Hey, I'm Dave

[fallentomato]

Short Version:

I've been playing with Lego as long as I can remember. About 5-6 years ago I started focusing on building sets and characters for stop animated movies. You can see all those movies on my youtube page. I graduated from college just over a year ago and got a full time job and thus a disposable income which I mostly spend on Lego. It's been awesome. I used to be an active participant in the AFOl community but then I had a dark age, but after meeting Hinckley and all the other awesome AFOLs at Brickworld this year I have returned.

Long Version:

I am the youngest (by far) of three children and thus I reaped the benefits of my brother and sister's lego collection which included many classic space, castle and town sets. The first three lego sets I remember owning are: Basic Set 3+ (1613), Basic Building Set, 7+ (725) and Forbidden Island (6270). For many years we three all collected lego together and every Christmas we'd set up a gigantic display with all of our sets. My sister even went so far as to suspend her space ships from the ceiling with fishing line. Eventually they both grew out of it and I was left with an incredible collection at my disposal.

From my late childhood through my early teens I played Lego with my best friend. He brought most of his collection over to the Lego room in my basement and there we built empires and spaceships galore. There were ongoing epic struggles that we would act out continuing each time wherever we left off the last. The story would necessitate a gigantic space battle every so often in which most of the space ships were destroyed, then there would be a month of rebuilding and then another massive battle and so on. Eventually he too gave up on lego and my collection was increased yet again.

Some time during that period I also started lurking (and occasionally posting) on the rec.toys.lego newsgroup. You know, back in the dawn of the internet before forums were so ubiquitous and people actually used news groups. Anyway, after a few years most of the people there migrated to the Lugnet forums, but they seemed too daunting at the time. Also I was a teenager and had more important things to do, like feel awkward!

For a while my collection sat in the basement more or less collecting dust. Then a school project got me to make my first stop animated lego movie and now that I had a creative goal to justify playing with Lego I dove back into it and am very glad I did. Throughout college I was separated from the majority of my collection and only had access to a small amount of bricks that I used for making brick films. (I still haven't liberated all of that lego from my paren'ts basement, but I'm working on it.) Naturally, I am a member of Brickfilms.com, but I rarely post and don't even lurk that much.

Anyway it wasn't until I attended Brickworld this year as a registered attendee and spent four days talking with all the other AFOLs that I realized how much I had been missing out on by not being an active member of the community. So I've started a flickr account and am going to start photographing my MOCs and sharing them (something I've never done before). And I've joined up here to talk about all things Lego.

And that's my Lego life story.

[Captain Green Hair]

What a great introduction, welcome to Eurobricks!

[Hewman]

Welcome, and it shows that being the youngest child in a family sometimes has its benefits with hand-me-downs!

[Tarfful]

Hello and welcome Dave, I hope (and think) you will enjoy your stay here with us.

I have a question about your avatar- what was the inspiration for the fig?

-Tarfful

[I Scream Clone]

Hi Dave welcome to EB, looks like Hinck and Copmike's recruitment drive has paid off!

Looking forward to you MOC's

Old collections liberated On!

[fallentomato]

I have a question about your avatar- what was the inspiration for the fig?

So in the English class that spawned my interest in stop-animation there was this closet full of costumes, one of which was a panda suit. For a different project I wore the panda suit and strutted around the room and then people started calling me Pandavid and thus it was only natural to make a panda-suit minifig.

[legotrainfan]

Hi Dave'! That was a very detailed description about your LEGO passion! Welcome to eurobricks! Be happy that you were the youngest of three! I'm the oldest of three and I didn't have much LEGO at my disposal for some years. I always accompanied my mum when she visited one of her cousins. She has three sons and they had an amazing collection of space sets. So when I was 4 or 5 I enjoyed playing with their sets for hours!