Meet a member: Lucent
Posted by Huw,
I'm still working my way though all the 'meet a member' submissions and still have about 20 in the queue, so if you've sent me one recently, don't worry, I'll get to it eventually!
Today we are taking to Michael Dayah, aka Lucent, in Tennessee, who's the creator of Ptable.com, a periodic table website.
What is your first LEGO memory?
I remember rebuilding my favourite sets over and over, like 6699 Cycle Fix-It Shop or 6378 Shell Service Station and the thrill of being placated on a family shopping trip by a set as small as 6235 Buried Treasure.
Did you have a dark age and if so what caused you to emerge from it?
My Brickset inventory shows I purchased virtually nothing between age 10 and 32. After I found all my manuals at my father’s house and bricks in a huge bin at my mother’s, I spent many weekends separating the 6200 parts back into their 56 sets and the few missing parts were recovered for $5 on Bricklink.
Then, realising I was an adult and could buy whatever I want, I got the Parisian Restaurant, which brought back all the joy Lego gave me in childhood and more. All the times I was told 'no' at Toys ‘R Us came back with a vengeance and I spent the next 5 years buying hundreds of sets!
Which set or theme has been most influential upon you, as a LEGO fan?
It’s always a unique joy to build each year’s modular building. If I could only buy one a year, that’s what I’d choose. That we have 13 years and counting of architecture that all fits together is a really underappreciated work of art. It’s what people comment most on when visiting, Lego fan or otherwise.
What are you building right now?
The sheltering in place we all need to do now is an excellent time for Lego. I’m putting together the Ideas Tree House with the summer leaves.
How do you store your LEGO?
A few, like the buildings, stay built on shelves, but everything else gets bagged up and stored in the basement after a few months. If people knew how much space they’d take up if they all stayed built, I’d probably be checked into an asylum.
Do you build MOCs? If, so what?
A children’s hospital where I volunteer added on a new building a few years back and I created a replica of it using its architectural plans which was later filmed for a TV clip. Interestingly enough, the house I now live in was designed by someone who made a Lego replica of his own house, so I may reach out to him to see if he’d like to collaborate on one of this one.
What is your favourite part?
Curved slopes like 6091 and 15068 really allowed Lego to step up their game and produce lifelike replicas. I don’t know that the 10265 Ford Mustang and 10262 James Bond Aston Martin DB5 would look any different other than colour if Lego stuck by square bricks and exposed studs.
What sets would you like LEGO to produce?
Technic is way too narrowly focused in what it’s used to make. Instead of two cranes a year, I’d like to see interesting, different machinery. I’d love to build a Lego toilet, washing machine, grandfather clock, oscillating fan, or piano (I’m anticipating the Ideas one more than anything in years).
LEGO also really needs to buy the Star Trek licence, at any price! It would be able to recoup the losses just on me buying every Enterprise, A through E!
Do you have a presence on Instagram, YouTube or elsewhere?
Yes, but I’d rather take the chance to offer up the use of a tool I made for fellow colorblind Lego enthusiasts, https://color.brick.design. Enter a set and it’ll tell you what pieces are in similar colours and how many there are, so you don’t build your Fire Brigade and hold it up to the light the next day and find you swapped dark red and reddish brown plates.
What is the availability of LEGO like where you live?
It’s great where I live, but when visiting family in Jordan, I had to do some research to find a toy store with a good selection. Luckily I did and convinced the whole family to partake in it while I was there.
Do you have any interests or hobbies other than LEGO?
Other than volunteering, which involves a lot of Lego so it may not count, I like taking photos, programming, and writing.
How long have you been visiting Brickset?
Ever since I came out of my dark ages, I’ve used Brickset. Maybe Lego people are also organised people, but without Brickset and sites like it, I would not have got nearly as deep into the hobby and found so many sets to buy, sorting by number of pieces and adding them all to my wishlist. It’s not the people on TV who are the real hoarders. If they really wanted to hoard like us, they’d organise it carefully so they could maximise their hoarding!
What's your favourite/most used feature of the site?
I keep how much I paid for sets in the ACM and store it for insurance purposes, but day-to-day, the custom flags are invaluable for marking sets as unbuilt, displayed, and stored.
Why did you choose your Brickset username?
I picked this name back in 1995 when flipping through a dictionary and have held onto it since for every site. I got so many Twitter DMs asking “since you’re inactive, can I have your handle?” that I started tweeting once a day and haven’t stopped in 8 years!
Are you a member of a LUG?
I believe I’m still on the roster of the Tennessee Valley Lego Club, which does a lot of great community events, including a life-size Lego Christmas tree display for a yearly hospital fundraiser that’s attended by 60,000 people.
Have you been to a LEGO event?
I dragged my girlfriend along to BrickFair Alabama several years ago and had a great time. I even won an Atlantis Neptune Explorer in a putt-putt competition.
Thanks Michael!
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17 comments on this article
Second the motion of star trek license, would buy all the sets af least twice (one to keep MIB and one to build)
Just wanted to say ptable is awesome.
Well done and thank you
Congratulations for replicating a real building! There are not too many and not enough of us doing this.
And also for analyzing perfectly some of the key words of our passion, like vengeance and hoarding.
Since English is not my mother language, when I first read "color blind", I was thinking you are speaking the truth about the situation when you pay for expensive sets and after building them you can unfortunately see 2-3 nuances of the same color for parts that supposed to be exactly identically manufactured in a 21st century factories.
I can totally relate to the hoarding aspect that you mention and also to the enjoyment building modulars bring, it's so nice to see how a large structure comes together brick by brick! Glad you chose Parisian Restaurant when you realized it was time to catch up with Lego, it's one of my favorite sets ever :)
"All the times I was told 'no' at Toys ‘R Us came back with a vengeance and I spent the next 5 years buying hundreds of sets!"
Ah. The joy of adulthood, right? You can buy as much Lego as you want, whenever you feel like ... you just need to pay for it yourself, and have the space in your home to put it :).
I like your adult vengeance of being, at last, able to buy any set you want to :)
Yes, but I’d rather take the chance to offer up the use of a tool I made for fellow colorblind Lego enthusiasts, https://color.brick.design. Enter a set and it’ll tell you what pieces are in similar colours and how many there are,
This sounds awesome but I think there is a fault with the link?
I have had ptable.com bookmarked for years now - its just a nice reference tool for me, so THANK YOU for that contribution! And also thank you for sharing your LEGO passion as well. :)
Thanks for sharing.
Reading about that old Shell service station of yours made me a) think I need to rebuild my own 6371 and b) how sad and incomplete the current 60257 looks by comparison.
@sjptawp said:
"This sounds awesome but I think there is a fault with the link? "
What problem are you seeing? I'll try to get it fixed right away.
Is this a Ptable appreciation thread? If so, I'm in!
I have that same Sagan/Tyson shirt.
Never would have expected the ptable website to be made by a LEGO fan, a definite surprise to welcome. Thank you for your work!
@Lucent said:
" @sjptawp said:
"This sounds awesome but I think there is a fault with the link? "
What problem are you seeing? I'll try to get it fixed right away."
The URL in the article was missing the initial 'h' in https due to sloppy cutting and pasting on my part, but it's sorted now.
I love the hoarding aspect. That is quite true I suppose. 700+ of anything seems like a lot, but when it’s categorized & organized, it doesn’t seem so bad. :P
@Lucent:
I'm curious how dim the light needs to be before "normal vision" makes black look like light-bley.
But more importantly, I see a way in which you might need to expand the range of lighting options. Color temperature in lighting makes a _huge_ difference in how pigments appear to the human eye. I personally favor using Daylight Spectrum LEDs (previously CFLs in the same spectrum) because they make it easier to read the difference between light-bley and light-grey. Under incandescent or halogen light, they become a lot harder to tell apart. Cool-White fluorescents also makes it easy to tell them apart, but those are terrible for your eyes. So "normal lighting" is a bit vague.
I'd draw the line at adding UV light to the mix because I've personally witnessed several cases where two groups of parts that all appear to be the same color look very different under UV, and I even know someone who has some red 1x2 bricks that look marbled under UV. That's besides the fact that unless it's a fluorescent or glow-in-the-dark color, they're pretty much all impossible to tell apart under UV.
@PurpleDave said:
"I'm curious how dim the light needs to be before "normal vision" makes black look like light-bley."
Right now the "dim" lighting is just a modifier value that is represented by the number 50 out of 100 you notice if tampering with the querystring.
I agree on the light color playing a significant role in discernibility, especially when I've had high CRI daylight fluorescent bulbs that made similar colors starkly different. I'll investigate the formulae to add options for temperatures representing most indoor lighting options like warm, cool, and daylight.