morning. It was cold out. We could barely see across the street from the big window, But we could see a couple poles and the barbed wire from across the street.
Silence befell as we observed the cold day when a jackdaw landed on top op one of the poles that delimited the field.
He told me all about the jackdaw, about their white head and how we could recognize them by it from other black birds. Some memories are not made to die trough time. The old man awoke a flame in me; a love for nature and detail that I carry with me to this day.
What are your plans for the future?
I want to continue creating, preferably with Minecraft as a means, and gather people with the same vision to start a programming band. Preferably let it be a means for me to survive and/or live.
Will you ever drop modding?
I have had multiple opportunities to stop. I will not. It keeps pulling me back. I love the creation and I love the community.
Are you ever planning on becoming a well renowned programmer?
I have no ambition of career. I just want to be able to pay rent and if Odin allows me to, one day buy a house. But I just want a place to work where I'm comfortable and happy.
What are your plans for the future?
I plan on founding a team to work on my passion project and Minecraft creations. Over the years I have managed to work together with multiple bright minds. My qualities as an artist have been requested during my three year absence where I attended university. My mods have equally had some updates from fans or people I work closely with, but my library of mods is expanding and so is the work accompanying these responsibilities. The ultimate goal is therefor creating a team of people as passionate as me so we can expand our frontiers and provide creative fun for the next generation of players as well as solutions to problems we haven't found yet.
Did you study anything to become the awesome person you are today?
Don't flatter me! No I didn't for a long time. Mainly self thought with a curiosity drive for the next step. Starting 2021 I did take up studies to try and get a bachelor degree in software development as a full stack dev at the PXL University at Hasselt. As of currently I do not have a bachelors yet. If I had more drive for new technologies in the past, I could have learned what they gave me by myself, but I can't deny that in the three years I went there, I have learned a lot. It equally gave me the image of self worth I was looking for for ages. I feel like my knowledge is legit now.
Why Minecraft?
Back when I was a teenager, Minecraft was released and I got to discover it around 2011 when one of my friends was playing it on his laptop. I was intrigued.
Not too long after that I bought the game for myself and after playing a mere six hours, my fantasy was going wild. I found some mods on the internet to install and before I knew it I was reading documentation on how to make a mod myself.
The mods that I made back then are long lost to time. I didn't know what GitHub was yet and I was brand new to programming altogether. There are some traces left in the dusty corners of youtube, in the category that has seemingly died out since 2015. There are some mod reviews left of a tiny handful of mods that I found on Youtube, dating back to 1.5.1, somewhere around 2011.
The creativity I could funnel into the game was unlimited. At this point in time, I had been looking for artistic expression in the world of video games for a while already. Track Mania Nations had an editor and I can remember tinkering with GameMaker before 2010. I have a vague memory of some kind of 3D-platformer in which I tried to make some levels but none of them tickled my fancy. I can also remember some off-brand GameMaker knockoffs; but they all had pre-made assets and every level I tried to make felt the same.
Minecraft however was a blank canvas. The art style is accessible, simple and square, and the worlds the game creates are the very definition of a sandbox. There is nothing that defines a century or culture the game might be set in. With the help some youtube tutorials made by x2Robbie2x, I was able to let my creativity flow freely. My creativity is what has always primed in my mods, and will be the only drive that justifies my mods. This mindset also defines the way I create my mods. I will always create mods out of creative drive first, which in turn is fueled by a need of necessity, and never by demand.
The mod that made me realise this was Paintings++. The irony in the story is that it isn't my own creation. Paintings++ was made after I found the original painting extension mod somewhere around 1.2 and saw that it was no longer maintained by the original owner, and already had had a couple of people trying to keep it alive at that point. I found the mod when it was in an abandoned state and picked it up because I needed it.
I needed more paintings in my game and there were no longer any options to do that. Turns out I wasn't the only one with the opinion and lots of people started chipping in and saying how happy they were with my continuation of the mod.
The reason why I want to underline this mentality is because a lot of people start creating with the hopes of their creation becoming the next best thing. Their work turns into labor over time and their hobby becomes a burden. Even if their creation becomes a staple of the community, they quite often drop it soon after because they cannot find the drive to continue maintaining the very thing that makes them wake up stressed. This is the very thing I try to avoid for myself and to which I will never give in to.
This doesn't mean that when I make a mod I refuse to cater to the people that use it. There's a right balance to be found between I want and what the community wants. There's a fine line that we can thread to please the most amount of people possible. The creation is the primary part, and sharing is a happy byproduct of the process.
How I ever got from "Yay blocks" to "Damn, Tailwind isn't correctly formatting my Svelte page, yet it worked correctly when I was using NextJS yesterday" will forever stay a mystery for me.
I call it 'my happy little accident'
If you have any questions, inqueries or want to know more about my work, me or my environment, feel free to join me at my discord.
