Extending the number of letters in the Star Wars fleet of fighters (X-wing, Y-wing, B-wing, A-wing, etc.) is a popular pursuit among Star Wars LEGO fans. From Bricks to Bothans, the Star Wars LEGO community, is holding a contest to build an R-wing fighter.
Here’s Mark Stafford’s entry in all its delicious orangy goodness (via Snoikle):
Behold the powerful masked luchadores of Mexican wrestling (click for the photoset on Flickr):
From left to right (click for profiles):
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Monty Python’s Flying Circus! (Cue Sousa’s “The Liberty Bell.”)
(Click to view my Monty Python photoset on Flickr, with three new minifigs.)
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In today’s batch of tuneful minifigs, I present gods of grunge, costume-wearing indie-rockers, Edward Scissorhands, musical innovators, and Aussie rockers. Confused? Read on.
First up, the incomparable Soundgarden:
Next, some minifigs to go with Jonesy’s Leslie Anne Levine, Portland indie-rockers The Decemberists:
Venerable innovators Sonic Youth:
Robert Smith, pasty lead singer of The Cure:
Finally, up-and-coming Australian power trio Wolfmother:
With looming deadlines and a mountain of work, it’s been a pretty rough week at the office, so I wasn’t looking forward to a four-hour training course on how to conduct customer visits. My day picked up immediately when I saw a big tub of basic bricks on the conference room table.
After a brief overview of the topic, we were divided into teams of three — one “user” plus a note-taker and observer who “worked for LEGO.” Naturally, I wanted to be a user so I could get paid to build! The user was supposed to perform a task: To recreate their living room with the available bricks. Being the sorty sort that I am, I quickly had the bricks sorted by color, telling the observer that I wasn’t happy that my “product” also included some knock-off parts (Mega Bloks, ugh).
Given ten minutes and parts limitations, all while talking through my process, I was fairly pleased with my sorta-kinda vignette (photos by my quick-thinking office-mate, Crystal, who said, “Oh, you should blog this tonight!”):
Kate, my manager’s manager and one of the other “users,” had this to say about my creation: “Overachiever.” Hee hee.
Here’s another living room, by Ilana:
I like her entertainment center, couch, and coffee table. The multi-colored stacks of bricks also work surprisingly well as bookcases. Both Ilana and I kept playing with the LEGO throughout the rest of the meeting. Ilana ended up with a three-foot-tall rainbow thingy and I had a bunch of geometric objects of various shapes and sizes.
After we finished our living rooms, the observers and note-takers presented their findings, writing up a “sequence” of each user’s actions:
Along the way, the group collected various data points or “factoids” about what the users said and did, which we then organized into related sets using a process called “affinity grouping”:
(If you want to read what a bunch of geeks had to say about playing with LEGO, see the full-size versions of picture 1, picture 2, and picture 3.)
Not nearly as fun as free-building at home, but hey, it beats a meeting any day. ;-)
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Moko wraps up his cast of playable characters from Final Fantasy VII with Vincent and Yuffie:
Vincent:
Yuffie:
Several people asked for a link to the steampunk contest on Flickr, so here it is:
http://flickr.com/groups/classic-space/discuss/72157594172210603
The contest is almost over, but the judging should be beginning soon, and it’s always interesting to see which creations are selected as the best.
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For a creative approach to making Final Fantasy VII characters, I didn’t think Moko could top his banana-coiffed Cloud, but here’s Barret:
And Aeris rounds out Moko’s latest pair of figs:
Clean them up with Endigo Vandane space sweeper! (Cue trumpet music.)
Here it is in flight (click for gallery):
And in its even cooler landed configuration:
Seattle residents will always hold a special place in their hearts for Boeing, even after they ditch the city for Chicago. Oh well. From LEGO employee Steve Witt, here’s a new set — 10177 Boeing 787 Dreamliner (via mumu’s I Love Cute LEGO):
(More pictures in Steve’s Flickr photostream.)
Thanks to the Flickr steampunk contest, there’s been a bumper crop of steampunk lately. Awesome. Kevin Blocksidge adds two more with his Heliocopter and Whirlygig.
Kevin’s heliocopter has gone through several iterations, and I have to say that this, the simplest version, definitely works for me (love the minifig):
The whirlygig is apparently based on a real-life experimental vehicle:
