Millennium

Using Hero Factory torso armors in cool ways? And the leg armor from the first wave, too. That does it for me. What else can I say? He nails the brute character perfectly; I'm not sure if the light in his chest is supposed to be an eye/head of some sort, but I gotta say the holes in the upper/central part of the Hero Factory chestplate look like eyes and mouth, and that's great. What are the blades on the back for?

Impressive. Black and yellow is a simple yet always fluent colour scheme. I like the abscene of eyes: being a thunder dragon, I like to think it does not need to actually see, and instead visualizes its surroundings with sound waves, like a bat, but better.

We are really running out of ideas to keep this community alive. Sushi love.

Magic loves infinity - Septicflesh

Anastasia - Voltaire

Holy Mata Nui cow. That thing is frightening, Gadunka's head never looked so good - and scary. The trans-red creates an awesome and creepy and totally new look to that piece. Wings are cool, size is impressive, combination of old and new Bionicle is lovely.

These are just awesome. Placing Bionicles in their natural environment has always been my dream, and while I could (I live in the countryside) I never had enough of them, and no photography skills whatsoever. Amazing work.

History of the Conquest of Mexico by William H. Prescott. Or, History of Hernan Cortes, as it should be named. It does not care much about the Mesoamerican world, culture, and lifestyle, the beginning chapters about Aztec politics and daily life are vague and way too harsh, preferring to describe the intrepid, heroic character that Cortes has been through all his life. I must admit that Prescott's style is captivating, making me end the book in a few days, but he is too indulgent towards the atrocities committed by the Conquistadors, justifying them because they were moved by the 'superior' call to christen those unknown, 'unholy' lands, while judging the natives, all their achievements and all their works alwasy as inferior to those of europeans - although he was right in condemning the Aztec rule, which was the real cause of its fall. Then again, as Prescott himself said about the deeds of the Conquistadors, one should judge him by the moral standards of his time, and not by those of our time. In this light, the book is an exceptionally honest work, and praiseworthy, for Prescott never visited Mexico, and his knowledge of the land was due to research that, without Internet, in the 1840s, was extraordinary to say the least.

Legalise drugs and murder - Electric Wizard

Oh, cool, a new MOC. This section of the forum has been quite silent lately - and it's practically the only reason I'm still on the site. So far I've never seen the Star Wars armor part used on the arms, only on the legs. The result is a little weird, but fitting! We're talking about walking, fighting thread-bodied robots after all. I guess Flange is the muscle and Fold the mind in this duo. They look cute, and combative. I'm looking forward to see more of your 'outside Bionicle/Hero factory universes' characters (not that it is anything unheard of anyway)!

I have to agree with all that has been said. But let me add: the lifespans. And how ridicolously weak the matoran are. They could at least have access to kanohi powers.

Cultures beyond earth by Magoroh Maruyama. A collection of essays detailing the psychological, social, political and of course scientifical and technological problems and precautions we'll need to deal with in the eventuality of an alien contact on Earth/Moon/our Solar System and on an exoplanet, and of plausible human societies outside Earth, in space, on near celestial objects or on exoplanets. Having been drafted in the late 70s, it is in many ways ingenuous by modern standards, and anachronistic (it postulated a Moon base in the 80s), but it is generally quite valid, especially speculating the social and biological aspects of possible aliens, even if it paints them too ideally (they are socially 'better' than us humans).

The same could be applied to Lhikan and Kikanalo, or Takua and Pewku and Jaller and Gukko. As others have said, it's just two figures (not a figure and a means of transportation), a small and a larger one, put together in the same box. I say it counts as Titan. Takanuva, on the other hand, like the Boxor and Lesovikk and even Toa Ignika, could be viewed as a vehicle set, while the Exo-Toa could not, because while it can be piloted, in-story it also was an autonomous robot, and did not come along with a pilot inside the box. A clever solution could be this one: if the vehicle (not animals, mind you) is considerably larger than the pilot, then it is a vehicle set. Put this way, only Boxor (as the set title implies) is a 'true' vehicle set, while Takanuva, Lesovikk and Toa Ignika are not, because their vehicles are only slightly larger than the pilots. I don't know about Vultraz, though. His vehicle was pretty small, but so is he.

You build MOCs very rarely, Aanchir (as far as I know, at least) but the time between your creations is totally worth it. It's hard to find a good use of those...what are those exactly? I'm not familiar with later Hero Factory so I don't know, but I'm talking about the half-black/half-trans petal-like piece you used here as, well, petals. That's great. You managed to amazingly blend the looks of Hero Factory, G2 waves one and two. Waiting for your next piece!

That works for me as well. I'd say that all reboots, in terms of structure and feedback, are similar to one another. In terms of plot/concept, I'm not really familiar with any rebooted series that could be compared to Bionicle. It's a pretty unique theme.

The house on the borderland by William Hope Hodgson. What the heck. It's like Borges's surrealism meets Lovecraft's weird sci-fi horror. Did I like it? I don't know. I don't know what is Hodgson trying to say with this work (the first and I think the only one I'll read from him), and I bet he too did not know. Okay, it's suggestive, and it's got pretty intense suspence scenes - the phone vibrating scared me while I was reading it - but...I don't know. Lovecraft too sometimes didn't want to convey anything, just write down things that he'd seen in his dreams, but this doesn't look like the case, it's too contrived to be. The opening poems are great, though.

That's quite bizarre. Oddly enough, I've thought about writing similar about flour/bread/baking (although it would've been somewhat comedic). The spices in the novel are somewhat living 'things', that speak to the protagonist, and do strange things such as locking doors, moving objects from a place to another, whenever she breaks some rules or is in danger. If you'd like to create somthing similar, I will totally approve of it.

The mistress of spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni. I found it at a book trade a month ago due to my fascination for India, read it all in about a week. Well. It's not what I expected. It's some sort of urban fantasy where certain indian women are trained in the art of channeling the powers of spices, and are then sent across the world to help those in need. The plot focuses on such a woman and her bazaar in Oakland, and how her position as a mistress is threatened when she falls in love with a mysterious american man (the rules of the spice mistresses forbid them to love someone above the others, or more than the spices) who is acquainted with the magical world, though not the indian one, but the native american one. I will certainly read it again some time in the future.

I've finished Manfredi's Teutoburg. Eh. I think those critiques that half-discouraged me from buying it were quite right. It's filled with ups and downs, but the whole final part was rushed, and looked more like an historical essay than a novel.

Lovely! Clever spear design (where is that blade piece from??), and an overall excellent combination of CCBS and old parts. The Mogont is the best of the three, cool colour scheme. Does it have no eyes?

I've finished Greene's The elegant universe. An instructive read on not-so-well-known aspects of modern physics, though I do not like the concept of multiverse he described in the final chapter. If it is legit to say 'like' in science; then again, as the author himself said, is there a point in spending time and energy into something that is purely speculative and could never be observed anyway? I have to say though that the idea of a universe engineered to produce such fundamental laws to birth the larger number of black holes (which are thought of as 'new big bangs', birthing other universes, in an evolutionary manner) is intriguing, but demoralizing. I'm unsure what to read next. I want to plunge in Hesse's Siddharta a second time, but there is also Manfredi's new novel, Teutoburg, which I have bought weeks ago and has been waiting next to my bed since then.

Takadox was the creepiest for sure. Hypnotizing people and never knowing what he really wanted. Plus he has an unsettling body frame. If not Takadox, the Bohrok were quite scary, before we knew what they actually were.

Atlantis as a lover - Tiamat

I'm currently reading Brian Greene's The elegant universe, almost done with it. While the main focus of the book is string theory and why it could solve our problems, it is an extraordinary essay for people without in-deep knowledge of physics to understand it. It explains concepts like speed, acceleration, gravity, general relativity and quantum mechanics in an intuitive and simple way. If I were to explain such concepts (or string theory itself) to someone else, though, I'd certainly fail.

You know what the best part is? It could totally be possible. I bet Takanuva is capable of creating lightsabers, or a similarly working replica.