Carbohydrates

I'm not sure I'm thrilled with how the ceiling was handled (kind of ugly over the upstairs bed, plus the dormer is fake), but the rest of it looks very nice!

My goodness this is beautiful. I absolutely love the color choices, letting most of the actual color come from the glass and adding just a splash of brightness to draw the eye. The upside-down Persian half arches at the very top of the building are very striking. The overall proportions are just perfect. I'm not actually a fan of the whips used to visually support the glass on the ground floor - just my opinion, but they feel out of place. It really doesn't detract, and this is just a fantastic build. I love it.

B-RM-09A A spite house is a building made to, well, spite somebody. They were built to obstruct paths and roads, block peoples' views, and otherwise bother people. Since they were mostly built as obstructions and space-occupiers and not actually as liveable residences, they tend to have bizarre shapes as they were designed to fit into various alleys and oddly sized or placed patches of land. My personal favorite is this one, a 7 foot wide 'house' built to keep traffic out of an alley next to the owner's larger neighboring home. You can read more about spite houses here. This is an 8 stud-wide house built to modular standards. It is fully furnished and absolutely ridiculous: from a minifig's perspective, this house is about 2 meters wide on the inside. It's three stories tall and features staircases, a fully furnished bedroom, kitchen, and living room; wooden siding on the front, and a lovely slate roof and dormer. Front entry. This is my favorite image of the bunch, since this part of the house has all of my favorite details: the slate roof, the sided front, and the door! The roof, complete with furnace and sewer vent caps and an encased central air unit. Rear patio and flower bed. The first floor contains the living room, which is furnished with a couch, end table with lamp, wooden shelf, and large TV. The kitchen sports a counter with a sink, stove, and microwave; a fridge, a table and chair, and some shelves for cups and glasses. The top floor bedroom has a nice bed, a nightstand with a lamp, and a dresser. It's hard to see in the image but the bed's headboard is actually dark gray bordered with dark tan. Totally compatible with modular buildings! Laughably tiny! It's the spite house! This was a really fun "build" once I got past the siding / front door, which I had to re-do two or three times to make it all work. The spite house contains 1,065 pieces (1,067 incl. technic pins to connect it to other modulars).

I've been busy with life, work, and a couple other hobbies, so I haven't been around or worked on anything in a long time. Well, last night I was inspired by the relatively new masonry-textured 1x2 and decided to design something that was detailed by texture, not color. I've had this idea to build a street/scene in grayscale for a while, and this is a start. I own very few bricks right now so I'm stuck building in LDD for the time being. I had two rules: 1) No color. Black, gray, dark gray, and white only. 2) No metallic, transparent, or anything but plain old solid colored bricks. I wanted stark, drab tones and didn't want to introduce anything reflective or shiny. Anyway, here's what I came up with. I figure I could write up a bunch of words about the build process and what was easy and what was difficult, but I think the photos speak better than I can!

Hello! I find myself in a bit of a financial bind, so I'm gonna go ahead and list some sets I don't really need to have around anymore to free up some cash. I'm not here to make a fortune and I don't feel like profiteering from a casual hobby I like to share with others, so I hope you'll find my prices reasonable. I'm located in the US and would prefer to ship to the US, but I'm certainly not adverse to shipping farther so long as you understand it costs more to do so! 10194 Emerald Night This set is 100% complete with all parts, figs, and accessories. The box and instructions are included as well. Stickers and bands for the engine's drive wheels were never applied, and are included. The sticker sheet is flat and perfect and the wheel bands are still sealed in their little box. This set was purchased brand new, built once, and put on display. Asking $80 for this one. 7888 The Tumbler: Joker's Ice Cream Surprise If you were to only own one set from LEGO's short lived and unfortunately timed Batman series, I would say this is the one to own, seeing as it includes the iconic Tumbler from the latest Nolan films and the ridiculously highly valued Joker fig ($40 for one fig on Bricklink). This set is 100% complete with all parts, figs, and accessories. The box and instructions are included, but not in mint condition - one instruction book has 4 pages dogeared at their lower left corners and the box has some scratches and tears along edges and a slightly concave back. Again, this is a set that I purchased new, built once, and put on display. Stickers HAVE been applied, but I assure you they've been applied spot-on perfect because I am pretty obsessive about that sort of thing. It's really hard to gauge the value of this, because I think Bricklink prices are absolutely ridiculous (charging $250 without the box? come on!), so I was thinking $160. SOLD 10182 Cafe Corner + 10185 Green Grocer + 10197 Fire Brigade + 10211 Grand Emporium SOLD This is my collection of all 4 of the modular buildings, all of which are complete with parts, figs, accessories, instructions, and boxes. Okay, so here's the deal on these. I know how much they're worth, especially Cafe Corner. I know that if I sold them one by one, they'd be worth a ton of money. Like I said, though, I'm not in this to make a fortune and I think this would be a great opportunity for someone who missed these the first time around to get a complete set, so I'm asking $600 for all four of them together - exactly what they cost brand new. I am not interested in splitting up this lot: it's all or nothing! (please ignore the extra figs scattered about in this photo, the only figs included are the 18 that come with the modular houses)

My one suggestion would be the addition of a table between the living room and kitchen, perhaps with a small TV on the end of it closest to the wall. That way, those in the living room would have a TV to watch and those in the kitchen would have somewhere to eat!

It's a recreation of the cover of Abbey Road, arguably the most famous album ever made. It's also quite good - if you find yourself with a bit of spare time, give it a listen. As for the lighting, you'll notice how the orange minifig heads don't sit flush with the round 1 x 1 bricks beneath them. The orange heads are sitting atop LEDs, the wires of which are fed through those hollow bricks. It seems a few parts have been drilled to allow for the installation of a switch. It's neat, but a bit of a hack job. With smaller LEDs and more precise drilling, I feel the assembly could have been made much more cleanly.

No need, IMO - real loading docks on factories like this are just blocks of unfinished concrete anyway! I suppose you could add yellow safety rails if you really want to tweak it a bit.

1. Plenty of users post them and many use "Western" in the thread title somewhere, so you might try searching for that. If you want to look beyond EB, there's a Western group on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/westernlego/ 2. Here are some figs I made with various torsos. Let me know if you'd like to know more about any of them: Themes, left to right: Harry Potter, Adventurers, Harry Potter, Speed Racer, Speed Racer Speed Racer, Harry Potter, Adventurers, Adventurers I've actually got more, but those are the only ones I've photographed, sorry. 3. I sure do. They've even got a derringer and a lever-action rifle in prototype stages!

I used 1 x 2 log bricks turned sideways using 1 x 1 bricks with studs on 4 sides. I hope this diagram of the bottom floor's front wall helps!

Thanks! I spent a lot of time on the furnishings, especially on the lower floor. There are a lot of details that are hard/impossible to see in the photos I've got, such as the details of the bar and the blackjack table, so I may have another go at capturing those. The lettering was made very early in the build, which forced me to build around it, making it a focal point of the outside of the building. I tend to MOC that way - do the most difficult or important parts of the build first. The rounded bits turned out to be a gigantic pain, especially because the upper balcony is entirely tiled, and there are no 1x1 dark brown tiles, but it worked itself out. The sideways log bricks were something I've wanted to do on a Western building for ages, but I just never got around to trying it. Funny thing about that, this isn't the original palate. For about half the build, I was designing it in dark brown with dark green accents, until I realized that there is no dark brown 1 x 1 round brick! I mocked up a few variations in different possible colors and ended up going with tan, and I think it's a better choice in the end, since all the brown would have been dark and overwhelming. I did leave the dividing wall on the top floor dark brown as an homage to the original design, though. I didn't even plan for it to be quite this big! It just sort of built itself that way once I started working on it. It's large, but I really like its proportions. Oh, if you knew how much time I spent on those stupid beds... It's hard to see in the photo, but the dark green is only trim around the headboard. The bulk of it is brown. Sometimes, I spend too much time working on unimportant and relatively unnoticeable details like that. I love the serif letters. They're imperfect, spaced just a little off and some are 'heavier' than others, but I love how much they look like a proper old-West font with overly large serifs (I'm an English major so I care about these things ). The lanterns were an afterthought - I borrowed them from a previous MOC and they actually obstruct the upstairs door from opening, but hey, they look ace! Thanks for all your time, comments, and kind words, everybody!

I posted this up in LDD form a while ago and ended up actually building it in July, I believe. I never got around to posting it because I didn't love how the photos came out, but at the same time, I don't really have the means to re-shoot it right now, so I hope this will suffice! Original LDD plans: The real deal: "How'n the hell do we BOTH have a full house, kings over aces? AGAIN?!" As you can see, the saloon utterly dwarfs the official LEGO western sets in scale. I attribute this to the lucrative nature of alcohol sales. Thanks for looking!

2 points: 12) Diver & Surfer Entry (Build by squiz) Absolutely incredible. Hilarious, well-built. I don't know what else to say - the idea is so basic, but the execution is phenomenal! 1 point: 8) Robot & Jungle Explorer Entry (Build by lisqr) I love the idea here, and I love the pod being buried in the ground, canted at an angle. Details like that really make it looks more natural and it's something you could've not bothered with, but I'm glad you did. I also love the greebletree. Honorable mentions to #3, which had a nice build but a kinda weak premise, and #23 for the great premise but a build that didn't quite meet the potential.

1 point each to: 14) Skier Entry (Build by Lt.de Martinet) Cute idea, well executed. The premise is funny and the grooves for the skis are inspired. 23) Vampire Entry (Build by Darkblane) Again, funny idea, and the build here is fantastic! The color scheme, though simple, grabs you immediately and everything just feels right. 34) Witch Entry (Build by Athos) I'm impressed you managed to build something so recognizable on such a small base. Wonderful use of space, which is really a what a vignette is all about to me. Great parts usage as well. Honorable mention to #22 for the lovely and clever sky.

edit: Hah whoops, nevermind.

Keep 'em in a bag somewhere. Throwing away LEGO in any quantity is a sad thing. :( Also, try your hand at MOCing sometime!

Bandits! Shot with a Nikon D3000, kit 18-55 lens with macro filters, no flash, indirect natural light. Very little editing on these - none of the usual background washing I like to do.

All of that's right here: http://peeron.com/inv/colors

SNOT is, as the name indicates, Studs Not On Top. Headlights on City cars count, a banner sticking out of a wall counts. The difference to me is whether it's being used for small details as it has been since the 70s, or whether it's being used for more complicated constructions that flow into the rest of the model, like the sideways windows and upside-down trim in Fire Brigade. SNOT has been used for decades, but advanced building techniques utilizing SNOT and LEGO's 5:2 and 6:5 ratios are much more recent - in official sets, at least. I never built complicated SNOT junk until I discovered the wonderful MOC communities on the internet, back when LUGNet was relevant and it and Brickshelf were the only places MOCs were posted. Back then, advanced SNOT construction simply didn't happen in LEGO sets and I had no idea LEGO could be put together that way. I think if I first started MOCing these days, I'd have a much more solid foundation of technique from sets like the Modulars and the LEGO exclusives. Like you said, even recent City sets have relatively advanced SNOT constructions these days - the front end of the 4 x 4 from the horse trailer farm set comes to mind.

I already plan to equip my Western Army soldiers with these. I really hope they do become available in brown, and as long as I'm hoping for things, the repeater and coach gun would look sublime in brown as well! In fact, with the coach gun, percussion revolver, and single action revolver, as well as the the upcoming bolt rifle, repeater, and musket, Western builders have it quite well these days! The only thing we need now is that derringer. :)

That's a pretty sweet club. I personally like the tan at the bottom if you can get it offset to fill that half-round window. You've absolutely nailed the "old building converted for modern usage" look.

True, but I find myself using basic bricks less as well. Actually, looking at my last big MOC, a building with about 1500 pieces, only 97 of them are basic bricks. Comparatively, there are 347 plates and 62 snot bricks (1 x 1 with studs on one, two, and four sides, headlight bricks, 1 x 4 w/ 4 studs on one side, etc). If I had to guess, I'd say I've probably used less than 150 basic bricks in all my MOCs since my dark ages and most of them are 1 x 1 bricks. I love the variety of exotic pieces available and am no longer interested in the "normal" style of making buildings. Why settle for a flat, plain wall when I know how to make it look like brick, horizontal or vertical siding, corrugated aluminum, logs, or anything else I can dream up? Today's part and color selection is an absolute luxury. For basic bricks, there are buckets and tubs, Pick-a-Brick walls, and Creator sets, especially houses, which seem designed around providing you a nice model with as many basic bricks and plates as possible.

Henry rifles don't have a forestock like that. Looks more like a Win 1866 or 94 to me. Definitely a Winchester, though. Man, I am so damn excited about a bolt-action rifle and a lever-action rifle. Now howsabout selling us that derringer that's been sittin' around for over a year? Might as well give us the trifecta of conspicuously absent Western weapons, eh? Eh?

I ended up voting: 3794 Plate Modified 1 x 2 with 1 Stud (Jumper): Earth Green (141) Dark Green 3070 Tile 1 x 1: Dark Brown (308) Dark Brown 3024 Plate 1 x 1: Dark Brown (308) Dark Brown 3024 Plate 1 x 1: Earth Green (141) Dark Green 3023 Plate 1 x 2: Earth Green (141) Dark Green Basic plates (and 1 x 1 tiles) in dark green and dark brown would be amazing. The dark green 1 x 2 plate technically exists already, but only in one set and it's crazy expensive - over a buck each on BL, I think. 50745 Vehicle, Mudguard 4 x 2 1/2 x 2 with Arch Round: Medium Stone Grey (194) Light Bluish Grey 4493c01pb07 Horse with Black Eyes with White on Two Sides: Dark Brown (308) Dark Brown 4274 Technic, Pin 1/2: Black (26) Black 3741 Stalk: Sand Yellow (138) Dark Tan x97 Minifig, Bandana: Earth Green (141) Dark Green I could do a lot with a light gray mudguard. I've wanted new horse colors for ages. Black technic half pins would be all kinds of useful. Dark tan stalks are nice for dead / deserty foliage, and a dark green bandana is probably the most specialized and limited-use thing I voted for, but dammit, I build Western and I need bandanas! As an aside, I'm very sad I couldn't vote for a brick 1 x 1 round in dark brown, because I'd LOVE to have that piece for so many reasons and applications.

I encourage you guys to vote for 50745 Vehicle, Mudguard 4 x 2 1/2 x 2 with Arch Round in light bluish gray! It'd be useful for castle decor, space detailing, and town vehicles and architecture, and it's a really glaring omission that we don't have this piece in such a basic color yet!