Pointless building

So, I've had a reasonably sleepless (reasonably sleepless? What kind of stupid phrase is that? Sleeplessness is anything but reasonable), mostly uncreative week, so in lieu of the usual Illustration Friday effort (which I'll attempt to effortise tonight, assuming that my current headache will let me) please enjoy this look at one of my unfortunate obsessions.

Pointless building, yes. And I do realise that pointlessness generally belongs on my other blog. Just think of it as taking a holiday today.

I've liked building pointless objects for as long as I can remember. I probably stacked blocks as a toddler, I was definitely a Lego kid, and...

Oh hey. A quick word about Lego. Yes, I was a girl who liked Lego, and liked it long enough ago that it was just straight-up Lego and not all of those fancy themed kits you find nowadays (and you kids get the hell off my lawn...). My Lego time was spent building houses, mostly. Why houses? Well, why not?

Anyway. I had Lego, I had Canadian Logs (which were, perhaps unsurprisingly, the Canadian version of Lincoln Logs), and I'm pretty sure I also had Tinker Toys back when the pieces were still all wooden and a lot smaller than the picture in the link makes them look now.

Not dangerous at all, no.

Yeah, I liked building things. And that hasn't changed much. I still (sadly, for a person of my age) have my building toys, and when I can't be bothered to do anything constructive (ha! Constructive! I kill me) I've been known to get out my toys and just build.

It was that kind of week, boys and girls.





So. Let's introduce the toys. In the first two photos, magnetic sticks with ball bearings. There are a few different brands of these out there, and I can't remember what brand mine are so I won't bother trying to endorse anything specific.

In the third photo, coin connectors featuring exactly one hundred pennies. And yes, I did count them.

In the last three photos, a silly desk toy consisting of a magnetic base and way too many tiny little screws. So much fun to clean up afterwards. And you've just gotta love that Wave O' Screws at the bottom, right?

So what's the point of all of this?





There is no point.

Aren't you paying attention?

At least read the post title, people.

This is just something to do with my hands when I'm thinking of other things, or sometimes when I'm not thinking of anything at all.

I'm not sure why I do it. It's probably connected to the whole OLF thing, which I'm sure you'll agree with when you notice how much more it's about the patterns of building rather than the end result.

You see, I don't usually build with a reason. I build pointless things. Things that have no purpose and don't emulate anything useful.

I do like to build strong things, though.

That would explain all of the triangles and hexagons, I guess.

I also like my things to be symmetrical. They almost always are, except when I'm playing with the screws. It's hard to make them do symmetrical things.

That frustrates me, to be honest. I don't play with the screws much.

I just realised that I'm kind of letting you people into my messed-up little world here. Ah well. Yay for blog therapy.

Let's see... what else can I tell you about my toys? Not a whole lot, really.

I could mention that if you're thinking of getting into building things with pennies you should look into developing some serious callouses. The little plastic connectors are really stiff and after a while your fingers build up all kinds of annoying sore spots from forcing the things together. But then, I also have pretty wimpy hands when it comes down to it.

If anyone's wondering, at this point in the post I'm just typing enough words to maybe make all of these silly photos line up without overlapping. Serves me right for uploading them the way I did, though. If I'd made the thumbnails bigger they would have gone down the page very nicely without my having to do a thing about it...

That's got to be good enough now. I hope you enjoyed the open house, so to speak. Check back often, when we'll probably NEVER be doing this again.







Hmm. I wonder how the Little Modelling Clay Men would look doing a bit of pointless construction...