dviddy

Too bad you won't find any "skeleball" on there. Since that doesn't exist.

They are very very good sets. I still can't get over how great they look.

Just as an fyi, the LEGO team said during the ramp up to BIONICLE 2015 that BIONICLE's main audience and best market was the US. Well the ask max page said otherwise, although maybe in the earlier years the U.S was the best and then Europe took over (possibly due to bio's decline). Not really, what you paraphrased doesn't say BIONICLE was more popular in Europe, just that it was the second most popular theme in Europe. Even if Star Wars was the most popular theme in the US, and BIONICLE was behind that, it's still possible that BIONICLE sales out-paced and out-performed European sales. The US is TLG's second-biggest market (behind Germany), and the creative team this past summer made no secret that BIONICLE was always a more US-centric theme in sales and focus. (As an aside, Hero Factory apparently performed best in Russia and the Ukraine, where it was immensely popular.)

Just as an fyi, the LEGO team said during the ramp up to BIONICLE 2015 that BIONICLE's main audience and best market was the US.

Destiny on its own is absolutely a theme in an academic sense, though as I jokingly pointed out, it's often referred to as fate. The two are simple synonyms which, when used in a literary sense, refer to the dual ideas of free will and predestination. Heavy themes echoed throughout world history in both literature and religion. Otherwise, my post was a bit of tongue-in-cheek reference to how the very first answer in the topic simply chose close synonyms for the words the story developers for MoL decided were important. I have a lot of issue with the UDD as thematically relevant or as particularly important as a core story concept, but the joke was too good to pass up.

Brickfair is the best week of the year for me. It's the event we most look forward to, and the last few especially have just been lights-out amazing. I highly recommend it to not just you, but to everybody!

This is the realest though.

I don't know, the wording seems... off. Would you accept the slight-synonyms of unity, duty, and destiny???

Just pointing out that even stories that set out to purposefully avoid having a theme or "saying something" are, by the very nature of their story, saying something. Storytelling is primal- it's the deepest form of social communication documented in human history. We've been telling stories longer than we've been writing, drawing, recording. I was going to say, I agree with a lot of this in here. It's a more post-modern reading of stories and literature in that they don't have to be internally consistent, and that fiction and story-telling is inherently flawed because so are the story-tellers. This sort of literary criticism has been causing a huge stir in the literary world (and also in the religious community, as literary criticism is the same method used for exegeting things like the Bible). I subscribe to it pretty fully, with the caveat that new ideas work best when standing on top of old ideas. But I also think a good story mixes a good theme and strong premise with internal consistency. Though sometimes contradictions also have something to add to the story. I think all stories have themes, they all say something, even when unintentional. (In fact, stories where the author wrote the work solely to promote a singular theme often come off as uninspired and boorish, as I find the case with The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald is all too proud of himself and it makes the work insufferable.) Sometimes an author sets out to tell one moral, and a separate one emerges (Fahrenheit 451, for example, was written explicitly to showcase how television was ruining the world, but tells a story about how censorship is wrong instead, much to the author's anger and denial. The them is there, whether the author intended it or not). A story can, and a good story often does, take work to fully understand. But not the same kind of work BIONICLE often does. Needing mathematical theorems to understand the relative sizes of celestial bodies is certainly something you'll find in other fandoms (looking at you, Star Wars and Star Trek), but it isn't required. I've seen Bonesiii say several times over the years that BIONICLE purposefully took work to understand, and that this was an intentional part of the line's core theme as a toyline- but he's the only one I've ever see say that, and it feels uncorroborated. The line's concepts and themes are blessedly simple, the storytelling often juvenile and simplistic, and the only "complexity" inherent in the line is the absurd amount of extraneous details and random answers we've been given via the "Word of God" from outside the story itself. This is a rambling random mishmash of literary nonsense, but this stuff is important to me as someone who studied literature for several years in college before switching to a different major entirely. All stories say something, even when they're not trying to. Sometimes because they're not trying to. But don't discount the purpose of enjoyment and cathartic release either. Sometimes a story simply says "have fun" and that's okay too.

But the story wasn't complex- it had a lot of extraneous details, but those generally had no impact on the actual story. The entire theme could be told ignoring all of the names of random character seven from the background of that flashback from that one serial who wore that one mask, and everything would be fine. The complexity of G1 that people seem to think existed really didn't. It had multiple media sources, which meant you had to read a book, a comic, an online serial, and maybe watch a film in certain years, which made following the story more complex and often acted as a barrier to fans in parts of the world or even parts of the US, but the story itself was overwhelmingly simple. Having a lot of details that don't impact the story isn't how you make a complex story. It's artificial, it's false. I miss a lot of things, and I'm with Lyichir that I'd love something like the MNOG- but TLG's proven that was a fluke and though the new team talked a devotion to it, it's clear that a game like that will never exist again. I wish it would. The MNOG is what sucked me into this world and the world never let go, even though it got pretty bad as the years waned. I love the CCBS, but I'd like to see new feet because I hate these ones, and I would like to see more parts in more colours. I've gotten used to the fist pieces, but I agree that they often feel too big. Otherwise, a few more discussions with the story team here and there would be awesome. Not like Greg answering questions on BZP daily level, that was too much and created a lot of problems for the fanbase that still linger today. But maybe little blurbs explaining more of the background, or even just why they've made the decisions they've made would be awesome.

I'm not sure which parts you are talking about. Do you mean shells or bones? Yes. This is spot on. I love the CCBS, I love the smooth textures and smooth aesthetic. I just want more parts in more colours.

Those orange shoulder pads... I need that part in my life.

Which is exactly what we got with every setting post-Metru Nui. We got an island shape, some concept art, a few descriptions (maybe) of some local villages or landmarks, and that's it. People act like G1 was this massive story where the landscapes and places had character themselves, but after the first two islands, they were simply settings glossed over to focus on the Toa and villains at the expense of everything else. Were it not for MNOG or the Metru-Nui films, honestly we wouldn't have even had real settings there either. In G1 we got "the scary island of doom, the water island, the cave ceiling, the swamp, and the desert planet". That's about all we got, though Bara Magna did at least give us "we have villages that are giant robot parts apparently and we fight in arenas". Still not seeing much more than what we have now in that. Sometimes I think people have built up this vision of this grand storytelling adventure in G1 that the reality just doesn't support. We had four books a year, with months in between them where there was no story information. It felt more exciting just by virtue of having Greg to constantly answer ceaseless questions, but nothing really happened in those down times. And even then, we weren't allowed to talk about the books on BZP for stupidly large amounts of time after publishing to avoid spoilers. We were all younger and passionate- things weren't as intense as you remember them being. Or perhaps I was mostly reffering to Mata-Nui/2001 when I was saying gen 1? Maybe I wasn't entirely clear about things, but sometimes I feel people like you just go around hunting for reasons to say people with different ideas/opinions are wrong. I never said the original Bionicle was perfect, but at the beginning things were a lot more fleshed out/interesting than they are now. Also nice to see none of my other criticisms are even relevant, so long as you find some way to pull some miniscule satisfaction out of saying one of my points is wrong. I'm not blinded by nostalgia, I'm looking at things realistically, and though later years of Bionicle weren't completely fleshed out, they weren't even part of the point I was trying to make. It's completely idiotic to try and compare one year to ten, so I had hoped it would be implied enough that I was only using the beginning of Bionicle. Bruh, chillax. If you were referring to mostly Mata-Nui 2001, then say so. Considering I left that doorway wide open in my post as well, you'd think there's a bit more agreement here than you want to find. Your post generalized as if you were referring to the entirety of G1 compared to three months of G2. Which is unfair and more than a little annoying at this point. If you want to do more than imply, next time, clarify. That said, you're still off. I didn't bother with the rest of your post because this little nugget summed most of it up pretty well. There simply wasn't much emphasis on culture, society, or even mythology by the time the Metru-Nui sagas ended. We got "this island is DARK AND DANGEROUS!" and then we moved. We got "this island is UNDERWATER" and then we moved. Nary a bit on any culture or society in any of those. I think your criticisms are unfair and I said so. You wrote more than anyone else in this topic- it seemed fair to interact with it. But for the whole "we had more than this by this point in G1"... we really didn't. We had what, two comic issues? And the bios on BIONICLE.com were not only pretty bare, but not even canon by the time the line really got going (Lewa as the youngest, Onua as the oldest, etc). What we did have was the first chapter of the MNOG, and I think everyone who experienced the beginning of both lines from the start can agree that MNOG was one of the defining aspects of the first line, but outside of the feature films, the only real piece of media that actually immersed us in true world-building and gave us a feel of what life was like and what the culture was like. It's a shame that even the second game failed to do much in the way of cultural immersion and world-building, trading those in for annoying fetch quests that took hours and Kolhii matches. Look, I loved G1 just as much as everyone else here (I have a kakama tattooed on my shoulder, after all!) It inspired me and changed me and completely altered the trajectory of my life. I'm with you on how it made you feel. It was special. And that feeling, that special, amazing, life-altering feeling, it just doesn't happen that much, and to expect it again from the second iteration, as older persons in different life situations than we were the first time is to misunderstand the way media interacts with our lives. Were it a new theme entirely, built on a different foundation with different expectations, we'd be having different conversations. But that's not how human nature works.

Yes please.

Which is exactly what we got with every setting post-Metru Nui. We got an island shape, some concept art, a few descriptions (maybe) of some local villages or landmarks, and that's it. People act like G1 was this massive story where the landscapes and places had character themselves, but after the first two islands, they were simply settings glossed over to focus on the Toa and villains at the expense of everything else. Were it not for MNOG or the Metru-Nui films, honestly we wouldn't have even had real settings there either. In G1 we got "the scary island of doom, the water island, the cave ceiling, the swamp, and the desert planet". That's about all we got, though Bara Magna did at least give us "we have villages that are giant robot parts apparently and we fight in arenas". Still not seeing much more than what we have now in that. Sometimes I think people have built up this vision of this grand storytelling adventure in G1 that the reality just doesn't support. We had four books a year, with months in between them where there was no story information. It felt more exciting just by virtue of having Greg to constantly answer ceaseless questions, but nothing really happened in those down times. And even then, we weren't allowed to talk about the books on BZP for stupidly large amounts of time after publishing to avoid spoilers. We were all younger and passionate- things weren't as intense as you remember them being.

I'm certain there would probably be other people at some point, but it would mainly just be Micah and I. Most people here haven't experienced it, but for a year Micah and I lived a mile apart in Portland, and it was awesome. We would talk MOCs all the time, and it's really hard to get a word in edgewise when him and I get going. Any guests would have to have the ability to jump in at any moment and figure out how to get us to shut up. Also, full disclosure: we would probably swear a lot, just so we're all aware. We weren't planning on it being a BZP feature, but more like something cross-posted to various places but hosted probably on Youtube with some sort of visual component.

Ant-Man is going to be six feet of snark. Paul Rudd is nothing but snark. Snark that somehow never gets older and continues to look like he did in Clueless, but snark nonetheless!

Like a lot of artistic things, you can teach technique and theory, but there has to be some sort of internal talent and "eye" for a lot of things. You can teach someone a technique, even why it is a technique that works and when it works, but that doesn't mean you can teach an understanding. THAT said, Kakaru and I have been throwing around a MOCing podcast idea for awhile, and have been trying to conceptualizer a format and get the equipment together to make it a thing. So a thing talking about our views and techniques and theory is definitely something we would like to do.

Be careful- the more you play around with CCBS the less you'll want to play around with other parts. I used to build with so much system, but I find all the textures and curvature I used to use literally dozens of fragile system parts and system connections for can be replicated with CCBS parts. And not only can they be replaced with CCBS parts, but I can now use three parts where I would use twenty. It's a sudden and jarring change for a lot of folks, but I almost find it freeing. Instead of saying "I already used this as an arm, maybe I need some new designs?" I just use shells and focus instead on what defines the character I'm building. It's a focus on depiction over technique in a lot of ways, but I think the two feed into one another in a lot of ways. In a weird way, though they have almost gotten simpler, my MOCs currently feel like more of an embodiment of that "perfect action figure design" Jinzo was always on about. /digression All of that said, there was a little flair-up on my Flickr over these "gaps" on the calves and knees you mention here. A few folks mentioned them as well as detriments, but as I said there, I literally don't see them. The "empty space" between the sides of the shells and the sockets doesn't exist to me. Curves flow into one another, the parts flow solidly into the ones below. Obviously you can't see the sides of the legs since this is the only photo I currently have, but there are shells on the lower legs (that the new add-on attaches to) that help finish the leg's simple flow. I just don't see these gaps as a thing, and I think maybe we as a community might have to untrain ourselves to stop seeing "gaps" or empty connections as detriments, because the CCBS system is the future. It's not going away, you know? And the technic-heavy, "custom everything" builds look so unsightly and unwieldy 98% of the time compared to CCBS builds. I don't know. I'm drifting from the point again. The back of the arm is the brain attack HF torso with a red boat stud attached via minifig clip through the chest section of the torso shell (where the HF "H" round part would go). Simple but I wanted something detailed and bigger to help set the two arms apart from one another. You can zoom in on the head on my Flickr photo. The "has more personality" thing is really the thing I want to hone in on. This is the entire point of why I do what I do. I want to bring characters to life. In a way, all of these MOCs are little OCs with backstories and personalities that are all told solely through their visual presentation. I don't want to just build another cool humanoid warrior thing- I want to build a person. Something you could look at and say "this MOC looks like it would like rock music" or "I bet this guy tells bad jokes but doesn't care". Things like that. When you're in such a visual medium, there's no other way to tell the story properly. You can say in your description "this MOC is a super magical girl who hates fighting, she's not a physical fighter" but if you've build a giant, buff-as-rocks woman, does the story fit the build? Is that really who you built? Man you made me go and right several treatises on building. For shame Tess! Well, in the elaborate backstory I built for her in my head whilst I built her, she's a demon princess (hence the horns) from a kingdom of darkness. Her regular skin is white (hence the face and the white fingers on the normal hand), but she's a warrior princess in a demon regime, so her other hand is a corrupted claw covered in armour. Something to make her look a little less cutesy and a little more monstrous. I was also sort of worried that she'd end up looking too adorable and perfect and not "villain" enough in the eyes of a lot of people. So, claw hand! Plus I wanted to use some of the literally hundreds of dark grey skull spider legs I own.

Think of the colours more like you would see on a costume in a movie, or a video game, or something like that, versus the way the community has usually done colours (primary plus secondary plus tertiary (usually black or a "highlight" colour). It's more akin to a character study or sketch design you'd see on a storyboard for a game or a film. Well hey there buddy. Where you been??? Can you believe how long it's been since what felt like our heyday? Yet here we still are. Crazy, isn't it? The cape does look weird in the photos, and it's also because the photos look weird. You saw the photo of Lily, which is more like my usual current photo editing standards. But I also usually have a professional studio and lighting setup, and right now I've just got some stuff I rigged together to make due with. We just moved to SoCal and my photo equipment stuff is still in storage. Soon! I didn't plan a cape for the MOC... ever? Then it was sitting in front of me and I put it there and I sat back and went "woah". It was exactly the thing I needed to push the MOC over the edge, you know? It just completed the entire thing. The feather/wing piece is just a little piece of flair. Something silly and sort of iconic at the same time. It reminds me a lot of the plume on swashbuckling headwear, and while he doesn't have a hat, he does have a mask and goggles! Honestly the MOC looks sort of empty without it. It's sort of character-defining at this point for me. The wrists hold exceptionally well. The sockets come with several sets now, but were mostly released in the Mixels line (concurrent with their release with the Chima legend beast sets) a year or so back. They are perfect. They hold every weapon I've built for them without slipping. For 90% of my builds now this is my go-to hand. Four fingers still isn't five, but it's more realistic than three, and looks superior to the molded fist I still hate. Humility.

Okay so this was my last-minute entry to that whole "battle for the Gold Mask" thing. I didn't quite have time for anything intense, but I felt with all the help Julie and the CEE team had been to us with the NYCC stuff and the parts and all, that I should at least build something! So this is what I came up with. It's not an intense MOC by any means, but I'm pretty dang proud of how she turned out. I've been having a lot of fun with character design work, and I think this is one of the best MOCs in that regard I've done. I like it a lot, and I hope you do too! And if you don't, that's chill, but I do so I'm not worried. For some reason this is the only photo I took? I think because of the mad rush to get it in before the deadline. Oh well.

Whoo! What a great little blog contest we had here. As I said, it ended sometime on a Saturday that happened recently, so let's cut to the chase and see our winners, shall we?? From ~Shockwave~: From Dina Saruyama: From tylericious definicious: And last but not least, from Sumiki: As you can see, the simpler, clever puns are the ones I gravitate towards. Remember this! Who says this is the only pun contest this lil' blog will have???? Oh WAIT WHAT'S THIS A SURPRISE FIFTH WINNER? WHAT, THAT'S CRAZY! From Takuma Nuva: I think it's fair to say he put too much work into this piece of clever mask art not to recognize it. So now we're giving out FIVE masks because it's my contest and I can change the number if I want to! Anyway, if you are listed here, send me a PM with your address, and I will mail you a mask! Unless I'm going to see you at Brickfair VA, which I know is four months away, but I'm going to just bring you one (Sumiki). Thanks for all the amazing puns you guys, I really enjoyed them all! And be on the lookout for other ways to get a clear NYCC mask from yours truly!

| Hi guys. Long time no post, for reasons I'm not sure of? I mean, I've built a lot of MOCs the past six months! I've really been playing with character design and the CCBS system. This MOC is a tribute to our very own Kakaru, who goes by Arkov on most other LEGO sites (specifically Flickr). That name just seems to flow better for the vaguely steampunk, swashbuckling motif going on here. Speaking of which, what I really wanted to do here was create a MOC that represented a more fantasy/swashbuckling style than the usual "character in body armour" look we all tend to gravitate towards. I think I succeeded! His weapon is an electric baton, powered by some sort of battery on his back. Anyway, off to post another MOC topic!

Congrats guys! Really proud of how well these entries represented the theme! Any of the top several could have been the winner, and absolutely deserved it!

I mean, people keep forgetting too that it's a holiday weekend, and Denmark loves their holidays. Most of the team probably had the last several days off.