This beauty right here hails from the frozen north. Gerard Joosten (Elephant Knight) has created this lovely Blacktron ship, and it’s a sight to behold. This thing is massive.
Taking over two months to construct, this ship is full of great details. You can stroll through his flickr stream to really get a good inside peak at the galley, the bridge, and other sweet details. I keep seeing something new every time I look at it.
Proving that there is life after building a monumentally large Star Destroyer, Polish builder Jerac put together this stylish little Auriga Mk III speeder in just a couple of hours. With its concept-car curves and wraparound canopy, this design would not look out of place in some futuristic thriller (…so I’m assuming that’s a Tom Cruise mini-fig!).
Unless you’ve been living on the nerd equivalent of Mars for the past few weeks, you’ve probably heard about Exploding Kittens, a new card game featuring artwork and character designs from Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal. It has already become the largest Kickstarter campaign ever, at this point just shy of $6M in funding from 150,000 backers.
To unlock project stretch goals, the game’s creators have challenged backers to post photos of themselves accomplishing certain “achievements”, such as posing with goats or cramming five spidermans into a Kayak. Nick Della Mora decided to do his part by contributing photos of a taco cat, magical enchilada and potato cat built from LEGO. Which meant he could follow the artwork on the cards, rather than torturing actual household pets!
If anyone feels like creating “weaponized back hair” out of LEGO next, we’d love to see it…
Welcome to my abode, dearly esteemed Readers!
I’m very sorry for the delay in posting today. When I crawled out of my crate this morning, all the contributors were already up (a true rarity, let me tell you) and running amok. I was sternly informed that it was Andrew’s annual inspection and I had to rush about straightening and dusting all of their offices and suites. There were a lot of confusing references to Andrew and his white glove. Not entirely sure what it’s all about but I’ve been pretty busy, running from one rancid mess to another. It was almost enough to ruin my appetite. Almost.
Just now I decided that I deserved a break today, so I had a mango and peanut butter sandwich and sat down to answer your questions. I am a bit afraid that someone will come looking for me, so I’m writing from inside the vacuum-cleaner bag. No one uses it except for me, so they will never think to look here.
Off we go!
What is your stance on the word “Legos”?
This is a common question and it’s probably time to cover it again. Grammar police all throughout the hobby love to beat down people who refer to LEGO Bricks as “Legos”. The offender is generally someone new to the hobby and the enforcer gets to show off his or her superior knowledge. In all honesty, it’s not about being correct but usually about being a jerk. It doesn’t matter what you call our lovely little building elements. It’s about creativity and relationships. Don’t be a jerk.
And remember, in Denmark LEGO is pronounced “LEE-GO”. If you correct someone for saying “Legos” and insist the correct way is “Lay-go” without an ‘s’, you are just as wrong. There, now I’m a jerk too.
I love using Bionicle pieces in non-Bionicle themed models, and it appears that Brother Steven shares that sentiment. This awesome spacesuit looks like a cross between Bioshock and Apollo, and it’s brilliant. Kudos to Steven’s brother Mark, too, for the lovely presentation, which definitely kicks this model up a notch.
Most of the scientists I know love LEGO and, as shown by LEGO’s own research institute set, scientist can actually be a suitable subject for a nice set. Steen Dupont, Benjamin Price and Vladimir Blagoderov are not paleontologists, astronomers or chemists (nor are they female), but they are scientists, who work for the Natural History Museum in London, and who actually use LEGO in their research. In their latest paper, titled The customizable LEGO® Pinned Insect Manipulator, they present an unusual and innovative solution to the problem of how to study insect specimens without damaging the delicate wings and other appendages.
Among their advantages are that they are modular, cheap and easy to construct. The article contains one of the funniest sentences that I’ve ever read in a research paper: “The authors welcome correspondence on ideas for the next generation of IMps, and although the current models are easy to assemble the authors are happy to assist if no children can be sourced locally.”
Via Science. Thanks to Tim Gould for bringing it to our attention.
In what we hope is to become the start of a series, Chris Adams has chosen to follow up his brick-built JAWS movie poster with a similarly 3D-ified version of the iconic Ghostbusters movie poster:
Can’t wait to see which movie he chooses next! My money’s on The Breakfast Club.
While many here in Seattle spent the last week getting over our last-minute defeat at Super Bowl XLIX, the rest of the country seems to have been focused on Katy Perry’s half time show – in particular the fabulously unsynchronized “left shark”.
Several of you were puzzled that I didn’t jump on this viral image with one of my trademark LEGO parodies. That’s because I decided to experiment with a different format on this occasion. So hats off to Conrado PLG for stepping in and creating the LEGO version that we were all dying to see!
I’m crossing my fingers that this will inspire our friends at the LEGOLAND theme parks to add a left shark “easter egg” into one of their Miniland displays. I think he’d look perfect next to sad Keanu ;-)
No, there is no spelling error; it’s the deliberate result of me, a Dutchman, trying to mimic Jeremy Clarkson impersonating a Dutch person speaking English. I know that this is perhaps confusing, but bear with me. It was prompted by the great Donkervoort built by Vinny Turbo.
Donkervoort is a small Dutch manufacturer of sport cars inspired by the classic Lotus Seven, and I’m pretty sure that if Top Gear were to review one, there would be lots of tire smoke and Clarkson would try to speak in a mock Dutch accent. The overall look of the model is somewhat reminiscent of the great Caterhams built by Carl Greatrix, but at a smaller scale.
The style of Dutch painter Piet Mondrian lends itself well to being reproduced in LEGO, but the mesmerizing new video by Cheesy Bricks takes this to another level.
[WARNING: contains classical music]
Thanks to Martin Long for bringing this to my attention, via The Brickish Association.
This collaborative display of Mordor by Chris Perron and Scott Semple incorporates lights to make the lava look unbelievably realistic. Check out the details shots on Flickr, and don’t miss seeing the microscale Minas Morgul dwarfed by the rest of the build.
Jason Allemann has come up with a design for Lego ballista that can launch a 2×4 brick 15 feet (which will let you hit almost any target in even the biggest dioramas). The best part is that he has posted step-by-step instructions for you to build your own. Time to get ready for battle!
