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Showing results for tags 'rambling'.
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So BZP got a revamp, and only went down for a few month. Now it's back and I have to get used to all the changes!! I think the blogs got the worst of it, TBH. Although this does seem more in line with other personal blogs I've seen elsewhere on the internet, so it's probably a modern template that's cool for everybody but those of us (like me) who are so used to the old BZP / Invasion format. This new one looks like it could incorporate pictures better, so that's something I'll have to start thinking more about. So far my photo uploads have just been scenic mountain shots from various trips... but I'm boring and don't do as many of them anymore, so I'm going to need to diversify. The lost of the custom sidebars is also disappointing, but I also noticed that all the various blog tags and groupings have been trashed, so now I have 10+ years of unmarked entries, and at least a few of them were useful and will take a while to find by just scrolling thru. Anyway, as for what I did this summer... go to work and get by. I did manage to make some MOCs and attended BrickFair for the first time in three years. It was a lot of fun to hang out with folks again, although I felt a bit mellow over the weekend and didn't have a big rush rush rush to do everything. (I didn't participate in any of the official games because I was too lazy). Also didn't win anything, but my Mt. St. Helens lenticular mosaic did get nominated, which was awesome. (And also a little odd because it's a repeat MOC, but then again I didn't exactly disqualify it when I entered it in.) Outside of work and some Lego, I've played a lot of Pokémon Go and reached level 40, finally. But gosh darn it, there are still more to collect, so I'm still playing. I'm also playing the Harry Potter Wizards Unite game, but in general it is less compelling than PokeGo. The previous game I was all in on, Ingress, did an upgrade last year that totally broke the gameplay mechanics and I still haven't been able to get back into it. Which is a shame; it was fun to travel to different places and use the game as kind of a tour guide to various local art and scenic spots. I've also looked into working more on my stories, or in particular reposting them. I finally signed onto Fanfiction.net and started posting a few of my Bionicle stories. (Because, honestly BZP is not the hotspot for library posts anymore, sorry.) Not that this site is any better... I haven't looked around really hard, but the quality of the average story is pretty bad. (I mean, we all had to start somewhere, so fair is fair.) But I don't know if there's a readership for lengthy Bionicle novels. But I did start reposting one of my old popular stories, Time Disruption. (I checked on the Wayback machine and I started that story on 10-11-2003. It's also crazy that it was popular enough that I was able to find a Wayback entry for it; the Epic forum was so crowded back in the day and Wayback is spotty about archiving forums.) Anyway, after doing a editing run through, I'm still impressed with my teenage writing, even if the language is a bit more basic than what I write now... and I desperately needed an editor. Man, no wonder half the comments were about spelling and grammar errors, they were bloody everywhere! But I've started reposting that story (all 63+ chapters) and it's been getting a lot of views... so I guess people still like it. (It also doesn't focus on crazy custom characters, so I'm sure that helps.) I've also had readership of my Hero Factory story when I didn't think there was any audience for that! I've written it so far in batches for NaNoWriMo, so maybe I'll work on the final part for it this year. I've also been playing in Voltex's BZPGOT RPG on Discord for months and months now... and the activity there certainly helped when BZP went down. It's fun to play, but the Discord format is a bit easier than the forums, and I managed to get into the lore with only a few weeks (or months) of what-am-I-doing-ness. I can now see why the RPGers are the ones keeping this community alive. I've gotten a few cool Lego sets over the summer, but kind of slacked off in doing reviews and such. Last spring, my camera's charging cord vanished, making said camera unusable, so I haven't had anything to take decent review pictures with besides my phone, which is only so-so. Chocolate Frogs and I were planning to pull off a few more livestreams, but then Youtube changed the system and we haven't been able to figure out an Encoder that works, so that's been put on hold for a while. I have a backlog of sets I want to build, but haven't gotten any truly big ones... except for the Bricklink models, which I ordered back in March and received in August. The Western Saloon is an awesome design, although the instructions make it a bit difficult to distinguish between the various shades of brown. I would like to do some more reviews, either official or just generic blog posts, but I'm a combination of lazy / exhausted most of the time. Maybe I'll put together some just to test the picture capabilities of the new blog system. Anyway, here's to another long and rambling post. Honestly don't know if anybody will bother reading (did they ever?) But the post count now including blogs really upped my count; I went from 6K to 8K, so I'm guessing it was the blogs. I know in the old forums when there was a list of the most comment / most viewed / most posted of the blogs, I was in the top three (or top one, I forget) of the blog with the most entries. Not views or comments, but entries. So I like typing a lot and posting stuff nobody reads. I hope to continue hiding subliminal messages in walls of text as long as BZPower lets me! Thanks for reading, take care y'all! (yay at least the emotes stayed the same, I would be sad without my signoff)
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I have this problem in regards to fanfiction where I think about the ridiculous ideas I came up with in my younger days with such undue fondness that I start trying to rework it and see if I can salvage the concept and redo it. So, story time! (Oh gosh I really have to explain this I’ve been dreading this day) For several of my BZP years, I was working on a long and convoluted series of stories known as Bioni-Lords. It started out as a story where Bionicle characters were Pokémon, but then I changed things so that, rather than sending out the Bionicles to fight, the humans would fuse with the Bionicles to gain their weapons/powers/etc. And then go and fight Gym Leaders while being hunted by a criminal organization. So, it still wasn’t all that different, really. As this coincided with the beginning of my weeaboo phase (gosh I hope it was just a phase), the scope quickly expanded and I began including “Bioni-Spirits” for characters to fuse with that were based on characters from just about anything—anime, video games, movies, books, and so on. (I also let other people submit Spirits, so at the time of the series’ cancellation the count was…1683? Dang. On the other hand, take that Pokémon! We got more!) The plot only got more confusing from there, with the sequel tossing in an exponentially larger amount of weirdness, and then I started on a prequel that…well, by then I’d like to think my writing had improved and it was decent enough, but then I got super discouraged thinking about the things I would need to do to keep that story in line with the overall canon I had decided on when I was 12 and concluded it would just be best to drop the story and dump all the ideas I was going to use into a few blog posts in case people wanted to read about them. So, that’s it, time to move on, right? (Man there are some serious run-on sentences in this post) …Well, okay, even when I was cancelling the series I still wanted to do something else with the concept. I tried simplifying everything as much as possible and seeing where that would go, and ended up with The Blade of Valor, which I then began to expand into The Kaita Legacy. Though, now I’m feeling like those might be erring too far on the “dark and gritty” side, so…I’d still like to finish Kaita Legacy, but maybe I should explore other options as well. Honestly, a big part of the fun I had with Bioni-Lords was that whenever I got a new hobby or a new idea, I could incorporate it in some form and things would keep going. I thought of it as a “Fanfiction of Everything”, and while part of me feels like that’s innately off-putting, I still just…really, really want to do that again. (Especially with Bionicle being rebooted. It’s given me very targeted motivation.) Of course, even if I were to do that, I know I should probably drop that massive Spirit list and take a new, much more streamlined approach to things (limiting the list only to Spirits that actually show up in the story, at the very least). I could probably also drop the more Pokémon aspects—some of these I abandoned even in the story, things like fixed HP and attacks, they just really limit what you can do in a fight more than I usually liked to. Instead, it’d be better to just state what abilities and equipment a Spirit gives, along with maybe a few specific named technique, and see what the characters do with those. Or, maybe have a basic transformation for characters that can then be customized by adding the abilities and equipment of characters from various things? (Plus some original stuff, probably.) (I mean…I don’t really want that giant list to go to waste, so I’ll probably preserve it separately from the new list I’ll have to make, even if I hide that old list forever out of shame) And I mean, the plot will probably still be more like a long-running manga (both of the original Bioni-Lords books that I completed ended up having over a hundred chapters), so I’d probably just embrace that and try to come out with a (probably pretty short) chapter each week or something. That of course presents difficulties that will never go away (both from a time and writing standpoint), but eh, if I’m embracing the manga style, then that comes with it and I’d probably be okay with that. Besides, if I did end up doing something like this, it’d really be for myself, so, who would be there to complain? Course, then there’s the question of “why do all this writing if you don’t expect anyone to read it?” but, I mean, it’s still practice, I’m still writing, that in and of itself should be good. And I’m pretty sure it would be a better idea than that one Final Fantasy story I was also considering redoing. (Come to think of it, since this time I know already that I won’t be sticking to Bionicle Spirits I should probably just put it in OTC. I mean, you know, if I were to do this. Hypothetically.) I guess what I mean by all this is that the nostalgia blinders-induced motivation is evolving, I already have a bunch of brainstorming stuffed in a document, it seems it may only be a matter of time until I start a new ridiculous and convoluted Bioni-Lords successor, SAVE YOURSELVES.
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aight so a real quick blog post because of urg the big ole life decisions. This is more for my sake than for actually getting y'all to read this but whatever so I'm going to college in the fall, thus I've been applying to schools and such. I'm, uh, pretty good at school I guess? And so I just got a letter today. I never thought that getting a letter saying that you got money would make me so freaked out. So basically I spent this last weekend at my number one school, that we will call school A for the purposes of this blog post. School A is where my grandparents taught, and is within 5 minutes from where my grandfather and my aunt live. It's been my top choice for a while, because not only do I have family there, but I really like the faculty and the programs and the like. I was honored to get the highest possible scholarship that they got, which is half tuition for four years. A pretty good deal, for a private college. I've got a friend who may go to this school, and overall the only thing really keeping me from this school is the sheer amount of money. For a guy who is planning on getting a doctorate, this whole money situation is more than four years of school. Now we look at college B. College B was my safe school, one for me to go to if we just can't afford for me to go to school A. I thought it looked like an alright school, but I have yet to visit it. I did, however, think that it looked pretty good when researching it, which is why I applied. I got a letter sometime in the past 4 days or so, the days I was out of town at college A, from college B. College B is offering me, basically, a full ride and then a little bit. They are almost paying me to come there. Now, that was kinda the goal in the first place, but it also came with a requirement. I would have to commit to going to college B by the 6th in order to receive this money. In other words, I suddenly have just a little more than two weeks to decide colleges and I'm kinda freaking out over here. I would much rather go to college A, atm, but if college B is going to help get me financially to the next level... So now I am planning a trip to college b, and will likely have to make the three hour trip alone, because both of my parents are pretty much wrapped up until about the 8th. Things just got super real and i dont like it very much basically and man oh man .-. /endrealliferambling
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While I was a fan of Bionicle for its entire lifespan, I was often disappointed by its video games. There was obviously one exception—the original Mata Nui Online Game, which I feel was the best tool Lego ever used for establishing a world for a new line of sets. Later settings lacked any such vehicle for immersive world-building, and I think they suffered for it. If I could program in Flash (or anything else, for that matter), I'd love to create a "Metru Nui Online Game" based on the original MNOG. My concept for such a game would involve a Matoran (possibly Jaller, who had previously investigated the Toa Tuyet killings) being asked by Toa Lhikan to investigate the ongoing disappearances of the Toa Mangai. Such a story would allow for the exploration of Metru Nui, and a darker, more noir take on the MNOG formula (imagine if during the battles in which Takua was introduced to the Toa Mata in the MNOG, the Toa LOST and Takua could do nothing but watch). The climax would involve the discovery that Turaga Dume was behind the killings, and your character having to steal the Toa Stones so that Toa Lhikan could use them to train a new team of Toa to save the city. Obviously such a game couldn't have a completely happy ending; to maintain a semblance of canon and explain your heroic Matoran's absence in the main story they would have to be captured after delivering the Toa Stones. That's the other reason Jaller would be an ideal character in my opinion—it'd allow for a bittersweet epilogue, with his mask possibly being damaged over the course of his adventure and the epilogue being his awakening on Mata Nui (on the same beach the original MNOG started and ended on), and receiving Lhikan's mask from Turaga Vakama. Again, though, no matter how much I conceptualize, this is just another of those ideas I'll likely never be able to bring to fruition. I just don't have the skills necessary to make this dream a reality.