ToM Dracone

True, that part doesn't match the Akaku Nuva, but I feel it works with the rest of the mask's shape, overall. As for the visor, it's not about which Toa would or wouldn't be a wide-open-eye guy/girl, it's more about the fact that if you're flying around in combat, you really need to be able to see what's going on around you. Hence, a wide hole for the visor. But thanks! And people are calling dibs on getting to snuggle me now? Why was I not aware of this?

I'd love to; I love that song, but I'm pretty sure it's out of my range. By a lot. And hrmmm. I'm hoping I'll have a bit more free time next semester, since I'll be taking fewer classes, but... we'll see, I guess? And no, I don't do musicals. I do tech for theatrical productions. Not acting.

As promised! Started out as a doodle in Astronomy class, imagining the Akaku with a visor. I liked the idea, and I've never liked the real Akaku Phantoka (though it -would- be acceptable if it only had the scope on the right side), so I decided to go with the concept and translate the rounded, organic features of the Akaku Nuva into the more angular, geometric style of the more recent masks. I kept a few features of the real Akaku Phantoka – namely the lens and bits of the mouth area – and the final thing will still have a lightsaber blade in the lens, only aquamarine instead of red. And I'm quite pleased with the result. What do you think? ~ ToM

Hmph. I hate it when these unexpectedly long delays happen between blog entries. (and I'm also not a fan of how they seem to be becoming a trend.) So, life update! My semester has been busy so far. That's what comes of taking five full courses, I guess, but wow there's a big difference between that and the normal 4/4.5 I had last semester. Which is part of the reason for the lack of updates. I just haven't had -time- to work on much of anything not school-related. But that should change now that I'm on break. I did manage to get a drawing of Gali Mistika and the Akaku Phantoka, both Project Nuva-style, done in the last couple weeks, and I'll be working on them – and drawing more – in the next two weeks. And getting some MOCing done. You'll be seeing the first bits of that soon. Maybe even tomorrow! But I shouldn't get your hopes up. Otherwise, I absolutely love the acapella group I'm in. We've settled on seven songs in our first concert, and are still deciding on an eighth that'll be my solo. Four of them are classics for the group – Under the Sea, Beauty and the Beast, Wish Upon a Star, and Lovely Night – and then we're adding four new ones: I'll Make a Man out of You, Belle, A Whole New World, and whatever my solo ends up being. It's frustrating being a baritone singing Disney songs. All the heroes are tenors and all the villains are bases, and they're the ones with the cool songs... I can go low enough to do some bass parts (I've gotten stuck as Gaston in "Belle" and my solo will probably be technically bass as well), and can do -most- of a tenor part, but not all of either. Oh well. Not complaining, though! ~ ToM

National Latin Exam? It's a piece of cake. What level are you at?

Oops. Fixed.

Apparently, Six and I are twins when he lets his hair grow out. Or we would be, if he hadn't gotten it cut two days ago... ToyFair was fun. As was being in New York City again, and hanging out with Andrew (a.k.a. Black Six). We'll get news articles and photos up soon! Also, fortune cookies. ~ ToM

I don't think it's possible for me to be impartial on this, because Pandora is utterly, breathtakingly beautiful. Those sorts of spectacular, lush, vibrant forests are to me absolutely my favorite things in the world, so it was basically set in my own personal paradise (and spent an awful lot of time showcasing said setting), which is why I loved it, myself. And I found the plot enjoyable (I almost cried when various things were destroyed), the morals perfect, and I'm big on the whole "harmony with nature" idea. And I just liked the Na'vi on the whole. Not making any sort of argument about them in any direction, just saying they pleased me. So that's why -I- liked it. It just has loads of stuff I adore in it, and was very good with such things.

As of last night, I am now a member of an a cappella group! (One of the many that Vassar has.) We sing Disney songs. Oh yeah. We're awesome like that. I spent last week preparing for the audition, which was on Saturday, and at which my best friend and I sang A Whole New World from Aladdin as a duet. Then we were both called back, and the next day at callbacks they had me learn a harmony and then gave me a bit of "I Can Go the Distance" from Hercules to sing on my own. And I found that evening that I was in! It's a fairly new group, and I'm only the second guy to be in it. The other guy is a tenor, and I'm a baritone (apparently? I can cover most of his range, just not the very highest), so I'm just the baritone until we get some other guys in here... Since I think there are now eight girls who sing in the group. Heh. So, I'm extremely excited about this and can't wait to get singing further. As if my schedule weren't full enough already! ~ ToM

I'm shying away for Inika feet on Lewa because they're so flat compared to the Mantax ones... and Mata feet wouldn't be bad, but then you lose the ability to have color at the ankle (since I wouldn't give him solid green feet; just fond of the look of armor over his feet).

Same here. I would assume a Toa of air would be agile, soooo... Good point. It might be heinous of me to say this, but I've, uh, actually grown fond of the look of the larger feet on him. I think it's because they, coupled with the Technic pieces on his legs, call to mind his somewhat odd Nuva proportions: the bulky chest/shoulder armor, but thin arms and upper legs, and then larger lower legs and feet (compared to the arms and thighs). Originally (and I mean way originally, back when I first contemplated Project Nuva), I had given him Metru feet, and you're quite right that those would make much more sense. I think the reason I went away from them is that they just looked too small given how tall he is. What do you guys think? And I drew on paper, then scanned it in and did the lineart, coloring, and graphics in Photoshop. Thanks!

Dear Bones, Your entire post can be responded to by saying only this: what part of my post was anything more than a statement of personal taste? I'm not sure why you responded as if I were declaring everything I said to be a universal truth, or something like that, but because you did interpret it that way... Kindly see my PM instead. Though there is one thing I feel the record should show: ToM, I really expect more of you than this. This is a huge contradiction. Your reason for not wanting Bionicle to be subjected to the whims of the fanbase in this particular way is your own preference. That in and of itself is one thing. But you don't seem to realize you're arguing for the exact same thing, just in reverse. If you had your way, you'd be subjecting canon Bionicle to your preference on this issue -- you'd be subjecting all other fans to your own personal desire not to have canon forms. So the argument cancels itself out. Nowhere did I say anything of that sort. I stated that I didn't like the idea of subjecting Bionicle to the whims of its fanbase. I did not argue, anywhere in there, that I should be given control of Bionicle. I don't even know where you got that from. ToM- I edited out some of the more 'emotional language' so as to try and keep this entry from getting full of personal anger and whatnot. I hope you don't mind. <<DV>> Oops, sorry about that! I thought I had toned this down enough. My bad. ;>>

Finally, finally, I got his color scheme worked out. :: :: The bottom three are a mockup of his build, as far as is possible to build physically. Other things to note: The Technic jet intakes on his lower legs – they're there to both give his legs more substance and to recall the curved shape of the Nuva's legs.For the color distribution, since I was using both lime and medium green, I opted to make his upper arms and thighs green, rather than grey, so that his green components weren't exclusively locked away behind grey armor.And thus, the dark grey Nuva armor – again, because of his two shades of green, the silver would have added one color too many, and the result would have been very awkward. (I tried. It looked bad.) Making it dark grey meant that his body could be brightly-colored without losing the appearance of Adaptive Armor on his torso (as opposed to just on his limbs).Twin Air Katana once again, which plug into the ball-and-socket-attached Matoro claws to function as wings. The skyblaster becomes his weapon when he has wings, and since he has the Miru, he can use that to stay in the air if he needs to fight with his swords.New graphics! Yay for crystal brushes.I'll also draw and post the Miru Phantoka sometime soon, so you can see the top properly. Next up after that should be Gali or Kopaka (in the new art style), but as I have an awful lot of schoolwork this semester, so I can't say how soon that'll be. ~ ToM

Just to throw this out there, the reason I dislike canon-becoming contests is that I just feel there's absolutely no need for them. At all. Honestly, I like not having defined official forms for certain characters. Take Helryx, for example – I have an image of her in my mind that is absolutely perfect for me, and I have never yet seen any MOC of her come close to capturing what I believe is the essence of her character. I don't want to see one of those MOCs become her canon appearance, because I feel that they do absolute injustice to her, and the canonizing of one of them would detract immensely from Bionicle. A lot of you BS01 folk have said "well, if you don't like the contest, it's not like we're forcing you to enter." That's not the issue. The issue is that we are of the opinion that subjecting Bionicle to the whims of its fanbase is to its detriment, which we just find even less appealing when there isn't a need to have these contests at all. And to the statement that "you're perfectly free to ignore the result and just make your own appearances" – what if we actually care about how the official story of Bionicle goes? They're popular, I see, but that's not a reason to have a canon contest. We just think that a contest to make the canon appearance of a character should be held because there's some sort of need for that character to have a canon form – NOT just because people like having contests like that. That's why MOCs exist, so that each person can build their own interpretation of a character – it doesn't make sense for some of the fans to force one of those MOCs onto the rest of the fans as "okay, this is how this character looks now, and if you don't like it, you can deal with it."

In addition to everything that DV said, I'd like to add that the Toa are pretty much no different from humans as far as characters go, so it's pretty natural for us readers to project human-like appearances onto them (like proportions, hands with fingers, etc.). And thus it just looks bad to most of us when they have such awkward, non-human-like shoulder widths and arm lengths and flat torsoes and all that. So although they aren't technically humans, they are functionally. They're the people in the storyline we readers are most meant to relate to, so it would follow from that function that they would look like us. All the Toa from 2001 to the Toa Hagah had human proportions with only slight deviations, so clearly Lego had the things DV listed in mind when designing those, and as a result there's no apparent logic behind their decision to suddenly make the 2006-and-post Toa so wildly non-human in proportion. It's like, the Toa used to all have human proportions, so Toa were, as a group, established as entities with human shapes – not as entities who "aren't human and thus don't need to follow human proportions."

I just learned about the metathesis of a disyllabic preposition in my Greek class today. I feel somewhere between "... HOLD ME" and "this is the coolest stuff I have ever learned." Discuss. ~ ToM

You guys should all go check it out! (that's a link up there, by the way) I haven't read anywhere near everything, but there are quite a few awesome authors in this collection and if they're anything like me they worked really hard on what's in there. I've also added my own piece, finally; it's down at the bottom of the list and I personally am very proud of the result, as it's an idea that's been sitting in my head for possibly years now. So yeah. Go read them and leave us writers reviews! We like things like that. ~ ToM

Oh no no no, they wouldn't be an army enemy at all. They'd be like the Matoran. If they lived in tribes, hidden away in the forests and mountains, then we would hardly be seeing masses of them, since they take down the Nuva by stealth and then the Inika probably wouldn't go near the actual villages. We would see glimpses of unnamed Piraka (just like we saw a few Matoran we didn't know in the 2006 comics), but the seven who are sets would be the ones the story would focus on and who would actually be developed as characters.

It's called Base 02; I found it on some random free font site. And I am very fond of the shoulder piece.

I so wanted to, seriously... and I noticed today that the title could in fact work quite well both ways. Alas. Primus – Exactly, as I said, the torso and the lower limbs are by far the most useful pieces. I'm just turned off from the torso because it's so huge and has rather few connection points that aren't balls or minifig rod holes.

You thought I had forgotten about this, didn't you. Fortunately, I haven't! I -finally- settled my design for Lewa Phantoka a few days ago and started doodling, and subsequently finally got his mask down perfectly as well, so I'm working on coloring him now. And then the next day I started to redraw Kopaka – since I've decided that I want to draw all the Nuva from now on in the style I used for star!Hahli, that involves making a new image of Kopaka and also redoing Onua, since I've changed his design since I posted him ages ago. But while I was drawing Kopaka, I started sketching the new Nuva armor on the side, since I was bugged by the fact that the design I had for the chest armor looked too stretched and spindly, and the shoulder armor was slightly too small. I realized that instead of just enlarging and stretching the chest armor, it would look better to add another layer to it, which had the benefit of both making the piece look more natural and more fitting for the adaptive armor. And then I was toying around with ways to make the should armor to make it cover the shoulders more fully, and eventually applied the same design to it. And I'm pretty pleased with the result. I also added another connection point to the chest armor – under each top corner is an axle hole (in the manner of the axle holes under the Stars' feet), for more flexibility in torso design. The shoulder armor pieces still attach the same way as the old version, and the other connection points on the chest armor are still the same. Next up is Lewa Phantoka. Hopefully soon! ~ ToM

Seconded. But whatevs, TLC makes its own choices for its own reasons and is alone responsible for them. Still, if I may venture to say this, TLC is one of the companies by far the least hostile toward bright-eyed idealism that I've seen. They really do have kids at heart, I believe. Money is of course a sad reality that they, too, have to live within. They do, and most of their themes really do look great (Atlantis leaps to mind) as always and actually have all sorts of innovative ideas in them. Thus seeing the action figure lines left with pretty much "it's good enough to sell, and that's all we need" is rather lame by comparison.

Initially, I was going to go into some sort of rant about what abominations these sets are, but I've come to realize that that would be quite pointless, for a number of reasons. Instead I shall explain why I am disinclined towards them, including those reasons. It's possible, even, that this entire entry will be filled with things you already know. First, for clarity's sake, the best adjective to describe my feelings towards them is 'disappointed.' Not in the way I was disappointed with the 2008 Nuva, since I lack any sort of fondness for Ben 10 like I had with the Toa Nuva, since I had no idea what the show was so much as about until basically tonight. Rather, I'm disappointed with Lego for making them the way they did. Clearly, Lego has created sets that will sell well, and already are. I think it's pretty simple to say why: Ben 10 is a popular thing, and these sets look impressively like the aliens from the show (so much so that one wonders, if basing a set on a familiar image is clearly a ticket to success, why they didn't make the Nuva actually look like the Nuva we know, but that's another matter). Therefore, kids see them, like both Ben 10 and Lego, say "cool!" at the combination, and they fly off the shelves. Thus they achieve their purpose (making money for Lego), and you know what? They're pretty good-looking sets, from an aesthetic standpoint. Solid colors, smooth pieces, and we get some nice stuff out of them. But – I wish Lego's goal in them were more than just to make money. That is what I find so disappointing. They've done what's needed to make them sell well – now why not go a little bit beyond that? Why not actually, say, make the builds slightly more creative than Avotoran on a massive scale? I'm not talking UCS-type complexity here, or 2001-style functions. I'm talking about the level Bionicle's been at for the past few years, if absolutely nothing more: where the feet are separate pieces from the ankles and the torsos are made of several pieces, not just a front and a back, and the upper limbs have a 'bone' piece and then armor over that. Was it really necessary to strip all of what little complexity there is in the Bionicle style, leaving the Ben 10 sets with exclusively ball-and-socket joints as the connections between all but two pieces? The Ben 10 sets are made pretty much exclusively of big, clunky pieces. While I recognize this is what many AFOLs (and heck, some of us Bionicle fans) have complained about in Bionicle for years (see things like the Piraka torso), there's a crucial distinction between even the clunkiest Bionicle piece and the Ben 10 pieces: something like the Piraka or Avotoran torsos is riddled with Technic connection points of all sorts, and (minus the Avotoran-clone sets) every Bionicle set has been filled with Technic connectors of some sort. Ben 10 pieces are lucky to have an axle hole in them, and if they have anything more, it's just a minifigure rod-sized hole (the kind viking horns attach to, for clarity). We've already seen several creative folk make lovely-looking MOCs with the Ben 10 pieces, so clearly they're not useless (and some of them are in fact quite appealing, even to me). But what gets me is this: the Ben 10 pieces look as if they were not designed to be usable in ways other than what they do in the sets. And that is the essence of why I feel enormously disappointed in Lego here. They look like they're the result of some line of reasoning like "Hey, these sets need to be solid builds that look like Ben 10 characters. Don't bother making them work as anything else; the important part is that they sell well, not that their pieces are modular." Some are better than that. The lower legs are a welcome addition to the lineup of Bionicle limbs; the new torso is intriguing and does have a fair amount of connections, but is limited severely by how huge it is. But the rest... are just oversimplified and disappointing. ~ ToM