2020.08.16
binclocks
Lately I've been spending Sunday mornings hanging out with my superniece Cora - playing some sort of dolls, or drawing together, or parallel building play, or more lately just hanging out playing video games - her telling me what to do and me doing it in game. Anyway, I had a hard time finding a holder for the phone so I could position the back camera towards the TV (but still see Cora on the screen) so I decided to build a new one out of Lego during our session this morning... here it is
And here it is in action...
I'm sort of frustrated with my Lego collection. I split my childhood Lego collection into threes, and gave two of those parts to different friend families. (I'm planning on giving the final third to Cora at some point, though Lego has only been a minor jam of hers thus far.) So my current collection, the one in my office that I used to build this, is just the stuff I got as a grownup. And I'm not sure if it's the number of bricks or a trend towards more fiddly, specialty pieces, but it seems harder to come up with stuff for a good build. Of course, I've always done more in Space Lego then Technic and actual sturdy construction, and while there are more "flexible joint" pieces than ever I'm not as practiced with using them, and I don't have enough of any single type to focus on it.
(Incidentally this is my third phone cradle out of Lego... here's one from 2005, also at a jaunty angle, and then a simpler upright on one for my 2009 work phone. All 3 of them were built around making sure the charger cord could snake on through.)
Whoa. I just realized at bricklink you can just...order individual pieces, like Lego "Pick a Brick"... and it's cheap! (though there are some minimums... it's so weird to think about these dealers having to do all the legwork to gather an order) The hardest part is finding the piece you're thinking of... I find myself longing for a "natural language Lego brick search engine"...
But overall it feels like a "cheat code" for Lego... you don't have to rely on the vagaries of what high price sets you receive as gifts (or maybe if you get a big ol' flea market tub) - you can just go and get it!
Actually it reminds me of one of the weird things about the "LEGO Masters" series... I think roughly there are three types of builders: people who keep the bricks in the form of the original purchased set, like on display, people who put all the pieces from the set into a big bin (the model I grew up with) and people who carefully sort (I dabbled with that after college, but it was so much work.)
But whatever the level of organization, for casual Lego fans it's often a scarcity model- you have a limited number of really unique or useful pieces and you have to dole them out - like for me with Space Lego it was a certain number of cool Blacktron wings and cockpits windows. But to compete on a show like LEGO Masters, you have to be designing with the idea that you'll be able to get your hands on all the parts you need, or close enough...