ToroLUG's Blog
Member Feature – RandoBuilds
Welcome back to the ToroLUG Member Feature series! I’m joined this time by RandoBuilds who agreed to answer my questions. -Thank you RandoBuilds. To get started, why don’t you tell me about your relationship with LEGO and its history? Thanks for having me! I don’t remember a time where LEGO wasn’t a huge part of life. LEGO has provided me with a creative outlet, retail therapy, and with the LUG- a social outlet as well! It’s really become a huge part of all aspects of my life. A bucket of system bricks was how I got my start at an early age, but what I remember most about my earlier LEGO history is playing with Bionicles. This was my favourite theme up until its eventual retirement, but I also have fond memories of Exo Force, Power Miners, and LEGO Star Wars. In addition to building the sets, I’ve always had a passion for creating. I would spend a lot of time building spaceships, Star Wars inspired walkers, or cars to race. Being a big Bionicle fan, I had naturally made my own Bionicles as well. I don’t think I’ve had a LEGO dark age, but if I had to say...
Collab Spotlight – Animal Crossing
ToroLUG launched an Animal Crossing Island collab in 2025. For those not familiar with Animal Crossing, it is a video game series developed by Nintendo, with the latest entry, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released in 2020. In that game, players can explore and develop their own island, populated by anthropomorphic animal neighbours. Following the success of the game, Lego released the first Animal Crossing sets in March 2024. Many ToroLUG members are fans of the game, sparking the idea for a large collaborative build. Seven of them joined forces to build a large island, similar to those you can find in the game. After months of careful planning and building, the result of this collaboration is an impressive island filled with details and references recognizable by any Animal Crossing fan. Jon, Ryan, Matt, Maia, Victoria, and Marissa will guide us through the island they built, sharing stories and memories from the collaboration along the way. Join us as we dive in and explore the nooks and crannies of ToroLUG’s island with all its bells and whistles. The...
Member Feature – VictoriaBuilds
Welcome to the first ToroLUG Member Feature! This series is about celebrating the creativity within ToroLUG by getting to know the builders behind the MOCs we can see and admire at meetings and events. Our first featured builder is VictoriaBuilds, who joins me for this interview. -Welcome Victoria. To kick things off, can you tell us about your LEGO journey and when you first started building? What drew you back to LEGO as an adult (if you had a dark age)? What does LEGO building give you personally today? It’s funny, I don’t think of myself as having had a dark age, but not in the way that most people say that. When an AFOL says they never had a dark age they usually mean they kept loving LEGO their whole lives, but in my case I was, oddly enough, not that huge of a LEGO fan as a kid. I had a box of generic parts and a Belville set, but I don’t really remember ever thinking of myself as a LEGO kid, for whatever reason. So to turn out this way as an adult was certainly a surprise. Back in 2010 I took a summer field course on urban geography in New York...