A Fandom's Path of Defiance

(Personal fan art created by yours truly)

Occasional ideas flow once again from the depths of Real Racing 3. I can't be more happier than this when I completed the final goal of the game's newest event "Path of Defiance" which pitted me to get one of the motorsports' icons: the Mazda 787B. Just what I needed to complete my race car collections. Right now, I've made my call to skip the XJR9 event in favor of the Porsche 962C one because I kinda want to make a Taisan Starcard 962C livery whenever possible. Back to the special event, the first days were normal until I reached the sixth day where things got intense in Catalunya. But, the last two days were more forgiving than the day in question despite having a far lower PR from the recommended number.

But knowing the event's name "Path of Defiance" reminds me of something that qualified as such. No, it's not something motorsport-related sadly, but this time it's related to fandoms: there was a story where a TV show nobody would heard of blazed its way to the victory in a fandom competition, going as far as defeating 63 of the "usual suspects" in process, even managed to topple the reigning champions. To embrace such a story, one has to flashback months ago where the mentioned miracle took place: the 2017 edition of E!Online's TV's Top Couple competition.

Le Mans' Bizarre Adventures

Image by Jayson Fong, part of the #24ofLM24 project. You can replay his live stream on these arts here, while you can support him by buying all the prints of this project on his site!

Just when I thought that this year's Le Mans would be as crazy as last year, the craziness level went to the roof this year, cranked up to eleven, maybe twelve? Yes, we have the same LMP1 winning: Porsche, which is effectively its third hattrick since its return in 2014, and yes, Toyota failed Le Mans again, but outside that, there's plenty of crazy for this year's race that's worth talking about here.

The 83rd running of 24 Hours of Le Mans featured Porsche and Toyota fighting head-to-head for the outright victory in the LMP1 category (poor ByKolles though), with the abundant entry of LMP2 featuring Orecas and friends with Gibson engines for everyone in contention for the win, five works teams with attitude in the GTE Pro class were ready to give their all, and then we have the GTE Am class. Throughout the span of 24 hours, going from the broad daylight to the darkness of night time and day again, teams combined not only speed, but consistency, clean racing, teamwork, and of course reliability to succeed.

Mobile Race Cars (and some Dilemma Involved)

My recent mobile gaming venture seemed to center around racing-themed games lately. Everything came to a full circle as Real Racing 3's update featuring Koenigsegg One:1 and Nissan Skyline GT-R R32 came out which triggered my desire to return to the game, after one successful attempt at rooting my device just to enable the phone to store app data to the SD card, something I have envisioned by a mile at that time though with no time to execute it.

From that point on, what started as an effort to avoid cluttering my internal memory's lack of space turned out to be a profitable end, though not without facing a dilemma that I will explain later on. Furthermore, another big-name title also joins my collection list after a Google Play Store sale which had such a title available for free, while it had a price to pay normally.

A Little Update

Greetings! It's been months without activity on this blog due to several things which also includes working on my final paper. While I have been active on my other blog, posting stuffs about various fandom polling competitions, there hasn't been any activity I could blog on here unfortunately, especially after leaving PC games I usually play which impacted on halted projects of mine. That goes to my pages [R]GARAGE as well as there hasn't been any activity and update for the past months. My last promise World Tournament (spoiler alert: it's actually a working title now!) hasn't been executed nicely since I ended up tweaking more things than I intended (although there are already two chapters released on my other blog), and I might restart the fic albeit in a different platform, perhaps AO3.

WORLD TOURNAMENT - A March Madness-style Simulated Competition with a Fandom Twist

Over my other blog, I've always wanted to create my own March Madness-styled tournament, involving characters from television series and movies, and some other stuffs. I pitched a couple of ideas along the way, triggering my necessity to make March Madness brackets on Excel just to waste time, to the point that I even made one for last year's SpoilerTV's Favorite TV Series competition (and will be used for future competitions on the site) like this one. Eventually, I stumbled into this World Cup simulation on Excel that uses VBA Macro functions and an idea flowed to my mind: How about making a March Madness competition with characters from TV, movie, and all other stuffs, but with a twist of World Cup-esque qualifiers? There will be eight categories in my tournament, and these will act as "confederations" just as World Cup Qualifiers do (and by the way, we're in the middle of the 2018 World Cup Qualifiers too!).

So many TV series and movie titles exist, with a handful of them win awards for quality, another handful for its loyal fandom, but sometimes it's hard to determine which one is the best of all. Because of this a tournament was conceived to determine the best of the best: the "World Tournament." It's not a good name to boot actually, but I believe this is the best name chosen in order to clear up the confusion whenever I either name this "insert a word here March Madness" or "insert a word here World Cup," which are oft-used I believe.