BrotherhoodWorkshop presents another amusing installment of their LEGO Lord of the Rings videos, this time featuring the Ent Treebeard — along with the usual orcs.
Hope everyone is having a wonderful Christmas, full of boxes under the tree that rattle in that very special way.
For those who are working during this Holiday season, you are not alone. Tyler Clites’ (Legohaulic) Elves feel you pain. Merry Christmas!!!
My next guest is from the post-LUGNET generation, a college-age wunderkind with a penchant for the machines of war. Carter Baldwin is an accomplished builder, collaborator and veteran of the American convention circuit who has inspired a legion of younger builders with his innovative designs. I sat down with Carter at Pat’s King of Steaks restaurant in Carter’s home town of Philadelphia at 3am PST. We talked about wine, women and song. We also talked about LEGO.
KG: I’ve read a few older builders grousing about how all the fancy new parts take all the skill and fun out of building. React to that attitude or to old cranky builders in general.
CB: I actually haven’t seen this attitude too much within the AFOL community, but I see it constantly whenever a build leaks out onto the wider internet. Invariably, there will be the ‘this is cheating, in my day we only had 2×4 bricks in three colors, and we liked it that way! there’s no creativity anymore!’ I hate that attitude. Tim Gould made an excellent graphic of all the one-use specialized parts that were available in 1980, but I can never track it down quickly enough to avoid remembering that arguing with internet strangers is a pyrrhic endeavor at best.
I’d agree that the ’90s saw a proliferation of useless parts that lead to the well documented juniorization of sets, but the past decade has been a bonanza of amazing new parts. In particular we’re seeing a lot more excellent small parts, which really boosts the fine grain detail that’s now possible. We’re seeing a lot less of the pixelation that used to define Lego builds. Fans of Lego who haven’t picked up a brick in a couple decades can’t deal with that, but I haven’t heard any actually active builders complaining.
KG: How important is it when designing a model that you employ a new technique? Does the want to use a specific technique ever drive a model? if so can you give an example.
CB: It’s become less important to me over time. When I first entered the internet community I tried to do that with every build, do something that hadn’t been tried before, or at least do it better than I’d seen it.
I think now I build shapes rather than techniques. I have enough of a library of tricks that I don’t have to worry too much about how to achieve a connection, but forcing all those connections to form the shape I want is the new challenge. My Golem Hardsuit would be a good example; I knew the shapes I wanted to achieve; the techniques I came up with to get there weren’t particularly exciting or novel.
And, in the end, I cribbed a ton of ideas from Chris and Rabadan.
KG: You recently took part in a popular and imitated Flickr Group called called World In Confict:2070. Describe this group to our readers and your experience as a participant of the group?
CB: World in Conflict started about two and a half years ago as a general repository for the various unconnected faction sorts of things that a bunch of us had floating around at the time – my own NATO faction, Craig’s South American Coalition, Forest’s amoral PMCs, Dane’s biomechanical atrocities, and others. We certainly didn’t start the trend of faction building – NickDean is probably the best known originator, but I’m pretty sure people have been building private armies for as long as Lego has had greyscale bricks.
Once we had all these factions under one roof, naturally the next step was to slug it out. We developed a complex ad hoc system that was part model UN, part wargaming, and part tabletop-style roleplaying and carved out a cyberpunk storyline that meshed with our collective vision for our imaginary universe. Since this was a long-term and long-distance group, we couldn’t simply play BrikWars in order to determine tactical prowess; instead, we built scenes to depict our movements on a more strategic scale.
As much fun as we had with slaughtering the other sides cannon fodder and blowing up tanks/bunkers/cities, the really interesting thing that came out of the game was the storytelling. Due to the interest in the stories of the scenes we built, we created a public group for others to follow the WiC narrative, and I think it’s the persistent narrative of the game universe that inspired a number of similar groups.
World in Conflict is two years old now and starting to show signs of winding down – while the game has always had lulls in activity between spikes of conflict, this latest hiatus has been particularly stubborn and long-lasting. But fans who have been watching the storyline don’t need to worry; there are plans to end at least the current incarnation of WiC with a proper finish.
Read the full interview after the jump!
When I was buying sets to review, I had wanted to purchase 70501 Warrior Bike, but unfortunately wasn’t able to get it, so I settled instead for 70502 Cole’s Earth Driller, which is similarly sized. Although I still want to get the Warrior Bike eventually, I’m happy I got Cole’s Earth Driller, because it turned out to have more interesting pieces than I’d thought. It has 171 pieces, and retails for USD $19.99.
The set consists of a lone bad guy, and the eponymous earth driller, driven by Cole, who always gets the black vehicles in the Ninjago color-coded universe. Inside the box are three bags (not numbered), the instruction book, and a sheet of stickers. Now, those who have read my previous reviews know I’m not a fan of stickers. But I applied all save one (the canopy sticker) of the stickers that came in this set. They were simply too cool and too useful for me not to apply (though I’d still rather have printing). The best of the lot was easily the big sand green sticker which goes just under the front of the cockpit. I’m not sure exactly
how the designs on it and on the black stickers go with the aesthetic of the Ninjago world, but they look purpose-made for Steampunk builders. Bravo, I say. The earth driller is a good sized vehicle for a set of this price, being around 30 studs long, and of course has a huge drill on the front. It’s the same mechanism as was introduced in the Power Miners sets, with the larger black part spinning in counter-rotation to the pearl gold drill when the vehicle is driven forward. The whole car is built on a Technic frame, which makes it tremendously sturdy. Both the drill and the 4×4 circular plates in the rear wheels are new in pearl gold, and I’m always happy to get new pieces in that color.
The minifigs included are standard fair for this wave of Ninjago, but cool nonetheless. Cole is simply a black version of the red warrior Kai in the Fire Mech set (read my review here), though there are some subtle differences in the printing between the two, such as different logos and buckles. Likewise, the bad guy is very similar to the one in Kai’s Fire Mech, except that I guess this one is higher ranked, since he’s taller and sports pauldrons. He also has a different, cool blue mask for a face. The pauldrons are a new piece to this line, along with the ninjas’ super swords. Cole’s sword here is identical in shape to Kai’s yellow one, but Cole’s is trans-bright green with a trans-black infusion. Here are links to the inventory pages.
This seems a very solid set for the price, though I do wish it had at least one more play-feature, like rear suspension or a pop-up missile or something. It’s a very chunky, heavy vehicle with a huge drill on the front, which I suppose is precisely what you’d want on a real earth driller, but it leaves me wishing for something more. The minifigs are great, and I’ll definitely be getting more of the stickered pieces.
Yaroslav (Dark-Alamez) expanded his layout of the Chicago cityscape for the DoubleBrick festival in Moscow. For detailes of the diorama, check out the gallery on Flickr.
Sean and Steph Mayo are ever so innovative in their builds. They created a mosaic of Cortana from Halo featuring spinning columns of 1×1 transparent round plates. You have to see the video for the incredible effect. You can read more about this building technique on MosaicBricks.
The hydralisk is one of the most iconic creatures in the game of StarCraft, and Mike Nieves‘ Lego rendition captures the ferociousness of this feared zerg beast. Mike recently made an infestor and has plans to build other zerg units as well, and I can’t wait to see them.
It’s December 21 now in the Mayan heartland, and the apocalypse seems to have passed us by. (For the record, historians and archaeologists agree that the Maya never actually predicted the end of the world today.) What better way to celebrate than with a roundup of the best post-apocalyptic LEGO creations we’ve featured here over the years!
To give you a sense of how the genre has evolved over the years, I’m listing them in chronological order.
First up, Adrian Drake‘s “Forest Sentinel” was debuted at BrickFest in 2006 and remains one of my favorites to this day.
Tyler Clites spent the better part of 2007 building post-apocalyptic LEGO models, popularizing the brown-and-gray aesthetic that remained in effect for the next several years.
Brian Kescenovitz combined Nannan’s Black Fantasy theme with a post-apocalyptic diorama in “Ephram’s Garden” back in 2008.
See all of the best ApocaLEGO models after the jump!
Here is a video review of 79103 Turtle Lair Attack. It was just made available from the Lego store and online. I enjoyed building this set and it has many colorful earth-toned bricks that may be useful. There are also several play features as I will show in the video. It’s a decent set and well rounded in all aspects.
One of the additions I enjoyed about the first new Hobbit movie is that Peter Jackson fleshed out Gandalf’s fellow wizard Radagast the Brown. (There were certainly other additions or differences I appreciated less…)
K.Kreations saw The Hobbit as well, and was inspired by Radagast’s very unique abode.
