Thoth and Hermes

Evas, dear readers! These are the vaguely monstrous biomechanical mechas from the popular legendary mecha animu "Neon Genesis Evangelion", which was about tweenage emos who pilot mechas to save the world from unknowable alien invaders, or something. We only managed to watch half of it! Does anyone wanna let us know how it ends? Anyway we had a lil convo with knick where he was in the planning stages of a blended wing aircraft, and it made us think of these two recent Eva mocs:

knick: this plane's going to be a bit bigger than I thought...
jonesy: uh oh
jonesy: dont make it too big to finish
jonesy: and dont make it too small that the snot required is impossible
jonesy: like aristotle, shoot for the golden mean!

One Eva is a little on the small side, and is short on the sort of impossibly organic detail that the Evas are famous for, and famously made toy makers grouse at the difficulty of producing them in collectible figure form. And the other Eva is maybe too large to ever finish. What we really need here is some sort of middle ground, stylized and achievable given the Evas' impossible lankiness and the limited parts selection of knight bus dark purple: in short, an ideal moc given the constraints of the situation. Does that mean tkh or Moko's moc is wrong, per se? Not at all.



The economic equivalent of the golden mean is called "equilibrium"; finding one great equilibrium of a whole socioeconomic system is a quixotic Holy Grail sort of journey, but finding it for a product or industry is pretty simple. Tkh's moc probably shows his equilibrium: what he can do with the skill and spare time and purchasing power available to him at the moment, and Moko's moc shows his.

We really want Moko to finish his impossible dream project though; and we actually know a pretty good way to do the joint technology! There was this rare wizzardly grimoire we happened to collect a few years back by legendary mecha builder Klaupacius. His 3 foot tall gundams were pretty much a wonder of the ancient legos world, and he sold instructions on a cd years ago. But his website is defunct and he has become a bit of a lego recluse in recent years, so it would be pretty impossible to ask Klau if we could share his instructions. And given our very limited grasp of Japanese it would be pretty impossible to tell Moko we have the answer to his engineering problem. (For the record, most of the joints are based on technic turntables and worm gears.) We're getting a bit of a Cassandra complex about it!

It would be great if there was a nice big centralized repository for lego technique knowledge for everyone to dig through and discuss. Gambort curates a flickr group called Lego Techniques, d-higdon curates one called lego math and patterns, but the user-submitted model can't really cover the techniques not on flickr satisfyingly. Remember when Brickshelf was going to shut down and there was that great scramble among lego builders to save as many favorite brickshelf folders as they could? It was like our Destruction of the Library of Alexandria! But there are all sorts of sticky issues of permissions in the way of launching a great central library, and putting in the effort and webspace and publicizing it across all the farflung subcommunities would be a monumental task. It's more than one mere lego nerd and his scarce resources can handle.

So we will stick to criticism, not because we are a pack of sour-faced bitches who love nothing better than to cackle at perceived failures, on the contrary--we know all too well the kind of paralysis perfectionism can bring. Instead, we criticize mocs because essentially we really want the builder to get better at building. So keep building your tiny moc-a-day or your impossible dream projects everyone, because we here at Twee Affect are rooting for you.