Janaina Medeiros
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@mhuffman
1964 New York World's Fair
With pandemic sorting, comes going onto auction web-sites and looking at LEGO lots for saleā¦ when I ran across this ā Itās a 1964 New York Worldās Fair LEGO set, that doesnāt seem to be listed on Bricklink. Like the other two sets that were know to be sold at the Denmark Pavilion, there seems to be remnants of handle on topā¦ Unfortunately, not more is know about it.
1964 New York Worldās Fair was originally published on BrickBuildr
Pandemic and the PaB
Thanks to Natasha Smith on Facebook and the LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Group
The pandemic has not slowed people down from buying LEGO. š Pictured is the Pick-a-Brick (PaB) parts available at the Castletonās LEGO store (thanks to Natasha). Most stores have gone this way for selling PaB parts ā you tell someone which parts you want and how much you want, then they fill a cup for you. Itās not a bad system, youāre not touching bricks tens of people have touched before you. But it also means you donāt get to pack the cups by stacking parts. š
Some stores have their Build-a-Minifig (BaM) displayed this way as well, or they have pre-packaged set of figs you can pick from (sometime with a generous amount of extra parts). I find it interesting that thereās a female elf released with the BaM. The Elf Club House (#10275) looks to have (maybe?) a female elf as well, but with a green hat, not the pink oneā¦ I like variety and diversity, so Iāve picked up 2 pink elves now.
If youāre not subscribed, join the LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Group on Facebookā¦ Not that I want people to stop using this web-site, but I also find the group useful for shopping.
Pandemic and the PaB was originally published on BrickBuildr
Pandemic Sorting
Many of my AFOL friends on Facebook are doing pandemic sortingā¦ sortingā¦ and more sorting. Iāve taken the time to do some as well. I feel like Iām about 5% done. This has been one of several attempts to sort out my LEGO collection to a place where it easier to build. My system before was plate, brick, slope, tile, miscā¦ Not a terrible system, but cumbersome when trying to find a 1Ć1 blue tile in a huge tub of tilesā¦ This time, I resorted to sorting first by color, then by brick typeā¦ Still not ideal, and Iāve got a lot of Ziploc bags full of unsorted single color bricks, to be broken down even further.
No matter how I look at this, sorting is about a 2-3 phase approach. Below is the result of sorting most of my tile/panels into two big tubs, then further sorting them by color, then by size. I tend to group certain colors together because (1) like paints, it easier to just grab a smaller tub of a smaller color pallet than a larger tub of many different colors/sizes; (2) when I build, I either need earth (tan, brown, grays) tones, fire (red, yellow, orange) tones, water/floral (blue, green) tones, or black/whiteā¦ I now have a growing collection of pinks/purples, and sorted out the transparent parts.
Pandemic Sorting was originally published on BrickBuildr
Table Scraps
With self isolation comes sorting & building with table scrapsā¦ Enjoy!
Table Scraps was originally published on BrickBuildr
LEGO Archeology
When I started into the hobby, I ended up buying LEGO at garage sales, off eBay by the pound, and other methodsā¦ At the time, I was looking to build a classic castle collection. Some of the lots were just a mess ā pounds and pounds of bricks, mixed in with other toysā¦ As you would pick through the lot, youād stumble on a unusual part or 50 of an unusual part, that most sets only came with 1 of. You ended up scratching your head a lot of time wondering where the parts came fromā¦ Anyway, with a friend ā who had been in the hobby years longer than I had ā together weād go through my latest LEGO acquisitions, and it became a form of LEGO archeology to sort through the parts and understanding what sets they were fromā¦ Like the above picture, the baby, the purple bear, the cloth pouch, and Bellville figure (and a few other odd parts) makes me believe they all came from #5860 ā Love āNā Lullabies. The process is fun, but can it be challengingā¦ and a little frustrating. At some point, you think you have a great find. I find maybe 20% of a set, but over time pieces were lost.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Iāve resorted to sorting out LEGOā¦ partly to find parts to complete a build, partly to clean up, partly to relax from some of the new work stresses with āworking from homeā full time. Within this tub of parts, I found the above Fabuland figure, the Belville parts, and some LEGO figure puppetsā¦ I didnāt realize they mostly came from basic setsā¦ I learn something new today.
Also in this mess, there were a lot of ālovedā parts. Parts that were panted with the same light pink that came in Paradisa setsā¦ The color still matches, which Iām a little surprised at. Apparently, someone didnāt have enough pink parts, so they panted many of themā¦ in some cases, theyāre still stackedā¦ donāt know if Iām talented enough to recreate this pink MOC, lining up the paint marks just rightā¦ meh, for another time. I havenāt thrown the parts away, figured Iād recycle them in something at some point.
There were several Slope 10 6 x 8 with Slate Roof Pattern as well as basic bricksā¦ part of me suspects this batch of parts were accumulated late 80ās to early 90ās. Also found one Trans-Yellow Windscreen 6 x 4 x 2 Canopy (which I needed for my project, woot!)ā¦ which might had gone to a #6872 Xenon X-Craftā¦ one of the smallish sets that Iāve seen most of the parts to, except for the minifigs and printed parts.
LEGO Archeology was originally published on BrickBuildr
SkƦrbƦk Fan Weekend/MOC Ideas, part II
The theme for SkƦrbƦk Fan Weekend was announced a few days ago: Classic Space. Iām not a space guy, per se, but I did get inspired to try somethingā¦ So I love mash-ups. Iāve seen a few space/castle mash-ups over the years. Some really successful, a few are so-so. Since I still had floating rock in the back of my mind as something to pack/take to SFW, I hadnāt 100% given up on the idea ā donāt get me wrong, I do like the Mary Blair tribute mosaic, but the more I started to think about his mash-up, it resonated more with me.
Iāve got the base laid out and mostly built ā it breaks down easy enoughā¦ I might need to buy some trans-neon-green bricks to make the sulfur lake. My only other thought would be, should I add lights underneath so the lake glowsā¦ Next would be the erupting sulfur pillars that suspend these rock formations in the airā¦ Figured one rock would be living quarters, the second would be the mining operations/storageā¦ a gangplank to to move the cargo over to a landing/launch pad, where the cargo will be shipped offā¦ Figured a small moonbase type corridor between living quarters and the mining operationsā¦ A little unsure of a rocket for cargo, or some type of drop-shipā¦ Transportation between storage and the drop-ship might be a small specialized vehicle or some type of hover forkliftā¦
Iāve got a little bit of time to build and more time work through the details, as Iām working from home, being self-quarantined and allā¦
SkƦrbƦk Fan Weekend/MOC Ideas, part II was originally published on BrickBuildr
SkƦrbƦk Fan Weekend/MOC Ideas
A few weeks ago, my wife and I started planning a trip to Europe for fall, with plans to go to SkƦrbƦk Fan Weekend in Denmark, along with a trip to Paris, Franceā¦At this point, weāre still planning on going. Despite my wifeās objections, Iām planning to take a MOC, with the requirement being, easy to cary in an overhead bagā¦ Throw into this crazy mix, weāve really been impressed with LEGO Dots ā mostly the vibrant colors, the the packaged bento-boxed designed sets.
In the back of my mind, Iām thinking about what to buildā¦ One thought was rehash the floating rock display, modify the base (so itās easier to pack), add more rocks, do a suspended bridge between rocks, add more organic elements, maybe a few floating rocks with castle ruins on top (like a remains of a tower)ā¦ To be honest, I havenāt totally discounted this idea. I feel like the display needs the built out more to enrich the story.
However another idea Iām thinking about is a tribute sculpted mosaic to Mary Blair. Something thatās no thicker than 4-5 inches, built on several half baseplates (12Ć32), figuring it might end up bing about 84Ć32 studsā¦ Still noodling on this one, but able to capture some of her wide images like this:
Or like this:
The ones Iāve been looking at are from Cinderella, obviouslyā¦ Iāve been looking at images from Alice in Wonderland that are just as rich, with more greens and florals. Iām thinking about mixing in minifigs or Friends-dolls, minifig sized horses/architectural pieces, Playing with depth, colorā¦ maybe skewing the visuals out towards the viewer (say in the above, building out the steps to the staircase in tile, making the dance floor at a skewed angle, adding a little depth to the balcony above the dance floor, take a little liberty in sky colors behind the glass windows, etc.).
The more I look at the above image, I wonder if it hasnāt been chopped down from a larger/longer imageā¦ In the image above, with the carriage arriving at the castle; Iāve found the same image, but cropped smaller, where the three house tops on the right hand side and the one house on the left hand side were cropped outā¦ At first glance, I discounted the cropped image because it didnāt look ābalancedāā¦ The ballroom feels a little unbalanced as well, like there should be more on the right hand sideā¦ but that could just be me.
I love visual elements in all three images in this post, the colors are dark and rich. Thereās a forth image that I didnāt include that had the carriage glowing in gold/yellows/whites casting sickly-greens on the buildings it was driving in front ofā¦ I have different shades of purples and pinks, a stash of pale yellows, dark bluesā¦ I think my next step is to do some sketches, figure out how Iāll connect the āpanelsā together and skewing some of the elements towards the viewerā¦
SkƦrbƦk Fan Weekend/MOC Ideas was originally published on BrickBuildr
Amsterdam LEGO Store Added
Iāve added the Amsterdam, Netherlands LEGO store. If anyone has any images they can share, please let me know. Hereās one I grabbed from a web-site, somewhere.
Amsterdam LEGO Store Added was originally published on BrickBuildr
Wizarding House at the Orlando LIC
I installed my Wizarding House at the Orlando LEGO Imagination Center (LIC) today. Itās apart of GFLUG re-doing the community window again. After some thought and consideration, Iāll be rejoining GFLUGā¦ The LUG has regained itās RLUG status. OLUG is pretty much defunct, and thereās been some organizational changes with GFLUGā¦ I want to get back to building, so this provides an outlet to display my MOCs againā¦
Wizarding House at the Orlando LIC was originally published on BrickBuildr
New Parts on the Build-a-Minifig (US?)
Suzi posted in the LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Facebook group about new parts on the Build-a-Minifig. I was in Las Vegas last week for a conference and hit the Las Vegas, NV store and was able to confirm they had the parts thereā¦ lots of nice parts just in time for Halloweenā¦ So if you live near a LEGO Store, check them out and let me know what you findā¦ I donāt know if this is just in the US or everywhere, so let me know.
Oh, and I added the Utecht, Netherlands store.
New Parts on the Build-a-Minifig (US?) was originally published on BrickBuildr
LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Group on Facebook
Lately Iāve been thinking a lot about whatās BrickBuildrās role in the future, and one of the things I come back to is Pick a Brick wall informationā¦ how the information is communicated, the best way to represent that information on a web-site, and are there faster/quicker ways to share that data without a lot of ādata entryā, especially since that information changes so fast. And Iāve hit on a few ideas, but I must admit, may not be the best person to help make that jumpā¦
As a starting point, Iāve joined LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Group on Facebook. Over the past few months, Iāve been sourcing pictures to figure out when I should make trips to the nearest LEGO storeā¦ Iāll see people talking about new parts hitting the wall, and sure enough a few days later, they show up locally (or theyāre already sold out of the part)ā¦ From this, I realize, images is still the fastest form of communication.
Iāve also watched a video recently where machine learning (ML) was used to determine when it was time to restock inventoryā¦ the full details I canāt go into right now, but it was fascinating how thousands of pictures were taken to build a ML model that would train a machine to identify the part/color, no matter the orientation, and from that determine the parts density on a location to determine if more of that part/color needed to be addedā¦
Simple enough idea; now the practical applicationā¦ Each one of us cary around a smart phone when we shop. What if instead, we took a picture of the part, send the image to a ML processor, that would identify the part/color, send back that information to the device, from there, the user could verify that part/image was correct (or the information could be a best guess) and then that person could assign a PaB wall location? Facial recognition for LEGO bricks.
ā¦If this is the direction, I really need to work on an API for the web-site. Do research into image processing and object detectionā¦ Find cheaper alternatives to AWSā¦ but at the same time, Google/Amazon do have a ML platformā¦ but this site doesnāt make any moneyā¦ hmmā¦
LEGO Pick a Brick Wall Exchange Group on Facebook was originally published on BrickBuildr
Halloween/New Look
Figure it was time for a new look & to streamline the web-site a little. And with it almost Halloween time, figure it was time to break out the pumpkin heads. š
So there are a few things that Iām thinking about doing:
dropping Flickr and links to images all together, which means we need to update our by-line
this means Iāll need to clean up/optimize the database to only serve up PaB information
need a new logoā¦ something representative of the new direction
Your thoughts?
Halloween/New Look was originally published on BrickBuildr
On Competition & Flickr
Brickbuildr has been up and running since since 2007ā¦ Thatās 12 years now. It started out as a way to view LEGO MOCs, built with Flickrās API. Then morphed into a site hosting PaB information from around the world ā the information was crowd-sourced. From there, BrickJournal and I hosted a FOL calendar of events on Google Calendar; and tried to open the calendar up to the community (for more updates via crowd-sourcing). That changed when we gave the responsibilities over to Ā Swooshable.com, but now, that looks like that endeavor is deadā¦ I think thereās a calendar being maintained over on LAN now, but itās not every user friendlyā¦ personally, Iād like to see events in my country, or see some type of classification of events (conventions, displays, vs. club meetings, etc.).
Iāve been busy adding new stores and going back through old emails to make site improvements. Iām finding new time to revisit old plans/back-burner projectsā¦ Iām not promising anything, but hopefully there will be some improvements in the near future.
Iām also thinking about the web-siteās futureā¦ I think the PaB part is important ā looks like I out lasted my competition. The site owner succumbed to life and shifting priorities. The code that ran that site is now on GitHub. Not to talk bad about the competition, but now looking at the code, it confirmed something I always suspected ā he started off by scraping the HTML from my site to build his. And to be honest, later on, I took a few ideas from his site to improve BrickBuildr. š
Itās not an easy task to come up with a GUI that allows you to edit 72-ish bins, with over a few dozen of color, and possible thousand of parts in various shapes and sizes, thatās easy to use on a desktop, mobile phone, or ipadā¦ I had talked to a friend of mine in mobile development if there was a way to use the camera to identify the color and part, using some AI on the back-end, to use that as a method for updating the web-siteā¦ I didnāt get a resounding, āthatās a great ideaā, but more of a ādo you know how much computer power that would take?ā response. Meh, oh well.
So mix into this long train of though, Iāve dropped my Flickr Pro account, on the account itās too much per yearā¦ What once started was a web-site built on Flickrās API, I may end up dropping that aspect of the site. I donāt get many hits from people looking the images on the web-site; people mostly use it for the PaB featuresā¦ And honestly, I donāt know how many people read this blogā¦ Iāve thought about picking up pod-casting again, but itās a challenge to find the time & people to talk withā¦ Anyway, more later.
On Competition & Flickr was originally published on BrickBuildr
Silver Building Bricks
I have read over the years about how Lego Sets Have Been a Better Investment than Gold Since 2000 (an article from 2015) to Lego bricks outshine gold bars as investments, study finds (from an article posted Jan. 2019). Thereās some truth to them, but theyāre articles to grab attention like click-bait. The most recent article chronicles the price of mini-figs/sets only obtained as special events that have sold for 6-figures, to talking about the dark side of buying/selling LEGOā¦
Well, during this financial turbulent times, Iāve decided to invest my money in silverā¦ both 2Ć2 & 2Ć4 bricks and plates of it.
Silver Building Bricks was originally published on BrickBuildr
South Korea LEGO Store Added
With building with LEGO again, come web-site updates. Got an e-mail today about a new LEGO store opening up in Seoul, South Korea. Itās been added to the database. Iām hoping over the next few days to do some web-site maintenance. The first act was to update the server, which broke the web-site for about 10 mins or so, while I figured out why PHP wasnāt doing itās job. Added the new store (Iāll be looking back at email and checking LEGO web-site to see what other stores have been added), and wasnāt till a few hours lated that I discovered that my code broke with upgrading to PHP 7+. *sigh* So that should be working again. Next, Iāll refresh the parts DB and pick up some of the programming projects Iāve left on the back-burnerā¦ Like a BrickBuildr APIā¦
In other news, within the past few days, I decided not to renew my Flickr Pro account. Even though I was grandfathered into a lower Pro renewal price for the past 2 years. I donāt feel like under SmugMugās new leadership, itās worth the 100% increase or the $50/yearly costā¦ Maybe Iāll upgrade my free account to a Pro account with the next round of site improvements, but until then, Iām out.
With that said, Iām reconsidering some of the pages that I have built based on Flickrās API. At one time, I wanted to integrate it into Googleās Photos and other photo web-hosting sites. But I may end up just dropping it completelyā¦ Iām also noticing many of the FOL sites are going stale, I should ping each web-site daily and if a site fails 7 days in a row, flag it to be deleted, or something.
Several years ago, one of the challenges I saw facing the FOL community was where to find photos of what people were building in LEGO. Most people had moved away from BrickShelf to Flickrā¦ but Flickr isnāt just LEGO/MOC-centric. Tagging helped with that. But now the digital landscape is much different ā I find LEGO news and MOCs on Facebook and Reddit. I still have a RSS reader (Newsblur), that I pay for since Google dropped support for itā¦ but thatās slowly dyingā¦
If you have any suggestions on web-sites to use to keep up with new MOCs, drop me a line or post it in the commentsā¦
Anyway, look for more updates soon.
South Korea LEGO Store Added was originally published on BrickBuildr
Wizarding House
Hereās my Wizarding House as displayed at Bricks by the Bay 2019 and my Flickr album.
Iāll do a write up of the event laterā¦
Wizarding House was originally published on BrickBuildr
Building Again
So after a long hiatus, Iām going to attend Brick By The Bay convention next month. I honestly have not done much with LEGO or the web-site in a long time, not from lack of interest, but from life changes that I donāt want to go into hereā¦ Needless to say, itās been good to start building again, taking inspiration from many better builders than myself.
Above is only a WIP, I have more detailing to do. Thought about adding another small floating rock off to the side with another small tree on it or a fountain or a wishing well or some type of mystical conjuring structureā¦ Roof needs to be finished (not completely sold on the look of it yet). Iāve been liking the details of a few medieval houses Iām finding on Flickr, with an angled dilapidated look. The landing pad needs to be better anchored to the structure. Need to add more water detailing around the bottom, and more flowers/plants. And I might alter the look of the building a little more. But overall, I like the direction itās headingā¦
My next post (unless something else comes up between now and after the convention), Iāll post thoughts on the convention ā itās one I havenāt attended before, so looking forward to meeting new people, maybe seeing a few faces I havenāt seen in awhile, and seeing a bunch of new LEGO creations.
Building Again was originally published on BrickBuildr