Bits and blocks

In this New York Times feature from last winter, illustrator Christoph Niemann spots bits of New York in Legos.

Fantasy dollhouses

Today I would like to present pair of stunning miniature replicas of locales from popular fantasy series. Both are exquisitely detailed, obviously labors of love.

First, creator Obelia medusa's Tiny Bag-End, Frodo's Hobbit-house faithfully recreated from the movie. Includes lots of nice close-ups.






Sal's Site has a sizeable collection of excellent dollhouse works by artist Sally Wallace, but be sure not to miss her Hogwarts. She has also done Mr. Ollivander's Wand Shop and Honeyduke's Candy Shop.






Bonus: not a dollhouse, but one of the most wonderfully detailed Lego structures I've seen: "Entrance to the Caves" by Norro. Full of little nooks and crannies, with some great landscaping -- those rocks! and those trees! These thumbnails don't do it justice -- check out the full gallery, with lots of different views.
Via The Brothers Brick.

Brick by brick

Today we come to a subject I've been wanting to cover for a long time: Legos. Specifically things made out of them. (Later we'll look at movies made out of them, but that's another post altogether.)

First, from TecheBlog, the Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations -- and not just sculptures, but working...things, like a fully functional air conditioner, knitting machine, or harpsichord.




Eric Harshbarger is a very prolific Lego sculptor. From mosiacs to sculptures to puzzle sets, monuments, architecture, portraits, and pop culture icons, he's done it all.




Minifig's Lego photoset has lots of great stuff, from scenes to bands to famous people. Below are two from his famous people series: Socrates and Neil Gaiman.
Via Bibi's Box.




There are many creative things you can do with Legos, like kill yourself. Flickr photoset The Lego Suicides demonstrates.
Via Bibi's Box.




The Little Artists create miniature replicas of modern artworks in Lego. The Walker Art Gallery has an exposition of their work, Art Craziest Nation. It's probably even better if you know about modern art.




A new favorite blog of mine: Vignette Bricks. Each post features a new mini scene in Lego, by a variety of artists. Lots of movie scenes and the like, particularly Star Wars.
Via pootling.




The Brothers Brick is another nice Lego minifig blog, with lots of models of science-fiction tv icons.
Also via pootling.




The Art of the Brick is the gallery of talented brick artist Nathan Sawaya. He does large-scale mosaics, scenes, and replicas of objects in addition to tabletop scultpures and other works. One of his most impressive works is his Han Solo encased in carbonite (Lego artists have a thing about Star Wars). But since you've probably already seen that in the TecheBlog article, I'll show you this big pencil instead. And Oscar.

Random of interest

I like things made out of Legos. I like Escher. So I was happy to discover architecture blog gravestmor's post about this incredibly nifty Lego recreation of Escher's famous staircases. Kind of mindbending.



It was created by Lego artist Andrew Lipson, who specializes in rendering Escher's illusions in solid 3d, and has also done Escher's "Ascending and Descending" and "Belvedere" (featured on Amazing Art). He has his own website, which I couldn't visit because he has exceeded his bandwidth, but I bet it's pretty interesting.




In November, Spacing Photoblog, a Toronto group blog featuring submitted photos on a certain theme, did a series on the abandoned Whitby Psychiatric Hospital. Here is the permalink to the first page, but in order to get the navigation links it seems you have to use this link, which counts backward from the most recent entry so might only be good for today. If you see the title page, good, just click the "previous" link to see the series; otherwise, you might have to use "next" until you see the title page, or just go to the archive to find the start of the series. Sorry I can't give a better link, but anyway, they're some pretty neat photos.




I recently came across the essay "Shakespeare in the Bush", about an anthropologist's experiences with a West African tribe and an evening of storytelling. When she decides to share the tale of Shakespeare's Hamlet around the fire, she discovers some pretty wide cultural gaps as the elders interrupt to make "corrections," reinterpreting and making sense of the narrative on their own terms. It's an interesting read, suggesting that some of literature's "universal" themes aren't quite as universal as we think.

The old man handed me some more beer to help me on with my storytelling. Men filled their long wooden pipes and knocked coals from the fire to place in the pipe bowls; then, puffing contentedly, they sat back to listen. I began in the proper style, "Not yesterday, not yesterday, but long ago, a thing occurred. One night three men were keeping watch outside the homestead of the great chief, when suddenly they saw the former chief approach them."

"Why was he no longer their chief?"

"He was dead," I explained. "That is why they were troubled and afraid when the saw him."

"Impossible," began one of the elders, handing his pipe on to his neighbor, who interrupted, "Of course it wasn't the dead chief. It was an omen sent by a witch. Go on."

For the longest time I've been meaning to link to this -- it's a coverpop featuring a few thousand covers from some seventy years of science fiction magazines, arranged in a huge spread by year and hue. The main site features a random coverpop from genres like horror, vintage, or art. Neat concept.




And now, some more Samorost stuff:

Adventure Gamers has a nice interview with Samorost creator Jakub Dvorsky in which he talks about his work, influences, the success of Samorost, other projects, and the meaning of the names amanita and samorost.

E-mental is the new media lab of Tomas Dvorak, creator of the Samorost 2 soundtrack, and there's a page where you can listen to some nice samples of the tracks.

Stuff and things

Slow and Steady

Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy. They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady plodder. It'd really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or on the spur of the moment. They expect you to examine everything carefully from every angle and then usually decide against it.

How Do People See You?

the Wit (52% dark, 30% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style: CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that the Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my opinion. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 40% on dark You scored higher than 7% on spontaneous You scored higher than 20% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid

Start ya off with a couple nice quiz results. Now that I've got y'all warmed up...

TIME has just created a worthwhile list of the fifty coolest websites. I was quite pleased to discover that I already knew about most of the interesting ones.

A man in Spain is building his own cathedral. It's pretty impressive-looking. Sadly, he's having trouble finding people to support him, and the unapproved building will likely be torn down after his death.




In other singlehanded-monument-construction news, a retired carpenter who believes he knows the secret to Stonehenge is raising his own Stonehenge in his backyard using only rudimentary tools and the power of his own body to move stone blocks weighing tons. (I read a news story about this somewhere, which had a video of the guy in action showing how it worked, but now I can only find his own website, which is much less interesting. Damn. Sorry.)




Giant "Bra Fence" Sparks Controversy: Official Says Fence Offends Asian Cultures, South Africans. For years, women returning from a pub in the nearby town of Wanaka have stopped at the fence and removed their bras...




The New York Times article Bad to the Last Drop explains why tap water is better than bottled.

There is apparently an update of the EPIC 2014 media-documentary-from-the-future video (I originally linked to it here): EPIC 2015.

I've just stumbled across somebody's blog called Bluetealeaf. I know it's impossible to be truly original in this world, but I'm always a little unsettled when I come across other people with identities I feel are unique and original to me. No sign of what inspired his name; I promise to tell the story of mine someday soon if anyone's interested.

The Brick Testament: the Bible in Legos! It's a Christian site, naturally, and while I am generally repulsed by things evangelicals do to make religion hip and appealing to kids (like Revolve, that New Testament packaged as a teen fashion magazine, and Refuel, its masculine counterpart, for example; or that game King's Call, which I'm still sore over), I like this particular project a lot. It's not cleaned-up at all, either -- a helpful little code warns about episodes containing nudity, sex, violence, and cursing, of which there are many. I never expected to see so many naked little Lego people knowing each other Biblically, so to speak. The segments are very short, and sometimes quite surreal and strangely humorous -- a lot of which comes from the source material, I suppose. The many panels which read simply "And then he died," with a little croaked-over figure, are wonderful. Ever read the Bible? There's some weird stuff in there. There's essentially no effort made to interpret or reconcile the bizarreness of some of the stories -- they're just there, built brick-by-brick as faithfully as possible. The Brick Testament is really a very impressive artistic endeavor, and a lovely rendering in Lego of a great work of literature.




UPDATE: I was not entirely right about what The Brick Testament is all about.

Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions is a pretty cool site for science-fiction fans comparing images of spacecraft, bases, and other objects from numerous examples of the genre to show relative size. It also makes a nice visual compendium of sci-fi vessels. Very comprehensive.
Via Bibi's box.




reading: Charles de Lint, The Newford Stories; A.S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (re-reading -- I love that book); Kenneth Morris, The Dragon Path; J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye; Lois Gould, Subject to Change
saw: Firefly; Beverly Hills Cop 2

music: The Blue Room on BBC Radio 1
beverage: Twinings Darjeeling tea