Rethinking the LEGO Tower

There’s a fundamental law to building with LEGO, especially if you’re making something original, not building to blueprints.

A LEGO creation isn’t right until it’s right.

It may take some tinkering at the edges. It may require a teardown and rebuild. It may have to sit six weeks or six months.

But it’s not right until it’s right.

Last month I built a LEGO tower at the office for my web camera. And it was fine!

Yet, every time I went to the office in the month since, I felt the need to tinker.

It didn’t look unified enough.

I didn’t feel the structure was engineeringically sound.

It was insufficiency chaotic.

So I tinkered.

I keep a container of bricks at the office for exactly this eventuality. I tried this, and I tried that. I built some things. I took them apart. I left some unfinished structures in the container.

This afternoon, in a spare half-hour, I assembled stuff.

That’s colorful! That’s chaotic! That’s structurally sound!

This is so crazy it just might work!

This will do nicely!

I anticipate no more significant tinkering… unless I come into work one morning and it’s a shattered wreck of a hundred pieces.

Unless I can integrate my LEGO business card holder into this…

?

Published by Allyn Gibson

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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