Sadly I wasn't quite creative enough to make impressive stuff, and mostly I didn't have the requisite pieces to make much anyway. Rather expensive things, you know. 

...but some inferior knock off, yes. 

Yes, legos were. It was the only toy I ever got (and in terms of cost per hour of entertainment, were incredibly low!). 

- Things frequently got pretty messy, and lego pieces were always getting lost everywhere, my giant collection eroding with every building session, in the end - I lost the last lego, and my Amateur Structural Engineering days were over.

They were indeed alot of fun though, the most fun was when you used standard pieces and built original stuff with, rather than following some plan or layout with special pieces by some danish guy. By the way, this job of coming up with the sets and ways you could build them was a plan of me and my friend when I was about 10, we spent weeks building and looking at lego plans, and trying to muster up the nerve to call Legoland in Denmark to see if they could employ us in their big factory.

Ah, the mind of a child :D 

I STILL play with Lego, for my birthday a couple of years ago the gf bought my one of those Mindstorms robotic sets. :D

Voodoo: just think, if you'd worked on your lego skills instead of level design you could be working for Lego right now. 

I used to dream of working for Lego building stuff when I was a kid, up until the day I discovered quake mapping really, then I kinda stopped playing with them. 

i play a lot legos :) with my kid! 

I was convinced at one point in my early years that I could construct a robot with them. I would not only use tinkertoys, but raid the kitchen for small applicances and tupperware that might come in handy. I would create a big pile of these useful parts in my room ro the den, and set about work all day, or until my mom came from the kitchen screaming about where such-and-such container was. I never did make that robot. Sigh. 

i once tried to build a bong from legos... fortunately, it didn't work out.

fantasy spaceships were always cool, especially when they had a battle, were shot down and crashed into hundreds of pieces afterwards. :) 

I love you, negnegke.

Yeah I was into Lego too. Mostly Technic though. 

 

Voodoo, we're on the same page with the single-dad-who-didnt-give-a-shit-about-messes thing :D I think the freedom to utilize 3 entire rooms with my own projects really affected me... 

It seems I was less creative than you guys at that age. I played with He-Man mostly. I was really into He-Man. 

Oh lol I mean grayskull sorry there Kinn ^_~

Adam has faaaabulous hair though, right? 

GO GO GO! 

they were cool, their sqeezable heads in particular. i quickly had to discover their vulnerability to fire though, and then, on some new year's eve, they were all gibbed under mysterious circumstances...

sleazygee: lego is even more versatile. check out this useful tool for example: http://that.kicks-ass.org/~steev/teledildonics/ :P 

I wasted many an hour on those damned wonderful interconnecting plastic thingies. My crowning glory was a hugeass medieval town thing, which was completed, carefully populated and then was immediately strafed by my super-intricate Death Interceptor (which was really cool and utterly deadly, even if the wings did have a tendency to fall off a bit).

The only bad thing about lego was getting those really small thin bits off. 

That's why most of mine had teeth marks on them ;) Looking back, however, it probably wasn't the most sanitary way of removing them... 

I still have two boxes full of them (in storage, sadly.) My largest creation was a 7-story tower where the bottom two floors were castle, then there was the hospital floor, then the police station floor, and then it was just random girders and platforms.

Also: http://sauerbraten.org/new/screenshot_5409294.jpg 

I used to dream of working for Lego building stuff when I was a kid, up until the day I discovered quake mapping really, then I kinda stopped playing with them.

this is my post also. 

My legos are all still in tubs in my parents' basement. Wonder if I should go nick them some weekend and see what I can do with the entire monstrous collection now that I'm all mature and creatively trained and not so anal-retentively worried about not taking the individual sets apart and mixing up the pieces. 

Do it. 

Forget robots, I was convinced I could make a working laser or raygun of some kind purely out of lego utilising all the little coloured half spheres, and the black two inch long bendy tubes. 

Sure, but a laser or raygun couldnt do your chores. 

i've tried using legos as an adult. The problem is the old "finding that one piece" in the giant box with 10,000 pieces in it.

I think i'm permanently converted to making game levels becuase you never run out of the piece in the color you want.