A comic titled “LEGO Friends” recently went viral, striking a chord with people by humorously pointing out that girls don’t need a separate line of LEGO toys. No, no—girls just need better female representation within existing LEGO sets: I was so taken by how well this cartoon encapsulates so many parents’ and advocates’ position on the unnecessary gendering of children’s toys—a topic I address in detail in my book, The Princess Problem—that I reached out to the cartoon’s creator, Maritsa Patrinos, to learn more about her work. Maritsa is illustrator living in Brooklyn, NY who grew up just outside of Washington, DC and went to Pratt Institute to study illustration. Since graduating in 2010, she’s worked on staff at Marvel Comics, made backgrounds for a Cartoon Network show called MAD, and has worked in different editorial jobs, including a couple New Yorker comics. For the past three years, she’s also done the cartooning and animation for the shows “16 & Pregnant” and “Teen Mom 2” on MTV.
REBECCA HAINS: Your LEGO Friends cartoon has clearly struck a chord with people, and as someone who does work in this area, it’s been really gratifying to me as a bystander to see your piece go viral—as of this writing, it’s been reached by 106,304 people from my facebook page alone. The traction it has gained is really impressive. Can you tell me what inspired you to create this cartoon? But I made this comic after I saw the short documentary Inside Lego. It was very informative, but the last stretch of it highlighted the “Friends” line and I was a little surprised. I had thought LEGO was a company that prided itself with being a unisex toy, so it seemed strange that now they would create a line targeted towards just girls. I actually don’t have a problem with the content—I know there’s absolutely nothing wrong with playing with juice bars or shopping malls. I just don’t know if those things should be associated with gender. I thought about the girls who don’t like those things, and the boys who do like those things, and wondered if they felt alienated at all.
since 2009, covering a pretty wide range of topics. How do you usually choose topics for your cartoons? RH: Have any of your other posts gone viral like this one? MP: I’ve made a couple things that have gained a little traction, a short comic about an experience I had as a teenager and my latest zine about common curses and blessings. But I’m not sure if anything has made the rounds quite in the way this one has. Oh, and few years ago I also made a Game of Thrones lost wolf flyer that made the rounds and got featured on io9. That made me happy. RH: What kinds of feedback have you been receiving from people about your LEGO Friends cartoon? What would you say the balance has been between supportive comments and comments that are critical in some way? Rebecca Hains, Ph.D. is a media studies professor at Salem State University and the author of The Princess Problem: Guiding Our Girls Through the Princess-Obsessed Years, a book meant to help parents raise empowered, media-literate daughters.
Rebecca would like to thank Maritsa Patrinos for taking the time to be interviewed for this blog, and would like to note that Maritsa is also available for freelance work! Be sure to check out Maritsa’s impressive portfolio. Rebecca is on Facebook and Twitter. LEGO Trains are lovely. Their tracks are lovely, but I really miss the possibility of making several levels circuits ( btw check this Top 10 LEGO Trains list). At first, being new to LEGO, I though that maybe there was a special part to create slopes much like the one that exists for LEGO Duplo. But it looks like there isn’t. Someone show me a train diorama with several levels where the inclines were created with the ground that was done with some kind of sintetic material and the LEGO tracks simply lay over it. It was nice, but I want to buld my slopes out of LEGO bricks. So here it is how I did it. So, being an engineer myself…, the first thing I do was built directly without any plans or measures, just using common sense and LOTS of LEGO Tracks.
Yes, it works but I wasn’t happy at all with the result. If you notice the track isn’t continuos and it has bumps that make the train jump and the downside of the incline was too step so the train gets too much speed. So, time for a bit of maths. Let me show you the video and I explain later what I did and how I did.It is nice but still you see the train derails on corners and takes a bit of problem climbing. Here it is all the HOWTO and then I explain you a few tips to make it work. There are two concepts that we really want to apply to our inclines building technique: continuity and incline angle. I promise to be light and readable. We don’t want huge changes in the slope because it would add dangerous bumps into the track that will surely make our train derail… and trust me that you don’t want to kill all those innocent LEGO minifigs So the slope has to change slowly. Using the LEGO System we have two different measures, the brick and the plate, were three plates are one brick.
So the only way to do a smooth transition is using at first one plate, two plates and finally one brick on the three first tracks… and keep that method for the rest of tracks… too many tracks don’t you think? So this introduce us the slope angle. Now we have to define how step is our incline. The higher the more difficult would be for our train to climb it. I have been told on several forums that I should just add another motor to the train and problem solved… that’s one way, the other is just use more tracks and make the angle smallers. Conventional trains must not travel on slopes bigger than 3%, that’s means that the train should never climb more than 3 metres vertical each 100 meters horizontal. To know the angle you just need to compute the arctan of B/A. Personally, I decided that the angle approach was pointless as I wasn’t able to use 60 straight tracks to get my train up and down… so instead I just decide that I want to climb 12 bricks high using 16 straight LEGO Train tracks.
If you see the above diagram you will see that it is pretty straightforward to compute how tall each track must be. It is just constant to (A/B)=(C/D) Watch the video of it working and a bit below you have the PDF with all the values and a Excel sheet in case you need to change the values. It really depends on the trains you are using, but a common number is between 14 and 16 bricks tall. So if you do the basic match, each straight track is 16 studs long, an each stud is 8mm long, while the brick is 9.6mm high so… To climb 14 bricks with a 3% incline we need…35 straight tracks to climb safely to 14 bricks high. No, I am not mad… I don’t have the 4.5 meters needed for this, so even forget about the tracks, you would need 35 to climb and another 35 to go down. That’s the price of perfection… So as you are perhaps as limited by constraints like room and tracks as me, use this Excel sheet. Using the above principles, you just write how many tracks do you want to spend and it will give you the height in bricks and plates of each of the pillars.
I have done a PDF for 12 bricks height and 16 tracks long. You will save time and mental health if you build two pillars of each height, that way you will have done the up and down inclines. Keep in mind that you will also need a good amount of LEGO bricks to build the pillars. One option that I have used it making part of them out of LEGO Duplo bricks. You will save lots of bricks that way, although the result isn’t as good. I built them using the LEGO Digital Designer for climbing 12 bricks of height in 16 tracks. That’s a mean slope of 3.5º. Yes, in fact that’s what I did on my second approach. But keep in mind that the slope with curved tracks must be even softer than with straight tracks or the train will derail and fall from the track. I haven’t really tried it myself but the accepted agreement here is that no, you need at least one flat track before a switch track or the train will derail. When everything else fails just go to The LEGO Shop and order another motor, they are just 12€ each.