While pictures and other such “on the ground” reporting are still scarce, cnet.com has posted this fantastic slideshow of photos with interviews with fans and the community coordinator, Steve Witt.
If you’re in the Fremont, CA area tomorrow, the public exhibition is Sunday, April 11 from 10am to 4pm at the Fremont Marriott Silicon Valley. Admissions is $5; ages 2 and under are free!
The latest edition of Hispabrick Magazine is now available for download in both Spanish and English. As always, the online magazine is free.
Issue 007 has lots of great content, including:
You can find links to download Hispabrick Magazine 007 on HispabrickMagazine.com
Sean Kenney has been busy building sculptures for the Creatures of Habitat display at the Philadelphia Zoo. The display aims to inspire awareness of endangered species and protection of our planet, and it will run from April 10 to October 31, 2010.
This huge life-sized polar bear is made up of over 95,000 LEGO pieces and took over 1100 hours to construct together with a team of 5 assistants. Sean deliberately and carefully captured the realism of a bear that seemed to be a little frustrated, a little sad and confused at the same time about the predicament of being an endangered species.
Toys R Us is having a buy one, get one 50% off sale yesterday through next Saturday, April 3.
The sales exclude Star Wars, MINDSTORMS, and Toy Story, but Toys R Us does stock some of the harder-to-find sets online, like 10197 Fire Brigade and 10196 Grand Carousel.
That’s right, it’s a new contest, over at classic-space.com. The challenge, put your brick where your mouth is. People love to talk about how they could do a better job designing a LEGO set than the folks at LEGO do. So here’s the challenge, DO IT! Build a great space set! Mark Stafford, a designer at LEGO, has graciously offered to serve as a judge for this contest, but it is NOT an official LEGO contest. LEGO didn’t put me up to this, and they won’t be taking any of your ideas and turning them into sets. There will be prizes, though, thanks to Steve Witt. Each size category winner will receive a space set of that size.
More details are here.
All of the five new LEGO Prince of Persia sets are now available from the LEGO Shop Online. In addition, three keychains and a Prince of Persia magnet set have been listed. Nannan recently confirmed that the quality of the minifigures from the magnet sets are the same quality as normal minifigs, so get on your camel and start shopping!
For $20, 7570 The Ostrich Race includes two ostriches and a shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal minifig.
If oddly pink ostriches aren’t your thing, 7571 Fight for the Dagger ($30) includes the first LEGO camel.
The big set in this theme is 7573 Battle of Almut, with 7 minifigs and a camel.
These last two Prince of Persia sets didn’t seem to warrant pictures, but also have some interesting new parts and minifigs:
After seeing the full trailer before Alice in Wonderland, I’m even less inclined to go watch the movie, but I’m rather excited by all the new stuff in the Prince of Persia LEGO sets.
Right now, you can get 7595 Army Men on Patrol for $8.97 on Amazon. Free shipping for orders over $25 and no tax for most states. This sale may not last long, so build your army now.
10189 Taj Mahal will be discounted $50, down to $249 from $299, starting at 8:00 AM EST tomorrow (March 18). The sale is available in the US and Canada only.
The sale ends on May 15. That probably feels a ways off, but I suspect this is the first step toward the set being discontinued, so get it while you can.
Talented builder and former TBB contributor Linus Bohman recently unveiled LEGO Building School (LBS), a new application for his LEGO-related app project, Swooshable. It warrants something more than a simple referral, so, in true TBB fashion, I used an Imperial interrogation droid on him.
TBB: You went through a bit of mini-dark age recently. Why was that, how long did it last, and why are you coming out of it?
Linus Bohman: I think I’ve been on a LEGO hiatus for almost a year and a half, give or take. Life and my hyperactive nature came in the way. I tend to stock up on things that I really like and do those 100% – all of them at the same time. So I was working full time, doing heavy freelancing, studying a bit, constantly moving, as well as trying to spend time with friends and family and get time for hobbies. It didn’t really work out so I eliminated everything but the basics: friends and family. I quit my job to do something I really enjoy, stopped freelancing, found a nice place that I settled in, and now I’m adding in hobbies again. That purge was the best thing I’ve ever done, but I also needed the busy period – I learned many, many really useful skills.
TBB: What are you especially hoping to accomplish with LBS? What needs do you think it meets?
LB: LBS was built to answer questions like “How do I become a better builder” or “What is SNOT?”. The answers float around in the community, but they’ve been hard to find since the post-LUGNET community is so fragmented. I don’t believe we need a central place for communicating with each other – those things tend to work out anyway – but I do believe we need various central hubs for other things. TBB has largely filled the LEGO news niche, for instance. I intend for LBS to fill the learning niche, at least until something better comes along.
TBB: What inspired you to start working on Swooshable?
LB: Well, to be honest: nothing significant has changed in the community while I was away. The conversation is mainly held on flickr instead of in niche forums and different building styles have evolved, but otherwise we haven’t really gotten anywhere as a group. The same questions are asked, the same needs go unfulfilled. The community boat needs some gentle rocking – and intend to lead by example. I looked at my skills, workflow and already finished material and decided that the best way to do it, without falling into the half-assed trap many other LEGO projects end up in, was to do short bursts of self contained apps. They may be fun for a while (like the probable life span of the Fad Masher) or usable for a long time (like LBS), but either way they’ll make people think a bit differently.
TBB: Tell us a little bit about the special features of LBS.
LB: I have two criteria that guides all of the Swooshable apps:
Thus, if you use LBS you’ll find that it’s mainly just a toolbar. You do everything from this toolbar, and it follows you around on the different sites (except flickr which doesn’t allow these sorts of things). If the toolbar gets in the way you can just flick it to the side, and it’s there when you need it again by the press of a button. The lesson listing only display the basic information for easy scanability, but still encourages exploration. If we’ll need a new moderator it’s as simple as creating an account. People can also submit articles directly through the toolbar, so that I (hopefully) don’t have to monitor the entire community to get the freshest and bestest material. *hint hint*
Of course, nothing is set in stone. I monitor statistics, comments and behavioral patterns pretty carefully, and intend to make things better if I discover things aren’t working as planned. Iterative work for the win!
TBB: What do you think are the most important things that you hope newer LEGO fans as well as veterans will get out of LBS?
LB: The ability to focus on building and cultivating better discussions. Want to learn some new techniques? Stop hunting them down and go to LBS. A new guy wants to get into the building scene? Head on over to LBS and read up on what you can, then explore the forums and ask good questions instead of mediocre ones. Those are the main ways I believe the School will make a difference, but these things are pretty much impossible to predict. I’m very open to different way of using them, or making them into something else than they are. Creativity is fun like that.
TBB: What’s your vision of what the adult LEGO fan community should be, and where do you think Swooshable and LBS fit in that vision?
LB: I don’t have a vision, but rather a wish: that we stop making so much darn drama and do fun stuff instead. Sometimes it feels like we fight internally as soon as someone is doing something different – be it making money off of the LEGO hobby, get a certain number of fanboys or use clone bricks. Different isn’t bad; it’s just different. Something great may come from the next different thing.
Okay, so I do have a vision, then. More intentional chaos, less demeaning of different stuff. Creativity to the people!
TBB: What’s the next Swooshable app up your sleeve?
LB: I’m choosing between ten or so ideas. I need to do some testing to get an indication of which ones will fly and which ones will fall, but it’ll be something really simple this time. LBS took a lot of time to sketch out and build, and now I need to do something that is less worky and more silly. I’ve been itching to do something that gives me a feeling for the general community – perhaps something to do with all of the LEGO blogs out there? Or a continuation of Repoort’s old but inspiring Creativity Challenge?
In the future I want to do a project of a more emotional nature. Unfortunately I need a good amount of people to be involved before I release it in order to make it good. I’m putting a lot of faith in the Swooshable mailing list for that. If anyone wants to help me and receive notifications when a new Swooshable app is ready, please join it!
TBB: Thank you very much! Anything else you think is important for us to know?
LB: If someone accidentally got my fame, money or girls, please point them in my direction. Thanks.
Two weeks before their scheduled release in April, the new LEGO Prince of Persia sets have found their way first to Toys R Us online. Three out of the five sets are now available at MSRP, and with free shipping over $100, this makes for a great opportunity to get these new sets early!
UPDATE: you can use the code 935009 (exp. 3/21/10) to receive $10 off on orders over $50. However, this cannot be combined with the free shipping offer.
According to my Future of LDraw? post there are a bunch of readers of this blog who use LDraw. But LDraw can only work with a steady stream of volunteers to make and review parts for use in new parts releases. (I also forgot to pimp the Flickr group for LDraw)
Reviewing parts is a great way to get involved without having to get too technical. Niels Bugge has written a very handy tutorial explaining what is involved and how to get involved. If you feel you’d like to give something back to LDraw this is a great way to get started.
It is also a good start to making new parts if you wish to pursue that path. If you understand 3D software which can output 3DS format you can even get involved with LDraw part creation without leaving your known environment. Simply team up with someone who does understand the LDraw file format and make and convert a file from your preferred tool to LDraw format for tidying.
There are also other ways to get involved such as running for elected office (not for a year or so now) and helping out with the website. If you think you might be interested in these roles please contact me privately.
Remember that without volunteers the LDraw library would grind to a halt. Fresh faces are always welcome and necessary. If you like LDraw please consider helping it.
Image credit to LDraw.org, Elroy Davis (taltosvt) and Niels Bugge from top to bottom
A recent discussion at LUGNET raised questions about the future of LDraw in the fan community. Oddly enough I feel I’ve seen a resurgence in LDraw work recently but of course like all of us I tend to see what I want to see so I figured I’d throw some questions out to a wider audience.
The first question is, obviously, have you ever heard of LDraw? And if you have do you know what it is? Have you ever considered using it but decided against it? If so why? Did you know the parts are all designed by volunteers?
To quickly give an overview it’s a CAD system and associated library designed to let you build LEGO models on your computer. It’s not the editors (those are things like MLCAD, LeoCAD and Bricksmith) or the renderers (like LDView) but the system all of these use and the parts library. Like LDD but more versatile. All the pictures in this article are recent creations designed in LDraw compatible software.
If you are a user I’d really like to know what you use LDraw for? Do you use it to document old models? To make instructions? To make nice pictures? To make things you don’t have the bricks for? To design models you later build in bricks? Other reasons?
Personally I feel that LDraw has enriched my LEGO hobby immeasurably and I am constantly thankful to all the volunteers who have dedicated their time to making it such a good system. I don’t ever want to see it die a slow death and I don’t think I will. I would, however, like to know what a newer and broader audience thinks.
So please, comment here, on LUGNET, or on flickr. But please do comment if you are remotely interested.
Image credit to LDraw.org, Tyler Clites (legohaulic), Mike Pianta (scruffulous) and Robin Chang (GreenLead) from top to bottom
