[iamkroot]

I was a Lego obsessed kid through the 90s and 00s, and now I have a school age son who is similarly devoted to it. Lego today is waaaayyy cooler than it was when I was a kid.

I got the very first Lego Star Wars set, Lukes X-Wing [1], and while I loved it as a kid the newest Xwing that my son just got [2] is so much better on every level. It's bigger, more detailed, looks sleeker, and has this really clever mechanism that opens the wings synchronously when you press down on a piece.

All the new sets are this way. The care and detail that Lego puts into them has dramatically improved in the last 20 years.

He still takes them apart a few months after he gets them and builds something new. I don't think that will ever change, the thrill of making something on your own will never go away. Furthermore, the online community of people making things and sharing their creations has exploded since I was a child. We had a single user forum (LUGnet) where a small handful of people congregated. All images were uploaded to a single, tiny website (brickshelf) to be shared. Now you have youtube channels, instagram pages, tiktok creators, subreddits, you name it. The resources available for creating and sharing your own designs is massive!

1: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9yXo6HF8hTo/hqdefault.jpg 2: https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-f...