Brick Geometry Recording from October BayLUG Meeting

Since 2008 I’ve been giving a presentation at various LEGO conventions, mainly BrickCon in Seattle, Washington, and Bricks by the Bay in Santa Clara, California, called “Brick Geometry” covering a variety of LEGO building techniques. A new recording of the latest version of this presentation is now available on YouTube.Cover slide from Brick Geometry presentation

Continue reading “Brick Geometry Recording from October BayLUG Meeting”

Brickpile YouTube Channel – Brickworld 2011 Videos

I’ve started a new YouTube channel for Bill Ward’s Brickpile. I’ll be adding videos from LEGO events, and maybe even some original content, tours of my MOCs, etc. So far I’ve just published two videos, which form a 2-part walk-through of Brickworld from 2011: Continue reading “Brickpile YouTube Channel – Brickworld 2011 Videos”

Why Does LEGO Ignore Girls?

Blogger and podcaster CC Chapman has set up a great video series where his daughter Emily pontificates on the issues that matter to her.  The latest one is “Why Does LEGO Ignore Girls?” where she makes the case for LEGO to make more products that are accessible to girls.

I’ve always been bothered by this.  They say time and again that their target market is boys ages 8-11 and that’s what they target all their products toward, and they offer token girl sets such as the lame Belleville line and pink brick buckets, which don’t sell well because they are lame!

Like Emily says, girls like the town sets a lot.  She suggests a shopping mall.  I’ve heard this from other girl LEGO fans as well: build sets that model everyday life, and girls will love them.  The town sets always seem to be about police and firefighters historically.  Lately the farm line has some promise, as do the Cafe Corner type buildings (though these tend to be for an older age group, and you’d lose the girls before they got to be old enough to be able to build them without frustration).

Another suggestion I’ve heard many times is to make LEGO babies.  The new 1×1 stud footprint figures used in the LEGO games might be a good starting point for this.

Anyway, watch the video  for yourself, and share it with anyone you know who has girls that might feel the same way.  And more than anything, keep pestering LEGO about this issue.  They won’t do anything about it until there’s a large groundswell of support for LEGO sets aimed toward girls.

Ignite: Hillel Cooperman – “The Secret Underground World of Lego”

Hillel Cooperman gave an “Ignite” presentation on the adult LEGO community recently. You can see it here on Youtube:

I found this through a post on Facebook by Felix Greco (I don’t think I can link to that because of the way Facebook works). The comments were not entirely positive, mostly around the way he talks about the adult LEGO fans, implying that they are so nerdy that they don’t date. It does sound to me like Hillel is not entirely comfortable with his AFOLishness. If he hadn’t had a kid and a wife who was enthusaistic about Harry Potter LEGO, do you think he would’ve rediscovered LEGO? Somehow I doubt it. However, most of the presentation was pretty positive. I do think he needs to take more pride in LEGO as a hobby and not denigrate his fellow AFOLs. But all in all, it’s a pretty good overview of the LEGO scene, told in an engaging and lively manner.

My Coast Guard helicopter featured in YouTube video

A photo of one of my creations was (very) briefly featured in this video:

At the very end, when he does the “you can build anything out of bricks” bit, there’s a brief shot of my Coast Guard helicopter. No, I’m not annoyed that they didn’t give credit, I think it’s cool that it was chosen to represent the helicopter genre.

I guess I need to repost the Coast Guard base pictures on Brickpile — it’s currently only posted on my old site (and occasionally appears on BayLUG‘s layouts).

Seen at Bricley’s Words.

Amazing Great Ball Contraption video

This is really a work of art – not just for the clever LEGO creations, but maybe even more so for the filmmaking. The modern classical music accompanies the images very well. By taking a series of close-up video shots of various parts of the contraption, each one well composed and from an interesting angle, our interest is maintained throughout. Exceedingly well-done!

Via TechnicBRICKs blog.

Another LEGO Video of the “Numa Numa” song

Properly titled “Dragostea din Tei,” this song became an Internet fad a couple of years ago when Gary Brolsma posted his “Numa Numa Dance” video on YouTube. A couple of years ago, I posted on Brickpile about a LEGO animation based on Gary’s video that I had seen on The Brothers Brick. I was going over some old posts on Brickpile and saw that video was not available any longer, but did a quick search for “numa numa lego” on YouTube and found that the video had been reposted, so updated that old blog post.

But in the process of doing that search I also found this:

It was made with the English translation of the song, which I’d never heard before. Sounds strange to my ears, having heard the Romanian version so many times…

Tilted Twister – Mindstorms NXT Robot Solves Rubik’s Cube

I just came across Tilted Twister while reading Mike Walsh’s LEGO Blog (link removed, as apparently his site has been compromised). It’s a Mindstorms NXT robot that can solve the Rubik’s Cube!

The really amazing part is that it’s built using only the parts in the stock NXT kit.  Instructions are provided – I’m tempted to make one myself.  (Note however that you either need to buy a special color sensor, or modify the colors of your Rubik’s Cube so that white and yellow can be distinguished by the stock light sensor.