saal-school-project

[saal-school-project]

Part 5

9th grade 

The entirety of 9th grade was online school. Well, actually, we did go to school for like a week, but that was mainly for the exams, so we can ignore the fact that they are not important. And you know how online school is; I don't need to explain much. It was chill. I had a lot of free time, which led me to develop quite a few interests that year.

I got into transformers.

I started getting into Transformers during that time. At first, some clips of Transformers Prime on YouTube were randomly recommended to me (it was exactly this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZAwYv_N-RQ). " And while searching for it to paste here, I also ended up watching a half-hour essay on Starscream's Wings, and it was mind-blowing, so here's the link to that too, I guess: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFYk_ZFpo9A "). I remembered the show back when I was still watching TV; it aired on CN, and honestly, I never really liked the show back then. Then I realized the reason for that was the fact that I remembered absolutely nothing about the decepticons. Perhaps I decided to give the show a shot back then, and it happened to be an episode that Desepticons weren't in, and I decided that "this show is boring; I'm not watching it" and would change the channel whenever I saw it on. I can't think of another explanation. because the autobots in that show are really boring, like, Omg, why are you so boring? I'm going to be honest, as I've admitted so many things already that it's too late to turn back now. I watched the show solely for Starscream (yeah, Transformers do have weird names, but I love them for them, like imagine them being named Michael or something bruh). Have you seen his design? He has built-in heels, he is the skrunkly

To be fair, he looks kinda weird in this pic idk.

The other decepticons were fine too, I guess. Then I checked out other series too, because Transformers is a pretty old franchise, and as a result, there are many different cartoons and spin-offs about it. There is "G1", which stands for generation one. It's a really old cartoon that aired in 1984, but the whole show is basically just an elaborate toy commercial if you consider the fact that the toys came before the show. And oh yeah, they do have toys; thats the best part about transformers, to be honest, and they do actually transform. G1 toys aren't really impressive engineering-wise, but they get better over the years. There is also a spinoff called "Beast Wars," in which robots turn into animals rather than vehicles. There are other shows, comic books, videogames, and life-action movies that fans often like to ignore or denigrate as bayformers) (and we also do not talk about kiss players), etc. but let's get to the good part. If I hadn't stumbled upon Transformers toy reviewing channels (mostly jobby i guess) on YouTube, things would have taken a different turn for me, and I wouldn't be owning any Transformers figures now.

 From the start, I liked the character designs; yes, I'm also a character design enthusiast. Human designs can get pretty boring after a while; but with robots, you can have all different shapes, sizes, and colors, which is great if you want to make unique and memorable designs (I guess with humans, you can have unique clothing, but whatever!). The idea of robots transforming into vehicles was an excellent touch too; this way you wouldn't just slap on random shapes and hope for the best but instead figure out a way where the vehicle parts would go to form an astechnically pleasing robot, and the vehicle form should reflect the robot's personality too and even on its own be recognizable—we all recognize the Optimus Prime truck, right? All of that on its own impressed me, but what absolutely blew my mind away was this.

(Please politely ignore fact that it turns into a gun)

Yes, that robot indeed transformes into this.

(Here's another link if you want to watch it transform: https://youtu.be/_EvBRGjaXHM)

Never once did I think this level of engineering was possible. It's like black magic. Incomprehensible. I want to transform it myself to understand how it works better, but oh god, the prices are just... well, there are a few things to know about transformer figure collecting. There are official toys. Hasbro (American-based) and Takartomy (Japanese-based) companies own the Transformers franchise, or something like that. I'm not fact-checking. These are both, like, toy companies? Hasbro also owns Monopoly, so imagine stuff like that. The one I showed you above is a masterpiece figure, and the number comes from how many figures there were before in that toy line, so they just basically enumerated them. That above is mp36 (as in Masterpice and the 36th figure), and the character's name is Megatron. That figure is one of my favorites, and I would buy it if I had the money.

Masterpiece figures aim to recreate the characters' G1 appearance as faithfully as is physically possible while being able to transform and be posable at the same time. There is "mpm" too; it stands for "masterpiece movie," which is just life-action versions of the characters (live-action movie). Transformers have completely different designs thanks to the director of those movies, Michael Bay, which is where the name Bayformers comes from. Needless to say, all of the masterpiece figures are hella expensive; their prices usually vary depending on the size of the character, but no, it's expensive; there is no cheap masterpiece unless you buy knockoffs, which goes into the unofficial third-party market that I will get to in a bit.

Then theres Hasbro; now Hasbro makes relatively cheaper toys targeted at children currently consuming the myriad of Transformers content out there as opposed to Takaraatomy making collectible figures for people who back in the day grew up with G1, so they are now grown adults and can afford those steep prices. These toys come in three classes: leader class, voyager class, and deluxe class, with deluxe being the cheapest and smallest and leader being the biggest and most expensive of the bunch. I personally own 1 leader class, 1 deluxe class, and 4 voyager class figures.

Here’s some of my figures:

My first and favorite figure is this one. His name is Skyhammer.

I got more but I dont have pictures of them.

Honestly how i got these figures has a story on its own as toy stores rarely sell them due to their prices being too high. I got most of these second hand.

Those were the official figures. and then there are third-party figures. the meat of the topic. It's basically just companies other than Takara and Hasbro making figures, and their legality is kind of questionable as it borders on intellectual theft because they own the copyrights for the Transformers franchise. but that doesn't really concern us. Another thing about third-party services is that what you get can drastically vary in quality; it could be an amazing figure or it could be really bad. You can't really be sure until you personally hold it in your hands, but Toy Rewiev channels have got you covered. Don't worry. Third parties are usually for official masterpiece-class figure quality, but they are a little cheaper. Then there are knockoffs. Knockoffs are just knockoffs; they literally just copy the official figures engineering and just remove the Aoutobot/Decepticon logo or something like that and sell it for cheaper. These companies are often Chinese for some reason, and the engineering can be more mind-blowing than the officials. Saddly, I don't own any third-party figures; I was so close to buying one, though. But, uh, I don't know about buying something that expensive overseas; I didn't want my package to get stuck in customs, so I decided against it.

There are also non-transforming transformer figures; it's just an articulating robot mode. They do this because it's more aesthetically pleasing. There is a term called kibble, which refers to pieces that have no clear purpose in one mode but are there only because they are part of another mode.

Usually shellformers suffers from this the most. Look at all those penguin parts in the robot mode. Making those parts removable is an option, but that would be partsforming. No one likes partsforming.

 some of the kibble is accurate to the character's appearance on TV, it is part of the character's design. but they are not; there are extra parts that stick out, and then there is less than excellent kibble management.

Oh god look at this things backpack.

So if the figure doesn't transform, they can just focus on making it more accurate and posable; it's just an action figure. And, oh yeah, most of the time, the fact that a figure transforms can hinder its poseability. and I think poseability is very important. and a non-transformable Transformers figure is just... meaningless? Like, why are you taking away the best part? I personally wouldn't buy one.

GUNDAMS

Now you can't be in the Transformers fandom for too long before you inevitably hear about Gundams too, and vice versa. They are very similar, minus the transformation, and the robots are way bigger and more pilotable now. They are both old anime that aired around the 1980s, and they are both about giant robots. The best part of both of them is the merchandise.

Gundam merchandise is now available in the form of model kits. They come in pieces. You cut the pieces out of the sheet of plastic with a pair of side cutters before you assembled them like Legos. In the end, you have an action figure of a robot. and they are more customizable than transformers; you can paint them and add details as you like as you build them, unlike transformers.

But I prefer transformers over gundams because you can only build a gundam once (technically, you can disassemble it and build it again, but thats a pain), whereas you can transform transformers as many times as you like. Gundams are also more fragile; I learned that the hard way when I broke my first gundam the day after I finished building it. but then I got another one. Here are some pictures of my Gundams.

Here’s my gundams. Well there is only two of them:

My beloved first gundam, high grade beyond global. Don’t  ask why that pose. This is like, the last picture I took of him before I accidently broke his leg.

I like this picture. He’s standing on one of my many journals.

Gundam model kits also have classes like Transformers toys do, but they are called grades from small to big: SD grade (basically just chibi). high grade (mine are both high grades, so they are small). real grade (real grade is small like high grade but way more detailed) Master grade (bigger) perfect grade (even bigger)

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This is enough, right? I mean, I've got more things to talk about; we barely scratched the surface. I could go on, but I feel kind of tired now. sooooooo goodbye?

#this one is really long #transformers figures #gundam model kits #forgot to mention I yoinked half of the images from internet

[saal-school-project]

Part 4

8th grade (2019-2020)

8th grade was special, in a bad way. It was the last year of middle school, thus the year of LGS. It's a high school entrance exam. Nice. It's a snippet of whats to come 4 years later, the real deal, the YKS (collage entrance exam, which braches out as TYT, AYT, and YDT), but lets not worry about that now. I kind of feel a little foolish for taking LGS so seriously. But the teachers made it seem that important, and all of my classmates studied, so I felt like I had to, too. I remember the Joker movie coming out. I watched it on the net and made an… unfinished fanart? I guess I just couldn’t find anything beter to draw.

Now that I look at it that hand is way too small.

I know this is a really bad picture of it and it looks like I cropped it someone else’s thing, but really I dont know where the drawing is now. Its been more than three and a half years, this is the only pic I could find of it.

I still wrote occasionally, despite my main focus being studying. Ugh, studying, yuck! And I think I started writing in English too sometimes! The middle of 8th grade was when COVID hit. Remember 2020? I can't believe it's already 2023; my sense of the flow of time got all messed up after 2021 for some reason. During the quarantine, I really didn't want to study, but I had to. I designed another character for my hybrid of a game. Back then, I still thought I could pull it off on my own if I learned Unity. Duh, I still have delusions of my own, but I'm over that particular one. Anyway, towards the end of it all, I started to feel like maybe I deserved to buy a Nintendo Switch and finally play Breath of the Wild once all this was over. So I just did that. I entered the exam, did my best, and didn't care about the rest.

My mom also forced me to take a talent exam at some fine arts high school, even though I wouldn't go there even if I won. Maybe she made me do it as a backup plan if I got a bad score from the LGS. Thats kinda sad now that I think about it. So when I went to the talent exam, I was all grumpy at first because I didn't even want to be there, but I left feeling pretty happy because it was pretty fun and a great confidence boost. Normally, I'm pretty antisocial, but I made friends with the kid who sat next to me instantly. He was pretty talkative, extraverted, and a bit clumsy, as he somehow managed to break both the eraser and the pencil sharpener given to him, so I let him use mine instead. He was pretty surprised when I handed him the unopened eraser, as it was way more than halfway through the exam and I hadn't used it yet. We talked about stuff. It's been years; I don't remember. It probably started with something like, "Yo, how did you make LGS? I didn't really care about that, but I also didn't have anything else to talk about at the moment, which made me feel kind of shallow. It wasn't exactly a pleasant experience for me, and I didn't really want to be reminded of it, but since we got along and I enjoyed the company, the topic must have shifted to something I actually liked at some point. While I was leaving, people who saw my art complimented it and said I would definitely make it into the school, which I did. but, like I said, I wouldn't go there either way. This sounds like I'm bragging, but actually, when I think about it, it makes me sad. I didn't have memories like these after middle school. It's like I'm a husk of what I used to be. Something went wrong somewhere, but I can't pin it down. (This is the existential crisis sprinkled in; it can be like that sometimes.)

I spent all of the summer of 8th grade cooped up in my room. more so than other summers. Well, the fact that my dad sold our summer house, where I spent my previous summers, is partly to blame for that. I didn't mind. I got my Breath of the Wild and played the hell out of it that summer. I also got Mario Odyssey and Super Smash Bros. Did you know that cartridges for the Nintendo Switch taste like trash? Because they are so small, it would be easy for a toddler to swallow them, so they made them taste bad so the baby would spit them out. or at least thats what I remember; again, I'm too lazy to actually check. Anyway, there's not much else to talk about in 8th grade, I guess. I just really wanted to enjoy myself that summer.

Pictures of my switch:

#lgs #yks #nintendo switch #drawing #joker

[saal-school-project]

Part 3

7th grade (2018-2019)

7th grade was the best. It probably wasn't that good, and I remember it with rose-tinted glasses, but I remember actually being happy and actually liking school. insane, I know. I had a really tight-knit friend group. I had a best friend who best friended me back. I loved math and I was good at it too (what a plot twist!). I worked out and ate healthy (well kinda, it was healthy compared to now). I had to get glasses because I messed up my eyesight just the summer before by playing so many video games and writing a lot, but I didn't mind. I still kept journals. My ramblings were still in Turkish but now sandwiched between lists of new English words I came across on the internet every day. I started using a pen some of the time instead of a pencil to write (That might seem like a really unnecessary detail, but over time I came to hate the feel of pencil on paper). My notebooks are much bigger now.

Oh, okay, I remember really wanting a Nintendo 3DS (handheld gaming console) to play Ocarina of Time (it's exclusive to the 3DS; well, thats the remaster version; the original is a N64 game). Now you don't have to own a 3DS to play Ocarina of Time; actually, just use an emulator. Tell that to my 7th grade self. I actually wanted to buy a Nintendo Switch and play Breath of the Wild, but that was too expensive in my mind, so I decided to go for a 3DS to satiate my longing. Gosh, I made a cardboard version of a 2DS, and I made it at school during the art lesson.

The thing is, Nintendo consoles really aren't popular in Turkey. PlayStation is, Xbox is, but Nintendo? Nope. That made things harder for me. First of all, there is no regional pricing; they sell the games dollarized, and the Turkish lira was losing its value against the dollar even back then. Well, to be honest, Playstation doesn't have regional pricing either, but since Playstation is widespread in Turkey, you can buy games secondhand for cheaper, which is not the case for Nintendo at all! Anyway, my mom had a friend living in the United States, so he bought one for me and sent it with international cargo. I had the intention to pay, so I picked one of the older models so it would be cheaper, but then he just gifted it to me. Not gonna lie, I wished I picked a better model.

Me playing pokemon x on my link edition 2ds. I put stikers on it.

Oh, remember how I mentioned that I wanted to make a game too? Well, during 7th grade, I designed some characters! It was very Hollow Knight and Undertale influenced. I want to make a platformer with 2D animation like Hollow Knight, but I also want it to be story-driven with fleshed-out characters like Undertale. It would be a weird combination. I haven't played that many different types of games yet, so I didn't know that there was a much better format for the game I was envisioning. I am sure I knew of visual novels back then, but I didn’t know of their potential yet.

I made quite a few designs, but I was only satisfied with three of them. I'm not going to show any of my designs here, but maybe one day.

Anyway, aside from me picking up a 2DS in 7th grade, the summer was uneventful. No wait, I also bought a drawing tablet for my laptop to make animations because I like animation!

Again this is a really cheap and small one, it’s kinda hard to draw on it.  I recently formatted my PC, so most of the animation is gone now. (ignore my dusty keyboard)

Overall the 7th grade’s summer wasn’t that bad; I got new games to play on Steam too, but it definitely wasn't a blast like the last summer. A bit disappointing, to be honest. and the summer eventually ended.

#nintendo 2ds #drawing tablet

[saal-school-project]

Part 2

6th grade

In 6th grade, I changed schools, so I didn't have many friends for the first few months, but my notebooks kept me company. I might sound like a loser here, but bear with me. I was really into horror games, movies, and stories back then, and it was around the creepypasta craze, so it didn't take long for me to join in on that too. (Creepypastas are short horror stories on the internet, btw), but keep in mind that I still didn't know any English, so my options were limited to whatever was available in Turkish, which wasn't much at all. So soon I ran out of actual creepypastas to read, and I was left with whatever self-insert romance fanfiction was written about the creepypasta characters. Great, now I'm admitting my dark past for a school project. To be honest, I don't regret it because the lack of good content available in Turkish eventually led to me learning English. There were a lot of creepypastas based on video game characters. I liked watching horror game let's play on YouTube, and I was really proud when I managed to pirate Minecraft to my mom's phone (admitting crimes now). So by extension, I got interested in video games in general, so in the summer of 6th grade, I decided to become a REAL GAMER by making a Steam account and buying some games. I also bought an ininal card because I didn't feel like convincing my mom to use her credit card. I exactly transferred 50 TL to my card and, after some not-so-thorough research, decided to buy the following games: Undertale because people recommended it to me; Hollow Knight because I'm a big fan of 2D animation; Don't Starve Together because I don't remember why; and Deus Ex: Human Revolution because I got leftover money and it was on a really big sale, so my cousin urged me to buy it.

I would try to play these games throughout the 6th grade's summer, but there were some problems. First of all, none of these games are in Turkish (I'm not sure, but that's what I remember; I'm too lazy to check). That fact didn't really matter for games like Hollow Knight and Don't Starve Together (as there wasn't much of a story), but it mattered for Undertale. Oh, I know, I could just use a Turkish patch (unofficial translation); it's not that I couldn't figure out how to do it. It's just that the game recently got a new update, and the patch didn't work with that update. As for the other games, Hollow Knight was pretty hard for a kid who never really played any proper video game other than Minecraft. On top of that, I didn't have a controller at the time, so I had to play it with the puny keyboard my laptop had, and that made it unplayable for me. As for the other two, I didn't like them very much. There was a learning curve to Don't Starve Together, and it just felt like Minecraft without the creative mode (which happens to be the part I like the most). I didn't even bother checking out Deus Ex because I randomly bought it and I don't like first-person shooters. So much so for becoming a gamer, I guess. But one day, while still in the summer holiday, there was a problem with the wifi for a few days, and it really got boring. So I played the games I downloaded before to kill time. I started playing Undertale. I looked up the words I didn't know (which were the majority of them) in a dictionary or something, and I wrote them down along with their meanings in one of my journals. I was pretty used to writing thanks to school being so boring, so my hand never really got tired of writing pages and pages of words. and I really took a liking to the game too! It took me a long time to beat it since I literally had to pause to write some words for every single dialog line, but I enjoyed it, so it didn't feel like a chore. Eventually, our wifi came back, but I continued playing. I also started watching more English content. I watched Lele Pons again, something I'm not proud to admit, but the lightness of the language used in her videos made it perfect material for a beginner like me. I also texted with the cleverbot. Lately, the chatbots are much more advanced, so Cleverbot isn't so clever anymore compared to them. I can't remember why exactly, but cleverbot had something to do with creepypastas I think. like there was a correlation between Cleverbot and Ben Drowned (a creepypasta character) for some reason? It's been years; I don't remember.

 I talked with the bot so much that I could literally predict what they would say with 99% accuracy, so it became boring, and I stopped talking to them. By the end of that summer, I had replayed Undertale for a different route and, for the first time, noticed that I could actually understand what it said without having to look anything up. It was a weird feeling in the best way possible. and I decided that I wanted to make a game too. The summer ended, and I started 7th grade.

#creepypasta phase #first time buying steam games #im definitely using tags wrong #probably over explained a little #cleverbot

[saal-school-project]

Part 1

Wow, I have been putting this off for a while now. I tell myself I can always do it later, but I guess later is now.

For context, this blog is for a school project—homework, in other words. Every year, it's mandatory to pick one of the subjects you see in school to do a project on. The project itself varies from subject to subject. But really, there are only two ways to go about this. You either pick math for the project as it raises your math grade, and of course your math grade always needs some raising; or you pick like any lesson other than math because doing the math project is a pretty time-consuming thing and you don't really care that much about your math grade being low, so it's not worth it. For the first two years, I always went with literature. It was easy—just writing some articles and whatnot. But this year our literature teacher changed, and the new teach told us that if we picked his subject for the project, we would have to visit some museums or something. That would require me to get out of my room and go outside! Ugh, can you imagine? no thanks. What else can I pick? English (as a second language, btw)? sure. and where I am now, blogging (surprise, that's what the project is!). I mean this is what blogging is, right?

Here's the chronological order of … how I acquired my hobbies? I mean what else to talk about? (Spoilers: It's going to be boring.)

Lets start with 5th grade 

I'm somewhat experienced with... uh, what would you call this? journaling? holding a diary? an elaborate self-monologue? with existential crises sprinkled in here and there? I didn't necessarily feel the need to put a label on it. And besides, I started doing it way back in 5th grade, and this habit of mine has evolved quite a bit over the years. The label would have to change eventually, so why bother? If I remember correctly, in 5th grade, I had a tiny notebook and made up my own alphabet to write secret stuff in it. Of course, back then I didn't know any English—sure, we saw English as a subject in elementary school, but I didn't really learned much from it—so all the stuff I wrote was in my native language, Turkish, just coded in some alphabet I made up. I never really used a pen to write in my notebook; it was usually just a pencil. As time went on, I started writing stuff to keep me entertained at school when it got boring—and it often did—and so it became a habit. Not much else to say about 5th grade.

#not sure what im doing but oh well #homework #school project