Think of it as a lego set.
You have the baseplate. That’s like your body. No one can help you with this. This is what you have to build on. You can’t make Rock Island Refuge without it. This particular baseplate is 2552px4 — An important thing to realize is that all of these lego sets are kept meticulously catalogued, like they have their own genes and hereditary connotations, and your job is to either build the set to spec, or put aside your instructions and do other things with all of this set.
But you have all of these pieces, probably in a rubbermaid container, that you can put together in whatever order on this baseplate, which you can expand ad infinitum. That’s the great thing about lego: each set you buy supplies you with new pieces and minifigs, ready to create, oh, say, a time-warp at a moment’s notice.
Install your handy, newly built Futuron time-gate, using pieces you harvest from your other sets… all of those pieces which are classified and numbered in some database, and from an sheer part-based perspective, the instructions dictate that you are going to make some kind of ship. Or, like I said, you can ignore the instructions and make something else space-y that would explain that your pirate fort is now a hot vacation destination for dudes in space-suits. But the fact of the matter is that all of a sudden you have guys from the future romping around in your pirate fort.
So you have this quickly-getting-out-of-hand situation, where parrots were getting blasted a half hour ago, the tourists were mugged and tortured in the shark pit, Red-beard went back through the time-gate and came back with a stockpile of laser swords and blasters so that when the French Armada shows up with cannons, they’ll be no match for the hapless time-tourists’ stolen weapons. Things were going so well, too!
This is the problem with something like lego. You have these rules you can follow, Good Orderly Directions for making space-walkers, monorails, the crappy city sets, pirates, Forestmen, Wolf Pack, and so on, that don’t have to cross over. Just build the sets, put it on a shelf, and leave it alone. Maybe consider a career in Engineering or Aerospace or Architecture.
But the potential exists for something completely different. Something unique. A great utopia. A terrible dystopia. The parts are all in your rubbermaid container. What can you build?
