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Photos on Instagram I've honestly not purchased a lot of Friends sets in recent years. First I started collecting from the theme because of the new pastel colors, but the novelty kinda wore off after a while (and I started focusing on the Elves theme instead) so I haven't picked up any. But this set had a few fun pieces that I was interested to get. And besides, I've always been tempted by submarine sets. The figs are... honestly I don't care, which is kinda unusual for me. The designs and hair pieces are nice but I have no real need for the minidolls. (I hear this is a scene directly from the show though, and the other character is actually an antagonist, so that's cool.) Indeed, the bigger drawl was the wildlife. The adult dolphin isn't new but I love the mold so I can appreciate another one. The baby dolphin is a great addition too, and actually has better connection anti-studs, so more versatile. Plus, the pack of coral-colored sea life is great, with fish, clams, seahorses, starfish, and an octopus; these are super fun and I can't wait to find a way to incorporate them into a MOC. If we're also looking at new molds, the teal seaweed / coral elements also greatly interests me. The plethora of pins and attachments is inspiring me to have fun with these somehow. I am a bit disappointed that they are very much unsymmetrical, but that just adds further challenges to using them in builds. And the angles are quite fun to experiment with. You get three pieces in this set, which is a nice start, but I'm thinking I'll need a lot more to really come up with something crazy. (And I've apparently angered a lot of folks in LUGBulk by making these my part choice. Hehehe.) The first big build is the submarine, which is well rounded and compact. It's not a super intricate build by any standards, but the rounded doors in the back and the bubble window are positioned quite well, and the setup inside to seat the minidoll works quite well. It's a bit of a junorized built but it works well. My biggest gripe is that the arms on the front are too short to really be useful. (I'm sorry, I'm nostalgic for the Aquazone subs and their lanky arms.) The two mini-builds that you build before the sub, on the other hand, are forgettable. The landscape piece is very simple (and I guess it has a cloth that reveals a treasure map when it gets wet... I didn't really deal with that element.). The underwater scooter also positions the propeller right beneath the diver's belly, which seems unsafe. The best part of the build was the sunken ship wreckage. It was kinda fun building a mini pirate ship and then covering it with sealife. The stern of the ship has a neat technique that angles it upward pretty nicely, but the bow's angled attempt is a much weaker connection that is prone to breaking whenever the model gets moved. There are a few hiding spots for fish and the baby dolphin built around the ship, and the mast has an action feature where it can fall down and pin the dolphin, which necessitates the need for the sub to swing by and help them out. It's also not a super complex design, but it really does a great job at setting the undersea location. Very well done. For $39.99 USD, only 363 seems a little low, but the coral, dolphins, and sea life elements bring up the value. It's also the second cheapest set for the teal coral and baby dolphin, the cheapest set for the coral colored sea life elements, but it has them all in one set. Plus, the sub and sunken ship are fun designs and add a lot of play value. Yeah, it won't win set of the year, but it's a modestly priced set that does a great job at bringing out the Friends underwater adventure. And it's been a while since a Friends set caught my eye, so I'd say it's worth it. (Granted, I bought it nearly six months ago but only recently put it together, so I guess I wasn't that hard pressed for the pieces.)

Untitled spider tank Untitled rover for Febrovery Matilda (of Robot Wars fame) Gallery VIC-R 'The Officiator' (part of a collab with some other hot boys & gamer girls here's the gallery) (yo is there a way to centre-align images in blogs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4yr5ozlQyUA&list=WL&index=3 I'm 17 orange again! Wheeeee! (Also, that is probably my favorite song by the Fold as of yet.) (And this is basically a head-off of all of that "Congrats on the orange!" nonsense. I was there, then I was not, and now I'm back, and should have never left.)

Another year has gone by, and so it's time for another top five. 2019 was better than usual for films; I feel like I saw a really diverse set of movies, more diverse than I usually do, and almost all of them in the cinema too. As usual, there are a few films I did not get to, which I'll give honorable mentions to now: How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World - while I doubt it would have made my top five or even come close, the first film in this trilogy remains one of my all-time favorites. Though the trailers to the finale didn't sell me on it, I have heard that it's very good. I should probably give it a proper chance. 1917 - It hasn't had a wide release in Canada yet, but will within the next two weeks. I guess since the wide release is technically this month, I might actually count it for 2020, and maybe it'll make the next top five.... That's about it. For once, I feel like I actually managed to see just about every movie that I was interested in. Feels weird. Anyway, onto the top five of the year. #1: Avengers: Endgame Avengers: Endgame isn't the best movie that was released this year, and it isn't even the best movie in the MCU. I think Infinity War is probably the better movie between the two, but I also think it's important to judge Endgame as the event and phenomenon that it was. Providing a satisfying conclusion to 11 years of story and 22 movies was a near impossible task, and yet Marvel managed it with flying colors (barring a few missteps - it REALLY sucks that Black Widow was by far at her all-time best in this movie, only for her time in it to be cut so short). Ultimately, Endgame is the movie that impacted me the most this year. These characters and stories have come to mean a lot to me in the past 11 years, and getting a proper sendoff meant a lot. I cried during my first viewing of the film, and continued to tear up at points during repeat viewings. The MCU will continue on - but this was the end, and I don't believe the MCU will ever really reach this point again. #2: Knives Out Rian Johnson has discussed possibly doing a sequel to this movie if it does well, starring Benoit solving a different case. I hope he does, because Knives Out was just a whole lot of fun, and I'd love to see a little bit more from this world. Plus, I can't get enough of Daniel Craig's outrageous accent. #3: Joker Joker was another cultural phenomenon. It was rather fascinating to watch Gotham descend into anarchy, while Arthur Fleck disappeared into the Joker. #4: Ford v Ferrari Matt Damon is always fun to see onscreen, and Christian Bale does a wonderful job here too. The racing is heart-racing (pardon the pun), the struggle between these two individuals and their corporate overlord feels real. #5: Ad Astra Sad Space Man Brad Pitt goes off on a quiet, lonely adventure through space. Ad Astra isn't for everybody - it probably isn't for a lot of people - but I enjoyed it a lot, and found it a nice change of pace. - And those are my top five films for 2019. Tomorrow, I'll do a Top Ten of the Decade.

So BZP got a revamp, and only went down for a few month. Now it's back and I have to get used to all the changes!! I think the blogs got the worst of it, TBH. Although this does seem more in line with other personal blogs I've seen elsewhere on the internet, so it's probably a modern template that's cool for everybody but those of us (like me) who are so used to the old BZP / Invasion format. This new one looks like it could incorporate pictures better, so that's something I'll have to start thinking more about. So far my photo uploads have just been scenic mountain shots from various trips... but I'm boring and don't do as many of them anymore, so I'm going to need to diversify. The lost of the custom sidebars is also disappointing, but I also noticed that all the various blog tags and groupings have been trashed, so now I have 10+ years of unmarked entries, and at least a few of them were useful and will take a while to find by just scrolling thru. Anyway, as for what I did this summer... go to work and get by. I did manage to make some MOCs and attended BrickFair for the first time in three years. It was a lot of fun to hang out with folks again, although I felt a bit mellow over the weekend and didn't have a big rush rush rush to do everything. (I didn't participate in any of the official games because I was too lazy). Also didn't win anything, but my Mt. St. Helens lenticular mosaic did get nominated, which was awesome. (And also a little odd because it's a repeat MOC, but then again I didn't exactly disqualify it when I entered it in.) Outside of work and some Lego, I've played a lot of Pokémon Go and reached level 40, finally. But gosh darn it, there are still more to collect, so I'm still playing. I'm also playing the Harry Potter Wizards Unite game, but in general it is less compelling than PokeGo. The previous game I was all in on, Ingress, did an upgrade last year that totally broke the gameplay mechanics and I still haven't been able to get back into it. Which is a shame; it was fun to travel to different places and use the game as kind of a tour guide to various local art and scenic spots. I've also looked into working more on my stories, or in particular reposting them. I finally signed onto Fanfiction.net and started posting a few of my Bionicle stories. (Because, honestly BZP is not the hotspot for library posts anymore, sorry.) Not that this site is any better... I haven't looked around really hard, but the quality of the average story is pretty bad. (I mean, we all had to start somewhere, so fair is fair.) But I don't know if there's a readership for lengthy Bionicle novels. But I did start reposting one of my old popular stories, Time Disruption. (I checked on the Wayback machine and I started that story on 10-11-2003. It's also crazy that it was popular enough that I was able to find a Wayback entry for it; the Epic forum was so crowded back in the day and Wayback is spotty about archiving forums.) Anyway, after doing a editing run through, I'm still impressed with my teenage writing, even if the language is a bit more basic than what I write now... and I desperately needed an editor. Man, no wonder half the comments were about spelling and grammar errors, they were bloody everywhere! But I've started reposting that story (all 63+ chapters) and it's been getting a lot of views... so I guess people still like it. (It also doesn't focus on crazy custom characters, so I'm sure that helps.) I've also had readership of my Hero Factory story when I didn't think there was any audience for that! I've written it so far in batches for NaNoWriMo, so maybe I'll work on the final part for it this year. I've also been playing in Voltex's BZPGOT RPG on Discord for months and months now... and the activity there certainly helped when BZP went down. It's fun to play, but the Discord format is a bit easier than the forums, and I managed to get into the lore with only a few weeks (or months) of what-am-I-doing-ness. I can now see why the RPGers are the ones keeping this community alive. I've gotten a few cool Lego sets over the summer, but kind of slacked off in doing reviews and such. Last spring, my camera's charging cord vanished, making said camera unusable, so I haven't had anything to take decent review pictures with besides my phone, which is only so-so. Chocolate Frogs and I were planning to pull off a few more livestreams, but then Youtube changed the system and we haven't been able to figure out an Encoder that works, so that's been put on hold for a while. I have a backlog of sets I want to build, but haven't gotten any truly big ones... except for the Bricklink models, which I ordered back in March and received in August. The Western Saloon is an awesome design, although the instructions make it a bit difficult to distinguish between the various shades of brown. I would like to do some more reviews, either official or just generic blog posts, but I'm a combination of lazy / exhausted most of the time. Maybe I'll put together some just to test the picture capabilities of the new blog system. Anyway, here's to another long and rambling post. Honestly don't know if anybody will bother reading (did they ever?) But the post count now including blogs really upped my count; I went from 6K to 8K, so I'm guessing it was the blogs. I know in the old forums when there was a list of the most comment / most viewed / most posted of the blogs, I was in the top three (or top one, I forget) of the blog with the most entries. Not views or comments, but entries. So I like typing a lot and posting stuff nobody reads. I hope to continue hiding subliminal messages in walls of text as long as BZPower lets me! Thanks for reading, take care y'all! (yay at least the emotes stayed the same, I would be sad without my signoff)

It makes everything better.