lego – The Roohr Way

This post marks ten years since I started this blog. Kinda wild. It’s been intermittent for most of those years and I’d say about half of the material is just notes I took because (back in the day) the easiest way to find a how-to later was to google it even if you were finding your own blog!

I should probably use a different wordpress theme… who uses black on white anymore?

The curious case of the 1875 Meteor Monitor (lovetobuild.net)

Bjarne Tveskov, the LEGO designer of the (in?) famous Meteor Monitor (as well as numerous other sets), one of the most confusing Space sets for theme-watchers, apparently has a blog and explains its origins. He also includes some concept ships that I’ve never seen shared anywhere else for what he jokingly calls “spectron”, a ZX-spectrum inspired iteration of what became BlackTron II. In these concepts I see the germs of the Warp Wing Fighter (above) and Particle Ionizer (below.) Maybe even the rover from Space Station Zenon. Not to mention the orange and white of Ice Planet.

internetpatternbook.neocities.org

A project to collect and share the types of tiled backgrounds you used to see on Web 1.0 sites. Exactly what you need for your Neocities site.

Someone made a studio quality model of an iconic EV Override Ship (youtube.com)

For crafting fans out there, this is an impressive build. Because the models for the EV Override ships were released and eventually converted into blender files, anyone can 3d print them to make physical versions. But Sublight Drive Crafts didn’t stop there, they did the hard part and finished the model to an amazing degree. There was discussion on the discord where we begged them to photograph the model to make a rotation sprite out of it! (When I was very young, I thought that’s how in game graphics were made!)

CNBC’s interview with GameStop CEO (youtube.com)

Gamestop declared that it wanted to buy venerable online marketplace Ebay, and CNBC tried to figure out why. The CEO didn’t really help matters and appeared to be under the influence during the discussion. The comedic timing is priceless.

Songwriting (donaldsonworkshop.com)

I think I finally found the real idiots’ guide the song writing. Very concise.

Trent Reznor Chord Theory (reverbmachine.com)

A piece on a particular music theory trick Trent uses.

CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on Github (krebsonsecurity.com)

One of those stories that just gets worse the more you read. Not only did someone forget to make the repo private. Not only did they commit sensitive keys to a public repo. But when warned privately about it, they didn’t do anything!

When were the [emperor’s children] first brought into the lore? (reddit.com)

A rather nice breakdown of the history (historiography?) of the lore of a particular 40k faction. I was going to write something like this, but it wasn’t going to be nearly as good, so I’m glad someone else did it.

gatherer.mtg.li

Searchable DB of old MTG card comments (from the “gatherer” site.) On the off chance that you want to know what’s up with a particular Magic card, this is a place to look.

The Samples of Jet Set Radio + Jet Set Radio Future (youtube.com)

I found these tracks fascinating back in the day. Very cool effort. Interesting to see so much is from Sonic Foundry.

flamewarriorsguide.com

Charming relic of Web 2.0 forum shenanigans. An illustrated guide to different types of posters.

Eighty Eight By Thirty One (neonaut.neocities.org/)

The slightly larger size of web badge. Complete with links to a treasure trove of these, the original digital collectable.

Balsa wood airplanes have taken flight-and delivered joy-from Wakefield for 100 years (wbur.org)

Short radio piece on the Guillows company. All this time I’ve been pronouncing it like Gull (as in seagull) but it actually rhymes with “willow.”

linuxsynths.com

Surprised I never ran across some of these before. Each synth listed includes demos you can listen to which is really helpful when compared to more mainstream sites like KVR.

Plague Music (kavarimusic.bandcamp.com)

Finally: industrial IDM. And dubstep. And lots of screaming.

AI Crisis

Bosses Are Becoming Obsessed With AI […] (futurism.com)

“I am at a point where I am tired of hearing about it every other day,” he lamented. “I just want my salary and to not lose my sanity.”

Leaving Mozilla (unitedheroes.net)

The un-website-like look of this page is striking. Here is someone who really cares about web design. They also apparently care about Mozilla even as they are leaving. This comes in the wake of some unpopular decisions by Mozilla management and I think other FOSS folks ought to take notice.

Google Search as you know it is over (techcrunch.com)

“Google Zero” is a concept online publishers have used for a while, but now we have a concrete date: this summer, Google plans to stop linking you to people when you search for stuff. This makes perverse sense on some level, since those sites are getting ad dollars that Google could be getting instead. The incentive for actually doing the work of publishing information to the open web is about to nosedive, and it’s not clear where Google will get the information to drive its summaries when they starve out the folks actually generating the data they summarize. I’m hoping that people like the web more than they like Google and will reject this, and perhaps the folly of killing the source of all that data they want to sell you might become apparent, but I’m mildly pessimistic.

See also: this response which I think sums up the reasonable take well.

Contributor Poker and AI (kristoff.it)

A great discussion of why Zig isn’t accepting AI contributions that generalizes to any type of community cultivation. It looks like I wasn’t the only one to notice this reasoning, since Godot Project took a similar position. I’m hoping this becomes the norm for community FOSS projects. Say Godot:

Reviewing PRs is already tedious work, but it is rewarding because reviewers generally feel that their efforts are contributing to educating a new contributor (who may become a future maintainer/reviewer). If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review.

But another section, one I didn’t see in Zig’s post, is something I think everyone should consider making their own policy:

No AI-generated text in human-to-human communication

When our maintainers volunteer their time to review your issue, PR, or proposal, they do not want to talk to a machine. This is a basic principle of respect.

Richard Dawkin’s Claude Delusion (youtube.com)

Watch perennial Dawkins gadfly Rebecca Watson take a victory lap after Dawkins humiliated himself with an article where he got oneshotted by Claude.

A eulogy for Vim (drewdevault.com)

My relationship with the software is intimate, almost as if it were an extra limb. I don’t think about what I’m doing when I use it. All of Vim’s modes and keybindings are deeply ingrained in my muscle memory. Using it just feels like my thoughts flowing from my head, into my fingers, into a Vim-shaped extension of my body, and out into the world.

But there’s a problem

I don’t think it’s cute that someone vibe coded “battleship” in VimScript. I think it’s more important that we stop collectively pretending that we don’t understand how awful all of this is. I don’t want to use software which has slop in it.

So he’s announced a fork, “Vim Classic.”

The cover of the book with some Lego characters added for flavor.

Apparently I am the coffee table book review guy now. I hesitated to pick this one up because I’d long ago scrutinized old catalogs and bricklink pages to learn about these old sets (and built a few of them even) so just seeing pictures wasn’t going to be revelatory, but I wanted to see what it had to offer.

Is the title appropriate?

My main complaint about this book is that it’s not quite what it says on the cover. It’s really three things:

Light biography of Jens Nygaard Knudson including behind the scenes information about Lego’s process.
An illustrated tour through the Space sets designed during his era with discussions especially about the elements and how they’re used.
A fanfic illustrating the type of things one might imagine while playing with lego sets.

The last item isn’t very engaging and I skipped most of it. It’s the type of thing that’s extremely fun to write and not necessarily what I want to read. Maybe there’s some larger story that emerges but the ones I did read were just vignettes. I don’t want to throw too much shade on a project clearly made with love.

The second item has some gems about pieces and is an interesting lens to look through but gets repetitive as the sets themselves get, well, repetitive. At times it felt like an exercise in trying to use as much aircraft jargon as possible or squeeze some sort of interest out of the third little seat with wings scooter vehicle we’ve seen. Reading that the rover is blue next to a photograph of a blue rover isn’t a great use of time. But don’t get me wrong, ‘this element was originally made for pirate ships’ is the type of interesting Lego lore I love. I really would have appreciated if the stat blocks listed the set’s designer though.

The the first, then, is the meat for the readers. It includes interviews with Lego employees from the era and other background color. What era you might ask? Knudsen’s era. What are they asked about? About the process yes, but also about Knudsen. I think a more appropriate title would have been “Lego Space: the Knudsen years.”

The Text

I’m going to focus on that piece. The Juice of this book, so to speak, is information about the creative work behind Space. But it’s also where I have the biggest bone to pick.

There’s interesting information on offer! Niels Milan Pederson says that he originally pushed for a Jules Verne 20000 leagues inspired Steampunk theme and that some of it was recycled into Aquazone (p28). Apparently Aquazone was designed in ’91 and ready to go before launching in ’95 without changes (p194) It should be noted that he sort of got his wish with the Stingrays which, despite the use of neon, have a fair bit of steampunk DNA with their browns and brassy prints.

The information that the famous light grid was an in-camera practical effect using converging wires to achieve the perspective look is really interesting and there’s definitely a magic to seeing how it was done.

Some of the the concepts are already well known having been printed in a highly recommended Brick Journal article a decade ago. Lots of M tron concepts on p155 and some amazing never before seen concepts on p156 and 157. And the fact that half of the concept shots are already known is a symptom: the era this book focuses on has been covered extensively in the past.

Is this enough juice to carry a whole book? I’m skeptical.

I still haven’t found my Lego Book

Several vintage Lego figures illustrating themes not covered in the book

For me personally, I’m once again left unsatisfied because they only covered the first half of Lego Space and neglected the more vibrant and colorful second half. None of the themes in that picture get treatment. Because it’s really about Knudson it for the most part misses the era of Space I find most interesting, 1990-2002. We get a (much appreciated) interview with Jørn Thomsen, but I want a full book devoted to his designs!

Tag: lego

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