Tusserte

I just called my LEGO store in Chicago. They have all the Q2 parts from the post I'm quoting but not the new parts yet. You can only buy pre-packed BAM packs in-store and those will be a random assortment. However, my store was willing to pick a custom selection over the phone, hold it for three days, then sell it to me. Not sure if all stores will do that but worth a shot.

I figured it out and I feel silly. It wasn't complicated. The pattern to view an image is https://www.lego.com/cdn/product-assets/element.img.lod5photo.192x192/{element_id}.jpg. I noticed the part at the beginning changed, but I originally missed that there's a new ".jpg" at the end. I updated the script in my original post:

The redesign also broke images on @typingduck's B&P site as well as my LEGO receipt image adder. I tried doing a quick fix but it seems like they're doing some sort of new hotlink protection. I'm not sure it will be easy/possible to fix. Brickset.com still works which makes me think it would still be possible. I'll try spending more time on it this weekend, but @typingduck, please let me know if you figure it out first.

That is fair, I did forget the official name has “guy” in it. But I hope my point of people projecting into ambiguity holds. Not that everyone does it always, but if enough people do it and come to the same projection then maybe it is worth questioning if the subject matter is neutral. It seems reasonable to be open to that possibility to me.

Ahh too bad, I never noticed they were available You saw this limit statement somewhere on the new web site? There was never a limit online in the past. I can confirm the phone definitely has a lower limit, I think it is 15 lots.

I have no doubt individuals can get see things differently and I am glad we have been able to discuss our differences rationally. I only ask the question on a bigger scale like population statistics. If it turns out there is a problem for some demographics to enjoy LEGO as much as others and LEGO can find a way to solve it without making it less enjoyable for others, wouldn't that be a win? I think LEGO would want to find ways to increase attractiveness to new customers while retaining old ones. I'm still not saying I think there's even a problem yet, this thread is just interesting discussion. You do raise an interesting point. I haven't focused on it because we can't know the answer without reading the minds of the designers/researchers at LEGO. Friends debuted in 2012, well after LEGO's public statement about yellow minifigures representing anyone. Friends figures are obviously a complete overhaul of character design so they had no precedent they necessarily had to follow. So why would they introduce realistic skin color now? There's a downside that figure parts are less interchangeable when they don't have uniform skin color, so what is the positive to making this decision? They must have plenty of data that pointed them to believe this is the best character design for some metric. I'm curious what their metric was and why unlicensed yellow minifigs wouldn't be improved with the same justification. So you do think it's likely that LEGO designers associate yellow minifigures = light skin? I don't think anyone else has tried to make that claim so I want to make sure I understand. I'm also not seeing your connection of consumer demand to minifigure color which has been the recent point of discussion. *Is* it a guy? I think you just put a gender on this minifig when I don't see a strong suggestion it's not a girl. By extension, is it hard to believe some people don't naturally see or default a race in caricatures of people?

Interesting, it seems like just a visual style change. I don't think it has impacted any prices/part availability.

I might have missed it, but do we have any reason to believe there are any *unknown* sets remaining in 2020?

I can try to get behind the idea that yellow minifigs represent all people equally but I am open to the fair argument that they don't in the real world. There are just so many counter examples even if you scope into the LEGO community. We covered Lando being brown in 2003 and other licensed skin colors not changing until 2005, but another LEGO inconsistency is with the LEGO Movie. They created a custom yellow representation of Abraham Lincoln and Vitruvius (voiced by Morgan Freeman) was medium nougat even though he is fictional and not built out of any previously-existing licensed parts. The community has plenty of inconsistencies too. For example, there are two people in this thread who have mixed brown minifigures in their MOCs that otherwise have only yellow minifigures. You do not have to go deep into the Historic or Pirates sections of this forum to find more examples. I admit I would not have thought anything of this until this thread made me question it. I'm not trying to make any accusations about individuals who do this. I just think there's a valid question if yellow minifigs really represent all people equally in practice when real people ultimately use LEGO products. I don't believe any individual in this thread is going to be able to make an argument either way. If LEGO cares about answering that question, they're going to need to survey a ton of people across cultures. Even if this is a problem, I don't know how they would make it better.

It's taking closer to two months right now for international shipping to the U.S. from some countries. I just received a Australian Bricklink order from April 6 today and a German order from April 17 on Saturday. I have several orders from late April/early May that haven't showed up yet either. I recommend taking that into consideration if anyone is thinking about buying HP sets from other countries under the assumption it will arrive sooner.

I can agree that a yellow minifig could be used to represent any race. I'm not against that idea. I also agree any hair piece in any color could represent a person of any race. But statistically speaking, a blonde or nougat hair piece is more likely to represent a white person. And historically, LEGO produces more blonde/nougat hair colors than black ones. So that is where I think there could be an argument that they do not produce equal representation even in their current yellow minifig lineup. It's changing though, their new Chinese sets have recolored black or gray hair pieces for almost every minifig so we will have a different balance going forward.

I can see the point you're trying to make about race vs ethnicity and I agree they're different things, but I don't think I agree it's possible to represent ethnicity without race. Also you said my example is a "Caucasian" person but I am pretty sure "Caucasian" is usually used a race, not an ethnicity. I don't want to go on a side discussion about this, just pointing out that I don't think it's clear-cut.

I agree with @Karalora, I don't think the minifigure color is the only indicator of race. @Kaero do you really believe that these two City minifigs are equally likely to represent white vs non-white people? Yellow minifig color does allow for ambiguity but I still don't think that these hair styles can equally represent any race. I also believe that Lego produces disproportionately more of these blond/nougat specialty hair pieces than more generic black hair pieces.

It's an interesting debate. I used to believe yellow minifigs are race-neutral but it became difficult to believe that with all the specialized hair molds and colors they produce these days. That said, it does seem like they are mixing up the hair molds and including more black hair recolors in the last year or two, so it does seem like they're thinking about this.

We discussed it a while back in this thread. If you pay with credit card they might silently change your order total when they charge you a few weeks later. d