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Lord of Skull Spiders

.:|:;

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A most sincere Apology for Image Spam

Hello, I just wanted to make a quick post saying that I came to the realisation that the number of images I put in posts may have lead to some problems. I noticed that simply loading my main blog page was causing my browser to lock up. I've since added read more links to all the posts I've made that are very image heavy.

My major regret is that is seems the way this website handles reblogs means these changes aren't retroactive, so any post I've made that's been reblogged will retain the massive amount of images, and for this I am sorry.

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I tried to look around your blog but didn't find a specific answer so I'll just ask here, what about the toa mata entering the bohrok cave specifically makes you stop liking Bionicle and its settings beyond the island?

I'm just not a fan of the Toa Nuva design wise, I think the Bahrag fight is a bit lame, the Exotoa doesn't do anything, and as sets I found the Bahrag very disapoimting.. It just isn't a very good ending to what I think was a pretty good story arc.

Basically I love everything in the animations, its just how the Bohrok are ultimately beaten that's weak.

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The most valuable thing in my collection

Hello,

I've been collecting Bionicle for quite a while. Over the years I've accumulated quite a lot of neat things, but as we all know what really matters is money. Things are worthless unless they're worth a lot of money, its just basic word usage. So today I wanted to show off the most valuable thing in my collection.

But first a few runners up.

NUMBER 9

A complete set of the Kabaya Turaga.

While these may be rare and hard to find, they weren't stored particularly well, so the cardboard outer box was ineffective at preventing the candies from perishing. Effectively worthless.

NUMBER 8

A massive model of Mata Nui.

The parts are painted so its worthless.

NUMBER 7

A trans neon yellow Kaukau.

While it has quite a high price, this one was kindly destroyed by the shipper wrapping it in effectively a plastic bag and a sheet of paper, so its worthless.

NUMBER 6

A genuine Mask of Life in gold.

While rare, something got messed up in the production of this part so it doesn't match its appearance in the film. A costly mistake. Worthless.

NUMBER 5

Several of the Toa pen masks.

No price data on Lego's bricklink market place, so effectively worthless.

NUMBER 4

A sealed Quest for the Masks Rahi expansion box.

Well, it was sealed. Then I opened it, reducing its value to nothing. Worthless.

NUMBER 3

Various Gold and Vacuum Metal parts, along with original Bionicle Documents.

These were stolen from the Duck compound in a partly successful operation though many people died. They're soaked in both proverbial and real blood, so they're still too hot to get valued. Forget you read this part actually why am I writing this

NUMBER 2

Original Quest for the Masks artwork.

They were just on ebay for honestly not very much, who cares. Its just doodles on paper, anyone can do that. Worthless.

And finally, the most rare thing in my collection, really the only thing with any value:

NUMBER 1

Bionicle Quest for the Masks card number 38.

A first edition printing, this card has been valued at over sixteen hundred dollars at auction.

And the one at auction was rather tatty. This one has been officially graded a 9.87/10 so the price has been estimated at over 3 times that.

So this card has a place of honour in my collection. The most valuable thing I own.

Thank you for reading. I'm not currently accepting offers for this card.

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The "Mystery" of the Sleeping Mata Nui

Bionicle is, by volume, pretty bad¹. I think this is indisputable at this point. There are some cool base concepts that were completely ignored by the final story in favour of kidnapped expat americans, and toothy gangsters lounging on couches, I've done a post previously about some of the earlier ideas behind the so called "ignition arc" that, shockingly, makes sense of one of the most nonsensical sequences of events ever put to paper.

Now, I'm quite a big fan of the GSR, despite it being firmly outside of the roughly 18 months² of Bionicle I think matters. I've made a 3D model of it³, I've painted a legoes version of it, I love it. Now, outside of Mata Nui Rising being a legitimately great piece of animation, and the design of the robot itself being amazing, what really draws me to the GSR as a concept is that is is very core to the series itself. Right from the start it was always planned to reveal that the island the series was set on had formed⁴ over the face of a massive robot.

It predates the line even being called Bionicle.

Recently I saw this map again. Its a terrible map, I think most will agree. Its just utter nonsense, even the story penned by Greggory T Farstey seems to not pay any heed to this map.

But this time I noticed something. This is a map of the GSR, the islands on the sides are supposed to be in its arms. They're at its sides. They didn't do the pose...

Right from the start, the idea was that the GSR would by lying on the ocean floor with his arms and legs spread out.

Seemingly aping the Vitruvian Man image, a famous anatomical study by da Vinci⁵. An early internal image makes this clear.

And this pose was quite key to the series as a whole, being depicted on the face of the Mask of Life, a mask that eats people.

So I, and probably many people, had just assumed that the GSR was lying on the sea bed in this pose, it just fits too well. I think its just one of those things that the community had come to accept.

But this map threw it all in to doubt, because...I don't think anything actually depicting that pose was ever officially released.

Now, I'm not going to go in to some big "Oh that pose isn't CANON!!!" thing, because I don't care about canon⁶ one bit. I just find it funny how they just failed to show one of the key images of the series.

The closest we get is this image from somewhere of the GSR floating in space scanning things I guess. Idk I don't care.

For the record, we know the GSR was lying in that pose. This is a fact.

Concept art from that time makes it clear, and there's even a blocking animation found in a puddle of goo⁷ that shows the animation from a fixed angle, showing that yes he was in that pose.

I'm not saying this is a failure of the Mata Nui rising animation. Its one of the best things to come out of later Bionicle. Its well filmed and really shows the sheer scale of the robot. I wouldn't have had it any other way.

I think what this comes down to is them trying way too hard to hide the final reveal, that this was all taking place in and around a massive robot.

If you look at the sketch posted earlier you can see that part of the hand is sticking out of the water, forming what are known as the three finger islands. These islands have been seen in other art predating the Bionicle name.

And there was attempts to bring them back, having them appear after the Toa defeat Makuta.

But unfortunately they never made it in to any final material.

So I guess, to try and bring this to some sort of conclusion, I think this is just an example of how poorly managed Bionicle was in the later years. There were good ideas there, a lot of them made sense and worked both from a micro scale as conflict for the Toa, and from a macro scale of them repairing the GSR, its just unfortunate that so many of these ideas were ignored entirely.

They just kinda....forgot to ever depict the GSR on the ocean floor, to make it tie in to the Life Mask imagery.

Its funny but also tragic.

~

I remember once I was treated like an alien for not just liking Bionicle wholesale. I was weird for having opinions about it, having parts I liked and parts I didn't⁸. Nowadays it doesn't seem quite as bad, I don't know if its just the groups I associate with, or if the fandom has gotten a bit more reflective in recent years.

But I think, at the end of the day, love it or hate it, all Bionicle fans can agree on one thing: The Mata Nui GSR was B4, one of 6 large robots that travelled through space with their mothership in this configuration:

Its not even worth mentioning at this point. Its just common sense.

¹-By weight though its merely mediocre. ²-Bionicle ended the instant the Toa went in to the Bohrok Hive. ³-Its now known to be horribly inaccurate because of🦆 ⁴-Camouflage system believers, just leave. Block me. You are not welcome here and I don't want you reading my posts. Your existence disgusts me. ⁵-That posting here would get my account banned. ⁶-Technically, if you are a supporter of the one true canon of Greg, you have to reject the GSR lying in this pose, and accept that map as the only canon representation of the GSR on the sea floor. ⁷-🦆goo ⁸-AKA having standards.

anything.

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Psst, heads up: You can upload up to 30 image files, or add 30 web URLs!

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Mata Nui, The Great Spirit, Photo Catalogue

This is a collection of photographs I took of the Mata Nui model I detailed the construction of HERE.

Full Body

Leg and Back Detail

Arm and Shoulder

Head Detail

Sleeping

Accessories

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Mata Nui, The Great Spirit

Hello, how do you feel about painting legoes? I think its fun.

Read on to see the terrible, unethical building process.

Many crimes were committed and I will likely be put to death soon.

Recently I completed quite a large project, painting this huge model kit of the Great Spirit Mata Nui. The kit in question is GiiKei's really impressive build, the instructions of which you can purchase here:

I was quite happy to see they cited my 3d model as reference, along with the original ideas submission. Fun fact: I really liked that ideas submission and made an account just to support it, but something about the proportions never sat right with me, and it was one of the things that motivated me to make that 3d model! So its fun to see it get used in the creation of another model :) And now here I am building it. Full circle.

Now, full disclosure, this is made from third party parts, I did test it on bricklink and it would have easily doubled the price, even before shipping from about half a dozen international stores. I kinda just bought this on impulse, it was pretty cheap and on sale and it was a gamble it would come at all really. But a week ago a nondescript bag came and inside it were sixteen hundred parts of honestly pretty good quality.

I think a couple parts used weren't in their parts catalogue so they had to be 3d printed, but even these were pretty acceptable. Actually in a way some parts were better, because this flame piece was pure red, instead of a mix of red and yellow as all branded parts are.

Some bits had a bit of a tight fit, and I drilled out the middle of the pistons, but I would have done that anyway to accommodate the painting. All in all, really good, was only missing one non essential part.

You can debate the ethics of stuff like this, but either I bought the instructions and paid a company in china X for the parts or I bought the instructions and paid a bunch of unrelated people X*2 for the parts, either way the creator gets the same amount. And I can say I wasn't going to build this off bricklinking parts. For various reasons I'm kinda done with bricklink*.

So after quite a few hour's work I had this lovely fellow. I must say, the design is quite good, its well articulated and has a lot of good build techniques. The head is both the strongest and the weakest part really.

I love the eye assembly, its built to allow for lighting, but it also cleverly includes natural light piping, and the kit comes with 4 sets of eyes, trans red and green for lighting and solid green and pink for display. Even has a little wrench to help swap out the parts.

On top of all of this the mouth is even articulated! So much shoved in such a small package. Unfortunately it does come at a cost, as its incredibly unstable. its a lot of 1 stud wide assemblies held together at odd distances with bars. I think the end result looks good, but its so easy for it to fall apart or get misaligned

Which is why, the instant I finished building this I decided to take it apart again and go at it with a tube of glue.

I glued large parts of this model together. I would happily do it again.

I'm not even going to hide behind any sort of "oh it wasn't real legoes so its fine" excuse, I would have 100% done this with "real" parts. Same with the painting really, I'm sick and tired of hiding behind the excuse that its acrylic so it can wash off, yes, technically, but it would take so much effort and the paints would probably stain some of the parts anyway. If something can benefit from paint or glue I'm not going to hold off just because the parts have a certain company's name on them. They're not sacred.

I can just use mineral spirits to undo everything anyway.

From the moment I saw the original ideas submission I knew: I wanted to paint it.

The GSR is a massive robot that's lain on the bottom of the ocean for millennia, and it reflects that with how dirty and rusty it is, its such an important aspect for me. And personally I quite like painting rust. It seems to be something I end up doing quite a lot.

So basically over the next couple of days I glued everything I felt needed glue, separated the model out in to several chunks, and then began painting.

First I primed it.

Then I did a black wash.

Then I started painting on the rust!

And then I realised I'd made a terrible mistake and redid everything.... Basically I kinda overestimated how much the black wash would fill in the nooks and crannies of the parts, so starting with a light primer base coat meant I was spending an inordinate amount of time trying to fill in all those little gaps and it was taking forever. So I made the correct decision of giving everything a coat of black paint first, and THEN moving on to the rust.

And after that everything went super smooth. Its really important to be open to admitting you made a mistake, and even if it will take more time its for the best to just start over.

For the bits of silver I used a similar technique to how I applied extra streaks of rust to my infected masks. It was a very enjoyable process.

After a quick coat of varnish and a day left to sit everything could go back together!

This guy is massive, around 50cm tall.

The back of the legs is by far the most interesting part of the model.

I especially like these movable pistons.

I did attempt to protect the light piping, and was somewhat successful.

The model is really poseable while at the same time feeling quite stable. Every joint in the legs is doubled. One thing I think is lacking is the ability for it to splay the arms completely out. But I can forgive it since, as I learned when rigging the 3d model, the arm pistons...don't really allow it. And the fact that this model actually has working arm pistons is much more of a positive in my mind.

In any case, you can just remove the pin holding the arms in and do it manually.

You may have noticed my old Mata Nui Island 3d print along with all the parts earlier. Well by some weird coincidence, they kinda match up proportion wise, ie the mouth and eye are roughly at the right places to be under the volcano and bay, respectively.

So that was a happy accident, and now I have a good way of showing how big the GSR is compared to the island.

Its big. And this is the logical size, not the insane 40000000000000 foot number thrown about by some. I have a series of posts about the various sizes of things because I find it interesting.

So in summation, I really couldn't be happier with this. The model design was great, I had a fun time painting it, and now I have a GSR model the size of a small child to display somewhere in my room. I've long been thinking of 3d printing my model, but this has really reduced my need for that. Also with recent duck related developments I've been made aware of how woefully inaccurate my model really is, and have to redo it at some point.

I have reached the maximum number of images per post. I might make a gallery post later. Good night. Have a nice weekend.

*come to bricklink and pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of getting a smashed mask in the mail. And don't you dare expect a full refund. Not a single part in this kit was damaged and it came in a bag! You can see this guy lying in the background of some shots.

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BMOP: Banned Monkey

This is just a short little slideshow I did as a graphic representation of a quest that was being discussed at the time. According to the files this was in March of 2021, so literally just after I joined.

It would have been based around the Abandoned Koro area, as discussed in my previous post HERE. Basically there would have been this little brakas monkey guy who would lightly harass you throughout the demo.

You'd see him right at the start. At this point the demo would have started with Tahu meditating in a clearing.

His plot was that he was in search of a mask, so later on in the demo you'd think you were about to get a ruru only for him to take it and run in to a dark cave.

Then deep in the cave you would see him being menaced by some rahi. After defeating the rahi he'd give you the mask and run away.

And then tragedy, just as you were going towards the end of the demo, where the sanctuary was, you would meet him again, only now he's unfortunately found an infected mask.

You would have to fight him in a little midboss fight, just a simple thing, running around, jumping at you, throwing rocks, etc. It would have been in the marsh in front of the big Miru gate.

Then you defeat him and its very sad.

BUT! This would tie in to a seemingly unconnected quest earlier in the Koro, if you've read my document HERE it details a side quest mirroring the main quest in QFTT, having to collect 4 gears to open the top of the tree.

Within the tree would be a shiny copper mask.

So if you had the mask with you when you got to the monkey encounter you got a happy end!

Final Verdict: Rejected for being too much like twilight princess.

Oh well...

I was quite happy with how the infected mahiki came out. I think the mask really fits well with the brakas.

Sorry about using the old build though. I was ignorant please be kind. The mahiki works so well with the new design too.

Unfortunately, the ultimate tragedy, the komau doesn't fit.

So monkey will rest in peace, maskless, forevermore.

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BMOP: A history of the Abandoned Koro

Now that things have all come out, and the project is well and truly over, I thought I'd take a moment to talk a bit about something I worked on in the game, the "Abandoned Koro" area, now that there's video footage of a playthrough I can easily reference.

I suppose as a quick primer, I was with the BMOP team from around March of 2021 to November of 2022, serving as both 3D art lead and Level design lead for a time. There's a post out there about my experiences with the leadership of the team that I mostly stand by still, I do feel bad for how the project ended, and I have come around a bit to remember the positive times more than the negative, but that doesn't erase what happened.

So to begin, when I came on level design was a fairly inactive sub channel of the game development discord, some ideas got tossed around occasionally, but not much seemed to be happening, before I'd joined there was a rough map drawn up by the then current level design lead.

It was very basic stuff, there was a version of this map in engine that had been extruded a bit to make it a kind of playable space, one area had some trees on it and some random platforms.

One area that interested me greatly was this part in the south, the so called "Abandoned Koro"

The rough idea being that it was the Le-Koro seen in the GBA game Bionicle: Quest for the Toa, that had been abandoned in favour of the one seen in the browser game Mata Nui Online Game and the cancelled PC game Bionicle: Legend of Mata Nui, as the one in QFTT had a lot of wooden structures while the one seen in the other two was more like a woven nest.

At the time I was just a 3d modeller, and had never really done any real level design, but the concept just really inspired me, so I went off and in blender sketched out a possible level layout for this area.

I made a bunch of renders and wrote out how I thought the level could work, which can be seen in this document HERE.

For a quick overview, the idea was you'd enter the area, the bridge would break, you'd have to clear a river to activate the water wheel on a large mechanical tree that would allow you passage upwards, and then navigate through the Nui-Rama infested ruins of the village before coming to a cave.

The tree was something I poured a lot of time in to, its worthy of its own post at some point in the future.

Now I'll be honest, I was super nervous about releasing this document to the team, I thought I was overstepping my bounds. I was just a relatively new 3d modeller on the team, I didn't have the right to be talking about level design, but to my surprise people were really receptive to it, and I very quickly got added to the level design team¹.

I ended up doing a rough blockout in engine. This was back in the time before Lewa had been chosen to be the main player character, so it was still Tahu.

This was the first time I'd ever touched Unreal, so it took a while. That's why the sky is black, I didn't know how to add a skybox.

I never got in to level scripting, but as a proof of concept, I think it was successful.

You can see that in this version of the level it had already progressed, now there was the idea of using the Pakari to break the dam, so finding it was the first task on the ground.

This version wasn't in the actual demo map, because as I said before the demo wasn't really very fleshed out at the time. One thing my map showed though was that the demo was way too big. The level design lead at the time had decided the size based on how long it took to get around the map as a perfectly flat plane with no terrain, at max run speed, with no obstacles. This is a very flawed methodology to say the least. Having an actual level with things scaled to the character really started to show the holes in this, and eventually, once I became lead, the demo area was massively shrunk.

Here's a version from just a month later. The version is now part of the new, more compact demo area, but its mostly barren at this point.

This version was actually completely rebuilt from the ground up because it had been decided to try out voxels as a basis². They were a pain to deal with and this was overturned eventually. I'd say in total, including the 3d sketch I did, I re-built this map maybe 4 times.

One benefit of voxels was it was trivial to have caves, so this is where the idea of the pakari being found in a cave started to emerge.

As I continued to play and refine the demo it became clear how much the movement systems would need to be tweaked. There seemed to be this idea in the team that everything could be done separately and bolted together later, so character moment was all handled by someone jumping around on some big blocks in a test map whereas level design was off doing their own thing, but it really wasn't working. So while the movement felt good in a vacuum, actually putting it in context really exposed a lot of issues. You could easily jump over any enemy you could come across, as said earlier maps had to be huge in order to make the world seem big while you were running at full speed, and after about 3 jumps you'd be 20 metres in the air.

At this point the idea still was to have the entire island of Mata Nui be one large open area you could freely explore, so the sheer size of the maps resulting from the over powered movement was a major issue. I lobbied very hard to have things pulled back and eventually they were.

its a bit out of order, but here's the demo area from closer to when I left. Its a fraction of the size of the original map

Here's another video from a month later.

As much as it pains me to say it, this is basically it in terms of meaningful development. By this point Lewa had been locked in as the playable character, and the movement had been dialed back to a more reasonable degree, so I was able to really start trying to refine the area. This is where I ran in to a fatal issue.

No one else wanted to play the game.

And what was worse barely anything worked.

The level is still in what I would call a grey box state. I used a couple tree trunk assets I'd made here and there, and put in a big canopy asset from one of the many asset packs we had for a bit of ambience, but it was all still very basic geometry, easily changed or modified.

Unfortunately, there's only so much you can do for playtesting your own area. You built it: you know where everything is, what's supposed to happen, where you're supposed to go. You can try to pretend to play it as a new player, but that only gets you so far. I was hoping people on the team would play it and provide feedback³, but outside of maybe one or two people a handful of times⁴, trying to get any real feedback was was a futile effort.

The thing was that this area was very complex. If the demo was a vertical slice of the game as a whole, this area was itself a microcosm of the demo⁵. It had platforming, puzzle solving, combat, mask powers, the lot. Now unfortunately for me, barely any of those systems actually worked.

As an example, this long ledge was for a long time a stand in for vine swinging, then rail grinding⁶, then was ultimately just replaced by a platform.

So things had kind of hit a wall. I couldn't properly design areas with combat in them until combat existed in a more stable state, I couldn't design platforming sections until platforming worked in a consistent way. I couldn't even adjust the overall flow of the level because everyone else basically refused to give feedback.

But the unfortunate thing is, in August of that year they'd released a teaser trailer.

And that trailer had gotten hundreds of thousands of views.

This is where the whole development of this game really went off the rails. Now there was this push to get things in a presentable state, start set dressing and making final assets so things could be shown off.

But I refused. Everything was too up in the air to commit to set dressing, this is why block out exists, if the jump changes height its no big issue to grab the couple cubes an area is made out of and shift them up or down, if combat is found to need more space its easy to make things bigger, or add or take away walls. If something is confusing things can be shifted. Once set dressing starts now you're dealing with dozens to hundreds of objects being scattered about, even the smallest tweak can lead to a mess.

Not to mention set dressing raised its own series of issues, from plants triggering the IK on the toa's feet, making their knees go up to their chin when walking through a bunch of ferns, to collision volumes being oversized or offset, meaning that big rock face they just added has now created a massive invisible wall in another area. Once the addition of some plants caused all ledges within a wide radius to no longer work⁷.

It was a miserable state of affairs. My mental state rapidly deteriorated as I fought against this, I became very short tempered and irritable, and eventually near the end of 2022 I was kicked from the team. It was such a relief honestly.

I think the tragic thing is, set dressing is actually quite a fast process. The starting area went from looking like this to something quite like the final in about a month?

But you can't show off the first screenshot on twitter⁸.

I guess I'll spare a quick moment to talk about the final version seen in the video.

Its at 46 minutes in if the link doesn't work

Its...fine? The assets they've made are all good, though I think they lost the QFTM inspiration along the way. The thing that stands out to me is just how...little its moved on from 2022. Just look how much progress was made in like 3 months, compare that to now, 3 years later. Temporary platforms I placed are still in the exact same spot. I do find the addition of a matoran with a key for the cave to be a not great addition, if only for the fact that you need to find a tiny green man in amongst the overwhelming greenery to proceed.

One part I found quite amusing was the final enemy encounter. It was supposed to be this large hut, probably Matau's, that had been completely overtaken by a hive, and Nui-Rama would spawn constantly from it until the encounter was over.

There were a lot of concepts drawn up, but I guess it just...never happened. I also don't know why there's waves of fikou there either, that was after my time I think.

So that's really all I have to say about that version, it looks okay. Its still clearly unfinished. It kinda works more than it did when I left, but its shockingly not that much different, outside of some new assets.

I'll be honest, I did intend this to be more of a happy, reflective post, but when watching part of the developer commentary a quote stood out to me.

"Traditionally you would kind of have really basic blockout for an environment and play test that to see how the level design is working. Because of the the situation we had we were kind of forced to just go ahead with set dressing and prettying it up and everything so if it were in a perfect world I would have loved to have gotten to do some more play testing early on but we did what we could with it. And I mean you basically had to just blindly trust the process because many systems weren't working at the time things were designed." -AN UNKNOWN BMOP DEVELOPER (2025)

And I just fundamentally disagree. This was a fan project, there were no deadlines but those that were self inflicted. This process they blindly trusted just lead to a thing that on the surface looks okay, but is still riddled with bugs that were well known for years. I've seen some people on the team say the game was 90% completed, feature locked, just 3 more months of polish and it would have all been working, but from what I've seen of the game I really doubt it. They say themselves in the commentary that there's bugs they've been fighting for nearly a decade still rearing their head.

So yeah, its not exactly a happy tale. I'm quite proud of the work I did, I learned a lot, and met a lot of people I'm still friends with to this day. Its a shame the project had to end this way, and I'm sad everyone's work has gone to waste, but I'm also not going to pretend this was some amazing project that was struck down right before achieving greatness.

But most of all: Fuck you lego.

If you're interested in seeing a few more of the things I worked on in my time with BMOP, go HERE. I may post more publicly about some of them in the future, who knows. I have a post about the regional Kini temple I designed and built for the game HERE. Also some renders I did for some of my game design reports HERE.

¹-I say team, it was maybe two other people who were barely around. ²-I'll be honest here: Some people wanted to have the entire map destructible so that they could have Bohrok dynamically destroy it. For the post game DLC after we'd finished this Zelda sized free fan game⁹. ³-💯👍👀 isn't helpful feedback at the end of the day. Its supportive I'll give you that. But sometimes you need more. ⁴-One person on the team even outright refused to play the game until final release, to "save their first reactions for their stream"... ⁵-idk if its clear at this point but the "demo" is, was, and now always will be the entirety of the existing game. Oh there were ideas for other things, but nothing concrete ever materialised⁹. ⁶-You know, like Sonic⁹ ⁷-The ledge's over sensitive detection for something blocking it is one of the most frustrating things about the game's development for me. ⁸-You absolutely can show off real development stuff, there are lots of people who find that fascinating. ⁹-This game was nothing if not ambitious.

You see that kind of mop is called a "Bee Mop", because of its sponge's resemblance to honey comb.

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The Nature of Adaptations, Or: Why I Hate the Bionicle Fan Base

Recently I finally managed to get all of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex on bluray, so I want to take the opportunity to discuss something I find very fascinating about the series as a whole, and eventually tie it in to why I just don't get on with most of the Bionicle fan base, and how, out of many fan bases I've had the displeasure of interacting with⁰, I find them to be the most infuriating.

The Ghost in the Shell series is quite interesting when you compare it to other series. Often the story is that a manga comes out, becomes very popular, an anime is commissioned, animation production is faster than manga production so the anime ends up outpacing the manga so either they pad things out a bit, end up doing their own thing, or ending early. With Ghost in the Shell the original manga I'd say has never really been adapted. Across the first two movies and S.A.C.¹ they take plenty of elements, but none of them are a straight up retelling of the original work.

For instance, the manga's first chapter has a scene of Motoko shooting someone, quite violently², and then jumping down in to the city, activating her optical camouflage as she goes.

This is quite an iconic image, and the first movie recreates the scene quite faithfully. S.A.C. has several shots that are similar throughout it, notably both seasons end with a similar shot, though only in the second season does she do it after violently shooting someone³, but the context is quite different.

Now, even though the first movie very closely recreated this first scene, going forward in the manga what do we see?

Motoko and her team, in white body armour, watching the cherry blossoms with their tanks, and they get called away and drive down the road. There's nothing like this in the first movie, but this is almost exactly what you see in the final scene of S.A.C.

The funny thing is, that in the manga they're off to a fight that's quite similar to the final fight in the S.A.C. movie Solid State Society, right down to the gate designs and the 3 cyborg security guards.

Again, context is quite different, there's multiple years between the scenes in S.A.C., and there isn't a gestalt formed from old people connected to the internet in the manga.

And, just so it doesn't come across as me picking on S.A.C. in particular, the garbage truck scene from the first movie is beat for beat from the manga.

And the ghost dubbing, and pretty much the whole comprehensible plot⁴ of the second movie, is from a chapter of the manga.

To now go in to an overly long aside about mecha designs, take this tank:

Its an interesting case, because two adaptations each took half of it. There's a similar tank in the first movie, a tank I desperately want a model kit of:

Particularly the back, the half circle with the recessed central round part is pretty bang on, and the whole scene around it is very similar. So they took inspiration from it but basically made their own robot. Scale wise its also a lot larger, this one can easily stand over a car while the manga version the back part can barely hold a person.

It seems that later, when making S.A.C. the designers noted how there was a perfectly good front half of a tank lying around, so they went and took it and made a new back. They had the decency of making a model kit of this one this time, a model that exists in the show too:

One small detail I want to mention, is that the manga version has two larger arms on either side, but also two smaller limbs sticking out the front. The S.A.C. one is lacking the front two limbs, but there are things that could possibly be ports there, and also the final image in that collage is of a model of the tank and this model actually includes the extra two front limbs. Just a little detail that I wanted to point out from the manga.

//Mecha aside over//

One finaly thing I want to touch on regarding the Ghost in the shell series is that when I say manga I mean one single volume of the manga. All these things, and quite frankly hundreds of other little details you can see across the two main movies and two seasons and a movie of S.A.C., are all from the one single volume of the Ghost in the Shell manga.

There are more volumes, but they very quickly become very full of cgi and soft core pornography⁶. I think this robot was in volume 2?

And nanomachines causing someone's heart attack. So there are a couple things, but on the whole it feels like they weren't as heavily referenced as the first volume.

One of the more delightful things about the manga, something I haven't really seen other places, is how the author stuffs the margins and gaps between panels with notes. Like often there will be a couple pages at the end of a volume for some author notes, but here the author wants you to know right away why they chose this model of gun, what they think the political climate is, why this mech is designed this way, etc. Its really fun.

So yeah, the manga is the original work, but the adaptations really just use it as a basis, its characters, setting, themes, and some basic set pieces and design, but then go off and weave their own stories with these building blocks. I find it fascinating.

~

Okay, so: What does any of this have to do with Bionicle? Its just the idea of cannon. I feel like a large contingent of Bionicle fans⁷ really take cannon to its biblical extremes, where something being cannon or not is vitally important, something being non canon⁸ means it literally has no value. There is one actual factual version of events and anything outside of that is an aberration and should be ignored. I've seen quite big people in the community say things along the lines of that since Greg Farstey⁹ said that the Mata Nui Online Game wasn't fully cannon they can't enjoy it.

It just feels very self defeating in fiction, this whole idea of a very rigid cannon, and I think its really just a marketing thing, but that's a topic for another day.

When you're dealing with series like this, I think its better to see them as a setting, a set of characters, and some themes and over arcing ideas, rather than things that all slot together in to a perfectly realised alternate universe. As I've just described, there's 3 different versions of Ghost in the Shell, they have the same characters, a similar setting, some plots and designs are shared between them, but they just can't be made to all fit together in to a whole, yet they're all good in their own ways, they're all valid.

To bring it to some other series I love, here's Patlabor:

This is Izumi Noa's first fight in her Ingram in the 3 different versions of media out there, manga, OVA, and TV anime. The OVA and manga are similar, both being at night with a multi legged labor, but there's still a thousand differences. In fact over the whole course of the manga and tv show, which ran concurrently, there's like...9 episodes/2 manga arcs worth of cross over.

And for another quick example, here's the opening shot of the Card Captor Sakura anime and manga:

Both feature Tokyo Tower¹⁰ at night, with a huge moon in the sky, but for the anime its a vision foretelling future events, for the manga its a cold open, seeing the capture of a card right at the start. Compared to Patlabor there's a lot more direct cross over between the two versions, but the anime adds so much and shuffles things around, so they're very different things on the whole.

~

I just find it interesting how wildly something can vary from iteration to iteration, while still being at its core fundamentally the same series. Within one version, you'd want consistency, obviously, but demanding that every single entry in a series has to be both internally consistent and then also part of some larger meta narrative just reduces a piece of media, the result of many people's hard work, into a puzzle piece that can be entirely discounted at a whim if it's deemed to not fit in to the broader image.

Now of course, this isn't saying that there aren't bad adaptations or entries in a series, that's a given, but I think that's also a place where this adherence to cannon just serves to make people miserable. Now a bad entry is there, forever, tainting everything that came before and after. People cry to the holy owners of the IP to strike it from the record so they can go on liking this thing, its a truly wretched state of affairs.

I'm quite outspoken on the fact that though I'm a Bionicle fan I really only like 1.5 years of it. Now, do I think the other years are bad? Yes. Do I think you're a fool for liking them? You don't want to know the answer to that, but you can probably work it out. Do I think they should be removed from existence? No. Despite my personal disdain for them, they don't really negatively impact my enjoyment of the parts of the series I do enjoy¹¹, and occasionally I find out there were some really interesting concepts buried under the pile of boring sets and bad dialog, ideas that I really love and just get my mind buzzing with ideas.

That's why really, I find the Bionicle fan community so disappointing. It's very odd how the story for this toy line, a toy line made with interconnecting modular parts that heavily promotes creativity, became this super ridged thing. This story line that was founded on mysteries and framed as being the retelling of a legend. There's no room for imagination, everything has to be codified and explained in detail. It just takes the joy out of it. Anything outside of the official cannon must be ignored or derided, instead of just enjoyed on its own terms. Personally I like to think of the Bionicle story like how I do the sets: there's some interesting, well designed interlocking parts, you can study each part in detail and marvel at its construction, or you can see how they fit together and speculate about what shape may have filled the gaps, what the original intent was, etc. Its so much more fun than shutting down discussion by quoting some forum posts made years later like its the bible¹³.

To go back to Patlabor briefly, there was this part in the live action show, which at several points was directly stated to be a follow on to the movies.

They show a photograph of the old team, the main cast of the original series. This photograph was from a very specific episode, in fact one of the women there never even appeared in any movie.

I found it very interesting, I take it as saying to use a bit of imagination. The movies only cover a short bit of time, the TV show lets you spend years with these characters, It doesn't take much work to imagine that off screen in the movie timeline they had much of the same sorts of adventures. These are still fundamentally the same characters, in the same setting.

~

So to try and reach some sort of conclusion, all these pieces of media are, fundamentally, fake. None of it is real. But the emotions and thoughts they provoke are, and the canonicity of a work should never diminish or affect that. Its odd how in this age where "death of the author" is thrown around so liberally so many are shackled to the IP holder as being this authority in how they should enjoy something.

~

I guess I should include at least one Bionicle image in this post, here's a nice picture of a couple bugs I found whilst digging through a duck's mess¹³.

Hope you have a nice day/night.

I think this is the worst thing I've written lol. Really struggled with it.

⁰-The Zelda fan base are a group of people who don't like anything Zelda games do, but instead of trying out other games, simply sit there and demand Zelda become an fps post apocalyptic game with multiplayer.

¹-I did watch Arise once but I can't really recall anything notable from it. I'm not interested in the live action movie or that newer show, so I can't speak on them. Okay I can say the live action movie sucked based on the awful version of the tank fight I saw on youtube. ²-They literally explode, guts and eyeballs everywhere. ³-His head pops. ⁴-Innocence is a pretty straight forward plot that's just so stuffed full of otherworldly dream like imagery. Its quite good, but very unsettling at times.

⁵-This scene is just so good, I needed to put in a foot note to gush about it. Like the first time you watch it its just like...this seems overly emotional for someone going to go kill his parents. But after you see how its resolved, watching it again its just the saddest thing.

⁶-Not that there wasn't already a lot of that in volume 1 lol. ⁷-There's some good people out there, but all too many I just have to try to not interact with, or respect them, or listen to them when they talk, or acknowledge their presence. I probably would call out if a speeding train was heading for them. Probably. Some of them at least. ⁸-I care so little about cannon that I flip a coin on whether its canon or cannon and refuse to look it up. ⁹-Its the cannon spelling now, sorry. ¹⁰-A fun game to play with Tokyo Tower is seeing which animation studios in the 80s-early 2000s were operating off old photos/memories. The main viewing platform was painted white long before the CCS anime was made. ¹¹-Well, okay. I do have to preface I'm talking about the real Makuta and not some guy named terry that shows up later a lot. ¹²-Like literally, there are archives of Greg F.'s forum posts structured like the bible. ¹³-its a secret

[boxturret]

Matoran Gacha Simulator

I made a Matoran (from Bionicle) unboxing and building simulator! Check it out and feel free to reblog with the characters you roll! Inspired by @boxturret, @kdnx, and @toaskello

[boxturret]

Galactic Conflict Robotic Chicken

I was young and foolish once, I was a fan of *t*r w*r*, I'm not happy to admit it, but its true⁰.

I made quite a few models back in the day, what some would call "M.O.C.¹"s. I didn't have a ton of parts, so I had awful blue grey mixed in with normal grey, I didn't really use "Studs Not On Top²", and I used minifig parts in ways that would likely get me murdered by purists.

Did you know minifigs hands fit in the hip holes on minifig legs? They don't want you to know this, to keep you docile. There's dozens of uses for minifigure parts outside of being in the shape of a tiny plastic man.

So I wasn't a great builder, I just worked with what I had. Also was quite bad at taking photos. Still not that great honestly. One day I'll work out white balance.

But I was going through some old files and found a bit of an anomaly. Usually I did the classic bit of white paper in the back and a couple shots of the front back and sides, but for one build I did, of the robotic chicken from the third episode, I went through the effort of making instructions, but only had one shot of the final model.

And it was quite blurry.

So I just thought, why not use these instructions I made to rebuild the thing.

Insert that obnoxious LSW building sound all the terrible meme channels use³.

The instructions were...not quite as great as I would have liked. I missed some steps, parts weren't really visible when added, and I didn't really know photo editing back then, so I used some program that came with the camera, and this was genuinely how large the text went. I also had the bright idea of just making the notes out of bricks, but had to use roman numerals since I didn't have any curves.

But nevertheless, I was able to build it. I made a couple substitutions here and there, things I would have done had I had the parts.

And then I removed it from the vile studio program⁴ and moved it in to blender to rig it.

Wow was I ever rusty. Forgot all the shortcuts.

I was quite happy with the legs. They're quite accurate to the original, and as I recall were quite strong. Gelo doesn't want you to know how useful studs in to technic holes are.

I'm quite happy with the build really, even if I'm no longer a fan of the source material. Or the medium.

Good night and/or morning. Sleep well and/or have a nice day.

⁰-I think its more accurate to say I was a fan of the IDEA of s*a**a**, as for most of my time being a fan I really just played LSW1 and read wikis. After I started actually watching the movies I fell off a lot. Also LSW2⁵. ¹-A term A.Fs.o.L.⁶ use for when they buy instructions for someone's custom model. The original meaning has been lost to time. I was too poor as a child so I made my own designs and pretended to buy them on-line. ²-Abriveated as S.N.O.T.⁷ in the parlance of the A.Fs.o.L.. ³-There was only ever one good gleo youtube channel, G.N.A.J. Bricks. And he is gone now because he was too pure for this wretched world. ⁴-I only use studio because the non technic parts are not on a nice friendly 8mm x 8mm grid. Who ever designed these brick things was a madman. ⁵-LSW2 is vile. ⁶-Adult Fans of Elgo. The acronym pluralisation may make you uncomfortable, but its been verified by acronym scientists. I'm just as unhappy about this as you, but this is the world we live in. ⁷-Which is short for "Studs Not On Top⁸". ⁸-Often referred to by AFsoL as "S.N.O.T.⁷".

[boxturret]

A Terrifying Ramble About Bloodborne's Gameplay Mechanics: Primarily Discussing Blood Vials

Recently I've finally been able to play Bloodborne for the first time after being really interested in it for a decade (happy belated 10th birthday Bloodborne, by the way) and I had a great time. I was always a bit nervous to actually play it for myself, which is why it took so long. I didn't want to go out and buy a ps4 just for it and 20 minutes in realise I didn't actually enjoy it, like what happened with elden ring.

I had watched a lot of play-throughs of Bloodborne over the years and they just solidified my fears, hours long videos of someone trying a boss over and over and over again. In the meantime though I did play and beat Demon's Souls¹ so when I started playing Bloodborne for myself a lot of mechanics became clear to me that I missed when just watching footage. Because of this I've actually had a fairly smooth experience.

I think the issue is a lot of people play Bloodborne like its darksouls³, when it really isn't, darksouls' healing mechanics promote this gameplay style of smashing face first into an obstacle over and over again. They even outright say it in the intro of 2⁴. Bloodborne however, with its blood vial system, really makes that not as viable.

Its interesting, because I'd say that Bloodborne is much more forgiving when it comes to health overall, which comes in to the fore during chalice dungeons, of which I did a lot of⁵. Enemies drop blood vials, you can just find blood vials on corpses, and there's the rally system, where you can regain a portion of your lost health by attacking the enemy in return within a short window. This means that in the exploration phases of the game you're really free, you're not tethered to the checkpoint like in darksouls. Darksouls' healing system is refreshed by resting at bonfires, which also brings back all the enemies, so basically until you rest you have a fixed amount of HP and every hit you take is depleting it. Contrast that to Bloodborne where often at the end of a large chalice dungeon floor I'd have full health and full blood vials just from exploring and not dying. Now some might say the darksouls version more hard core and thus better, but personally when I'm exploring I like to feel like I'm freely exploring the area, not on an ever tightening leash. To each their own⁶.

Where Bloodborne is more limiting is when you get to the boss phase. Now you're in a closed system where you're stuck with what you brought in. As opposed to darksouls' healing items that fill up to a specific amount every time you rest at the bonfire, blood vials and quick silver bullets, Bloodborne's version of MP, are pulled from your stock. At a base level you can only carry 20 of each item, and any excess you find go in to storage. If you're at a part where you're dying a lot you can quite quickly get to a point where you deplete your stock and are basically helpless.

I think this is some really good design, honestly. If you're dying so much you run out of healing items, clearly the current challenge is a bit beyond you. This is where we come to the hub system.

Much like Demon's Souls' Nexus, Bloodborne has a hub, the Hunter's Dream. Here you level up, repair your equipment, and purchase items. Darksouls consolidated a lot of these things in to the bonfire, and I've heard many people complaining about having to talk to a lady to level up, but personally I like it. Again, its pulling you away from your current obstacle in to this safe environment, from which you have the whole game open to you.

You can warp to any previously discovered checkpoint from here, and also access the chalice dungeons. This is why I think that running out of items is actually really good, it gives you the chance to reevaluate what you're doing, and maybe try something else. At any point for the majority of Bloodborne it felt like I had at least four to five possible places to progress, so if I got to one that felt a bit beyond me, I'd just choose another. By the time I came around to that one again I was usually able to beat it pretty painlessly.

Yes, I know what I'm saying basically boils down to "If an area is too hard grind some more levels and try again", but I think that that's something quite a few people who did play-throughs on-line could learn, and I think its something that the game itself is, in its own way, trying to tell you too. Especially with how high the rewards are in the later chalices, a lot of people just ignore them⁸.

~

I also just want to take a short moment to go over the MP system, which I think is quite neat. At the start its not even clear it is an MP system, as its just bullets for your gun. Later on you find guns that can shoot two bullets at once, which is pretty normal. Then you get a flame thrower that's powered by bullets which is...a bit out there. And then by the end you're a horrifying eldritch tentacle broccoli shooting cosmic energy powered by bullets formed from your own blood⁹.

Which is pretty neat.

So, much like blood vials, bullets can be collected as you explore, but in the boss fights you're stuck with what you have. However, the bullets have an extra little mechanic where you can sacrifice a chunk of your health to make some more. As someone that was really put off by darksouls' version of magic compared to Demon's Souls', this was quite enjoyable.

So in conclusion:

Bloodborne is a really cool game, and its a lot more fair than most people will tell you, you just have to take the hint now and then and come back later instead of running head first in to every obstacle despite dying instantly. I'm not good at games and I had a great time.

Cosmos

¹-though I do owe that to realising that the game actually has quite a generous system of save points² if you close the game fast enough after you die. ²-It was accidental, and I only really used it in the shrine of storms with those reapers making infinite ghosts. ³-I guess I should say, I don't like darksouls, or "Dork Souls" as some are known to call it. Personally for me its very basic fantasy, the only really interesting bosses are moonlight butterfly and gaping dragon, and I beat both of those so why bother continuing. ⁴-Darkouls 2, the 3rd darksouls game, chronologically. ⁵-I beat all the main Chalice dungeons, which I'm quite proud of. As a fan of Pikmin 2 the idea of holes in the ground full of enemies and treasure appealed to me. ⁶-You're free to be wrong. For now. ⁷-You kill ONE nurse...

⁸-For they are cowards who are terrified by the concept of "holes". ⁹-Why don't people talk about the eldritch broccoli man, I was genuinely surprised by it and I've watched so much Bloodborne related content.

[boxturret]

Atlantis: Addendum

Just a quick little thing I wanted to note, since I ran out of space in the last post as I always do:

The Ulysses appears to have a red marking on it in this shot, and this shot only, right around that large round window on the port side.

It isn't there in other shots.

It looks to me like its the A symbol the Atlantis Expedition uses as a crest. May have been planned to be there at one point, and the colouring was left on that one scene.

Also on this note, the Sub pods have a cartoon saw fish on their fins.

Its cute.

UPDATE:

Seems my hypotheses about there being an Atlantis expedition crest on the side of the Ulysses was correct! Often tie in media like this is operating off older references.

[boxturret]

The Mystery of the Exploding Truck

Atlantis: The Lost Empire is one of my favourite movies, in fact its the one gisnep 2d animated movie I like. This is a little rambling article about the convoy of vehicles that the middle of the movie focuses on.

The movie features a ton of really interesting vehicles, from the massive Ulysses submarine to the more conventional trucks, all brought to life by some really stunning 3d animation. If you've looked in to behind the scenes materials and toys there's actually quite a few that were designed but never used. (Well, actually most if not all of them are in the movie, you just have to look closely, but that's another topic entirely)

Recently, I was watching the movie closely and was quite impressed how consistent the convoy is throughout the movie. After the Ulysses submarine is destroyed only one evac pod survived (conveniently the one with the main characters in it) and it contained a small fraction of the number of vehicles for the expedition.

This little convoy is what makes the final trek to Atlantis. Its made up of 8 vehicles:

1-The Command Car

2-The Drill

3-The large tanker truck that actually houses the escape balloon

4-Cookie's wagon

5-The Oiler, the truck containing fuel

6-The truck hiding the plane launcher catapult

7a and 7b-two generic covered trucks

Its quite consistent about this. There's some scenes where you can't easily see ALL of the vehicles, but overall they're quite good at keeping it straight.

Where things get a bit confused is the scene where the fireflies attack.

There's a truck they explodes behind Milo, it seems to be one of the covered trucks, you can even make out the emblem on the side of the canvas. The truck that Milo is attempting to get in is also one of these for what its worth.

Then afterwards another truck blows up, the Oiler.

The larger explosion of this one seems enough to take down the bridge and cause the rest of the convoy to fall in to the chasm below.

As they all fall down the bridge you actually get a pretty clear look at every remaining vehicle.

First you've got a covered truck followed by the plane launcher, then the tanker, the wagon, the command car, a second covered truck and then finally the drill. So that's everything minus the Oiler, 7 vehicles in total.

So somehow a third covered truck appeared only to blow up.

For the rest of the movie the convoy has less focus, since they've gotten to Atlantis, but it remains constant. Audrey says that two of the vehicles were totalled and for the rest of the movie you only see the digger, the two covered trucks, though their coverings eventually get removed, the tanker, and the plane launcher, so its possible that the two vehicles in question were Cookie's wagon and the command car, leaving the functional convoy at 5.

So I guess just for completeness sake, he's what happens with the rest of the convoy.

The group takes the two covered trucks with them to Atlantis. Can't imagine how brave you'd have to be to drive on that bridge.

And then once they've revealed their true intentions the trucks carry the kidnapped princess and everyone who didn't stay behind back to the shaft.

And then they get zapped. A tragic end to these two loyal trucks, so far from home. It wasn't even intentional, Vinny accidentally hit the kill button.

The drill was abandoned after it broke through the wall in to the main chamber, and then eventually met a magma induced end.

The plane launcher finally gets to fulfill its true purpose, before cruelly being killed.

And the Tanker grows up in to a beautiful balloon. (it disappears after this so it might have transformed in to the balloon somehow...)

I don't see a tractor with massive metal wheels in there but anything is possible.

Now the question is, where did that truck come from? Well its interesting, because up to that point, there's actually been a missing truck. If you've looked in to the toys there was a truck for Vinny, an explosives truck.

Its actually in the movie, you can see it very briefly in the background of the loading scene.

The tires match up, as does the haphazard way the truck is loaded.

Now this could just be written off as one of the many casualties of the submarine sinking, but it actually does appear later on, in the scene where they trick Milo in to thinking he's drunken nitroglycerine.

Without seeing the wheels its hard to say for sure, as the covered trucks do take their canopies down occasionally.

One thing against this being part of the convoy is that Vinny goes to drive the Oiler initially, and gets told that he's not allowed within 50 yards of it, which wouldn't have happened if he had a whole truck full of explosives just for him.

But in any case, this mysterious third covered truck appears from no where and explodes. As a little gruesome detail you can actually see the hand of the driver pressed up against the window if you go frame by frame.

Its an interesting catch-22, where the more you like something the more you watch it, and the closer you watch it, so you start to pick up on little mistakes and inconsistencies, and now you know that they're there, forever....

Really, though I'm pointing out an error, I'm really trying to highlight how much care and attention was put in to the movie, outside of that one slip up they did a great job of consistently depicting this little convoy as it travelled to Atlantis.

I feel Atlantis is unfairly maligned, but a lot of care and heart went in to this movie.

For my next trick I'll track all the Sub Pods.

[boxturret]