2018: A Year in Review

Once upon a time (like... six years ago), I did year-in-review posts for the state of my LEGO collection here. It's getting to be a while since 2018 ended, but not quite so long that I don't want to put one up, having just stumbled on the old ones.

LEGO Set of the Year:

The last time I did one of these, 9472 Attack on Weathertop was brand new and my selection for this honour. A lot of water has swept under the bridge since then. I never did get the big sets in The Lord of the Rings theme.

2018 was not much of a sets-prominent year for me, and most of the sets I bought were somewhat swiftly parted. The most striking set was one that I didn't buy for myself and probably wouldn't have bought for myself: 75952 Newt's Case of Magical Creatures, a Christmas gift from my in-laws.

I'm a Harry Potter fan, but not to the extent I'm a Tolkien fan, and even as a Harry Potter fan, I've never been into Harry Potter LEGO, so Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as a source of LEGO sets has never been something I've definitely needed. This set is really well-built, however: a dense collection of parts (for its size, the box it came in is one of the heaviest I remember) in an attractive form. Building a playset that folds into an actual case is clever, and I like the animals. Despite having NO prior need to have a Potterverse set built in my collection, this one is actually staying.

LEGO Theme of the Year:

This is a hard category to nominate. In terms of sets purchased, Star Wars and Nexo Knights were far and away the numerical leaders, but Star Wars was mostly battle-packs riding a wave of nostalgia more appropriately alloted to 2017 (when I first, belatedly, watched The Clone Wars and then Rebels), and Nexo Knights is misleading, since it's mostly deeply discounted accessory sets.

Outside of buying new sets, I didn't do much MOCing, excepting temporary things for various webcomics. Even here, Android Files took place largely in the wild, with no clear leader for intervening themes between Adventurers, Wild West, Arctic, and Alpha Team. My other comics and pictures on Flickr reveal no dominant interests.

So, what was new in 2018? Filtering my purchases on my master spreadsheet (because, yeah, I keep track of a LOT of things...), City was the only theme other than Star Wars that I bought multiple 2018 releases in. And these were a bit more substantial than battlepacks.

It's a victor by default, though.

LEGO Minifig of the Year:

It's also hard to name a Minifig of the Year. Though my LEGO time was somewhat sporadic and largely webcomic focusing, there's always some fig-fiddling going on, but if we look at what cropped up on my irregular Flickr account, we don't see a predominant theme or a prominent fig taking centre stage.

If someone must be named, then we'll look at the gentleman on the left: one of many Evil Peachies, his ever-changing nature as torsos, arms, hands, and more get cycled in and out of as new figs are added to the collection has made this former Naboo Royal Guard (he hails from the more recent Flash Speeder set) a much built-and-rebuilt fig over the past year, which was the main way that a fig could hope to achieve attention.

Minifigure Profiles: 7131 and 7141

It's been a looong time since anything was posted on this old blog--about four years. That's not to suggest I've been away from LEGO that long: Android Files, whose first season was announced in that last post four years ago, has updated averaging a season a year, and will see its fourth season debut this coming Sunday.

In addition to Android Files, which has been my primary comic, I've also seen sporadic updates on Grandfather's Tale, Crossed Bricks, and Aquazone Breakfast News, all of which used to exist here on this blog and now have their own comic sites on Comicfury. I also contributed, for one year, to a joint comic with my younger brothers: Crossover Championship. This is the most esotericly in-jokey, pandering almost more to our joint knowledge than existing as something really intended for a public audience (however, more is coming starting this Advent, so maybe I should plug it more heartily than that!).

I've also been posting pictures of minifigs on Flickr for better than a year and a half--not quite as daily as the plan might have been, and certainly nothing special in the realm of either photography or LEGO building, but it speaks to my ultimate love of LEGO as the realm of the minifig and has been a good "tablescrap" of LEGO involvement for the long months of adult monotony between doing anything with my collection--"doing anything" these days being primarily focused on comic making.

What has been lacking, though, across these platforms, is the long-form writing about LEGO in any form that used to exist here, and I have missed it. Authorial comments on the comics or Flickr lacks the longer form depth that I sometimes miss, so here we are--years later--with a new post!

L-R: Pitdroid, Rey, Elf-warrior, R2-D2, altar boy, battledroid 1, battledroid 2

The subject of this particular post is a look at two sets that I got for Christmas in 1999. That was a significant end-of-the-year for my LEGO collection, because not only was it the first gift-giving season for a 12-year-old Star Wars fan, but it was hard on the heels of my first viewing of ANY Star Wars movie--friends had introduced my brother and I to the Original Trilogy in one unforgetable movie marathon and we got our parents to take us to The Phantom Menace, which was still playing in the cheap theatre, 5 months after its release.

By Christmas, my meagre cash reserves (expended earlier in the year on sets like Mystic Mountain Time Lab and Pharaoh's Forbidden Ruins) had only resulted in two Star Wars sets in my collection: the iconic 7101 Lightsaber Duel and 7110 Landspeeder: two absolutely iconic sets, some of the best value for your money of any set I've ever owned [warning: nostalgia factor is approaching critical levels].

For Christmas, I got two more sets: 7131 Anakin's Podracer and 7141 Naboo Fighter. Neither of these sets goes down as all-time favourites, but they--or, rather, their minifigs--might actually be a bit more interesting to look at because of it.

Anakin's Podracer has the dubious distinction of being identical to one-third of a much larger set, the massive 7171 Mos Espa Podrace. I never had that set, nor 2001's 7186 Watto's Junkyard, which meant that I never had (and still do not have) any other LEGO podracers for Anakin to compete with. The Attack of the Clones eventually came out, so even if I didn't already prefer Darth Vader as a minifig over Anakin Skywalker, I had "better" Anakin options to keep built in my collection, and with a collection built (especially in those days) more for play than for display, that meant both the young Anakins of these two sets were doomed to be parted.

One of these Anakins, the minifig on the far left, would ultimately end up back in my Star Wars fold after the release of The Force Awakens. Nearly a decade after LEGO's decision to shift licenced themes to flesh-toned minifigs, the heroine of the new saga did not come as a yellow-toned minifig, but my Star Wars collection has stubbornly refused to update--indeed, I have deliberately modified new human Star Wars characters to be yellow-figs rather than flesh-tones. Young Anakin's face has proven, if not perfect at least the best option I've found yet for Rey's face.

However, as my collection only needs one Rey, the other Young Anakin has ended up with a career as a Town fig, having been paired with a classic Ron Weasley hair and a plain white outfit to serve as an altar boy in my ever-unfinished parish church MOC.

Unlike Young Anakin, who reappeared in several sets over the years--and many, many more in his older forms as both Anakin and Darth Vader (in a couple of sets, twice over!), Padmé Naberrie would go many years before being released again, and is still a somewhat uncommon minifig--and, in my collection, this would continue to be the ONLY Padmé/Amidala fig down to the present day!

Despite that--and despite the fact that I do have a Padmé in my standing collection--this original Padmé has long since been sent elsewhere. Although I think it's a good head, I don't think it really looks at all like Natalie Portman, and in the intervening years, it has become long associated with an elf-warrior from my own fantasy legendarium.

The four other minifigs in the two sets are all droids, and are all currently extant in my collection, though the pit droid owes his recent re-existence to a Clone Wars-driven Star Wars mood coupled with a bit of nostalgia for some of my earliest Star Wars memories, in those days before Attack of the Clones. It's quite a faithful build, except for its scale, and made out of generic '90s pieces. I'd like to see what a 2018 set would use for a pit droid, because they would surely make it smaller, but I don't if it would be so general in build.

On the other hand, I know exactly what the droids from the Naboo Fighter would look like today, because the moulds haven't changed! LEGO perfected astromech droids in 1999 and have only ever tweaked the printing. I do use a 2016 R2-D2 as my primary R2-D2, but all my older models continue to be perfectly functional astromechs in my collection and this, the first, remains an R2-D2 by virtue of a self-entertaining loophole.

The battledroids haven't seen even a printing update, because they don't have printing! A sharp-eyed viewer will notice that I've upgraded their right arms to the newer, straight-arm options. Thanks to LEGO's propensity for including extra pieces of smaller parts, I have more than a few from newer sets. The original, side-ways-handed arms actually look better, on their own, again indicating the perfection of the original battledroid, but most guns looked ridiculous in their hands and I'm glad they eventually made the switch. These two battledroids are part of a larger army now, completely undistinguished--the only two minifigs out of these seven to fulfill exactly the same role in my collection as upon their arrival.

Updates

It's June now and I last posted in January, so I think it's fair to say that I've had a bit of an unscheduled hiatus. In this respect, the job situation has continued to be killer (though the continued possession of a regular income has been very nice indeed), and I don't foresee a change to that. Nonetheless, especially with summer here--and the opportunities it brings to take pictures of LEGO at later hours--I find myself wanting to get back into the blogging habit.

That said, I'm not planning to bring AqBN back as a weekly feature. I've had enough experience over the past few years to say that I don't have the requisite interest AND free time to guarantee that I could manage that, and going to a less frequent schedule would just make it easier to forget and easier to put off.

I'm not planning to end AqBN forever, but I think it will go to an "Advent-only" schedule. That was part of the problem when this hiatus rolled around: I'd been cruising so hard to make sure AqBN went up daily in December that I crashed when it was finally done--but, by the same token, while the Advent Calendar was actually still running, I had the enough momentum of interest and passion to keep at it day after day. I know I can't manage it year-round, but maybe I can do it every Advent. Here's hoping, anyway.

If I do succeed in putting things up here more regularly, it will have to be the irregular stuff: Grandfather's Tale, set reviews, and things of that nature. Maybe a Crossed Bricks or two, but for the most part I think that was an experiment that ran its course. I *do* have an idea for a new webcomic, which is a large part of why I'm here dusting things off the old blog, but I'm trepidatious of promising anything when my track record is largely built of hiatus of late.

Assuming I *do* go ahead with this comic, the idea is probably that it will be closer in format and scheduling to Grandfather's Tale than to AqBN--meaning that it would be released in chapters or episodes, rather than weekly strips, and it would have more of a prescripted arc. It would also move away from breaking the Fourth Wall. That was fun, now and again, in AqBN, but as the series progressed, I found that it was a dragging factor on keeping the series going. My natural instincts as a storyteller are not meta at all and tend to dislike mixing the consistency of an internal world with the world of the viewer. It worked here and there and will likely persist in AqBN as it continues, but I know it's not something I would want to hang onto in developing a new project.

Aquazone Breakfast News: 155

That's right, folks, your eyes aren't deceiving you: it's a new AqBN! It's been three months since the last update and I would *really* like to say that I'm back, but we'll see... I'm hopeful, because I've figured out a routine for picture-taking on my breaks at work, but I'm not-so-hopeful because, to use this week as an example, I'm working upwards of 50 hours a week and by the time you get home in the evenings, you're much too tired and lazy for most creative endeavours.

Still, I'm going to give it a try, and I've even stockpiled an Advent Calendar for December in the hopes that I'll manage a 24-day schedule then. In the meantime, enjoy the (hopefully not temporary) return from hiatus:

Crossed Bricks: 001

Today I want to debut a new comic series here on Grandfather's Tales: Crossed Bricks. The idea is not to replace Aquazone Breakfast News, which should continue apace (and hopefully with no unscheduled hiatuses), but to add to it.

Unlike AqBN, Crossed Bricks is not narrative-driven or character driven. If you think of AqBN as closer to Peanuts, then Crossed Bricks is closer to The Far Side: single panel strips, with little or no continuity from one strip to another.

The major "device" behind Crossed Bricks is to make use of my approximately 1300 minifigs. If it has not come up before, it should be mentioned now that I enjoy cataloguing things and keeping track of them, and having done this in a few ways with my LEGO collection, I am able to "randomly" select minifigs from across my collection. The goal with Crossed Bricks is to do this--and then throw the selected minifigs into a photo together and come up with a funny caption.

Here's the first comic:

Selection Method: I asked my younger brother to select numbers between 1-300, 301-700, 701-1000, 1001-1300. Each of these minifigs is listed under a "census" spreadsheet under those numbers--the fact that we have two Castle figs and two Space figs is an indication of the high numbers of both types of those figs that in my collection.

2012: A Year in Review

Last January, I made a year-in-review post and today I'm going to do that again. So here was my 2012:

LEGO Set of the Year:

In 2011 the top set that I acquired was unequivocally Medieval Market Village, and in 2012 I acquired its immediate successor, 10223 Kingdoms Joust, which is an equally impressive set, and taken set-by-set was probably the most impressive or iconic set that I acquired in 2012--but I don't think it was the Set of the Year for my collection. That distinction belongs to 9472 Attack on Weathertop.

As I blogged about when I first got it, Attack on Weathertop was my first Lord of the Rings LEGO set, and I was deeply impressed with it--more impressed than I expected to be before I opened it. It's well-designed, has excellent minifigs, a great parts selection, and best of all (from a Tolkien fan standpoint) it's set in Middle-earth. Although if you told me to pick one set only, I would probably take Kingdoms Joust simply because it is so much larger, it would not be without a longing backwards glance at Attack on Weathertop, and within the context of 2012 being the year the Lord of the Rings LEGO was first released, it is a worthy Set of the Year.  

LEGO Theme of the Year:

Last year the Collectible Minifigs were my Theme of the Year and on the basis of simple volume, they would make a compelling case again this year. The Dino and Monster Fighters themes that came out in 2012 were both excellent original themes on LEGO's part, though I have but a single set, with a single minifig, between them. NinjaGo continued to be a major presence in the LEGO world as well, but was barely a blip on my radar. All that I bought this year in any sort of quantity were Collectible Minifigs and Lord of the Rings LEGO. Part of this was due to financial considerations. What with the expenses of getting married and then waiting unemployed to get my green card, I did not have the disposable income for most of the year to spend on LEGO. A Collectible fig here or there, and a few VIP points-fuelled Lord of the Rings sets were all I could afford. (The Kingdoms Joust, referenced above, was a very early purchase indeed--all the way back in last January.) And with that in mind, the clear champion theme this year was the Lord of the Rings.

When LEGO announced that it had acquired the license and was developing sets, I feared the worst, which is to say sets as forgettable as the entire Pirates of the Caribbean line. What I got--and yes, this may have something to do with my status as a Tolkien fan--was another Star Wars line, and I daresay I said enough good things above when talking about Attack on Weathertop to explain my decision for naming the Lord of the Rings my Theme of the Year.

LEGO Minifig of the Year:

 Last year I declined to name a Collectible Minifig as my Fig of the Year, and I'm going to again this year, but it's worth noting that there was no real stand-out minifig addition to my LEGO-verse this year. It did not change drastically this past year due largely to the fact that "REAL LIFE" things kept a focus on the story side of LEGO to a largely background position. Among those that did get some sort of attention was the Black Falcon knight (redux), who comes with Kingdoms Joust.

MOC of the Year:

This is a new category, and one that I think I may not have included last year due (among other things) to the fact that I haven't made a lot of MOCs over the past few years--and certainly haven't posted many online. But I make a few this year, and even managed to post a couple. The one that says "2012!" more than any other was not a complex MOC; indeed it was quite simple... but I made 75 copies of each half.

Other Thoughts...

In general, 2012 was dominated by becoming an adult. I graduated with my Masters degree, I got married, and my wife and I went through the wranglings of getting my Green Card. All of this kept LEGO to the sidelines--but the sidelines are where LEGO has been in my life for years, and it's a comfortable place. LEGO had a chance to be centre-stage as favours. at my wedding and was there as part of solace during the long wait for my work permit. In general it was a Castle/Lord of the Rings sort of year. I've always been a Castle fan first, but this year there was little room for anything else, and the fantasy angle had the opportunity for a lot of attention with the new Middle-earth lines, attention that I foresee persisting into the next year as more Hobbit sets come out and find their way into my collection. That was my 2012 in LEGO... what was yours?

News Update, Thanksgiving Edition

My computer is back in business! This means that, all things being somewhat equal, Grandfather's Tales is back in business. I plan to put up a regular, set-reviewing post later today, to get back towards the swing of things, and I should have a new AqBN up next Friday. I'm not sure how I'm going to make up the lost time (about twelve weeks) of AqBN, because I'm also not finally sure what I'm doing for Advent this year. I have not acquired an Advent Calendar and I'm not sure I really want to, but I *DO* want to do Advent on AqBN again this year. What will probably happen is that I will not attempt to recover the lost AqBN weeks in any way, in favour of getting right into the Advent, more-than-one-day-a-week routine.

News Update

As may well have been noticed, there have not been any updates to this blog in a few weeks. The problem is twofold. On the one hand, I have been without home Internet since the start of September; one the other, my personal laptop (on which I have done most of the work for this blog, especially the webcomics) has "died," at least temporarily. As of today, I now have home Internet, so the first problem is addressed. This means that there might be a few irregular, non-Aquazone Breakfast News posts going up, but as long as my laptop remains out of commission, it is unlikely you will see a lot of work here, and certainly no webcomics. Once my laptop is back and kicking, I hope to make enough webcomics to make up for the weeks missed, but I would not expect that to take effect until sometime in November--and I have no idea if that will affect the Christmas season (last year had a daily schedule). If you're still around to read this: good on you! and hang in there.

Aquazone Breakfast News: 100

Add a no-Internet situation at the new apartment to the rigors of moving and posts here will continue to be infrequent for a while--though I hope we won't see an AqBN-free week again.

2011: A Year in Review

Inspired by this post on Gimme LEGO, and by the prevalence of "Year in Review" things in general that crop up at this time of year, I've decided to take a look at some of the things that were the best in my LEGO life of the past year.

LEGO Set of the Year:

There can be little doubt, I think, that the most amazing set I acquired in 2011 was Medieval Market Village. Released in 2008, this set is the almost-uncontested pinnacle of LEGO's Castle design thus far. Some of the Kingdoms sets of the past year went a long way towards incorporating some of the magic of Medieval Market Village into the more everyday sets of the theme, but this enhances rather than detracts from the Market Village's prestige.



So why was the Market Village my set of the year, rather than a 2011 set? Were the 2011 sets that bad? No, not at all; on the contrary, LEGO put out some amazing sets in 2011. The thing is, however, that 2011 was not a year about expanding out into new things in my collection, but of consolidating what I had. In the first few months of the year, I rebuilt a number of sets that hadn't been constructed since the Great Take-apart of 2004. In my trips to the LEGO store, I've focused more on smaller sets, mystery bags, and the pick-a-brick, with an eye towards increasing my liquid parts supply than to broaden my set horizon. Medieval Market Village was the only outstanding set that I got that I can say with a high degree of certainty will not be taken apart. This trend towards consolidation was increased in mid-summer when I had a number of minifigs stolen, and my Bricklink orders which had already been focused on finding parts to rebuild long-dismantled sets became additionally focused on replacing lost figs.

LEGO Theme of the Year:

Hands down, the Collectible Minifigs were my Theme of the Year. This was the second year LEGO had been releasing collections, and 2011 was nowhere near as frenzied as 2010 had been, when shortages of Series 1 and 2 led to mad scrambles by LEGO fans and exorbitant repurchase fees on Bricklink. By contrast, Series 3 through 5 were easy to find and remained present in stores for a generous amount of time. That said, however, I only bought two collectible minifigs in 2010, both off Bricklink, discouraged by the difficulty of finding them. In 2011, however, I caught the bug.



The Elf was the one who started it. When I picked him up in January, I was still in "old me" mode, which told me that I was only going to pick up one or two per release. The problem, if I may call it that, is that I did so well identifying him by feel that I wanted to do it again, and believe it or not that was the trick: I got hooked on the success of grabbing the one I wanted... and I've yet to disappoint myself. And the numbers are telling: a year ago I had 2 Collectible Minifigs and today I have 32.

LEGO Minifig of the Year:

This is the hardest category to pick yet... and turning to the Collectible Minifigs is, the last category notwithstanding, not going to provide the solution. As many Collectible Minifigs as I bought, none of them has definitively stood apart as the Minifig of the Year.



Instead, I'll recognise Lucien and Alex from Aquazone Breakfast News as the Minifigs of the Year, for the simple reason that 2011 was the year that my focus on Minifigs and their accoutrements took a significant step from the realm of game-play to the realm of storytelling. Grandfather's Tale, the year before, had already begun the process, but Aquazone Breakfast News took it a step further. More importantly, AqBN has been an ongoing commitment, and because of its weekly nature (daily, in December) was the most constant element in my LEGO life.

Other Thoughts...

2011 was a major shifting year for me. This blog was a large component of that shift, as the recognition of Lucien and Alex may already suggest. Also too, the new emphasis on consolidation, rather than expansion, has seen an increase in the time I spend on LEGO, rather than a decrease, as might be expected. Filling out the corners of my existing LEGO-verse and LEGO collection has been a more focused, and more attainable, goal than simply keeping up with each year's new round of themes.

2011 was also the year that I realised that my fiancée (girlfriend, at the start of last year) was not going to be a one-time LEGO purchaser, but that she had it in her to be a rather significant LEGO fan herself. I have yet to visit the Braintree LEGO Store without her, and she's spent probably as much money there as I have. So far, she's more of a collector, especially of the cooler licensed sets, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing.

And that was my LEGO 2011--what was yours?

A Century of Posts

This week's Aquazone Breakfast News, which would normally publish today, is going to be held off until tomorrow. Not, as might be thought, because I have been yet to figure out a successful way to take pictures of LEGO in my dimly lit basement (though that would be true), but because this post is the 100th here on Grandfather's Tales, and it seems appropriate to mark the occasion.

Looking back over the eight months or so that I've been blogging, I have to admit that the back half would have looked a bit better if it had followed more closely in the steps of the first half. This is partly due to the tumultuous Real Life events that have spanned the past few months, from a death in the family to moving home across the continent for the summer and then moving back to Boston in the fall. Nonetheless, I am not going to criticize myself too harshly since, after all, I made it this far despite that, and 100 posts in three quarters of a year is not a bad statistic (unless it were sheer quantity in place of quality, which I hope has not been the case).

All the same, I'm not going to pat myself on the back too much, because as much as this is a time for celebration, it's a time for reconsolidation. In the effort, then, to keep myself on course, I am going to publicly commit to the following:

1. First of all, that I will continue to post Aquazone Breakfast News on a weekly basis. I haven't missed a week yet, but the image woes surrounding my living space suggest that I should definitely make this a priority.

2. I will not let myself use poor images as an excuse for not posting. After all, everyone else on the Internet links to images from other people--surely I can do that too.

3. I will aim to post at least once a week besides Aquazone Breakfast News. This is an average I am aiming for, not a second Regular Posting Day (the way Friday is AqBN Day), but it is an aim for greater constancy.

4. To finish Chapter XII of Grandfather's Tale. The pictures have been sitting on my computer since April, so I have few excuses.