Robot Claw – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Barad-Dûr

July 30, 2026

In Lord Of The Rings, Barad-dûr is the tower fortress of Sauron. Taller than any structure built by man, it stands in Mordor near Mount Doom and at its peak The Eye Of Sauron endlessly scans Middle Earth looking for The One Ring. It’s the domain of ultimate evil, and it was time for me to build my own:

This is another monstrous set, and since Rivendell is my favourite LEGO build of all time I wanted this one as soon as it released. And bought it I did, although that was two years ago and it has sat on a shelf all this time waiting!

The 5400+ pieces came in exactly 40 bags which I’ve needed to pile two deep to fit them all in the above photo.

The tower is built in three parts with separate instruction books. In total; there are 1003 steps across the collective 620 pages of instructions!

Disappointingly, the set also came with a sticker sheet. No one likes LEGO stickers, and for a $460 set their inclusion is ridiculous. Most of these were placed on curved pieces, and apparently LEGO doesn’t yet have the technology to directly print onto curves.

The first instruction book is the base of the tower and uses about half of the bags of pieces. There’s a lot of detail here both inside and out, with doors that open via a hidden switch, a secret compartment where Gollum hides, and various items to furnish the interior for its wicked inhabitants. The angled walls are achieved using clever building techniques and are strongly reinforced, which is a good thing considering the size of the finished tower.

Most of the included minifigures are in the first few bags, and they’re all great. Frodo has a couple of faces, but I’ll always display the one where he’s almost seduced by The Ring.

A group of orcs with a range of armour and weapons inhabit the lower level of the tower. According to the instructions much of these figures – and their gear – is unique to this set. Yes that one in the middle is grilling a sausage!

Sauron and The Mouth Of Sauron are both suitably creepy. While I’m not showing them here, believe me both are even more disturbing without their helmets on! Until rereleased in a recent set, Sauron was one of the more expensive minifigures available, selling for up to $100 on the secondary market. He has a thrown room in the middle of the tower which has a Palantir hidden being a moving throne:

Here’s the finished set:

It took me over thirty hours to build, which I did in sessions of two or three bags at a time. The last book went very slowly since I could only use one hand (I’ve recently had hand surgery) and needed to be extremely careful since I was dealing with the spire.

The Eye lights up via a light brick, and can also be moved to look in any direction:

Here’s the view from behind showing the interior detail:

I enjoyed building this so much I hardly wanted it to end. Now I need to work out where to put it, a non-trivial problem since it’s 83 cm tall! I’ve got an idea or two, but for now it remains on our dining table since it’s remarkably heavy and I’m certainly not going to move it with only one hand!

Gamebooks For Girls?

July 22, 2026

In the early 1980s, gamebooks were topping children’s best-seller charts in many markets. And while they were popular with both boys and girls (and adults), this didn’t stop publishers from dabbling into gamebooks targeted at girls.

These are four books from TSR’s 1983 Heartquest series. These were a spin-off from their successful Endless Quest series of Dungeons & Dragons Gamebooks, only with less combat and more romance.

In the books you play teenage heroines on quests to defeat evil. You are joined by one or more young men with which romance inevitably ensues. In advertisements of the time the romantic aspects of these books were highlighted, which seemed quaint now until I recalled the ‘romantasy’ genre currently dominating women’s book sales!

In Secret Sorceress you play an orphaned girl going on a quest with an equally orphaned prince to find a magical scepter with which you can defeat a usurper. It’s a slim volume with only about a dozen choices and the D&D trappings (a Dragonne, Leprechauns) take a backseat to fluttering hearts!

The book ends when the scepter is found (there is no mention of what the scepter does and the big bad never makes an appearance), although some ‘bad’ endings throughout don’t seem bad at all since they involve your character living happily ever after with the prince after all!

Both as a gamebook and as a fantasy novel I found this underwhelming, but then I’m not a young teen girl in 1983! My opinion may not be too removed from the original audience since the line failed and the final two books (which I don’t own) received extremely limited distribution. Forty-three years removed this series is now a curious footnote in the history of D&D, and the books themselves have become expensive and rare collectibles.

The Starlight Adventures were six gamebooks released by Puffin in 1985. These were a spin-off from the very successful Fighting Fantasy series and featured similar trade dress, formatting and even utilized many of the same artists for interior art. They were advertised in some of the Fighting Fantasy (FF) books at the time, although they have no fantastic elements at all, instead taking place in the real world.

The books are much longer than the Heartquest series, telling a robust story with many more choices. While they all include potential romance, the player can choose to ignore it if they wish. Also, despite a whimsical series title, these are definitely written for an older reader than Heartquest, featuring young adult protagonists who have careers and drink alcohol!

In Trance you play a young nurse investigating the cause of your brothers mysterious illness. You’ll discover a conspiracy to defraud wealthy patrons of a clinic, and in the process you may be aided – and even abetted – by several eligible young men.

It’s a mysterious albeit predictable scenario, but I found it interesting to read a real-world tale using the familiar skeleton of a FF book. Some of the jumps between sections are too abrupt, and I would have preferred dice or even some sort of game system to replace choice in a few spots, but overall I felt this was a good read and enjoyed the book.

Like Heartquest, only six books in the Starlight Adventures series were ever released. I was still actively buying new gamebooks at the time, and I have no memory of ever seeing these and didn’t learn of their existence until over twenty years later! I’m happy to have them in my collection now, since these have skyrocketed in price on the secondary market.

One last series I’ll mention is Lifegames, also from 1983. Four of the six books were targeted at adult women. I’ve never read these and even by gamebook standards these are rare today and I can’t even find reviews of them online. I recall reading once that they are very simplistic branching-choice choose-your-own-adventure style books and they may have contained Christian elements!

Aside from these three series, I know of very few other gamebooks published ‘back then’ specifically targeted at girls. Possibly this is because the above ‘failed’, or probably it was because publishers realized girls were happy reading ‘normal’ gamebooks 🙂

The Japan Postcards

July 15, 2026

I sent myself a whopping 63 postcards from Japan! That’s an average of nearly 4 each day. If I was an independent observer, I’d suggest this was excessive, but as with the Australian cards it didn’t seem so while I was there. A ritual of my solo Japan trips has become relaxing postcard-writing in my hotel room while watching anime on the TV 🙂

Why so many? Well an explanation is hardly needed, but let’s just say I’ve leveled up in my postcarding! It’s also true that I bought many more than usual, and even brought with me a couple of dozen leftovers from last winter’s trip.

I was in Japan for 16 days, and for the first time completed a special ‘postcard project’. Once a day I sent myself a card from an art series involving two cats exploring Japan. I had 12 of these from past trips in my collection (here at home) and was confident I could find 4 more while I was there. As you can see above, I did!

I also successfully sent the above enormous lenticular card, which I photographed next to a normal sized postcard. I’d purchased this in Australia several years ago, but never sent it because I was confused about the Japanese rules for sending oversized cards. But I know how to send these now, and I was happy this arrived in perfect condition.

I didn’t count how many unique stamps I used on the cards I sent home, but it’s surely in the dozens. I bought mint retro stamps several times during the trip, and used many of them. You probably got some yourself. I wonder if you look at the stamps?

Last January I went to a postal museum in Arima, and saw some Japanese stamps featuring various pop culture properties. Six months later I used some of these myself on cards 🙂

The above is on a card sent home from Osaka, and which features the rubber stamp I made myself at a Sanrio store. What’s this card talking about? These:

I went all in on these gacha machine ID photos, which followed in the footsteps of ‘someone else’s dog’ from last winter. I think got about 10 times of these, and I stuck every one on a postcard. As it turns out these are members of Japanese (not that famous) idol bands that I believe are all signed to the same management company.

But that still doesn’t explain the dog!