Flak Maniak

In most builds and settings, I'm not enamored with the ultra-smooth, only-slopes-and-curved-slopes-showing terrain. But for Aquazone, it matches the catalog backgrounds! And dark blue wasn't even a color back then, so it wouldn't make sense in the main submarine builds... But in the terrain, it looks very good!

Ninjago has to be recognized as the king of action themes, for being the longest-lived, but my personal nomination is... Aquazone! You can say that's because of the very specific time I grew up; that's fine. I'll admit I am in a small age-cohort of Aquazone fans. But that doesn't make me any less of an Aquazone fan!

These guys; well, I'm looking for the torsos basically, but I wouldn't say no to the dark bluish gray + black double-injected legs too: Wanted to get some from my local Lego store but they ran out. I'm just looking for a dozen at a reasonable price; I don't wanna give in to the BrickLink resellers! Surely some of you, who found these at your locals and bought many, perhaps hundreds, can spare a dozen? I'm in the US (hence I couldn't get them on the online Build-a-Minifigure, since it isn't available here!), but I'll pay whatever the actual shipping-costs are.

Wait really?! They were on the website? Now THAT I will be looking forward to! Such a cool part! I've only seen the copper ones on the website before, and only briefly too.

A juicy phone-order? Managed to get Uruk-Hai swords, even? Wish those would show up on the website...

It will only make it harder to do large orders if parts stay on PaB&P for less total time, right? If they stay buyable on it for about the same amount of time (if they get a similar amount of total stock?), then it's just shifting the whole thing by three months. Which is fine with me. I'll be patient for new parts. If this policy means that we get a good selection of the most-interesting parts, then... It's a great resolution to... Well, whatever Lego's primary concern was. From their statements it sounds like it was stock of actual replacement parts about which they were concerned. Obviously I hope we get an even-broader-and-greater selection of weird parts. If delaying their buyability on PaB&P lets us have that, it's a great trade I think. It's JUST the following four months that will be annoying and hard to wait, this gap. But once that passes it'll be, well, every month we'll get new and interesting parts to buy again.

If it was a website order, it was almost certainly that those parts are out of production and gone-forever (and any remaining stock is allocated specifically for missing/broken). Which means that between the time you ordered and now, they ran out of what they were willing to sell. Happened to me too, a couple days back, with minifig parts from that 2021 Monkie Kid bike-duel set. (By contrast if you phone-ordered stuff that can't be bought on the website, well, it may be canceled from your order if it wasn't supposed to be sold in the first place... Or it may sneak through.)

What are the minifigure heads for the orange-on-orange guy, the white-hair guy in the middle, and the grey-civil-war-hat guy next to the white-haired guy?

Even on the old version, not all parts would be shown. It would usually be most of them. Some others you could call in for... Depending on CS rep. The new merged version seems to have a very similar selection to what was on B&P at the end of 2021. For now, all 2022 parts (yes that's right, all, not just weird and esoteric stuff) have been removed, pending... Whatever policy decision Lego will make about which super-interesting elements will make it on there, and when. So, now is the time to pester Lego and tell them "please sell us all the cool and unique minifigure parts and other weird stuff; we will buy so much of it that it will be worth it to you."

For the fig with the big dark bluish gray/copper-printing armor, the turquoise torso underneath... That's that 2021 Eternals torso, but with DBG arms added by you, right?

The updated/merged B&P/Pick-a-Brick has been available in the US for a couple hours now. I dunno if there are significant new/exciting parts that weren't on the old one. But, plenty of exciting parts that WERE on the old one, aren't on the new. I think the fears that the merged one would curtail our access to neat parts were warranted, but it remains to be seen how much. Also remains to be seen if phone orders are still the same "roll the dice with the CS rep" grey zone that they were, where you MIGHT get sold incredible jewels, or you might be told they can't sell you anything interesting at all, or the coolest parts in your phone-order might get canceled. Who knows; maybe they'll clarify things with CS reps and we won't be able to order any more over the phone than on the website.

I agree that Lego Space means something specific. And it shouldn't be something that's hard for Lego to satisfy, even if they don't pick Space for this thing. I think you're exactly right about the colors. I've thought for years that too many windscreen pieces are ONLY made in trans-clear, trans-light blue, and trans-black. I think that Lego should do two things, neither of which is "make sets branded Lego Space", and these two things should be sufficient: First, they should make modern minifigure prints that feel like cool space characters. I think they're doing a reasonably good job of this of late. Basically a modernized space-torso in that Creator rover set/Cyber Drone. They could do better, and give us some more brightly-colored space characters. More minifigure designs that make you think "this should be a whole space faction". Second, they should take more modern canopy pieces, and just... Make them in trans-red, trans-dark blue, trans-bright green, trans-neon green, (trans-neon orange if it were still around ;_;), trans-purple, trans-dark pink... Just, for each cool-looking canopy piece, make sure it's made at least once in ONE of the above colors. (Okay fine or trans-yellow, sure.) There are plenty of great recent ones. I mean we all remember that pointy Nexo Knights canopy that was only in trans-neon orange. That one was great! It was an excellent successor to the old long-nose windscreen, 2507. Wouldn't it have been amazing to get in more of these bright colors? I think that the "bring back old molds" crowd is really misguided in general. Look at Benny's 2014 spaceship; that isn't built around some ancient piece. You don't need old molds. You just need to take the right modern equivalent and recolor it. As you say, the feel of old-timey space is, having a bright main color, and a contrasting bright transparent color for windscreen parts and some other details... There's slightly more to it than that, but that's most of it. If we have good access to a reasonable variety of windscreens and other parts in these bright transparent colors (through Bricks & Pieces/BrickLink), and we have access on Bricks & Pieces to minifigure parts that spark our imaginations for our space factions... That should be enough. A big D2C set with no new molds or recolors is much less-valuable to me than just... Having more canopies recolored over time, in pedestrian, non-space sets. And as for the minifigure parts... Just give me brightly-colored sci fi Lego-original minifigs, that as I said, spark my imagination. "That could be a space faction" is something I said about Mei from Monkie Kid. Just... Make cool sci fi minifigures, and eventually some of them will be the right thing.

I think that "easiest" and "most cost-effective" are at odds. If you spend a lot of time shopping on BrickLink/Bricks & Pieces, hunting garage sales, blah blah blah... You can get a lot of parts for very cheap, and maybe even ones you're interested in! But if you want to get parts for cheap on BrickLink you gotta be patient and be prepared to accumulate things over the course of a bunch of orders. I'm not sure where on the "easiest" scale it falls, but, if the wall at your local Lego store DOES have parts you want, then it can't be beat. But what it has on it is up to fate. If you want to buy with the largest selection available, and get very specific stuff, then Bricks & Pieces has got you covered. But for many many things it won't be the cheapest, not by a long shot. It gives you the most flexibility (out of currently-produced elements); you can get a LOT of stuff together in one order. But it's not gonna be as cheap per-part as some German BL seller. For myself, I tend to accumulate parts over time. I don't buy sets for parts very often; most of my Lego-buying is on BrickLink and Bricks & Pieces, opportunistically hunting for things that seem cool or spark my imagination. Sometimes I'm building X thing and I need parts ABC for it, so I go to BL and I find a seller with those parts for cheap... But obviously I'm going to buy a whole bunch of those parts, right? Or maybe I look at parts in a certain color, a color I use often... And I just look for cheap and useful parts in that color. I think a big part of building a collection is tailoring it to what you tend to build. What colors and part types you accumulate most of... This will be informed by your interests. If you're patient, then yeah, the garage sale or equivalent will be a very cheap source of mixed parts. But it has the least choice.

I know I say this every time anything vaguely related comes up, but: If I were in charge, I would make sure that the 18+ black-box sets have goofy alternate builds depicted on the back of the box (remember those?), and a giant "What will you build?" in between them. Would this be popular? Very possibly not! But I would do it. I have my convictions.

I'm not concerned about shipping time; I'll wait as long as it takes. I didn't expect this Dec 17 order to be here by now or anything. I've just never seen this new mysterious order-status before, and I want to know what it means. And it's concerning that I can't check contents! I want to be sure it will get to me with everything it's supposed to have, even if that takes a long time!

Anyone seen this? My 17 Dec order recently changed from whatever... Whatever pre-"Shipped" status it was to "New Order", and now it doesn't show any contents, it only shows this:

I believe that Jang's mountain has almost entirely BURPs (and some MURPs) under there, but yeah a lot of them are well-covered by slopes. I think he has some DUPLO or other structural stuff in there, too. No idea how much that mountain cost him to build but it DEFINITELY wasn't cheap! Anything at that scale is both monstrously expensive AND hard to make look good...

Is there a way to search a given part category, and exclude stickered parts? Or I guess, some kind of anti-search, to exclude terms from part names. For example if I'm browsing some BL store, and I want to look through the "slope, decorated" category, but exclude all stickered parts...

Here's my view on "purist": If you look at the end result, and a purist result would be indistinguishable from a non-purist one... Then it's irrelevant. Cutting up Lego strings instead of just using any old string is therefore pointless. (Also, even if you did cut up Lego strings, people would assume you hadn't, and that it was just some regular string!) But, my opinion is that it'd look great even without the string. Only very slightly more imagination needed in that case!

That bow design is sick, even without the string! Gotta get me some reddish brown horns immediately!

Very good shape-mixing, evoking various modern Gundam designs and the X-Wing... And the colors too. I think the almost-total omission of Gundam-standard yellow is... Basically correct here, because it'd look out-of-place on the X-Wing. Turning the V-fin into the rebellion logo... I was gonna ask what that black part was, that connected the thumb to the hand... Was baffling me, but then I opened the stud.io file and... It's the Overwatch gun base! I was wondering how it was at that angle; I thought "that angle looks like a minifig hand, but minifig hands can't attach into bar-holes like that, can they?", and then separately, I couldn't figure out what it was attached to the underside of; I thought MAYBE a headlight brick in some orientation but... Whatever I thought didn't make sense, no matter how I thought about it.

That'd be sick if Peach wore overalls! I mean, we gotta have SOME depiction of Peach eventually, right? It baffled me that she wasn't in the first wave, even! You'd think they'd do a big brick-built Peach! (I won't even ask for her to be twice as tall as Mario, but you know I'm right that she should be!)

As a company... I'd say they're more ethical than most huge corporations. And the reason is, if you ask me: That they're privately held. Being privately held doesn't in itself cause a company to behave more ethically, but I think it's a prerequisite. I generally like their level of do-gooder spirit; they have some, but, it's not all-consuming, or over the top. I'm not asking for them to have zero net carbon footprint, or advocate for every good cause, or donate 90% of profits to some starving-orphans charity. But I do have to complain about various things. First, a venial sin of incompetence: Lego is not good at making websites. Now, I do recognize that their website-making challenge is very very difficult, given their large range of products (but is it more difficult than Amazon's or Wal-Mart's or Hasbro's?), and in some ways they go above and beyond, like offering Bricks & Pieces at all. So for example I won't complain at all about the B&P interface being janky and asking you to type in part/set numbers. But... Their website is generally unreliable, and slow, and just... It just feels like various of the modern web-design problems, smushed together. It's just not good. They're wizards in ABS, but barbarians in silicon. And I can't really excuse it as "Well they're just a family-owned company" or anything; they're the biggest toymaker in the world, or close to it. I should expect from them a top-notch website. Next, a mortal sin of malice: They are/were an IP troll, suing their competitors in un-meritorious ways, in order to try to be more of a monopoly. Like when their patent ran out for brick designs, and they sued under trademark! This is not a small thing! Apparently my affection for Lego runs deep enough that I have forgiven them for this, but, I do have to mention it! Being an IP troll is a serious offense! It's much worse than merely being bad at web design! Yes, it's much less evil than what many other huge companies get up to. But it's still pretty bad! So, overall, a mixed grade. Oh, and I'll hit them with their own "Only the best is good enough" 'til the cows come home over color-consistency issues. But that's a waaay lesser offense than being an IP troll. And maybe that's even too product-oriented for this thread.

It really depends. Lots of pieces are much cheaper on BL, and sooo many parts/colors aren't available on B&P anymore. But I've trended towards more B&P because I'm less at the mercy of a particular store's contents. If I'm adding a few of one not-super-expensive piece to a B&P order, that's almost always better than trying to get it on BL, even if the BL prices are nominally lower. But... So many things aren't on B&P at all. I think the best strat for BL and B&P together is to keep an oft-updated wanted list on BL that has "parts you're interested in if they're cheap", then pick a single part that's BL-only, a seed-part. Look at its price guide and pick a BL store that has enough of it for cheap. Then in that store, on the "Shop" tab, hit "Wanted List", and snipe parts from your general-interest wanted list, and maybe have a browse through some part categories/colors in that store, or its minifig section. BrickLink is for hunting down very specific old things, or for being opportunistic and seeing what pops up on a given store. It's not really for the in-between "I really want twenty each of these twenty different parts", unless you're willing to place a pile of orders. (Which sometimes one is!) Or, I should have outlined B&P's use first: Check if the parts you want are on B&P. If not, put 'em on a BrickLink wanted list. Occasionally compare prices. Sooo many things are cheaper on BL, provided you're already looking at a big BL store with a good selection, so... The trick is to look at them, and see what they have. Well, maybe you'd say that most of BL's use IS getting things not available at all on B&P, but... That ends up being, over time, most parts in most colors!

My July 29 order, now that I check it, says "shipped" on the website, but I haven't gotten an email yet about it shipping. I'm not sure if the shipping-alert emails were super-close to when it said "shipped" on the website for previous orders. My August 5 order still says "in warehouse". As usual, I can't fault them for slow shipping, especially during a pandemic. But, well, you get what you pay for, and $3 shipping is incredibly cheap! Compare to BrickLink orders from Europe where I'm probably waiting half a month at least, AND paying tens of dollars in shipping. I'll take the super-slow dirt-cheap shipping every time!