Jongno Tower is a unique office building in Seoul designed by architect Rafael Viñoly and completed in 1999. bigcrown85 has faithfully recreated the structure in LEGO, with extensive use of transparent blue bricks. Similarly, the outer structural elements of the building use numerous LEGO struts, demonstrating that repetition is often a key element of achieving a real-world look in a LEGO creation.
Even the trees at ground level use some interesting techniques.
This is a guest post by Mike Nam. Nam is a journalist and activist from the NYC metro area. He has volunteered for observing police interactions through Cop Watch, escorted patients at abortion clinics and led a skeptics group in New York City for a time.
I have a problem with Walmart. Not necessarily every Walmart greeter, cashier, marketing associate or vice president, but I have a problem with their employer as a monolithic organization that exacerbates poverty and global labor exploitation.I have a problem with Congress. Not necessarily every rep, every staffer, but I have a problem with the institution that maintains pay-to-play style governance and gerrymandered “for life” type membership, all married with ideological gridlock.
I have a problem with Fox News. Not necessarily every writer, producer, executive or even on-air talent, but I have a problem with the network’s adherence to misinformation and spin, and the rampant bigotry and misogyny it exploits so that wealthy individuals like its CEO Ailes can continue to live a life free of consequences (including from sexual harassment).
I have a problem with my profession of journalism in general. I have a problem with the Boy Scouts of America. I have a problem with the Roman Catholic Church. I have a problem with the NFL. I have a problem with the corn-growing lobby. I have deep criticisms for and distrust of many organizations, institutions, professions, associations and corporations.
So, this shouldn’t be difficult to understand when I say I have a problem with policing in America.
I have a problem with the use of police as a revenue stream through targeted citations and civil asset forfeiture – disproportionately in poor, black and hispanic communities – often under the guise of “broken windows” policing.
I have a problem with the heavy militarization of police forces without even the accompanying military use of force restrictions.
I have a problem with the majority “good” cops that turn a blind eye or knee-jerk protect the violent, racist ones. And when members of the police come forward to do the right thing, they are shunned, careers destroyed, or even get brutalized themselves.
I have a problem with police feeding the prison industrial complex.
I have a problem because if the police are the guards of civil society, who guards the guards themselves?
Technique A:
The "Decorative Candy Drizzle Embellishment"
Step 1. Hold container in hand:
Step 2. Invert container:
Technique B:
The "Elegant Victorian Baroque Fine Lace Ornamentation"
Step 1. Hold piping bag over cake:
Step 2. Squeeze
Technique C:
The "Parisian Silk Corinthian Fancy Ribbon Embellishment"
Step 1. Hold ribbon over cake:
Step 2. Cut ribbon:
We trust these techniques will bring your cakes to new depths, bakers. Keep up the "good work."
Thanks to Anne Marie, Jill L., & Erin L. for proving it can always be worse - and when it comes to cakes, it probably will be.
*****
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One of my favorite minor characters in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books is Radagast, a wizard like Gandalf and Saruman who cares for the plants and animals of Middle-earth. I really kind of hated how Peter Jackson blew up The Hobbit into a bloated monstrosity of a movie trilogy, but I did deeply enjoy the extended screen time that Radagast had. Who can fault a sled towed by a team of enormous rabbits, handled by a man with birds’ nests in his hair? Real-life Middle-earth resident David Hensel recently built this enormous version of Rhosgobel, the house in Mirkwood where Radagast lives, for the Christchurch Brick Show this weekend.
The largest LEGO creation he has ever built, David says that the build includes twenty to twenty-five thousand LEGO bricks, and measures 77 cm (30 inches) on each side.
This bird’s eye view shows just how huge the build really is, with Radagast walking along the path on the left side of the scene. This photo also shows off David’s skill at incredibly detailed landscaping, from the varied flora at ground level to the trees around and into which the house is built.
The roof of Radagast’s house is built from the arms of Star Wars battle droids, and the whole thing includes David’s signature level of detail. Just look at the stonework around the brick-built front door, which has hinges made from minifig hands.
The whole build is modular so that David can take it to LEGO shows, and he plans to display it around New Zealand over the next year, since it’s too big to fit in his own house! You can see more pictures in David’s thread about his creation on Eurobricks, and see it in person 16th & 17th July at Horncastle Arena.
"Rotterdam, Netherlands. A girl meets a polar bear at Blijdorp zoo." Photograph: Action Press/Rex/Shutterstock." 
Before-and-after images of an astronaut’s eyes via spectral domain optical coherence tomography show choroidal folds (marked by arrows), which are similar to stretch marks. (Courtesy North American Neuro-Ophthalmology Society)From an interesting story in the Washington Post:
During Phillips’s post-flight physical, NASA found that his vision had gone from 20/20 to 20/100 in six months.More at the link.
Rigorous testing followed. Phillips got MRIs, retinal scans, neurological tests and a spinal tap. The tests showed that not only had his vision changed, but his eyes had changed as well.
The backs of his eyes had gotten flatter, pushing his retinas forward. He had choroidal folds, which are like stretch marks. His optic nerves were inflamed.
Phillips’s case became the first widely recognized one of a mysterious syndrome that affects 80 percent of astronauts on long- duration missions in space. The syndrome could interfere with plans for future crewed space missions, including any trips to Mars.
Visual impairment intracranial pressure syndrome (VIIP) is named for the leading theory to explain it. On Earth, gravity pulls bodily fluids down toward the feet. That doesn’t happen in space, and it is thought that extra fluid in the skull increases pressure on the brain and the back of the eye.VIIP has now been recognized as a widespread problem, and there has been a struggle to understand its cause — and even to study it.
Wait…I know what you are thinking, The Brothers Brick lets another sister start blogging and she gets distracted and starts posting about fashion and sewing machine techniques! Look again: the items adorning this table are life-sized scale models all built with LEGO bricks. The Singer sewing machine, glasses, scissors and tailor’s chalk are very accurately depicted using LEGO as part of an exhibition called the Tiong Bahru Show by The Brick Collective that took place at Temasek Polytechnic in Singapore.
Another scene from The Brick Collective show is a typical cafe in the 1980s with some snacks, drinks and the classic Coca-Cola sign on the wall. When I say typical, clearly this is location dependant as Green Spot, Egg tarts, Siew Mai were not on the menu in my hometown of Glasgow, Scotland in the 1980s.
If you want a closer look and images of further scaled LEGO builds that appeared in the show, then you will find more within crayonbricks album on Flickr.
It’s worth repeating what Lynna already said: the Republican party platform is made of poison.
– the platform committee endorsed constructing a wall along the U.S./Mexico border, just like Trump wants
– the committee changed “illegal immigrants” to “illegal aliens” in the text
– the committee refused an amendment that would have pushed for a restriction of magazine capacity in firearms
– they approved an amendment that would make it legal for parents to force their LGBT children to go through conversion therapy
– Children raised in “traditional” homes are “healthier.” “Children raised in a traditional two-parent household tend to be physically and emotionally healthier, less likely to use drugs and alcohol, engage in crime, or become pregnant outside of marriage,” the platform reads.
– Education includes “a good understanding of the Bible.”
– Coal is a “clean” form of energy
You don’t like Clinton (I don’t particularly care for the Clinton regime, either). You think Sanders was robbed. Ignore both Hillary Clinton and your grievances about the DNC: if you don’t vote to make sure that odious collection of lies and destructiveness isn’t put right at the top of our nation, you’re not helping.
Even with my top choice not making it on the ballot, this is the goddamned easiest election decision I’ve ever had to make in my life.
I’ve been harassed online by a demented Canadian for over 20 years. He’s still at it, but at a much lower rate, fortunately, but years ago I printed out a couple of months worth of his threats and hatred — it was a stack of hundreds of pages — and plunked it down at my local police station, and told them about the problem. They had no idea what to do.
At the height of the Catholic annoyance with my desecration of a cracker, I was getting death threats every day. I reported them to the police a few times. They shrugged.
I’ve had people send me email with specific, credible threats: they’re going to come to town on such-and-such a day. They have this weapon. They have my home address. They are going to show up at my university office.
The response? Nothing. I’ve given them names and email addresses and IP numbers. No action of any kind is taken, not even sending a warning.
I still get routine threats of maiming and abuse and murder. I’ve given up completely. I know from years of experience that the police will do nothing. I’ve heard every explanation: “It’s just social media,” they say. “Grow a thicker skin.” “We can’t do anything until they actually act.” “It’s free speech.”
I know women who experience far worse, far more often. By comparison to the police, Twitter is a model of friendly, fast-acting responsiveness to abuse and harassment, and if you know anything of Twitter, it’s a scum-sucking friend to every asshole on the internet.
But apparently, I’ve just been doing it wrong. I should have just joined the police.
Four men in Detroit were arrested over the past week for posts on social media that the police chief called threatening. One tweet that led to an arrest said that Micah Johnson, the man who shot police officers in Dallas last week, was a hero. None of the men have been named, nor have they been charged.
“I know this is a new issue, but I want these people charged with crimes,” said Detroit Police Chief James Craig. “I’ve directed my officers to prepare warrants for these four individuals, and we’ll see which venue is the best to pursue charges,” he said.
The self-serving hypocrisy is breath-taking to anyone who has had to deal with ongoing harassment on social media. For decades I’ve been told that nothing can ever be done about written threats. Suddenly that has changed now that the police are getting the same treatment.
An Illinois woman, Jenesis Reynolds, was arrested for writing in a Facebook post that she would shoot an officer who would pull her over. “I have no problem shooting a cop for simple traffic stop cuz they’d have no problem doing it to me,” she wrote, according to the police investigation. She was charged with disorderly conduct.
In New Jersey, Rolando Medina was arrested and charged with cyber harassment. He allegedly posted on an unidentified form of social media that he would destroy local police headquarters. In Louisiana, Kemonte Gilmore was arrested for an online video where he allegedly threatened a police officer. He was charged with public intimidation.
“Disorderly conduct”? “Public intimidation”? But I’ve been repeatedly told that there is no applicable charge to be made against, for example, someone who has declared that he’s going to shoot me in the head and rape my wife! This is news to me.
This is not to say I think the police should be arresting people who say rude things to me — there are serious civil liberties issues here. The article makes the point that there is legal precedent that sets a very high standard for taking action, which is fine with me.
The policing of online threats is hardly a new issue. The Supreme Court set a precedent last year when it ruled that prosecutors pursuing a charge of communicating threats need to prove both that reasonable people would view the statement as a threat and that the intent was to threaten. Elonis v. United States dealt with a man who had posted violent rap lyrics about his estranged wife; the court reversed his conviction.
The problem, though, is that the police apparently have one standard for action against people who are rude to them, and a very different standard when it comes to the people they are supposed to protect and serve. You can’t say “I have no problem shooting a cop” without being charged with a crime, but you can say “I’m going to murder PZ Myers” with no risk of even a warning.
So fuck the police. They’re worse than useless when it comes to harassment — they’re enablers of every bad behavior, except when it affects their delicate sensitivities.
Announced just last month and out on August 1st, The Brothers Brick is pleased to bring you a full review of the new 10252 Volkswagen Beetle, thanks to a special delivery from LEGO headquarters in Denmark. This new Beetle in stunning dark azure joins the dark green 10242 Mini Cooper and classic 10220 Volkswagen Camper Van in what I’m hoping is a permanent fixture in LEGO Creator sets. The set includes 1,167 pieces, and will retail for $99.99.
We’ve come to expect some solid techniques and clever tricks in the “Expert” LEGO Creator series sets, many of which are very obviously designed by the numerous builders who have disappeared from the face of the Internet only to turn up in Billund. And that’s the case here — the set was designed by the very talented Mike Psiaki, whose LEGO creations we’ve featured many, many times here on The Brothers Brick over the years — most notably one of the best LEGO X-wings ever made.
Mike’s Beetle doesn’t disappoint. The 211 steps span an instruction booklet 124 pages thick. I recently also built the new LEGO Ghostbusters (2016) Ecto 1, and it had far more complicated techniques than this larger vehicle does, but the Beetle is still full of half-stud-offset, SNOT, complex headlight and bracket geometry, and other techniques you’ll rarely if ever see in a LEGO City set.
The set comes in three batches of numbered bags, though each set of bags includes a lot more parts than your average, highly modular LEGO Star Wars set. The first set of polybags take you through step 67 as you build the chassis and some of the rear body, the second bags get you to step 119 and the front fenders.
The stickers are noteworthy for several reasons. First, they’re only placed on “common” parts (none of the dark azure pieces). Second, there’s a complete extra set of bumper stickers on the decal sheet — something I’ve never seen in a LEGO set before. Finally, the set includes spare license plates — stickers on different-colored tiles — for Germany, the US, the UK, and presumably Denmark (I have no idea).
I placed the stickers on the window at a jaunty angle, because I’m a rebel.
Oh, the azure! My God, it’s full of azure! I don’t even know where to start, so how about this brand new piece in dark azure?
While this 6x6x2 round brick appears to be the only totally new part (in other words, from a brand new mold), there are more parts in dark azure for the first time than I can list here. For example, the set includes 4 1×2 brackets in dark azure, plus 2 more of the “inverted” versions, typically only available in boring “internal” colors like light gray. Similarly, there are a whopping 30 1×2 tiles, 33 1×2 plates, 16 double-wide cheese slopes, and so on. The designers have even used the rare color in places where the bricks aren’t visible in the finished car (as long as the same bricks are also used elsewhere).
Also noteworthy is that several key pieces are printed. The VW logo on both the hood and gas cap under the hood is printed on a 1×1 round tile, and since they’re built from separate bags, you end up with two extra tiles. The top of the beer can in the red cooler (hey, it’s an “Expert” set geared toward nostalgic adults, right?) is also printed, and you end up with an extra of that tile as well.
For over a thousand parts at a hundred bucks, including hundreds of rare dark azure pieces in a huge range of shapes, you can’t go wrong here.
The set depicts a 1960’s Beetle kitted out for a day of fun in the sun at the beach. Like the charming little extras that came with the Mini Cooper, this set includes a surfboard, cooler, and even a striped beach towel. LEGO Scala Man is perfect for this set, complete with turtleneck and cargo pants.
(Note: Slightly out-of-scale LEGO Scala Man not actually included. If you want your own LEGO Scala Man — his name is “Chris” — you can pick him up new for about $5, which is just over half of what he retailed for in 2000. Not all LEGO appreciates like gold. See also, Galidor.)
All of the gear fits on a cool roof rack, with some rubber bumpers to hold everything in place.
The roof itself comes off so you can check out the mostly tan interior.
The Beetle has a surprising amount of functionality, including seats that fold forward so people relegated to the back seat can clamber in.
While the wheel doesn’t do anything (a lost opportunity for working steering, as Ralph pointed out in his review of the Mini Cooper), the Beetle includes a parking brake and manual gearshift so you can exert total control over that high-performance 40 horsepower engine.
Speaking of the engine, the 1200 cc, 4-cylinder engine appears in the same place as the Porsche 911 GT3 RS — in the back.
The hood opens to reveal the spare tire and gas tank (useful as a crumple zone in front collisions), whose cap has another printed VW logo.
Finally, it’s worth comparing this Beetle with some of its LEGO forebears. Here it is with the Camper Van, proving how wonderfully they go together.
This new Beetle is substantially smaller than 10187 Volkswagen Beetle from 2008, and has about 500 fewer parts. I know many LEGO collectors loved this older set, but I much prefer the smooth shaping and curves of the new version. Plus, DARK AZURE!!!
You can also see a few more photos in our album on Flickr.
Even though this set doesn’t include a LEGO Scala Man named Chris wearing a turtleneck and cargo pants, it’s still a pretty groovy set. For $100, you get over 1,100 pieces, including a massive amount of dark azure. In addition to great parts, a fun build, and cool play features, this is a stellar display set.
As you can probably tell already from my writeup so far, this was a joyous build that had me grinning often as I built the set. I rarely recommend buying two of a set, but I’m doing so here — buy one for the parts (I expect to see plenty of azure spaceships at BrickCon in three months), and buy one to display proudly in your LEGO room or at work — mine is going on a shelf in my office next to my Mini Cooper.
LEGO sent The Brothers Brick an early copy of this set to review. Providing TBB with products for review does not guarantee coverage or a positive review.
No Man’s Sky/70s sci-fi covers, mashed up by NeoGAF user ichtyander.
Ayrlego has been working on some medieval creations and has united them to come up with a larger diorama. The crowded display mainly depicts a market place, but a tavern and a royal building delicately occupy the background. The masonry and roof tiling on the buildings are quite elaborate. A band of pikemen, a small pen for pigs, an eastern caravan, a monument and a nice collection of flags add more detail to the scenery. And a cobblestone pavement perfectly matches the entrance of the angled royal building. Take a closer look and enjoy the special brew of fine apple cider that Ainesford is famous for!
Amazon is making tons of money by allowing cheap, counterfeit Chinese goods to be sold directly to their customers. There’s no quality control, and the scammers are doing a very good job masking the terrible quality and origin of the garbage they are selling.
Amazon should block these sellers, and protect its customers.
And now, John's Handy Reaction Gifs.
(You might want to give this post a moment to load)
When I see a date like this on a cake:
When I see bakers trying to write text speak:
When I can't tell if the cake is supposed to be dirty or not:
When someone sends in a picture of a "good" cupcake cake (patoiee!) to try and prove they're not all bad:
And finally, when Jen tries to post a cake she really shouldn't post and I have to stop her:
Thanks to Rich H., Cindi L., Candice B., Haylie E., & Amber J., who I hope appreciate the irony of my posting a cake I've been telling Jen she can't post for at least 6 years now.
*****
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A good solid door. On any space station, it’s the only thing standing between you and the dark, dangerous, cold of hard vacuum. Sad Brick‘s latest model focuses in on this essential part of any space facility — and this door certainly looks like it can take the pressure.
The vehicle and the little droid are cool, and I like the details and texture on the walls. But the door itself is the undoubted star of this show, with huge hinges and the use of slope bricks suggesting an appropriate heft. This is clearly a serious portal — not for casual opening.
This white woman’s shocking account of police brutality reveals the importance of the #BlackLivesMatter movement
Molly Suzanna shared a story on Facebook that she had never told before: when she was 19, she ran a red light while crying, then was pulled over and forcefully removed and beaten by a police officer. She explains in the letter that she believes her situation would have been even worse had she been black — and she ends the letter with an important call to action.
It’s terrible that police officers were murdered in Dallas — that was an unforgivable act of inexcusable violence. But now the police are lashing out, and it’s going to make everything worse. DeRay McKesson was arrested in Baton Rouge: he was “flagged” as a troublemaker for his role as a spokesperson and as someone who was photographing events, and tackled and thrown into jail.
Police, I beg you: stop. You are doing yourselves no favors by denying the legitimacy of the protests, and any sympathy for the genuine difficulty of doing your job is going to evaporate if you continue to confirm a reputation for brutality.
Also, the visuals are going to simply demolish the case for a valuable service that “protects and serves”. You cannot win against this.
Jonathan Bachman
I have to ask, who arrived dressed for violence and rioting? Who stands both fearless and with dignity?
If you’re one of those people who argues that it’s the criminality of the citizenry that provokes police violence, that if only black people would stop committing crimes, they wouldn’t get shot, you might want to look at the data: there is no correlation between community violence and the violence of police responses.
While some have blamed violent crime for being responsible for police violence in some communities, data shows that high levels of violent crime in cities did not appear to make it any more or less likely for police departments to kill people.
Over the past several years, police departments in high-crime cities such as Detroit and Newark have consistently killed fewer people per population than police departments in cities with much lower crime rates such as Austin, Bakersfield, and Long Beach.
Rather than being determined by crime rates, police violence reflects a lack of accountability in the culture, policies, and practices of the institutions of policing, as investigations into some of the most violent police departments in America have shown. Campaign Zero, among other initiatives, seeks to directly address the policies and practices that contribute to police violence.
Here’s another report from a black policeman that explains a lot of what is going on.
On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.
The Palace of Culture and Science is the tallest building in Poland and dominates the skyline of the Polish capital, Warsaw. Łukasz Libuszewski has not only recreated the building in LEGO but has also managed to capture his creation in a beautifully atmospheric photograph.
The building’s art deco style is achieved with clean lines, grille tiles for the tall windows and some lovely detailing using texture bricks. I particularly like the seemingly simple parts used by the builder to represent the decorative masonry atop the walls, the original architect purposefully copied this from Renaissance houses and palaces of Kraków and Zamośćthat – a tile with clip and technic gear rack.
The full sets of photographs and views of the Palace of Culture and Science can be seen on Flickr.
This is kind of awesome: cephalopods only have one kind of photoreceptor, so it was thought that they would be only able to see the world in shades of gray. Those amazingly clever camouflage tricks they pull? That was just matching intensities and textures, fooling our eyes. But now someone has figured out a way they could see color, and special bonus, it also explains those funky weird pupil shapes, like you see in the cuttlefish eye to the right.
They use chromatic aberration! We think of chromatic aberration as an imaging problem — it’s caused by the fact that the degree refraction of light is partly dependent on wavelength, so the blue light in an image focuses closer to the lens than the red light. When you focus optimally on the green wavelengths, for instance, that means that the red and blue colors form an out of focus, blurry image on top of the sharp greens, producing a pattern of color fringes around objects. They jump out clearly to me when I use the cheap student microscopes here, and are why I spent a lot of extra money getting planapochromat lenses for my microscope. They have lots of corrective glass to tweak the different wavelengths into the same focal plane.
But where I see an annoyance, cephalopods evolved an opportunity. Where an object comes into sharpest focus on the eye can actually tell you what wavelengths are — so by focusing backwards and forwards on something, they can extract a rough idea of its color.
And that leads into the next nifty explanation. Where I want to minimize chromatic aberration, cephalopods want to increase it…and as it turns out, having weird off-axis apertures causes more disparity in the focal plane of different wavelengths of light, which makes it easier to discriminate color using this mechanism.
Chromatic blur and pupil geometry. The (A) full and (C) annular aperture pupils produce more chromatic blurring (CB) than (B) the small on-axis pupil, because they transmit rays with a larger ray height h. Vertical lines show best focus positions for blue, green, and red light.
It’s settled then. Cephalopods are cleverer than we are. Or maybe it’s evolution that is smarter than we are. One of those two.
Stubbs AL, Stubbs CW (2016) Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2016 Jul 5. pii: 201524578. [Epub ahead of print]
ZCerberus will make Benny The Spaceman very happy with this huge star-base built in Classic Space colors. The model was created for Brickworld to play host to the builder’s spaceship display.
The base is very smart, with nice landing pad details and good rockwork. But take a closer look at some of the spaceships themselves…
The little Blue Jacket fighter craft is eminently swooshable, but my favourite of the collection has to be this bad boy — the Firemoth. Check out the gray-greebly-awesomeness of its wings — amazing.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, the display looks pretty cool in the dark too…
