GregoryBrick

I don't know if you are agreeing with me or not. The reason why people express disappointment seems to me to be their unwarranted expectations - the set is rumoured to hit a particular price, a price which indicates pretty clearly the size/scope of the set. Yet people geared themselves up for . . . well, who knows what. A modular done with fewer elements, or something. I have no idea how this set has 'no details', it seems to me rife with them.

Unreasonable expectations, probably. The rumoured price should have indicated that it wouldn't be the same size (and therefore detail/complexity) as the Bike and Café shops.

I had a similar reaction. The snowplow is a winner. My favourite CITY sets from 2014 were the LeMans car, Monster Truck, and Light Repair Truck - maybe in the second half of the year? I think the new tow truck is a nice one - two vehicles in one and a pretty broad selection of elements/colours, but it doesn't pop out of the range. The starters sets are pretty good too, I think - four figures and there's more than a handful of elements in them. Those clamoring for more construction sets ought to like what's coming.

Great review, great pictures WhiteFang. There's a lot of nice parts in what's a smaller Creator set (bows, technic pins, transparent bricks, radar dishes and a cone, ball/socket elements, 2x2 tile, dark green, multiple different SNOT elements etc.). The build(s) themselves are very charming too - much better in person than on the box. It would be neat if further train sets were produced in this size.

Looks like a great lineup; it's great to see two buildings offered. If price conversions are reliable, the Toy & Grocery shop should be equivalent to the Mountain Hut and the Beach Hut should be around the Small Cottage / Treehouse sizes. But what's a Beach Hut? Gilligan's Island, Swiss Family Robinson, surf bum central, south pacific getaway? I take it a Vehicle Transporter could come with smaller vehicles and a Cargo Heli have some, well, cargo (like a shipping crate)? Always something to look forward to!

For the sake of pointing it out, the greatest cause of mortality and morbidity for children in the U.S. and Canada is unintentional injury. While it is still the largest contributor, the rates of unintentional injury have been on the decrease in the 20th century, with a significant contributor being preventative measures (and technological intervention being much less significant), and this includes safety during play. So, when you talk about child experts, I figure the CDC and WHO are pretty good experts - if people want to rail against all those other child experts who apparently just make things up I think it would be helpful if posters were specific about who they were talking about.

57. by CM4Sci (1 vote) 69. by Yatkuu (1 vote) 76. by Dredgen (1 vote) 136. by SpacySmoke (1 vote) 150. by Galaktek (1 vote) 170. by Emma (2 votes) 191. by j_w_smart (1 vote) 202. by cara (1 vote)

No, no apologies needed, the levity was fine. I didn't find it an offensive comparison, rather I thought it got at the central point - not everything demands the same moral consideration, and a focus on one element doesn't preclude or require a focus on another.

A joke, yes, but it makes clear why minifig representations might be a concern where tyres and leaves wouldn't be - one's a representation of a category of person (which has been politically marginalized and poorly represented in popular media and children's toys) and the other two are representations of objects.

The all-caps question aside, I understand the company's standards by thinking of LEGO as comparable not to Ferrari but to Sony. It would be odd to say either "I own a lot of Sony" or "look at all those Sonys". One would probably say "I own a lot of Sony electronics" or "Look at all those Sony products". LEGO wants their name to be used the same way - either to refer to the company as a whole or with an accompanying noun. And this of course is a convention (with legal issues attached), not a grammatical one, for the reasons already stated.

11: 2 14: 6 21: 1 22: 2 26: 1 35: 2 39: 1 40: 1 41: 1 42: 1 50: 2

Here's Myrtle! This is a Multiple Region Transport Loader (MuRTL); ‘Myrtle the Turtle’, as operators affectionately call her. Fortunately, after a long day of hauling, MuRTL likes it cozy, fitting into a transit rack only 8 units square. Give her a heat lamp, a quick wash, and some minerals for dinner, and she’ll contentedly power down until the next job, dreaming of electric sheep. Features: Articulated legs Rotating superstructure Crane attachment Positronic brain Communications antenna (tail) MuRTL 000 by GregoryBrick, on Flickr (Edit: if it isn't clear, my Flickr album shows this creation fitting the 8x8 maximum size requirement)

Yes, I forgot this - a drawer system without easily removable drawers would be a dealbreaker.

It's easier to answer these all at once, especially since what I like is the opposite of what I don't like. I'll waive my usual consulting fee and let you know what I would like in a storage system if I could pick everything: Modular. Bins should be proportional to each other and to baseplate sizes. Drawers. No bags, dividers, or separate containers with lids. No internal dividers. They just hide the parts at the very back of drawers, they come loose, and they turn into little wells that are hard to dig through and pick elements out of. Stackable / Connecting. They should connect together, or at the very least align when they stack. Very shallow drawers. I'd rather have wide and shallow trays than deep ones; it's way easier to find parts. For larger parts, drawers should be 2x, 3x, Nx, the standard height. Clear trays in an opaque cabinet. Available long-term. I don't want to buy into a system that disappears a few months from now. Free/inexpensive. Good luck.

Thanks for the info just2good. I know Police sets are perennial but I'm surprised to see a Police ATV considering there is currently one still in production from 2013. Perhaps this newer set will be sized like the current Fire Chief Car / Monster Truck / Light Repair Truck, which would allow for a vehicle and side build.

Are people still making the argument that oil production is useful, therefore individual actors and actions in the industry are above reproach? Because it seems to have shown up several times in this thread, but doesn't make any sense. I'm afraid that this is incorrect. Working 8+ hours a day, 5-7 days a week is the product of industrialization, international commerce, and technological change. The capacity to generate wealth and increase productivity has no direct effect on increasing leisure time. To repeat the point, people's leisure time isn't thanks to modern advances in production. Prior to these long-term, massive changes in social organization, our ancestors worked 8-20 hours per week to produce all that they needed/wanted to live (the specifics are dependent on things like social organization and climate etc.). How do we know this? Because anthropologists and economists went out and checked. This isn't to say that we should resort to that form of economic activity, simply that we certainly don't have to thank Shell for our leisure hours. Leisure time in the present for industrialized countries is the consequence of the social democratic state and the labour rights movement. This is getting well off-topic and I'd rather just talk about clicking plastic bricks together but if we're going to emphasize how important facts are, those are some.

To hallonsylt, Since you don't know exactly which models are UCS, then how do you know you want a complete collection of them? As others have said, why not get the sets you want? Otherwise, you're just committing yourself to buying sets before you even know what they are, which I do not think is wise.

Thanks for the review Jim, very well done.

Time Cruisers / Time Twisters. I'd very much like to see another stab at this concept, especially with modern parts, techniques, and design approaches.

Most people in this thread seem to like it for all kinds of reasons, creativity and originality included. Is there an approximate element count for this set? Apologies if it's been posted anywhere, I haven't seen it. I also noticed the brick separator inclusion - perhaps this is going to be standard in Ideas sets, or perhaps it is because of all the little tiles on the plate, as is seen in the Minecraft sets.

And I certainly never said it was LEGO's fault. It just means that LEGO occupies a tricky space (as most of us do) - to what extent are they compelled to reproduce ideas about gender? Whether they intend to or not, it's reasonable to get kids and adults thinking about how LEGO might be inadvertently reproducing those ideas. No bubble bursted, because Pac-Man is the name used in North America regardless of origins; if gendered assumptions about male=neutral or male=default also exist in Japan, it only buttresses my argument; Pac-Man was only one example I used; and I'm not Anita Sarkeesian so I'm not responsible for her arguments about video games. I remain convinced by the evidence that In many cases when gender is unspecified, the assumption is that it is male. I can give even more examples: bicycle manufacturers divide their products into "bicycles" and "women's bicycles"; helmet and hiking pack manufacturers have historically done the same; Bic produced a product called "Pens for her" (and no "Pens for him")1; and the suffix "man-" as in 'mankind" or the pronoun "he" have long been used to stand in for a gender-neutral individual. In each of these examples and the others I've listed above, the 'neutral' case and the 'male' case are treated as interchangeable, whereas if something is to be recognized as 'feminine' it has to be explicitly marked as such. These examples are in flux and change with history, but they aren't myths; they are the facts. The toy aisles are a good example of this. It's quite clear which aisles are for girls, because of the overwhelming preponderance of pink. Why is this the case? If something is directed towards girls, it has to be marked as such, whereas if something is unmarked, it is read as neutral or for boys (which often amounts to the same thing). Why is this done? It's not because girls have an inherent preference for pink. It's because of post-WWII marketing efforts by North American department stores. If girls now prefer pink, that's specific to our current historical moment. Biology doesn't tell us much, considering firstly that the bulk of sex-based traits are distributed on significantly overlapping curves and secondly that the role such traits play in everyday practice is hard to measure and not in any simple relationship. I don't what you mean about parents and instruction manuals, is this just a smear or something? 1And got roundly criticized for it, I should add.

The general perception in North America and Europe is that anything which is not explicitly marked as 'female' is assumed to be male. People often don't even realize they are doing this, but we see it in all kinds of everyday examples - look at washroom icons: the default icon is male, but a skirt is added to specify 'female'. Pac-Man is simply a circle, but Ms. Pac-man has a bow to indicate 'female', as well as the prefix 'Ms.' (Why isn't it the reverse? The plain circle could be the lady and then there could be Mr. Pac-Man with a bowtie). It's the same with language in many cases, such as 'hero' and 'heroine' (the default is assumed to be male, and receives the suffix to indicate female). You can also look at the history of anatomy textbooks, which long assumed that the male body is the default case, and female bodies are deviations from that (which of course is incorrect). This isn't to argue whether it's right or wrong, and of course it's not absolute. Children will not ascribe gender to their toys in a universal fashion. But again, the default assumption (inside and outside of LEGO) is that if gender is not specified, it's usually taken to be male. Why, I remember a recent comment on these boards assuming that the Mixels were all male unless there was some specific indication in the cartoon clips about which ones were female. Look also at Gail the Construction Worker in the LEGO Movie figures: she gets lipstick and a special ponytail mold. If gender could be ascribed as easily as you suggest, why not just give the character a regular smiley face and hard hat? In such a case, most people would assume it to be a male minifigure.

Thanks for the review, I always like to see what's new in Creator sets. I did a double-take on that stabilizer connection. At first I thought "oh, of course that works" and the more I thought about it the more I realized how un-obvious a connection it is, even though it's based on a 3-4-5 triangle.

This is very very nice. Congratulations on making the front page! Some things in particular I liked: using the concave side of the 2x2 w. bow exposed studs none of your element use draws attention to itself - just a lot of harmony and variety

"These elementary school kids aren't learning proper methodology; this is deplorable" *uses an n of 1 to indict the entire US education system* What were they doing there? It's in the article: "to help its schools become more gender-inclusive and address bias and bullying". The paranoid backlash such efforts get is exactly why they might have some raison d'être.