Alien Stacking Dolls And Geeky Alphabet Blocks Are Homemade Art At Its Finest

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

alien stacking dollOf all the ways in which the Internet is the greatest addition to mankind’s existence (besides beer), high on the list is “seeing what people more creative than me have come up with in their spare time.” It probably wouldn’t take more than three minutes of hunting to find a creation that I would give up a pinkie finger for, and just one trip to io9 today has unveiled two of the coolest homemade items I’ve seen in a while. And neither of them can be used as sex toys. Well…

First up is the outstanding but still unfinished set of Russian stacking dolls made in honor of Ridley Scott’s Alien. And they aren’t just a haphazardly slapped together for the hell of it. As seen in the picture above, this is a lovingly crafted piece of memorabilia; or an eventual five pieces, really.

The order of dolls follows the sequence of events in the film, and not the actual evolution of the alien beasts themselves. It will go Adult > Egg > Facehugger > Kane > Chestburster. I suppose we’ll have to wait until this set is done to get one with Ripley’s big, beautiful, bald head to serve as the outer egg. Here’s a shot of the smaller Chestburster. Cute, right? It certainly makes some actual Alien toys look like garbage.

alien stacking doll

Next up we have the slightly more time-consuming project of geeked-out alphabet blocks created by Canadian renaissance man Jonathan M. Guberman, who rocks everything from computer programming to biomedical engineering. But it’ll be hard for Guberman to produce anything nearly as universally pleasing as this set of blocks, which were created for his son. That’s not a challenge or anything. (It’s totally a challenge!)

The set of 36 blocks (all the letters plus the first 10 digits) were laser-cut by Guberman himself, and each features a handful of awesome references and characters that all children should know about as they grow up. Star Wars and Doctor Who are a given, but we also have Gizmo from Gremlins, Portal‘s companion cube, a Fraggle, Leela, and the two creatures from Bubble Bobble. Man, I miss that game. Check out a few of the individual cubes below and go here to see them all. And go here for Guberman’s interesting blog.

geek blocks

geek blocks

With all the X words in the world, who’d have thought that the xenomorph would have showed up here, too? It’s too bad I’ll never get to own any of these things, but it makes me think that I might one day do the same thing for my own child. Just made out of mashed potatoes or something.