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The Big 0-6-0 Steamer

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Cheers to Six Good Years!

Dear Friends,
 
On June 9th, 2015, when I was twelve years old, I made my first public appearance to the LEGO® community on the now-defunct LEGO® Digital Designer Gallery (commonly referred to as the "LDD Gallery"). In short, the LDD Gallery was an official LEGO® social media platform (a minor one, at that) which enabled any user to upload files from LDD to the public, with a title, description, and tags. It was a basic platform that I met so many users on, and some of them, like me, transferred themselves to LEGO® Ideas.
 
For those of you who've known me long enough, such as M7rock_3468, the awesome trainiac, you'll know that I mainly posted random and irrelevant models on the LDD most of the time. If you take a look at some of my early projects here on LEGO® Ideas, you'll see that this pattern continued on for a while until I came to my senses. My goal was to upload 1,000 LDD files, so I uploaded a variety of... "models". To name a few things, I uploaded random stuff, sets for reviews, trains, sloppily put-together micro models, etc.
 
Along the way, I came across quite a few people who did things I didn't like--whether they uploaded posts with my model in them, without so much a word of credit to the guy who built it in the first place, as well as posts with bad names and critics who criticized in blunt ways. (Posts could be downloaded in the LDD Gallery, since all posts were .lxf files.) Honestly, I didn't handle any of these situations well or with kindness. In fact, I handled them with anger, becoming a bully myself in return.
 
And then, about a year and a half later, I came onto LEGO® Ideas and uploaded my first project, The Red Comet, a replication of Lionel's train set that bears the same name. This and my first few projects were, in my opinion, decent. And then...I decided to upload...this. At that point, I had the mindset of, "Okay, I'll upload a few really good projects here, and I'll upload some okay-ish I-guess projects here." Is that a very good attitude? Of course not.
 
Yet, I kept that attitude. Not all of my projects were at this level of badness, but they could've been built with much more care. Do you remember how I talked about criticism? Well, here's an example that I'm not proud of: Retro Video Game. I won't explain this in detail, in order to keep the topic positive, but feel free to shoot me a message on Discord. (Joseph cheeseinthepie#3168) Just tell me which user you are on LEGO® Ideas, and I'll be happy to speak to you whenever I'm available.
 
In short, someone criticized the project, saying that it would be cheaper to buy an actual handheld console rather than my replication of said object. I was insulted by this user's remark, but I stood my ground...in the worst of ways. Instead of approaching it calmly, I made angry remarks in return...and more. A similar thing happened with my Small Sports Car project, and I still regret what I did to this day.
 
However, in time, I learned from my mistakes, and started taking criticisms as words of advice. Furthermore, I started taking time to build my projects, rather than racing to the non-existent finish-line to build my project as fast as I can.
 
Over the years, I've met so many wonderful and talented builders, from here, YouTube, and beyond. Thank you all so much for your support, love, kindness, and compliments! It has been my absolute pleasure to know you all, and continue to do so. God bless you, and have a great day! Regards, Joseph cheeseinthepie. June 9th, 2021
 

Here's the model that stated it all! I only have this LDD screenshot of it, and I'm not yet sure if it was lost to time, or is berried deep in my archive of .lxf files.


Here's a recreation I just made of that same model. What do you think? Should I, perhaps, upload it to LEGO® Ideas? Of course, I'm always open to suggestions on how to improve this model, or what I should work on next!

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