Loads of LEGO

I wanted to put up some pictures of LEGO models I have created. As it says in my title header, among other things, this Blog will be occasionally about LEGO.

I write LEGO in all caps because the LEGO people have it copyrighted that way.
Apparently, most people get their brand concept wrong. I didn't know this until I became much older and began researching the LEGO Group and the LEGO community at large, which is called AFOL, or the Adult Fans of LEGO.

A quick primer of things I have learned:
LEGO is pretty much always capitalized like that.
Also, LEGO is a brand, and not a product. Like Kenmore. You don't say that you need to put your clothes in the Kenmore or that you have to get two brand new Kenmores. It's a Kenmore Washer and Dryer. So the LEGO folks would prefer that people call them LEGO bricks or LEGO models.
LEGO bricks, and the entire LEGO system of tiny plastic modular pieces and LEGO men (they call them Minifigures, fans shorten it to Minifigs) are just one of their products. It's their most famous product. Other products are considered to be different lines such as Bionicle and the LEGO Mindstorms robotics kits, which still tend to use the standard LEGO pieces along with fancier items. There is also a LEGO training division, which does corporate training seminars to help other companies become as awesome as LEGO.

Honestly, these are things that some people are huge sticklers about. Many are the kind who make sure that the little LEGO logo that is printed on each piece is facing the same direction when they put together a model. I have better things to spend my time on.

LEGO pieces are commonly known as "Legos" to the majority of the public, and it is not something I ever correct when people say. I love them either way, I grew up "Playing Legos" and still enjoy them, as a relaxing and creative hobby.

One more thing. AFOL hate MegaBloks, and all of the other cheapo LEGO knockoffs. They are inexpensive alternatives, but LEGO is definitely of the highest quality. LEGO pieces are engineered to two micrometers to ensure a snug but detachable fit, unless you are dumb enough to stick two huge base-plates together. MegaBloks and others are generally made of inferior plastics or with imprecise molding, and as such tend to warp and fail to fit together properly.

On to my creations! Click on any image to see it bigger.
This is the shelf above my desk. These are where I keep all of the models I refuse to take apart. It is not all of them. There are far more in a tote, but I need more shelves, and not fewer models.

This is a tower that I built. It is about 5 feet tall. I built it with the intention of making it a dual-purpose skyscraper/spaceport. 

Detail showing the tower, the lower garden, and the upper landing pads.

Closeup of one of the two arches. This entire tower started with me fiddling with getting these pieces to fit together at odd angles, and I thought "this belongs on the side of a building." So I built a building to put them on.

More detail of the mid-level landing pads. 

Lower garden area, and a familiar looking ship is parked on the ground level. Notice the scorpion gargoyles.

View downward, I put a "chronometer" on the side of the building. It's slightly after noon. Forever.

View underneath the tower. The entire structure is held up by those four gray columns, each about 1/2 an inch wide. There's a piece of modern art there, and an arrivals/departures board hanging from the red beam behind it. I figured that the transparent column in the center is a lift tube for those going up into the tower. The fluorescent green things are fountains. 

Some of the shuttles I had docked at the tower. A couple are based on the Rebel Blockade Runner (that's princess Leia's ship) from the beginning of Star Wars: A New Hope.

Back view of the same ships. I gave them color codings (the lime green and orange bits) to denote local and outbound transports. There are also color markings on the landing pads on the tower.

Some small local transports. Two made to look like tiny Clone Gunships from Episode II. One is like the helicopters from Avatar. The one with the blue cat people, not the Last Airbender. The rotors on the helicopter are LEGO steering wheels mounted sideways.

Three ships that may look familiar to you. The first is an tiny Ebon Hawk from Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The second is a slapdash Millennium Falcon I made from spare parts. The third is a mock-up of a Firefly transport. It uses a tiny LEGO barrel for the engine.

 This is a Star Destroyer that I built. On a trip to the LEGO Store, they had a bunch of angled plates in Republic Red. I got as many as I could fit in their container so I could build these. This Star Destroyer is about 9 inches long.

Aft view of the Star Destroyer. I ended up with an extra wing piece of one angle and not the other, so I turned it into a vane. It looks pretty cool, between the engines.

















Side view. It looks like the ship is ascending, but it is really that I can't hold the camera level.

Long front view. 

This is the second Star Destroyer I built. It is longer than the first and incorporates more pieces, many on the inside for superstructure.

 Long front view. Very long. This one is about 14 inches from stem to stern.

Top view, this one has a unique taper toward the back.

View of the bridge (on the tower) and the turbolasers on the sides. They are the same ones from the earlier ship, so I didn't re-design them.

Aft view of the engines, which are just LEGO wheels and tires. 

Side view, I turned the extra wing into a ventral fin on this model.

Final shot, in all its glory.

I hope you enjoyed all of my LEGO creations as much as I have enjoyed building them. More ships/buildings as soon as I take some of these apart!

Quick Summary- Burn Notice

Click on the image to see it full size.

Annoyvertising- Does anyone really think that it works?

We are bombarded by ads every day. 7.5 minutes of every half-hour of television are dedicated to them. 15-20 minutes out of every hour of radio they broadcast them. There is an ad at the bottom of your email: “Do you Yahoo?” Only when in the Swiss Alps.

Billboards. Newspaper. Sponsored events. Magazines. Free games on your phone. Magazine ads with a little barcode that takes your smartphone to more ads. Banners on the top and sides of web pages.

Companies turn you into walking billboards. That $30 T-Shirt (it cost them 30 cents to make) that says “American Eagle” on it in huge letters, really defines your style and announces your sense of taste (namely, none).

That Sunoco bumper sticker you put on your car in the hopes that you will win free gas reminds everyone else: Buy gas at Sunoco.

An advertising department’s wildest dream is to create a culture for their product where individual fanatics will “evangelize” on behalf of their brand, for nothing. Beneficial to a company without any personal return. For more on this, see Evangelism Marketing and also one of its most successful uses, Apple Evangelism.

I am not saying that I am against advertising. It is a critical part of our economy. I don’t think dropping a cool million per 30-seconds during the SuperBowl is necessary, but the market thrives on getting the word out on your product.

However, there are advertisers who are deliberately annoying. A couple of examples of what I consider Annoyvertising:

On the Internet:

When you watch a video on YouTube, sometime during the first 10 seconds of the video an advertisement will take up between 30 and 50% of the viewing area, and refuses to yield until you manage to locate and click the little X in the corner. The intention is that you will have spent time focusing on their ad and you had to make a conscious effort to avoid it, and the time spent searching for a way to disable it embeds their product in your brain as though they had written “Crest Whitestrips” on a cinderblock in Sharpie and surgically implanted it there.

This is the same intention for Popup ads and PopUnder advertising, in addition to the ever annoying Hover Ad. These advertisements obscure what you want to be doing on your computer, and linger after you have finished your primary objective. I have no need to see singles in the greater Ft. Wayne area, thank you.

Something else that annoys me about YouTube lately is that it makes me watch a 45 second commercial before a 30 second video clip. Why? Ads should be proportional, so if you watch a half hour of content, you get 7.5 minutes of ads, so 30 seconds of material should merit 7.5 seconds of commercial.

Another thing that annoys me about most places that do television online, like Hulu, is that their advertisements seem to be in higher quality than the content you want to see. Sure, you can’t make out the finer details while watching last week’s CSI: Manitoba, like plot critical evidence or whether the principal actors have, in the strictest sense, noses. It takes 10 minutes to get through that darn commercial where Sarah McLachlin wails over scrawny cats and dogs, by which time the Winnipeg Wringer will have claimed at least one more victim.

On Television:

I don’t watch television too often, but here I will say any ad where Carrot Top has been the spokesperson. Future ones also.

On the Radio:

In the Toledo area, there is a particular commercial that has given me tennis elbow from having to lurch for my radio dial. It is for a local electronics superstore called Car Stereo One. The radio ad always starts with some creep called “Steve” pronouncing the name of his store as Caaaaaaaaaar Steeereoh Wwwwoooooone. He does that about four times in 30 seconds. I wish that Seal Team Six would make him their next major priority, because as far as I can tell, he is the cause of most automobile accidents and traffic delays, tennis elbow complaints, and probably high blood pressure in the tri-state area.

Steve doesn’t get a hyperlink.

Also, another local ad, this one for David Fairclough Jewelers. I don’t think that he is intentionally annoying, I just find that Mr. Fairclough doesn’t know how to use a microphone, as he speaks as though he has a damp washcloth stuffed into his cheeks. You can hear him squelch his mouth directly into the microphone during every commercial and it drives me up the wall. They call their location in Toledo “The Castle” as in “[squelch] Come on down to The Castle and [squelch] see our selection of engagement rings [squelch]”

The point of all of this is that do they really think that Annoyvertising is an effective marketing plan? I know that personally, I have pledged to never, ever go to Car Stereo One for any of my electronics needs, and additionally I always say disparaging things about the store whenever I drive past it, which in turn annoys my Fiancé and makes her never want to ride in the car with me. Obviously Steve has to go.

Many of the things advertised on YouTube I will never, ever give money for, almost especially because they had to pester me and force me to make them go away. Banner ads and commercials are one thing, but being intrusive on what people consider to be recreational is not the way to go.

I hope Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups will never get the word out through Annoyvertising. I don’t think I can take swearing off their peanut-buttery chocolate goodness.

Where your teeth come from

When I was a little kid, I had a toy model of a dinosaur called Dimetrodon. Being a young boy, I had read approximately 37,000,326 picture books about dinosaurs and I knew Dimetrodon was not a true dinosaur, along with the pleiseosaurs, the pterasaurs, and Joan Rivers. The Dimetrodon was part of a class commonly known as the protosaurs, who still get to be in all of the cool dioramas, but they don't ever get invited to the afterparty.

According to leading evolutionary scientists (Steve and Rick,) Dimetrodon was actually a Synapsid (literally, Sid with a synap) which were lizard-like animals which had little in common with the true dinosaurs, and are the ancestors to the modern mammals.

Call me Granddaddy D.

First of all, Dimetrodon's name was all wrong for a dinosaur. Every schoolboy knows that the good dinosaur names all end in -saurus and -icus and -rex. Dimetrodon (scientific name Dimetrodonald Dinkum) just doesn't make the cut.

Also, Dimetrodon's skull was different, and he was often chosen last for dinosaur dodgeball because of it. Recent developments in skull technology gave Dimetrodon a different place to attach his jaw (back by his pelvis) than previous animals, giving Dimetrodon the advantages of being able to chew and sing seranades to their mates.

In addition, Dimetrodon was one of the first to develop what would in later mammals become the three bones of the inner ear: the hammer, anvil, and microphone. This is in contrast to lizards and birds, who don't have ears. Look at them. They don't.

There is still another delopment that the Dimetrodon passed along to modern mammals, as can be seen from the following diagramme:

FIG 117-D

So Dimetrodon was obviously very crucial to the development of all modern mammals, unless you don't believe Steve and Rick.