Warner Bros. has just released Emmet’s Holiday Party, a cute nearly-2-1/2-minute-long short that has The LEGO Movie's Emmett decorating Apocalypseburg for the holidays. It doubles as a promo for The LEGO Movie 2, which hits theatres in February 2019. Read the rest
Kids eat the darndest things. Dead flies, half-sucked candy found on the ground, erasers... and one of the most popular items, besides coins, are small toy parts. But once swallowed, do these toys always find their way out? And if so, how long does the journey take?
These burning questions inspired a team of pediatrics workers to conduct a study, which was just published in The Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health. They got six adventurous volunteers to dine on Lego heads, and then poke around after each potty run until they spotted the bright plastic pieces in their poop. Fun times.
The researchers constructed the study with a sense of humor, using a Stool and Hardness Score (SHAT) and Found and Retrieved Time (FART) score. According to Forbes:
Read the restBefore they swallowed the Lego heads, each participant had to keep a 3‐day stool diary, which could be quite disconcerting if confused with a regular diary. The researchers developed a Stool Hardness and Transit (SHAT) score to measure the frequency and looseness of their stool. A higher SHAT score meant that the participant had more frequent and looser bowel movements, which could affect how fast the Lego head was you-know-what out of the person. Each patient has a pre-SHAT score, calculated for the 3-day period before the Lego head meal, and a SHAT score for the time between the ingestion and the pooping out of the Lego head. Thus, each participant was given 2 SHATs.
After the Lego head was swallowed, the next step was to keep track of the subsequent bowel movements and keep looking for the Lego head.
Holiday pricing on giant LEGO sets continues as the LEGO Apollo Saturn V Rocket goes on sale for $79.
Cleverly this LEGO set comes with 1969 pieces. I bought it last year for $119, and do not regret a dime of it.
LEGO Ideas Nasa Apollo Saturn V 21309 Building Kit Read the rest
At 4163 pieces Big Ben is a massive LEGO set. I have sat on the Apollo Saturn V kit for a while and it a mere 1969 pieces.
When will we find the time?
The kit is $50 off today, $199 on Amazon.
LEGO Creator Expert 10253 Big Ben Building Kit via Amazon Read the rest
Prepare to be impressed: While it doesn't actually play music, this 2,798-piece miniature LEGO model of a concert grand piano does have 25 independently working keys, a removable keyboard, and a height-adjustable bench. It also has a working damper and pedal, a self-playing mode, a working piano lid, and more. LEGO master SleepyCow engineered it to contribute to LEGO Ideas in the hopes that it will be voted in to be mass produced as a retail kit.
He writes:
Ever since I started learning music, I have always wanted to build a piano out of LEGO bricks. I have also been asked many times by my students about the inner-workings of a piano. I think this will be a great set to teach students about piano mechanics. I've seen many people do it in different ways, but I decided to make my own version, as well as try to make it as similar to a real piano as possible with correct proportions.
Iain Heath writes, "I recreated the 'distracted boyfriend' meme using LEGO bricks." You certainly did, Iain, and very well, too! Read the rest
Automotive engineer Spencer Rezkalla spent three years building this astounding 19 square foot LEGO model of the just-opened Apple Park. The 1/650th scale model contains roughly 85,000 pieces, including 1647 trees. From Rezkalla's project gallery on Flickr:
I've always wanted to build a horizontal skyscraper. These are sometimes also called "groundscrapers".
In 2014 I came across some drone footage of an enormous circular excavation being dug into the California earth. When I discovered this was the start of the foundation for a new low-rise Apple "spaceship" campus, I knew I had found an interesting and suitable candidate.
Veterinarians at the Maryland Zoo outfitted an injured Eastern turtle with a wheelchair built from Lego. An employee of the zoo found the turtle whose shell had been injured in a nearby park.
“He had multiple fractures on his plastron, the bottom part of his shell. Because of the unique placement of the fractures, we faced a difficult challenge with maintaining the turtle’s mobility while allowing him to heal properly,” said Ellen Bronson, the zoo's sensior director of animal health.
From Local21News:
Zoo officials say there aren’t devices small enough for turtles to use so they got creative and drew sketches of a customized wheelchair. The sketches were then sent to a friend, who is also a LEGO enthusiast.
“The sketches proved to be a success and the turtle received his very own multi-colored LEGO brick wheelchair just a few weeks after surgery. The turtle is roughly the size of a grapefruit. The small LEGO frame surrounds his shell and sits on four LEGO wheels,” said Garrett Fraess, veterinary extern at the zoo.
LEGO Han in Carbonite is reason enough for me to buy the LEGO Star Wars Carbon-Freezing Chamber.
While LEGO Lando isn't to be seen, he's clearly still a traitorous jerk! LEGO Han is getting frozen in carbonite! LEGO Boba and an Ugnaught are included to run the operation.
LEGO Star Wars Carbon-Freezing Chamber 75137 via Amazon Read the rest
Agalmatophilia, a sexual attraction to dolls and other human figures, is nothing new: people have been attracted to and humping dolls for as long as there have been locks on doors – not that the practice needs to be kept a secret. Human sexuality is a weird attic to stumble around in. If your kink hurts no one and leans towards watching wee plastic people get it on, I say it's fair game. Apparently so do a lot of other folks.
From Motherboard: The longer you look for Lego porn, the more you see, and the more you see, the more have you wonder what the odds are that someone near and dear to you is consuming Lego-themed fetishism as their kink. There’s a subreddit dedicated to Lego porn with 725 subscribers, and only 15 posts over five years, but it’s quality over quantity—which makes me think a lot more people are consuming than making Lego porn.
There’s the Big Lego Porn Album, a glorious repository of some of the greatest Lego porn, from New Yorker style cartoons of Lego sex workers to tentacle-Lego crossovers. Several of the images are watermarked with drew.corrupt.net, which now redirects to a Japanese-language blog about someone’s toddler, and definitely not hardcore brick fucking. This album has more than 34,000 views.
r/legoporn features a few crossposts from r/bdsm with bricks, which are actually quite artful. Another crossover fandom: Harry Potter.
Motherboard's Samantha Cole spent a good chunk of time researching the smutty-stop-motion underworld of LEGO pornography, those that make it and the folks that consume it. Read the rest
My eight year-old nephew clicked this X-Wing fighter together in about 3 hours, and then spent two days playing with it, nonstop.
This Luke-era X-Wing, with Luke and R2 minifigs, was the project of choice for my nephew. He said he loves to build LEGO, and attacked this set with gusto. Unlike my daughter's massive collection of Star Wars LEGO, which is all carefully organized on our living room shelves, nephew plays with his LEGO builds hard.
It is fun to watch.
LEGO Star Wars X-Wing Starfighter 75218 Building Kit (731 Piece) via Amazon Read the rest
My 11 year-old paid more attention during Solo than I did. She insisted on Moloch's Landspeeder as her latest Star Wars LEGO. Read the rest
In this charming stop motion animation, YouTubers BrickBros created a lovely children's toy, shooting it in a way that makes it seem as if their woodshop consisted only of LEGO-based items. Some very clever uses of small pieces throughout. Read the rest
As part of its efforts to source its materials more responsibly, LEGO is launching a line of plant forms made from sustainable sugarcane plastics instead of petroleum-based plastic. Read the rest
David Aguilar Amphoux (aka Hand Solo) just built an upgrade to his original LEGO prosthetic arm. Very ingenious! Read the rest
Grant Thompson of YouTube channel “The King of Random” has devised a way to clean up a pile of LEGO bricks quickly using a special vacuum attachment, and he shows you how you can build one for yourself.
Both my daughter and I love The Incredibles. The new movie is wonderful! Naturally the film is matched with a pixel-perfect LEGO video game adaptation. Read the rest
