Wow, I can't believe its been a whole month since
Bricks by the Bay happened, in deepest darkest Fremont. So I suppose I should get off my stupid fat arse and do a trip report, hey?!
Gary McIntire gets too close
to one of the models
The event was a great success, especially considering this was a completely new convention. Huge kudos must go to
Bill Ward and his
tireless crew for putting the whole shebang together and keeping it running smoothly!
I personally had a great time, even though I had to commute there from San Francisco every flipping day, since my family did not particularly want to do their sightseeing in Fremont (...fair enough, I guess an Indian buffet doesn't quite measure up to the Indian Island!).
Best pirate town evARRRRRGH!
Anyway, I got to meet a bunch of AFOLs, BayLUGgers and Legoland builders that I had somehow missed at BrickCon. And make them buy me food, or search through piles of unsorted pick-n-mix bricks for me, mwuhaha!
The LEGO company made a good showing, with displays of many sets, including the Toy Story 3 sets. Yes, old news now they're in the shops, but exciting at the time.
Hapless recruits at the LEGO
company sweat shop
In fact, the final prize giveaway was for all of their display models, and as the TS3 sets found excited new owners, Steve Witt was heard to cry out "You absolutely, positively cannot sell these on eBay, or I will lose my job!!".
LEGO also held a 20-something-storey high-rise Grand Emporium build, but way more exciting was a keynote speech by Mads Nipper, a LEGO executive from Billund, who gave some interesting insights into their whole product development and marketing strategies. And no-one heckled him about old brown vs new brown or possible reintroductions of the monorail system. Well, almost no-one (I'm look at you, Angus!). There was also a very interesting discussion about their prior failed attempts to market to girls.
Out of this world!
The 'Spacers' (a very loveable, hard-partying, "Bill and Ted" crowd including the likes of Andrew Lee, Fradel Gonzales, Paul Meissner and other RoninLUG members) put on a spectacular show, as Spacers usually do, including
this collaborative display featuring a mountain base hidden behind a transparent waterfall.
Other highlights for me included the Yamato battleship, an expansive pirate town diorama,
Castle section goes classical
a whole Roman town (complete with Colloseum), an amusement park collaborative display, and a Ghostbusters scene in the town area (with excellent Staypuft Marshallow man by Bill Ward). The Art section included a huge miniland scale tug boat, Joel Baker's 1:1 sculpture of his puppy, and all of my favorite stuff by Bram Lambrecht.
Some local characters...
Tommy Williamson and I hosted a brand new category for this event called
Bricks of Character, and we were
totally blown away by the quality, quantity and variety of the contributions that showed up at our table. In the end we had over 100 models ...and that's counting Angus' cubedude display as a single model! It was quite a job getting everything to fit (especially for someone as obsessive-compulsive-anal-retentive as me!). We also got to give out a few
trophies, which made us feel rather God-like, for about 5 seconds.
Who you gonna call?
I didn't attend any of the talks, games, or contests, except for a pretty decent sized
draft of one of the Prince of Persia sets. This was only my 2nd draft, so a lot of the AFOL draft nerdery was still somewhat unfamiliar (bizarre rule variations, etc, etc). However, I did score a
big old pile of what I am currently referring to at the moment as
Iain's Lego Crak (1x1 brick with an extra stud on 1 side). I cannot get enough of those things.
Pick-n-mix madness!
I also peroused the expansive vendor sections, where I picked up some obligatory BrickArms weapons for my son and a pale blue moped, pigs and kittens for my daughter. But the coolest part of the vendor area was the guy selling loose bricks, $8 per pound, from a set of gigantic crates. He literally just put down some large sheets on the floor, and emptied it all out.
What ensued can only be described as a round-the-clock stud-imprints-in-the-knees fest as we all picked our way through the sea of bricks, tossing out the occasional MegaBlok or Perler bead in disgust. I have no idea where it all came from, and don't want to know! Sadly though, I did not want to haul too much extra baggage on the plane home, so I had to limit myself to just a couple of pounds.
(...and Joel, thanks for throwing all those black 2x4's into my bag!) 
BayLUG really, really like trains!
Local TV coverage of the event was strong (I counted 6 news crews), so turnout for the 6 hours of public exhibition time was great: about 2700 people came through the doors.
The only thing that marred the experience - and I have to mention this because for me the public event is kind of the point of the entire Con - was that we actually had to turn people away 2 hours before the end,
Angus materializes to pick up
one of his many awards
because we had a hard deadline to keep with the hotel, and the queue was around the building and up into the parking structure. So sadly, some folks who came a long way and had already queued for an hour or two (in continuous rain!) had to be turned away. But the many folks that did make it in seemed very entertained. And pointy. And damp.
For thorough photo coverage, check out Flickr photostreams from
Bill Ward,
Charles Esseltine, and
Tommy Williamson.
