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Bionicle Guru

Outstanding BZPower Citizens
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Year 19

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About Bionicle Guru

  • Birthday 10/19/1988

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  • Location
    Houston, TX
  • Interests
    Drawing, reading, Lego (especially Bionicle), Star Wars, fantasy, science-fiction, tennis, hiking, cartography, history, and engineering.

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  • Website URL
    http://www.flynnlives.com

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  1. You're not the weird old guy. That would be me. Nice to see you got some real-world friendships and experiences out of BZPower. I always envied that a little regarding all the missives I read between staff, retired staff, and their friends and sycophants alike. I think BZPower in the "real world" was mainly an east coast phenomena, and people like me here in Texas weren't really "in" on the community that was concentrated around the Bos-Wash metropolitan corridor. I always wanted to go to BrickFair and co-mingle, but it never happened. Thank goodness for Brick Rodeo here in Texas, even though I have met no BZPower members nor even BIONICLE fans through these Texas-based conventions. Anyway, I'm rambling, as old people do.
  2. Name is familiar, yes. But there were tens of thousands of us on BZPower back in the Before Time. My exploits and writings were numerous and widespread, and even then, people from that time do not recall the name of "Bionicle Guru" with any feeling. That is the way with ghosts and ghost towns, it seems.
  3. Once upon a time, there was an administrator of BZPower, one of the founders, who was fond of Ronald Reagan and the flag of the USA and his username on here was "Bionicle Rex". This inspired a host of copycat names with "Bionicle ____" something or the other. "Rex" is regal, and when I joined BZPower back in July 2003, I wanted to stand out, but not in an official-sounding capacity. I brainstormed other roles that could exist alongside and within BIONICLE and I settled on a guru. After all, Mata Nui was populated by tribes led by tribal chieftains, and there was a Chronicler and a Wall of History and Suva shrines and a Great Temple. I'm sure a guru of sorts could've found a niche in Matoran society, and that is what I wanted to do on BZPower: find my niche and be a guru regarding the toys and the myths of the BIONICLE. A BIONICLE Guru. And so I am still to this day, though few remain to remember me and even I have started to waver in my knowledge of the legends of olde.
  4. BZPower can now legally drink! Soon it will be graduating college and going off into the wide world... To think back in July 2003, I was a "latecomer" to the BZPower community. I think the major facelift in May 2003 and getting my own personal email address in July prompted me to join BZPower. Those first few years were pretty amazing as a member. Sad that so many of those posts from pre-2011 are now forever lost, but I'll always have the memories. Though I was upset BIONICLE got no more-than-marginal love for the 20th anniversary last year (and just a little more for the 90th anniversary of LEGO this year), it definitely still resonates in my heart and mind. I've been recalling a lot lately the summer of 2002, when the Exo-Toa, Bahrag, Boxor, and upcoming Toa Nuva were all the rage. So many awesome things happened to me that summer and BIONICLE is cemented among them. Axiomatic to my teenage memories. Kanohi-Power was a part of it, too, since I checked out that site before it merged with BZCommunity. A virtual toast, then, to BZPower!
  5. No, it doesn't sound mean, but the rant seems more like the standard, boilerplate reaction leveled against the hordes of more unreasonable BIONICLE fans who are screaming into the void about a complete resurrection of BIONICLE officially from LEGO. You have conflated my (admittedly) rambling frustration regarding a tribute or homage (not a set and definitely not a whole branch of merchandise) with some greater disgust of BIONICLE being the shamed, hidden titan that LEGO buries while uplifting the Harry Potter franchise. You can read that into my blog, but let me tell you, I'm well aware of how internally LEGO honors BIONICLE as well as how fans keep extracting life from it in numerous ways. Frankly, that's not my thing. I lived for the official legend of BIONICLE, not whatever fans managed to extract hungrily from it (hence my "blood from a [Makoki] stone" comment). Good for them getting a "canon" appearance for some minor character or making the original BIONICLE PC game a reality. But as a life-long fan of LEGO, I will always first and foremost be interested in what LEGO (the company) releases. That's what matters. All I hoped for was a minor tribute. I address my anger at finding out the possibility that such a tribute, if it exists, may only be a tiny sticker in a completely different theme which is celebrating, ironically enough, their 20th anniversary. I don't blame you for having the conclusions you did. But I figure if you took the time to write such an essay, I'd at least better follow up with an explanation of myself!
  6. I will concede that in spite of the controversies around JK Rowling, nothing seems to have dampened fan enthusiasm for all things related to the books. At my local LEGO store where I used to work, Harry Potter sets flew off the shelves frequently. People of all walks of life snatched up sets large and small, and if they harbored private reservations about supporting Rowling in spite of herself, they never alluded to them. I guess Warner Brothers Studios is determined to keep "The Wizarding World" a "thing" that it can milk into perpetuity, just like the Lucasfilm of today plans to milk "Star Wars" for all its worth. In that case, LEGO has to play along otherwise they lose a good revenue stream. I did state matter-of-factly that LEGO loves money, after all.
  7. As something of a realist, I knew going into this year that fangirl and fanboy pipe dreams of "The Return of BIONICLE" for the 20th anniversary was crazy talk. As much as I love the original run of BIONICLE from 2001 to 2010, there was no way in Karzahni that LEGO was going to revive the theme just for an anniversary year. It's a major one, but still. BIONICLE is done. No need to "continue" the story or reboot it (2015 and 2016 showed how poorly the latter went). My prognostication was we'd likely get something like a GWP or one-off trinket by the summer to commemorate the worldwide release of BIONICLE (Europe had the Toa and Turaga from the start of 2001, but the US and Canadian markets didn't see BIONICLE sets on shelves until July). On the lower end, I figured we might be lucky to see prints of, say, Kanohi masks on minifigure torsos scattered throughout CITY sets or sets from another theme. Then I found out about this "20 Years of LEGO Harry Potter" nonsense. Wow, I mean, I know LEGO loves money (and I write that realistically, with no chagrin or sarcasm), but Harry Potter is beyond a cash grab at this point. Especially considering several years went by when LEGO didn't produce a single Harry Potter anything. Why celebrate that, of all LEGO themes? But that's not even why I'm mad. It was the sight of a sticker on a piece in one of these anniversary sets that really spelled it out for me. In what looks like a star chart of constellations in whatever weird, transphobic, "magic" universe Harry Potter is set in, one of the designers snuck in a constellation that forms the shape of the Kanohi Hau, a symbol of BIONICLE as a whole. Great. Bravo. Slow clap. See that BIONICLE fans???? BIONICLE LIVES!!! Happy 20th anniversary! Watch my YouTube video to see how LEGO CELEBRATES BIONICLE - SECRET COMEBACK?!?!? Blood from a (Makoki) stone, people. I kept my expectations in check, but now, after seeing this "tribute" in one of the new Harry Potter sets, I'm beginning to wonder if I was the foolish BIONICLE fan too optimistic for LEGO to pay respects to one of the greatest themes they ever produced? Is this all we're getting for acknowledgment of BIONICLE's 20th anniversary? Or is there a leak to come of something just a tad more substantial? We can only hope. If this is it, though, it will be a very sad footnote to one of the best original stories I've ever heard and participated in. Reduced to a single image in a set celebrating the 20th anniversary of another, non-LEGO, IP. Well, there's always the 50th anniversary...
  8. Did not expect compliments on the drawing, but twelve-year-old me thanks you! I had been fond of drawing for years at that point in my life, but I was a slow learner. Very little progress could be seen in my work that wasn't traced (did a lot of that when I was in elementary school), but something about BIONICLE helped drive my natural talents forward. These toys and characters were so intricate that I wanted to convey that, do it justice, in my drawings. Hence Tahu here in March 2001. It's interesting to compare this drawing to the one from my other blog entry of Lewa in the trees from August 2001, five months later. Thanks! Yes, the imagery is burned in my brain. Even more so the MNOLG version of the scene, which I often puzzled over on school computers in the nebulous time between getting Tahu and getting BIONICLE comic #1 in May. But that is for another blog!
  9. This was the beginning... Exactly twenty years ago, the legend of BIONICLE officially began for me with the arrival of a small box at my doorstep. In that box were two LEGO sets that would change my life. One was Tahu and the other was Turaga Vakama, but in the early afternoon of March 25th, 2001, those were pretty much just random names to me. But by that evening, they would represent characters almost as real as I was. I won't go into the review of the builds, but as I assembled each of the two Fire characters, I sensed something more important was at work than in my previous LEGO set assemblies. The hints were in the pictures glimpsed on the canister and on the instruction pages themselves, but the full effect was only realized when I held the completed Toa in my hands. No more slick CGI; Tahu was tough, shiny, fierce, and seemingly alive. His eyes caught the sunlight in my room just right, and I almost swore they pulsed in brightness, a kind of biomechanical blink. Outside, the effect was even more pronounced. I tried to show this in amazement to my dad, but he dismissed my enthusiasm, already weary of yet another LEGO toy in his son's life. Parents just don't get it. Back inside, I dove headlong into the knowledge locked away in the mini CD-ROM. Just as Tahu as an entity clicked together in my hands, his background and the story of Mata Nui started to click together in my mind. I was glimpsing another world, a world extremely different from my own. Nevertheless, it was a world I could imagine, a world I could experience more of through Tahu and Vakama, and eventually, the other Toa and Turaga as well. That night, I drew the cover image attached to this blog, a portrait of the reassembled Tahu on a crest of sand on the beach. I knew he did the reassembly on his own, but I too had a hand in that. It was a connection between worlds real and imaginary. Even though I was twelve years old and on the tail end of a stuffy and unpleasant sixth grade year, this was a last gasp of the magical in my life, a spark of wonder as adolescence loomed and all these changes threatened to overwrite who I thought I was. Well, twenty years ago today, that didn't happen thanks to Tahu and Turaga Vakama. That isn't to say there weren't massive changes; obstacles and victories alike that would have repercussions for the lives of both my friends and I. I can't speak entirely for them, but I at least was not ever undertaking the odyssey of Growing Up alone. Whatever I faced, I did it alongside the legend of the BIONICLE. And the darkness couldn't stand before us!
  10. I mean, I get wanting to be optimistic and enthusiastic, but you have to face the facts. And the biggest one is past experience here. BIONICLE is only turning 20 years old, and that is a major anniversary for one of LEGO's most important IPs. So for reference, you should be looking at other successful LEGO themes that are gone, but LEGO has acknowledged in some "celebratory" way. Consider the main classic themes of Space, Castle, Town, Pirates, and Trains. For Trains' 50th anniversary, LEGO made a collection of mini versions of famous Train sets throughout the decades...and then gave it to employees only as a gift. Earlier this year, we celebrated 40 years since the birth of minifigure-scale Trains, and all we got was a replica of a small train from 1980 as a GWP from LEGO. That's it! Randomly in the past decade, we've gotten magnets and other small GWP to acknowledge Pirates, Space, and Castle. If there happened to a concurrent iteration of the theme (i.e. Kingdoms in place of Castle), well, we just got lucky. Mind you, all these themes are far older than BIONICLE. Why would anyone think that anything beyond a nice book or GWP is "not enough" to celebrate the 20th anniversary is beyond me. The love of BIONICLE is perpetuated and continues thanks to fans and fansites like this one. As Toa_Kralich expounded on above, it is in these communities that the real celebrations will happen. Anything LEGO gives us is gravy! I'll grant you one silver lining: if LEGO really wants to acknowledge BIONICLE properly next year, they'll wait until July 2021, which was when BIONICLE finally was released worldwide (it was only available in Europe for H1 of 2001). If that is the case, we may still very well be in the dark and far from uncovering what may be coming our way. If, say, somehow constraction was being Lazarus'd back into existence for BIONICLE's sake, it's possible summer 2021 is when it would finally be released, and we might catch hints or leaks of that early next year. In other words, it is a little too soon. I can't speak to software development, and I'll stand by my previous stance on "continuing" BIONICLE from where it left off. As far as most fans are concerned, BIONICLE finished its story in early 2010. No need to continue a decades-old web serial that has no bearing on the main plot, what made BIONICLE, BIONICLE. Whatever comes next year, I just hope it either honors what was already released, or makes a bold, new path forward.
  11. My condolences, that sucks! Fortunately, I did not have a dog growing up, so I never had to worry about that kind of damage to any of my LEGO sets. I can see, though, how this would've been especially devastating to BIONICLE parts. Good on you for performing the restoration! I'll have to check my Ehlek, I don't think I was quite so lucky. I know for sure my Hahli Mahri has cracked lime green parts, and Lewa Nuva from the Phantoka line may similarly suffer. I still have Lesovikk MISB, so hopefully everything is OK until I decide to build him. At least with the decline in parts quality happening in the latter portion of BIONICLE's life, it is easier and cheaper to acquire replacements rather than the earlier parts, many of which were discontinued even while BIONICLE was still up and running (the original Toa feet, for example. A 2004 revamp was released for the Vahki, but they were never seen in the original Mata/Nuva colors).
  12. The ultimate revelation will come when oceanographers detect a massive metal anomaly stretching the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean floor, with a roughly humanoid form. Suddenly, the news reports that New Zealand has started experiencing massive earthquakes as a giant, metal...face...starts to emerge from within it. BIONICLE: It's been here the entire time! EDIT: Wow, a quadruple post! Haven't seen (or performed) one of those in a very long time! Sorry about that; it seems the forums kept fritzing when I went to post this reply, and it never showed up after refreshing the page. Guess I was bamboozled!
  13. The ultimate revelation will come when oceanographers detect a massive metal anomaly stretching the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean floor, with a roughly humanoid form. Suddenly, the news reports that New Zealand has started experiencing massive earthquakes as a giant, metal...face...starts to emerge from within it. BIONICLE: It's been here the entire time!
  14. The ultimate revelation will come when oceanographers detect a massive metal anomaly stretching the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean floor, with a roughly humanoid form. Suddenly, the news reports that New Zealand has started experiencing massive earthquakes as a giant, metal...face...starts to emerge from within it. BIONICLE: It's been here the entire time!
  15. The ultimate revelation will come when oceanographers detect a massive metal anomaly stretching the entire breadth of the Pacific Ocean floor, with a roughly humanoid form. Suddenly, the news reports that New Zealand has started experiencing massive earthquakes as a giant, metal...face...starts to emerge from within it. BIONICLE: It's been here the entire time!
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