Tag: lego

On knockoffs

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

I need an intervention

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

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.

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 Geek1 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.