You’re getting this a day early because Easter!
It will be unsurprising to you that, as the owner of a LEGO city, I like miniatures. I’m not at all interested in building a giant LEGO Death Star, but I am all in when it comes to the story arc of an entire town. And something about lighting up my city transformed it from mere plastic blocks to a tiny world full of life.
In this vein, I’ve already mentioned my fascination with diorama builders, and I was thinking about it again this week when I came across this story on Bluesky:
I mean, just LOOK at these! Handpainted, not decals:
You can read more about Alex’s mind-blowing work here and see more pictures.
Painting trains is different than painting buildings. When you’re in a small town, this is the only surface you get to express yourself on; a canvas that comes in, and then travels for miles for other trainspotters to enjoy. “Even if you’ve never met an artist in person, it feels like you know them,” Kurtis grins.
I think some of my love for miniatures is that they’re almost like an optical illusion, playing with scale. I became obsessed with terrariums (terraria?) for a time after watching various tiktoks, and set about making these steps out of flat little rocks in a jar:
Some of my obsession is definitely just awe at the sheer talent from the creators involved. Marama is a local artist who makes the most extraordinary tiny things out of modelling clay. I mean, look at this:
I’ve tried a couple of kits, and I’ll be honest — the process is not something I enjoy, but the finished product is pretty cool.
I also love that electronics are getting so tiny we can now use them to accessorise incredible miniatures. In my LEGO train station, I have a fully-working electronic departure board:
This departure board is an OLED screen running Elegant Bricks code on a Raspberry Pi. You can have it show real-time actual UK train departures from any station, or in my case a variety of imaginary LEGO towns, and if you catch it at the right moment, you’ll see a train leaving from Platform 9 & 3/4.
I am still noodling on the link I shared here two weeks ago to the way screens are used in these Live Boxes. My dream is to use something like this for impossible spaces in my LEGO town (like the view down tunnels).
The absolute pinnacle of this comes from James Brown, a Wētā Workshops engineer who managed to get a working computer into the classic LEGO computer brick:
I was thinking about all of this while I was reading this piece: Tiny postboxes, working trains and Boudica’s grave: inside the secret world of the capital’s scale modelling community about miniaturists in London.
There’s a certain hopeful melancholy about these endeavours, I realise; as if by creating a scale replica you are, at least in miniature, holding on to a past that might otherwise fade. By way of a point, Ashley’s model will feature a recreation of the house that he grew up in, which is slated to be demolished at the end of the year. “My home will be gone forever,” he muses, “and will only exist in a few photos, and my model”. While you can’t stop a wrecking ball, you can create something so small that it might escape its swing.
The epitome of that melancholy might be ghostcat, who has been making miniature replicas of Christchurch buildings destroyed by the earthquake.
His favourite build was the abandoned Canterbury Sale Yards, including recreating piles of rubbish and walls covered in graffiti. "A lot of my friends are graffiti artists who would have done pieces in there originally. They came through and did little pieces in there as well, so it was layering it and trying to create a unique take on the build," he said.
Tiny graffiti. Full circle.
Anyway, I’ve just ordered a bonsai tree! Beautiful! Tiny! A play on scale! I’ll keep you posted.
If you’re old like me and remember OK Go from their original treadmill music video you should know that (a) it holds up and (b) that song’s a banger, but ALSO, they’ve kept at it over the last 16 (!) years and their new video is so clever. As I said on Bsky, if AI slop is at one end of a spectrum, this is at the other. This in-depth look into how it was made is awesome.
This is extremely me — a teacher who realised that his One Direction posters were creating a safe space for learning.
If you’re a fan of UK panel shows, you will love Last One Laughing UK (Prime, or lbr, steal it). Ten comedians are shut in a room for 6 hours and get evicted if they laugh. Stupid, simple premise, but I nearly cried I was laughing so hard when Bob Mortimer and Richard Ayoade went head to head on a speed date.
