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Finally got me an infected Hau.

I BUILT A MOC FOR A BBC CONTEST AYYYYYYY As per usual, image links to topic

I made a pretty neat flamethrower thing. The flames at the front can swing around and the cockpit can open. There isn't really anything that special about it, but it looks cool so that's good enough for me!

If you’re someone who remembers BZPower back before the archive deletion and downtimes (I confess, I’m getting murky) and roughly prior to '08-'09, you might know me as a different person. I mostly lurked 'round this little forum called Artwork II, which was the place where all the shops and "sprite kits" were safely hidden from the world. Back then, most of my contribution to BZP came in the form of pixel art. Yeah, it was a different time. Well, I haven’t done any pixel art for quite a while—nothing worth posting, at least. Even so, I get the hankering every now and then. And in fact, for a long time I’ve been wanting to start something long-term: a project to fiddle with in my spare time. Pixel art is quite cathartic, I find, and it’s actually a great stress-reliever. Go figure. Unfortunately I haven’t really had that much spare time lately. That is, until last week. It was spring break...for students, at least. =P Even so, in between the grading, I did find a few moments to get creative: The project is a roughly to-scale isometric map of the island of Mata Nui; 1 pixel = ~.25 kio (these images are at about x3 magnification). I find landscapes to be very enjoyable to do, and isometric pixeling suits that pretty well. The images above should be kinda familiar: the Mangai Volcano and the southern tip of the island coast. This is only a few hours’ work, so it’s absurdly rough, but you should get the general idea. So yeah, the plan is to keep messing around with it, and maybe post some updates as things progress. I confess, even now I’m still pretty much an amateur at this, but I hope I can do it justice. =P JRRT

No, it's a trick! We must destroy him!!

Black Six: Hey Xccj: Hi Black Six: Do you have something against apostrophes? OMG HE KNOWS!!

Does the southern tip really have those sheer cliffs? Personally, I'm still waiting for somebody to generate some really great 3D models of the island of Mata Nui from the greyscale bump map that Christian Faber lovingly provided. But sadly everyone who's tried to make it in either LEGO, or Minecraft, or any other 3D rendering software seems content to "wing it". I'd love to see a depiction of Mata Nui that you can view from all angles, because that would offer a fantastic opportunity to get a really legitimate sense of the island's scale and elevation.

I actually spent a good portion of today and yesterday spriting.

I dunno, I'd be less interested in getting that Spider-Man set for Electro and more interested in getting it for his parts—specifically, all that luscious lightning in such a small set.

I am not surprised at all by this revelation, but it's still the best news I've heard about the game yet. I choose to take it as a testament that maybe classic mechanics, plot, characters, etc. aren't bad. Experimentation is great and all, but the general opinion I can see of the Final Fantasy franchise as a whole now isn't very positive. =P Hopefully the game's good sales leads to the localization of Bravely Second worldwide, and maybe a new franchise that can get up there with the JRPG kings that were Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

[ tumblr ya] Treatise: Translating the Avohkii : Part 4 : Whoa, hold on! It’s dangerous to go alone! First, read this, then this, then this. All done? Good – let’s get moving. Here’s the full transcription of the Avohkii-text once again: The bolded part of the transcription has already been translated in the previous posts. To recap: Mapaku ke-whenu-ka kitu ak-ila ... “Reader, seek out an individual originating from within a secret underground (place)” This portion of the passage seems reasonably self-sufficient, and I have chosen to analyze it as an independent clause: it contains a verb, its arguments, and their modifiers. If we start from that assumption, it stands to reason that the rest of the passage will form its own unit/clause, separate from the first clause but presumably still related in meaning. We can start by identifying already-familiar terms in this portion of the inscription. We actually have an easier time of it than before. Makuta is pretty self-evident, as is taka. The relevant entries are as follows: makuta |n.cmpd.| 1. master of knowledge; 2. higher knowledge [mult. potential etymologies; one proposed etymology is makuta < ma-akuta, from ma(t) “mastery, control” and akuta “knowledge”; another proposed etymology is makuta < mai-akuta, from mai “up, upward, above” (variant of mi, see entry) and akuta “knowledge”] taka |n.| firelight, torchlight, illumination; heat [taka < ta-ka, from ta “elemental fire” and ka “power, force, ability”, yielding a sense of “light cast by fire/torch; light that leads the way”] Alright, now that we’ve identified some familiar terms, let’s continue with the same line of reasoning we used for the first clause: if this section of the passage is a clause in itself, we’d expect there to be a verb and some individual(s) involved in the action of the verb (subject, object, etc.). How do we go about identifying the verb? Well, one aspect of Matoran syntax that hasn’t come up much yet in this discussion (but probably should) is the fact that, according to the only example of a clausal-unit that we have, it appears that verbs in Matoran stand as the final element in a sentence. The example that we have is the phrase Manas zya, translating to "Attack the monster!" The verb is zya "(to) attack", while the object is manas "monster". This is an imperative (command) clause, so technically we can only determine that verbs appear in final position in simple imperative constructions – other clause-types might be different for all we know. Then again, for all we know, the verb-final pattern might be a strict rule for independent clauses in Matoran. For what it’s worth, verb-final patterns show up in ~40% of human languages, so Matoran wouldn’t be all that strange as a non-human language. Well...let’s see where the verb-final logic leads us: Based on its clause-final position, we might assume that taka is the verb. Does this make sense? Hm...taka doesn’t necessarily look like the only example of an actual verb that we have – zya "attack" – but of course morphophonological similarity isn’t a requirement, even if that’s pretty much the only thing we have to go on. It really depends on the categorial status of taka. Do we know anything about that? Possibly, yes. Taka shows up in Takanuva. Nuva means "new". It’s clearly an adjective in its other uses (Tahu Nuva, Gali Nuva, etc.). If we assume that nuva is generally an adjective, that would imply that taka is not verbal, but nounal. Then again, an argument could be made that nuva can modify nouns or verbs, or that Takanuva is an exception based on the fact that nuva appears to be morphologically incorporated into taka, rather than a syntactic modifier as in the other cases. All of these arguments are equally legitimate. This is kind of a sticky situation. On one hand, we’d rather not violate the only potential syntactic rule we know of by looking elsewhere for the verb. On the other hand, it’s iffy to just define taka as a verb. How to decide? Ultimately, the decision should be made based on its overall consequences. If we decide to redefine taka as a verb, that will entail making a variety of alterations to our understanding of Matoran etymology (how modifiers work, the categorial status of nouns and verbs, etc.). These are things that, to some extent, are already "established". In contrast, if we assume that Matoran is not strictly verb-final, we aren’t actually violating any established rule, since we’re simply postulating that there’s more syntactic variation than the single piece of evidence we have suggests. The second option is far more appealing to me, so I’ll run with it. Taka is not the verb – something else is. Where do we go from here? Let’s look at the other candidates for verbhood: We can probably cross out makuta, since that has a pretty well-established nounal status. That leaves ahano, nano, and atuana. Previously, I’ve already hinted that I think atuana contains a variant of toa, so I’ll cross that off as well. That leaves nano and ahano. Hm...time for some more educated guesswork. If Matoran is not verb-final, are there any syntactic patterns that we can observe at all? I’d rather not jump to the conclusion that Matoran word-order is completely free, since that would leave us without any direction whatsoever. Instead, we might come to the more conservative position that Matoran is verb-final in independent imperative clauses. Think about it: Manas zya is an independent imperative clause and the verb is in final position. Furthermore, I’ve also translated the first part of the Avohkii passage as an independent imperative clause, and the verb happens to be in final position there. That’s a convenient match, go figure! So if we say that the verb-final syntactic pattern is restricted (at the very least) to these types of clauses, we are free to postulate a different pattern for other clause-types. Specifically, I will propose that the clause under discussion (the second half of the passage) is not independent, but is instead dependent upon (or "subordinate to") the first clause. This is because of the status of the first clause as a command or instruction: do X. If the first clause is defined in this way, what is its relationship to the second clause? It makes sense that the second clause would describe something about how/why the command of the first clause must be performed. For example, we might interpret the relation as cause-effect: do X so that Y. Alright, so the second clause is subordinate. How do we apply this to the translation? Well, if Matoran is verb-final in independent imperative clauses, a simple pattern that could be used to mark dependency is to reverse the standard order, i.e. to place the verb at the beginning of the clause: verb-initial. This is actually pretty milquetoast when it comes to human languages – different syntactic patterns are used to mark dependency-status all the time, so I don’t have many qualms about postulating it for Matoran. However, this does lead us to a specific conclusion with respect to choosing between candidates for the verb: ahano is the first word in the clause. If we adopt the assumption about syntactic patterns above, ahano would be the verb. This is progress! Very small progress, but progress nonetheless. Even so, this post has been really wordy, and it’s getting a bit too long at this point, so for now, I’ll leave you with a recap of the translation. It’s a slow crawl, but hopefully worth it by the end: Mapaku, ke-whenu-ka kitu ak-ila ... “Reader, seek out an individual originating from within a secret underground (place)” ... ahano nano atuana makuta taka. "(so that) VERB ... [smthg. related to Toa] Makuta light/illumination." Still on the to-do list is determining a translation for ahano, as well as nano and atuana, and we also have to flesh out the relations between these elements and makuta and taka. It’s a daunting task, but I think we’ll make it. Next time.

These are very interesting reads, you seem to derive mostly from the words and making conclusions from them, may I interrupt your method of work and suggest you try to look at the context and fill in the blanks? I think you've considered and rejected this option already, but maybe it will help you on your journey to find out what the Avohkii says. Obviously we know that Takua becomes the Toa of Light, he is the individual originating from Karda Nui. We can shorten the entire first half down to "Find Takua". Then what? According to what you've figured out so far it's; "Find Takua (so that) VERB ... [smthg. related to Toa] Makuta light/illumination." I'm pretty sure the verb is transform or something like that. He's gonna become(VERB) [smthg. related to Toa]. Then the Makuta light/illumination part makes it trickier for me. My initial thought is that it means "Makuta illuminate", or rather "Makuta illuminated". But then there's a piece missing between [smthg. related to Toa] and that. Either that dilemma is solved through further examination of the [smthg. related to Toa]-word, OR it's something different. I dont know what in my mind made me associate the sentence with illuminating Makuta. It's a metaphor, nothing concrete there. So maybe that was a bit of a stretch because Orkham's razor(hehe, puns). Looking again at context and the concrete things. Beware, I haven't read any books, so maybe it makes different sense in them but here goes. Takanuva and Makuta fall into the pool of energized protodermis and become one, this is what I thought my metaphor meant. It could be any kind of defeat though. But maybe the sentence is trying to say "Find Takua (so that) VERB ... [smthg. related to Toa] Takutanuva." In either case, the verb is most likely become or transform. Hope this was helpful, I don't know, just thinking out loud.

I have not... that could explain why he asked if I minded snakes...

So, just to make sure I'm understanding you correctly, are you basically saying that any crictical survey of any form of entertainment is in a sense already wrong, as by criticizing something you are claiming that it's not just an opinion that it's bad? And if so, does this mean that criticizing productions that are obviously shoddy and poorly made (technically speaking) is wrong as well? I'm just having a hard time trying figuring out what the extent of your beliefs are concerning this issue, as I don't know you personally and don't know what you feel. As an example, if a twelve year old girl went up to you and said "Hannah Montana is waaaay better than boring Lord of the Rings," what would your response be? Because I don't think you can really make a logical argument supporting that proverbial girl's statement unless you use the argument that "since it's her taste, it's not wrong or right." I think the reason I'm rather put off by this kind of extreme is because I fear that a widespread acceptance of it would encourage laziness and a lack of originality in all forms of media. That's not to say that's already a problem, but if no one even questioned the quality of any sort of production (under the belief that it's totally a matter of taste), then unoriginal, poorly produced media would run rampant, and quality works would be obscured. After all, if there's no clear definition on what is "high quality entertainment" and what is not, then the biggest factors in how a show or movie or whatever woud succeed is how much money and time the producers poured into advertising it to people and drowning out the competition. That, of course, is exactly the reason why fads like Hannah Montana are so popular - because the producers are so rich that they don't need to make a high quality product to succeed. By claiming that it's only an opinion as to whether things like this are good or not, are we only encouraging this kind of market behavior? Keep in mind, I'm still not sure whether this is your opinion or not, as I don't know how far you're taking this kind of view. Care to enlighten me? ~~END~~