In thirty minutes, I need to pile the kids--including a friend who slept over last night--into the van, pick up the Tiny Tornado early from school even though I forgot to tell his teacher I would be doing so, and take the whole crew to a homeschool swim outing at the Y. I will need at least 5 of those minutes for collecting swimsuits & towels. In 24 minutes, I will post whatever I have managed to write. [sets timer]
Raider loves everything I write. If I post something to my blog or send him an e-mail, he drops whatever he is doing to read it. And then, we have this conversation:
Me: Did you read my blog post?
Raider: Yes! I liked it.
Me: Did you like it?
Raider, patiently: Yes.
Me: What did you like about it?
Raider: Its general goodness.
Sometimes I press him for details. I pressed him for details about yesterday's post, and he said he espeically liked "The afore-mentioned Mocha, for instance, went from Suave Seductive Butch to Frothing Drama Queen in something less than 96 hours." He said, "You have a way with words."
He also said he liked the math in the first paragraph.
I said: You don't feel like I share too much information about us?
Raider, sighing: No.
Me: That sigh says something different.
Raider: I am mostly teasing you. I mean, would we still be together if...
Me, interrupting: What you're saying is, that ship has already sailed.
Raider: Heh, yes.
I have been thinking about the Lego Savant. I recently read yet another on-line conversation in which people pulled out the old "Lego sets just aren't creative like they used to be" cliche. You know those Bingo cards for on-line conversations? There's one for Lego-related conversations where every square says, "These new sets have all these specific pieces and can only build the model on the box."
"Guaranteed Bingo by the seventh comment," the creator says. In this recent conversation, I Bingo'd at comment four.
I always think these people have never actually watched kids build with Lego, or that they themselves are not very creative. Or that, as parents, they are imposing some kind of ridiculous rule on their kids that they're not allowed to breakdown sets and re-purpose the pieces. The Lego Savant used to do that all the time; when he heard me commenting to someone that over the last couple of years, he had started keeping more of his sets intact for display, he said, "Oh, that's just because I finally had enough pieces to work on my own stuff."
The Lego Savant builds amazing stuff out of his re-purposed Lego Star Wars sets, which have wonderful pieces to work with. But what I was going to talk about was how much I enjoy his technical interest in new sets. He is excited by new pieces--he recently was talking to me about a dilemma he had about a set he got for Christmas (not the big one, with 3000+ pieces. A more modest one). On the one hand, it was a very cool set he would enjoy keeping intact; on the other hand, it had a couple of new shapes that were giving him all kinds of ideas for MOCs. (In Lego parlance: My Own Creations.)
Probably, it occurs to me, if he decides to keep the set intact, we'll end up at BrickLink or eBay, buying some individual pieces, or a lot, so that he can also build the ideas in his head.
He is also interested in new build techniques the designers come up with. "I've never seen a hinge done like this before!" he'll tell me. I have discovered that I like to build Lego sets, having helped my kids with many over the years, and for me it's much the same experience as doing a puzzle, or building a model from a kit. For him, it is that, but he's also experiencing it on a higher level, integrating what the designers have done into his own reportoire of techniques. He is inspired both creatively and technically by building kits.
He got a set with over 3000 pieces for Christmas this year. He is enjoying working on it, and learning a lot. But he has also commented a number of times on the interesting fact that, although it is the largest set he has ever built--it will be about 4 feet long when finished--it is technically a micro-build. Most Lego sets are built to minifig scale--if it's a car, you can put a Lego minifigure in the driver seat and it will be proportional.
The Super Star Destroyer, however, is built to a scale that is too small for the minifigs. There is a smaller detachable part--a ship, maybe, or just the bridge, I'm not sure--that is minifig scale. But the rest is micro-scale. The Lego Savant likes that it is huge but also a micro-build--an interesting paradox!--and he likes imagining how big the ship would have to be to be minifig scale.
In that same conversation at MetaFilter, a user wrote an excellent comment about how licensing Lego sets for Star Wars and other tie-ins is pretty well accepted as having saved the company from bankruptcy. Imagine a world without Lego! We are such a Lego-loving family that when it was time to renew my license plates in October, I actually toyed with the idea of getting a Lego-related vanity plate. I am not really a vanity plate person, though.
Time to go. I could say much more about Lego, and I might come back and add a few images to this later. But off I go to do the swimming thing with the kids.
Posted with Blogsy
No comments:
Post a Comment