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So, hi. Wow. I will admit that I thought the place was razed to the ground years back, and became nothing more than a childhood memory. I was still technically a youth when I was last here. I was a child when I first joined this place - a very vivid memory of me asking my mother for permission to join the Internet in a world of Bionicle that I learned from a Flash game of Takua. To add to the feels of polishing off cobwebs, a lot of my old content was gone. I found a message in my Inbox asking for my second Epic, Changing Worlds. All those documents are gone, I'm afraid. I'd honestly be surprised if any data from 2005 made it to my laptop 13 years later. Lots have changed for me, once I left BZPower and the server move. I got a degree. I got a job. I moved countries for said degree and job, and had to leave it and return to my homeland. Taxes became a thing. Earning a living. The skill of the pen left me as well, when the demand of a day-to-day job overtook languid breaks between essays and projects... and World of Warcraft and Starcraft and Diablo, et cetera. And the 'death' of Bionicle. I honestly could not keep up when Mata Nui went from godhood to mortal life. He was the last figurine I got, and that was as a gift to an autistic boy who shared a similar passion. That was in 2010, I think? When the news from LEGO came out, I merely thought that all good things would come to an end. Fast track to today. Just two days ago, I had to dig out old certificates for an interview. I dug out my old backups to hunt down one missing cert, and came across my old FictionWrites. One of them was for Bionicle. And no, it was not everything. I eventually started saving my Epic writings in 2003-4 by copying what I raved into a text field onto Notepad. That did not come through. My short stories were lost too. I only found two stories, both in-progress and will probably be buried. They are fond memories to me, and it would be wrong to go back in and whack at it aimlessly. I honestly don't know if I will pop round much anymore, but it is great to see old friends and usernames still active here in BZP. Maybe I will? I'm not sure how the rules have changed - or if the rules have changed - but... Yeah. Good to see BZPower alive and well.

...I'm still happier now than I was before, I think.

Life isn't perfect, but at least Tekulo is still called "SwagtronYOLO".

Beating my own lay attempts years ago, someone figured out a way to extract all the musical fragments from BIONICLE: The Game and sewing them together to bring the most complete, well-composed and high-quality OST of the game available online: or DOWNLOAD! The score includes fragments that have never been used in the actual game for one reason or another, like amazing passage for Ta-Koro and entire battle theme for Ga-Koro. Credit goes out to Hexadecimal Mantis for extracting the music and That1Cactus for editing. Insane job, you guys. I'll go ahead and also share the original Onua Nuva and Tahu Nuva tracks Bob & Barn were kind enough to share with me some years ago that I never got around to uploading—and while I'm at it, here's the entire thing I personally managed to put together: DOWNLOAD! (23/32 edited tracks + 2 original tracks by Bob & Barn) Enjoy the best score ever composed for BIONICLE!

every year is at least okay if tekulo is SwagtronYOLO for even a moment.

Essays, Not Rants! 303: Personal History Exposition is, by nature, a weird thing. In fiction, it is effectively the author, whether through prose, dialogue, or (in video games) incidental environmental encounters telling you stuff about The World you’re visiting. It could be something as mundane as Ted and Jack used to be dating but now Jack’s into Sheila and that’s when Ted decided to quit his job or something as subtly major as "Years ago you served my father in the Clone Wars. [need better example]" You need exposition so the audience know what’s going on, but when done poorly it can feel like infodump, that is a whole lotta information dumped at once, usually just to keep the audience in the loop. It can be clunky and heavy handed, transparent in its purpose to the point where the immersion in the narrative is disturbed. It’s especially an issue in fanatical stories where a world’s gotta be established whole cloth (though stories set in the real world do sometimes stumble on the issue). But sometimes it works. Let’s talk Star Wars, because I want to. After the opening crawl (which, holy snap, is a magnificent narrative device in its own right that deserves its own essay), we’re told really freaking little about this world until Luke sits down with Ben — a solid quarter of the way into the movie. And so comes the exposition. Leia reminds Ben that he served her father in the Clone Wars. Ben tells Luke about his father. For a thousand years, the Jedi Knights were the guardians of peace in the galaxy. But it works. Why? We wanna know what's going on! After this big space battle we've been following a couple droids around and met this kid named Luke. Luke wants to get off this nowhere planet and be a part of something bigger, and we wanna tag along on that journey. So there’s Horizon Zero Dawn, a video game I’ve only been able to put down because my girlfriend really wants to know what happens next and I’m waiting until we hang out to progress. One reason I love it so is that it uses one of my favorite settings: it's post-apocalypse, but it's been so long since that a new society has developed and there's a mystery about what came before (see also: Mega Man Legends and The Chrysalids). The setting and its history, though, is wonderfully tied into the game’s narrative. In the game I'm Aloy, an Outcast from a matriarchal tribe who doesn't know who's her mother. My quest to discover where I come from reveals a connection between me and the Metal World of the Ancients (that is, the ruins of 2066) and starts to raise more questions than answers. Over the course of the game I uncover more of what caused the apocalypse, and Aloy’s link to it all. There is a lot of expository information thrown around, both through the narrative itself and old records Aloy finds and can read or listen to. But it doesn't feel like an overwhelming barrage of useless information. For starters, we’re more than halfway into the game when we start getting this and we've spent hours surrounded by these mysterious ruins and machines. At this point, we're ready for some answers. And, it's all related to Aloy. I'm connected to this history, and that connection might just help me figure out who I am. Assuming you're invested in her (and why wouldn't you be, Aloy’s great), you wanna know who you are. The exposition is important because it serves as a narrative catharsis to the character’s arc. In other words, the answers are the answer. The worst effect of the story is for the recipient to not care. When people monologue on about the geopolitical state of whatever, it’s easy to zone out. But when it’s personal, when the history of an apocalypse is relevant to your character, then it’s easier to care. And it helps when the world’s pretty dope.