Anyone who grew up on first-person shooters like Doom or Quake should recognize a few things in Steve Marsh AKA Rubblemaker’s LEGO build: the industrialized aesthetic, the glimpse of some otherworldly monster just waiting to be riddled full of bullets, and of course the giant minigun.
Tell the monster to wait a second while you inspect the build a little more.
My friends and I buy each other small LEGO sets that do not compute with the space-y things we build. We buy LEGO Friends, Trolls World Tour, DOTS, and the like. It’s all a joke of course, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t try to build from them. I (Mansur “Waffles” Soeleman) received LEGO Friends: Andrea’s Bunny Cube from fellow builder Gubi, and I knew I had to use the big cube pods in a build. Previously I used a Ninjago arcade pod in a Classic Space build, and the medium blue of this bunny cube wasn’t going to be that off-putting. I just had to hide the bunny face…
The Friends cube offers plenty of connection points both inside and out. Having one facing up and one facing down provided a good start, as one of them would be the cockpit. Hiding the hinges at the side is always a challenge, but it was nothing that greebling couldn’t fix. The addition of side engines also hid the irregularities of the cubes. One thing that seemed cooler in my head was the inclusion of the cloth pieces representing the “bunny’s ears”. They add more colour despite their texture and shape clashing with the mechanical nature of the landspeeder. After the struggle of attaching the engines from the top section which hides the printed bunny face, I could finally relax and go all out with the underside greebling…
TL:DR; Even the strangest of LEGO pieces can serve as the foundation for a good build. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
The creator of this nightmarish image, Bart De Dobbelaer, has combined cinematic inspiration from Hackers and Tron Legacy with 22 meters of EL wire in Trace initiated – a chilling image of cyberspace done right. I’m not sure exactly what’s happening here, but it doesn’t seem to be good news. Is the creepy central figure reaching out with a red data probe to track a hacker? Or is the trace running the other direction? Could this be a friendly cyber guardian about to be compromised by the outside world? We may never be sure. Where’s Flynn when you need him?? Either way, though, it sure is a spectacular scene.
At that glorious greebling makes me want to break out my collection of tiny parts and get to building myself. And I’m pretty sure I still have some light kits around here somewhere…
It finally happened! This new creation by Angelo Favretti has me at a loss for words. So instead of coming up with the words you can fill them all in Mad Libs style and post them in the comments section.
This (adjective) spaceship is totally the (possessive noun) knees! I like how it is divided into (a number) sections, each more (adjective) than the last. I’m willing to wager my (noun) that this took a metric (unit of measure) of time and LEGO to complete. We’re all (adverb) blown away by the amount of (verb ending in “ing”) greebling this thing has! It’s like a (noun) exploded in (a place) and this is the (adjective) result. I think the gray (plural noun) and the white (plural noun) are (adverb) nice parts usage. (Brothers Brick staff member) says this might be the (adjective ending in “est”) spaceship we’ve seen all year and (famous person) just might agree. Let’s hope for more (adjective) (plural noun) like this in 2020!
If you’ve read The Brothers Brick for awhile, you may have seen us reference the word “greebling” or “greebles”. The term was first used by special effects artists working on Star Wars and it describes all of the doodads and doohickeys on the surface of an object to help things like spaceships look more…well, spaceshipy. This effect is used heavily by LEGO builders, in fact, if you search Wikipedia for “greeble” you’ll find a photo of a LEGO creation. (Heck yeah!) Ethen T uses this effect, not for spaceships, but rather in a clever mosaic render of a LEGO skull. Subtle light gray, then dark gray parts rounds out the effect nicely and adds dimension to an otherwise flat-ish surface. This piece acts as a stark reminder that inside each of us is a disgusting skeleton hell-bent on scaring neighborhood kids! This is why I can’t wait for Halloween.
And be sure to check out our LEGO glossary for explanations of greebling and many other bits of LEGO terminology!
