Hello all!

For what I believe is around the 3rd time I've done this for this city journal, I shall reintroduce myself. My name is BugeyedDragon (an old name I use nowhere anymore besides this very community), and I used to run a modded city journal based in the fictional country of Boomooderie.

This, however, was a very long time ago. I still have Boomooderie and my old ~11-12 gigabyte plugins folder on an external hard drive somewhere. Since then, I retired myself away from building aesthetic-focused cities, as the crashing, hours of scrolling through the landmarks folder, long load times, and other fun issues were beginning to drive me a liiiiittle crazy. I've reverted to a more vanilla philosophy with a far smaller pool of mods (An act blasphemous to most, I do not use the NAM, though I'm considering installing the traffic simulator and a couple of isolated additions like the roundabouts and some other stuff. I merely want to keep my transportation menu as neat and small as possible, and I remember being very very overwhelmed when I was a young lad first installing it.)

I did have quite a lot of plans for Boomooderie, however! I had a storyline in which a new president was elected who centralized his power and transformed the otherwise decentralized government into something more totalitarian, while an island 20 miles off declared independence in protest of the new government. I had a whole fictional set of island countries, which I planned to place somewhere in the north pacific. Boomooderie was the regional power, having a complicated history of being colonized by both Australians and Brazilians (I was very young and knew nothing of how... plausible this would've been) in which war took place between the two countries over control of the island, only for the inhabitants to decide their masters were not worth the trouble, and the two sides unified and declared independence. I had so many tiles I had started, but never finished. I am still liable to return to this any day now, but for now, I'm content musing on all of the projects I started and never finished.

To this day, I still am taking a similar approach in my present region, Bashkorkistan (named after the region in the Russian Federation). My loose lore was that it was a newly discovered landmass colonized by... almost every country on earth. This is not present in the architecture, style, or anything like that. It's really just an excuse for me to put a city named d'Orleans next to one called al-Hattin. The only criteria I really hold myself to are to ensure each city is profitable before I finish it and to finish the entire region before expanding it. I try to make use of whatever randomly generated tile sizes the game gives me without editing the BMP (though I did add in two large tiles in my newest one because the game gave me like, only one.) After I finish a region, I expand in one of the cardinal directions and make an entirely new one there. I tend to finish up cities very fast, as the game has become something of a comforting pastime while talking with friends

Unfortunately, disaster struck me when my hard drive died. I lost almost the entire region plus a couple of other things. Repairing the hard drive is going to cost upwards of 900-3900 dollars. Almost not worth it for a region I had spent like, 5-6 sporadic months on, right? Well, life has been viscerally cruel for the last two years, and I got a job recently, so I am going to recover that god damn region if only to tell life to go fuck itself for the sucker punch it gave me by doing that. One might say it's more about sending a message. To compensate, I've been working on the northern expanse of the region, called "Bandar-Brunesia", a name I based on the Asian nation of Bandar-Brunei.

I have been zipping through this one relatively quickly for my standards, I first created it on March 31st of this year, with intermittent breaks. You'll likely be able to notice one of the mods I use already; the SPAM mod (since it's practically necessary anyway). I intend on mostly revisiting some of the older stuff I worked on that I never released, and also comparing my style in cities as old as Bedfordale (which you can see in my first view entries on this CJ) to newer ones I had made in preparation to be featured on this very CJ. 

That is all I have to post for now, but I will be back hopefully soon. I am unsure of how many people will be interested in this CJ from here on out considering how much... well, better all the others are now. But even then, trying to make the best-looking cities and trying to make your stuff look cooler and more realistic than everything else isn't entirely in the spirit of the game. For me, it's become something of a peaceful escape, and I intend on keeping it that way for the foreseeable future (instead of cursing at my screen every time the game randomly CTDS )

Also, if you remember me from back in 2015-2016; let me know! I don't think I was ever a particularly notable member, but I did have a couple of people who'd always comment on my stuff. I still remember the old simtropolis chatroom, talking to those such as Biprio and confused04 and even Cori before she had become a mod. 

Fare thee well!