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.
I put myself on an RSVP list for this enormous bastard today, which just means that they’ll let me know when it’s for sale, which will be good, because it’ll take a while to sell the house so that I can afford it.
Be sure to note the tiny FF members and the Silver Surfer, for scale.
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.
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.
Several things are true about this metal scorpion, which would probably be 10″ or so long if I straightened the tail out:
It was a hell of a lot of fun to put together.
It featured probably the clearest obviously-translated-from-Chinese instructions that I have ever seen for something like this, and the few times I made mistakes, fixing them was pretty easy.
It was packed with an absolutely absurd number of extra pieces of hardware. There was a bag of screws missing– naturally, the most common kind– when I bought it, and a quick email got the bag sent to me, but I think they shipped close to double the amount of tiny screws and bolts I needed to build it.
When I say “teeny,” I mean “I needed tweezers at several points to put this thing together,” and I had to keep my glasses off because my vision doesn’t work right at that distance and that resolution, for lack of a better word, to be able to put the thing together.
There’s also a wasp, which I’m thinking of getting, but it’s $109, which seems pretty steep. This was $60 or so and I feel like I’m okay with that price.
I did not lose a single piece while putting it together. I dropped a couple on the first day (this was built over maybe a week in three or four spurts, mostly because my eyes would get tired after a while) and managed to find them. I needed the boy to help me find one. But they’re all still in there. 🙂
The best thing about it? It isn’t Diablo IV. Which, uh, I’m gonna go play now.
My son’s best friend currently lives in Indianapolis, and she was in town overnight last night, and today we met her mom in Kokomo to hand her back over. For those of you who don’t know Indiana geography, Kokomo is more or less a halfway point between us, and it’s also the site of several cons I was a vendor at back when I was doing that. The guys who run Kokomo-Con have a comic shop, and two doors down from the comic shop is a fairly massive vintage toy shop, and a couple doors down from that is a used bookstore, with a used record store in between that we didn’t go into because I am not about to bring physical music media back into my life. We spent … I dunno, probably close to a couple of hours browsing between the three stores, and I somehow didn’t manage to spend any money despite finding any number of things I could have bought.
The copy of Iron Man #1 — the real first one, from 1968– was awfully tempting, especially since I’ve now spent some time looking through other listings for that same book and the $660 they wanted for it either indicates a hell of a deal or terrible condition. It wasn’t graded and obviously I didn’t take it off the shelf and look through it, but that’s always been a book I’ve wanted to own. If I was into Westerns I would have been ecstatic about the used bookstore, which had tons of series paperbacks that probably cost a quarter when they first came out. I always go looking for old Tor Conan books from the 1980s and early 90s and I can never find any, and it was the same here.
Three different $1000 Funko Pops. I don’t even remember what they were. That bubble’s got to … uh, pop soon, right?
Anyway, we came home and I took a nap until around 8, and now I’m up and if I wasn’t sitting here in front of the computer I’d be pacing around trying to decide if I wanted to do anything with the rest of my evening or go to bed. Spring Break is basically over at this point since we just have the weekend, and I have stuff to do on both days, so we’ll see if I’m a maniac on Sunday or if I manage to stay calm for the next couple of days. After that, seven weeks of school and then year 19 is in the bag.
Forgive me, for I have sinned; I spent money on Black Friday, the fruits of which arrived today in the form of that pretty-ass new 27″ monitor on the right there. The one it replaced was, in general, a capable device (and will continue in service, but on my wife’s desk) but was so old that I literally don’t remember when I bought it; it may well date to the computer before Apple switched to the current iMac setup, where the computer and the monitor are one piece. It’s possible that it dates back to my Chicago years, although I think it might be too thin for that.
Thing is, I have a new desk coming– it’s backordered, but it’s coming– and that desk is a bit wider and deeper than my current one, and has a spot underneath it where I can put the PS5. So I decided that meant it was okay to become the ultimate in geekery: a three-monitor person. And Amazon had these fuckers on sale steep on Black Friday; I saved about $220 on the two I ordered, one of which is just going to sit in the box until the new desk arrives in a couple of months and, when I install it, might go in oriented vertically. Why? Why the fuck not?
Also, it’s curved, and I don’t know if you’ve ever used a curved monitor before? I hadn’t, and while I can’t quite explain why I like it as much as I do, it’s kind of amazing, and between the curve, a more efficient stand, and the smaller bezels compared to the old monitor, it actually really doesn’t take up much more room on my desk– so even the one drawback I’d managed to come up with regarding spending the money & upgrading really didn’t pan out.
Next trick: figure out why the colors on that picture look so supersaturated. Which I think is the phone and not the (main) monitor.
I have successfully solved the Speed Cube three or four times, tossing it to my son in between attempts to have him remix it, so now I can start working on memorizing patterns since I’ve got the basic vocabulary down. This was already worth the $18 or so I spent on the cube, honestly.
That’s all I’ve got at the moment. I know I’ve been boring this week; please accept my most sincere apologies for my lack of dedication. Maybe something fascinating will happen tomorrow! I have a union meeting with my boss after work that has all sorts of potential to go deeply ugly. We shall see, right? Presume positive intentions and all that.
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