It’s rare that I pick up a Lego set specifically because I want to build it, and not necessarily because I want it on display, but I took a look at the soccer ball set that hit stores in time for the World Cup and then a conveniently timed double points weekend rolled around and my money disappeared. Because look at the inside of this thing:
That looks a lot more complicated than it was, surprisingly enough, and it was tremendously satisfying to put together. Then there’s the bit that goes in the middle:
If you press that little tan piece sitting right in front of the green, the players jump up and down and the fireworks swing from side to side. Then the whole thing can close up, and honestly, the ball looks pretty cool closed up, too:
We aren’t going to do the math on how much this cost vs. how many hours it took to put together or anything like that, we’re just going to say it was a fun way to spend an evening and an afternoon, leave it at that, and … sigh, figure out somewhere to put it.
Book review coming tomorrow; I’m waiting for the high to die down a little bit.
Woke up at 6:30 in the morning, not because I wanted to.
Laid in bed and screwed around on my phone for a while, because to hell with getting out of bed that early on a Saturday.
Finished Kylie Lee Baker’s Japanese Gothic, which was fine, I suppose, but I don’t have a lot to say about it. I’ve read two of Baker’s books now and I feel like I bounce off of her a little bit for some reason that I can’t quite explain.
Finished a not-Lego build.
Watched the Netherlands absolutely demolish Sweden.
Did a really poor job at several online games that I’ve been playing lately.
And now I’m watching Ecuador play Curaçao, which just went into halftime tied.
Tomorrow my brother and his family are coming into town, so I need to spend the morning cleaning. A sensible person would have started today; I am not sensible.
I am important and influential, and my stupid little website is going to reach 200,000 people this year, and you should really, really send me a review copy of the Sagrada Família set. I keep seeing TikTok videos of people opening their review sets early, so I know you have a program. I’ll review it and put up multiple build posts. Come on. Do me a favor.
Also, finally revealing this the same week you got me to buy Minas Tirith is mean, so you should definitely send me this for free to make up for it.
So the Task that I was nattering about for a few days there was building the Lanter Fish— no, not a “lantern fish,” we’re going to respect the Chinese misspelling here– which represents the first not-a-Lego set I’ve ever ordered. And as you can see, it looks pretty fucking cool– the jaw moves up and down, and the little light is actually a light– the Amazon listing claims you can use it as a lamp, which is hilariously wrong, but it is an actual working light.
At 1038 pieces for $35 or so, it’s probably less than half of what you’d pay if it had LEGO on all of the pieces, and there are a couple of places where you’re going to suffer for that difference, because there are definitely some quality of life issues involved in putting this thing together that Lego ironed out years if not decades ago.
Let’s start with this, the contents of Bag 2:
Perhaps you haven’t put a Lego set together in a while: the pieces come in numbered bags, and there’s usually fifty to a hundred pieces in a bag, sometimes even fewer. This set had three big bags, each of which had five or six smaller bags inside that bag:
The problem is that, while I can see some organization in terms of which pieces were in which bag, that organization has nothing to do with the order they’re put together in, so you have to open all five of those bags right away, because the first three steps might involve pieces from all five bags. That means you’re sorting through hundreds of pieces to find whatever you may happen to be looking for for any given step, which slows everything way the hell down. I am not the type to pre-organize my pieces before building, but that feels way more essential with these sets. It took me easily twenty minutes of searching for one particular piece, which I eventually found stuck inside another piece. Now, that could happen with a Lego set too, but there would be a fifth as many pieces inside the bag, so it would still have been much easier to locate.
The other thing: I’ve occasionally wondered why Lego chooses the random colors they do for the pieces you can’t see, and have speculated that it was maybe a product of whatever they had a lot of lying around or something– was there a reason this piece was red and not blue? Sometimes the answer is yes, but in putting this set together I’ve realized a couple of other reasons to vary the colors:
Easily 90 percent of this set is black(*), and any piece that isn’t black is going to be grey or dark brown, which blends in with black pretty damn well. The eyes are the only red pieces in the entire set. This makes it really hard to pick out individual small pieces in a pile of parts, especially when you’re stupid enough to try to build the set on a desk with a black surface, like I did.
It helps with orientation when you’re looking at the instructions– not just “Okay, the 2×6 brick needs to be facing up,” but “the 2×6 blue brick needs to be facing up,” which is a big difference.
I spent a lot more time than usual pondering the instructions on this set and making small mistakes that I had to undo later, and it just led to more respect for the fucking geniuses Lego has creating their instruction manuals over there. They do this thing where all of the new pieces in a step are in color (mostly) and everything else is greyed out, and I can see why they decided to do that– it’s a lot easier to pick out the new parts, and one of the most common mistakes you will make with a Lego set is not noticing a specific part you were supposed to add on a certain step– but the printing quality of the manual was not high in the first place, and what it often meant was that the instructions were just hard to understand. There were also a few steps where you were building things in a way that would never fly in a Lego set, and instructions where you were adding things to the bottom of stuff you already had built, which was a huge pain in the ass.
That said? The lanter fish looks pretty fucking cool, and at that price I’ll put up with some nonsense.
(*) All black, yes, but a gorgeous, pearlescent black that is really hard to capture in pictures. I love the color of this thing.
Three Billy bookcases from Ikea showed up on my front porch today.(*) I’m not sure at the moment where the third is going. My wife said she had “bookshelf fatigue” a bit ago when I called her into the bedroom to ask for opinions. I don’t blame her; I have Me Fatigue, which is a close variant. I have Entirely Too Much Shit, and I keep acquiring more shit, and I looked at those filled bookshelves (which won’t look like that forever, as they’re going to be organized better sooner or later) and started musing about how my house burning down might solve some of my problems.
Not all of the books in the picture are mine, for the record. But enough of them are, and when you widen the scope to the whole house, I’m not exactly a hoarder, because I’m too organized for that, but Jesus, I have a damn problem.
Also, I need a second Spring Break where all I do is read. Like, 24/7, without breaking for food, bathroom, or sleep. Either that or I need All the Writers to take, like, a year off. I understand that writing is how they feed themselves but if everybody could just take a little hit on behalf of my mental health and the success of my marriage I’d appreciate it.
(*) Initial review is that at their price point they are excellent bookcases, which is basically what everyone I’ve ever heard mention them has said. We’ll see how well they hold up; that shelf on the far left is effectively made of cardboard and probably ought to go as soon as possible, so what might happen is I get rid of it, slide the other tall one down and stick the third Billy in between it and the two that are already on the wall. We’ll see.
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.
I have to say, putting together the Minerals setis 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.
