About Blogging …

Canteen scene with Drew barely visible on the left, washing dishes; Tim and Trish in the right foreground, sharing their stories; and Wendy, in the right-side rear having a break from the cooking.

About Starting a Second Blog

Inevitably, when an activity starts to take more of the hours in my week, more of the effort I have available, more space on my dining table, it starts to look like an obsession. I’ve been there before. Twelve years ago I lost a beautiful tung nut tree in my backyard to an excess of rain. As the rotting trunk was chopped down, I comforted myself with the idea that I’d be able to see a parade of fungi taking hold of the wood one after another.

The rain continued. Dozens of fungi species helped rot that stump down. I learned about fungi wherever I could find the information. Over the wet months of the El Nino weather pattern, more than a hundred species helped me become obsessed. I took my camera out for walks and recorded the ‘chitinous critters’ wherever I walked.

Chitinous critters?

Fungi cell walls are made of the same stuff as insect exoskeletons. Fungi have more in common with animals than with plants, despite having been umbrella’ed by ‘Flora’ since Linnaeus. Fungi have no chlorophyll, they need plant food to survive. They don’t move around in the same way that sponges don’t. I could go on and on. Have, in fact, given talks about them; walks and talks; I’ve done guest speaking at high school science classes; written articles; IDed fungi on FB, entered fungi sightings on ALA and iNaturalist. Citizen science stuff.

But I’ve probably only seen about four fungi species in the last two years. I have much less energy. More sedentary time. I’ve become rusty on names. Chemo fog didn’t help. It was the right time for a new obsession.

So. Lego seems to be it. With so many platforms where I could post up my finds, I never hankered to set up a separate blog for my fungi finds. Although there are quite a lot of platforms for Lego too, they don’t tend to encourage what I’m interested in. Stories. I like to write about my discoveries while building, and I like to write stories from within the building process.

Though I could write on this blog about my discoveries, I haven’t found a good way to format the stories in this blog’s existing structure. Hence. Designing and planning a second blog.

But keeping this one going is a thing. Usual stuff. Life and about life. Fiction and about fiction. Earth versus World. About media and about reading. Blogging and about blogging.

Lego Rest Breaks

Every so often while packing up my house, I’ve been taking breaks reading, writing, painting, Lego building breaks and far too many hours scrolling through social media feeds. But, probably my brick collection will be the last thing I pack.

It’s Thursday 29 December 2022, the middle of the Christmas/New Year break. The apartment complex where I live is almost silent with no soundtrack in the background of kids in the pool or kids racing around role-playing their version of cops and robbers.

To cut the quiet, I’m piping Geneva by Russian Circles (post-rock band) into my ears, by way of the Blue Tooth connection between my modem and my hearing aids. Philos is the last ‘song’ and my favorite. Coming up. Still seems funny calling them songs when there are is generally no singing. Better than the superseded tech of ‘tracks’ I suppose.

So, although I’m still building, I’ve put the village aside and am concentrating on ‘furniture’ the elements that will liven up the various scenes. This week I’m looking at how the brick experts build trees. Tips & Bricks has some really good posts. Brick Crafts too. And then it’s up to me adapting.

I’m never going to have as vast a collection as brick-professionals or extreme hobbyists, or their large scale set-ups. My 4-seater dining tabletop is it. Space enough for seven 🙂 whole MILS plates, and maybe 6 to 8 half plates. When the table is needed—like for eating on—the village has to be moved to the shelves adjacent.

This tree is still experimental. As most of my green leaf pieces are in the Christmas Wreath build above, this tree must make do with lavender leaves. The dark green part is a piece of seaweed made-over. The tree trunk? Not much to look at yet. It’s a work in progress.

Lego: MILS Base-plate

The minute I saw a Lego base-plate, I knew I’d have to find an alternative.

Underside of Lego base plate in green, my version of a MILS plate in blue etc

Most of the building I’m doing is on my smallish round dinner table. When I have guests stuff has to be able to be moved easily to shelves. Just how weak and bendy the original base-plates are was amply illustrated to me by Darryl of Bevin’s Bricks on Youtube cutting one up with a box cutter.

I already searched through possibilities like glueing base plates on cardboard and building on ordinary plates and joining those with other ordinary plates. Neither of which attracted me. The first because it’s hard to stay accurate. The second because of heavy and awkward builds springing apart when you least expect it. I’ve read about builds grievously falling apart while being transported from one table to the next. Not ideal, in other words.

Then, on one of the FB groups I joined, I saw mentioned the MILS plate as the next development in the search for a strong base plate. Following that up, I saw a good explanation on Bevin’s Bricks. [Though I have again forgotten what ‘MILS’ means. I have a life-long memory glitch in relation to acronyms.]

Me constructing a ‘proper’ MILS base plate right now would’ve meant ordering the required parts, and weeks of waiting on covid-struck postal services in several countries. Even getting supplies by post from my local brick resales outlet a few suburbs away, usually takes a couple of weeks.

Not helped this week that I’m house-bound again, waiting to be told whether I have covid or another lurgy. Well, I know I have a lurgy. Ten days of coughing.

But … I have six alternate-lego base plates, lots of blue 2×2 bricks and red 2×2 bricks that I have no idea where to use, a few 30-year-old Technic 1×6 bricks, and a bunch of blue sun-damaged plates of all sizes. Can I achieve something with them?

I could. Very likely the ordered honeycomb of professionally built MILS base plates is not present in the internals of my sandwich base plate (below) because I spaced the reds and blues according to need, not design. I’m very happy with it and am aiming to put another one together tonight.

Learning Lego

Yesterday I was reminded that Bosley & Co need at least 2 more hard hats to be able to pass building inspections. Off went another order to BrickResales.com.au for hard hats, a few other building site necessities, and a trio of frying pans for the new outdoor dining setup. LBT’s (Australian delicacy: lettuce bacon and tomato sandwiches) coming up.

While most of the structures I build are MOCs, aka My Own Creations–for the ongoing story– every so often I buy a set for what I can learn from them.

This week, I tackled the (shown above) Campervan Model #Lego60283. Took me a couple of thoroughly enjoyable hours to put it together at the same time learning two techniques that’ll help me keep the interiors of my own models accessible.

First there is the camper’s easily lifted off roof. This has made access to the vehicle’s roof spaces so easy, I’m planning to use the technique for some of the apartments in Bosley & Co’s proposed multi-storey build.

Starting with the ground-floor cabins, I discovered that once you put a roof on a place, the windows and doors are too small for adult fingers to access the interior. Furniture, for example, that needs to be installed inside, has to be done during the build, or the build carefully dismantled and done again with extras included.

In that mode, there are cabins on the site that have been built three times. Jackie and Jed Cranedriver’s now very fancy hut is a case in point. Version One looked like a grey box. Version Two had some color in it.

Third time, this time, it has a swing-open wall similar to the one in the camper-van. I love it. Though it will take further study to get the colors matching where they are meant to. I can foresee a fourth rebuild.

*Jackie Cranedriver on her newly built cabin*.

The Hardware Store Rebuild:

Part One of a ‘Bric-Fic’ Fantasy

Despite the optimistic style of the title and subtitles, this is a story about ‘trying’ to publish a bric-fic fantasy. It’s been a zig-zag journey of dead-ends, so far, and I wrote this paragraph last because even WordPress is not productive when asked to do something a little different.

I’ve always wanted to name a new genre, and here it is. Little did I know it’d be in the arena of AFOLs (Adult Fans of Lego) but that is also what I am. An AFOL.

The genre has been in existence for a while, I’m sure, since the Lego Group has been going 90 years, and I can’t be the only one who’s ever seized on these bricks and the mini-figs to tell a story. But it’s hard to find them, to compare my work, without a genre label.

Let me know if there is a term already out there?

After producing a slideshow on my desktop, I’ve been trying to find a good place to publish. I’ve tried a FaceBook Page, an Instagram account, and a WordPress slideshow with varying success rates. None of them more ideal than daily FaceBook posts on my Feed.

The slideshow block on this site likes photos, but finds captions harder to deal with. It’s another learning curve of the two-steps-forward-one-step-back variety. Something like a muddy path.

A gallery of photos and text boxes may serve. We shall see.

“That’s a laugh! I can’t fit through the door. There must be something wrong with the plans.”

You can see in the third pic that the caption continues beyond the bottom of the page. Conclusion? A gallery will not do. The ‘captions’ are often too long.

I need a structure to input once, not one that needs me to scroll to the place where it exists, for every photo and every caption, copy, then scroll back to where it’s wanted. Wondering now if a table will work …

Nope! A prefabricated WordPress table does not stretch or accommodate photos and long captions, the way a word processor table does. Lucky last for today, I’ll try the column block:

Scene 8:

“After I dump the foundation blocks, fetch what?”

“Park the run-about and help me install the blocks.”

“But Boss, the scaffolding is cluttering up the yard. I should get that first.”

“But Dan, nowhere here to put it until we get the blocks in place.”

Scene 9

Beep. Beep. Beep.

“Tip them out. Dan, I’ve got Drew here to help me. You go wrangle the forklift attachment. One of the sparkies will help you get the electrics connected.”

“Right-ee-oh, Boss. Hey Drew, don’t let him run you ragged!”

“Boss and I are good, Dan. We’re brothers.”

“Well, that’s good to know!”

And that is it … the ‘column block’ feature stops working after two photos. It lets me input more text, but refuses another photo.

THE END

LEGO Masters’ Australia 2020

For something completely different, helped along considerably by losing my internet link and having only ordinary television, I started watching LEGO Masters. Much less depressing than everything else on offer.

My interest in Lego began when I received a box of red components, the approximate size of a pack of cards, way back in my childhood. Both my brothers and I were given a set each as presents before our family left on the first of of its sea voyages.

I think my set probably represented the build of a little red house. I recall a red framed window-piece, bits of red roofing-tile and some red eight stud bricks for the walls.

It’s an off-the-planet experience for me to see a bunch of eight adult teams race each other and the clock to produce amazing masterpieces using all the colors available, pressing thousands of small pieces together and coming up with astounding themes. The builds tonight required the interpretation of a fairy story.

Apart from the sheer inventiveness of the projects, the thing that grabs me most is the complexity of the meta-world that surrounds the Lego phenomenon. There’s Lego-specific jargon to describe, for example, each Lego piece. SNOT pieces? Only users will know what they mean. And as for acronyms? There may be a dozen that probably even the Urban Dictionary doesn’t know.

And there’s a language for critiquing the builds. How else would the best be chosen, you might ask? But seriously, this language rivals the language invented to describe post-rock music that I studied last year. One of my interests is how specialist terminology can help or hinder enjoyment of the art they describe. In the case of Lego-critiquing, the Lego specific terminology definitely helped me to see and appreciate the different projects’ intricate complexities.