Tag: lego

Family time!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

So what does family time look like when everyone in the house is an introvert?

The boy and I working on Lego sets while my wife works on a puzzle, all of us in the same room, but with minimal conversation happening, because we’re all concentrating.

I’ve been working on the Notre Dame set a few bags at a time for the last several days, but I picked up this AT-AT today and decided to take a break and get this done in one sitting. The Notre Dame set is beautiful, but it’s also crazily repetitive and I didn’t have the strength tonight to make 32 more windows or 10 more flying buttresses. I noticed the instruction manual had a link to the new Lego Builder app, and holy hell, I’m never touching one of the manuals again other than to look through them for the little flavor details they like to sprinkle through them. The app surrounds any new pieces for any particular step with a little glowing aura, making it way harder to miss them than in the manuals, and you can rotate and enlarge the model on the screen.

That’s a Goddamn game-changer right there. Lego manuals are impressively well put together 95% of the time, but sometimes there’s just no way to display a step with one single perfect angle, and letting me zoom and rotate at will was just amazing. Plus they gave me stats at the end, and y’all know how much I like stats. Turns out if you were to stack all of the pieces in that AT-AT on top of one another (I assume the long way, and not actually attaching them to each other?) it would be 6 meters high! I also managed to put together 7 pieces per minute in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to put the set together. I don’t know what the hell I could possibly do with that information, but I love that I have it.

Another Lego post

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I have to say, putting together the Minerals set is a perfectly pleasant way to spend a Saturday evening at the midpoint of a five-day break. I don’t want to be too much of a Lego wanker (who am I kidding) but this set, especially for something that only has 880 pieces and has to build three frames, has a ton of cool techniques that I’ve never used before. I’m going to have to find somewhere bright to display this so that all the translucent pieces look properly amazing.

Brace yourself; it’s possible I’m going to watch a movie later.

I wanna play with Legooooooooooos

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

The Treehouse set, which has since been retired, has been sitting in my office waiting patiently for me to get to it since my 48th birthday. I finally started putting it together a week or so ago, doing a couple of bags at a time because the instruction manual was terrible and I was going blind every time I looked at it. One way or another today I finally tackled all those leaves and finished it off. There were also green leaves in the box, but I like the autumn look a lot more.

Also, my fingers are not quite bleeding, but damn, putting all those vertical pieces into the leaves hurt.

The leafy portions can be lifted directly off, and all of the roofs come off of the three “house” portions of the set, so you can explore inside if you want to. Everything is detailed and furnished according to Lego’s traditional “details where no one will see them” system (and there’s a yellow gemstone hidden underneath the grass for some reason, too) and it all looks really nice.

In its final resting place, giving the A-Frame cabin some extra shade:

I may end up putting it on a little riser to make it more visible. That picture’s not from eye level in my desk chair but it’s still a little more covered up than I’d like.

A quick Lego Easter egg

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I’m putting the Taj Mahal set together, finally, and I decided to do the first two bags tonight. I was kind of surprised at how colorful some of the bricks were since the Taj Mahal is almost entirely white, but Lego loves to use random colors for bricks that are going to get hidden anyway. I’ve wondered before what made them decide that some specific part ought to be some specific color and I’ve usually assumed it was because a certain color of plastic is cheaper or something like that.

It took me a few minutes to realize why they’d chosen these colors for the inside structure of this build. Are you smarter than me? Do you see it?

I actually thought the wheel in the middle was black and it appears to be blue, so I’m a little surprised the black pieces aren’t a dark blue, but yeah: for no better reason other than to do it, they’re echoing the colors of the Indian flag here, just to make the build a little bit more fun while you’re putting the base together. It’s a minor thing, I know, but every time I put a set together I find another reason to think their engineers really ought to be working on, like, global warming or something. These people are geniuses.

Last teaching day of the year today, and after three straight periods of teaching the whole day plus two days with optional after-school study sessions, I’m beat to hell. The final is tomorrow, and it took forty minutes to photocopy everything after the study session so I didn’t leave work after five. That time included one (1) copier jam that ate fifteen minutes, because, Christ, when modern photocopiers jam, they jam everywhere.

Five days left.

My mom says I’m funny

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This was on my board on Friday, which was the last catch-up day until the final. I passed out progress reports at the beginning of class and went to my desk.

Spent the day running around town– as a family, no less– and getting stuff done and possibly spending some money unnecessarily. Then I came home and built a Lego set. I’m going to play video games for an hour now and then do some reading, so this is pretty much the perfect Saturday. We drove past a protest downtown, too, and the boy’s reaction to it makes me think I should probably take him to one sometime soon.

(I am … ambivalent, at best, about the utility of public protests, especially in 2025. That doesn’t mean that I look down at people for participating in them; I definitely don’t, but I don’t know that I find it a useful way to spend my time. There may be a post in there somewhere; I should probably interrogate the idea more.)

Anyway. What are you doing with yourself this weekend? I would like to officially plan as much of the next three weeks as humanly possible tomorrow, so spending the whole day at my desk is definitely possible.

In which it’s cold & I made stuff

On By Luther M. SilerIn art2 Comments

We’re going to present these in reverse order, because one of them is a better picture than the other:

I finished the Lego Himeji Castle set this evening, which turned out to be a really fun build even if it continues the fine Lego tradition of putting a bunch of cool details in that are immediately completely covered up by other bricks, never to be seen again. I suppose I would rather have the cool details than not have them, but I wanna see them, dammit.

Also, I need a bigger house, because I have four unbuilt Lego sets sitting in boxes a few feet away from me right now and I have no idea where the hell I’m going to put any of them once they’re done. Anyone want to give me their house?

My wife got me (well, both of us, but I was the one who wanted them) registered for three pottery classes at a local makerspace for Christmas, and we had our second class today, charmingly titled “Build a Mug.” The first class was kintsugi pottery and I did not post my product from that one because, frankly, I screwed up on the very first step and didn’t notice it until it was much too late, and since the modern version of kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with epoxy, the initial mistake meant that every subsequent piece I tried to put back together only ended up slightly more askew, and the final product just looks crap.

This mug? It’s not glazed yet, but I think I might actually use this mug once I have it finished in a couple of weeks. It needs to dry for about ten days and then we can go in and glaze it for final firing, so it’ll be a bit before I can post a picture of the final product, but my understanding is that glazing will smooth over a lot of the little imperfections. This obviously won’t look professional but I don’t think it looks completely crap, and the class was a lot of fun.

We’re actually doing a throwing class on Valentine’s Day, and I am fully ready to make pottery my entire Goddamned personality for a while if that’s as much fun as I think it might be.

Happy Thanksgiving

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

First of all, in accordance with our most ancient and sacred traditions:

And while your family is eating dry turkey and you’re arguing with Aunt Ruth about whether trans people deserve to be able to pee in public or not, my family is doing this:

On my inner child

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I know I talk about this every single time I put a Lego set together, but holy shit, the people who design these things are the smartest motherfuckers on Earth. I’m building the TIE Interceptor right now, which has been sitting on the floor in my office waiting for the right mood to strike me for probably several months now, and the cockpit and interior structure of this thing is just nuts. You can’t really see how detailed the cockpit is at this angle, and I couldn’t get any good pictures of it one way or another, but there are multiple screens in there for the minifigure to look at, along with two control sticks and a little radar screen with a picture of an X-Wing on it. My favorite little detail– see the two tiny gray dots at the top of the cockpit, underneath the two pale yellow studs? They wanted those two triangle pieces attached to them to be at an angle, and the pieces holding them at that angle are clearly guns. They took gun pieces from some other minifigure and reused them to hold the “screens” at the right angle.

It’s so creative it makes me sick. I could never be smart enough to design one of these damn things, and I’m in awe the whole time I’m building them. The model you get at the end isn’t even the point anymore. It’s all about marveling at the ingenuity it took to create these damn things, and wondering what these motherfuckers could do if they applied their skills to curing cancer instead of making toys.

(Oh, shit, I think I have the red pegs backwards on one of the wings. I’m gonna have to check that, before it’s too late to fix.)

(Actually the top row of pegs was backwards on both wings. Fixed!)

Anyway, I spent the day in Michigan visiting my wife’s family, and continuing to be vaguely weirded out by the fact that while her cousins are all perfectly nice people, I have never particularly clicked with all of them, but every time I see them lately one of their kids suddenly becomes interesting. I swear I have talked about this before, although I can’t find the post now; my favorite member of her extended family is her closest cousin’s younger daughter, which is weird, and I’m at the point where when we go to these things I just assume I’m going to spend most of my time talking to the generation underneath us more than I’m actually going to talk to her cousins.(*) It’s less weird than it could be; everybody’s in or out of college now and my son is the youngest person at these things by a mile, which is too bad for him. We were at this particular cousin’s house for the first time today, and one of her daughters, who I have known since she was ten and is now 26, finally actually started talking today? And she combines being a horse girl and an emo kid somehow, and I find that combination kind of hilariously endearing.

Jesus. I’ve known these people for sixteen years? I really should learn everyone’s names.

(*) Her uncle Bill is super cool too, for what it’s worth. So I spend my time talking to the youngest and the oldest people there.