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Showing results for tags 'In Other News'.
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I feel like the dubbing is going to be pretty awkward.
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So this will be a really boring blog entry just to apologize for how long it's been since I've posted one, and to say don't worry I'm still alive and yeah. For those that are wondering, the current plan for ATYU2 is to go right to polls as soon as the Wildlife polls are done (those were just launched by TN ). I've run out of time to commit to reading all the entries, but my judges assure me the remaining ones are clear of any major issues. If any minor ones show up in a winner we can deal with it later, etc. Main reason I'm slow lately is I've been working like crazy on insane brainstorms for my non-Bionicle fiction, had to get as much of it written or notes taken as possible due to my horrible memory. But I think I'm at a good stopping point now and am trying to get back to Bionicle stuff more.
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So, I'm a little late in seeing this, but I just found out I am one of the winners in the Lego Digital Designer 4.0 contest. Whee! The announcement page is here, and here's the download page. I'm cited by name there (they mispelled it, but everybody mispells my name anyways so whatever ). If you open the program, my Giant Unicycle is shown as the third of the top three models! I've seen lotsa people upload modifications of that in the Gallery already, which is awesome. Then if you go into the Vehicles subpage, my 2-Way Buggy made it too. Nobody in the gallery seems to like that one lol. (Although it does have the most advanced Step One wheel system, and some of the vehicles might be using it and I didn't notice. ) Congrats to the other winners. (I dunno if any of the others are BZPers.) And if you've never tried out LDD, do so -- it's very fun IMO.
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Hey, I just wanted to quickly apologize for not being very active lately, keeping up with things, etc. Unfortunately, you can expect this to continue for the next few weeks, so if I seem to be ignoring questions, etc. please bear with me. *man, that was a boring blog entry...*
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Two important updates: 1) Last chance to enter the Bohrok Kool contest. Ends this Tuesday at midnight EST! [Edit:] That's just a few hours left! 2) I want to do a poll asking opinions on the best mask name for (what is currently called) Vulture. See my previous blog entry for full details and discussion; basically it's a power that Toa consider immoral, absorbing escaping energies (esp. life energy) from recently dead in your vicinity. Vulture is the name with the most reasons behind it (such as the obvious vulture-like shape of the mask, Vultraz's name, and it's concise, plus it introduces a new naming style of metaphor). But that said, a lot of people are not liking it. I'm NOT asking for reasons here. There's been plenty of debate about WHY they don't like it, but ultimately all of this is irrelevant -- without a good alternative, it can't change. Several suggestions so far, but none that Swert or I think is "the one". So, please suggest alternatives. Be inventive. The best names will take the mask shape into account (IMO ). We don't wanna do the poll till we have good options. We're not saying we'll necessarily agree with the poll results. But it would be helpful to know what people think about this in general, or if the complaints are merely from a minority, etc. For the record, these are the best alternatives so far: Vulturation Carrion Necrophagy Necrosorption Leeching Deathfeeding Remains Desecration [update: That's eight so far I think are worth voting on. Room for two more. ] There may have been other good ones I'm forgetting at this moment; please remind me (the discussions got very long and I don't have time for archeology right now ). Another thing I might include as a second question is if we should ask for "The Kanohi Vultraz, the Mask of [insert new power name here]" as a compromise; and then we'd also ask Greg if it could be said that Vultraz himself was named after his mask, or something along those lines. That way we could keep the reference to vultures and to Vultraz himself in the Matoran language name, but use some other name as the English power name. [Edit: I think I'll arrange the poll this way, for the record. Three questions: 1) Should the power name of "Vulture" be kept? -Yes, keep "Mask of Vulture" -No, use "Mask of [insert alternative]" -Compromise, use "Kanohi Vultraz, Mask of [insert alternative]" 2) Which alternative is best? -(ten alternatives listed here) 3) IF (if) the compromise of "Kanohi Vultraz, Mask of [alternative]" is used, which explanation of the character Vultraz is best? -Vultraz became evil and used that mask shape, calling himself Vultraz after his mask as a codename and rejection of his past life -Vultraz had the mask from the start (on Makuta Gorast's Tren Krom Peninsula), was named after it, and embraced evil because of it This arrangement lets us show ten alternatives, not just nine with Vulture.]
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Did you know it's possible to down an apple tree -- or half of one, at least -- merely by the weight of the apples itself? It is. Here's the reasons I have been very inactive in recent weeks: 1) Half of the apple tree in our backyard fell down a few weeks ago. Remember I said I was dogsitting? Exactly one day after the dogs went back home, the tree fell. During that week before it fell, I had spent hours upon hours trimming the low-hanging branches, cutting off tons of weight, and then for hours upon hours upon days more we picked up and branches and apples. THEN the tree fell, but thankfully in the middle of the day when nobody was out there. Seriously, I came within one day of getting squished by a tree in my own backyard. Yikes. And all that is AFTER I cut off a ton of weight. Yeesh. Took out my nice shade area under a smaller redbud tree too; took off half that tree's branches. Pics and stuff. Don't blame me for the awful angle, Ojh took these. One Two Three Four Five So then for that whole week we spent hooooouuuurs upon hours, with chainsaw help from our next-door neighbor, who luckily for us cuts down trees all the time, chopping that up, sloooowly hauling away a ton of wood, twigs, and apples. Then we dogsat (past tense of dogsit? ) the week after that, and still weren't done with the tree. One of the dogs is dying of cancer, and she can't see very well, so we had to guide her around giant piles of sticks outside, etc. The other two dogs are extremely high energy and love to run like bullets, so we had to be careful there too so they wouldn't impale themselves. And while we were at it, the neighbor trimmed the other half that was still standing for us. It's standing at a less precarious angle than the other half, but still not totally stable, and so a ton of the weight, which also hangs over our garage, got removed. Later we removed some that hang over wires. Now what's standing is more like one third an apple tree, heh. So anyways, finally we got all that removed. What seems to have happened was this: Last year, we had zero apples, because of a late frost. Which was great, because we don't have the time to do all the proper things to keep bugs out, so they all just fall and rot and then we get reeeeally tired of picking them up every summer. But this year when the flowers came out, the whole tree was freaking white, there were so many. We knew it'd be bad, but it was clearly soooo much the weight was too much. There WAS a storm the previous night, but the tree was still standing then, and it fell when there was no wind, and it was dry. I had noticed while trimming it that that side was hanging waaaay lower than it usually did in apple season, and the trunk seemed to be splitting away from the other half. I hadn't quite put two and two together though -- never heard of a tree bringing itself down lol. So anyways. Pros: We'll get a lot less apples, at least for several years, now. Cons: We lost our best shade, and had to waste a ton of time on it. 2) This came during the FCG contest entry period, which Ojh and I had already committed to entering. That combined with dogsitting took a lot of time. But: 3) We also lost one of our two networked computers. Usually Ojh will code on the faster one while I do art on the slower one, so we can get work done faster. We lost that capability until the last week of the entry period, so that slowed us down even further. So our entry took twice as long as we planned. Go figure. At least we got it done. So anyways, that's all over with, unless the other half of the tree feels like falling (those apples are monsters now and still growing). I plan to get the Expanded Multiverse stuff up and running soon. Not yet sure if the BRC topic or the first main contest will begin first, but the contest is slated for July, which is here. So yeah. Swert and I still have to pin a few things down. Also, coming soon will be a major announcement related to the Greg Dialogue topic. --------------THIS ENTRY BROUGHT TO YOU BY:-------------- --------------AND:-------------- --------------SO LIKE, HAVE FUN AND STUFF--------------
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Updates: -- S&T5 Ranking Poll. Congrats to the ten winners! (That poll is just to determine order of listage in BRC. ) -- Ojhilom and I love the theme of the first FCG contest so much we decided to go ahead and enter. We've got a test level about haaalfway completed -- the basic gameplay is already playable and it's addictive. I don't want to say too much, but I can say it's set on Twisted Island, will be the fifth Paracosmos Bonus Series episode (takes place after Mindfire in late 2006/early 2007 storyline), will center on a new character, and it will be titled "Enigma Pacman." [Edit: Oh, and it won't be what I mentioned in the contest topic that Ojh and I had been testing for TMOMN; it's a totally new game, though it does pull in a few tidbits of TMOMN code. What I mentioned will be saved for a bonus TMOMN minigame, most likely.] -- Now if you know anything about both the Paracosmos Bonus Series and simple arithmetic, you're probably wondering why Enigma Pacman will be the fifth episode, not the fourth. That's because the Monstery Mystery short story will be posted soon and will be the fourth. It will serve both to reveal the winner of the Powerpoint Contest and to lead up to the new game. Now, it might end up being a short epic instead of a short story, as a warning. If so, it would be posted both as an epic with chapters and as a series of blog entries. That might be more fun as you guys would be able to theorize.
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I O N: Home Makeover, April Fools, Wii, Twisted Island
bonesiii posted a blog entry in blogs_blog_39
Random occurances, updates, and interesting stuffishness: I have decided to change my "every entry has a banner" tradition, and say that update entries like this will generally not have banners. It takes time. But major entries will always have banners, if I can help it. 'Twill make it easier to fulfill the "weekly blog" rule. These will be called "ION" entries -- "In Other News." Twisted Island has been re-begun, and the Paracosmos Tapestry Collection Topic re-revamped. Now all that's left in that category to repost are the other previously posted TI chappies, and the two Altacosmos Chronicles short stories. I'll let yall know when TI is up to the first new chapter. Time Capsule polls being worked on now. Very soon I plan to get to those .ppt av requests. I plan on overhauling the blog imagery (and update the important entries links and such) along with my new planned av, using the highest quality .ppt art I can muster. The bonesCAFE avatar website is nearly finished. I think I'll do a whole buncha new avs of Bionicle characters and such to accompany an artwork topic celebrating its official launch. Hopefully, that will be next week. For now, a new text line in my sig is advertising the site now. Sometime between the beginning of the show and today, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (which I think is a ridiculous title; I just call it "Home Makeover" ) made over a house near us. Since I don't give out personal info like my location over the 'net I had to wait a random amount of time before talking about it on here. Zat time has now passed. So here's the story: We live two houses away from a residential street intersection. One day, we were leaving the house early morning, and saw that a cop car had blocked off that intersection. We assumed there must have been a wreck or something -- this was right in front of a house that we know to have or have once had a cop living in it. We figured it was nothing. Later when we got back, though, the blockade was bigger, with tons of cars parked in people's yards. This was odd. Not knowing what to think of it then, we asked the neightbor who said it was the show. Eventually through the TV news and such we learned that it was a house just a block down, in our neighborhood. We used to deliver our local paper on foot in our neighborhood. Ojhilom usually delivered to that house; one time I took over for him. So I have hung a newspaper bag on the doorknob of a house that was demolished on national television. If I stand on the corner, not twenty feet from our front door, I can see the roof of the new house. When I walk dogs I usually walk right by the house. As word got out to the whole city, we saw tons and tons of cars drive by, wanting to get a glimpse of the action (or more likely hoping to get their mugshots on national TV ). Within a day or so they set up a parking lot a ways away and brought people in on golfcarts to see it. Personally, I hate the idea of being on TV, and I hate crowds, so I never went over there. They literally had hundreds of spectators behind ropes trampling all over people's yards over there, and that's not counting the workers themselves and cameramen yadda. The whole street the house was on was blocked off from cars, and the people in the houses there were offered hotel rooms in the city for the duration. The work went on night and day all week, so you could hear construction sounds even in the middle of the night. Afterwards they had to redo the whole street and the yards that everybody had trampled on. At one point, a marching band went down my street in the early morning. I was only half awake at the time, and wondered if I'd dreamed it -- that was one of the weeeeirdest things I've seen in my life. A parade down my street. Freaky. We think from watching the episode that the leaves on the extreme (pun!) edge of the tree in our front yard probably made it onto the show, but it's hard to tell from the camera angle. Since then I have noticed how bad a job most cameramen do at getting a clear shot that gives a good sense of where the shot is coming from -- but then maybe that's intentional. Anyways, the hoopla just got bigger as the week drew to a close. At one point we had fullsize city busses parking in our neighbor's front lawn, and cars (rather rudely) parking in everybody's lawn, including ours. We had to actually put out a sign saying to stay off the grass, both for that and because there were SOOOOO many people walking back and forth that many of them ignored our sidewalk and trampled OUR grass. We weren't part of the whole "we'll redo your lawn" dealio, so we didn't appreciate that. At one point, a massive construction vehicle got in an accident with our neighbor's car. Apparently, the worker in question offered to just hammer out the dent, XD. (That was a no-go; they wanted full payment, heh.) But the best incident of them all I really gotta be vague about. Our mayor is... how shall I say it... ah... infamous for a certain crime involving parking. He or she was caught in this crime before these events, and issued a public apology. But during this incident, the mayor parked across from the same unfortunate next-door neighbor's house, breaking this very same law. Photos of it were taken, showing our neighbor's house, and bandied about the city media websites. Far as I know, he or she didn't apologize again. The crime in question isn't a jailing crime, just a violation, but it does possibily involve the risk to life of living beings (if I said what it was it could be too easy to figure out what city I'm in, although maybe this entire paragraph is revealing too much lol). Finally, the construction was over and they did the whole "move that bus!" dealio, and after that, we had a LOT more traffic on our streets. Usually when I walk a dog now past the house I still see cars going past and slowing down in front of it -- obviously in the neighborhood just to see it. So I can officially say that I live in a tourist hotspot. Luckily our lawn escaped with minimal damage. The lawns of the other houses are back to normal. The memory of the incidents is fading. It was an interesting experience, both in how cool it is, and in how when you're in the thick of it, it's not as all-wonderful as the show would probably lead you to believe. When it's happening, it's a mess, it's chaos -- yet out of that chaos comes a freakin awesome house. Certainly way bigger than any other in our neighborhood, and looks very high-class. And several months later we actually watched the episode. We don't watch that show normally. Personally I can't stand the over-emotionality of the show, but that episode was tolerable given the extenuating circumstances. That's pretty much the story of that. This April Fools day, Ojhilom and I unintentionally pulled a prank on our mother. We were watching some kind of television; she had the remote. Now, we usually mute ads, 'cuz they are annoying. (Muahaha.) An hour or so before the show, I had found an old remote that miraculously still works, for volume only, on our TV. When the show came back on, she wanted the vol' back up, and I pointed at the screen with nothing but my hand, and at my bidding, the volume rose. She freaked out, having no idea how I did it. Ojh had actually had the other remote and kept it below her line of sight behind a chair arm and he'd happened to think of turning the volume up with that remote right as I had raised my arm. I swear, it wasn't planned, and only afterwards did we realize it was April Fools. Thus, an unintentional but well-timed prank. I know, I know, our RPG computer game's download link is out of date. For now we're still planning to just quickly finish the updates we're nearly done with and put up a new version. If this stretches out through the summer we'll give in and put up the old link again. But I really think we SHOULD... shoooooouuuuld be able to do that sometime in May. Shooooooooouuuuld. But who knows. So does anybody still use the Wii anymore? You see so many stories on TV of trampling incidents where a bunch of lunatic parents (or maybe adults wanting it for themselves) line up by the hundreds to get the darn things. But personally from the Wii some relatives have, for the most part the games aren't as interesting as GameCube or whatnot. Where they now have a Wii, there used to be a GameCube, and at every holiday family gathering, us boys would be crowded around the GameCube. When they first got the Wii a few people tried it out halfheartedly, but most people just hooked up GameCubes to a different TV. Now the Wii is ignored at all family gatherings; I doubt most of the fam even remember it's there gathering dust. But the Gamecube is still the spot to be for the boys of the family. Maybe it's just a "different fanbase" thing, and I'm sure the makers of Wii don't care anymore since they be rich off it now. But it seems to me that the Wii, for most people, may just be one of the most successful fads of all time -- and nothing more than a fad. With exceptions, I'm sure. However the heck they pulled that off -- maybe just marketing, maybe who they chose to target instead of the usual videogame fanbase -- I'm sure it will go in the history books. And the ONE game I've ever actually played on the Wii was a Smash Bros, and everybody used gamecube controllers. None in our family are fans of the weird Wii controller. And finally, just a reminder that I am on the Poll-Making Squad. PM me poll ideas. Now that my break-from-BZP is over I should once again be able to put polls up quickly during weekdays. LOST FREAKIN ROCKS.
