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New York City, LEGO Style 204

Posted by michael from the make-your-eyes-bleed dept.
Obiwan Kenobi writes "I know we've done LEGO links to death, but The Brick Apple is in a class all by itself. Between the 5 foot tall Empire State Building, the 50,000 piece Greenwich village or perhaps the best of all: the World Trade Center, from which this quote was taken: 'Actually, sticking together all those little 1x1 and 1x2 pieces would get VERY tedious, and after a while they would really hurt my thumbs. Each floor had over 500 little 1x1 and 1x2 pieces.' Wow."
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New York City, LEGO Style More

New York City, LEGO Style

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  • Slashdotted already... (Score:5, Funny)

    by WIAKywbfatw ( 307557 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @02:57AM (#7652296) Journal
    Looks like his web server's made of Lego too.

  • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Been up for about a minute and we're already getting everyone's favourite error:

    Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in /usr/www/users/smkenney/moc.php on line 31

  • Your breath smells like beef and cheese (Score:5, Informative)

    by originalTMAN ( 694813 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @02:59AM (#7652309)
    This was in the new movie Elf [elfmovie.com]. Will Ferrel decorated Macy's with a lego NYC (among other things) in honor of Santa's visit.

  • Lego and employment (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xactoguy ( 555443 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:00AM (#7652311)
    Although something like this may seem stupid or pointless at first, if I was an employer, the fact that someone had actually completed something like this would be a big point towards me hiring them. Something like this not only takes some serious drive and commitment to actually bring to completion, but especially with some of the larger models, there had to be some serious planning going into them, both excellent thigns to look for... and on a complete other note, I'm not an employer, lego rocks, and these are some serious awesome lego creations... wish that I had enough commitment to make something even a tenth as big as some of those :D
    • Yes, and it takes obsessive-compulsive disorder. Wheee!

      Boss: Hey Legoman, did you get those TPS reports?
      Legoman: Yes, and I dotted each "i" and even used the new cover!
      Boss: (Drat! Now I've got to harass someone else!) Hey, Peter, have those TPS reports for me?

      Joke. Laugh.

    • Re:Lego and employment (Score:5, Funny)

      by prockcore ( 543967 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:05AM (#7652331)
      if I was an employer, the fact that someone had actually completed something like this would be a big point towards me hiring them

      Only if you were going to hire them to build shit with lego.

      An obsession like that has got to distract them from working.

    • Re:Lego and employment (Score:4, Insightful)

      by cgranade ( 702534 ) <cgranade@gma i l . c om> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:05AM (#7652332) Homepage Journal
      Hmm... I would wonder about the man's sense of priority. Though they are cool, 500 pieces for each floor of each building? Plus, how much money would it cost? Don't mean to knock his achievement, but I don't think it yells of employability, either.
      • It would cost a lot if you actually had to buy the pieces from LEGO. The cheapest LEGO available is a 2000 piece tub for $20, or 10 cents a piece. Unfortunately, that only contains bricks, not the plates and arches needed to build a WTC model. LEGO has been very slow to offer any bulk packages at all, and even those that are offered are still very limited and very expensive (around 10 cents a piece still, but you get the pieces you want.) At 500 pieces per floor, you are looking at an absolute minimum of ab

        • Re:Lego and employment (Score:4, Informative)

          by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @11:51PM (#7657235) Homepage Journal
          > The cheapest LEGO available is a 2000 piece tub for $20, or 10 cents a piece.
          > Unfortunately

          Your mistake was buying them all new. Lego has been around for quite some time,
          and so there are a *lot* of them available in secondhand-toy land. When I was
          a kid, we picked up a big cardboard box of them (must have been two feet long
          by a foot wide at least, and there were maybe three inches deep of legos in
          there) at a garage sale for a couple of bucks. Granted, that's an especially
          good deal, but if you hunt around you should be able to pick up used Legos in
          good condition at well less than the new price. You'll probably still have to
          buy some new if you need specialty pieces in certain colours or whatever, but
          for just plain old ordinary regular-sized bricks that you need in bulk, you
          should be able to pick up quite a few of them used.

    • Re:Lego and employment (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Xzzy ( 111297 ) <sether@@@tru7h...org> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:28AM (#7652397) Homepage
      > wish that I had enough commitment to make something even a tenth as big as some of those :

      Not a commitment issue so much as a money one. :p

      LEGO bricks are not cheap, doing things like this (and not recycling the peices into other projects) has to be one of the more expensive hobbies you could pick.

      A 2 second google search reported a price of $40 for a box of 500 bricks, and it was one of those random color/piece collection. $40 times the 100+ floors the WTC had?

      That's a lot of disposable income.
      • mebee he gets a special discount for bulk orders?
      • It is possible to [lego.com]
        order the specific pieces you want, although the prices aren't really any better than the buckets of assorted pieces.
      • See the links from the bottom of my site: Bricklink [bricklink.com] is king!
      • I'm currently in the acquistion phase of my LEGO habit, not having built anything spectacular yet. I have accumulated about 30,000 LEGO bricks, 21,000 of which came from purchasing the 1000-piece blue "Creator" tubs which were on sale for under $15 last year at Target. I've been to Target a few times so far this holiday season and they haven't dropped below $19 yet.

        $20 for 1000 is much better than the $40 for 500 price mentioned earlier. Just look for the large blue tubs in the LEGO asile at your favori

  • Legos of Mass Destruction (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:01AM (#7652319)
    One man's Lego NY is another man's detailed 3D terrorist planning tool. We must be ever vigilant against these evil tools of teror. Ban Lego now!!

  • He's a terrorist! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:15AM (#7652363)
    See for yourself. He depicted Ground Zero in Lego, [brickshelf.com] months before the real attacks.

    Paging John Ashcroft...

  • Really weak mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by NightSpots ( 682462 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:15AM (#7652364) Homepage
    Be kind ...

    Get the zip [hmc.edu] if you can.

    Otherwise here's the index page [hmc.edu], and midtown manhattan [hmc.edu].

    If you can put these up elsewhere, that'd be much appreciated.

  • Would you break the Lego WTC? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Aqua OS X ( 458522 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:16AM (#7652368)
    When I was a kid I used to love to build giant Lego forts and smash them with lego vehicles. They were one of the few toys you could break and put back together. My Lego men always lived in a state of destruction and war, or reconstruction.

    If I had a giant lego WTC that would seriously mess with me. On one shoulder, a little Lego devil would say "toss a Lego plane into that, you can easily put it back together." And on my other shoulder a little Lego angel would say "Are you f**king kidding me?!"

    What would you do... if no one was looking?

    • Re:Would you break the Lego WTC? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I'd hire a radical group, through underground contacts, to fly a Lego plane into it, and then I would fabricate stories about Legos of Mass Destruction found far outside of Legoland in a country named Iraq. I would then bomb the shit out of that country, and sacrifice hundreds of Legoland soldier lives in the name of freedom, but truly so the Lego oil barons can have another billion Legobucks to roll around in with their Legohooker girlfriends.
    • I'd kick the Lego angel in the nads, make sure "they" weren't looking, and then see if I could have done a better job. All in the name of preparation of course...
    • I certainly would not stage the scene with the Lego President hugging the retired Lego Firefighter!

    • Re:Would you break the Lego WTC? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      screw the plane, i'm king kong. aaaaaahhhhhhhhh!!!!
    • Hmm, I'd have called this interesting or insightful. I used to do the same thing all the time - build buildings our of legos or blocks and then have armies of lego soldiers and vehicles destroy them. Just thinking about it makes me wish I had some legos right now. I guess the closest thing to that I still do is build maps for Unreal Tournament.

      Would I fly a Lego plane into a Lego WTC? Definitely, though I'd build both towers first and add dry ice to simulate smoke, and I'd probably use several planes on
  • The larger Lego structures are actually held together with super-glue on the joints, or else parts of the structure would topple under its own weight! Lego is sturdy enough for your little space ship and fire truck, but not much else. I use DUPLO. J

    • Re:Little Known Fact (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Bombcar ( 16057 ) <racbmob@bo[ ]ar.com ['mbc' in gap]> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @04:51AM (#7652560) Homepage Journal
      Not true! The Lego structures at Legoland are held together with glue, but that's because they are outdoors. Southern California Lego Train Club [scltc.org] builds with no glue! See This picture [scltc.org] for an example.

      Some "in construction" pictures available at my website. [bombcar.com] (Scroll to the bottom).

      Funny thing is, for Duplo you'd need glue. It doesn't stick together as hard as Lego does.

      • My mother is a professional LEGO builder (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Gnavpot ( 708731 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:55AM (#7652644)
        ...and has been so for something like 20 years. Just to put some weight behind my second hand knowledge. (And of course to brag of a mother with an unusual occupation.)

        I can tell for a fact that almost all structures build by the LEGO company are glued together - including the structures for indoor use.

        Further, the largest ones are internally reinforced by welded steel structures. Sometimes because they have moving parts, and sometimes because they would not be able to carry their own weight (not all LEGO structures are just vertical piles of bricks).
    • Duplo might be more structurally sound internally, but the bricks don't stick together particularly well. On the one hand, this makes sense, since it's for younger kids. My three-year-old wouldn't be able to take apart some of the Lego bricks. On the other hand, it means that anything non-simple collapses because the bricks won't hold together under their own weight, so it's a bit *more* frustrating than standard Legos would be.

  • Biggest Nerd Ever? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    He spends all his time playing with legos and sells anime DVDs over the internet. How could he get nerdier?

  • Google Cache of Sections (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheSpoom ( 715771 ) * <{ten.00mrebu} {ta} {todhsals}> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:23AM (#7652384) Homepage Journal
    Most important bits in Google cache:



    All the images (with the exception of the Greenwich Village... look them up directly on the Google cache if you want) load correctly (they're on a different server than the pages, oddly enough).
  • In the few thumbnails that are loading i can maake out lego people, is the whole thing done to that scale? That would be about 1 classic (4x2x3) lego brick equals about 1.5x.75x.5m. If these models were to that scale it would certanly be impressive.

  • Mirror (Score:5, Informative)

    by utahjazz ( 177190 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:44AM (#7652430)
    Here's a backup of the WTC page [archive.org] in the wayback machine.

    Here's another guy with a lego WTC [brickshelf.com]

    --I prefer the term "Karma Slut"
  • I've always loved them. I'm a college student now and STILL have a huge box under my bed. But what I've always wanted was legos that could be remote controlled. Mindstorms has come a long way with this. But what I want is for the little figures to move around. And I want technology that makes it so my little lego battlemechs can actually fire missiles in an attempt to hit the lego jets that my friend would be flying via remote control.

    • Re:Ah legos (Score:5, Informative)

      by Niet3sche ( 534663 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:14AM (#7652595)
      But what I've always wanted was legos that could be remote controlled.
      Aha, but you can. At least, you can if you are willing to build a bit. As part of my CSE X86 series at my undergrad hell-hole, we had to merge forces with all engineering disciplines and build lego robots, controlled through the parallel port. It's actually not as difficult as you would think, and the pinouts are quite freely available. Of course, you'll need a language with low-level hardware access, and an OS without an abstraction layer that will thwart your code.
      Besides that, the rest is reasonably simple - you build the control box, hook the sucker up to your lego creation via an umbilical cord of wires, and viola - you're running via a wire.
      Now, running R/C would be even easier. However, most standard servos that I know of (e.g. Futaba, JR, Hi-Tec) from flying R/C planes aren't likely to be what you're looking for. Rather, you can get high-performance servos for some extra dough, but hey, if it's what you want to do, then go for it. :)
      My personal recommendation on a radio? The Futaba 4-channel digital radio (model number escapes me right now). It's awesome, and you can do flaperons / etc with it, so if you ever want to do R/C flying with fixed-wing craft, you'll be in good shape.
      Hope this helps a bit -
    • Yeah, tell me about it. I have filled bookcases just with my Lego creations, and even though I'm 18, I still get the Lego mail order catalog....

  • The terrorists have already won :( (Score:3, Funny)

    by gasgesgos ( 603192 ) on Sunday December 07, 2003 @03:51AM (#7652449)
    clicking on the World Trade Center [mocpages.com],

    results in:
    MOCpages is undergoing emergency repairs. Please try back at 2:30pm Eastern Time. (19:30 GMT).

    The World Trade Center is down. The terrorists have already won :(

  • Ok, another site for you all to slashdot... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 07, 2003 @04:01AM (#7652464)
    Now that I've seen it, of course :)

    All of Sean's work [brickshelf.com]

    If you ask nicely, I might put up a mirror :)

  • This brings to mind one question... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Cyno01 ( 573917 ) <Cyno01@hotmail.com> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @04:17AM (#7652500) Homepage
    Anyone got a Godzilla suit?

  • LEGOLAND! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by gutier ( 129597 )

    Guys ... there is LEGOLAND. Many of the building are already done, and most are larger than 5 feet tall.
  • Apparently the server is hurting more than his fingers ever did: MOCpages is undergoing emergency repairs. Please try back at 2:30pm Eastern Time. (19:30 GMT).

  • New York is swell, but... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by teamhasnoi ( 554944 ) <teamhasnoi AT yahoo DOT com> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:05AM (#7652580) Journal
    does it run Linux?

    Seriously, I've always been more fascinated by things that aren't 'just' lego sculpture. Try this [google.com], or this [i8.com]

    As for buildings and 'industrial stuff, This site [texbrick.com] is pretty nifty, this [amyhughes.org] is rather impressive as buildings go, as well as (w0w) this [building-utopolis.com]. And what the hell am I still doing up?

  • Empire State Building??? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BTWR ( 540147 ) <americangibor3@ya[ ].com ['hoo' in gap]> on Sunday December 07, 2003 @05:29AM (#7652618) Homepage Journal
    Um... the Toys R' Us in Times Square in manhattan has had a 20-foot tall Empire State Building Model (as well as Chrysler Building, Statue of Liberty and i think another) since they opened in 2001. This 5-foot model, while nice, is not unique nor is it the biggest by far.

    At that TRU, they sell the Statue of Libery as a kit. I think it's like $399.98...
  • wow. if all girls into lego towers are as cute as the one next to the WTC replicate....

    yep! i think i found myself a new hobby :)
  • When I went to go watch the launch of MER-B [nasa.gov], the KSC visitor center had a Lego model of the rover [leebert.org].

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