Canama

I guess I have to just take this one day at a time.

I just got accepted into graduate school. My dream program. I feel excited, and I also feel guilty for feeling excited because I'm also still mourning. None of this makes sense.

Nacho 09/11/2005 - 01/17/2024 The best dog in the world

"He is only a dog", but he is human enough to be a great comfort. As I type, my best and oldest friend lies in my lap, drifting in and out of consciousness. He has not eaten in more than a day, nor has he drank anything in that period except a small amount of water administered by syringe. He can barely move, though he keeps trying. It has been eighteen years since he entered my life and I am not ready for him to leave it. He's one of the few remnants of my childhood, which is perhaps why I felt the urge to write this here, on this site I used to haunt in my elementary-school days. Perhaps I will clean this up, post it somewhere else, somewhere other than the ruins of Web 2.0, somewhere where it might get more attention, but this version, typed in the BZP blog submission box at five-thirty in the morning, is the original. I joined BZPower in 2005; I adopted Nacho later the same year. But only barely the same year. He was a belated Christmas present; we picked him up on New Years' Eve. Actually, there was another dog there too, and we had our choice of which to take. The other puppy was let out first; he was small and so very sweet. He walked up to nine-year-old me ever so calmly and politely, introduced himself in the most dignified way a four-month-old Shih Tzu could. Then the-dog-who-would-become-Nacho was released. He immediately charged my six-year-old brother, leapt into the air, slammed into him with all the power his seven-pound body could muster. My brother was actually knocked backwards. We could tell he didn't mean any harm by it. To the contrary, he loved being there, loved to meet new people, loved to be alive. He wanted to share that with us, even if he didn't know any way to do it beyond throwing himself full-force into the nearest kindergartner. --- I "made" a spritesheet for him, back in those days when the Comics board (I believe it was called Artwork III back then, having been split off from Artwork I because the people who actually knew how to draw were tired of being overshadowed by Dark709) was the hottest place on the site. Of course by "made" I mean I took a preexisting sprite sheet (actually, it might have been by Dark709, though I no longer recall), recolored the spot on the dog's back, and was off to the races. The entire process probably took me about sixty seconds, which was the limits of my patience at the time. He only ever made one appearance in a comic I was a co-author for; why someone would let me, with my complete lack of artistic or comedic talent, touch their strip, I can only wonder. I'm glad that Brickshelf has archived my achievement in the field of bad BZPower sprite comics. Man, I was such a kid. --- I wanted to name him "Wicket," after the Ewok from Star Wars. My younger brother wanted Nacho. He was inspired by a cute MOC he had recently seen, here on BZP, that had the same name; that build is probably lost to time now. I was a little sore about losing out, but in retrospect, he definitely chose the right name. It's funny how much of that dog comes back to this website. --- I haven't done much of anything today besides sit and worry. Every now and then I try to see if a miracle has happened, if his appetite has returned, if his body has decided not to shut itself off after all, and every now and then I am disappointed. I have my laptop, but I don't want to play or watch anything, nor do I want to read the book I have left sitting on the coffee table. I have marked my life through fiction, and I know that anything I read or watch or play now will be the thing I was reading/watching/playing when Nacho died, indelibly linked to him in my mind. I don't want to ruin a perfectly good anime series that way. Nor do I want him to be permanently associated with a bad one. Instead, I mostly scroll Twitter. The one other bit of entertainment I afford myself is playing randomly-generated Picross puzzles. Actually, it's kind of boring, but it appeals to me. The canvas is a rigid grid, its solution locked away in the numbers, and all I have to do is put things in their place. Either I get one that's easily solvable, or else I get one where there are at least two valid solutions and it comes down to chance which one the computer thinks is right. I think I have a winning record at guessing, though. I suppose writing is now the third interesting thing I've done. --- My brother and mother (yes, I still live with my parents at twenty-seven) have gone about their days in as ordinary a fashion as possible (given the severe winter weather we're now experiencing). How can they act like the world isn't ending? --- In a way, the Nacho I met all those years ago has already gone. It's been many years since he could run and jump and force his joie de vivre on the most proximate elementary-schooler. Then, when he went blind a couple years back, whatever energy he still had vanished. These last few months he's had difficulty walking, and sometimes even difficulty standing. Two days ago, I was already never going to take him on another walk again. But even two days ago, he wasn't skin and bones like he is right now. Where did the mass go? As long as he's alive, there was--is--always that irrational hope beyond hope that he would somehow get better, that his eyes would regain their form and function, that his energy would come back, that his telomeres would re-lengthen. When he dies that will be it. He will stop being is and become was. --- I remember how he would greet me when I returned home from school. He was always so excited, like it was the first time we'd seen each other in years. I remember how much he used to love broccoli; I've never really heard of a dog who liked broccoli, but he always went crazy for the stuff. Whenever we had it with dinner we'd save some for him. I remember how he used to love to play with plastic water bottles, more than any actual dog toy. I remember how excited he got at so much as a glimpse of the leash. I want to keep those moments frozen, forever, as if in amber. It's not even that I didn't/don't want to grow up; I just always wished, wish, for the ability to grow down, to return to these comforting events in a format more perfect and real than memory, to reclaim my innocence, to revive the mosquito in the amber of the past. My best friend is dying. My life can never be the same.

metal gear solid v with morbid's side-op expansion mod. actually i just finished the last of those new side-ops tonight. probably going to play something light now. incidentally my FOB just got invaded for the first time in all the years i've been playing the game. the invader got gunned down by my security team within 50 seconds of arrival lol

gahlok and lehvak

That's... what I said, yes.

remember the kanoka club? they totally did IN FAIRNESS i think those were just meant to be replacements for when you inevitably lost the originals rather than proper collectables, since there were only three colors and each box included all of them

not as weird as the kanoka disks, where they expected people to get excited about collecting three-digit codes

yeah the proto stuff was definitely all manual. besides the premier stuff, i also got proto one time for going sicko mode and reporting every rule-breaking post i could find on like the comedies board or something. got rewarded for my snitching. i tried doing the same thing again a couple times after, but i never got any more proto out of it. i also feel like i might have lost proto at some point? don't remember. when i was a kid becoming an obzpc was one of my big goals. never wound up swinging it.

i'm not there yet, but i'm also not comfortable with how close i am to being there.

lol homestuck is a comic that i loved, then hated, then found myself loving again, if only because i can't not love something that's taken up so much psychic real estate. i still think about it sometimes; every now and again i pull up the soundtrack and, say, listen to Doctor and remember how i felt the first time i saw the Land of Wind and Shade. it was my last outing with fandom, but man, what an outing it was. i think the one thing that could get me so obsessively into a massive, sprawling work again would be if it were like homestuck, with the caveat that being "like homestuck" means also being unlike homestuck--part of why i loved it so much was because it was unlike anything i'd ever seen before, and so this hypothetical work would have to exist in some form that i can't presently conceive of. of course, homestuck was also the last cultural hurrah of the era of the web that i grew up in. it was a comic about a particular incarnation of the internet, one that i thought and think of as home. the world has changed; i am no longer in the thick of it, nor do i much want to be. so this successor might fail to draw me in, no matter its merits, on that basis alone.

if it's true, and i doubt it is, then it won't make much difference to me. bionicle's main value to me now is as a source of nostalgia, and this won't be the bionicle i grew up with as a kid--plus i'm no longer the kid who could fall in love with bionicle.

i kinda stopped being into "franchises" and i don't really involve myself in fandom anymore. i'm (ostensibly) an adult now, and i have a lit degree and everything. my relationship to fiction is different than it was back then, and grand, overarching epic narratives with sprawling canons (and don't get me started on those) just don't interest me the way they used to. the last thing i was big into, and this was when i was still a teenager, was homestuck. but that was years ago now. that's not to say i've quit consuming fiction; to the contrary, i consume more--and more varied--stuff than i did back as a kid. but the way i feel about it isn't the same.

i recently had an Actual Nightmare where I got banned from bzpower. like the kind where you wake up and have to check just to reassure yourself that it's not real. it's funny--it's not like i really come on here very much anymore. it's not like anyone comes on here very much anymore. if my account were to actually be banned it would make no difference in my life. when i joined bzpower, i was eight; now i find myself uncomfortably close to thirty. thirty still seems so old to me. i could never--not as a kid or a teenager, not even in my early twenties--conceive of being thirty. i still can't. and yet the calendar insists that there are just a few years left. as i get older, i find myself trying to hold onto tchotchkes of my childhood--things that have no functional value to me now except in the conveyance of memories. sometimes they appear in my dreams; bzpower is not unique in this regard. i want to remember who i was, where i came from, to keep from finding myself unmoored in time. when i was a teenager, i was glad that bzpower lost the old forums database and majhost went down and spared me the humiliation of knowing my awful attempts at a sprite comic or my execrable fanfictions were still out there somewhere. now i find myself saddened by their loss. no one else will mourn them, of course. (nor, frankly, should they.) none of these things had value to anyone but me. the banning of this account would represent a final foreclosure on that past, an admittance that it's over and done. realistically, that past is gone forever anyways and there is no going back--but while it exists i can pretend, if only for a moment, that it is still 2005, still 2008, still 2012, can step back into my old selves and see the world through their eyes. at least this blog remains, in its entirety. its first entry (actually, its first four entries) was posted the very day blogs were made available on this site. the things i wrote as a child survive, even with their atrocious spelling (faveorite???) and utterly vapid content (i was, in retrospect, not a particularly smart kid). by my teenage years i had mostly moved on from bzpower, but you can see bits and pieces of my adolescent struggle for self-actualization posted here. none of this will mean anything to any of you. this very post is nothing more than an exercise in self-indulgence. but it means something to me. i'm glad i'm not banned.

are they bad from like an actual filmmaking standpoint? sure. would i go back and watch them as an adult? absolutely not. but then, their raison d'être was to entertain 8-year-olds (who were too young to have taste) and get them to beg their parents for more bionicle toys. and since 8-year-old me sure was entertained, and sure begged his parents for a lot of toys, i'd say that they achieved their intended purpose. and so, in a sense, aren't they good? they were made to do a job and they did it well.

i really can't make a comparison. the first generation of bionicle was something i followed obsessively from when i was 7 all the way up through my mid-teenage years; for a good portion of that, i lived and breathed it. (i started developing more diverse interests towards the end of that period, as part of a general project towards self-actualizing as an actual human being, but i always retained a soft spot for it and i made sure to read every bit of canon material.) but when the second generation came out, it was different and i was different. i was, by that point, an adult. the idea of obsessive fandom didn't really appeal to me anymore; if i was going to pay attention to this again, it would have to make an argument for its own worth. but even from the early preview material i got the sense that it wasn't going to have the same sense of mystery, the same layered world, that had so appealed to me all those years ago. so i let it pass me by. didn't get any of the sets; didn't pay attention to the story. i don't, to this day, really know anything at all about the short-lived bionicle quasirevival, and i'm not really interested in learning. i still come by this site every now and then when i feel a little pang of nostalgia for the story i fell in love with, but i'm not interested in the one that wore its skin. i'm not even trying to denigrate the second generation of bionicle here; like i said, i don't know enough about it to denigrate it. if you enjoyed it, then good on you. i hope, genuinely, that you had fun with it while it lasted. it was for you. but it wasn't for me, and i wasn't for it. edit: honestly, at second thought, it's not even bionicle generation 1 i'm really nostalgic for, it's bzpower itself. whatever.

i don't even remember at this point honestly

eh, there have been plenty of fandoms who have continued to follow "their guy" even after they get let go from whatever job he had. i expect people will still try to ask him stuff about bionicle as long as he has any online presence. of course, we'll see if he goes along with it or not.

it used to be "why is this blog so wide" before recent developments for reasons i never figured out, my blog's main page was rendered really, really wide. like, there was a scroll bar for scrolling left and right, and it was loooong. this went on for a while. then one day in december 2021 i checked in and it had shrank back to normal blog proportions

what happened, i miss it

they're getting smaller and more insular all the time. the days in the mid-aughts where you could come on bzp and see like 800 people online? that's gone forever and we've replaced it with twitter and reddit, which are both awful sites that i hate but continue to use because i've become addicted to content and they're the only place i can get my fix anymore you can play mnog on bluemaxima's flashpoint. don't think it has the piraka animations though

everything that was ever interesting and good about the internet is on its way out

considering that this is in the top half of the first page of gd despite being long-dead? yeah

can't believe i'm seeing a leetspeak news title on bzp smh my head