the dilly, or toys as art and more about me

‘i’m sure by now you’ve all heard the news about jon stewart. i just want you to know that as we speak, the best doctors in the country are busy reattaching his head.’
— stephen colbert, the daily show

suffice to say things are rapidly growing more and more awesome around here. note the new address up top there; you should probably change your bookmarks, although the old address will likely redirect here for the forseeable future. but you’re going to want to remember the new name. big things are in store for you. things i may or may not have mentioned in passing or in absurd detail recently, or perhaps a long time ago.

there will be other urls to remember in the near future, but more on that later. all the shiny urls and web design in the world won’t help if i can’t get some content ready.

in largely unrelated news, toy fair started today. don’t except much coherent thought from me until next week. conveniently, that’s about the time i’m expecting the boys to make some more progress on Things Unmentionable.

my toe is doing much better now. whether it’s good enough for a full day of work tomorrow, we’ll see around lunch time.

ebay is an evil evil thing.

putting aside money for taxes is going to kick my ass for the next two months. but i should live.

sharpie mini is both the silliest and greatest thing ever. i desperately want to track down all twelve colors so i can hang them all on a giant keyring from my belt, all jangly and shit.

found two more gestalt limbs tonight, including the first limb for bruticus. that puts me at 5 out of twelve limbs, and i’m already 3 for 3 on torsoes. not that that makes a mere 7 transformers to get caught up on. in addition to the totally sweet new grimlock and swoop 2pack(who technically are a small gestalt of their own), an energon dx repaint, two new universe repaints from beast wars and beast machines, and half a dozen binaltech/alternators figures to get caught up on, the new transformers for 2005 are starting to hit stores in the states. at this point, it’s only a matter of time. and unlike armada which had only one good new figure, or energon which didn’t get good until the three gestalts hit, about half the opening salvo of cybertron toys look totally cool. given that most transformers lines get better as the year progresses, well, you do the math.

my buddy in singapore came through on the xevoz wave four basics, huzzah! coupled with the stuff i grabbed on ebay this weekend, i’m down to only three more that i need. not counting mor extras for parts, although ideas will be course be limited for lack of new parts to work with.

what could possibly fill the void of simply combined customizable toys? well, besides the ever present monstrously large idea-fest that is Lego, there’s the new microforce figures, and a ton of imaginext toys i want. i just realized the imaginext pirate ship is only $25, which when combined with the other two pirate playsets ($30 and $40) will make an awesomely weird pirate world unit. not to mention the new line of dinosaurs that hasn’t made it to portland yet, but which i saw at the south hill tru up north. the cavemen figures are totally good and represent a wide variety of early cultures, while the large dinosaurs are actually really well articulated despite their totally playskool type sculpts.

i don’t know if i’ve talked before about how much i love imaginext, but it fills the same kind of creative void xevoz did. lego is its own thing with almost infinite potential, but sometimes that can actually be too much freedom. my lego ideas tend to be so ridiculous that i have to either try to apply them to one of legos existing themes, or else create a new theme, like putting them into the stargate universe or somesuch. without that to rein me in i’d want to do things like the moonbase project all on my own.

i run into the same trouble with writing, which is why i do so many bastard sequels or reimaginings. i find it helpful to work within a preexisting framework of ideas, which gives me inherent limitations for which kinds of ideas work for a specific project. eventually i tend to find those limitations restraining at which point the idea may break away from the source material and become its own thing. but by that time the idea will have generated enough mass that it now posesses it’s own framework and has it’s own rules of what will and won’t work in that universe.

xevoz provides a built-in restraint that you are working with action figures of people. add too much stuff to a person and you lose the concept for all the clutter. (something mcfarlanes designers could use a few more lessons in…) imaginext did the opposite, playskool type figures with modular environments. the essence of both is simplicity of design and complete interchangability of parts. there is a finite number of existing parts for use, but even within those restrictions there is a ton of room for creativity.

if i were more crafty and liked using clays and paints to alter the existing parts, i’d have even more options, but don’t enjoy that kind of thing. the appeal of legos or xevoz for me is that i can’t do anything i want, i have to use what i’ve got. if i was sculpting and painting and altering all the time, i’d inevitably get tired of limiting myself to xevoz at all and i’d end up building everything from scratch. that or i’d get frustrated with my lousy painting skills, as i did with games workshop miniatures.

what i like about lego, xevoz, and imaginext is that the limitations of working with preexisting parts, rather than being a hindrance for creativity, is in fact a challenge to it. the limitations give you a framework for you ideas. like any other artistic medium, you just have to learn how to interpret what you want using the materials at hand.

this is what i’ve realized more and more as i look at absurd creations on brickshelf, as i marvel at the design and creativity that lets someone take parts of xevoz robots and bugs and make an angel and a demon.* at the idea that someone with a ton of black lego blocks could make a five foot replica of orthanc.

the building toy has transcended childhood and become an artistic medium of it’s own.

as for specific ideas that prompted this ramble, i filled about four pages this weekend with notes on an alpha team spycar, ogel mecha, steampunk stargate concepts, and there have been plenty of bionicle ideas lately. not to mention bionicle covenant elites and my new idea, a nano-scale model of a halo’s control room…

*scroll down to the bottom
testing…