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Fang Rock

Thursday, December 8th, 2022

I’ve been on a crafting bender recently, digging into my supply of unopened kits. Last weekend, it was time for this:

I got this guy several months back, and since I’d always said “I wish LEGO made a lighthouse” I’m happy they’ve made such a nice one.

Assembly was easy and fun, and it goes together literally from the ground up. The rocky base hides a combination power-supply and motor, which both powers and turns the lamp.

Oh and this is surely the simplest LEGO assembly step ever:

There’s loads of little details in this model that aren’t immediately obvious, such as a secret cave in the base that hides a pirates treasure chest (and the switch for the power), detachable walls/roof for play purposes or that the interior of the house is fully furnished complete with glowing wood stove:

As a child I would have loved playing with this set!

For the lamp LEGO created a fresnel lens element, which focuses the light from an led. It works very well, and in a darkened room the lightdoes produces a bright and somewhat directed beam.

All told it took me about five hours to build and as with many other recent LEGO kits I continue to be impressed by their skill at creating convincing – and in this case working! – models of real life structures. To have done it at minifigure scale is all the more impressive.

This joins the Medieval Blacksmith as one of my favourite LEGO sets of all time. I don’t think I’ll be disassembling this one any time soon 🙂

Posted in Crafts, Science, Toys | Comments Closed

LEGO Atari VCS

Wednesday, November 23rd, 2022

It’s ‘craft week’ this week (kls and I are using the days off to do a lot of craft kits we have), and I decided it was a good time to build this:

It’s the LEGO Atari Video Computer System, or VCS (later renamed the 2600). This kit looks like a remarkable reproduction of the original console only in LEGO, and has a few play features as well.

An immediate nice touch is the retro-style manual. There were about 20 of bags of pieces inside the giant box but as with all LEGO kits these days the bags were all numbered and assembly was easy and a lot of fun. All told it took me about 6-7 hours over two days.

It’s very big! I haven’t checked but it feels about life-sized and once finished it’s much heavier than the NES I made a couple of years ago. It also looks wonderful:

The switches all move, and the two on the right have rubber bands attached to they bounce back up like on the original 2600! This version however has a surprise: you can slide the cover forwards to reveal a nostalgic diorama:

Here’s some detail:

Look at the little me playing 2600 back in 1982 🙂

The controller feels life sized and it astonishingly accurate. The stick even moves (and due to rubber bumpers returns to the vertical position):

And of course the cartridges can be slotted in and out of the console or stored in the little caddy that is part of the set:

And lastly the set includes three small dioramas based on the three included games. These are cute but I would have loved this set even without them:

Overall this is an amazing kit. It looks great, it was great fun to build, and it hit all the nostalgia buttons. The only possible negative is that it’s quite large and I’m not sure where to put it!

With an NES and now a 2600 reproduced in LEGO do you think they’ve got more planned? If I were to make a prediction, I’d guess a first generation Apple Macintosh may be in the cards for a LEGO kit one day…?

Posted in Crafts, Games, Miscellaneous, Models, Toys | Comments Closed

Gumball Machines

Thursday, November 10th, 2022

As a child, no trip to a grocery store was complete without a coin spent on a gumball machine, usually near the exit. The same was true for visits to the mall or cinema or any other place where the machines could be found.

There were two types of machines: those that vended lollies, and those that gave toys. Usually the lollies – almost always gum – only cost 5 or 10 cents. Toys cost more – up to 50 cents! – and we’re usually either ‘super balls’ or a motley collection of plastic trash.

As far as the lollies were concerned, I always preferred the standard gumball, and would often spend the coin mum or dad have me on one. Sometimes a machine would sell a (child’s) handful of tiny gum pieces, and since these seemed to be better value for money I could never resist them. As I grew older the gumballs became more exotic – some even had fizzy crystals inside – and I occasionally bought them all the way up until I left Oz.

As mentioned the toys were usually dreadful: cheap tchotchkes from China that would have cost the machine owner considerably less than 20c apiece! But as a kid I hardly cared, and one type of toy in particular I loved: the tiny rubber car. These were about an inch long, molded from hard unpainted rubber, and usually quite detailed for their size. If ever I saw a machine that sold these I always had to get one, and as a young boy I had a small, prized collection of them. Coming home from grocery shopping was always more fun with a tiny rubber car in my pocket!

Recently I’ve been paying attention to the gumball machines in our local shops, and all the photos in this blog were taken these past weeks. There are fewer machines than there used to be – Covid killed many it seems – but they’re remarkably similar to the ones I recall from my youth. The stock of machines is remarkably similar to what I remember from my youth, and still contains mostly gumballs, super balls and disposable ‘toys’.

The above was the closest I could find to the rubber cars of my youth. These are about the same size, seem to be made of similar material (or perhaps a flexible plastic) but as you can see are painted now, which gives them an extra dash of sophistication. At $0.75, I couldn’t resist buying one…

I reckon I would have loved this tiny rocket as a kid. It’s probably the ‘worst’ in the machine, but it’s also the one that my young imagination could have easily thought of as an alien spaceship. For me, that would have been enough 🙂

Posted in Blog, History, Retro, Toys | 1 Comment »

Ramen 19: Stop In The Name Of Ramen

Tuesday, August 16th, 2022

No soup this time, but a few more ramen-adjacent items I’ve acquired on my travels.

I bought the above in Australia. It was one of those things that come ‘free’ with a Japanese magazine, and is a Cup Noodle ‘purse’ (based on the photo of the girl using it as a purse). Naturally it’s an insane item to use as a purse, so I’m displaying it here as a ‘ramen carrier’. It’s a nifty thing, with nice printing in and out and a cute fork-shaped zipper pull. Of course I have no actual use for it 🙂

Here’s another ‘noodle stopper’, displayed in the intended position. This is now my second such figurine, and was a prize from a (type of) UFO machine in Sydney. Sue watched bemusedly as I loaded $1 coins into the machine at a good clip, and I’m sure she shared my joy when it only cost me $52 to ‘win’ it. Naturally I’ll never use it to steep noodles, and it will live happily on my shelf forever.

This last item was a surprise! I’d never seen a noodle stopper for sale here, so when I saw this double pack at Kino in NYC a couple of months ago I had to have it. Here’s a closer look at the contents:

A cute pair of noodle stoppers, and it even comes with a fake ‘cup noodle’ for them to sit on! These are of course sisters Ram and Rem from the anime Re:Zero (which I’ve never watched) and are amongst the most licensed characters in animation these days. The pair cost me less than the previous figure. So I have four noodle stoppers now, who sit on the edges of shelves. I think this is enough 🙂

Next installment some more chicken noodles. Stay tuned…

Posted in Food, Otaku, Toys | Comments Closed

LEGO Dagobah

Sunday, August 7th, 2022

In the previous post I referred to a pile of unopened LEGO kits in our house; it was time to make one. This one:

For me, this is the best of the three Star Wars dioramas they have released and I bought it as soon as I saw it a few weeks ago. And apparently it jumped to the front of the line as far as assembling kits goes 🙂

Here’s what was inside:

Exactly 1000 pieces apparently. When I opened it I didn’t pay too much attention to bag #3, but more on that later…

As with most LEGO kits these days it is built in stages, and the pieces for each stage are collected together in the same bags. This makes the build easy and fairly fast (in total it took me about 3 hours).

For the first few steps it feels like building a mosaic, with a lot of small pieces going into the flat base. And then you reach bag 3 and this step in the manual:

Yep, place 177 flat 1×1 transparent green tiles! I think this must be the largest amount of pieces I’ve seen in a single LEGO step! Thankfully the bag contained exactly 177 tiles and it was easy:

The next step built most of Yoda’s house:

What you can’t see is a cute touch: there’s a lightsaber hidden in the ‘attic’. While this obviously wasn’t in the movie (The Empire Strikes Back) it’s reasonable to assume he had it with him when he fled to Dagobah!

After the final steps – adding trees and the X-Wing – the diorama is complete. And it looks great! Here’s a detail of Luke ‘do or do not-ing’:

What an amateur he was in those days… he couldn’t even lift an X-Wing 😉

This is the ideal sort of LEGO kit for someone like me that makes these and displays them on shelves. I like it even more than I thought I would and am now considering the other two. And with so many iconic scenes in the Star Wars films I expect there’ll be more dioramas on the way.

Posted in Collecting, Otaku, Toys | Comments Closed

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