CineMeL

As copied from the TDW Geeks page on this LEGO automaton, who brought this to my attention, calling it their “LEGO Pegasus Of The Day” (I love many of their – Of The Days, they often make my day),

“What’s a Legasus?”

“The Legasus is pretty much my favorite animal. It’s like a Lego and a pegasus mixed, bred for its skills in magic.”

This particular Legasus isn’t just a sculpture, it’s a moving automaton. Turning the crank makes its wings flap and its tail swish.

Yes, a classic example of things that make my day. They’re way geeky, plus they have something that makes me daydream. Oh yeah.

I would just like to meet the virgin who is able to see this pegasus. Geek girls are really it, in my book.

Ahhhhh…

Whoah. I mean, whoah! Those darned yellow people can be pretty bad-ass!

I am posting, or should I say ‘transmitting’, this pretty awesome stop motion animation, involving Playmobil, and not LEGO, toys.

I’ve been asked, during my childhood years mostly, but since then, too, if I prefer LEGO or Playmobil. As if they’re enemies, or as if I’m obligatorily contracted to choose among the two, for some reason. When I was a kid, I used to play with both of them together, especially since I mostly used LEGO to build things, while their ‘people’ were yellow and unrealistic, whereas Playmobil people were good enough for me (I drew the line around Playmobil’s level of non-realism, I guess). And that’s why I post this under the ‘LEGO’ category.

Now, the reason why I post it altogether is that… well, other than the fact that it’s pretty awesome, it also involves a Joy Division song which I’ve heard a quadrillion (a real number, there, mind you) times, among others, mostly during my teenage infatuation with the band, but since then, too.

Brace yourselves, this is… hardcore! Loud music, guitars, swords, ogres, even little LEGO trees die. Forcefully. Yeah.

Badass guns don’t always go “bang, bang, kerbang”. Sometimes they go “click, clack, kerklack”. Like your brother running around and bumping into, and destroying, what you made, what you were so proud of – and then you having to face your mother’s shrieks about almost causing ‘the poor kid’ to fall. Scary, huh? See?

Here I have a vid that is paid for and generally produced, I take it, by LEGO – but it’s still awesome. I’d upload this one (which is 8-bit referencing, even cooler, and non-commercial), but it’s much Christmasier, and the Winter Holidays have really passed, for this year at least (but I just discovered it).

I’m not sure if love is actually better than LEGO – I’ll leave the choice to you. In any case, I show you this vid for the simple reason that snow has been chasing me and mine like anything this season (’tis the season to be snowy, apparently, even in places where it’s not a particularly regular phenomenon as it is in Russia).

Since this is my blog, among all else, this is a chance I get to whine away about this, describing the difficulties that it brought. First, my brother’s flight back from London to Athens, Greece, was not only cancelled, but had him spending 48h awake, going from Gatwick to Heathrow airport, where they sent him for a different flight, waiting in the KLM queue like a true Londoner until he was third from the airline’s till and being sent away when it closed as he finally reached third in line, checking the Heathrow Airport Twitter feed from his laptop and all, as I not only freaked out for my poor little bro’s ordeal, but supported my parents as, on their end of the line, here, did all they could and more to bring the kid home for a trip to New York they had booked (and paid good money for) a few days later.

And, as if that wasn’t enough, when he arrived, having already changed bookings for three cancelled flights (the original KLM one, another one which they eventually told people would be on Thursday while we were supposed to be flying to NY on Wednesday morning, and one with Aegean, that didn’t even let people that had given them their card details and assumed that they had tickets since they had booked them for the extra flight they sold as secured) with Olympic (which we love-love-love, plug-plug-plug and inform you that even their aeroplane food is good) we went to New York, only to encounter, after the first three days of having-a-good-time build-up, even more snow.

It suddenly gave us a meter (three feet or so) of snow, within a few hours, when we’d awoken to encounter a simple case of freezing, almost-sunny, weather – the kind usually combated with a simple armour of heavy clothes, a scarf, a hood and gloves. And I must inform you, by the way, that UGG boots, as warm as they may be with their sheepskin interior that resembles walking on a flock of actual sheep without the annoying “baaa” sounds and smells, are the complete opposite of waterproof. If you step on a little bit of snow, less than a foot, just enough to get on the boot, both the boot and the sock inside become tragically wet with ice-cold water. Which, of course, is tragic when you don’t plan to return BTB any time soon, as is typical in sightseeing holidays.

All this made me so tragically sick of the snow, even if my worst kind of weather is still rain. But here you can see LEGO conquering the snow, in my fave colour (orange) too, in a venue where the snow is a typical enough phenomenon to drive the Nazis off, back then. But, nooo, LEGO conquers all, as you will see. The Stilzkin Indrik wins over the snow, and has working lights, and just generally rules.

The joy of making your own LEGO creation cannot, naturally, be compared with much else. But the same goes for imagining things made of LEGO that you couldn’t actually garner the patience to build, physically, with your own hands. And, well, some will say that designing something on a computer is almost the same as physically making it. The keyword here, of course, being “almost”. Plus, well, someone actually, physically, made this LEGO printer, I don’t expect that they just went to the corner shop and bought it. That’s creative, and fulfilling, right?

This ‘ere ad-looking thing for LEGO is probably not an ad, but a little… brick put there by Temujin Doran to help us dream of living in a world made of LEGO.