A new poll

Inspired by a conversation with Tiffany, here are some things I find disgusting. Do you agree? Note: Do not even try to differentiate between types of olives. I have seen an olive bar and know what it truly is - a cornucopia of bad decisions.

Pona!

My posting habits have been a bit erratic recently but here's some wonderful things that have happened in the last month. Chronology is rough.

1) Beat Okami - Stephanie and I started this game over a year ago. It was long and there were some big gaps in our playing through, but we finally defeated the finally boss. It was a good ride. The ending was satisfying I guess, but it's not one of those games where the ending really matters - because the whole thing was so delightful and the story was convoluted by the end anyway.

2) To mark the end of the school year we had a CMIG BBQ. It went really well, a lot of students showed up, as well as some people from the news office. There was lots of tasty food and we got to hang out in our little yard (one of the coolest things about our office). The weather was threatening rain all day, but it brightened up just in time. A nice way to get hte summer in gear.

3) Dana's farewell party was fun but sad. I gave her a little lego Dana to keep her company in her travels. There was pizza and delicious desserts.

4) Animating the soccer game for Out of Bonds was a lot of fun. I suppose I should give a behind the scenes thing to show you all the cool details and tell you the tricks I used. I am feeling lazy right now, but if enough people ask for it I'll put something together.

5) Hanging out with Robert at Guthrie's tavern. This was not a date, though it may sound like one. Guthrie's is a local bar/tavern that has a cabinet overflowing with board games. I introduced Robert to Carcassonne and then we spent the rest of the evening drinking woodchuck cider (on tap!), eating Pockets (they deliver!) and asking questions from this deck of cards from a board game called psychology or something. A few sets of questions was psych trivia (what animals do young girls dream of vs. young boys? what foods should you eat if you want to dream? what colors do sociopaths like? etc.), another set was about rorscach blots (unfortunately the blots themselves were missing so we couldn't do this part), and then the ones we ended up spending the most time with were personal questions (on a scale of 1 to 10 how much to you believe in God? which player do you think would make a better companion on a long space flight? how cautious are you? etc.) which acted as pretty convenient springboards for 'get to know you' converstaions. It was a lot of fun and seemed like a first date, though, as I've previously stated, was not a date.

6) I enjoyed this article about made-up languages. I may start using the word pona - it's fun to say. Pona!

This is roughly where Brickworld happened. See posts below.

7) Then I spent roughly a week at the beach with my family.

A lot of this time was spent playing in the sand with Isaiah

The way we played horseshoes was we stuck them all in the sand, ran around them in a circle and them "crash!"ed down on them. Repeat.

Isaiah got knocked over by a couple waves early in the week and after that point he would only go in if someone was carrying him. He seemed to enjoy the waves this way.

One day we went to the zoo

There were a lot of these fat birds running around free

There were also flamingos

Isaiah was content to sit in his stroller for about half of the zoo. Then he got out and ran as fast as he could from animal to animal, saying "excuse me, excuse me!" to all the people in his way as he ran past. The second half of the zoo went much faster. We also spent some time at the boardwalk where there was delicious soft-serve ice-cream and a small amusement park.

Where Isaiah went on his first ride.

Isaiah and I build this owl together. I made a general owl base and then he improved on it by giving it green and "chartreuse" hair, an orange shirt, and red socks (as he put it).

It was a great week or sleeping, eating, playing and relaxing. There were lots of things that happened that didn't involve Isaiah, but why would you want to hear about them. :) I'll leave you with my favorite picture from the week.


8) Got back in the swing of things. Had lovely dinners with Paul and Stephanie and Krista, Tiffany and Seth. Continued season 4 of the Wire, saw the last episode of Pushing Daisies :( and watched a disc of Buffy and started the second season of Avatar. Also went to see fireworks w/ Paul and Stephanie on 3rd of July (it's a Chicago thing). On the 4th I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark on the big screen (relatively) with Tiffany and Krista and then we had brunch at Julius Meinl (delightful!) and then we put together a lego drawbridge set while watching Avatar at my house. If it hadn't been raining I might have done something outside.

9) Had a couple fun off-site meetings for work this week. It was also a short, slow week, perfect for readjusting after vacation, though I must admit I was still very much in a vacation mind set this week.

10) I made not one, but two trips to the lego store this week. The first one, I was dissapointed to find that all the sets I wanted to buy were out of stock, so I picked up Propeller Power - one of the sets designed by the designer I met at Brickworld. I put together the plane and then took that apart and put together the helicopter, then I took that apart and built this collection of alternate models.

I'm proudest of the poodle and the spaceship.


I returned to the store on thursday after I discovered that they have an order in-store service that lets you order anything that's available online and get it delivered with free shipping! So I put together an order for all the sets I want (well not all the sets, but many of them), got the loyalty stamps (and a $10 gift card) since I did it through the store, will get this golden minifig (keychain) since it was online, and I didn't have to lug them all home on the red line! Awesome!
I also built this prison.

Finally!

I got blogged by The Brothers Brick! I've been working toward this moment for almost exactly a year. Woo-hoo!

Brickworld 2009 - Sunday

Sunday was a very short day. I rolled out of bed and set-up my laptop for the public. Moved my luggage down to my car and check-out of my room Spent more time at public hours, same idea as yesterday. Found out I won Dirty Buildster!

Attended “Lego from a Girl’s Perspective” where 13-year old OliviaConahue talked about what she likes and doesn’t like about lego. It was interesting to hear her perspective and I hope the LEGO employees in attendance were taking notes. It seems like they have been taking steps in the right direction anyway, but still, the current small percentage of female minifigs and “realistic” themes is disappointing.

The rest of the public hours flew by and then it was time for the (very short) awards/closing ceremony. We got into to the room and I thought “weren’t we just in here for the opening ceremony?” They took a group picture of all the contest winners, which I got to be in. Because I won two contests Bryan said, "Next year we'll make him build with his eyes closed." I didn’t get a trophy for Dirty Buildster, but they will be mailing one to me. Then it was over and it was time to break down. It wasn’t long before all my stuff was packed up and ready to go.

Then I went across the street with Mark and Steve to get dinner. Did I mention Steve? Mark I met last year, but Steve wasn’t there last year. Two years ago he brought this crazy castle which I remember. He has been active in the AFOL community for quite some time now. He currently works at Legoland CA as a master builder/designer. Mark is going to be flying out there this week (as I’m writing this he’s there, by the time this is posting he will probably be back) to apply for an open position they have (he got it!). After dinner we said our goodbyes and I dropped Steve off at O’Hare and then I drove home.

Now that I’ve actually gotten to the end of Brickworld (in writing about it) I feel like there is still so much I’ve left out. There were several other fans I met and had great conversations with, lots of cool models I saw and just so much that happened that even with this play-by-play I built using the schedule I still feel like there is so much I haven’t told you.

Brickworld may physically be over, but mentally it will still be going on at least for another week or so.

Brickworld 2009 - Saturday

I got downstairs with only ~15 minutes before the doors were opened to the public. I got my laptop up and running and then waited for the crowds. There were a lot of people who passed by, I actually missed the biggest crowds, since I went out to lunch, but I spent most of the public expo time (10 AM – 4 PM) sitting at my display.

Some people were hesitant to touch my computer to choose a movie even though I had signs telling them to do so, but anytime I saw someone lingering around watching my DVD menu repeat I would point out that they could click to watch the full movies. I was vigilant at making sure there were MooCards for people to take, that the DVD player stayed full screen and that the octopus machine was spinning whenever there were people around. I answered the typical questions (how did you make this? what equipment/software do you use? Are these online? and of course, how long did it take you?) and a bunch of story specific ones (why did they take their arms off? What’s so great about shielding? What happened to the soccer player that soccersaurus kicked?).

Other than that I mostly just sat back and watched as people crowded around the computer and made mental notes of what they found funny. As the kids watched “Out of Bonds” they would point to the soccer field display next to it as different parts came on to screen. My favorite moment was when a ~6 year old kid pointed at the Robert and Phil who were set up in the NNN studio and said “he’s a robber and he escaped from prison and then he hired him!” People also enjoyed looking through the crowd in the stadium and pointing out all the different monsters/crazy characters who were there.

I did do a little walking around during this time (finished up the Botanic Ballroom) where I talked to Ricecracker AKA Issac Mazer AKA the incredibly mature 14 year old and his mother. Here are some other cool things I saw during that time.

Tiffany, Krista, and Tiffany’s friend Anne came up around lunchtime and we went to the nearby Claim Jumpers – a mining themed restaurant I will not be visiting again. Then I showed them my set-up and other creations sprinkled around the room and Anne had to leave but Tiffany and Krista stayed for the last couple hours of the public expo walking around on their own. We talked about their favorites (many of which I had not had time to see) and then I drove them to the Metra station.

I came back and was deciding whether I should go up to my room for a quick nap or hang around the main ballroom for a while. I knew that the CEO of LEGO, Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, was supposed to be giving a speech around that time while people were lined up for Pick-a-Brick. However, I didn’t see him around and figured I had missed him and the owner of LEGO, Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, entirely. I started heading up to my room and then as I was turning into the lobby, who should I see but Kjeld and Jorgen heading toward the main display hall. I quickly turned around and went back to my table and waited for them to pass by.

Kjeld passed by about 15 minutes later and I said heloo, shook his hand, showed him how Soccersaurus’s legs moved and he watched maybe 20 seconds of “Out of Bonds” and then I pressed one of my MooCards into his hand. He took another look at my name tag and repeated “David Pickett” to himself. I was told before that he is very good with names, so that was probably him memorizing mine. Sweet!

Jorgen did not come my way, but he did give a nice speech to all assembled, during which I told the kids watching my movies that I was closing down the laptop because that was more important. I’m sure his speech is online somewhere since there were cameras aplenty. My takeaway was that they were “overwhelmed” by the things we build.

While I was driving Krista and Tiffany to the train I missed the announcement of the winner of the combo build. This may have been fortuitous. After the Kjeld & Jorgen excitement faded away I noticed that several people had removed their combo models from the judging table. I went over there to see if I could figure out the deal was. As I was approaching my model John-Henry Harris (remember him?) and Asli Bilgin (remember her?) walked over. John-Henry was pointing at my model and telling Asli what he liked about it. He then said that he voted for it and that it was ultimately the winner.

“That one won?” I asked innocently. “I built that!”
“You’re David Pickett? Here, have a prize!”

John-Henry then proceeded to tell me the various things he liked about my model. He compared it to graffiti style monsters he and his co-workers (at LEGO!) had been researching. He also pointed out the heart-shaped face and the golden robot heart in between them. Then he talked about the models/themes he had created as part of his job application for LEGO. It involved bunnies in the forest fighting against an evil steel queen who was intent on destroying the forest. Asli had us pose for a picture (which I need to get from her).

Then I asked if they had seen my display, and the three of us proceeded to walk over there together. I showed them my various monsters and handed them my MooCards and started explaining the story behind “Out of Bonds” to them. I showed them parts of the animation. Asli was confused about the players taking off their arms, but John-Henry understood immediately. We talked for a bit more and John-Henry promised to show my animations to all his co-workers (at LEGO) and said “I lived with some animators for a while, so I really appreciate the amount of time and energy you guys put in.” And then they had to run off to something else.

I was bummed I didn’t get to talk to them longer, but excited that a LEGO designer was getting so excited talking about my creations. I was floating on cloud nine for a while after that for sure. Then I went around to try an see the rest of the creations on display specifically the ones that had been nominated for awards so I could vote for the best ones. I ended up walking around with David Pagano and William Jennings (who was very concerned about how to address just one of us, since we were both David P’s, eventually he decided on Dave {me} and David). Here are more links to pictures of the AWESOME stuff on display.

Then I ran off to Potbellies for dinner yet again and got back just as movie night was starting. David had put together a bunch of LEGO animations, commercials and other related videos and was projecting them for a crowd of about 50 people. He also showed “Out of Bonds” and let me give a little introduction. I stayed for about half of the program, at which point a lack of sleep and a belly full of potbellies were taking their toll. I went up to my room and had a lovely 1.5 hour nap.

I came downstairs and finished my rounds of the halls and finalized my votes and then I prepared for World of Lights. The main lights went down and the creations lit up. Here’s what my display looked like for about an hour and a half.


And here are some of the other AMAZING light displays. I was particularly impressed by the displays that made the light seem natural.

The best part of World of Lights (and arguably all of Brickworld) though, was when Asli brought Tim Courtney and a couple other people over to my display to show them my stuff. That in itself was merely flattering, but what she then proceeded to tell me blew me away. She said that after John-Henry and her had left earlier that they had gone out for dinner and drinks and then proceeded to talk about me for an hour! I understand that “an hour” may have been an exaggeration, but it was clear that they were both really impressed by me. Alsi said she was impressed by my marketing, “You had four components; tactile, visual, take-away and then you, your personality.” And she said that John-Henry was impressed by the way I build stories around my creations and that he wanted me to come to Billund (the HQ of LEGO, where they design all their new products, for those of you who don’t know). This is the point where my jaw hit the floor.

I confirmed with Asli that she wasn’t pulling my leg and she assured me that he really was that impressed and excited about me. She also went on and said that if I ever needed anything from Microsoft to just drop her an e-mail and reiterated again how impressive my marketing was, especially for a 24 year old, but that really I should be working in design. After she went away with her companions I sat in stunned silence for about 10 minutes. My mind was reeling.

After World of Lights wound down I went up to Mark and Mikael’s suite for party times with other cool AFOLs. I ended up talking to Asli some more and found out that John-Henry was already on his way back to Europe (I was hoping to talk to him on Sunday). I impressed Steve DeCraemer and Tim Courtney by knowing about Auczilla and Rec.Toys.Lego. I finally went to sleep around 4 AM

Brickworld 2009 - Friday

I woke up, got ready and got downstairs as quick as I could. I used the free wi-fi in the lobby to check e-mail, make sure “Out of Bonds” was working right and throw some quick status messages up. I set my computer up back at my table and then went off to “Being a Designer at LEGO.”

This session was by John-Henry Harris, who’s been a designer at LEGO for about 18 months (I think). Remember his name, he will appear again later. Here are the three sets he’s designed that are on shelves now. He talked about the process and constraints of designing a set, which I was more or less familiar with from talking with Matthew Ashton and Jamie Berard last year, as well as numerous BrickJournal articles. Still, it’s always nice to hear about your dream job, and know that even though there are problems (German kids don’t understand Ice Dragons, you have to stay within price points etc.) it is mostly awesome. He talked about how all the designers work together in an open workspace and get feedback from one another on different designs and how every summer there’s a period where they spend a few weeks just building all sorts of crazy new models as they brainstorm ideas for the next year.

Then I ran to Chipotle for lunch, and spent a little time sitting at my display and then I went to the FFOL Roundtable where I was one of 3 men. Of course the focus was on the ~16 women. It was interesting to hear their perspectives on the hobby and what they like and want and how they feel about their husbands being involved with LEGO etc. It ended up being more of a MOC show-and-tell than a discussion of issues, which was fun, but not exactly what I was hoping for.

Then I went to “Serious Study of the Brick” where a small, motley crew discussed the creation of an online site/forum dedicated to academic studies of LEGO. I talked about the talk I gave In January about the otherization/imperialism trends in the past 30 years. We talked about possible formats and names (I suggested BrickThink) and such. Could be interesting, we’ll see where it goes.

Then there was some a brief time for hanging out at my display before the opening ceremony. I think this is when David Pagano and I first saw each other this year. I had introduced myself briefly on the last day to him last year, but this year we hung out a whole bunch more. We’re both David Michael P’s who animate using lego and are very close to the same age, so it’s only natural that we got along. He is currently living off of lego animation as he has been commissioned by LEGO to make these Space Police animations. Pretty cool. We talked about doing some combined displays/stuff for Brickworld next year.

I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention the other two animators I met at Brickworld. Rifraf AKA William Jennings had a little display set-up in one of the other display rooms and did some animating during the public hours. OneBrickMedia AKA Sean Carroll found me on Thursday night and he and his younger brother watched through all of my movies. His younger brother spent so much time watching my movies that by the end of the weekend he had them memorized. At some point during the weekend Sean showed me some of his movies and we laughed. His family sort of used my display as homebase for the weekend and so his mom and brother would often come by looking for one another. He also cheered me on during the combo build (see below), which was nice.

The opening ceremony was nothing worth talking about really. Then there was a group photo taken and then (pay attention, those italics must imply something important!) there was a raffle to see who would participate in the combo build that evening. The combo build was an event sponsored by LEGO where 30 lucky people were given three unopened sets and then given ~2 hours to build something new out of those pieces. I was fortunate to be drawn for it and then I rushed to Potbellies to pick up a sandwich, soda and cookie and brought them back just before the contest was starting. They put us at tables in the hallway outside the main ballroom, handed us out three sets and let us go wild.

I started by sorting all my pieces by color. The first thing that caught my eyes were those big purple/yellow spikes. I had gotten some of them when I purchased that set over a year ago and never found a good use for them, so I was determined to make them a central component of my model. I looked through my yellow pieces, saw a big curved piece and knew that they where going to be a bear claw. I made one claw and put it aside while I investigated the other pieces. I liked the way the orange cockpit and green curved sloped looked next to each other, so I found a way to connect them, which slowly took shape into a lizard/fish type creature. Then I went back and built the rest of my yellow/purple bear. Then I needed to connect the two. Having them fight was too easy and too obvious, so I decided to have them fall in love instead. I used the robot bodies to make a heart and thus “Monster Love” was born.


I then drove over to the Northbrook LEGO store for the in-store event where they had a huge selection of slightly damaged sets at 50% off. The way they did the line this year was totally nonsensical. You pulled a raffle ticket which had a color on it. That determined your position in line. I got there half an hour after the event had started and pulled the color that had gone in first, so I got to get in before a couple hundred people, some of whom had been standing in line for an hour and a half. I wasn’t complaining though. I picked up this Power Miners set for the giant rock monster, this drawbridge set I was going to buy at full price anyway, this duplo set for the adorable baby animals, and these two bionicle sets for the snowflake & blue flame pieces. I was in and out in no time at all, not really fair, but not my fault.

I went back to the hotel and finished up my Dirty Buildster creation. I was very happy with the way it turned out. I was given the Clickits remover and challenged to find a way to use it. Once I had figured out it was going to be a tongue, it was just a matter of building the rest of the creation around it.


Then I finally started walking around the 3 display rooms to look at all the incredible creations and take pictures and talk to the creators. I only got through half of one room, but I saw cool custom minifigs, this amazing pond scene, these really intense vignettes by a 14 year-old, a giant space worm, a giant football stadium (of the three stadiums on display, mine was by far the smallest), the MST3K robots, and other cool things.

Then at about 1:30 AM I called it a night, since I would have to be up early in the morning again for the public expo. Then I decided that sleep was a waste of time and went back downstairs to hang out some more. I finally talked to Mark, who had been so busy putting his display together he hadn’t done anything else (Mark update - less than a week later he landed a job as a master builder at Legoland California). I helped stabilize the train tracks on his display until they finally kicked us out of the ballroom.

Brickworld 2009 - Thursday

Warning – The Brickworld posts are Long and Rambly and possibly don’t entirely make sense.

I was up very late on Wednesday night finishing “Out of Bonds” and set it to export/compress while I slept. I woke up on Thursday and started uploading it to youTube. The estimated upload time was 7 hours. I compressed a smaller version that had a more reasonable upload time of 4 hours. While it was uploading I finished packing, ate lunch, took a shower, went and picked up the Zip Car and loaded up all my legos and luggage. As soon as it was up I posted the link and then I was off to Brickworld.

I missed the morning/early afternoon workshops on Thursday, but I hadn’t been too excited for them anyway, so it wasn’t a big loss. I pulled up right as they were opening the main display halls, got registered and checked in to my room, dropped my legos off at my tables, dropped my luggage in my room and then went down to the River Ballroom for the WomenBuild Presentation.

WomenBuild is the brainchild of Asli Bilgin (who will be important later in the weekend). It’s a program that uses LEGO Serious Play to engage women in the software development industry. I had heard about LEGO Serious Play before, but only in a vague way. The most interesting thing I learned was that while the % of women in all other STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines is rising, the % in computer science is drastically dwindling.

After that there was a session where we got to try out Serious Play and talk about the problems facing the online AFOL community. The first thing we had to do was take the bricks we were provided with and build a tower that represented some aspect of our personality. Mine of course had a camera and a little me (just two eyes and two arms) behind the camera moving the pieces in front. Then we had to build something that represented a problem/hurdle we saw in the lego fandom.

Me and most of the other people at my table, focused on the fragmented nature of the online AFOL community (space people don’t talk to castle people, train people don’t talk to pirate people, no one even realizes the lego animation community exists etc.) but what I thought was more interesting was the one woman at our table who thought the biggest challenge was in how the rest of the world views us. She is in her 40s and most of her friends don’t know about her life as a lego fan. She feels like she doesn’t have anyone to talk to about it. She is in the lego closet. In that moment I felt very glad to have this blog where I frequently post about legos without having to worry about who might see them and know how crazy I am.

The last challenge we had was to build a solution to the problem we had defined. Most of these involved a central site that acted as a portal to the various splinter sites. Then we had to arrange all of our table’s models together and explain the rationale to the whole group. I was the spokesperson for our group as can be seen here. It was a fun exercise, although I don’t know what will come of it, there was someone from LEGO there videotaping and apparently the tape was given to the owner of LEGO, but it’s one of those things where it’s very easy for people to talk about solutions and another thing entirely to implement them.

Then I ran to Potbellies for dinner. I came back and got my pieces for Dirty Buildster and then ran off to do more set-up on my display. Then I went back to the room for Dirty Brickster where I passed on Lego Checkers from last year (mwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!) and picked up a new Agents set I’d wanted. Then I returned to the main event hall and finished setting up my display. Already that night I had people watching my videos and checking my stuff out. Then I turned in early since I hadn’t slept much the previous night.

So awesome

I just shook hands with the owner of LEGO and gave him one of my NNN business cards!

My Brickworld 2009 Display

NNN Episode 1.1 - Out of Bonds