| The Brickmaster Returns. |
[Sep. 11th, 2006|11:02 pm] |
So, what with college coming up and all, I realized it was time to get back to basics and take up a task I've left neglected for far too long. Namely, playing with Legos. This might seem like a frivolous waste of time, I'm sure, but when I can't write, Ye Olde Bricks are a nice tangible outlet for all that pent-up creativity.
Unfortunately I'm terribly out of practice. For those of who you have never been builders, believe me, practice is required; there's an elaborate skill set involved in this art - it's much more than just sticking the classic 2x4 bricks together. It's sort of a Zen activity, sorting through the big buckets of parts waiting for the one you need to show up. If you're good, you'll get a picture of what you're making in your head, and the pieces just sort of float into your hands.
I'm not that good right now. I made some progress on something that looks like the left broadside of a Napoleonic-era warship, but I wasn't able to SNOT or greeble it; things just didn't work out quite right.
Yes, we builders have a lexicon too - SNOT means 'studs not on top,' a difficult set of skills used to make your Lego models look as if they're built of something besides Legos. 'Greebling' is the addition of lots of tiny eentsy little details, the kind of thing you'd see on the side of an 80's-era sci-fi movie spacecraft. My brother is an excellent greebler, and I tend to outsource the tasks to him. I'm more of a big-picture man.
Legos are actually what first got me into writing. I started building little model spacecraft when I was four, and I made up stories to go along with them. I'm actually still writing in that universe - it's gotten wildly complex, both in paper and in LEGO, but the old brickfleet that I used to act out the tales in the halcyon days of my youth is in need of a major overhaul.
The fleet is a gaggle of assorted models that takes up an entire wall's worth of shelf space, sorted in rough ascending order of size from 'corvette' through 'dreadnought'. Like the strata of a canyon wall, they can be sorted by age: the ones that look decent were assembled within the past five years, while the ones that look like they were built by a six-year-old...probably were. The styles have evolved over the years, too; at first they were fairly homogenous, but different cultures now have their own appearances, from the hodgepodge little Fold raiders to the raven-winged Ir Nashiriyah juggernaughts.
I can't claim credit for all of them. The sleek, bristling set of Concordium warships on Shelf Three belongs to a friend who's put as much time into the universe as I; my brother authored the bizarrely intricate ships on the bottom shelf. They still look as if they're made of spun glass and cobwebs rather than plastic
I did put a great deal of thought into these models (spacecraft, mostly, as I'm sure you've guessed.) I would calculate thrust-to-mass ratios and fuel supplies, weapons loadouts and electronic warfare capabilities. I still have a dogeared master notebook filled with esoteric arcana, telling me that a '1x2 slatted brick, two-stud' corresponds to a 'countermeasure rack, type 1' and that the distinction between a particle beam and an RMD lies in the greebling on the base of the weapons mount.
There was more than dry technicality to it, though. I swear that I found this overgrown make-believe more dramatic than the assembled works of Shakespeare. I had a city once; it occupied an entire room, complete with a working monorail, zoning regulations, an irrigation system, and a currency. I babied that city for almost five years, but the universe's storyline took a dark turn when the war (there was always a war) began going badly for Our Heroes. Regretfully, I realized that the demands of the plot meant that the city was going to go.
I nuked it with a vacuum cleaner handle, then spent the next six months acting out survival-horror as the dazed survivors tried to put their lives back together. There's still a little Lego pyramid memorial tucked into one of my closets, complete with a pageful of printed size-two font that was supposed to be a list of the dead. (I think I copied something off the US Census website.)
I definitely had too much time on my hands as a youth. Ah, the memories. It's a shame that years of disappointment and empty materialism have left me jaded and cynical.
...though I've got plenty of bricks left, and some room in the notebook, and a few idle days left. And I think, last time my thoughts turned this way, that I left things on a cliffhanger.
Maybe it's time for a resolution. |
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