Sumiki

It's different at every school. Lots of places will have you write a piece and also write either a theory or musicology paper that may or may not be related to the thing you wrote. I had it relatively easy by only having to do the piece, present on it for about 40 minutes, and then get absolutely grilled by a bunch of professors for about an hour ... ! And all that for three fun letters to put after my name.

The Motion of Light in Water by Samuel R. Delany. Wonderfully vivid portrait of his early life and career and his gradual understanding of community and identity.

Sumiki Investigates. All this and zero mention of the legend of Sumiki's Dad. Like what is AI even doing at this point

Has it really been this long? Geez. Do people even remember me? When I last posted a blog entry, I had just finished college. My grandmother willed herself to live long enough to see my live-streamed graduation, and I started grad school outside of Boston rooming with my best friend from college, an organist looking to get a church gig in a big city who tethered himself to wherever I ended up going. Grad school was way more intense than I expected. It requires an enormous amount of self-motivation compared to undergraduate work, especially in the humanities. On top of that, the pandemic meant a full 2/3 of it was online—which, in music composition, was a lot of writing music and not too many performances of it. Plus, doctoral programs cut back on admissions or paused them entirely. 2020 is also when I fell in love with the woman who is now my wife, and I have many wonderful memories of our first days together at the end of an otherwise miserable and deeply scary year. Our relationship was long-distance as she was still in grad school in Boston while I moved to Buffalo to begin a PhD. Those two years were my first spent living alone, which in a lot of ways I really liked. I'd always liked the snow (growing up in North Carolina meant we only got a full, fun, sleddable amount of it once every few years), so I've come to really like western New York in a lot of ways, from city life to the suburbs, and even to small towns. So now I'm in the final year of the PhD, where the piece of music I wrote for my dissertation has been performed, and now all that's left is to defend it. I've been teaching a lot, including a class on the Beatles in the 1960s. See you in a few more years, I guess? Or maybe I'll stick around. All my Lego is still back in North Carolina and I've only taken a few small trinkets with me on my various moves over the years. Two of our three cats would be absolute menaces with the stuff.

The life jacket makes for some really nice color layering on the second one—and I do love the teal. Is that ... Galidor? Mad props if so. The whole foot-less aesthetic has always intrigued me, though I can't say I understand it.

If Lego decides to bring it back, for sure they'll go with another generation. If you're asking about a fan-driven reboot, it seems that we're all pretty comfortable working in the universes already created (or alternative versions of them), so pulling in the same direction for an unofficial G3 would be worse than herding cats.

I made it up when I was eight years old for my first MOC. My second MOC was a "Toa of Sushi," so I kinda dodged a bullet there.

You've managed to recontextualize a happy-go-lucky smile into the grimace of someone paralyzed in the kind of nightmare where you can only use your eyes to cry for help, and I'm not entirely sure how to feel about that

If only the rubber band holders' gray were the same as the rest of the gray ... nice work on using those, by the way. They make neat landing gear. Love seeing Mata torsos getting some love too, as in the second one.

Frankly it's just nice to still have forums somewhere on the Internet. I miss forums. Can we sacrifice social media to have more of these? The BZP heyday was something to behold. EDIT: Holy moly I've been on this site for over 13 years. That's over half my life

Oh man there was this one comedy that just ... blew up. It was at the top of the hot topics list for weeks, if not months. All I remember is the premise that various characters were working at a McDonald's. Can't for the life of me remember the name of it, other than that it got shut down very suddenly one day.

The more hindsight I have, the more I've gained a distaste for the Piraka. I don't mind prefab torsos and the Inika torso is incredibly versatile, but the Piraka torso is hard to use, doesn't have many connection points, juts out at weird angles in certain places, and largely only came in metallic colors, which limits it use in MOCing. The spines were a neat idea but limited arm and head poses, the big feet on half of them were just odd, and why did they have to have arms of two different sizes? Is there some T-Rex blood in their families? Plus Avak's head never worked right and that always upset me.

Have we considered the possibility that the Piraka themselves wrote and recorded it

My grandmother died this morning at the age of 77. Words can’t even begin to describe the misery she went through in the past several years of her life. Her immense medical record was just about as long as the list of doctors who were mortified at the prospect of having to navigate the murky medical waters of a woman who, by all rights, should have been dead five times over. Between her assisted living facility, the various wards of the hospital, and rehab facilities spanning across several counties, she was a threat to sap the combined medical resources of the greater Charlotte area. 77 is not an old age, but aside from her thinning, yet stubbornly black hair, her body might as well have been 97. I don’t know, at this point, what finally did her in, but I can venture a guess that it’s something to do with the all-too-uncommon perils of someone with her comorbidities: her stage 2 kidney failure prevented her from taking the full dose of diuretics necessary to get the inevitable fluid buildup away from her heart and lungs, while her stage 3/borderline stage 4 heart failure had a hard time keeping up with the volume overload. People in her condition walk a thinner and thinner tightrope until they (or their loved ones) are forced into choosing death by kidney failure or death by heart failure. It was getting to a point where we would have been forced into making a difficult decision on her behalf. While she never suffered from any sort of neurological conditions (other than lifelong anxiety and depression), she was so tired—especially in the final months—that she could barely lift up her head, and her generally high creatinine levels (a byproduct of kidney failure) led to many a moment when the vivid imagination of her dreams got to her in her few remaining waking hours. She would have been in no condition to weigh the awful choice which was coming her way; a nursing home would have been the next step, and that process would have been an unimaginable emotional anguish for everyone involved. Her passing, while undeniably sad, is a weight lifted. Her condition would have killed a lesser person, and her life is a testament to a strength of willpower so strong that the rest of us would do well for ourselves in life if we had the tiniest fraction of hers. You often hear about deaths like this being sad, but not too sad, because they’re “expected.” As cliché as that might be, I can attest to its accuracy, having seen her on her deathbed on multiple occasions within the past several years. It was hard on those occasions because we grieved her passing and got through the emotions associated with such a loss, only for her to pull out and get through another two years. Even towards the end, she had good days, good weeks, and even good months. She found as much joy as possible in the little pleasures and comforts still available to her—watching the livestream of my graduation, hosting her bridge club for the final time—up through May. When it became clear that her body wouldn’t get back to the quality of life she once enjoyed, it shut down for good; that fight to get to the next goal, the next thing-she-was-looking-forward-to, just wasn’t there this time. If there’s anyone who taught me perseverance in the face of adversity, it’s her, and I hope that I can follow her example for the rest of my life.

Topic closed at the request of the starter.

Despite not having tradition features, this guy's got a lot in the way of character and expression! Would you consider adding a few more touches of chrome here and there to complement the metal of the spring in the middle of his torso? It's the only thing that stands out, and even then it's very minor.

Matthew Ewald is too good for this world, too pure

How does this differ from the mask released with the Berix set?

Apparently, "not blood." Kopaka.

Congratulations!

Congrats!

Congratulations!

Congrats!

Congratulations!

Congrats!