For the first time in a very long while the Gang of Five is getting a few new emoticons and for the first time ever they come in land before time style:
       
Thank you very much, RockingScorpion, for making these for us
They are really beautiful!

Last August I picked up origami (paper folding) as a hobby. The hobby is really beautiful and relaxing though it has the downside that by now my entire place is somewhat littered with paper cranes, owls, kangaroos, elephants, giraffes, horses, dinosaurs, squirrels, all types of paper flowers etc.
Combining this hobby with the MLP fandom I recently created some print designs for MLP character origamis. Here are some results:

Last weekend I was at a larger bronie meetup for the first time and of course I had some of these prints along to teach anybronie interested how to fold the characters. It was well received and I got asked if I could do a discord origami too.
For that one I couldn't rely on any existing folding instructions on which the mane6 origamis were based (though I did change the instructions for paper horses a bit in order to get unicorns and pegasi / alicorns too), but I got some ideas and this is my first (alas wingless) attempt at an origami Discord:

The voting for the Appreciated Member Award will run until midnight between saturday 29th to sunday 30th of August. The following GOF members qualify as candidates for the Appreciated member awards for having participated in the vote but not won any awards themselves this year:

bestarianna1girl
Kor
LBTDiclonius
LettucebaconandTomato (but you must vote in this award in order to qualify yourself)
Littlefoot1616
Nick22
somerandomfangirl
The Chronicler
The Lone Dragon
vonboy (but you must vote in this award in order to qualify yourself)
Zimba

The first results are in by now so we will be able to start the tie breaking vote soon.
Some of the results this year have been very clear so several awards got no runner up (as a reminder, the runner up needs to have at least a third of the votes of the winner):

These are the clear results:
Fanart Award: Rocking Scorpion (no runner up)
Feedback Award: Ducky 123 (no runner up)
Friendly Member Award: Nahla - Malte279
Helpful Member Award: Ducky123 - Malte 279
Proactive Member Award: The Anonymous Person (no runner up)
Projects Award: ludichris (no runner up)
Philosophe Award: Rhombus (no runner up)
RPG Award: bushwacked - a tie breaking vote between Nick22 and Serris has to be held for the runner up RPG Award.

Appreciated Member Award - Nick22 (no runner up)



[EDIT: These earlier lines are not up to date anymore but kept for the record:

Things are somewhat complicated about the Proactive award. A decision about the proceedings there will be made in the staffroom and announed tomorrow after which the tie breaking vote can start.

Voting on the Appreciated Member Award will begin after the end of the tie breaking.]

The rules of the 2015 award votes will be run essentially on the same rules as the last two years with the main difference being that those who are entitled to vote and be voted for in the award ceremony need to have joined the GOF at least three months ago, must have posted at least a 100 times and (this is the single difference) must have been active within the last three months rather than within the current year.
Here are the full rules:

The voting process officially opens on Saturday, 1st August. A voting thread will be opened by one of the admins.
Voting for the initial 8 categories will last for 2 weeks and will close at 12 (midnight) on 15 August 2015 (forum standard time)

We understand it is a wall of text, but we would like you to at least read through the rules once before you start voting so that you won't breach any rules.

♪♫♪ OFFICIAL RULES AND REGULATIONS FOR 2015 GANG OF FIVE MEMBERSHIP AWARDS ♪♫♪

1)  All selected GOF members listed are invited to participate in the GOF Awards. These candidates have been granted participation on clearing of the following conditions:
A. Have a post count of at least 100 posts
B. Have been active on the GOF within the past 3 months
C. Have been a member of the GOF for at least 3 months
The list of eligible candidates for this year's awards can be found below! If your name is not on that list, you are not eligible to receive an award in this year's nominations. If you find you fulfill the three criteria listed above and still are not on the list, please contact one of the admins about it. We do our very best, but mistakes are always possible.

- The Appreciated Member Award will also be included but nominations for this award will be conducted AFTER the main 8 categories have been finalised and the awards distributed. DO NOT reveal your nomination for the Appreciated Member Award alongside your votes for the initial 8 categories because it won't be counted.

2)   You are to offer one (1) nomination per category highlighting the nominee's GOF username in underline and/or bold to aid with the tallying process. We strongly advise all participants to vote in every category if possible.
Understandably there may be some areas you are not too sure on if you haven't been involved directly (e.g. the RPG section) or are genuinely unable to select one candidate but we urge you try to offer a nomination if you can.

3)   If you want to be entitled to win an award, you will have to vote for at least 6 out of 9 categories. In case you did not vote in at least 6 categories, you will not receive any awards you are entitled to. The awards will instead go to the member with the second highest amount of votes. If you are not interested in winning an award, but still wish to vote in several categories, you are allowed to do so.

4) If you skip 3 votes in the first 7 categories, you are obliged to vote in the Appreciated Member award in order to win an award yourself.

- The Appreciated Member Award voting will be held after the main 8 categories have been finalised and the awards distributed, since only members who didn't win any of these 8 categories can be voted for the Appreciated Member Award. DO NOT reveal your nomination for the Appreciated Member Award alongside your votes for the initial 8 categories because it won't be counted.

5) All nominations must be accompanied with a few lines or a brief statement as to why you feel your choice deserves the award. It doesn't have to be long, but it should at least help enforce your choice so that it can be counted as valid reasoning. Feel free to express credit to those member you felt were close contenders for an award if you wish. Nominations without explanatory comments will count as a skipped vote, so make sure to include them!

6) If you do not complete all your nominations in one post, please submit the remainder of your nominations in a separate post. Please do not edit/update previous posts, since this will confuse the one keeping record of the votes. We will constantly update your votes and will not go back to check older posts once votes are cast.

7) We discourage voting for yourself in any given category for the awards. if you genuinely feel that there are no other eligible candidates who deserve a specific award then you are permitted to vote for yourself in 1 category only. Voting for yourself more than once will count as skipped votes. In case a tie in number of votes comes up, the candidate who did not vote for themselves automatically wins the award.

8) The candidate who gets most votes for an award will be permitted to add one of the drafts of the award to his or her signature. The candidate with the second most votes can choose one of the drafts of the awards after the winner has chosen his and can call himself the runner up! Runner ups must have at least one third of the votes the winner had and cannot use the same banner as the winner. Runner ups do not have to state that their award is a runner up, they can be just as proud as the actual winners.

9) In case two members get an equal amount of votes and are both entitled to either the award or a runner up award there will be a tiebreaking vote. These will be held after the main voting and before the Appreciated Member award voting. This final tiebreaker will decide who wins the award.

And lastly, we would like to remind you all that the awards are here for fun. Any activity that could be considered ruining the fun will disqualify you from the awards and might even result in a harsher action if necessary. Here is a list of what we find unacceptable:

• Cheating
  
• Bribing
  
• Vote fixing
  
• Conspiring
  
• Any general misconduct of ensuring that one GOF member will be guaranteed an award
  
• Claim an award when you're not elected
  

We want all of you to have as much fun as possible and we can only assure that if you help along yourself.

Thanks for reading. If there are any other questions feel free to post them below

- The main categories for this year's Awards are as follows -
~Fanart Award
~Feedback Award
~Friendly Member Award
~Helpful Member Award
~Philosopher Award
~Proactive Award
~Projects Award
~Role Play Gamer Award

A happy 27th birthday to you Rachel!
I hope that you have a great celebration today and will have an awesome 28th year of life of health, success, happiness, friendship, luck, peace, love and occupation to come

Since I am likely to log out for the rest of the year I want to wish all of you a good start (or as we say over here "Einen guten Rutsch" (which literally means "A good slide")) into the new year.
May 2015 become a healthy year of success, happiness, luck, of problems solved, friendships found and maintained and love received and given for all of you

I just saw the final part of the trilogy that was made out of the hobbit. Same as with The Desolation of Smaug I went in with fairly low expectations and by doing so I could enjoy the movie for not expecting to much from it. If one watches the hobbit movies (any of them) with the expectation of it being particularly faithful to Tolkien's work or with the expectation of them living up to the quality and the impression left by the lord of the rings movies one is almost bound to be painfully disappointed.
If one can keep out those expectations and watch it as a product in its own right it is a movie that can be enjoyed if not taken too seriously.
Same as the previous Hobbit movies the final one does include some very spectacular images and in some parts an impressive choreography. That later point however is also a weakness of the movie since it totally overdoes it in an attempt to appear epic for it. Unfortunately the result is mostly the opposite. Again we see orcs getting slaughtered at such a scale by elves that one must almost question if the killing rate does not sort of question the concept of who exactly the good and the bad guys are (this impression is further increased by the fact that the elven king Thranduil comes across as a total douche).
In combat elves (so long they are no "anonymous armor wearing dudes" = canonfodder) would fit as Marvel superhero cartoons with no real claim to realism but not so much into a Tolkien setting of fantastic realism. Admittedly they had the same problem already in the lord of the rings movies but for some reason they always seem to be been on trying to top the impression of total superiority of the "good guys" over the "bad guys" to the point where it becomes ridiculous. Same as sharpteeth in later LBT movies the orcs in this movie rarely come across as a threat.

CAREFUL THERE ARE SPOILERS NOW WHICH WOULD NOT BE GIVEN AWAY BY TOLKIEN'S BOOK



None of the "good" characters invented only for the movie and not being part of the book dies. I had been pretty sure that Tauriel (whom they had brought up to include an (in my opinion) rather cheesy love story between Legolas, her and Kili) was to be a Qui gonner, but in spite of the fact that she is pretty much used as a sledgehammer to tear down surprisingly fragile solid stone structures she survieves with just a few scratches being more scarred by the death of Kili (which had been part of the original story though not laid out as much as in the movie). On the other hand there are helmed orcs dying from headbutts by a bareheaded dwarf (Dain) and in one scene two of the dwarves announce they are going to take on a group of hundred orcs and NOBODY even gives and hint that they might get hurt in the process (of course they don't).
Appart from the harmlessness of the orcs the movie also somewhat suffers from the same degree of having been streched out for too long. The hobbit just wasn't meant to be a trilogy. On the other hand some scenes that would have been interesting were once again avoided / changed for the worse (in my opinion).
Anyone hoping to see more of Beorn will be disappointed. You are not going to see more of him than him getting dropped by an eagle and transforming into a bear while falling but not more of a fight of him (ignoring the fact that in the book he is not only the one to save the mortaly wounded Thorin from the orcs but also the one to kill the orcish chiftain who has been replaced by Azoc in these movies).
The subplots invented for the movie also seriously interfere with the continuity of the story as it feels a bit like the main battle is left on behalf of a kind of commando mission carried out by Thorin to kill Azoc.

One thing I found quite interesting was the way they depicted the Nazgul in a not quite coporal form at Dol Guldur. I think that their depiction was inspired to some degree by the appearance they had in the 1970s cartoon version of the lord of the rings when Frodo put on the ring. Whatever else I may think of the scene as such, I kind of liked their appearance.

So yeah, there is a lot that could be improved in my opinion and a lot that was done poor without any understandable reason. A lot of time in the movie was wasted that could have been used better. Nonetheless I don't regret having seen it. If one can watch it without comparing it to the book or the lord of the rings movies one can enjoy it (not as a master piece but as something that is okay) if one cannot and if one gets angry about movies not living up to high expectations one may want to avoid seeing it.
The elves and men in the movie are a lot more aggressive against Thorin than in case of the book

Before starting I must once again appologize for a lot of delay in this year's vote. The blame for this goes to me. The start of the vote was delayed to the point where all of the admins were back in work (rather than during the holidays), on externships abroad and adding to that there came some unforeseeable events messing up schedules and spirit (a minor among which was a computer crash deleting a vote result list which had to be remade).
I'm sorry for all that.

We got our votes in and we got the tiebraker votes.
The last step now are the Appreciated member award votes. There are two voters (Pterano and LoyfeCycleProtector) who so far cast five of their eight votes meaning that they must vote in the appreciated member award to qualify for being elected themselves for the appreciated member award.
Candidates for the Appreciated member Award are all the members who did cast at least five (in which case they must vote here to be elected themselves) votes in their previous awards but didn't win any award or runner up award themselves.
This year the candidates for the Appreciated member award are:

jansenov
Kor
LoyfeCycleProtector
Malte279
Nahla
Nick22
Pterano
Serris
The Anonymous Person
The Chronicler
vonboy

The vote will run until midnight (forum standart time) friday 10th October after which at last there will be the long awaited awards

And once again it is that time again for the award voting
Since we fared rather well with the rules of 2013 there haven't been any changes to them, here they are. Everyone please read through the rules and ask if you have any questions about any of them:

The voting process will officially open on Friday, 29th August and will be started by an opening speech from one of the members of staff of the GOF. You cannot start voting before this opening speech.
Voting for the initial 7 categories will last for 2 weeks and will close at 12 (midnight) on 12 September 2014 (forum standard time)

We understand it is a wall of text, but we would like you to at least read through the rules once before you start voting so that you won't breach any rules.

♪♫♪ OFFICIAL RULES AND REGULATIONS FOR 2014 GANG OF FIVE MEMBERSHIP AWARDS ♪♫♪

1)  All selected GOF members listed are invited to participate in the GOF Awards. These candidates have been granted participation on clearing of the following conditions:
A. Have a post count of at least 100 posts
B. Have been active on the GOF within the past 3 months
C. Have been a member of the GOF for at least 3 months
The list of eligible candidates for this year's awards can be found below! If your name is not on that list, you are not eligible to receive an award in this year's nominations. If you find you fulfil the three criteria listed above and still are not on the list, please contact one of the admins about it. We do our very best, but mistakes are always possible.

- The Appreciated Member Award will also be included but nominations for this award will be conducted AFTER the main 7 categories have been finalised and the awards distributed. DO NOT reveal your nomination for the Appreciated Member Award alongside your votes for the initial 7 categories because it won't be counted.

2)   You are to offer one (1) nomination per category highlighting the nominee's GOF username in underline and/or bold to aid with the tallying process. We strongly advise all participants to vote in every category if possible.
Understandably there may be some areas you are not too sure on if you haven't been involved directly (e.g. the RPG section) or are genuinely unable to select one candidate but we urge you try to offer a nomination if you can.

3)   If you want to be entitled to win an award, you will have to vote for at least 6 out of 8 categories. In case you did not vote in at least 6 categories, you will not receive any awards you are entitled to. The awards will instead go to the member with the second highest amount of votes. If you are not interested in winning an award, but still wish to vote in several categories, you are allowed to do so.

4) If you skip 2 votes in the first 7 categories, you are obliged to vote in the Appreciated Member award in order to win an award yourself.

- The Appreciated Member Award voting will be held after the main 7 categories have been finalised and the awards distributed, since only members who didn't win any of these 7 categories can be voted for the Appreciated Member Award. DO NOT reveal your nomination for the Appreciated Member Award alongside your votes for the initial 7 categories because it won't be counted.

5) All nominations must be accompanied with a few lines or a brief statement as to why you feel your choice deserves the award. It doesn't have to be long, but it should at least help enforce your choice so that it can be counted as valid reasoning. Feel free to express credit to those member you felt were close contenders for an award if you wish. Nominations without explanatory comments will count as a skipped vote, so make sure to include them!

6) If you do not complete all your nominations in one post, please submit the remainder of your nominations in a separate post. Please do not edit/update previous posts, since this will confuse the one keeping record of the votes. We will constantly update your votes and will not go back to check older posts once votes are cast.

7) We discourage voting for yourself in any given category for the awards. if you genuinely feel that there are no other eligible candidates who deserve a specific award then you are permitted to vote for yourself in 1 category only. Voting for yourself more than once will count as skipped votes. In case a tie in number of votes comes up, the candidate who did not vote for themselves automatically wins the award.

8) The candidate who gets most votes for an award will be permitted to add one of the drafts of the award to his or her signature. The candidate with the second most votes can choose one of the drafts of the awards after the winner has chosen his and can call himself the runner up! Runner ups must have at least one third of the votes the winner had and cannot use the same banner as the winner. Runner ups do not have to state that their award is a runner up, they can be just as proud as the actual winners.

9) In case two members get an equal amount of votes and are both entitled to either the award or a runner up award there will be a tiebreaking vote. These will be held after the main voting and before the Appreciated Member award voting. This final tiebreaker will decide who wins the award.

And lastly, we would like to remind you all that the awards are here for fun. Any activity that could be considered ruining the fun will disqualify you from the awards and might even result in a harsher action if necessary. Here is a list of what we find unacceptable:

• Cheating
  
• Bribing
  
• Vote fixing
  
• Conspiring
  
• Any general misconduct of ensuring that one GOF member will be guaranteed an award
  
• Claim an award when you're not elected
  

We want all of you to have as much fun as possible and we can only assure that if you help along yourself.

Thanks for reading. If there are any other questions feel free to post them below

- The main categories for this year's Awards are as follows -
~Fanart Award
~Feedback Award
~Friendly Member Award
~Helpful Member Award
~Philosopher Award
~Proactive Award
~Role Play Gamer Award