Module Pages

I may be crossing a line with this one, even more so than what I did with Jar Jar on the Red Module, but the Castle Wall Garden Stereotype Connection Module is a pretty sweet addition to my castle overall as far as I’m concerned, bringing some humor and making one of the boring castle parts a bit more exciting.   Basically I’ve got the main modules which I keep talking about on this blog, but none of them are built to fit against each other.  All of them are assumed to have a boring little lesser wall piece, a “connection module” if you will placed between them.  To date I had built two such boring little things and while they add to the “castle” look they don’t amuse me much.  This one though, this amuses me because I got to use a collectible minifigure and make use of some of green and brown pieces I avoid in the normal modules.

Assume when seeing this that this connection module will be sandwiched between two larger modules, usually pressed back a couple bricks compared to the main modules, and that the idea here is that a bit of terrain overflows into the wall and has been turned into a useful gardening plot…   yeah yeah….  I’m crazy.

When the POP sets came out a couple years ago I knew the one thing I truly wanted was the ostrich figures.  Mission accomplished.  After getting them they sat on my desk for a long time.   I refused to box them up because I knew I would forget about them.  Finally they entered into use – into my castle setup!  Why use horses as beasts of burden when you can make cool harnesses and strap ostriches to a siege tower?

The associated siege tower stands almost as tall as the tallest module in my castle so far so this is going to look great next to it on the shelf.  The huge wheels came from a Star Wars clone trooper transport set and I rather enjoy the dynamite as sort of a steam punky thing to find in the kingdom at large.   I’ll have to populate this with figures later, but I’m pretty happy with the creation AND got things off my desk for once.

When I started anew on building my castle a few weeks back I made a very plain “yellow module” to go along with the red, blue and orange modules.  It hadn’t been touched until now because I didn’t know what to do with it, but in forcing myself to open the second half of my brick horde I’ve realised one thing I really lack in is yellow bricks.  In fact most of them I found already so that told me what had to be done – consolidate what I could find into the existing Yellow module.  So for now almost all of my yellow bricks are in this module for my castle shown below.  I think I must have acquired a good number of these from City sets, probably from dump trucks and similar stuff originally.    It’s a shame really because yellow is a nice color and I could see doing more with it, but for the moment here’s a little something something that’s full of monstrous minifigures.  I’ll probably have to stare at it for awhile to see if I’m going to keep it as is or screw with it.

This is also the only thing I’ve made so far that has stairs well though out.  The brown stairs in the center go to the third floor, and the picture doesn’t do it justice but there’s a series of yellow bricks making stairs on the back right hand side that a mummy is going up.   Part of the top floor is held together by minifigure base plates to, heh.  I had to open a new Vampire and Zombie so…. looting ahoy!

It is still under a month since I started working on the castle I promised myself I would build “one of these days” when I figured out what I wanted to build and got organised.  I have had great success in getting a move on with things as you can see from other posts on here recently but I knew I would eventually have a case of Builder’s Block – which means I would eventually loose the mental ability to figure out what to commit brick resources to at some point.  It’s my OCD for having these things built “perfectly” which is of course impossible, and it is getting in my way again.

I find myself unable to start any new modules at this point because I fear running out of bricks for other parts of the castle and it pretty much cripples me, which is rather dumb but how it makes me feel.  I have yet to put even a single Kingdom/Castle themed minifigure into the setup either, which means I am unsettled on the permanent distribution and the like as well.  It is rather a catch-22 for my brain:  I won’t know what I want to do until I am out of options but I won’t make any choices because there are still so many options.  Some toys and hobbies I’ve encountered in my life have been wonderful and allowed me to really get absorbed in them, but most at least have a point where decisions are easy or at least have good reason to be forced.  The very nature of LEGO bricks though is that they are infinitely interchangeable and imagination can run wild.  To my brain that’s so wonderful that it is damning.

Going over what I have done in the last few weeks made me realise something very important though and I think this data will help me move forward if I make use of it.  To the point:  I make the most progress when my brain is distracted.  Those first few days when I did the most I was watching a lot of TV and my hands were pretty much doing the rest in the background.  Little brain action going on, lots of progress.  Since then I’ve done most of the best things with this castle creation process only when tired or drinking alcohol.  See where this is going?  The less control I have over things the better I do.  If I had not vegetated those first few days when I started the castle modules I probably would STILL be trying to decide how to lay the first brick and another year would pass, pile of loose parts growing, progress unmoving.  And thus I have plans in the near future to put this to the test with a good dose of drinking and late night building.  I may lose a little sleep but I’m curious to know what I can pull off in a very intentionally altered state this time.