Screenshots released today of Harley Quinn from Lego Batman: The Videogame, which means this is probably what the actual minifig will look like in a kit released later on this year. I like the head, but I still think my torso design is better. 
More screenshots at Shacknews.
On a related note, I love Paul Dini’s current writing on Detective Comics. More Harley and Zatanna (in April)!
You did know I was a comic book/Lego geek, yes? ‘Cuz I would hate to have misrepresented myself.
So I may have mentioned a silly Lego minifig customization project a few posts ago. It started out with deciding that the current line of official Batman minifigs sorely needed a Harley Quinn (given that Joker, Poison Ivy and Catwoman were represented) — so I built one. Then in typical fashion it quickly spiralled out of control after surveying the rest of the DC comic book universe. So it’s been a hobby of sorts lately, getting me through the otherwise grim November doldrums. Picture of some of that work above. Batman’s the only stock character; all others designed by yours truly (well, original characters designed by DC, of course).
Construction notes in brief: those are all water-slide decals, drawn in Illustrator, printed on an Epson color inkjet. Other than Harley, I used Lazertran paper — the stuff is expensive, but great to work with, for one simple reason: on the same decal, you can choose areas to have either transparent or white backgrounds simply by choice of painting with water or oil varnish. (Why care? Inkjets generally can’t print white, relying on the color of the paper instead, and if you’re trying to keep most of the decal transparent, not being able to print white is a huge issue. Plus areas with white background also end up more opaque, so they keep the color truer if you’re sticking on a colored torso. Case in point: Superman’s chest shield would be green — yellow on top of blue — if I hadn’t painted that area with water varnish.) I was still figuring out techniques on Harley, so she ended up with Krylon Fusion paint under decals printed on cheaper (and much inferior) paper, and tiny amounts of Sculpey on parts of the hat. The bow and hammer came from BrickForge. I’ll be happy to answer any questions in comments.
Update: I’ve finished a few more characters, and started a photoset for them on Flickr.
It’s Talk Like A Pirate Day. Arrrrr. That’s little enough excuse for today’s digression about Lego string, specifically: the thicker cord used to rig pirate ships, like the Black Seas Barracuda or the Skull’s Eye Schooner.
Lego isn’t just about acrylonitrile butadiene styrene. There’s a few string and canvas elements, particularly in the Pirates line used for rigging and sails. Lately, a Barracuda was procured by yours truly, and the main mast string was completely wrong: the previous owner had replaced it with something too short, and as a consequence the jibsail wasn’t attached correctly. This was just. Completely. Unacceptable. Reading Patrick O’Brien’s novels has turned me into a rigging nerd, and if I was going to devote brain space to knowing what a brig-rigged sloop was (more or less what the larger Lego pirate ships are), I sure as heck wasn’t going to have a jib sheeted to the wind on my toy ships. Hence, a string finding expedition commenced, which started out at the local JoAnn’s fabric and Michaels’ craft store; and ended up with obsessive google searching for “nylon braided twine”. Results for the two of you who actually care:
Last week, Lego started selling their new Castle kits on their online store. Someone in Denmark must have missed the memo about Harry Potter being a bad influence on kids, because by golly they’ve one upped them. Instead of bandits or rogue knights as villians, they’ve gone for an Evil Dead theme this time around. An army of skeletons! Armed with new morning stars! And giant sweeping scythes! And a necromancer! It’s enough to make a medieval minifig collector weep.
Coinciding with my eight year anniversary at Pixar, I found out today I’m moving offices soon, to another building. Neither my current office nor my new one is in the main Pixar complex. This will be my sixth office move. This is probably about average for employees of my tenure - as productions wrap up, a lot of people get moved around at the same time. On the other hand, I’m also probably above average in terms of number of different buildings (six for six!) and zipcodes (three) that I’ve worked in.
When I moved into my current office a year ago, I discovered it was one of the few that had a steel I-beam smack in the middle of the back wall. This didn’t bother me very much, I was happy to have an office and not a cube. Then I realised the beam width was almost exactly the width of a 48-stud light grey Lego baseplate. Score! 75 2×16 plates, 25 4×12 plates, and 100 2×2 by 2×2 brackets later (all ordered from bricklink), along with a bunch of Scotch mounting squares, and all the unique minifigs in the collection had display shelving less than two feet away from where I sit, happily hidden by the I-beam sides from casual passerby. (Which I have to admit isn’t really a big concern here, no public tours in this or the next building.)
A co-worker and I were discussing Lego, there being plenty of bricks of various colors and shapes scattered about within a few feet of where I sit at work. As such conversations do, it turned to custom Lego creations of the Star Wars variety, and then to B-wings.
“What an odd ship. Was that really in the movie?” (Him.)
“Yeah. Return of the Jedi, you see a couple of them flying in during the final attack on the Death Star.” (Me.)
“What a strange nonfunctional shape for a space ship. I wonder why they’re shaped like that?”
Beat.
“Um, okay, this is probably going to scare you, but I actually know the reason for that. See, they were built by a insect race.”
“Oh.”
“I know this because I remember from playing the original X-wing on the PC. It was in the manual.”
“Oh.”
“Um, I’ll go back to work now.”
Wednesday I went to the opera to watch Manon Lescaut. Does Puccini ever put anything to music which doesn’t involve the miserable demise of the heroine? Dying of thirst (Manon - in the middle of Louisiana?!), or of consumption (La Bohème), or jumping off a tall building (Tosca), or self inflicted stabbing (Madame Butterfly), or poison (Suor Angelica - in one act!). Oh wait, I did see La Fanciulla del West last season, and technically I suppose one could count Turandot, even though who knows what Puccini intended for the ending there since he didn’t finish it himself. Anyways, Wednesday’s performance was extremely well done. In the middle of a somewhat numbing work week I was definitely in the mood for emotionally overwrought melodrama, and Carol Vaness in the lead role delivered that in spades in an amazing performance, vocally and dramatically. Jay Hunter Morris was somewhat less convincing, but then he has a pretty thin role to play (duped boy to duplicitous girl) so I can’t blame him there. And this time around, they didn’t try anything new fangled with the costumes or scenery that I could complain about.
Rosalind bought a new computer, and gave her old one to Mom. I brought it back home with me temporarily to upgrade it, so I paid the Microsoft tax for XP, and installed RAM and a new CPU. It was pretty much a no brainer to pay $46 for a new Duron 1.6 GHZ processor (Slot A motherboard) to give it a speed boost so her bridge games can go that much faster (and presumably smarter). I know this is old hat, but the price of hardware is just ridiculously cheap. Back in the day I paid Mom paid a horrendous amount of money for a pokey 386SX with 2 MB of RAM, and now look at what you can get for pennies
Friday was my sixth anniversary at Pixar. I can’t decide whether this means I qualify as a curmudgeon yet, or whether I can’t compete with others who have been there much longer than I have.
We finally got a new beta release out the door, and thinking that testing the speedups might be fun, I hacked on l2rib over the weekend, and have decided the result is worthy of being called a 1.0 release. This may seem ridiculous but Lego - yes, those not-even-close-to-resembling-skin-shaded ABS plastic Phong shaded bricks - Lego can bring a renderer to its knees provided you throw enough bricks at it. RenderMan implementors take note: LDraw and l2rib provide very useful data sets of quite arbitrary complexity. Ever think you could skip implementing all those silly quadrics with those crazy sweep angles that noone gets right on the first try? Think again: l2rib gives it to you in spades, becase Lego likes half spheres, conic sections, and cylinders upon cylinders like you wouldn’t believe. Oh, and for those people who need to generate images for SIGGRAPH right about now: if you have absolutely no talent at lighting (like me), keep in mind that a hemispherical occlusion light requires no brains and is thus well worth the rendering time.
Lego has this new line of kits called World City, and they scare me. Kids see police toys made from building bricks; I see an indoctrination into an Orwellian future populated by undercover vans (black, unmarked, and sporting a camera), G-men in black suits, high tech surveillance trucks (monitoring all communications), helicopters with more prominent cameras (undoubtably for riot control) and sinister police ATVs (about to mow down some poor proletariat). Even the term “World City” sounds vaguely ominous. However we should also note the Danish refusal to join the European Union, so maybe this is just their tongue in cheek commentary on globalisation. Of course I had to buy a couple of these kits.
I finally finished the flooring project: before, during, after. I’m pretty proud of the result. The worst part was the last part: applying sealant to the seams. Not only was it tedious work, but the stuff was super toxic and I nearly passed out from the fumes until I discovered the only window in the room actually had to be propped open in order to stay open.
I wish I had something better to blog about, but it’s hard to avoid devolving into writing about why and how disgruntled I’ve been at work for the last month, something that would probably just be pointless and would get me in trouble. I have certainly showing been signs of stress - not just crankiness, but total exhaustion at the end of the day. The worst of it was last week when I fell asleep while standing at the bus stop on the way home. A couple of mornings later I searched for keys and discovered that I had left them in the front door lock the previous evening. I am now on a one coke/two coffees a day habit that I can’t seem to shake; yes, this is pitiful by university standards, but I was getting along just fine on one coffee for a while. Vacation can’t come soon enough.
Anyone looking for l2rib should note that I finally fixed the download links. The files they used to point to were certainly present on mac.com’s disks, the corresponding web service was just refusing to acknowledge their existence - until I shortened the filenames. Sorry about that.
By the way, I’m also aware that the address www.levork.org/l2rib.html actually doesn’t point at the right page; it gets you back here. Unfortunately I can’t do much about that for now - the URL redirection service at register.com isn’t very intelligent.
So, has anyone besides me actually made a picture with this thing?
There’s thunder and lightning outside at the moment, and I can’t watch TV - taping Black Adder for Mimi - so it’s back to updating.
Spent some idle time last week building a juice can-powered trebuchet out of Lego bricks, of course, from the collection that I hauled back from Vancouver. The first prototype pictured on the right fires a clump of six 2×4 bricks a good two metres; Mark suggests with a proper rope sling and a complete follow through of the counterweight, I could double that distance.
Actually been fiddling with toys a lot lately, in an attempt to avoid general depression. So along with trying to rebuild all the various Lego kits acquired by both me and sisters over the years (filling in the missing bits via Brickbay), I’ve also recently started to buy Transformers, the new Robots in Disguise series. They’re kind of spiffy, or at least the Autobots are - the Predacons (not Decepticons, this time around) really suck. C’mon, a flying squirrel? A skunk?! Soundwave’s tape rollers must be spinning in his grave.
Last Saturday, I went rock climbing for the first time - put the new Berkeley Ironworks corporate membership to work and went for the introductory belay class. Turned out quite fun too, I was taught us how to put on the harness (the most troubling part, for me - couldn’t tell front from back for a while), tie myself to the toprope with a double figure-eight knot, and belay with a carabiner and ATC. I didn’t have much difficulty with the actual climbing or belaying, although there was one brief moment of terror where I was at the very top of the wall, about to descend, and I made the mistake of looking down - and it suddenly occured to me that I was both trusting in a knot I had just learned to tie ten minutes before, and trusting a complete stranger who had just learned to belay in half that time.
Nonetheless, I was hyped enough to go out and spend a couple of hours buying a harness at REI on Saturday. Now I just need a pair of shoes and a climbing partner. Anyone?
Yes, I was in Vancouver for a week at the beginning of the month - didn’t do much, and generally kept a low profile. Roz and David were in Vancouver for the first weekend, so we went out for good food (vegetarian Lebanese at Habibi’s - excellent), did a bit of hiking in Lynn Headwaters Park, and walked the dogs. After they went back to Summerland, not much was done, relatives and friends took me out for lunch or dinner and I reciprocated, spent a couple of nights out with high school and university friends - otherwise I did a lot of reading and relaxing.
12:28 AM: Why doesn’t this sort of thing happen to me (in reverse)?
