Have you suddenly found yourself with a lot of free time now that Star Wars: The Force Awakens has come and gone? Feed your Star Wars addiction with the trailer for the new series on Disney XD — Lego Star Wars: The Freemaker Adventures. The series is set in the time between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. It follows the Freemakers, a family of scavengers, and judging by the trailer it's packed with plenty of Lego-style gags from Star Wars characters old and new.While I’m more of a fan of LEGO space vehicles, I do know an amazing building creation when I see one, and this Classic Space tower by Wami Delthorn has all the right notes of a brilliant, detailed build. As a control tower for your Classic Space astronauts, it’s complete with classic grey colouring and the yellow translucent window panels. The build sits on a hexagonal base, giving a different twist to your usual 4-sided box. The picture is a bit deceiving, but this thing is quite tall! You can see the little space minifig at the bottom for a better sense of scale.
Just as impressive is the inside rooms and the working lift, both of which you can see in this short video:Tell all your friends! I’m sure that Primoz Mlakar didn’t mean to minimize your childhood…but he totally did. He has built a series of microscale versions of the earliest Space theme sets. Each build is recognizable, and packed full of nostalgia. Let’s take a look at some of these classic Space sets, starting with the iconic 928 Galaxy Explorer: Click here for more Classic Space! A pillar of the classic LEGO Space community, Mark Neumann has emerged from myth and legend to bring us Universal Explorer LL2016. This 11-foot-6-inch behemoth of a ship is complete with giant guns, a science module, a motorized ring, interior lights, a huge cargo bay big enough to fit most official LEGO sets, and over a dozen smaller vehicles stored on board. We’ve sat down with Mark to learn a bit more about this incredible creation and Mark’s journey to build it.
Click to read our interview with Mark! Don’t know how to give your new speeder a cool and trendy look? Grab some light grey, blue and yellow pieces because everything looks better in Classic Space style. Billyburg proves this simple axiom once more with a top-class makeover of the legendary Star Wars X-31 Landspeeder. This model is awesome in many ways, but I especially love to see the curved windscreen piece, which has already become an inevitable part of this particular vehicle. Let’s take a walking tour of this gorgeous spaceport, built by Stephan Niehoff. Stephan estimates it took 6 months to build. In terms of parts, he stopped counting after 9,000. Hats off to you, Stephan, because I’m quite sure I would have stopped counting parts at 10. On to our tour. You’re going to have to sit down with this and just oogle the gorgeous details, but let’s cover a few of them to get you started: The Craters: The building style gives some great angles and very smooth lines for the entire display.
Communication Tower: With the dish set to receive signals, the tower is sturdy, industrial, and excellent situated with everything anyone could need. Landing Pad: I absolutely love the textures from using the up-side-down plates here. It’s a great way to seperate it from the smooth lines of the studs-not-on-top design of the rest of the diorama. I am particularly delighted by the rocket and launch tower, with all of the access points and the rocket itself.What’s your favorite detail from the Outpost?Tell all your friends! Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics: New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries
, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works.Widely acknowledged as the first modern novel, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote features two of the most famous characters ever created: Don Quixote, the tall, bewildered, and half-crazy knight, and Sancho Panza, his rotund and incorrigibly loyal squire. The comic and unforgettable dynamic between these two legendary figures has served as the blueprint for countless novels written since Cervantes’s time.An immediate success when first published in 1604, Don Quixote tells the story of a middle-aged Spanish gentleman who, obsessed with the chivalrous ideals found in romantic books, decides to take up his lance and sword to defend the helpless and destroy the wicked.
Seated upon his lean nag of a horse, and accompanied by the pragmatic Sancho Panza, Don Quixote rides the roads of Spain seeking glory and grand adventure. Along the way the duo meet a dazzling assortment of characters whose diverse beliefs and perspectives reveal how reality and imagination are frequently indistinguishable.Profound, powerful, and hilarious, Don Quixote continues to capture the imaginations of audiences all over the world. Features illustrations by Gustave Doré.Carole Slade specializes in late medieval and early modern European literature.Her publications include St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life and Approaches to Teaching Dante’s “Divine Comedy”. She teaches Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Barnes & Noble Classics Series 5.20(w) x 7.95(h) x 2.00(d) From Carole Slade's Introduction to Don Quixote In the first few pages of Don Quixote, Cervantes had his contemporaries laughing. King Philip III remarked of a student he spotted from his balcony bursting into fits of laughter while reading a book, "That student has either lost his wits or he is reading Don Quixote."
A courtier who went to investigate found that the young man was indeed reading Don Quixote. Even if apocryphal, the remark conveys the contagious hilarity with which Don Quixote infected seventeenth-century Spanish readers. What did they find so amusing? Understanding the continuing power of Don Quixote to entertain as well as to instruct begins with answering that question. Cervantes's contemporaries would have immediately recognized Don Quixote as a low-level member of the nobility struggling to keep up appearances, always a comical endeavor. His rusty lance and rotted shield, relics of the means by which his grandparents and their forebears had acquired land, wealth, and power, now serve only as ornaments on his walls. Far from living with the ease of a gentleman, the status to which he pretends, he is tightening his belt to the point of constriction. His skimpy diet, which consumes three-quarters of his income, his "skeleton of a horse," and "starved greyhound" suggest that he lives right on the edge of his financial means.
In taking the title of don, which he does not merit because he does not own enough land, he follows a widespread practice of inflating rank with nothing more substantial than assertions. His fragile ego, which he always protects from admission of failure, suggests that he would have needed a way to avoid facing his financial bind and prospective social ruin. Like many Spaniards of his time, he finds an escape in books of chivalry. To buy his books of chivalry, Don Quixote has raised money in a way that a seventeenth-century audience would have found ludicrous: selling off good, potentially income-producing farmland. Engrossed in reading the books, he has let his house and holdings go to ruin, and he has given up hunting, a perennial pastime of Spanish aristocrats. On these points he is laughably imprudent; but soon it becomes clear that on the subject of chivalry, he has not merely gorged himself on books, but perhaps has lost his sanity. Over the course of the novel, readers slowly begin to reckon with the sobering idea that they could be laughing not at a clown or a fool, but at a lunatic, and what's more, that Don Quixote quite possibly reflects their own image back to them.
In choosing not to anchor the novel in a specific time and place, Cervantes signals that his satire will be directed not only at Don Quixote but also at his contemporary Spaniards. Don Quixote is not the only one, Cervantes suggests, who lives in a laughable, and dangerous, fantasy world. Don Quixote was as topical in its time as the most recent broadcast of Saturday Night Live is today, and it has proved as timeless as Shakespeare's King Lear and Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Seventeenth-century Spaniards are not the only ones who cannot reconcile themselves to change and decline. In most of part I, especially in the first foray, the humor of Don Quixote remains relatively benign and broad. Consider, for example, Don Quixote's appearance. On the morning he rides out of his village on Rocinante, Don Quixote wears a full suit of rusted armor and a medieval helmet outfitted with a cardboard faceguard. In addition to being more than a century out of date, obviously jerry-rigged, and completely inappropriate for the intense July heat on the high plains of Castile, this outfit confines him to stiff, clumsy gestures reminiscent of the inflexible gait of the Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz. Henri Bergson explains in his treatise on comedy, Laughter (1900), that "the artificial mechanization of the human body
," the transformation of a human body into a "thing" by whatever means, costume or gesture, constitutes the stuff of physical comedy. Like the ungainly movements of the Tin Woodsman, which exhibit his lack of a heart, Don Quixote's armor, particularly his corroded helmet, represents the rigidity of his mind and spirit. He has created a self-image from books of chivalry, the accounts of heroic deeds of medieval knights, and he proceeds to treat the world as if it were the scene of such a romance. Spotting a very ordinary inn just at sunset, Don Quixote conjures up a castle. As our hero's imagination converted whatsoever he saw, heard or considered, into something of which he had read in books of chivalry; he no sooner perceived the inn, than his fancy represented it, as a stately castle with its four towers and pinnacles of shining silver, accommodated with a draw-bridge, deep moat, and all other conveniences, that are described as belonging to buildings of that kind. He hears the swineherd's horn call to round up his pigs as a trumpet salute to his arrival;