In Rainbows

Good evening everyone. I'm usually apologizing for a lack of updates, and I could continue this trend but beating a dead horse isn't very fun. I'm in that last year of school where you have to decide what the hell you want to do with your life and apparently there is a lot of work to go along with that. Had a nice holiday in the form of a school trip to Italy, it was real nice to be somewhere else for a while. Plenty of shots on flickr from that trip, and there'll probably be more come Christmas when I get a full account. Here are some pretty examples:






So with my mind still in other places and boat loads of work ahead of me, LEGO has essentially been put on the back burner. I haven't even really been keeping up on most everybody else's work. So far be it for me to try and keep you posted and informed on current works, when I myself am not. This would be a post where brickshelf's random feature is highly lucrative and ideal - however the days where said feature would be ideal and the days where said feature actually produce ideal results must run on separate calenders. Instead, I did indeed find a recent piece. A piece, as in one, so I'll try and make this long winded.

I don't really think the Arvo brothers have actually ever made anything that on some level (most often on many) I don't love. I choose the term love over like here because there's a hint of jealously and admiration, as opposed to just general interest. Their recent make of Giger's Alien is creepy, smooth, and organic and inorganic in the same TV dinner. There's a certain feeling in this, and most arvo pieces, that every element put into place on the final model is the only one that would work. Every element flows so well that you stop looking at the model as a collaboration of different shaped ABS blocks and more as something that has been sculpted. Each section moves so seamlessly into the next that the model transcends its own medium - which I believe is a concept I've ushered as one of instant gratification on this blog. Adding to this is the idea that the build itself still isn't enough. If the Arvos had simply built this Alien, posed it in some classical contrapposto with less movement than a mortared brick and taken the photos in a gloomy basement apartment with the flash on - chances are it would still be seen as a high point of building achievement. That, however, is not what we get. What we get is an Alien in some sort of dynamic post-kill contemplating pose (with drool for extra glam) captured with such beautiful photographs that even if I put the Lego builder in me aside, the photographer in me steps forward to give worship. All this knowing how hard black Lego bricks are to photograph.

True to Giger's vision (award for the most phallic head ever), the Arvo's produce another stunning work. And with that I'll probably be silent for sometime again, so if you would mind Laura, get me home tonight.

Fed and Watered

Rather than boring you with boring tales of an ultimately inane and crap-ulouse nature I'd thought I'd strap on my goggles and bathing cap and dive headfirst into today's Moc's straight away.

Introducing the titular Jaguar Force mecha by corebookg7 of Brickshelf. I have no idea if this Moc is an official alternate model or just a fan built alternate but either way it's a pretty fancy looking feline vision of loveliness. The side boosters/ cannons look right out of some fancy anime mecha show and those paw/toe claw wrenches are quite cute as is the sword-tail.
The cockpit on this however is quite crap, pull the minifig out and it'd look about a hundred times better. At top speed, (assuming he hasn't fallen out by then) the poor guy would have a spine similar in appearance and density to that of a large sock filled with lemon jelly.
Having nothing to do with either footwear or sugary desserts is the MaK Fireball SG which is a lovely old fashion diving bell style hardsuit by Tromas. The hatches on this thing are absolutely ace with no pun intended, the ace and bullet hole decals add a lovely layer of personality to an otherwise fairly drab Moc. And I like that little spoiler thing sticking out of the shoulder chillin' on the back there. But's this Mech's suffering an ailment that's seems common to a lot of mechs, the dreaded tiny feet syndrome. Niels Bugge's Railgun spider might have a lame name but it doesn't suffer the small feet disorder most likely due to the fact that it's an awesome phallic spider cannon death machine usefull for defending planets and shooting cans. The big gun of the Spiders namesake is fairly impressive. I love the way the monorail noses form an attractive boomerang/ U shape which sandwiches in the greebles like tasty cream filling. Great use of cockpit domes, the ones behind the gun stacked up in that peculiar vending machine/ can dispensing machine fashion are uniquely awesome. The cockpit placement on this couldn't be more perfect.

Also under the Lame parts contest umbrella we have the Anti Satellite patrol buggy which features a slightly smaller gun but however utilises a Castle Roof and a basketball hoop in an interesting way. It's even got a little control room instead of a back seat which is not really a room as such but more of a control-hole for the techs to sit down in and do some serious controllin' and shootin'. In a minor nitpick it's a shame that those windshields aren't made in a six stud length variety, cause the 4x4 one is adequate but ultimately sucky.
The Accentor by Nic Dean has a crap name that makes it sound more like a brand of escalator than a VTOL killing machine. Any boring and generic name like the 'Predator', 'The Stalker' or the'Phantom Sky Cougar Delux' would be way better. Trivialities aside it has some decent but fragile looking rotors and a really neat flowing tail design. The ramp is cool but I can't help wonder just how much you can fit in the interior which is hopefully practical and not just for looks. Which is precisely what Felix Brun's Spacecrane v2.0 is all about, a beautiful exercise in function over form. A lovely old-school cockpit choice and two big pneumatic cylinders on top which look great but there really is an absence of hoses. Surely a solid and manly industrial craft such as this needs far more hoses to pump around various fluids which are no doubt vital to lifting stuff.

David C's Crimson Angel support craft is pretty cool, what stands out on this for me is the engines that sit neatly tucked in underneath the lame-part cowling. But the rest of it to me seems fairly boring as I feel like I've seen it before. Hippotam has built a handy Space roller which is just dandy for dealing with the pot-holed space-roads and troublesome protesters of the future. I particularly like the sporty stabiliser fins and the knee height doors. Who here hasn't found themselves sitting and thinking to themselves that construction vehicles also need fancy sports versions? Just imagine a star studded movie premier with all glitz, glamour and fancy cars. Rolling up to the red carpet is a sleek cherry red cement mixer with thick black tinted windows. The Gull wings doors elegantly slide upwards open. It's Ferrari's newest model of course, the Concrete Panther. On slightly less insane plane of thought there this Hardsuit by Incayne with is kind of similar to the diving bell hardsuit that was observed earlier but much more jolly and plump. And it gets bonus points because it shares a name after a totally awesome song and because it's also packin' a shoulder mounted spoiler too. Ley Ward/ Whateverly's has presented the Eye in the Sky which is a huge space donut thing that features a cool focusing ring of transparent goodness that shoots lasers. I guess it kind of looks like a gigantic magnifying glass with a broken handle.

Also, I saw this on B-shelf and thought it was somewhat kinda cool. May it bring much joy & happiness.

Death is the Road to Awe (dancing with myself)

Sorry for the lack of posts from me, I went on vacation. I didn't build much over the summer, threw out some stuff at the end, but now I'm in school and the building is grinding to a halt. But, I have been working on the website! You may have noticed the header change here to better fit in with the main page. So check out http://masokotanga.unicornbreak.com to see the intro page that took me much longer than it should have! Both sections are up, however the extent of both is limited. The galleries all look fine for me, but apparently the font didn't embed because whenever I view a gallery on another computer all the writing is 'off'. Sigh. The Art section of the new website is sauntering along, the galleries there will be similar but different in presentation. Making a website is quite the frustrating project, and unlike the guys at Next-Gen Design I don't have Kepplah to code monkey for me. Also, watch 'The Fountain', buy the soundtrack, and die happy.

This post has been mulled over for a while, so I'm not going to give much of the average variety. No, today's update will run more like The Histories than any sort of review show. Today I'm going to look at my preferred topic, Microspace, in retrospect. A search on Lugnet of 'Micro' and 'Space' comes up with a few topics reaching back 11 years, with MOC topics showing up around 9 years and the first with pictures still accessible at 7 years ago. There's a topic from Jon Palmer talking with Mark Sandlin about what would become Zemi's SHIP Gallery (also 7 years ago), 6 years ago Bryce McGlone talks about a Japanese page of micro-mecha originally link to by a fellow by the name of David Perry - the page has since moved and my amazing ability to not understand the Japanese language leaves me to think said content is long gone.
This seems to be the main problem with looking this far back into the LEGO community's past without any real strategy or tangible sources; links dry up and folders are lost to the ages. However, one sees the names of those who are quite famous in the community today, Mladen talking about some micro-mecha, a link to a page once containing some works from Ken Takeuchi. I guess that is one problem of not being in community back then.
I think microspace has always been at least the hidden passion of some LEGO builders, the more popular solution is to build space ships in scale to Mini-figures, this gives a better sense of realism and allows for a pretty detailed interior - featuring spacemen. But somewhere, someone never has enough pieces to build their dream boat in scale to a mini-figure. What do you do? One way to realise the vision, at least partly, is to build it at a reduced scale. While I wouldn't say microscale was a bastard child of the space community (it was liked) it never garnered any glory or popularity until it's first mention on the Lugnet .Space Timeline: "Paul Baulch takes microfig scale to a whole new level". These are among my favourite all time LEGO creations, and the most inspiring: The Lance of Athena, and The Empyrean Flame. I think any space builder who knows which end of a drill bit to use knows at least one of those names and the creation behind it. Those two ships really gave microscale a name, and started a slow rise in microspace building. They were built a while ago if you judge it against a time-line of the community - against a time-line of LEGO, the revolution of more shaped slopes had come, though not to the extent we enjoy today. As it was, the Lance did something that few had really seen with any larger build (whatever scale it may be): it had shape. This wasn't your everyday box with decorations of Greebs and guns, this was the real deal. Both are huge, representing an enormous investment in parts seen most effectively in the repetition of numerous types of slopes. Both the Lance and the Flame are great milestones in Microspace, and though techniques may have improved you could argue that we've never really seen anything of their stature since.
Things become a little harder to trace in a timeline from here, I turn to the search engine on Classic-Space to see what comes up. There's a few results that talk about micro-gravity and renders, a few small ships by Sastrei, some of my own earlier attempts. Over all there's some interest in mircoscale but nothing monumental.
So the next great piece I found was the micro dioramas of Mark J. Stafford. Great because they were an entire setting of micro, one could see how different pieces interacted with each other and in turn create a better sense of scale between them all. The Octan Refinery does a few things: it shows us the great extent greebles can have on micro, they're not the same as greebs at minifig scale but work to convey more robust industrial workings of a ship (or anything else); it also shows the effective use that simple slopes can be put to to achieve shape. Baulch's big work showed this to some extent, but the size of his two more well known ships defeated this aspect.
The refinery seems to have opened up a new can of Microscale, and the summer of 2006 is filled with wondrous creations from a plethora of builders: Peter Reid, and Justin Vaughn. It was about this time, spring '06, that I began to try and microscale in earnest. I'd been building for a few years now, but it wasn't until Mike Yoder came on the scene that I really wanted to try and be better. I think Mike said once that it was some of my microscale that helped inspire him to build microspace himself, so I felt obliged to try and offer some friendly competition when he floored me with his awesome building skills. The result of this was the Lancaster, the first in a series of three capital ships that were an on-going experiment for me. I feel like sometimes I build in stages, currently I'm trying to design civilian ships and see what space is like from a non-military view. When I built the Lancaster I was trying to build a capital ship - what does a ship need to be a flagship? It must be big, powerful, but must be a multi-role ship. But every ship needs to have some focus to it, otherwise it's slightly good at everything but very good at nothing. After the Lancaster was the Emperius, now with focus on a carrier and long range weaponry. It was still missing something, and I grasped for over half a year to find the right design. I was no longer sure what it was I was looking for however. Mike continued to kick ass, and the building genre was growing (and growing). When I finally pumped out the Eos, after I think seven separate attempted builds, I felt that I reached a milestone. The Eos itself was a pretty shapeless ship, and yet somehow I still admire its beauty - I achieved with it a great advancement in my skills concerning its individual parts, even if as a whole it was visually disengaging. But as I pushed my limits with larger ships, a new builder was experimenting with more manageable sizes: Spook. When I first saw Spook's microscale it was a little chunky and uninteresting, but his skills grew quickly and he soon surpassed me with both style and skill.
Microscale as a building genre was now quite established and diverse. Content that the style had picked up, I turned back to my own progression as a builder. I had achieved what I wanted in terms of technique, so I turned to experimenting with shape. I had quite a few stagnant ideas sitting around from my quest for the Eos, so I knew where to start. I wanted big guns, and classic style. This came together in the Argos, which of all my ships contains the most striking shape - especially for it's size. By now everyone was looking to try their hand at a microscale design, but it wasn't the typical fad bandwagon - it was a much slower build up and obviously is more open-ended than any fad. Lukas, J5N, not to mention Nnenn who had been building the scale for some time now. There was/is even talk about collaborating a microscale space base for conventions, along similar ideals of Moonbase; and rise of a special flickr group, one which breathes on a regular basis.

And there it is, a small history of Microspace. A little bias, and probably missing a lot, but there it is. The interesting thought I'd like to leave you with is this: What will the next generation write on this subject? Who will be remembered as doing what and what models in specific will earn respect as the time goes by. I'm sure there were more microspace builders back in Baulch's fame, but I wasn't there and now we see the things that get remembered.

Pushing the Sky

Many apologies for the delay, my Internet connection has always been similar to that old couple in the beaten up flintstones-era car dragging a caravan at a whopping speed of 30 in the fast lane. Well that was my Internet, but now imagine that same car but the caravan is full of bricks and that the wheels mysteriously vanished a couple hundred miles ago. In short, 20.0 kbs Dial-up is a curse so terrible and vile that I wouldn't even dare bestow it upon my worst enemy and I miss my 40.kbs. Anywho, just yesterday I got to do something I've always been longing to do, I got into a plane which then climbed to about ten thousand feet and then the door opened and I stepped out of the side of it onto the little platform and jumped. Skydiving's a completely amazing and disorientating experience, nothing like weightlessness but probably as close to it as you can get without spending a few hundred thousand dollars I reckon.

Anyway, onto the Lego, the lame-parts space-defence contest deadline has been extended to the 23rd of September which is good news for both the lazy and those who had a legitimate excuse. (who are also lazy) Be sure to check out the competition as there's some fantastic entries.

Luke's Wipeout inspired Orbit Racer is undeniably blocky but I think that's a main part of its charm. It's been quite a while since I've played Wipeout so I'm assuming the hinged panels on the wings are either Airbrakes or maitience hatches but whatever they are they're a fairly nifty and practical addition. I like the cockpit choice but I feel that the nose could be a little sharper. Peter Morris's Wraith has got a nice nose on it and some neat looking thrusters but the wings look a little uncoordinated. Kind of looks like a Star Wars version of a Wraith Dart from Stargate which makes it a good wing-man or adversary to the Buzzhawk which is also by Peter. The gears as thrusters arrangement looks really good as the gears do a way better job here than any cylinder, axel or wheel could. I love the mowhawk but I'm sure the blasters could do with some fattening up. In a similar vein we have the Jethawk from Adam Nies, it's got a nice colour scheme and I really love those compact winglets and their accompanying blue tipped thrusters. The Grey Gosling by Roy T Cook looks like some kind of bizarre amalgamation, it's a ship with a front like a semi-trailer and a rear end like and grey fluffy cloud, which is actually pretty cool so go check it out.

I've heard plentiful praise awarded to the Pc game Crimson Skies in the Space community so I finally gave in and picked it up. If you haven't heard of it, it's a Flight-Combat Pc game set in an alternate 1937 where nations and continents have been split into warring factions and where sky pirates and lawmen roam the friendly skies in a wide assortment of blimps, zeppelins and bizzaro fighters. I finally buckled and picked it up just yesterday but unfortunately it won't work properly for me as it doesn't get along with Nvidia graphics cards.
Problems regardless the combination home & hanger Zeppelins in Crimson Skies struck me as beautiful things both in design and concept and would be pretty amazing in Lego form if done well. I did some sleuthing and discovered that it doesn't take much research to learn that Lego Zepplins are fairly rare and illusive beasts. There are a handful of smaller ones but there's only one big one out there and that's Ash's rendered Daryabar. My research also confirmed my initial assumption that there are too many words for them, zeppelins, airships, dirigibles or a blimp or whatever you want to call them. Back to the first point, big blimps are in short supply but there's slightly more smaller ones out there thanks to that rare Adventurers balloon peice that's restricted to modest small Zepplins due to it's size. It's fairly obvious why there's a shortage of Airships, one being the obscurity of the aircraft and the second being all in the challenge of tackling the balloon and making it look good. You can't just sweep the problem under a convenient balloon shaped rug, because after all a Zepplin balloon would just look like a strange looking caravan wouldn't it? The midsection or waist of a big balloon could be easily done as with plates and click hinges to produce a big hexagonal cylinder preferably with tiles over its surface to make it nice, smooth and balloon like. That's the easy part done, the hard part lies in capping off the ends off smoothly. Take the Darybar's ends for example, they've been capped but the technique used to cap them doesn't look very balloon like.
Moving onto new ground there's two Mocs that I know of out there that aren't Zeplins but similar to the original Crimson Skies multipurpose Zepplin vein, those being Adrian Drake's Dewy and Nathan Proudlove's Mistral. The thing I like about the Mistral is that it has a ton of great details like the spikes surrounding the gunner the mass of pipes and of course not forgetting the bike sitting on the flight deck and those lovely big steam boilers. (Huzzah for Roborider wheels!)
The Mistral proves it's worth as a lovely steampunk craft but on the more whimsical side of the divide there's the Dewy which serves as the giant roasted chicken fighter-carrier of the skies. Like the Mistral, the Dewy has a great amount of detail both exterior and interior and looks great. The large scale application of the built up plate technique used to build the hull is simply fantastic. Perhaps this same technique would be perfect for the balloon on a big airship?

Now come on people, get your building caps on and let's see some great Lego Airships!

Wicked and Weird

I recently journeyed to see Transformers, I know it's been out for a while now but my laziness is beside the point. It was allright, some unessacary silly bits mixed in with some really great bits and visual candy and maybe a wee bit too long but very enjoyable none-the-less. Afterwoods I got back home at about two 'o clock and immediately started rummaging around my room for the G1 and G2 transformers I owned as a kid. Unfortunately, Lady time has not been kind to them as they're all missing more than their fair share fair of various guns, limbs and other choking hazards. Regardless, they're still great for swooshing around ones desk with the all important accompanying engine & shooty sound effects even if they look like they've all been mugged.

Speaking of Transformers, Florea Adrian showcases his amazing Decepticon Shellshock Moc. I've always admired Lego Transformers, I think it goes with out saying that a lot of skill and patience must be invested in the model to ensure a balance of quality between the two forms. There's not much I can say about this that hasn't already been said. The Halftruck is a lot better than any Halftruck moc I've ever seen and would look completely at home in a WW2 diorama. The detail is brilliant as the front grill and towbar looks simply outstanding and I love the rear turret gun.The robot mode is quite awesome but it doesn't really have much character to it. Maybe that's just because the aesthetics of the more realistic and sleeker style of movie transformer don't lend themselves to as much character as the old bulky transformers from days of old.

One Moc that is simply not getting near enough love is Kev Levell's Hornet smuggling ship. It's easy to guess where the inspiration for this ship came from but I think there's plenty of variance and original touches in the design to diferententriate it from everyone's favourite Firefly class transport. For example the wedge slope forks on the wing tips are a homage to the Reaver ships in the series which had the same kind of thing going on. Though I think the engines are a little weak as to me they look more like last minute additions rather than a central part of the design. It would have been much better if the booster was incorporated into that lovely round and bulbous bee-rear-end. Despite the lack of thrusters on it I do like the stinger on the end as it adds a tiny bit of character to the ship which is good. The landing pads look really great but unfortunately due to they're size and complexity it doesn't look like they're retractable or fold-up-able which unfortunately means minus minus points in my book. This ship doesn't disappoint with smuggling compartments as it has a fair few. That Golden C-3po that's hiding in one surprised me as I had no idea that TLC had started making them chrome gold plated as opposed to the dull pearl-cream C-3po's of the past.

From Jerac a strange looking mechanical beasty known simply as Mechos or the Biterer. I don't know weather it's supposed to be organic or man-made but to me it looks vaguely like somekind of Alien Hybrid from the Alien fims that happens to be packing a pretty wicked pair of dentures that could easily fit around an elephant. Not forgetting the simple but effective red eyes that perfectly add alot of menace. I really like the design of those flat feet too, they're neato.
Zach brings us his unusual and interesting Microscale siege ship, The Oktober. All around it's a nice simple working design but maybe a bit too plain. I really like the orange on this but it's more of random splodges rather than a focused coulorscheme. I think a large scale ship would be great with an orange paintjob like this. As it's a colour that's usually confined to small creations and not given large scale application due to to uncommon nature of bulk orange bits I think. The slopes look nice on this but the bridge sticks out like a sore thumb and really needs a bit of trimming down and sleeking up. The engine design is really boring, dead boring. Much could be done to improve it, even a few bits of pipe and tube running alongside the axles would do visual wonders.
Yet another Slam variant, this one by Sir Bugge is shrunken down to pocketsize.Excellent use of that Dino midsection, it fits in quite smoothly. I really like the big nose mounted minigun on this, the little dog in the corner with the nasty bark. I can just imagine these things flying in formation a big swarm, like big metallic piloted space locusts.

The widespread occurrence of a global Lego building phenomena hit me the other day, one of which to my knowledge, shockingly goes without community acronym or title. (Gasp..) There it is, somekind of mind bogglingly complex part that you've been working on to perfect for the last few hours. One more piece and it's finished, the tiniest bit of excess pressure results in profanity when the Moc flings itself into multiple corners of the room. Usually the Profanity and shattering are a few seconds apart, the common builder will sit in dead stillness with whats left of the shattered remains lieing in his or her hands. It takes a few seconds of realisation and eyebrow twitching before the profanity kicks in. There is also another variant of this that has the same end result but occurs when one tries to alter something on an allready perfectly good finished model. There is no name for this global occurance and there is no cure, we're in the dark here people..