Years ago I read a book called Accelerando, by Charles Stross. Mind still reeling from it lol. There was a lot in there, but one of the things I often think about was how, in that universe, any raw material like asteroids or, say, the Moon, was a terrible waste until it was converted into processing power. I'm ok with the Moon just being the Moon but my gigantic horde of loose Lego bricks definitely seems like unrealized potential.

Luckily I have discovered Rebrickable! The best way to convert loose Lego into Awesome.

Spoiler- I also discovered BrickLink stores, the best way to acquire even more Lego so that my pile doesn't really actually seem to shrink at all...

So there's this guy that I follow on InstaGram, ScruffyBrickHerder, who is an accomplished Lego builder, and he makes what he calls 'Uglies'- mashups of Star Wars ships. They're pretty cool, the design language of Star Wars being very amenable to this sort of thing. When he posted this TIE ugly, I fell in love. So pretty! He calls it the TIE Convor, after a bird creature seen in Clone Wars, Rebels and so forth. Simultaneously cute and cool. Right up my alley- I had to build one for myself! And he was thoughtful and kind enough to post free instructions on Rebrickable. In my innocence I just started building, from step 1. Oh sweet summer child. I know better now. But this was as far as I got with the parts I had on hand before getting stuck:

Which, not a bad start, but I didn't want to just discard it as I had so often in the past doing similar things. That's where BrickLink came in. Turns out there's a guy just across the freeway from me, so I bought the parts I needed and was back in action. The best part, though, was that my daughter Pallas asked me what I was up to, and I showed her and pretty soon she was right in there, digging for parts and just being a great Lego building partner. In fact, it's become a thing for us now. More on that later! Here's another view of the finished model for now. I stole the cockpit window from Yoda's Starfighter (75168) and I feel bad but he wasn't using it so. Cheers!