Miscellany
Jan. 25th, 2006 12:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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sclerotic_rings, all the graph, grid, and hex patterns you could want. Also, an interesting NY Times article on Photoshopping in scientific publications.
Mental Commit Robot For Psychological Enrichment. Not available in Norway.
Achieved my first KoL Ascension on Monday, as an Accordion Thief. Now playing as a Pastamancer.
Exercise yesterday: 10 km/6 miles. (Have been slack the last week, due to heat and feeling like a big tired wuss.) Total 75 km/46 miles, which gets me to the end of Day 2, past elves and second Black Rider appearance, hobbits camped at Woody End. Tell you what, the travel scenes go past a lot faster in the book than they do when you're pedalling through them.
da_norvegicus got some new Lego the other day and I have to say, I'm sorry to see what's become of the line in recent years. When I was a kid, I'd buy a Lego set* and assemble it into the thing on the box... and then after an hour or two I'd take it apart and make it into something completely different. A house turned into a yacht, then a truck, a spaceship, a castle... that flexibility was what made Lego cool.
But with this set, about half of it is clip-together dinosaurs that can't be used as anything else. (If they're designed so you can make different types of dinosaurs as per this review by a certain LJ acquaintance of mine, I'll improve my evaluation very slightly, but I don't think they are.) The only connection to proper Lego is four little studs on the back of each dino that can be used to attach a rider.
The other half, though, just makes me sad. Back when I were a lad, the Lego company had a policy of not making modern-day war toys. No tanks, no guns (except rayguns in the space set), no green bricks that could be used to build military vehicles. Of course we all managed to make guns and missiles anyway, but we had to be creative about it, and they didn't encourage that direction. And now they're selling attack helicopters with miniguns.
It's not that I'm particularly fussed about war toys. I had my own plastic soldiers and tanks as a kid, and I don't think they did me any harm. But there's a certain 'loss of innocence' feeling about seeing Lego abandon that stance for commercial reasons.
*with my hard-earned cash after trudging through the snow and selling kidneys, not like the soft kids of today oh no.
sclerotic_rings, all the graph, grid, and hex patterns you could want. Also, an interesting NY Times article on Photoshopping in scientific publications.Mental Commit Robot For Psychological Enrichment. Not available in Norway.
Achieved my first KoL Ascension on Monday, as an Accordion Thief. Now playing as a Pastamancer.
Exercise yesterday: 10 km/6 miles. (Have been slack the last week, due to heat and feeling like a big tired wuss.) Total 75 km/46 miles, which gets me to the end of Day 2, past elves and second Black Rider appearance, hobbits camped at Woody End. Tell you what, the travel scenes go past a lot faster in the book than they do when you're pedalling through them.
da_norvegicus got some new Lego the other day and I have to say, I'm sorry to see what's become of the line in recent years. When I was a kid, I'd buy a Lego set* and assemble it into the thing on the box... and then after an hour or two I'd take it apart and make it into something completely different. A house turned into a yacht, then a truck, a spaceship, a castle... that flexibility was what made Lego cool.But with this set, about half of it is clip-together dinosaurs that can't be used as anything else. (If they're designed so you can make different types of dinosaurs as per this review by a certain LJ acquaintance of mine, I'll improve my evaluation very slightly, but I don't think they are.) The only connection to proper Lego is four little studs on the back of each dino that can be used to attach a rider.
The other half, though, just makes me sad. Back when I were a lad, the Lego company had a policy of not making modern-day war toys. No tanks, no guns (except rayguns in the space set), no green bricks that could be used to build military vehicles. Of course we all managed to make guns and missiles anyway, but we had to be creative about it, and they didn't encourage that direction. And now they're selling attack helicopters with miniguns.
It's not that I'm particularly fussed about war toys. I had my own plastic soldiers and tanks as a kid, and I don't think they did me any harm. But there's a certain 'loss of innocence' feeling about seeing Lego abandon that stance for commercial reasons.
*with my hard-earned cash after trudging through the snow and selling kidneys, not like the soft kids of today oh no.
