The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I have decided that I need something to fiddle with when I’m bored that is not my phone. So I bought one of these today:
I do not expect to become an expert, but reaching “moderately competent” would be kind of cool. I’ve mixed it up and today’s goal is to solve it once. We’ll see how it goes.
Let’s see how old my readers are:
This isn’t exactly a deep revelation or anything, but for some reason this commercial popped into my head this morning as I was getting ready for work. I strongly suspect if you’re within five years or so of my age you have this jingle memorized still, but have you ever really thought about just how impossible it would be to market My Buddy in today’s kids’ toys market? Things weren’t as rigidly gendered in the 1980s as they are now– that is a straight up doll being marketed directly to boys, doing boy things like riding Big Wheels and hiding in a clubhouse and climbing trees. They’re not even trying to muddy the waters with the label “action figure.” My Buddy was a doll, and never wanted to be anything else.
There are not many ways in which I think American culture has backslid since the 80s, but the rigid adherence to gender essentialism in absolutely fucking everything related to kids is definitely one of them. I had a parent come in this morning looking for white bedroom furniture for her son, and it threw me for enough of a loop that I almost needed to have her repeat it to make sure I was hearing her right. Because no one buys white bedroom furniture for boys. We have a couple of sets that are gender neutral and you should see how incredibly confused people get when they can’t immediately figure out what genitalia the children in the room with the furniture are supposed to be. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad.
Oh man it’s SO TALL.
SO the boy got home, and saw the Falcon, and immediately any thought of me not finishing it tonight went out the window. And therefore:
This is the end of bag five. 
Bag Six, mostly concerned with building out the middle section of the Falcon.
Bag seven. Most of this was actually underneath the ship, putting in the belly gun and landing gear. 
Bag Eight, AKA “Build this exact same thing a whole bunch of times.”
And the completed Falcon.
You can fit two minifigures in the cockpit, at least barely. Rey and Han are piloting.
And the top blooms out to reveal the inside. Hi, BB-8!
Cooool.
Random bits that were left, and the Lego Separator, which I’ve never used. I took a bunch of them and just sprinkled them around the outside of the ship, especially the bright red circle bits. I don’t know why these were extra, as I didn’t miss anything. I swear. The extra missile is good, as the two missiles fire unexpectedly far and they’re going to get lost soon. The rest? Whatever, I’ll throw them in with the rest of the Legos.
Stayed up last night and livetweeted the convention up to the point where Tim Kaine’s speech finished; I’m always amazed that I don’t have a ton of unfollows during these things, as I tend to tweet a lot when I’m watching anything remotely political. But no! Only six people all day yesterday, which is a perfectly normal number. I ended up liking Tim Kaine more than I thought I would– a thought that I think my Twitter feed shared. There was a lot of making fun of him going on but it felt affectionate, if that makes any sense, and dude has succeeded in making his stupid Donald Trump impression worm its way into my brain– meaning that every time the idiot says “believe me” again, people are going to hear Kaine doing it. He’s like Ned Sanders, but with a really sharp knife, the kind where you don’t realize anyone cut you until your head falls off. I still would have preferred several other options, but I’m starting to think I can get to like this guy.
Anyway it’s my day off and I decided to build the Millennium Falcon. Legos have gotten fucking complicated, guys.
That’s a lot of bags. They are labeled 1-8, but several numbers have more than one bag, some of the bags have other bags inside them, and one bag has no number on it at all. There’s maybe 12 outer bags. 
That is one big-assed instruction manual. I got through about 90 pages of it before deciding I’d had enough for the morning.
This is the part where I realized I’d screwed up for the first time, as you really need to pay attention to the colors in the instruction manuals and the right pieces were inexplicably in the unlabeled bag. At any rate, you start by building the superstructure of the thing and I made mine too short.
There, that’s better. As it worked out, this was my only big mistake, or at least the only one I’ve noticed so far. The engineers for these things are crazy people and the people who make the manuals are crazy geniuses. 
Adding the floor.
Finishing the first step of the build with some work on the underside. This is crazily complicated already. All of this was the first bag, by the way. 
On to the second bag. We’re making progress! 
The end of Bag Two, which was mostly furniture and detail stuff. Also, I got to put in some decals. 
The end of Bag Three. Which, weirdly, doesn’t look all that different from Bag Two at first, until you look a little closer. 
And here’s the end of Bag Four, putting me halfway through the build. At this point I realized my eyes were bleeding and decided to be done for a bit. There are at least two more minifigures in the bags somewhere, because I haven’t found Rey or BB-8 yet. The first four bags took about two hours, so I’ll probably end up finishing this tomorrow. Whee!
…before I forget it happened.
Two of the boy’s great-aunts (my aunts, in other words) were in town this weekend while he was spending the night at Grandma and Grandpa’s, and one of them brought a big bag full of games and toys that her grandson has outgrown to give him.
One of them is a neat little anatomy puzzle, four layers deep, where the top layer is a clothed boy, the layer underneath has no clothes, the layer under that has no skin (in other words, just the muscles), then the organs, and then the final layer is the skeleton. The skeleton isn’t a puzzle, it’s just printed on the frame that contains everything else.
The puzzle is obviously European. The instructions on the back of the box are printed in six different languages, and the naked boy on level 2 is anatomically accurate. Now, I don’t give a damn about the boy having a puzzle with a cartoon penis on it. He has a real penis he can look at whenever he wants; there will be no damage done to him by looking at a cartoon penis.
I am enough of a juvenile, however, that I was in tears laughing when, just now, after having put the puzzle together, he brought it to me and informed me that it was missing a piece:
We found the piece, by the way.
ALTERNATE TITLE 1: Why I Need to Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 2: Why Everyone should be Glad I Don’t Have a Daughter
ALTERNATE TITLE 3: Why Liberals are Dumbasses and Don’t Run Anything
The boy’s at a birthday party right now. I’m not at the party, but my wife is; as someone who has run dozens of parties over the years for young kids where the adults way outnumbered the kids, I long for the days when it was okay to just drop your child off at a birthday party and then just go away for a couple of hours, but that’s not how society– or at least the parts of it I move in– works any longer. I wouldn’t have objected to going, for the record, but I had some stuff to do around here and she volunteered. So she’s there and I’m here.
The party’s for one of the girls in his class at Hogwarts. I had been meaning all week to email her parents and ask for some details about what she might want for her birthday, and finally remembered to do it yesterday. Mom responded pretty promptly. The first sentence of the email was “Oh, she’s all girl.”
Oh.
I would kinda have liked some more specificity than that, but whatever; basically it meant go to the Pink Aisle and close your eyes and pick something.(*) My wife and I went through this fun and stupid rigamarole in the Pink Aisle last night where neither of us really wanted to get her something froofy and glittery and princessy but that’s basically all there is; I suggested a couple of different (mostly pink and purple!) age-appropriate Lego sets when my son came running over with a Barbie doll dressed as a superhero.
Just under $20, Barbie, and the boy literally picked it out. Fine. Done.
The mental subcurrent of all this, of course, is that while I don’t especially like the idea of plastering kids with this is for boys and this is for girls, it ain’t like my own son isn’t into superheroes. Of course, so is his daddy, and I suspect if I had a daughter she’d be just as able to tell you about the Hulk and Iron Man as he is, but I don’t have a daughter, now, do I, so who knows how much reinforcing of The Patriarchy I’d be doing as a parent compared to how much I’m already doing, and who the fuck am I to try and subtly condition somebody else’s kid by trying to find a toy for her that isn’t ridiculously gendered when I have never not once suggested my own son go into the Pink Aisle when he was hunting for toys for himself.
(Did you know there are girl Nerf toys? I did not know this.)
So, yeah, whatever, we got the kid a Barbie doll, and somehow I managed to turn buying a gift for a five-year-old who I think I can pick out of a lineup, maybe, into some sort of political act, because that’s exactly the sort of stupid wanker I am sometimes. And then my wife texted me from the party while I was busy hanging a mirror at home (let’s not let the gendered nature of that little detail escape us, either) to inform me that this party had blue ribbon water and pink ribbon water and she’d just heard one of the boys loudly insist that he needed the “boy water.” This was, thankfully, not my son.
So. Yeah.
That happened.
We shoulda gotten the kid a soccer ball.
(*) And I should make this explicit, too– Mom was trying to be helpful, and her point was “Don’t stress yourself out too much about a present.” She explicitly said that her daughter would be perfectly happy just to have all of her friends there. This post is about I’m an idiot sometimes, not Jeez, look at how these people I barely know are raising their kid, just to make perfectly certain we understand each other.
Allow the following to be a minor insight into my personality. This is a portion of my desk:
Take note: Finn, Rey, a Stormtrooper, Kylo Ren, and Phasma. That’s all the figures from this current film that I own; let’s not talk about the other movies. I bought all of these before seeing THE FORCE AWAKENS. Since then I’ve been considering demoting the Stormtrooper and Phasma to some other location in the house (or possibly, in fact more likely, a box somewhere) and I’ve been tossing around the idea of grabbing a Poe Dameron figure, since Poe is one of the few 3 3/4″ figures you can actually count on finding nowadays.
Just the other day it hit me: if I found a Poe, I could put him right next to Finn, and I could probably contrive a way to make the figures hold hands. And then it became undeniable: I had to have a Poe Dameron for my desk.
I had a few errands to run and found one at Target just now. This is what the Poe figure that matches the rest of these look like:
That helmet is molded on. It can’t be removed. And I didn’t buy the figure, because if I’m going to get into yaoi shipping on my desk, I’m damn well gonna be able to look both of the toys in the eyes while I do it.
(It has come to my attention while working on this post that there is another slightly more expensive Poe figure that is the same size, but not wearing a helmet. In fact, he’s wearing the same jacket my Finn is wearing, which is even better. So I’m now on a hunt for that one.)
And, while we’re talking about toys, I don’t own any of the Disney Infinity games, and in fact I’ve been doing my damnedest to not ever get sucked into it, but if I ever find this in a store I’m buying it anyway:
Because awesome.
That is all.
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