So BZP got a revamp, and only went down for a few month.  Now it's back and I have to get used to all the changes!!

I think the blogs got the worst of it, TBH.  Although this does seem more in line with other personal blogs I've seen elsewhere on the internet, so it's probably a modern template that's cool for everybody but those of us (like me) who are so used to the old BZP / Invasion format.  This new one looks like it could incorporate pictures better, so that's something I'll have to start thinking more about.  So far my photo uploads have just been scenic mountain shots from various trips... but I'm boring and don't do as many of them anymore, so I'm going to need to diversify.  The lost of the custom sidebars is also disappointing, but I also noticed that all the various blog tags and groupings have been trashed, so now I have 10+ years of unmarked entries, and at least a few of them were useful and will take a while to find by just scrolling thru.

Anyway, as for what I did this summer... go to work and get by.  I did manage to make some MOCs and attended BrickFair for the first time in three years.  It was a lot of fun to hang out with folks again, although I felt a bit mellow over the weekend and didn't have a big rush rush rush to do everything.  (I didn't participate in any of the official games because I was too lazy).  Also didn't win anything, but my Mt. St. Helens lenticular mosaic did get nominated, which was awesome.  (And also a little odd because it's a repeat MOC, but then again I didn't exactly disqualify it when I entered it in.)

Outside of work and some Lego, I've played a lot of Pokémon Go and reached level 40, finally.  But gosh darn it, there are still more to collect, so I'm still playing.  I'm also playing the Harry Potter Wizards Unite game, but in general it is less compelling than PokeGo.  The previous game I was all in on, Ingress, did an upgrade last year that totally broke the gameplay mechanics and I still haven't been able to get back into it.  Which is a shame; it was fun to travel to different places and use the game as kind of a tour guide to various local art and scenic spots.

I've also looked into working more on my stories, or in particular reposting them.  I finally signed onto Fanfiction.net and started posting a few of my Bionicle stories.  (Because, honestly BZP is not the hotspot for library posts anymore, sorry.)  Not that this site is any better... I haven't looked around really hard, but the quality of the average story is pretty bad.  (I mean, we all had to start somewhere, so fair is fair.)  But I don't know if there's a readership for lengthy Bionicle novels.  But I did start reposting one of my old popular stories, Time Disruption.  (I checked on the Wayback machine and I started that story on 10-11-2003.  It's also crazy that it was popular enough that I was able to find a Wayback entry for it; the Epic forum was so crowded back in the day and Wayback is spotty about archiving forums.)  Anyway, after doing a editing run through, I'm still impressed with my teenage writing, even if the language is a bit more basic than what I write now... and I desperately needed an editor.  Man, no wonder half the comments were about spelling and grammar errors, they were bloody everywhere!  But I've started reposting that story (all 63+ chapters) and it's been getting a lot of views... so I guess people still like it.  (It also doesn't focus on crazy custom characters, so I'm sure that helps.)  I've also had readership of my Hero Factory story when I didn't think there was any audience for that!  I've written it so far in batches for NaNoWriMo, so maybe I'll work on the final part for it this year.

I've also been playing in Voltex's BZPGOT RPG on Discord for months and months now... and the activity there certainly helped when BZP went down.  It's fun to play, but the Discord format is a bit easier than the forums, and I managed to get into the lore with only a few weeks (or months) of what-am-I-doing-ness.  I can now see why the RPGers are the ones keeping this community alive.

I've gotten a few cool Lego sets over the summer, but kind of slacked off in doing reviews and such.  Last spring, my camera's charging cord vanished, making said camera unusable, so I haven't had anything to take decent review pictures with besides my phone, which is only so-so.  Chocolate Frogs and I were planning to pull off a few more livestreams, but then Youtube changed the system and we haven't been able to figure out an Encoder that works, so that's been put on hold for a while.  I have a backlog of sets I want to build, but haven't gotten any truly big ones... except for the Bricklink models, which I ordered back in March and received in August.    The Western Saloon is an awesome design, although the instructions make it a bit difficult to distinguish between the various shades of brown.  I would like to do some more reviews, either official or just generic blog posts, but I'm a combination of lazy / exhausted most of the time.  Maybe I'll put together some just to test the picture capabilities of the new blog system.

Anyway, here's to another long and rambling post.  Honestly don't know if anybody will bother reading (did they ever?)  But the post count now including blogs really upped my count; I went from 6K to 8K, so I'm guessing it was the blogs.  I know in the old forums when there was a list of the most comment / most viewed / most posted of the blogs, I was in the top three (or top one, I forget) of the blog with the most entries.  Not views or comments, but entries.  So I like typing a lot and posting stuff nobody reads.    I hope to continue hiding subliminal messages in walls of text as long as BZPower lets me!

Thanks for reading, take care y'all!

  (yay at least the emotes stayed the same, I would be sad without my signoff)