Arctangential

You know, I forgot to write about the LEGO convention. I feel a right ass.

So, it was pretty fun. Technically it was 4 days, Thursday – Sunday, but Thursday was just 100% setup, and Friday they got started kind of late, and Sunday they ended a little early, so it was really more like 2.5 days. But, it was fun.

There were 3 different kinds of activities going on most of the time:

1) Exhibition — People brought a lot of MOC (My Own Creation, basically meaning LEGO creations invented by the person, and not sets designed by the LEGO Company) sets to the convention, and they set them up all over. There were rooms set aside for different themes — a castle theme, a space theme, a gigantic LEGO train setup, sculpture, stuff like that. There was a lot of very impressive stuff on display there. I’ll post links at the bottom here.

2) Bartering — There was a big area reserved on the 2nd floor of the building called the “Brick Bazaar” where a ton of people set up tables where they bought / sold / traded LEGO bricks and pieces. Some people had pieces they made themselves, some people had really huge selections of stuff, some people just had various sets they had picked up on clearance at Target or K-Mart and were hoping to unload them for a profit (and generally succeeding). One fellow had a big maybe 20 gallon tub filled with various LEGO pieces, LEGO mini-figures, instruction booklets, crazy stuff like that. He said he’d bought it at a yard sale, and was planning to separate all of the pieces into the sets they were originally in, and selling them independently. And then he got way too bored. So he was selling the whole thing for $150. I talked him down to $110, and took it home. So far I’ve built about 30 different sets from it, and I have maybe another 25-30 to go. Total value of the sets I’ve put together now is probably around $250, so it was certainly a good deal. And, it is fun rooting around looking for the pieces to make the sets.

3) Education — There were a fair number of talks on various LEGO related topics. I went to one about LDraw, a CAD-like program for designing LEGO models, a talk given by Eric Harshbarger, who makes very very cool LEGO sculpture and mosaic. There was also a talk given by Thomas Avery who talked, as you might imagine from his web site, about building big LEGO models. There was also some cool stuff about doing LEGO robotics, including some robotics challenges.

4) There was also a big socialization aspect to the whole thing, but we all I know I didn’t participate in that at all.

Overall, it was a lot of fun. I am for sure going to go next year.

Here are some links to people’s photo albums of the event. There’s some pretty neat stuff in there.

Two entries in as many days. Scary.

Anyways, there is news afoot and it’s exciting. As you all probably know, I am a big Lego fan. I always have been, really, but I didn’t have my Legos for a long time. Recently when my parents moved house, they found my old LegoTub and they were going to throw it out! The horror! I convinced them to mail the contents to me, and I’ve been banging away at the lego ever since (it was about a year ago or so). I’ve amassed a bit of a collection, some sets reconstructed from the pieces my parents sent to me, others purchased new or recreated from parts bought online. It has been fun, and not too incredibly expensive.

This weekend is BrickFest, a medium-sized gathering of AFOL (Adult Fans of Lego — that is, no kids) in Arlington, VA. There are going to be contests, and displays, talks on various Lego-related subjects. I think it’s going to be very fun. Eric Harshbarger will be there, as will the good folks who run Peeron, and some other people whom I know from the LEGO online communities.

I am excited.

Today was a good post office day.

On December 10th, 2002, I wrote “my lego castle is almost done”. Today, I got the last piece to finish it. I had it shipped to me from Venezuela. When I made that post back in 12/02, I had just ordered the same piece from a fellow in Germany. It never arrived. I spend 3 months waiting and hoping that it would eventually show up, since I forgot to ask him to send it airmail, and it ended up going surface mail. Which, as far as I can tell, means that they strap it onto the back of a dolphin or something. But anyways, it’s finally done now. I have pictures of it here and here. It’s really the height of classic LEGO construction. It’s nearly 100% “basic” pieces, many used in amazingly inventive ways. I could discuss LEGO for pages and pages here, so I’ll stop.

I also got some new art! Not unlike the LEGO, I ordered this a long time ago — back in early Feb of 03. It takes them a while to frame it and everything, so I didn’t expect it to be here immediately, but 2 months is a little extreme. They claim it got lost in Denver or something, but I get the feeling that they just forgot to ship it. Luckily, once I pointed out that they had already charged my credit card over a month ago, and could I at least have a tracking number so I could see where my art was please, they “noticed” it and sent it next-day. Like everything else interesting in my life, I have pictures of it on my webpage. The new one is at the very bottom of that page.