Slashdot Mirror
30 Years of the Lego Minifig
clikit writes "Today, the Lego Minifig turns 30 years old. Gizmodo is running a video contest with Lego, giving away Galaxy Explorer or the Yellow Castle sets and other unopened vintage sets. They also have an exclusive video from the factory, showing how the minifig is built. Check it out ... finding out how the little guys are made will make you smile." Scientists estimate that 98% of the minifigs created in the last three decades have lost a hand in a tragic vacuum accident, been melted by a magnifying glass, or been eaten by your dog.
They forgot "blown apart by blasters, whips, and batrangs".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
For those who are curios about the arcane technical jargon in this post.
"I'm a Genius!"*
*Not an actual Genius
is 30 years of 2 am blood-curdling screams and blasphemous curses against our lord jesus when a parent happened to step on one of these things barefoot.
lego: just because you didnt get candy at the supermarket,
doesnt mean you cant punish mom for her insolence.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Scientists estimate that 98% of the minifigs created in the last 3 decades have lost a hand in a tragic vacuum accident, been melted by a magnifying glass, or eaten by your dog.
Or how about a kid using a lighter to heat up a paperclip cherry-red so that he could reenact the ventilation shaft scene from Empire Strikes Back with his lego dudes?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Am I the only one who saw those Lego heads on that big board and thought "It'd be cool to have a Lego bulletin board in my office"? Put some big Lego sheets on the wall and then have special Lego bricks with clips to hold papers that connect to the wall sheets. Perhaps some Lego bricks with magnets embedded in them so you could stick magnetic items to part of the wall.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I'd love to see someone top the infamous Lego Beer Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATBl4qH9I54
is 30 years of 2 am blood-curdling screams and blasphemous curses against our lord jesus when a parent happened to step on one of these things barefoot.
You just gave me a 'Nam style flashback to pretty much every night this past week, and it wasn't fun. Good God, kid toys are awful. Stepping on Legos is bad - movement-sensitive toys that start a 15-minute sequence of annoying jabber because I walk within 5 feet of it when I get up to piss at night is the worst.
I swear to God, the next one of my in-laws that buys our kid one of those demonic talking toys, I'm buying their kids a drum set or electric guitar. This shit is war.
My generation didn't have any lego people, hell we only had rectangles. No curves. I remember "clear" legos being introduced and wanting them.
These days, the lego's are barely what I remember. Specially shaped parts, windshields, wheels!
We had to PRETEND our model cars with square wheels could role. Thee days, kids don't have to imagine anything!!!
I read the title as 30 Years of the Lego Milfing
Boy was I surprised!
But this is slashdot. A slashdoter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber!
Backinmyday, which was the Galaxy Explorer era, all the little figures had the same face. It was a 1970s-era smiley face. The only thing that changed was the headwear: space helmet, fireman hat, girl-hair.
Now, my son has space lego sets. The guys in the Mars Mission sets have decidedly bad-ass faces. Bad-ass facial hair with the bad-ass grimace of a real bad-ass.
Make no mistake about this: my 1970s astronauts did not lead pleasant lives. They fought brave battles, lost limbs, sometimes cracked (literally) under the pressure. Sometimes they even had that stupid smile wiped off their faces (again, literally).
Why do today's miniature astronauts wear their emotions on their sleeves? What happened to the steel resolve of yesteryear? Why not, when under alien attack, smile?
Kids these days.
--I'm so big, my sig has its own sig.
-- See?
Didn't you have the first year EE seminar where they made you swear a solemn oath to only use your powers for good?
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
I misread this as "30 years of Lego Mining". Brings to mind visions of people hard at work, in secret underground Danish mines, toiling to harvest bricks for the children of the world.
It's obvious that you haven't actually seen a child playing with modern Lego sets. My 11yo is in love with the Bionicle series. Since Bionicle was launched pretty much at the same time as he graduated from Duplo, Bionicle == Lego in his mind.
I'm 42, and I had the same worries you do. But you know what? My son's every bit as creative with his Bionicle as I was with the sets 30 years ago. He builds each new set according to the directions. Once. Then he rips it apart and combines it with pieces from all his other sets to make something new. Lather, rinse repeat. I still have all my old Lego bricks; they're in a big bin next to his Bionicle. He sometimes pulls pieces from there for his creations, but mostly sticks to Bionicle parts.
IMHO, when someone our age says that there's "zero creativity" in modern Lego, I think it's more a sign of how calcified we've become. The kids are doing just fine.
Chelloveck
I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
For a new father approaching 40, the new range of Lego is abysmal.
As a new father approaching 38, I'm kinda tired of this rant, considering last year I found it trivial to find large boxes of the plain bricks with the same pictures of generic houses, boats, trucks (with genetic wheels) as when I was a kid, in better boxes no less (hard plastic with good lids for permanence) and enough minor specialty parts (e.g axles, rotating blocks) to make things interesting.
The secret (other than online ordering) is to actually go to and support a decent non-chain toystore with good toys, rather than depending on your the Wallmart aisle with a couple boxes from the latest movie.