Toa Mahri Jaller

So I'm kind of stuck on Nuju and Onewa's hordika design, but I did finish my Jaller Mahri doodle, so I'll share that instead~

I have two versions here to share. One that's more in line with the mutated feel of that year and one that's just regular normalized human. I debated a bit of which I should stick with, but in the end it had to be the more fusiony look. The right one might be after Jaller and the other toa Mahri resurface and get their air-breathing restored to them.

But I really am liking the "horns" and markings on Jaller here, so I'm kinda eager to get to the other Mahri too and see what I can do with them~

If you guys like one design over the other too, lemme know, I am curious!

Humanized Bionicle - Keetongu

 Like the hordika I've design so far, Keetongu is no exception to being an out-of-the-box design of mine. And I enjoyed every second of drawing him. Check him out:

This has been a fun "humanization" to do. Keetongu is such a strange creature in the world of Bionicle, so I hope I did him quite a bit of justice here.

I've also been struggling weather to call each of my pieces of this series "humanized" since I don't teeeechnically humanize everyone, they'd probably fit better under a humanoid description like Keetongu here and the hordika. But I don't know what else I could call it, and god forbid I call it something like the Aniverse or Ani-bonks. But I really hope this series has been something people have enjoyed checking in on every now and then. I wanted this au to feel like it's not JUST humans since Bionicle has a wide variety of species even if they're all just technically robots (and fleshy like agori and glatorian)

Either way, it's a fun exercise in creativity and character design, and I've been loving every second of it~

Faustinius (Baldur's Gate 3 OC)

 I wanted to doodle my tiefling OC I'm using for my Dark Urge run in Baldur's Gate 3: Faustinius (Faustus)

NEVER have I been so nervous to play a character honestly. I'm already in the Lower City and never has my playthrough felt like such a wild ride. BG3 is already an amazing game by itself, but playing through the Dark Urge story has kept me on edge hoping my character doesn't make any stupid/gruesome decision on his own. And even a crazier backstory to pair with him!

Faustus was a gentle and soft lad of an oc that I had before, but playing him through the Dark Urge is giving me so many ideas to flesh him out more. Anyways, I hope you like his look~!

Kongu Inika Human Design

 I was going to post this later at some point, but the more I stare at it, the more I want to share it. I'm struggling with 05's designs a bit BUT NONETHELESS I plan on seeing it through. For now, have Kongu here:

I'm planning on '06 being more street wear based, that's just kind of the vibe that whole year gave off (thank you, Piraka rap) I also want to give the toa more unique weapons than just 1 sword and gun. I know that the sword and gun designs change between some of them, but a little variety in weapon types never hurt anyone. So taking a page from Kongu's Mahri version, he's gonna tote around two guns with blades attached to them. I'll have to draw that at a later date yvy

Feeling Good Today. Have a WIP

Nothing feels better than handing in a resignation after it was much needed. I'm in need of a break and some time to build myself up. I'm just tired over all, but glad I did what I needed to do, so next week will be my last week at the post office. So, it's time for me to let my mind improve~

So since I'm feeling good, I wanted to share a WIP of my Jaller Mahri design since I actually really like how his face is looking so far.

This is more of a pre-emptive doodle to see how I want to design the Mahri once I get to drawing humanized designs for that year.

Can We Talk About This?

I've been having these feelings for a while, and I'm sure everyone else has been too.

I'm talking about social media sites and their designs.

I'm just saying this now at the risk of sounding jaded and old, but I'm nowhere near an old age. This is a gripe I've been having with the internet for a while now, but it's only come more into light lately with more terrible decisions made by billionaires and their ego trips.

I don't like modern website design.

When I say this, I mean the very flat black or white design, depthless backgrounds, and overall "template-y" feel to the internet. This is not all to say that the internet before didn't have a corporate standard for its websites, but you'll see what I mean when I show some examples.

This is a site we should all be familiar with: Twitter.

This was Twitter in 2007. I mean seeing this already takes me back, but this doesn't look so claustrophobic as Twitter looks now. The charming Twitter logo at the top, the gentle cloud background that you could probably change the theme of to any picture, and what's this? No ads, useless recommendations, or news you're not forced to look at 24/7. Now take a look at Twitter now:

I understand people like this design more, but there really is no reason for a desktop site to look this squeezed together. There's an advertisement on the top for a Premium subscription. There are tags to the right that I have little to no care about. And a big box interrupting my feed about who to follow. Another site that has this layout is Facebook.

Looking at this, the gaps in the website look awful and the posts are way too condensed. And even at a glance, if the "F" icon was at the top left, I wouldn't have been able to tell you what site this was. This layout is only used for one purpose and that's specifically meant for UX-friendly design. UX is short of "User Experience" and in turn that means site design must mobile friendly too.

Even tumblr is taking on a similar design to these websites now, which is the whole reason I'm ranting about all of this. It's like a website can't try and be different anymore. Maybe this is only a niche complaint, but my point still stands, especially when I visit Neocities or the Web Design Museum. (Check these out and get a blast from the past)

It genuinely kind of hurts to see websites not take advantage of customization in favor of something they can quickly cobble together. This is not to slight the web designers that have to hard hours into these sites, they only do what they're told. Though with social media being so ingrained in society, it's hard not to copy the successes of other sites. You can't have your own website unless you have a social media page to redirect to. 

This is another can of worms that I can be grumpy about all day, but I'm not here to talk about that. Just wanted to say my piece about how every site is adopting this kind of layout and there just can't be uniqueness anymore on the internet. Anyways, Look at how Microsoft and Apple changed.

And also here are a couple of website designs from the Web Design Museum that I really like.

Not to say all this and be like, "The internet is doomed." Lots of people are still making their own sites and designing them to show off not only their coding skills but showing off their own personalities with it. And honestly I've been trying to learn good coding so that I can make a site like this one day. But if you don't agree with me on all these points, that's ok. Maybe I'm not the best person to talk about this, but I just can't look at modern websites, then look back at these design layouts and just be happy with the state of modern web design.

Anyways, thanks for reading, I hope this brought some nostalgia outta some people. 

On a Personal Note...

I've been working for the United States Post office for nearly two years now. Am I a regular carrier? No. When I was first looking for a position, no regular mail carrier positions were open or given to me, so the position I took was working only on Sundays and holidays. I had taken this job in hopes that I could dip my foot into the post office and they'd soon have me switch positions to like a clerk or a regular carrier when the time arose.

But oh boy... oh boy... I learned quickly how much of your life you have to give up in order to work at the post office.

These guys, both city and rural carriers, practically have to come in all week and work on hours that fluctuate between 8 to even 10 or more hours just to get every piece of mail out and delivered. Think about it, working practically 70 hours a week - most carriers don't come in on Sundays but a lot of them do to make a quick buck. And it's not just for one city for us, since my office is a hub, we deliver mail to 2 other cities about 20 minutes away from ours. And on Sundays, we deliver to 2 more cities, making that a grand total of 6 cities to deliver to.

This isn't so bad so far yeah? Could be worse? Yes. Yes it can be worse.

Some people like to call in regularly during the week and this is where things can get effed up. There are not enough subs or regular carriers to cover all routes so a lot of them have to do two routes in a day. Delivering mail and packages. In crappy tin can LLV mail trucks that are basically ticking time bombs that are just waiting to give out.

Now that I'm on the subject of trucks, MAN do we really need new trucks to drive. The trucks that we use have been with the office since the 80s. These things are literally fire hazards with how many wires are exposed, how there's only a little fan to act as "a/c" for the truck, and literally so many places you could cut yourself and undoubtedly get an infected wound from it.

Yes there's new trucks on the way, but we won't be getting those until 2028. And even then who KNOWS if we will get ANY.

Digressing a little to tell a story. This happened last week. One of the carriers was delivering packages to a city about a half an hour away from us (which I will get to in a second.) As he practically just started his route, the truck's engine caught on FIRE. Literally within the next few seconds the whole thing was engulfed in flames. Nobody knows really how it started, but one thing's for sure, none of the packages inside survived. The guy frantically pulled out as many as he could before the truck got consumed by the flames - he's ok though, if not a bit shaken... he was also a new guy I think.

But you get the picture. Literally ANY of these trucks can catch on fire and melt the metal of the truck. This isn't a picture of his truck, but it looked just like this:

Yeah you wouldn't want to drive this piece of junk would you? My post office desperately needs an update. We still have to manually write in our times on a green card, the trucks are death traps, and we still use dial up for internet... I'm not joking, the post office STILL uses dial up internet

Anyways, Sunday deliveries. These days are basically Amazon backlog. We come in in the mornings, take our pick of the routes, sort and number them, load them into the truck, and be on our way. The route I usually take is about 100 or more stops. ("Stops" are individual addresses that I stop at to deliver packages) And it could be even more, up to 130 stops some days, 90 stops other days. And packages can stack up to 140 or more. And most days I have to take this by myself. We are staffed just up to enough to cover every other route, which can have up to 70 stops or less than that. So yeah, the route I take is a monster.

I was trained to drive a van with a bigger interior (and actual a/c thank god) so I'm usually the one to take the monster route. My supervisors know how terrible of a route it is and have tried to request changing up the routes to alleviate some of the stress, but, of course, nothing has been changed so far - it's been months since this was brought up. 

So I mentioned that we deliver to up to 6 cities for Sundays, I'll name those cities: A, P, F, Al, C, and L. We deliver Amazon packages to these cities because they don't have any amazon facilities stationed nearby to deliver to them. F, C, and L are cities we regularly carry mail to since they're closer by, so it's no big deal and understandable that we deliver to them. And A is our own city. P and Al are further away, but they send their own carriers to handle their own packages. 

P is pretty good at sending enough carriers to deliver their packages, and I'm honestly jealous at how small their routes are. However, the P carriers absolutely do not care to help out our other routes. They help each other out, get done with their routes, and leave, while the rest of us have to stay out later and help out with our own crappy routes. 

Al is the worst one as of yet. Both of their routes are about 114 stops each, and it's only 2 routes they have to deliver to. The SMART thing they would do is send 4 people, 2 people each to handle both routes and split them so that they can easily deliver packages without having to worry about stay out later. Want to know how many people Al usually sends to handle these routes? 2 people, and on most days, only 1. This means we have to pull from our own ranks and send them to help split their own routes. Which means we lose out on help from our own routes.

So, let me summarize this. Al cannot give two shits on sending more people to handle their OWN routes, which means carriers from A have to help them pick up the pace on a city THEY DON'T KNOW, and P carries throw out any lick of sympathy they have and leave before they even get the THOUGHT of helping other struggling carriers. People really do like to talk shit about each other in the post office, it's just very toxic.

All this, and I'm going to put the blame on one conglomerate of people... Upper Management. I understand things take time to change, but this place literally had the beginning of the 21st century to change and yet nothing's come of it except for Amazon coming in and providing more time for carriers to work. The resources at our disposal have not been updated in years, even decades. They don't do anything to alleviate stress from carriers, and not even proper training for newer carriers. You are thrown to the wolves most likely. Without so much as a shadow day even. You really have to want to work at the post office if you want to make a career out of this place, because you will not have enough time to even breathe almost every day of the week.

I'm saying all of this because I'm going to quit soon enough and I just want people to know the awful experience I've had so far. On the bright side, the people that work at the post office, most of them are really nice and helpful. They understand how bad the job is and like to have a laugh about it all. But this place has affected me mentally and physically, scaring me away from trying my hand at any other position provided by the facility.

I made the mistake of thinking I could handle whatever the post office threw at me and I feel mentally crippled because of it. (And I only work one day y'all, I shouldn't be feeling like this) Not to say that you shouldn't work at the post office if you really want to, but I feel like people need to know what to expect when you consider taking a job from here.

If you live on your own, are on call every day, or need lots of hours and love to work all day, this job is probably for you. But I just can't recommend any position since I cannot see myself working every day in such poor conditions. I wish I could, but my body was not made for it.

So I'll be quitting soon enough. It was nice to have the experience, wish I could've had the courage to step up to a carrier position. But taking all of these things into account. 

No thanks. I need a break.

Oh, a P.S. here or whatever, Christmas time is a shit show. Nobody should have to work that long every day. In the freezing cold. 

Be respectful of your carriers, friends. They do so much work. Thank you for reading this, cause man... I needed to get that all out.

An After Bionicle Day Present and A Ramble

 I made an art piece for after bionicle day yesterday and posted it to my tumblr. I thought it might be best here to ramble about how I got into humanizing bonkles in the first place and how my art has changed over the years.

While I'm claiming anime was the biggest part of why I doubled down on improving my art, humanizing bionicle pushed me closer to diversifying my designs. Initially that was not really the case, a lot of my bionicle designs looked the the same. (And it is taking everything for me to share these designs cause I'm not proud of how I used to draw characters and it embarrasses me OTL) What inspired me before was looking through bionicle art on DeviantArt and see other people's interpretations of the toa and what they would look like as humans. So being the little kiddo I was, I really wanted to try my hand at making my own versions too!

                            

These definitely aren't the oldest examples I have, but looking back at how all these designs look, Almost all of them have spikey hair, pale skin, and what have you. I was probably 15 years old when I drew this, so I've definitely grown past these tropes as best as I can. Though I can tell you one thing younger me had more than I do now, an INSANE amount of time and passion. I wanted to be an animator back in high school, so I started making animations of these guys too.

Legit, I grew better as an animator doing little scenes like this and it sort of prepared me for what would be expected of me in college. But I no longer practice animation and I really wish I did, I would love to make an animation with my updated designs but it just takes SO MUCH. Anyways, once 2015 rolled about and Bionicle was coming back, that's sort of when I started to push myself to get more skin tones into these guys. And even so, I improved my art a lot by now, starting to learn better form and vary my designs a bit more.

So in 2016, that's when I finally went off to college at the Art Institute (which that was a journey and a half to get through, holy crap, that's a story for another day). And so while I still loved doing Bionicle art during that time, I was more concerned with my own projects. And in that time, I learned how to draw better, how to study references better, and overall get a perspective of what the art world is like. Yeah, my hopes were dashed for an art career, but I still love drawing to this day - I get enjoying from sharing my works, and my humanized bionicle drawings was where I got the most enjoyment out of my interactions.

As I said before, I went through a lot during my college years, and Bionicle had become a comfort to me during hard times. Every so often, coming back and drawing these guys, getting new perspectives on their designs, it's helped my art grow a lot. 

The inspiring reactions I get from these works over the years has helped me work towards bettering myself and my character designs. Bionicle has HELPED MY ART SO MUCH! And I hope to put those skills to all my personal projects that I want to create and share one day. 

Anyways, I always love seeing people's hashtags when they reblog my stuff on tumblr. It just helps make my day a little better and gives me a boost of motivation. Everyone's support is always appreciated~ ❤

It's 810nicle day!!

 Happy Bionicle Day to the community!

It's 8-10 today and to the Bionicle community it's a day to celebrate the LEGO toy line that brought us a lovingly crafted story that brought inspiration and creativity to many of us when we were young!

I nearly forgot to make something for it, but I hadn't contributed anything last year I don't think, so I made a piece for the occasion. If you don't know, I love making human version of the Bionicle characters, so this is why they don't look like their robotic selves here, but I hope any of you enjoy the way I imagine them looking like if they were human.

Something I admire about the Bionicle community is how DEDICATED it is to keeping this series alive today. People create fan video games, builds, stories, and plenty more of their favorite characters or their own characters and even music! A perfect segue into the banger song that came out by Essenger and Cryoshell: 
"As Above, So Below."

To me, this absolutely does capture the essence Cryoshell had in their music made for the commercials. First of all, love the male choir that is basically the tune hummed in the Mata Nui Online Game. Second, if Bionicle were to center a year on the Makuta's reign over Metru Nui, this would definitely be a fitting track for it. The desperation in the lyrics yet the flicker of hope portrayed in the song is just so amazing.

And watching the Bionicle Day stream and listening to the creator's commentary next to the movie that catapulted me into the Bionicle story was so wonderful. Bionicle: Mask of Light will always be a dear movie to me, alongside the year of 2003, since my brother had many of the toys that year and the year before. If he didn't have those toys, I definitely would not have gotten into this series as much as I have.

On a personal note, Bionicle has always helped me through tough times when I was younger. In 2013, I had refamiliarized myself with Bionicle since by then I was in middle school, and by then I was really in a depressive state. I was starting to feel lonely, losing my connection with some friends, and started to lose confidence in myself. It was really rough for me mentally. Bionicle's story had distracted me from all that and got me to learning about the story I never got to experience when it was running. It brought back memories of me checking the website every year to see the cool new Bionicle toys that were released and how the story correlated with the themes.

I was hooked again in a whole new way.

Bionicle still manages to be a comfort to me when I'm not feeling alright. The characters' struggles, the amazing atmosphere of the world, and the designs of the toys have inspired me in so many ways, I'm happy to have sat myself down and immersed myself in this world. And I'm super excited to see all these projects the rest of the community is coming up with. They all rock!

Anyways, I've said my piece, I'll be listening to the collab song all day now, lol. Take care all!!

New game: BG3

 Ok y'all.

So the past few days, my time has been CONSUMED by playing Baldur's Gate 3. It just came out, but I'm finding myself really enjoying the way it's set up its story and has you rolling out your actions to see if you succeed or not. Almost to the point where I feel overwhelmed, not that that's a bad thing, I've always felt that way playing DnD. But this is something nice to have since my luck with DnD has always kinda been bad.

While I enjoy the game, I do hope there's some more character focused stuff I hope it adds in the future. More CC options, player on player romance interactions, and I'm kinda disappointed to not see players able to use emotes or a text chat system (at least as far as I've seen, I have not seen any chat box for situations) Which I can't help but bring up Neverwinter Nights, which had emotes, chat box, and let the players do their own RP if they wanted.

Anyways, I've had fun making characters and I wanted to share a few pics.

This first one is my Half-Orc boy, Taurne. He's one of my vet OCs, named Taren, all the way back from my Wildstar days. In DnD, he's a Fighter Mage Slayer, but in BG3 he's just a normal Fighter. I wish he was a bit bigger in his player model, but whenever he smiles in game, it's so adorable. Fits his soft himbo personality very well.

And this guy is Faustinius (Or Faustus for short.) I'm kind of letting the story here decide what his backstory may be since his play through is play the "Dark Urge" character option - which has me making this face 'OvO' the whole playthrough. But I've had a Warlock Tiefling character before and I wanted to bring him back. And seeing him  again makes me happy. That's it for now, thanks for reading!

Welcome to the Blog!

 Hello! Welcome, welcome!

Some of you may know me already, but for the record, hi there I'm Ani! Or Anibonani, RRproAni, RRAni, etc. I'm an artist that loves playing videogames, Space, and sci-fi things - and much more!

I'm sure you all are tired of jumping ship on different social media websites, I am too. After moving from Facebook to Tumblr to Twitter (or I guess X now) then back to Tumblr, and then not having the guts to join any other social media site anymore, I'm just begging for a place where an algorithm doesn't weigh down on my motivation or having to look through another dumb advertisement selling me crap I don't need. And to add to that, I'd rather not have a place where I don't willingly want to partake in upsetting news making me lose faith in humanity once more.

And this is not to say this blog would be devoid of serious topics, but that this is a place where I can show off my art, have some interaction with you guys, and generally a place where it's not an eyesore to look at with how every dang social media platform starts to look like Twitter. 

So with that out of the way, welcome to my blogger page! While you're here, please be respectful and kind when leaving responses. Ask me anything in the contact form at the bottom of the page. As a fair warning, it is meant to be a mail box of sorts, so anything you ask I will post unless you say otherwise. Your privacy is important to me, so no email addresses will be shared and you are free to post yourself as Anonymous. I want this to be a safe place for you as it will become my safe place as well. 

 I will be posting more soon enough, but I'll leave you with some of the more recent doodles I've made. Please enjoy and thank you for stopping by~!