Pleasantly trippy, though simple, Lego illusion.
Cute and clever diorama and detail (via The Brothers Brick).
Using Legos to mend walls.
An absolutely enormous / insane (read: awesome) Lego aircraft carrier.
Nathan Sawaya makes all sorts of amazing Lego sculptures / art (found via Makezine).
A great/bad pun in Lego:
Attack of the Second Amendment from Jesus Diaz on Vimeo. Via Gizmodo.
On the slightly more serious side, here‘s a really interesting story from The New York Times about Lego as a company and the changes they’ve made and where they’re heading (via Kottke). As much as I fully realize that things like that have to happen to keep the company afloat, it kind of makes me sick too. I’ve bought Legos for birthdays and Christmas in recent years and each time it seems like they get more and more expensive, with almost no really little sets, and they’re so specialized that it’s hard to build much out of them aside from what’s on the front of the box.
I remember quite fondly Lego sets I had when I was little (okay, I still have some of them) that came with multiple sets of instructions for things to make out of them, and also had things pictured on the box that you could make which there weren’t instructions for, just to get the creative juices flowing a little more.
I sort of credit the old Lego sets with a lot of the way I look at thing (perhaps I had this view before I got Legos, and they just happened to fit in well, who knows). Mostly, putting pieces together, taking things apart and rebuilding them, just seeing how things work, and being willing to mess with them a little. I often explain my interest in computer programming in these terms – programming is Legos for adults. (Legos are Legos for adults too, but we’re going for a metaphor here people.) In programming, especially object oriented programming, you have all these different pieces you have to fit together and line up just right, and when you do, you have built a new toy to play with from the parts you had. And you can combine them in all sorts of ways, and swap out pieces here and there, and build whole new things no one else has thought of yet. And when you’re done, you can reuse it all and not have a mess. And the building that happens is a mix of building with your hands, and planning it out in your head as you go, and adjusting as you run into problems. In an overblown metaphoracal sense, Legos are life.
So, in closing, here’s a great, very simple Lego ad campaign (via Swiss Miss) that’s the way I like to remember them.