Yodeller

In two weeks I will hit the eight year mark on my writing streak. I have been thinking of breaking my streak for some time now. In the end I decided to at least get to that next big milestone. It would be a good time to stop writing daily. It would feel wrong to just stop at some arbitrary point. Although then I wouldn't be that far from 3000 posts.

There is still two weeks for me to change my mind. Still haven't done my final decision, but I'm pretty content it will be a good thing to do at this point. I know I could just go on indefinitely, so it has to be a conscious choice. I'm sure I won't be giving up writing completely, I just need to find another form to do it. Another challenge.

14 more posts and that's it. At least I have something to look forward after a long while.

Today, while I was drinking water I noticed a series of numbers on the bottom of the glass. It looked familiar. Sure I've drank from that glass countless times so it could as well have been just that - recognizing a number I have seen many times before. But it bothered me, and after a short thought I recalled it being a number of a LEGO set I was recently building.

I remember weird things like that easily. I wish I could remember actually important things as easily. Like people's names for example. For some reason they just doesn't seem to stick into my mind. Maybe I should start turning them into numbers or something as those seems to be easier for me to remember.

The Black Friday came and went. Sure, most of the deals are still on until Monday, but there won't be much of anything new coming on sale this time around. If you really need something this time of the year (and other similar sale seasons) is a good time to save some serious money.

You still need to be careful. Some shops still do exercise the questionable practice of driving prices up prior to these sales to make the deals look even better (or even sell at the regular price masquerading dropping price back to normal would be a good deal). This still happens here in Finland even though we have pretty good consumer protection laws in place. The shops are requires to display the lowest price of sale items from the past three months. Some shops still do it anyway, they just have to hike up the prices earlier.

This year I didn't really have anything I needed so despite some (actually) good deals I didn't buy anything. So this Black Friday I really saved a ton of money as everything was 100% off for me.

It's funny to watch old shows where they (try) to make fun of fashion of the previous decades. Sure, it worked at the time, but watching those same shows now is nothing but "making fun" of earlier styles. Of course those shows exaggerated those past styles to make it more apparent and humorous whereas they were considered trend setters for their own time.

But this requires those shows to originally be aired long enough time ago. Too recent, and it still feels moden enough not to make the distinction between current and old fashion. Or is it just that it hasn't really changed that much in the past few decades. Have we perfected the style, or is everything just become too boring when brands try to play it safe and nobody really wants to stand out.

Looking back at the last century and there was a distinct styles for each decade. You could easily tell in what time something was set just by looking how people were dressed up. Not so easy anymore on this century.

LEGO can be considered as a building sets for certain models. Some models even come with a few alternative models you can build from the pieces. Back in the old days this was quite common, but nowadays even those sets have been separated under their own subtheme.

Of course the main draw of LEGO is the creative freedom. You don't have to follow those instructions and be limited to building just that one (or few) sets. You can build almost anything and combine different sets into something new.

As I tend to put all my sets together, at least on part level both for collecting and resale purposes I tend not to use my loose pieces freely to create something completely new. Of course I could always buy all the parts for my creations, but there are so many different bricks I know I would end up in endless loop of finding the exact perfect pieces for my builds. This could end up both expensive and time consuming.

Instead, what I like to do is taking a set, usually ones that I have more than one, and creating something new using only those pieces (taking the liberty of sometimes adding a few critical pieces outside the ones from the set.