A Day at the Lab – LEGO Jurassic World Magazine, March 2021

While there’s still not much going on in the outside world due to the pandemic, at least the flow of LEGO magazines seems to have stabilized after it got a little stutter-y last year and so my little excursions to the local newsstand are sometimes the highlight of the week. I was definitely looking forward to the Jurassic World magazine for March, so let’s see what we have here.

The comic revolves around turning a Brontosaurus into a hungry predator due to a wrongly injected serum, which is kind of a weird concept to me, but I guess for the kids this will work, no matter what. The puzzles/ questionnaires and other activities as usual are super simple, so not much to talk about there.

The posters are excellent this time around and that goes for both the front depicted here and the reverse. Their reduced style that actually emphasizes the protagonists instead of drowning them out with too much fluff surrounding them is exactly what I think a good poster should be and it helps that this time there’s also no awkwardly translated text. Definitely worth a look and you really could hang up both.

As a small bonus/ free extra this issue comes with a sample pack of the new LEGO Jurassic World collectible trading cards and an additional limited edition “rare” card with metallic print. If you know the respective Ninjago and Star Wars counterparts you know the drill. I’m not really into collecting this stuff and my news agent has tons of these packs catching dust on the shelves, but the situation may be different elsewhere and apparently it makes Blue Ocean enough cash to justify doing it for this series as well, regardless.

As so often the highlight for me is the buildable extra. Having bought Dr. Wu’s Lab (75939) already I don’t necessarily need his minifigure again, but it’s still nice to get a bit more variety with the figures instead of the trillionth Owen. Things get more interesting with the mosquito enclosure in the amber by ways of a Trans Orange brick, which is also included in the lab set already, but you can never have enough of them. That also goes for the Tan egg, which is still a lot rarer than the White version.

The really exciting thing for me, however are the computer screen and the keyboard tile. Not for the reason that they are included at all, but rather that they represent the new late 2020/ early 2021 versions of these items which so far have only been seen in a bunch of LEGO City sets. Granted, nothing earth-shattering, but still extremely useful if like me you don’t really use stickers. It’s always good to have printed substitutes for such situations. Finally, the dino this time is Delta so even without ever having bought the T. rex vs Dino-Mech Battle (75938) you should now have a complete gang of the Velociraptors – that is except for the really exclusive grey version of Blue.

This issue is a pretty good one for multiple reasons and you can definitely buy it without much reservation even if you don’t share one of my nerdy obsessions. The posters are really nice, the play set works and the comic is okay. The only real problem you may face is your kids bugging you about buying more card packs if they develop a taste based on the free sample…

Egged all over…

This year I’m surprisingly busy with building stuff for contests pretty early in the year. That’s most definitely a sideeffect of the ongoing crisis and everyone trying to keep people distracted and engaged.

As you may have guessed already, this particular competition was themed around the Easter holidays and this is my contribution to it. I grandiosely call it “Verstecker- & Entdecker-Ei”, which roughly translates to a simple “Hide & (Re-) Discover Egg”

 

 

 

 

 

In initially I had planned something slightly different, but ultimately it became a matter of managing resources. I had way underestimated the number of pieces I might need and both my own stock and the extra parts from Bricklink I had ordered eventually ran out. Likewise, figuring out how to build the model and get a good approximation of the curvature took me longer than anticipated, especially given my own drive for savvy engineering and making things perfect.

I wanted it to have a large hollow space inside right from the outset and I wanted it also to close seamlessly, so the upside-down modular building were on the table right from the start. this is also extremely useful for transporting the model and stowing it away as separate parts and had the model ended up being even larger this would have been even more of a requirement.

The slightly irregular, asymmetrical shape is a concession to the curved building. The problem with these types of things is that you can ever only get it reasonably perfect in one direction and have to decide what’s more important to you. I in particular wanted to avoid those ugly large gaps on the corners where the two directions of the “flow” converge simply because there are no suitable bricks to fill those areas. At least for now the new 1 x 2 brick with the curved top isn’t available in Lavender like I would have needed it to fill some of those gaps.

I didn’t win anything for this as with people stuck at home there were a lot of participants, diminishing the chances of winning as a mere function of statistics, but if some user comments are to be believed, I may have been in the top ten or top twenty still, as many users liked the clean design and solid building techniques. Who knows? At least it’s a good basis and may be worth revisiting and improving some time in the future…