Planetperson

Saturday, October 27, 2007 A Manas pair sits on the great Bionicle shelves in my basement. Just visiting the collection and admiring the Rahi this afternoon, I tried to reconnect the rubber bands that allow the set to function properly. One crusty old band broke when I touched it. The set has been mine for five years, after all. Not that it mattered -- as long as it was going to break whenever I next tried to put it to use again. Then glancing down at the Bahrag, I looked at their white-rubber bands, how they haven't corroded at all. I wondered at this point if it were even possible now, being 2007, for a Manas set in any person's collection still to be in mint condition, having its original rubber bands completely intact. Do think that somewhere on this planet there sits a Manas box truly unopened from 2001? It does seem, after all, to be the least-owned Bionicle set in history.

Oh my gosh, I've been looking for a way to do this for the longest time. Where did you discover this?

Heroes after ten? I do feel sorry for you. But you will still watch it, am I right?

Saturday, October 6, 2007 Ah, the good old days -- spent playing Pokemon cards on the playground. For all the time I spent with it and for all its fascination, the Pokemon TCG will forever be a part of me, even if my Pokemon days are long gone. And now my younger brother has given me a fun idea. This is a preview for something larger at hand, of course. However many duties I have in the real world, I will always devote time to some sort of artistic endeavor. And when it's Bionicle, I know I'm sharing it with a respectful community. You know, I really I can't tell you when I'll be prepared to release the full base set -- which I want to do -- because being in high school makes me a very busy man. That's basically been the story behind my terrible lack of blog activity in the last month and a half. But hopefully when I bring out the first full novelty Bionicle TCG set, it will amuse you as much as it does me to be working on it. More will follow.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007 Before I get to talk about my favorite TV show, I'd like to start off by wishing everyone a happy Master-Chiefocalypse. Yeah, you know what I mean. And I don't have an XBox 360 yet... Last night, I didn't care if I had two papers to write or five tests the next day -- I was going to watch the season premier of Heroes. I have to say that I was very impressed by last night. I was afraid that it wouldn't be very good, that the writers wouldn't have been able to take the plot any further after what happened in the season finale. But they sure as heck pulled it off. I liked how they made the elapsed time in the story real-time (four months) since last year's plot resolution. And I also liked the fact that Peter Petrelli survived... since he's only the most awesomely powerful person in the show. If you don't stick with any primetime TV shows, start watching Heroes.

Now, I like how you just didn't try on Ditto.

Makes them about as durable as a cracker, too.

Yeah,. a good couch is fun.

Sunday, September 9, 2007 If at first you don't succeed, you're in good company. Yesterday I finally beat Halo 2 in legendary mode, earning the highest level status "The Great Journey on Legendary" in my profile. It feels great not to be haunted by failure anymore, if you know what I mean. Beating the first Halo on legendary this summer was no problem. It was fun. It was great knowing that every time I sat down, I would at least get past the next checkpoint. Halo 2 was different, however. Would you believe that the first level was the hardest to beat of them all? The second room with the elites spilling out of the gravity tube presented a major roadblock for me. No matter what I tried or how aggressively I played, I couldn't ever kill them all before they gunned me down, laughing. I felt defeated and decided to give up if the entire game on legendary would be as impossible as this. But just to test my theory, I skipped over to the final level and played it. Through hard work, I actually did beat that level, though it did not amend my profile's highest level status. Then I knew what had to be done. I needed to play through all of the levels; and in order to do that, I needed to make another stand against those impossibly tenacious elites and graduate from the first level once and for all. It must have taken at least two weeks before I performed "the fluke." It was exactly what it sounds like; by some ridiculous miracle, I actually took all the enemies down one by one -- battle rifle sniping, grenades, sneak attacks, isolation, even clumsily pushing the surviving UNSC officer from the previous room into the current one in an attempt to jumble the game's enemy AI algorithms until I had only two of the white elites left that don't die when stuck by a plasma grenade. It probably took about ten minutes for me to take down one of them. For the final elite, I waited until he got mad and took out his energy sword, which made him helpless against my dual plasma rifles. At last I reached the next checkpoint. It was over, and at the same time just the beginning. The last week has been a brawl through the remaining levels to reach the end. The inflated sense of self-esteem came back again as I completed at least one new checkpoint at every sitting. And yesterday I finally conquered the last level I needed to finish. Now just for laughs, I'm smoking through the game on normal again.

Wednesday, August 8, 2007 What would the structure of the universe have looked like had it been left up to human imaginations? Judging off of appearances, one would not suspect that the sky was blue light reflected by air particles, that the earth was round and rotated on an axis, that day and night occurred depending on which side of the earth one was standing, that the earth orbited around the sun, that the sun was a giant fusion reaction eight light-minutes away. Some people in the past assumed that the world was flat; others, that it was contained in a dome-like firmament. Some cultures believed it was made up of layers or was just one of a multi-layered cosmos. Had humans created our universe, its basic concept may have been taken in a totally different direction from one made up of interacting atoms, energy, waves, strings, etc. Instead of matter obeying physical laws, perhaps physical occurences would be effected through the emotions or actions of the people that inhabited the universe. And physical occurences might not always have had a definite, core explanation as ours seems to have. The ancient Hebrews thought that their world resided in an earthen dome, or firmament, that sealed out water above that sometimes leaked out as rain or snow. It's not accurate at all with our modern understanding, but they deserve some credit. The aspects they included all seem to fit together and explain their position in the universe. Now look at a fictional universe, one of the dome-worlds of Bionicle: A world supposedly created by semi-omnipotent, sapient Great Beings looks very similar to one conceived by ancient men. Perhaps the Matoran thought something similar to what the Hebrews did of their universe. Their assumption of being contained in a giant hemisphere would have been correct, because it was designed by beings with similar senses of wisdom.

Saturday, July 14, 2007 Do you ever get the feeling that the day is too short? Do you feel like you had no morning? Do you sometimes even get mad at yourself for waking up at lunchtime because you feel that you were shortchanged a few hours of your day? That's who I am. Because it's summer, my whole schedule shifts so that I sleep only past midnight and wake up only past eleven. So this morning I forced myself to wake up at 7:15, just to experience what morning feels like again. Now I remember what I hate about it again...

Monday, July 2, 2007 Hi! Wow, Planeterson has actually reappeared in his blog! Raise your hand if you noticed I was gone! See, its just past one where I am, but I cant sleep. Well, I havent actually tried to lie in bed yet, so I guess I just dont want to sleep. And now Im blogging. Just like the previous entry -- same hotel, same WiFi, just opposite directions. So Im coming home tomorrow. Oops -- tonight, it is now.

Friday, June 22, 2007 Im on WiFi in a hotel halfway between home and New York state. I always dislike these long road trips. The hours spent in our sedan can become incredibly uncomfortable. The rest stops in Ohio are horrid. Ironically, our destination has many acres of space to run through. Anyway, to whom it may concern, Im slipping off the edge of the earth until I come back a little over a week from now, probably Sunday. See ya later.

Illinois/Indiana border.

Thursday, June 21, 2007 Happy Summer Solstice! Celebratory cookout!

Alright see ya then. But as far as I know, there's no giving up Bionicle rule upon entering high school. Remember eighth grade as one of the easiest years of your life. Why? You're big man on campus, and you pretty much did nothing, right? I may be wrong, but that is how I will always view my final year in grade school.

Thursday, June 14, 2007 That's right, Kickapoo. That would be the name of a state park I went to on Tuesday and Wednesday. It's summer, and my mom said we needed to go on an "adventure." So what we did was go tubing down a river. That sounded really cool to me for a while. I had this vision in which I could see all of us in a circle in this giant, yellow inner tube racing down the rushing river waters. With the wind blowing stiffly at our backs, the water would then turn white as we hit some bumpy rapids and we swerved through a bend. So... um... actually, it turned out that we took these tiny personal inner tubes and floated down a one-foot-deep river for two hours doing nothing. Even after that... slight disappointment, I decided to try kayaking. That was a step up, for sure, but still I know it wasn't the same when the waters were shallow enough to stand in. But I got out of the house and away from the computer for two days, and I guess that's alright. And I got a T-shirt. Of course, I made sure it had "KICKAPOO" printed on the front for all to see. In other news, my dreadful iPod saga continues! At last I found a free file converter available for download here. Please, please, if you are having file type troubles, please use this robust file converter for whatever video/music converting needs it can fulfill for you, and it won't cost you a thing. I was able to use it to convert some .mov files with muxed mpeg1 tracks into (supposedly) iPod-compatible mp4s. The sad thing is, the files seemed not to transfer over from iTunes onto the iPod, so my elusive goal of getting all of my Bionicle videos on my iPod still remains... exactly how I just described it -- elusive. Of course, although I haven't attempted it yet, I can't imagine I would have such troubles bringing the files over to my Archos 604 WiFi device, being made by the company that does things right. Well, I wish you luck in your own software endeavors/dillemmas/ordeals, and hope I may have just helped you on your way a bit.

I know someone who wouldn't shut up for a while about getting the Beta. Should I do something about that?

Who will see the play?

Friday, June 6, 2007 ~The End~ - The Arrival of Summer - and ..:Freedom:.. Sophomore year wasn't so tough as it was long. But I took my last final today. I'm done. Summer is here. And I am free at last.

Friday, June 1, 2007 Happy June.

Heroes is about "ordinary people with extraordinary abilities." Throughout the season we met a bunch of different, seemingly random characters who emerged with a variety of superhuman abilities. They each reacted to their new abilities in different ways, and in the end, we found out that all of these characters are more connected than they would have realized. Of course, they also had skirmishes with a super-powered bad guy, which was cool.

Oh yeah, I'm definitely in on this.

One word: mp4. In my experience, Macs and everything else don't mix.

Wow, good one.