What else could bring the blog out of hibernation? LEGO! (Yes, all caps.) I didn't know about their U.S. stores and there's a LEGO Store in Natick.
When I was a kid, one of the things I wanted to be when I grew up was a LEGO Master Builder. I would have passed out at the site of Wall of LEGO found in these stores.
Like many from the LOS (LEGO Old School), I'm not happy with the proliferation of custom pieces in sets these days. However, some of the Star Wars sets are cool. This RotJ Death Star set looks amazing! Sure, it's ~$300.00 but it's 3449 pieces! That's less than 9 cents per piece! The Jawa Sandcrawler looks pretty great and comes with 11 minifigs.
Another cool development is the LEGO Digital Designer software. This is a free program that lets you design, in 3D, your own models using dozens of different virtual bricks. You can then save your design, take screenshots and share them, which is nice, but you can also order a custom set with all the bricks you need to make the model you designed! I'm sure the cost is significant but I think designing a model then being shipped the kit would be great for a kid.
Yes, I qualified that with "for a kid." While I'm still fascinated by LEGO, I don't feel that desire to build and play with them. All my bricks are at my parent's house and even when I had easier access to them, I didn't touch them (not that it would be okay to get rid of them!) I've moved on to other interests, including building things out of ones and zeros. But I don't have a good creative outlet, I need to find something that invokes the joy of creation as LEGO did.
Comments (1)
Sure, they're fun in retrospect, but when Lego sets are all that your kids want for Christmas, it gets somewhat exhausting. For instance, that 3449 piece Death Star kit will require me to put together approximately 3445 of the pieces myself on Christmas morning. Both boys have asked for multi-hundred-piece Lego kits for Christmas, so it will be a headache-inducing Christmas morning for me.
Unrelated: I'll be teaching a class (as an adjunct) at a local university this spring and I visited their computer lab today. I realized just how very good at your job you always were. Not that I didn't realize that before, of course; it just struck me that you are a smart guy who always did your job well. So there you go.
Posted by Kevin | December 5, 2006 5:24 PM
Posted on December 5, 2006 17:24