On the lighter end of the violence-in-LEGO spectrum, I’m predicting a new bandwagon started by KryptonHeidt. It’s called Primopoc, and it’s hilariously awesome.
Primopoc combines the tired tropes of ApocaLEGO — chains, buzz saws, ladders, and Gatling guns — with LEGO Primo components from the late 90’s. In doing so, Primopoc undermines the seriousness of ApocaLEGO and the baby-friendly image of Primo, yielding a whole greater than the sum of its parts.
Merriam-Webster defines the act of plagiarism as:
to steal and pass off (the ideas or words of another) as one’s own : [to] use (another’s production) without crediting the source.
Unfortunately, plagiarism is something we LEGO fans witness all too often online. “Hey, some kid on LEGO.com stole my photo and entered it in a contest. And he won!” or “There’s this scumbag on eBay selling copies of a MOC that I designed!”
I think we can all agree that stealing photos or selling someone else’s design for profit are both damaging to the legitimacy of LEGO as an artform and to LEGO builders as a community.
(Some good news is that the Brick-Busters are doing a good job of dealing with the kids on LEGO.com, though the problem is much broader than their scope.)
However, accusations of plagiarism seem just as common between LEGO builders. “Dude, aren’t you going to credit me for combining these three pieces in this particular way?” or “Here’s a photo of an awesome technique I just thought up. I call it SNOT. Please credit me if you use it.”
I believe that claiming ownership or requesting credit for building techniques can have a stifling effect on the creativity we all value so much, and therefore doing so can be just as damaging — in different ways — as real plagiarism. I’m proposing that we embrace a more open approach to building techniques by abandoning the possessive attitude too many of us have about the way we’ve put a few LEGO bricks together.
Of course, what I’m suggesting as it applies to LEGO isn’t unique either. Open source software has proved competitive with traditional boxed products. An increasing number of writers are embracing “copyleft” and open content philosophies as alternatives to traditional copyright.
Boing Boing contributor and science fiction author Cory Doctorow releases his work under a Creative Commons license — specifically, the same license under which The Brothers Brick releases our original content. (All of my own LEGO photos on Flickr are also posted with the same CC license.)
What I love about LEGO builders as a community is how collaborative we are. In most cases, someone who finds what they consider a new type of connection or an innovative use for a part shares it with their LEGO friends expecting nothing in return. It might be easy to dismiss my earlier examples as coming only from the sticky typing fingers of the pre-teens and early teens crawling all over Flickr these days, but I read those kinds of comments from adults all too frequently too.
This attitude is self-congratulatory at best, and has the danger of stifling others’ creativity. Before I had my “open LEGO” epiphany, there was more than one occasion when I paused while building to think whether I wanted to bother listing in my photo description later all the potential places where I might have first seen the technique I was using.
In a creative medium that values collaboration and innovation, I don’t believe claims of ownership for building techniques have any place.
What do you think? Are these claims just annoying, or worse? Sound off in the comments.
It seems to be a slow day for blogworthy LEGO creations, so I went back through my bookmark archive and ran across something we really should have blogged the second we got the link — Chris Meyer‘s how-to guide on making plastic LEGO train tracks backwards compatible with legacy 9-volt and 12-volt systems.
The problem (and benefit, depending on who you ask) with current Power Functions and RC systems is that they’re battery-powered. For LEGO convention attendees and train show participants who may run their trains for hours at a time, this means stopping everything in the middle of their layouts to replace the batteries, over and over again.
But since LEGO no longer produces externally powered trains, the tracks are exorbitant on the secondary market. Chris solves this problem by applying conductive foil tape to easily purchased plastic tracks. It’s a cheap solution, and looks much less time-consuming than sifting through eBay.
Read the step-by-step guide on ChrisMeyer.org.
We feature a lot of LEGO microscale creations, but it seems like the huge stuff always gets the limelight. Sometimes, though, it’s not about how much LEGO you own, but how you use what you’ve got.
These little spaceships by Craig Lavergne (Tayasuune) aren’t built from very many pieces, but demonstrate originality of design and several interesting parts uses.
The red ship looks like it could do some serious damage if it rammed the fragile white ship with the gravity rings.
After really enjoying Terminator Salvation
Thankfully, tbone_tbl seems to have appreciated what I think is the best movie in the series, and has created a microscale vignette of the first scene in the movie.
The micro A-10 Warthog in the foreground is certainly nice, but that Harvester mech in the background is excellent.
This microscale version of the McCallister house from Home Alone by Rob H. (rh1985moc) evokes cold Northeast winters and warm nights by the fireplace.
Like several of his previous creations, Rob has added LEDs to the windows so it lights up in the dark.
Of course, this also a good excuse to highlight Rob’s older microscale J. Edgar Hoover FBI headquarters building.
It’s a really nice building, but the same photoset yields Special Agent Fox Mulder at his desk in the basement office relegated to the X-Files.
Ralph Savelsberg (Mad physicist) recently moved from England back to The Netherlands, and he misses his former adopted home already. Away from the collaborative displays of the Brickish Association, Ralph decided to combine all of his Cafe Corner-standard buildings into his own layout, resulting in “Brickston Borough”.
As much as I like each component of Ralph’s layout — the lettering on the distinctly British buildings, the vehicles, and even the road itself — it’s the sentiment that brought them all together that I love. It’s the same community spirit on display in AFOL: A Blocumentary.
LEGO brings us together, and can keep us in touch even when we’re apart.
LEGO Star Wars fan favorite 7754 Home One Mon Calamari Star Cruiser is on sale at 30% off from Toys R Us.
30% off brings the price down from $109.99 to $76.99. The deal works both in stores and online.
All indications are that this is not, in fact, a trap.
Mike Dobson has created “CubeStormer” — the world’s fastest Rubik’s Cube solver. Watch it to believe it.
CubeStormer uses the older MINDSTORMS RCX robotics system, hooked into Cube Explorer software.
Thanks for the tip, Carter. I’d passed this up when it made the rounds on the ‘net about a week ago, but this MINDSTORMS Rubik’s Cube solver is different indeed.
As a former Bostonian from a family of New Englanders, I was bred to loathe and ridicule all things New York, but I can’t help but love I LEGO N.Y.
The book pulls together the simple but immediately recognizable icons Christoph built from his son’s basic bricks last year, and featured on his New York Times blog Abstract City Blog (along with several new pieces).
When the publishers sent The Brothers Brick an early copy to review, I was honestly expecting the kind of throw-away, impulse-purchase novelty books you find while waiting in line at Walgreens and Barnes & Noble, with poor copy editing and grainy pictures.
Instead, the only words in the book are the hand-written labels explaining each tiny creation.
The text and photos appear to have been cleaned up from the versions posted on Christoph’s blog, and the book itself is presented in the form of a durable board book like Eric Carle’s classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Here at The Brothers Brick, we feature a lot of amazing creations, from motorized cities of the steampunk future to lenticular mosaics, but it’s books like this and vintage LEGO ads that take us back to our earliest days playing with LEGO — long before SNOT, fan conventions, and Internet drama.
When you put one brick on top of another, you mostly just get two stacked bricks. Sometimes, though, you get New York City.
I LEGO N.Y. ($14.95) is due out from Abrams Books next month, and is available from Amazon.com
Documentary filmmaker Jess Gibson has just completed a 30-minute movie about adult fans of LEGO here in the Pacific Northwest. You can watch the complete “AFOL: A Blocumentary” right here:
AFOL A Blocumentary from Jess Gibson on Vimeo.
Jess attended BrickCon 2009, joined us for a SEALUG meeting, and interviewed many fans who’ll be familiar to readers of The Brothers Brick:
The description on Vimeo says that this is the “first in a series of Blocumentaries about the Adult Fans of LEGO,” so we’re looking forward to more from Jess Gibson in the future.
captures the whimsically terrifying nature of these nasty little robots.