As he and I have talked over the years and I have recently become more involved in commenting on TBB, going to my local LEGO user group (SandLUG) meetings, setting up a Flickr account (Yupa-sama) and extracting my LEGO from under my wife’s Barbie collection, the idea of becoming a regular contributor chronicling my journey out of my dim ages evolved. Gary McIntire, Legoland California Master Model Builder, deserves credit for giving me the term “dim ages” as the most apt description of the past fifteen years.
For you noobs, dabblers, non-builders, set-only builders, daydreamers, dismissed, “silent majority,” downtrodden and oppressed: You are my peeps. I will publicly humiliate myself in order to smooth your path toward enlightenment. Or the dark side. Whatever.
What you can expect from me:
- Tips, reviews and essays based on experiences like sorting my collection after years of neglect, building/posting MOCs for the first time, and exploring both the on and off-line LEGO community.
- Regional news reporting like Comic-Con, events at Legoland California, and Southern California LUG meetings.
- Posts of my “traditional” LEGO interests like classic castle, space, pirates, adventurers and Star Wars, though I am increasingly falling in love with modern and historical city building.
- My non-LEGO interests expressed in LEGO: Culture, sub-culture, counter-culture and multi-culture. I’m generally just fascinated by people and how they interact, which in this context will be about how those themes play out in LEGO. Oh, and Discworld.
- I hope to help expand the AFOL community into new under-explored fields, by promoting, inspiring and bringing in builders who want to do the same. Bring LEGO to the heathen and the heathen to LEGO.
Fresh blood is good (ask any vampire) and I dream that someday I’ll be an old AFOL fogey and when somebody else comes along to freshen things up I can be snarky about their noobishness.
Some of you may already know this, but “Thanel” is not my real name. Unlike many people, in my particular line of work (alas, not secret agency), online networking can be quite detrimental. Connecting with clients personally and repeat business are distinctly bad ideas, so I’d rather keep my real name on the D.L. as much as possible. I’m happy to reveal my secret identity if I meet you in person, and obviously online as Andrew’s brother. I would just like to keep my explicit electronic signature to a minimum and am going to withhold the location of my underground lair.
I exist and am a reasonably good guy.