Mylenium

Eurobricks Knights
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Everything posted by Mylenium

  1. Mylenium

    LEGO Education user research

    That would apply not just to the US... I only know a handful of college-level schools using it here in Germany and they keep a tight lid on it and usually buy just half the number of kits they actually would need. Mylenium
  2. Mylenium

    LEGO RPG system

    I don't follow. The 1 x 1 bricks with clips used in your initial design cost more than 1 x 2 Technic pin bricks and the situation would be no different here. Axles, bushings and all sorts of pins can be had on the cheap because literally everyone who has ever built a bunch of Technic models will have buckets and buckets of them. That aside it strikes me as a purely academic argument. Even on a perfectly flat table you will eventually have to reinforce your connections at some point because the game grid will come apart from the weight, friction and pressure even a handful of modules will exert. It's also one of those LEGO design rules which you can observe on their official models. They'll never use single clip connections beyond a certain level when the stress loads becomes too high. You honestly might want to rethink your strategy. The way I see it, even a basic 16 x 16 grid of your modules could already be so fragile it may not at all be fun having to fix the connections and closing the gaps over and over while playing with it... My 2 Cents. Mylenium
  3. Mylenium

    Clear transparent tiles

    Yeah, sure, but that is kind of the point. I've built a bunch of COBI and Mega Construx models and pressing together transparent plates and tiles based on the standard molds is not fun due to how the material behaves. So assuming LEGO were to ever use transparent elements more broadly and use them safely they'd likely have to come up with new designs, in particular for the reinforcement structures and anti-studs on the undersides... Mylenium
  4. Mylenium

    Clear transparent tiles

    LEGO has strict policies on what pieces are done transparent and which ones aren't due to how the material behaves and how it affects production. Even though they've eased up on this a little, bringing out some previously unavailable parts as transparent versions, the likelihood of them ever doing your tiles are infinitesimal. You could wait until you're too old to appreciate it. So for what it's worth, redesign your model to use 1 x 1 and 1 x 2 trans tiles or make it work with regular colored tiles. Mylenium
  5. Mylenium

    TLG Ban Custom Minifig Printing.

    Well, not meaning to be all that cynical, but LEGO are their own biggest enemy on that already. Following your argument, every custom head or the shorter/ longer leg pieces introduced with Harry Potter and Avatar, respectively, diminish the recognizability of the original minifigure 3D trademark. LEGO are diluting the pool in a manner of speaking. Likewise, and I've mentioned this many times already, since the company does not offer a way of officially licensing their stuff in a transparent manner, it's all a muddied mess of fair use rules and their goodwill that can change at any point. What's true today may no longer be true tomorrow. Therefore they'll always run into these situations even if the current conundrum can be resolved somehow... Mylenium
  6. Mylenium

    Out of curiosity

    There's no good way to grab a crinkled up and compressed bag with a machine and place it evenly in the open box. That's all there is to it. No need to look for conspiracy theories or deeper meaning, just one of those basic wisdoms of industrial packaging. Since the bags aren't filled with extra gas and the constituents of the contents are so different, the surface changes too much and the center of weight keeps shifting. Even advanced adaptive robots struggle with that and Humans simply can (still) do it faster. Mylenium
  7. Probably not. I have this strong urge to have every LEGO piece in every color it was produced in my collection and I can do stupid things like buy an otherwise unattractive set just to acquire those elements. Otherwise I'm thankfully not a serious collector of sets or minifigs and lately I find that the more relaxed you approach this, the more enjoyable it is. I think after a few years I have moved beyond a certain point and the pressure of building my parts stock is no longer as high plus lately there have been way too many overpriced duds from LEGO, which also helps to stay away from some sets. As for your new year's resolutions: You likely will fail if you're really that OCD, so it would probably be smart to narrow down your subject(s) of choice even further. there's just too many "things with wheels" in the LEGO world... ;-) Mylenium
  8. Mylenium

    Lego Ideas becoming bland and dull

    Yeah, sure. That is the crux of it and you can't have it both ways. Ultimately it's probably a matter of the horse being too big and too fast to ride anymore, i.e. IDEAS being a victim of its own success. That and I tend to think we wouldn't even be debating this if LEGO wouldn't be flooding other series as well with new licensed IP sets plus the overall sheer mass of sets they hammer out. Point in case: It's all drowned out by a flood of other sets and in the end every IDEAS offering becomes just another one to the buying list. It no longer has this magic where you would feel that an IDEAS set was something truly special and important because in this system it has been relegated to being "just another release" out of many. Mylenium
  9. Mylenium

    Lego Ideas becoming bland and dull

    I don't really think so and I disagree. In a way this dependency on licensed stuff has just become a bad habit or a vice even. It's one of the action <-> reaction things. People do those sets because they've proven successful in the past and everyone tries to find the next big hit based on his own favorite series, car, landmark building and whatnot. In my view it has (d)evolved into this unhealthy self-pollination process where former success dictates what potentially might become successful in the next round. Mind you, I'm talking about the idealistic merits of art, creativity and "ideas" in the purest sense, not the commercial viability and LEGO raking in cash. I understand all that capitalism stuff. Still, I strongly feel that they could be just as successful without so much licensing and even if they adhere to that strategy, perhaps there's indeed a way of doing it differently outside of IDEAS... Mylenium
  10. Mylenium

    Aftermarket pieces?

    At such short lengths they'll be super rigid and stay straight unless you really try very hard to bend it forcibly. Other than that I can't really help you with your conundrum, as much as I try to comb through my brain database. I would imagine, though, that indeed you could find a plethora of silver-ish pieces in COBI sets or some Chinese sets depicting military airplanes. Mylenium
  11. Mylenium

    Lego Ideas becoming bland and dull

    When it was announced, most people here in Germany didn't even know what it was. Even I as a gay person couldn't be bothered and I at least knew! That set was an epic fail and a stupid decision. Indeed people only buy it for the white masonry bricks and a few of the flamboyant prints... Mylenium
  12. Mylenium

    Lego Ideas becoming bland and dull

    Sure, but it's really, really bad ATM. There's so much wrong with how Ideas works and it really needs a fundamental change. Mylenium I don't care whether it's science or art. I love both. However, I'm tired of the low-brow approach to "art" even. The umpteenth TV series set really is super lame and I'm not even sure if the van Gogh set would not simply have slotted into the overall LEGO ART theme and they would have done it at some point, anyway. What I love is truly >>>original<<< art like the Jazz Quartet and we really could need more of that. As for science stuff - I still want it to look pretty. I don't need another ISS or JK Brickworks clunky orrery. So from that perspective I totally understand why some projects don't make it and LEGO will favor more popular stuff. It's one thing to nerd out on something and derive some pleasure from obscure stuff, but totally another to make it appealing to the masses. Mylenium
  13. Mylenium

    Buying from Lego vs. Bricklink

    No generalized answer to that, I'm afraid. Elements that tend to be widely available in many sets can be dirt cheap on Bricklink while others are more costly like popular minifigure add-ons. A bunch of white 2 x 8 bricks should not be too much trouble and some BL sellers have lots for 1 Cent a piece whereas this will cost around 50 Cent at least on LEGOs if I'm not mistaken. The only real consideration on BL is often the shipping cost and the minimum lots you have to buy, but if you really buy in bulk from the same seller this will eventually be a non-issue... Mylenium
  14. The policies on that seem to be a bit muddled, TBH. Some sets are sold at discounts directly in the stores, but I know for a fact that stores also return surplus legacy sets to a central collection facility to be sold off elsewhere. LEGO seems to mandate a lot of stockpiling in their own stores or even at some partners just so they can make it look good in the books and then they sit on large numbers of sets that may never sell... Mylenium
  15. Mylenium

    Taped or Punch-Tab Boxes

    I don't care much one way or the other, since I'm not a collector. I keep a few of the boxes around if I can salvage them and flatten them out, but overall it doesn't matter too much to me. For most sets punch tabs are just fine since I'll throw away the box, anyway. Sometimes it would be nice if LEGO made more use of actual lid boxes that can be opened and closed properly like on some Architecture and DOTs sets or recently the City Mission sets. That would facilitate temporary storage when building larger projects since I sometimes don't come back to them for days or weeks even after having finished a step. Mylenium
  16. Dark Blue is currently not really en vogue at LEGO, so this will be hard. It used to be hip two, three years ago with lots of Ninjago and LEGO Movie 2 stuff. Aside from the Ford Mustang (10265) I'm not aware of a "big" set that would offer Dark Blue elements in bulk. There's some in Deep Sea Creatures (31088) and the Supersonic Jet (31126), but the parts selection may be limited and not that useful to you. Same for Dark Green. It's the curse of LEGO going through those cycles every year with some favorite color becoming predominant and being used in a lot of sets, only to mostly disappear shortly after. There were plenty of Dark Green pieces in the Architecture Great Wall of China(21041) and the Ideas Pop-Up Book (21315). As older sets they may be hard to come buy, though. Dark Red is a bit better since it's used a lot in Super Heroes sets (Iron Man, obviously) plus there's the Pick Up Truck (10290) and Sunken Treasure Mission (31130) with a few useful pieces. That said, of course you can find bits and pieces of these colors in many sets, it might just not be effective to scrape them together this way, so it seems you can't avoid Bricklink entirely. Dark Red and Dark Green 1 x 2 bricks were available through Pick A Brick a few years ago, so you should easily find them in bulk at some dealer who had stocked up then. Mylenium
  17. Mylenium

    TLG Ban Custom Minifig Printing.

    Yeah, absolutely. And a minifigure in a set is a whole different thing just as well because the set puts it in a different context. Mylenium They don't have to lose anything, and that is the crux here. Since LEGO do not offer any official way of licensing, they only have allowed the situation to become so muddy. People use their trademarks, logos and insignia wrong all the time simply because there is no way to just say "Here's 5 bucks for you, no let me print that friggin' logo on the box!". This is further complicated by their own loyalist armies (certified builders, user groups, select partners etc.) being allowed to use those trademarks in some form, but also having contributed to this mess of third-party IPs being used in relation to LEGO stuff. It's certainly quite a corner they've gotten themselves into with those inconsistent interpretations of their own rules... Mylenium
  18. Mylenium

    TLG Ban Custom Minifig Printing.

    There's no changes to the law, but LEGO currently has several challenges in various courts and at the EUIPO. That's why they're scared witless over potentially losing their trademarks and some patents. That's all there is to this panicked call. It's too late one way or they other. There's plenty of evidence out there that they didn't care much about this in the past, which severely will weaken their case either way. They won't lose the trademarks likely, but they may have to instate more liberal policies and they clearly don't like that prospect... Mylenium
  19. Mylenium

    Spare parts in kits?

    Interesting. That rarely ever happens with LEGO sets and in a way you're even lucky that they didn't catch it when weighing the box... Mylenium
  20. Different packaging production methods. Too lazy for an extended write-up on a friggin' hot Sunday afternoon, but suffice it to say that it all makes sense once consider certain aspects of industrial product packaging and how it's done. The individual decision then simply comes down to the number of sets produced, the stability requirements for the box, sensitivity of the parts, hand vs. machine filling/ packaging and a few other things. Mylenium
  21. Bricklink, kingdom of the color blind. *lol* 90% of those "rare colors" are just flukes where sellers don't account for variations or simply mix up colors. This tends to happen quite a bit when sellers aren't specifically into a theme like Friends for instance and can't keep the colors straight... They could be anything from internal prototypes/ test shots to simply undermixed colors that slipped through QA. Impossible to know more without a photo. How and why they get out in the open is anyone's guess, but even a limited run test shot in LEGO's case means a few thousand examples of a piece and it is totally imaginable that employees might dig into that bin earmarked for recycling in an unobserved moment and take home a few items in their pockets. Certified builders can only order parts that would be in production that year, anyway, and in available colors. They have no privileges above and beyond that AFAIK, which is kind of logical. Why would a company like LEGO that produces millions of elements each day bother to produce a few thousand units for some guy in a weird color, when the run-up to this incurs thousands of dollars extra cost? Same for employee sets where it is even extremely unlikely that someone would splice them up for parts, given how rare they are. LEGO doesn't even produce extra colors for their user group bulk program where thousands of people all over the world would benefit, so they sure aren't going to do low quantity one-offs for "some guy". The rest is the ominous black box of the company of course testing new materials and new colors all the time, but I consider it unlikely that this stuff would pop up out in the wild before actually being certified for mass production. So to sum up my babbling: Your odd color item is probably a random convergence of circumstance and nothing more. Mylenium
  22. Does it, though? Actual availability of many sets lasts way longer due to retailers' stock not depleting as fast. Other than that there could be/ are a million reasons, several of which are entirely LEGO's own fault such as An unnecessary overabundance of new releases. You barely can keep up with what comes out every month and naturally in a world where people only have so much money, new releases cannibalize older ones or people simply forget that some sets exist because it's all drowned out in the everlasting beat of the hype marketing drum. Recognizable resource issues with LEGO's production. It happens way too often that popular sets run out and are on back order forever ore don't make it into wide retail in the first place. This could be taken as a sign that despite maxing out their production they can't keep up with demand, but at the same time are unable to free up resources because they're already running production on five million yet to be released sets as well. The ever increasing prices put off buyers and also retailers/ intermediate distributors. Some sets just don't sell that well, so there's no point in producing them for longer as retailers just won't order enough to top up their supply. Therefore additional production runs may simply become too costly to rev up/ reboot after the initial phase. The number of total duds has been dangerously high in the last three years, further causing retailers to be more cautious. I'm sure one could come up with even more points. To me the real question is mostly when this all is going to implode. Eventually people will simply will get pissed one way or the other... Mylenium
  23. Mylenium

    Those magazines with Lego included.

    I regularly review the German editions of several magazines on my blog: https://myleniumsbrickcorner.wordpress.com/category/news/magazines/ It just has become a bit more difficult lately with release dates being shuffled around a lot and not all of the magazines always being available at my local newsstand. Mylenium
  24. You need to filter out UV wavelengths and make sure the room doesn't get too hot. That's the most critical part. Consider covering your Windows in specific UV-absorbent foil or buy some pulldown shades to that effect. The rest is just normal ageing as the polymer oxidizes and partially breaks apart. That could also be mitigated somewhat, but clearly dousing your room in nitrogen or xenon wouldn't be an option. ;-) Mylenium