Tag: toys

space

The Lego Vault

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I love Legos. A lot of people love Legos. One of my favorite blogs Gizmodo loves Legos. Not only did they post about the best Lego sets in history but they recently paid a visit to Denmark and found out in the process that Lego keeps a (sort of) secret corporate vault that contains every Lego set ever made – 4,720 in total. “Great Googly Moogly!” and”Holy Mary Mother of God!” immediately come to mind.
I could not wait to take a fun trip down memory lane and started to look at some of the photos. Only a few pics into the stroll I immediately froze, like the proverbial deer in headlights, when I saw the set below:
galaxyexplorer.jpg
I had that one and still have it – the bricks and hopefully the blueprint are in my Mom’s attic somewhere.
In terms of the various Legoland themes, I was always a Lego Space guy. My grandfather and father instilled in me a love of the cosmos and in very “chicken and the egg” type situation, I’m not sure if my love of space is due to Legos or if my love of Legos is due to the space theme of the bricks I played with as a wee lad. I never had any Legoland Castle or Town sets – only Space. I had about half to three quarters of the sets in the Legoland Space part of Gizmodo’s “Best Lego Sets In History” photo collection and loved every single one of them.
In terms of time, I must have spent months – not days nor weeks but months – during my formative years stooped over hundreds of bricks that were spilled out on my carpet, hunting for the exact brick that I needed in order to either complete the Lego provided blueprint or the one that I dreamt up that day. I remember my back hurting on many of an occasion due to the hours that I sat Indian style, hunched over looking for these specific bricks. I remember when Don Mattingly first developed back problems, I thought to myself, “It must be like he’s looking for Legos…”
I’m acutely aware of my own childhood now that I see another one unfolding right before my eyes. I never want to force anything upon my daughter, I want all of her loves to be genuine, but I do hope that she enjoys playing with Legos as much as I did. Then again, Mega Blocks seem pretty cool too these days…
Via Neu

ramblings

Cute Guns

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When a frequent reader sent me a link to a Hello Kitty Assault Rifle yesterday, I knew immediately I had to post it. Its just so damn cute:

Hello-Kitty-Assault-Rifle_4.jpg

The gun comes from a site called GlamGuns which is full of ridiculous guns, like the gun above and one called “My Little Carbine.” Lovely.
Before you start to get too freaked out about the next school shooting happening in a pre-K class, if you read the fine print, you’ll see “NOTE: This site is a parody for humor purposes only. No actual weapons may be bought on this site.” Furthermore, if you try to buy a gun, you’ll get sent to Amazon where you can buy a book called A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Form whose premise is that “parody is a genre fundamental to 20th century art forms.” The author’s intro states, “Parody is not a new phenomenon by any means, but its ubiquity in all the arts of this century has seemed to me to necessitate a reconsideration of both its nature and its function.”
Via Dave

tech

My NXT Robot

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Lego is currently developing an updated robot kit for their Mindstorms division called NXT and I am so pscyhed to get one. I have never built a robot before, though when I was a child I dreamt of doing so and even figured out all the pieces I needed to ad-hoc acquire. While I got some of the parts, I never got the tank tread that was needed for mobility and that in a sense stopped the development in its tracks. Now, many many years later, after reading the recent Wired aritcle about this project and seeing the demo on the Lego site, I for some reason have a burning desire to build my own robot. It comes out in the fall and I for one cannot wait until the leaves start a’fallin.

The really cool thing about the development process is how Lego has tapped the hardcore Mindstorms programming community for advice, testing and feedback which in turn is actually being incorporated into the product design. The original robot kit from 2000 was not that great but a lot of talented and smart people took those limited bits to amazing heights – sort of how we put a man on the moon with less computing power than what is in a regular cell phone. Now those same people are now working with Lego to ensure that the NXT kit is friggin fantastic. This is not an open source product and project though – Lego is keeping all proprietary data and knowledge and Lego is the one making the money here but that to me, and to the developers helping, is okay. Its better to have someone to turn to do, to own the factories, to handle packaging and shipping, etc. Sort of how RedHat sells Linux in a way. Everyone is just happy that the end product will be the best that it can be because the global knowledge base has been tapped in order to make it so. I have signed up to be a Lego Mindstorms NXT Pioneer and will find out some time in February whether or not I’m picked to write article, post entries and build robots as a beta tester. I am sure I have no chance, there are only 100 Pioneers, but as NY Lotto used to say, “Hey, you never know.”

ramblings

“…And Knowing’s Half the Battle”

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FROM EBAUMSWORLD:
“Remember how at the end of every G.I. Joe Cartoon they would have some short educational segment and it would always end with the line “And Knowing Is Half The Battle”? These clips are dubbed over with new dialogue and even some of the animation is changed and remixed. The result is so hilarious that I almost wet my pants the first time I saw them. Watch the videos closely to catch it all. If you don’t get it, don’t worry. It is meant to be random and goofy. We want to thank Fensler Films for creating these videos.“

space

The Best SW Vintage Figure Book Ever

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I first read about this book in this month’s Wired mag. Even though I’m not an avid vintage SW collector, in fact I haven’t collected any vintage figures (I just have the ones from my childhood though I did buy lots of the 90’s reissued figures as well as Episode 2 figures in the past two years – that is another story altogether though as eBay and free time can be a very dangerous combination), I absolutely love these figures and not just because my Dad pronounces the word figures as fig-urs. They remind me of when life was simple, when an afternoon creating the Hoth base out of blocks and replaying the opening of “Empire” felt like it lasted for 2 months, when the world was just black and white (or red and green). God, I love original trilogy and those toys….

This book that John Kellerman has painstakingly put together should be requisite “Child of the 80’s” bookshelf material. It looks beautiful and even if you are never going to buy an original mint Darth Vader figure for about $50, you’ll love flipping through the pages any day of the week. It’s the kind of book that you wow company with (ok, fellow sci-fi loving nerd company) and that will make rainy days more fun. I would have ordered my copy already but I have a birthday coming up soon and a certain someone said, “Don’t buy it – send me the link.”