Penultimate day of the 2013 LEGO Advent Calendars.
Today we get two sleds and a squirrel … Both of the sleds are quite intricate and well designed. I especially like the Star Wars one. And SQUIRREL!
Building a brighter tomorrow with LEGO® bricks
Happy Solstice everyone! It’s finally winter. Or summer if you’re down under.
Today we get a confusing musical thing in Friends, a choochoo train in City, and Boba Fett’s “Slave I” spaceship from Star Wars. The Friends model is really weird – there’s a 2×2 tile with some sheet music (the song is Frère Jacques in case you were wondering) on a clip so that a figure can hold it, but also some kind of strange thing with transparent 1×1 round pieces and a tap which I can’t figure out … some kind of horn maybe? The other models are straightforward: a cute little train with one car, and a nice intricate detailed model of Slave I.
Today we get three miniatures in the LEGO Advent Calendars.
The Friends calendar gives us a nice little Christmas tree; City gives us a miniature fireboat; and Star Wars gives us Obi-Wan’s Jedi Starfighter.
Note: I noticed after taking the picture that the 2×4 plate on the bottom of the Christmas tree is on wrong and I missed an extra trans-pink 1×2 round plate, but don’t want to bother redoing the photo shoot. Sorry, I’m lazy.
For Day 19 of the LEGO Advent Calendars, we get three little vehicles and a torch?
The Friends thing seems to be like an Olympic torch. It’s a nice construction using an upside-down tile and cone, with a dark brown “flower” piece providing a hole that the flame can connect into. Clever construction but I’m not sure what it has to do with the other models in that calendar. For City, we get two little airplanes, which go along with the Star Wars mini-spaceships we have been getting all along, and today is no exception (Separatist Shuttle).
Curiously it seems that Flickr has made my life harder yet again… as of yesterday, they changed the HTML they generate to provide links to photos to use an <iframe> tag instead of the <a><img> that they’ve always been using (when I’m viewing a photo and click the “Share” icon, the HTML is presented for copy/paste). So while I’ve been just using that option to share the photos on my blog until now, I’m now being asked to give them a frame which who knows what they might try to use it for – ads? tracking? – and so I have started manually generating the link and image tags. Curse you, Yahoo!
We get three new figures for Day 18.
In Friends, we get the cutest little snowman! The body is made from a 1×1 brick with studs on 2 sides, allowing arms to be attached, and instead of the customary black top hat, we get a lavender knit cap! City continues the new color theme by giving us orange 1×1 round tiles, which I have never seen before in that color… also a figure with stubbie legs and a cool Classic Space theme torso, and the best part is we get not 1, not 2, but 3 extra of the orange tiles (and also of the antenna/lever part). Finally in Star Wars we get a scout trooper figure.
Day 17 of the LEGO Advent calendars.
The Friends calendar has a boom box with an iPod dock; City gives us the race car that goes with yesterday’s tires; and Star Wars has another mini spaceship from Clone Wars and Episode III, Padmé’s Naboo Star Skiff. The Star Wars model has a ton of small parts and some pretty good SNOT building techniques. I particularly like the telephone piece that serves as a handle for the boom box, the iPod tile, and the green double-cheese slopes (with an extra one!).
Today’s Advent calendar gives us lots of accessories.
Ice skates, spare tires, and a weapons rack… For Friends, we get ice skates! The model is kind of odd, but I imagine it’s a bench for putting on your skates with a little white table featuring flowers, one of which has a dab of snow on it? Nice to have a bunch of skates though, including one extra. Now LEGO has been giving us two extra of a lot of things this time around, but this time we just get one… wouldn’t two have made a lot more sense here? Sigh. Anyway, City’s model continues the Octan mechanic theme with a set of four spare tires and a barrel of oil or fuel, and Star Wars gives us yet another weapons rack, including a monster gun that looks more like a campy 50s sci-fi movie than a Star Wars weapon but I guess it must be another dumb Clone Wars thing…
For the 15th day of the 2013 Advent calendars, we get two minifigs, a park bench, and a boatload of spare parts.
The park bench in Friends is really simple, though anything that gives us parts in that shade of cyan (which is also the new Maersk Blue color) is worth having. The minifigs include a Star Wars Geonosian Pilot and an Octan mechanic from City. The mechanic includes some brick-built accessories (not sure what it represents) and more spare parts than the parts in the actual set!
The 2013 LEGO Advent Calendars give us three nice little models for Day 14. This time we get a water fountain, wrapped gifts, and another microscale spaceship.
Friends brings us a water fountain, built around a 4L Bar impaled through an assortment of hollow-stud parts facing various directions, and capped with a trans-light-blue rock crystal representing the water (I hadn’t realized you could stick one of those on a 3mm bar end, so that might prove useful in something). City brings us two wrapped gifts to go with the tree they gave us on day 12 (and with the wrapped gifts we got in Friends on that day). Star Wars has a Geonosian Fighter (whatever that is … I certainly don’t remember those in the original 3 movies).