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Joel Johnson wrote an article of some of his favorite Lego sets ( 50 Years of LEGO: Nine Sets I Have Known and Loved ), and the pictures inspired me to look up some of my beloved sets (you'll have to click through to see the pictures): 483 Alpha-1 Rocket Base . It came with rubber tubes for fun space plumbing. Multiple steering wheels made for vehicles that supported multiple drivers. Love those crazy transparent yellow bricks, which I'd use as a Energon cube -type resource. Also see all those kind of boomerang thingies? Three of them are being used in the box photo to support the rocket. Well, those were spaceship guns! At least in my variants. Hmmm... I guess they're more mini-handsaws than boomerangs. 6970 Beta-1 Command Base . Oh yeah, here's the megapuppy of the bunch. So many goodies here, from the flag (important for landings and exploration!) to the big screen piece (high def, natch), to those awesome clear mugs. No day in space is complete without your space ca...

I started and finished Portal tonight. Wow. That was just.. wonderful! Fun, fun.. addictive. I'm willing to bet that most people that tried it ended up spending hours (as I did) saying "Just one more level..." until finding that they'd finished the game. I loved the atmosphere. Most reviews you read talk about the dark humor, which certainly was entertaining, but what got me was the gloom of being a test subject in a capricious, arbitrary experiment. It reminded me a lot of Cube , which, again, I'll emphasize I liked for its setting, for which I was willing to endure a contrived plot and logic holes. Anyway, yeah, that feeling of being taken out of one's life and thinking of nothing but survival, escape and, eventually, revenge. Of course, the Valve/Half-Life 2 engine makes the game SUPER pretty and pretty damn realistic (it helps that there is almost none biological life in this world). While short at about 2-4 hours of play time, it's an intense couple ...