Daisy Ridley Builds A Millennium Falcon

The fine folks at Elle Magazine, which I guess is still a thing, had the clever idea of interviewing Star Wars: The Last Jedi star Daisy Ridley while she builds a Lego Millennium Falcon. I'm not sure how they'll put that in the magazine but as far as youtube content goes it's pretty cute.

Smart of them to go with the off the shelf Millennium Falcon and not the new UCS Falcon, that would have been less an interview and more of a Hoop Dreams documentary where the film crew has to live with her for the next 4 years.

You see the UCS Millennium Falcon is like 8,000 pieces and takes hours and hours to build. "It's smart. It's a smart line, and a smart crowd will appreciate it. And I'm not going to dumb it down for some bonehead mass audience!"

Happy Force Friday Everyone!

Did you know it was Force Friday today? Do you even know what Force Friday is? Basically it's the day our Disney overlords have decided to make merch for the next Star Wars movie available in stores. Some stores are doing "events" but for the most part its a big social media ploy to get people talking about cool new toys.

And no new Star Wars toy is cooler than the UCS (Ultimate Collectors Series) Millennium Falcon. It's been a good 10 years since Lego has released a UCS Falcon and this one makes the old one look like a pile of crap. It's roughly 7,000 pieces strong and will only run you about $800. I'm not going to lie, I'm tempted to buy one and store it in my garage for the next 10 years. The UCS Falcon that they made 10 years ago is incredibly expensive on the secondary market. It cost something like $300 new and now in the box unopened they can go for around $1,500.

Considering this is the second UCS Falcon they've made and it's already really expensive, I doubt you'll see that some sort of return on investment as the original set but it's still pretty tempting. Of course if my son ever found out that I bought one of these and never let him play with it he's probably kill me in my sleep. Maybe I'm better off just admiring it from afar.

The LEGO Batman Movie - "Behind the Bricks" Featurette

I'll be honest when I heard that the sequel to The Lego Movie was actually going to be a Lego Batman movie I was sort of underwhelmed. I really, REALLY like the Lego Movie and while Batman in it was funny, he was sort of a one trick pony, I was afraid that an entire 2 hours of his schtick would get real old real fast. Well, I am no longer afraid. Everything I've seen on this movie (including some of the tie in merch my son is already enjoying) is fantastic. This might just be the best version of Batman that DC/WB has ever put on film. It's certainly miles ahead of anything they've done int he last 15 years.

Handmade Christmas Cards, Now Made by Lego Robots

Oh man do I need this. I am terrible at writing any sort of card. Birthday cards, Christmas cards, thank you cards from my wedding 10 years ago that I still have but never mailed out. Sorry Brian, I really do like that radio you gave us. I listen to it almost every day. I'm a terrible friend.

Anyway this Lego Mindstorm creation is amazing. I can't imagine how much it would cost or how long it would take to program.

Lego Worlds Trailer

So if Minecraft is like Lego but for video games, what happens when you make a Lego version of Minecraft? Is it like crossing the streams?

Lego Worlds is a game that's been in development for a while, an early access version has been available on Steam for quite some time now. I always wanted to check it out but $9.99 to play a beta version of a game seems kinda silly. Anyway, it looks like the Real Deal with Bill McNeil is just about ready to ship and will be in stores in February of 2017. It looks pretty cool to me, the licensed Lego games my son love have gotten a bit stale and repetitive so I'm ready for something new.

Lego Batman, Trailer #4

It doesn't seem like there have been 3 previous trailers for the Lego Batman movie but that's what YouTube says and when has YouTube ever been wrong? I'm a bit torn on this movie, like I'm sure it's going to be hilarious and all but there already is a series of direct to video Lego Batman movies that are pretty good. The animation style is way different but the voice acting is really top notch. I wish they had used some of those voice actors, they might not be big name real actors like Michael Cera or Zach Galifianakis but being a good regular actor doesn't always translate into being a good voice actor.

Shut up Kevin you big nerd, this movie is still going to be great. Hopefully there's a good video game to go with it. I thought the Lego Movie videogame was one of the better ones in the series. Also if we don't get a cool Lego set with Robin in the short shorts and goggles what's the point of all of this? Someone get me that mini-fig!

BrickCon 2016!

You know what I love almost as much as a good Comic Book Convention? A good Lego Convention. Luckily for us we have a great one right here in our backyard, BrickCon. Every October master builders from across the country fly out to show off some of their amazing original creations. This is my 3rd BrickCon in the last 4 years and it was probably the best one. There weren't as many huge show stopper pieces as I've seen in the past (not that there weren't a few) but the originality of the builds and the sheer number of them was really off the charts this year. I took about 70 pictures so as opposed to posting them all here I've linked to an imgur album of all my photos.



The nice thing about BrickCon is that it's pretty cheap. Tickets at the door were $10, I paid more for parking than I had to pay for our tickets (thanks for taking away all the free parking near the Seattle Center Obama). As usual there were some very impressive space ships, the Normandy from Mass Effect was particularly beautiful but this year it felt like Castles Ruled the roost. Given the response this album has generated on reddit, Lego really needs to bring back the Castle line. The people are thirsty for castles.



Logan and I walked away with a cool Lego Atlantis Board Game, which I felt was a steal at $20, and a Lego Harry Potter minifigure (free with purchase!). There were a lot of vendors there of course, and while the prices weren't great they weren't gouging too bad. If you're looking for a deal at a convention you want to keep your eye out for the discontinued and hard to find sets. If you're buying the same Star Wars set you can get at Walmart you're going to pay too much. That's why I was happy to pick up the Lego Board game, they don't make those anymore and are hard to find out in the wild. I keep telling my wife that I'm pretty sure I could put Logan through college buying Lego sets and hoarding them until they go out of print and selling them on e-bay. Someone was asking $2,800 for the Ultimate Collector Series Millennium Falcon, which originally sold for about $400. That's a pretty good return on investment. It's not quite Scrooge McDuck money were talking about but that's like a weeks stay at Legoland.

Top 10 Most Wanted LEGO Sets of Fall 2016!

Wooo doogie, there are some cool Lego sets coming out this fall. Frankly, this video could just be full of the new Lego Dimension sets and it would be pretty accurate. I mean, Gremlins? The A-Team? Adventure Time? Yes and Please. The other sets on this list are pretty cool too. My son really like trains and I've been wanting to get him a Lego train for quite a while, the problem is that most Train sets are about $100 or more. This Holiday train is only 700 pieces, which is a bit smaller than most train sets. If it's only $80 or so we might have a new Christmas decoration this year.

I'll keep on dreaming for that Lego Death Star or the Disney Castle. Those are $300 sets easy. I love me some Lego but there's no way I'm spending that kind of cash on a Lego set. If I'm going to spend $300 on anything it's art and comic books at Rose City Comic Con. Less than 3 weeks away!

Warner Bros Drinks Marvel's Milkshake

Marvel was having a pretty good San Diego Comic-Con, with showy trailers for all their netflix shows plus some casting news for Agents of Shield, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and Captain Marvel. DC and Warner Bros took their "pretty good" gave it a wedgie and stuffed it in a locker with trailers for Justice League, Wonder Woman, The Lego Batman Movie, Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them, King Arthur: Legends of the Sword, and if that wasn't enough a new Suicide Squad Trailer.

As much as I would like to pad my post count for the week here's all of them. Nice to Warner Bros just post these to Youtube after they showed them at SDCC. Pretty much the best way to battle piracy is to just give it away. They've generated a ton of buzz and I kinda doubt the 6,000 or so at Hall H that got to see these first feel cheated in anyway.

Nothing about the reviews or previews or word of mouth made me want to see Superman v Batman so I still haven't seen it. A friend is letting me borrow the DVD later this week so I'll probably get to it next weekend. HOWEVER, Justice League and Wonder Woman both look awesome. I'm all on board the DC hype train. Hopefully Zack Snyder doesn't throw me off it again with more talk about Batman getting raped in prison.

Secretly Links

LEGO's BATMAN (Voice) To Host Syfy's 3-Day Live Comic-Con Coverage. Holy balls, that is one tortured title. What they mean to say is Will Arnett is going to host a show from San Diego Comic-Con for the SyFy network. I could care less about Arnett's participation, I'm just glad that someone network is doing a show from SDCC this year. Yeah, in the time it took me to write that last sentence I realized that it will probably cover Movies and TV exclusively but hey, something is better than nothing. I really miss G4's coverage of SDCC. The last two years they were still in business they did a great job. I remember one year I watched it sick from the couch and it was so fantastic. RIP G4.

Oh yeah, I saw the Angry Birds movie the other day with my son and they had the trailer for The Lego Batman Movie and it was pretty awesome. I'm really looking forward to it. Also Angry Birds was WAY better than it had any right to be. It's wasn't on Pixar's level or anything but what should have been complete crap was actually sort of enjoyable.

Say goodbye to the way the game console market works. Here's a nice think piece on just what the Xbox Scorpio and PS4.5 mean to the console market. What's happening right now is a thousand times more interesting than a couple years ago when the Xbox One and PS4 were announced. We're not just looking at new consoles with new bells and whistles we're looking a change in the way they're made, marketed and sold. Yes, you've always been able to pay a bit more for a console and get a "nicer" experience. A bigger HD, extra controller, maybe a game or two thrown it, but you've never been able to buy two consoles with vastly different specs that play the same games.

I'm going to take a shot a couple long form articles on this next week. There's so much to digest, even as someone that's kind of given up on consoles this E3 was really, really interesting.

The Buick Cascada Is A Lesson In How Much New Cars Suck For Small People. I noticed this trend the other day when I saw my mother-in law driving her Ford Escape. She looked like a child in it. I can't believe she can even see over the dash. I wanted to get a stack of books for her to sit on. Car makers need to take note, the second you can't comfortably rest your arm in the open window you've ruined the car.

There’s a shirt that lets you secretly masturbate anywhere. This is a terrible, terrible idea.

Lego Dimensions Year 2!

Lego just announced a sequel/expansion to it's toys to life game Lego Dimensions, Lego Dimensions Year 2. Looks like they're not pulling any punches, including properties like Harry Potter, The Goonies, Adventure Time, ET and the freaking A-Team.

Spoiler, I'm going to buy all the Lego A-Team sets.

My son just started playing Lego Dimensions last week. We've had it sitting in the closet for a couple months now while he earned the game, it was torture. The game itself is ok, I'd give it a solid B. By no means is it the best Lego video game and at it's original list price of $99.99 it was way too expensive. The Lego sets however are all they're cracked up to be and more. We only have two expansion packs so far, Doctor Who and Joker/Harley Quinn, they're really cool. The figures have a lot of detail and the vehicles they come with might be small but they're interesting builds with a lot of features. Hopefully with the Year 2 stuff coming out this fall I'll be able to pick up all the expansion packs I missed for relatively cheap. I'm not made of Lego money.

The Lego Batman Movie Trailer

I'm going to get all hipster on you and mention that this trailer for the upcoming Lego Batman movie technically isn't the first Lego Batman movie. There's Lego Batman, Lego Batman: The Movie and like three Justice League spin off movies, most of which focus on Batman. The Lego Batman movie just happens to be a spin off of The Lego Movie and this first one to appear on the big screen.

Ok, now that I got that out of the way I can tell you about how pumped I am to see this. The Lego Movie was fantastic, I absolutely loved it and am still massively upset that Everything is Awesome wasn't nominated for an Academy Award. Batman wasn't necessarily my favorite character in the movie but I can't imagine them doing a Uni-Kitt/Benny team up movie anytime soon, so I'll take what I can get. Frankly I'm way more excited about watching this than I am Superman v Batman. Nothing I've seen in reviews or heard about it from friends has changed my mind about seeing that one. I'd rather see Zootopia or 10 Cloverfield Lane.

LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens

The brilliant people at TT games decided the best way to tease the new Lego: The Force Awakens game was to recreate the epic first trailer for The Force Awakens trailer, with a lego twist of course. I know that I have a big soft spot for the Lego games but I can't think of a better video game trailer since that one for Dead Island. This looks hella dope. Also my son said I could get it for my birthday so yay?

Spinoff Links

Holy Bricks! I Love Everything About Lego's New Classic Batman TV Series Batcave Set. Holy (insert Lego pun here) Batman! This is a fantastic looking set. It's nearly $300 but you're getting a lot of Lego for your money. 3 vehicles, 9 mini figs and a HUGE playset with lots of features. It sure beats the pants off the Batcave set my son already has.

They really hit it out of the park with the little details on this set, from The Joker's hidden mustache to the pictures of Martha and Thomas Wayne beside the fire poles. I really hope they make more of these sets based on the old TV show. I can't imagine ever fitting this thing in my budget but I'd love to have a Adam West Batman.... I mean my son would love it.

Kurt Busiek on Loss of Public Domain. Kurt Busiek, noted comic book writer and cool guy I talked too once, had a lot of interesting takes on copyright and public domain. It's funny to think that every time something interesting is set to enter public domain the copyright laws keep getting extended. It's almost like some big entertainment company has a vested interest in keeping others from using their beloved mouse mascot.

Agents of SHIELD’s “Marvels Most Wanted”: ABC orders pilot for Marvel spinoff. So Marvel doesn't want me to watch Agents of SHIELD anymore? The show is already on my "I'm not sure I'm enjoying this anymore and there are good shows on Netflix and Amazon Prime I could be watching" list. Take away Adrianne Palicki and things are looking pretty grim.

5 Huge Products That Failed Because Of Hilarious Oversights. I like Cracked but this is a great example of how you can't always take their lists at face value. One of the items on this particular list is the IBM PCjr a computer that was a spectacular failure. Cracked attributes the failure almost 100% to the terrible keyboard the PCjr shipped with and while the keyboard was really really bad It wasn't the single thing that doomed the machine.

You could make a much stronger argument that the PCjr was ill conceived right out of the gate, targeting a market that wasn't there. It wasn't 100% compatible with the standard PC software most businesses ran so you couldn't bring work from home. It was far more expensive than offerings from Commodore or Atari AND it didn't run games very well.

It was a serious computer that couldn't handle serious software AND an overpriced hobby computer that couldn't play most games. It came with weird features no one would use like swapable ROM cartridges and a co-axial output so you could hook it up to your TV. Rumor has it that IBM intentionally nerfed it's compatibility because they were afraid of businesses buying PCjrs instead of the hgher end work stations.

Who cares if the keyboard is terrible (something they addressed almost immediately anyway), at the price they were asking (some $3,000 in today's money) why would anyone want one?

The funny thing is that the Tandy 1000, which was a huge hit, is based on a lot of the same hardware as the PCjr but by cutting the price, simplifying the peripherals and making sure it was near 100% compatible with PC software Radio Shack sold a ton. It was the perfect entry computer to the PC market, not the flawed mess IBM tried to hoist on customers.

And now both of us know way more about the IBM PCjr than necessary.

Border Links

‘Empire Records’ 20 Years Later: A ’90s Movie Unstuck In Time. Yikes... here's another one of those things that makes me feel hella old. Much like the Goonies or Clueless the cult of Empire Records has grown substantially over the last few years. Just more proof that the generation of kids stuck between X and Millennial should be called the Nostalgic Generation. We get nostalgic over anything. The stupider the better. Empire Records is a terrible movie that no one saw in the theater but I'll be damned if every Rex Manning day there aren't a dozen posts in my facebook feed about it. And I'll be double damned if I don't hit like on every one of them.

Damn the man.

LEGO Dimensions: The Kotaku Review. I'm not going to lie, I'm having a really hard time not running to the store and buying this right now. There's pretty much only two things keeping me from doing that. First, it's my son's birthday in about a month so if I'm going to drop $100 on a new game I should probably wait. Second, I kind of want it on the WiiU, a system I don't really have but have thought about trying to get the family for Christmas.

It's funny I was looking at some older posts a few days ago and I noticed that I blasted the WiiU a couple different times and now it's totally the system that I want. I'm definitely in a mode where I'd rather play Splatoon or Super Mario Maker than a new Halo or Uncharted game. Weird, huh?

18 People Who Are Clearly Having ‘One of Those Days’. These are funny. That is all.

Carl’s Jr. Border War Burger. I'm really confused with Carl's Jr commercials these days. Am I supposed to be eating the burger or having sex with it?

Lego Dimensions Launch trailer

I'm not going to lie to you, this trailer might have just cost me $100. How can I not get this? I mean, how can I not get this for me son?

No, screw it. I want to play this stupid game. I was going to wait until Christmas rolled around to see if I could get any black friday deals but I don't think I can wait that long. This Midway Arcade expansion pack is what really sold me on this:



Would you look at that set? The guy has a coke and is going to play defender. You know who love to drink coke and play defender? This guy. Plus it comes with a Spyhunter car? I LOVE SPYHUNTER. If you could somehow turn the car into a boat too, I think I'd sell a kidney to buy this.

Happy early Christmas Me Logan.

Lego Dimensions: World Collide

Here's a new trailer for that cool new Lego game that I'm probably not going to be able to afford to buy my son because there was a giant puddle of water on the floor in my garage this morning that is definitely coming from the drain pipes from the upstairs bathroom.

Have you seen how much plumbers charge? Either Christmas is canceled or we're all going to start taking showers in a bucket.

Lego First Person Shooter

This fake game footage is sadly fake. Like super sadly.

I'd pay good money to play a Lego Portal or Lego Skyrim but I'd probably wait for a Steam sale to pick up Lego Bioshock. I'll probably pass on Lego Counterstrike. That game is way to hard.

Giant LEGO Super Star Destroyer Smashed in Slow Motion

Hey it's Star Wars day. You know, because May the 4th ARGGGHHH that's so stupid. Even my son was like, Dad there's no Star Wars day. Whatever today is, here's a big old Lego Star Destroyer smashing into the ground in slow motion. It's really cool.

Here Lego, Just Take All My Money

Because everyone wants some of that sweet sweet Skylanders money, Lego just made an announcement that they would be getting into the collectible/interactive toy/video game business. They're new game Lego Dimensions will allow you to "teleport" your figures into the game just like Disney Infinity, Skylanders or Nintendo Amiibo. If you've never played on of those games congratulations on not having kids. That extra spending money must be nice.

This isn't Lego's first foray into this kind of thing. Last year they launched their Minifigures On-Line game which was a sort of Diablo clone that would allow you to use codes that came with individually packaged minifigures to play as those figures in the game. It was "free to play", so if you really wanted to have any fun with it you had to pay $9.99 a month. My guess is people who pick up Dimensions are going to find themselves spending a lot more than $9.99 a month.

For comparison I bought Logan Skylanders: Trap Team on black Friday for $39.99. I also got him an extra two characters for $9.99 a piece. Since the original purchase we've bought another character for $15.99 and 6 different Traps for $5.99 a piece. He's working his way towards an expansion pack that comes with a character, a trap and an extra level and that thing is freaking $30. Also he wants two the light and the dark expansion packs... Considering Lego is never on the cheap side of the toy aisle I'll bet Dimensions ends up being ridiculously expensive. Do they still pay you if you give blood? How much is a kidney, I'm sure I have at least one that still works.