NWBC

[J1A3L5]

squirkim said:

Really? You all had never seen John until now. lol, don't I feel special.

You should. You are special. In fact, everyone is special. Fortunately, you are special in a good way.

squirkim said:

Also I love how there was only two females in that group pic... it is so sad. lol

I recall there being at least 5 females at the Con. Unfortunately, none my age. Pity.

steven329 said:

Wow great moc! Jail!

Thanks!

admin said:

What was it like meeting other LEGO people? I would think it would be really strange...

Ironically, it wasn't very strange at all. I was sort of unsure what to do first, as the first person I really talked to was Ry. I wasn't quite sure what to say. After that it was pretty normal, to be honest.

admin said:

So where are the pictures of your MOC?

Still untaken. I will eventually...I want the parts for my next model. I aim to be an actual contestant in CCCIII this year, and am already prototyping.

dyip90 said:

There is a picture of him and his MOC together. It looks very good.

And I don't!?

admin said:

dyip90 said:

There is a picture of him and his MOC together. It looks very good.

But that's only one picture! It's one of his best MOCs and we only have one picture!

Patience...

nannan said:

How did you transport your moc to NWBC?

...snip...

+30 bricks for sharing the pics. It would be nice if you discussed more about your trip and posted your moc.

Nannan, I chose to ignore your previous post. It was emotionally disturbing, yet at the same time abnormally satisfying to see intelligent yet questionable content on the forum. That said, if you have a hot sister and wanna hook us up, I'm available anytime she wants. Especially at 1:30AM tonight.

Anyways, I transported it on a board with little lips on two edges, sized to accomate the MOC. That's 96*56 studs, by the way. Some of the sets were won, one traded, some bought. I can go into more detail if you wish. You know I love rambling about new LEGO!

The t-shirt was designed by Bruce Lowell. On the back it has a completed ghost and NWBrickCon with 2005 behind. Pretty cool. The theme was supposedly Halloween, because last year the event fell on that weekend. Didn't quite fit this time, but it was cool. No I haven't been to any similar events, but I definitely plan to in the future. I'm ready to begin gearing up for NWBC2006 and start building!


If you want, I could give some more detailed descriptions of exactly how the 3 days went for me. That'd be cool.

-John "J1A3L5" Langrish.

[Nannan]

Jail, my suspicious post was inspired from an article in a newspaper that I picked up while on my fall break vacation (I'll post pictures of my trip as soon as I can). True, my post did encroach upon some themes, but that's what spices the humor, right? For example, it would be a sin to censor people like Keith.

It would be caring of you to tell us details of your trip; I'm sure you have a caudron of emotions to share. I'd sure like to know whether Keith's humor is overrated.

I understand that pics of your mocs are slow. I still haven't found time to process pics from my trip.

[Steven329]

Were will the CCCIII be? PLEASE AROUND NEW_YORK!

[J1A3L5]

steven329 said:

Were will the CCCIII be? PLEASE AROUND NEW_YORK!

Umm, do you know what CCCIII is?

CCCIII = Colossal Castle Contest III. The third annual castle contest at Classic-Castle. They have some pretty cool prizes. Apparently it starts In November, and probably runs through to February. The rules for this one haven't been put up, so it may be different.

Nannan, assembling my model is taking longer than I thought and I'm making it a new and better tree. SNOTTY! I will go through my entire timeline of what I can remember and details when I have time, right now I'm building a bit.

-Jail.

[Nannan]

From what I know, Brickfest isn't a long drive from NY. Also, there are two LEGO stores in the state.

Here in Texas, we have nothing. [TEXLUG meets 5 hours away from me (it's not worth the trip for a meeting)]

[Steven329]

nannan said:

From what I know, Brickfest isn't a long drive from NY. Also, there are two LEGO stores in the state.

I know! I live near one!

Umm, do you know what CCCIII is?

CCCIII = Colossal Castle Contest III. The third annual castle contest at Classic-Castle. They have some pretty cool prizes. Apparently it starts In November, and probably runs through to February. The rules for this one haven't been put up, so it may be different.

Nannan, assembling my model is taking longer than I thought and I'm making it a new and better tree. SNOTTY! I will go through my entire timeline of what I can remember and details when I have time, right now I'm building a bit.

-Jail.

I dont care what theme its in If its made out of lego it has my interest

[J1A3L5]

Umm, Steven, what I meant is that it isn't a convention or meeting. It's an online contest, much like some of the ones that have been run at LAML. It can't be "around" New York: It's online, and people from around the world can enter.

-Jail.

[Steven329]

oh well give me the link when it starts.

[J1A3L5]

Okay Nannan and others, here goes...I'm skipping the first part since I was in Victoria, but will make a small comment..


In Victoria I went to TRU to pick up a small set for Dirty Brickster, and when I turned around I saw the end of the shelf had new bonus boxes in the same setup as the originals. Big red tub with box strapped to the top, 1500 pieces. I picked up three. After opening them they looked to all be the same, and all include a lot of plates and stuff. Not quite as cool as the originals, but still awesome.

Anyways, getting over the border was a pain. They randomly pick 20 cars a day to search apparently...and we managed to be one of them. It wasn't any hassel really, just a bunch of filling out forms and wasted time.

So, I finally got to Seattle Center, and found the Northwest rooms. I first met Terri who gave me my attendee package and brick badge. Then I wandered into the display room. There were maybe 20 people in there, moving around tables, unpacking MOCs and assembling stuff. None of them I recognized, except Ry. So I wandered over to him and introduced myself. I wasn't quite sure what to say, but it was cool. I helped him put together a MOC or two, since they'd gotten pretty bashed up in shipping.

I also wandered around a bit, seeing if I recognized anyone. I met a few people: Dan Parker, Jeff Pelletier, and a few others. Then I went back to Ry since he was sorta the one I knew. By that time Bruce was there, so I met him and it was cool. We wandered around together a bit, checked out my MOC and stuff. Then I went back to see how Ry was doing and a few other spacers had joined around. I was talking to him a bit more then a couple more people turned up. Keith came along and introduced himself. Then a couple of us went off to help rebuild his ship which has been disassembled for shipping. During this time I met a couple people. Mark Neumann and Dan Rubin, specifically. Names I knew but people I'd never actually talked to.

So it went on like this for a while. Generally checking stuff out. At one point the Quarch was being assembled, and the fourth portion of it crashed upon the moonbase below:
www.brickshelf.com/gallery/j1a3l5/NWBC05/nwbc085.jpg

Then came the opening "ceremony". I don't remember too much specific about what was talked about. There were the first set of door prizes given away though. I won a black X-Pod. My mom won the technic 4WD set and a skateboard set. How unfair is that?! Anyways, that was still cool. They had a lot of prizes too.

After this came the Dirty Brickster. It's an event where everyone brings something LEGO related worth $10-20, wrapped up so only they know what it is. Then numbers are drawn and an order is picked. I was number 21. The first person picks any package to unwrap. Then the second person can choose to either steal the first person's package, or open another one. If they steal, the first person gets to choose a new package, or if it's further on in the game, steal another person's. No direct steal-backs are allowed. Anyway, it went on for quite a while. There was some joke stuff, like the plush dragon or KK2 sword. I ended up with a Flash Speeder set. Here's a pic of all the participants afterwards:
www.brickshelf.com/gallery/j1a3l5/NWBC05/nwbc057.jpg

This more or less ended the evening for me. We went back to the hotel.




That's it for my first and shortest day. Tomorrow I'll post the next portion. I hope it was an interesting read so far.

-John "J1A3L5" Langrish.

[SquirKim]

Interesting story so far John. I'd heard most of it but it was good all the same.

[Nannan]

Very interesting story, being one of the 20 unlucky cars, your mom "winning" the big set, meeting celebs...

Yes, please continue, writing can be exhaustive, so I thank you for taking time to share your experiences.

+10 bricks

[J1A3L5]

Okay fellow LAML'ers, it a bit late but I'll write the second part of the story:

It was a fairly early morning. 7-8 I think was when I got up, I got to the Con about 8:30. Not as many people were there yet, but supposedly stuff was scheduled. The schedule was basically thrown out.

The main events for the day were the Death Star II build, Wacky Races, and a few other seminars.

The Death Star II build took somewhere in the 1h20 area, though I forget the exact number. As usual it was a 10-man team, none of whom had ever done the set before. Personally, after seeing the finished model I have absolutely no interest in the set. All bley, all plates, and looks really lame when finished. Unless you're looking at it from across the room, it's highly under-whelming.
www.brickshelf.com/gallery/j1a3l5/NWBC05/nwbc111.jpg
www.brickshelf.com/gallery/j1a3l5/NWBC05/nwbc119.jpg

After that, there was the Wacky Racers. It's basically using a wooden ramp and vehicles that go down it. The goal is to get yours the furthest...no motorization allowed. There was nothing overly spectacular, but someone did make a huge round one out of curved traintrack. That was pretty cool. Partway through me and Tom ran off and put dinky little brown wagon wheels on the bottom of his castle he wanted to destroy - Put it down the ramp, and it didn't even break...even after we purposely weakened it! Also, the owner of the DSII that was speed built put it down the ramp...
Castle: www.brickshelf.com/gallery/j1a3l5/NWBC05/nwbc027.jpg
DSII: www.brickshelf.com/gallery/j1a3l5/NWBC05/nwbc030.jpg

Then it was opened to the public for a few hours. Wow. The biggest mistake of the Con: Putting SNOT on my MOC card. I did wander around a bit, but mostly stayed with my stuff showing the public. The public was actually pretty cool - A huge variety of people. We had somewhere about 300 the first day if I remember correctly. But the second day had over double that, at 700 or something...so it made up.

Finally, voting also happened. Each attendee had a little package, and each MOC had a number on it. Then there were categories. It was really lame how they did it - There were lots of vague or useless categories, but others than were far too broad. It turned out okay, but it was really poorly done.

Near the end of the night they had another talk thing, where everyone sat down. Some more doorprizes and stuff, and Gary went crazy throwing X-Pods and keychains into the crowd. Not all the categories were announced - Some of the prizes weren't completed, and the results weren't finalized. Most of them were done however, so they have many awards presented. That was about the end of night.

Also, after the awards I bought some stuff from Todd Kubo. That's where I got the bonus boxes. I also bought a PaB cup of parts from Dan Parker. And, of course, a Space Police I set from Paul.

That's about all from day 2 that I can remember now. Maybe in a month or two I'll post the final segment!

-John "J1A3L5" Langrish.

[Jamit]

That Death Star did not last long at all.

Thanks for adding more on to the "story". I'm thinking some more people might want to read this. Would it be OK if me and TheQ think about adding this to the website?

[Nannan]

Pasting details of the event is a great idea.

The race and the death star build were rather unoriginal but adequately suffice for the event. If I were to come to an event like this, I would look for interesting people and hard to find LEGO products along with new building techniques and inspirations. I'd be interested in the seminars instead of the games.

What seminar topics were discsussed and what were the prize categories?

+30 bricks jail. Very informative show.