When people wax nostalgic for a simpler past, I often think about the huge improvements in the years since that we too easily ignore. Sure, life would have been an adventure in the Old West, or a quiet pleasure at Thoreau’s Walden. But if you’ve been hospitalized or had major surgery at any prior point in your life, odds are pretty excellent that, in those good old days, you’d be dead.

Of course, there are smaller advances than antiseptic, anesthetized surgery that still make life better. Consider Rebrickable, a site I recently discovered, that would have changed my life as an eight-year-old.

If you’re a Lego-loving kid, you probably have a bin full of pieces that you can create from as you see fit. But you’re also dying for you parents to buy you the pirate ship kit, or a castle kit, so you can follow directions, step by step, to something way more awesome than you’d figure out on your own.

Enter Rebrickable, where you can log the Lego kits you already have, and then download a nearly infinite array of the instruction booklets from other Lego kits you can build from your existing collection of parts.

If you’re missing a couple pieces for a project you want to take on, no worries; directly from the site, vendors will bid for the chance to send you those missing parts, one-off, on the cheap. Building that AT-AT is within a week’s allowance’s reach, rather than a full birthday off.