So I made the James Webb Space Telescope out of Lego, and it fixed my broken brain
Hello all.
This is going to be an interesting post. I’m going to tell you a story about my other life as a Lego creator, and at the same time hopefully navigate some of my writing journey, too.
I made the James Webb Space Telescope out of Lego.
Here it is.
To me, the JWST is a beacon of hope in a universe that can sometimes feel quite dark. It is evidence to me that, if we can work together, humans can be a force for good. Not just here on Earth, but across the galaxy.
You can turn this into a real Lego set, by the way.
You alone have the power.
Well, you and whoever you share this with.
It needs 10,000 votes to stand a chance at becoming a Lego set. It’s currently at nearly 1000. Care to help?
Voting is FREE and setting up a Legoideas account takes five minutes. They hardly ever email you. I’ve not seen anything from them in months.
There will be another voting link below.
So I made the James Webb Space Telescope out of Lego, and it fixed my brain
Here’s my writeup for the JWST project from its official page.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a fantastic example of what humans are capable of when we work together. A global effort of science, engineering, and imagination, this is one of humanity's most important creations to date.
Right now, as you read this passage, JWST is discovering new things in space!
And space is where we live, so that's kind of important!
Hi, I'm Grumblebricks. I'm an astrophysics nerd, Lego artist, bestselling Sci-Fi author, and Lego-based comedy writer. When I was on Channel 4's Lego Masters in 2017, I took my own space mocs to show the TV crew and judges. It has been my mission for a long time to bring science to the world through the medium of art, fiction, and Lego.
Building the James Webb Space Telescope was a unique challenge, not just because of the complex lattice of studs-not-on-top (SNOT) techniques involved in perfectly spacing the 24 hexagonal golden mirrors, but because I had to expand my own knowledge of space science just to make this thing accurate.
The angles, the proportions, and the overall shaping of this model took a few weeks to develop, and was helped by heavy research into what the JWST actually does.
It's an amazing machine. A huge acheivement for humans.
And owning this Lego set will inspire you to find out more about the universe, too!
It's such a cool thing. A big, impressive model with unique hexagonal panel techniques, which I first developed in my Giant's Causeway set, which sadly didn't get the votes it needed.
I'm glad to be back on LegoIdeas and to bring new experiences to you all.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? You can vote now, or read further to discover how building the JWST made me realise some things about myself, my brain, and how I relate to human beings.
How I fixed my brain with Lego.
The Lego JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE was a huge project for me. I put a lot of care into it, even developing new Lego techniques for the thing. I made sure the angles and scale were perfect, even down to individual instruments affixed to the underside, and the careful layering of fins and panels. The hexagonal mirrors are photo-perfect with the real thing.
Nobody else has done this before with Lego.
Nobody will again.
Making it made me happy.
The masks we wear
I designed this project to come out at the same time as the big news articles about JWST at the beginning of its fame. But without diving too much into it, my mental health got the better of me during construction, and my brain stopped working properly.
Anything that wasn’t already an embedded part of my routine became difficult all of a sudden. For a while I was someone who could do jokes on stage just fine, but found calling a doctor or shopping in a supermarket alone absolutely incomprehensible. There was a point where I had no idea how many book sales I’d made, because I was too anxious to look.
I could make cool Lego things, but I was scared of having hundreds of comments to read and reply to when I launched them online. This is a bit of a problem if you need 10,000 people to support something.
Because I was so outgoing as a comedian and author nobody noticed. I felt almost unsafe trying to buy shopping. I didn’t know what to say, how to act, what character to be. I wasn’t quite sure how to be human. It’s like I forgot who I was.
I used to know. But a lot of social constructs faltered. All I wanted was to sit at home, write, and build. That’s who I’ve always been, and it’s like the software of knowing how to talk to people outside had crumbled.
Cracked Actor
It wasn’t always this hard. For my first job, at Primark, I gleefully invented a character called Stephen who collected socks.
You may have heard of him during my standup.
Stephen was a mask I wore to come across more normal, because I’d noticed that sometimes in supermarket interviews you get grilled for not loving a supermarket to the point of obsession. Looking back I feel I was put through that because I was young and fresh out of college.
Regardless, I saw it as a challenge. I wanted to pass that first psychological test, so I lied. Stephen loved socks. I (he) collected them. I (he) had a collection of socks at home that I (he) organised by colour.
Stephen was a mask I wore.
When I got home, I became Phillip again and could sit on the floor and play with Lego all evening, write my science fiction books, and tell jokes to an imaginary audience (I was 18, and would not do any real standup until I was 23). When my door was closed and I shut the world off, I was me. I could put on eyeliner, listen to David Bowie, and go out partying with the goths that had adopted me as their sci-fi pal. It was a simple existence.
Becoming me
A lot of my fiction talks about aliens visiting and trying to understand other aliens (including humans).
Since developing 2019, I feel I’ve been on a journey of rediscovering just who the hell I was at university. I feel like a part of me died, and I am breathing life back into it with every new story, every gig, every post.
I was unstoppable at uni. From 2013 to 2017, I set up my own writing society, put out paperback books, edited those same books, organised my own events on campus, did standup so experimental the concept of it scares more experienced comedians even now, and went on TV to talk about Lego.
In 2019 I forgot how to talk to people in the supermarket and got fat.
This newsletter has helped a lot. I’ve been able to write again, and I cannot understate the importance of a listening audience. You’re all brilliant. I can have actual conversations here, rather than screaming into the void (this is not my first blog, I’ve lost count). I don’t feel like I have an audience, it’s more like a community of sci-fi lovers, comedy people, poets, writers, scientists, and friends I’ve made through radio and festivals.
I think without the internet I’d have struggled to find so many other nerds.
Remembering and forgetting
In 2023 my doctor told me I had PTSD, caused by events I won’t bore you with. Long story short I waited the requisite 7 months for a therapist, and explained to them very politely that I struggled maintaining in-person appointments and meetings because of my newfound issues. It’s like my brain just refused to remember some things.
As you can predict, the meeting notifications from the NHS never went into my phone anyway, so almost every week I had to explain that yes, I did still want to fix my brain and no, I didn’t want to be put back on the waiting list. This is not a nice conversation to have weekly. I had been told I needed the therapy to function, so to have the threat of it taken away was not fun.
For reasons I don’t understand, they wanted an in-person meeting and I reluctantly agreed to it, thinking it an opportunity to fix my issues with turning up to things.
in true sitcom style, I turned up to the ‘wrong’ building for our first meeting, and the therapist was not happy about it. I swapped them out for another one (pretty cool you can do that) and then went to America for a month to deep-fry my brain into figuring out what was wrong with itself. I used all my money, cut off my access to all but emails and instagram and tiktok, and accidentally started four new poetry books, wrote three hours of standup (two of which are good) and performed standup for the first time in America.
I return with some clarity.
Mainly, that I want to get good at producing my Science-themed Lego stuff again. And that I need to buy 100 ISBN codes for books. And that I should try again to get funding for my bookstore.
Other revelations will appear in other emails.
I love Lego and I love space
With Lego, life is easy. You sit down and build whatever comes to mind. That scope for almost boundless creativity is probably why I’ve managed to eke out simultaneous existences as an author, comedian, poet, Lego artist, and Minecraft content creator; I just love building weird worlds with words and bricks and blocks and jokes. The more freedom, the better.
To me, all of the above feels like parts to the same journey. Oh, I also do radio sometimes, and host events, and write comedy poems for weddings (you can hire me if you like).
Lego is the fuel that keeps me weird.
The JWST moc (that stands for ‘my own creation’) should have been made months before it actually came out. But I had a dark few years before emerging here on Substack and getting noticed as a Lego artist. The PTSD had ruined me socially. I cut off people who asked me how I was doing because I didn’t want to tell them. I stayed indoors and I tried to fix my brain with Lego and books.
Oddly, I don’t think the pandemic made much of a difference to the way my brain was changing. By that point I quite liked not having to socialise with new people, and on the infrequent occassions I went outside as a poet I could play a bit of a character.
I think I stood out as a spoken word poet who wouldn’t write about what had traumatised them as a child, and who wouldn’t speak about it at the bar as a very strange method of flirtation.
That poet character of mine was offered some cool gigs, but he didn’t fit in because, ultimately, he was me. No trauma poems please. I would rather write poems about sentient frost instead.
Remembering myself, brick by brick
This Lego project, THE JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, was one of the victims of my memory issues. Not only was the concept of launching it to the public anxiety-incuding, but I kept being carried away with real life drama, and half-remembered side projects. At the same time, I found myself isolating myself from my friends again because I wanted to be available 24/7 if my family needed me. I made excuses to avoid social events, and eventually people stopped inviting me to them.
These delays in my personal life meant the JWST was not the first on the Legoideas platform, even though it should have been.
It is one of several, but I think it is the best.
It’s big, shiny, and scale accurate. The hexagonal panels are a really clever design I invented which allows them to honeycomb together with a perfect gap between them (which is 1.3 plates thick). These almost ‘impossible’ angles (some people didn’t think it was doable) put this project at the top of JWST projects, in my opinion.
I love it.
Gathered friends. Listen again, to our legend, of the Bionicle
Way back in 2019, when lego’s BIONICLE intellectual property was given the ‘OK’ for fan projects on LegoIdeas, I dusted off my old account and created this set within 48 hours (minus the canisters, which I made as an update some weeks later). The set became one of the fastest growing sets on Legoideas, smashing its way to 5000 votes before ultimately slowing down.
And Bionicle is niche. I hate to admit it but it is.
The James Webb Space Telescope is relevant to every single human on this planet. It is a beacon of hope in a dark universe. It is creativity manifest. It is a physical representation of our pioneering spirit in the universe.
Imagine JWST bumping into an alien telescope out there in space.
Imagine a future where science is at the forefront of schools, toys, movies, books.
Imagine building the model above, piece by piece, knowing your favourite (or second favourite, I’m not fussy) science fiction author, poet, or comedian made it.
It’s a beautiful thing, and it could be real.
Help me make this thing a reality. Vote for it, then share it with every single smart person you know. They’ll like it.
Thank you for reading this post. It went through a few edits, and I realised telling the story in a sort of jagged, chaptered order made more sense. It’s all true, and I appreciate having you here to support my writing by reading it.
See you soon, for a free eBook and a Who Built The Humans?: Special Edition update.
-Phillip