Repair Your Town... With Legos

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Sure everyone knows that New York City is the most beautiful place in the world.  But why stop there?   Artist Jan Vormann has been patching it up in a pretty beautiful way. [caption id="attachment_2983" align="alignleft" width="566" caption="Look closely bottom right"][/caption]

Check out his work.  He's also made Amsterdam, Berlin, Tel Aviv, amongst others a little bit better.  What are you going to do today?

Lego: The Force Unleashed

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Lego and Star Wars are like peanut butter and jelly.  Stop motion and YouTube are their bread.  There is such a huge supply of great work out there, we are ready to see the best of list of the genre.  For now though, we are willing to venture that this is worthy of inclusion on just such a list.  Hope The Younger wanted this placed in The Bowl but the violence is a bit intense for the young 'uns, and we are not ashamed to confess our total love of these things anyway, so it's landing here today instead.

Change Your Shirt

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You probably know Michel Gondry from either his Lego videos or solving Rubik's Cubes with either his feet or nose.  He also is responsible for popularizing "swedes" -- the home made lo-fi versions of popular films.  He's been making movies and videos forever and is always great.  Here he takes a simple idea -- a shirt with one pattern on the front and another on the back -- and weaves a very complicated dance out of it.  Make sure to stay to the end as it gets close to glorious.

8-Bit Stop Motion Trip With Legos

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Wow. Four things we like that taste great together. Don't you just love putting stuff in a bowl and mixing different ingredients together and just experimenting what it might taste like? Well, this is not that, because they clearly knew what they were doing taking the 8 bit video game look, mixing in Legos and animation and backing it with some great computer generated music. Pure fun in our bowl.

The Ultimate Lego Star Wars Epic

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We've been speculating here in our nose-filled bowls of what would be the great Lego mini-fig flick.  We are working out the plot for Alien Invasion, but the bar has been raised.  This will be in heavy rotation in our dish for quite some time I am sure.


Building the LEGO Millennium Falcon from Gizmodo on Vimeo.

Thanks Cloudal!

NYC Goes Micro Scale Lego

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Do you ever read the New York Times?  You know that paper that your folks read?  Maybe if they printed more articles like this instead just putting up on their blog then they could tap into that 8-12 year old market.  Maybe we have to talk to them.

Anyway, we do a lot of minimalist Lego building in our bowl, but this Christof Neimann dude's got it done real good.  Check out the full site as there are at least ten more than what we have included here -- and many are more pure NYC than what we've posted here.  
Micro all the way!
Big thanks to Mr. SkipHop for this one!

Micro Scale Lego

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Is LEGO the best toy ever invented or what?  Can you ever outgrow them?  You certainly can't run out of ideas of what to do with them.

We are probably now on month six of the micro scale invasion in our house.  "What's "Micro Scale"?", you ask.  Well, try building your next inspirations as small as possible with as few bricks as possible.  You've heard of Minimalist Art?  Well, this is that taken into The Realm Of Play.
Some of our faves are this rendering of Wall-E and Eve.
These are creatures of my son's creation attacking this very computer I now type on.

The Biggest Lego Set Yet!

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This is Model 10179, Ultimate Collector's Millennium Falcon. It weighs more than 20 pounds and consists of 5195 pieces. It took the builder and his son about 30 hours. The completed model is about 33" long, 22" wide and 8" tall. This video shows each step of assembly from the instruction manual.  


All I can is "wow".  I was very impressed when my son built the new Ferrari set for his Granddad this past Father's Day...

Bionicle Rock Video

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I was in high school when somehow the entire student body burst into a spontaneous version of "We Will Rock You".  I didn't like the song then, but I've witnessed it become a parody of itself to the point that I can't help but love that it now exists.

Bionicles are some sort of equivalent to that song.  Although I love watching my son create new beings with their endless combinations, and there is something truly great about how the design of the pieces practice a "complicated is cool" devotion, they also possess the same bombastic essence as Queen's clobbering beat.
I am waiting for some genius to make the great comical animated Bionicle video for us all to laugh with, but for now this clip's closing guitar solo gets some serious props.

Bizarre Buildings

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I like to think my son loves bizarre buildings, but I know I love showing them to him.  As many as there are, I want more, more, more!   I do know he's an excellent LEGO builder so all the viewing I subject him to has got to have some benefit for the boy.

Listverse is a great website, although not always as suitable for the younger set as this selection.