ResIpsaLoquitur

Well, I tried doing a "Mines of Moria" mod to my tombs. I don't have any spare 2x4 or 2x2 bley tiles, so I need to remember to get some on my next Bricklink shop. In the meantime, I used 2x2 tan tiles just to see how it would look. It's...erm...ok, but I don't think it looks as good as the Moria tomb. The back headpiece of the tombs may need to go, or else be raised by one 1x4 plate, and maybe--just maybe--it'll look better with actual 2x4 bleys in there. Still, I'm pretty sure the Moria tombs have a lid which lifts off, lip and all. Here, the lip would remain attached, while only the 2x8 plate on top would lift by the technic mechanism. Oh, and I can't create a rear lip because of the play feature. So...I guess it looks better than the mere "boxes" Lego gave us, but not fabulous. Your thoughts?

*oh2* I love it. Especially the bottles on the palate. I don't know why, but they're great.

I wonder if they could do a black repaint-variant of the Revolutionary Soldier's torso to make a Headless Horseman someday. Add a cape, a black version of the one ring to secure it with no head, and give him a pumpkin and a saber for accessories. I'd be all over that figure.

"Alien Conquest Triumphant" Theme: City/Alien Conquest Minifig: Alien Avenger January 2013. The Alien Defense Unit was prepared for the tripods and the saucers. Taking down a battalion of alien troopers posed little difficulty, and Hypaxus-8 was on the verge of surrender. Victory seemed imminent, until the arrival of the Queen and her invincible Alien Avengers. Lego City quickly fell as wave after wave of Avenger arrived, the ADU's weapons unable to penetrate their impregnable armor... The survivors have taken to hiding in the sewers. "Hello...can anyone hear me? ...don't know how long I can talk...don't know how close they are. I've been hiding for weeks...the troopers are everywhere. Barely alive...hope that they can't detect my fire down here. Need to find a weapon...something...hope to get out of the city before they can find me. Please...is anyone out there...? Does anyone know a safe way out of the city...?" Close-up of the devastation. The ADU barely knew what hit them. Click here to see the Alien Avenger in his glorious victory! Feedback, comments, and rules compliance warnings are appreciated.

My entry: "DJ Brickmaster's Boardwalk Party" Minifig: The DJ Theme: City It's a Saturday night, and KLGO radio is hosting an all-night dance-off down at the Lego City boardwalk! A pair of contestants has come out and has been dancing for hours. Which one of them will drop first? The DJ has a supply of records to keep this party going until someone wins! Here's a photo without the figures so you can get a better view of the speakers and turntable. For the record--see what I did there?--that's the record from the Monster Fighters Haunted House, not the DJ. You can just see the storage slot for the extra records and album covers--including the DJ's--behind the left speaker. Update: Here's a close-up of the turntable itself. (Again, note that this is the Monster Fighters record.) Click here and here for a photo with the DJ at his turntable!

I noticed that the encyclopedia is using truncated versions of each minifigure's biography from the Lego website. It looks to be excluding their stats and quotes, for whatever that's worth. (I mean, the stats are cute but worthless, unless there's plans for a CMF game.) Too bad--a lot of the quotes were funny.

Man, that will look great in some Christmas displays. Good thing Holiday Elf and Gingerbread Man should be out before the end of the year--combine them with Santa for a great workshop scene.

Hmmm, I guess I have a similar question. I can't use the DJ's record, but could I use similar records from the Haunted House? Can we use a laptop from the Friends line if we're not allowed to use the computer nerd's?

Confession: I hate unfinished studs. I don't know why it never bothered me as a kid, but as an adult, I can't stand to see bumpy studs all over my products, especially buildings. Maybe it's because building techniques have gotten so much more sophisticated. Look at the modular buildings: my recollection is that they're all pretty smooth structures thanks to clever use of tiles. So I love the haunted house--it's pretty much on par with a modular building, although we all agree it's not quite the same kind of building. What's driving me nuts is all those unfinished floors. All I can see is studs all over the place. Today I decided to experiment with cleaning it up a little. I have a whole bunch of 1 x 4 brown tiles, so I decided to redo the right attic floor. Here's the result. And a more distant look, so you can see how the unfinished one below compares: This is mostly 1 x 4 tiles arranged in a pattern that makes sense. It's not perfect. There's a few spots where I need some 1 x 1 or 1 x 2 tiles, but they're not obvious from the photos. I also have a few 1 x 2 plates hidden here or there to secure the various boxes and items. The ghost is actually standing on one. You can also see that the skull is on one, since there's a stud next to his head. Your thoughts--is this better, or worse? I definitely think it makes the floor "cleaner" and more in line with the style of the modular buildings. It may be a little TOO clean--this is supposed to be a moldy old house, so perhaps it looks a little too nice to be appropriate. Doing the rest of the house is going to be tricky. The left attic is not as cleanly shaped, so I'm going to need to Bricklink a LOT of 1 x 1 and 1 x 2 tiles to make it look good. The bottom floors will also be tricky, as they're specifically designed to look like crumbling masonry and rotten wood--it may take me some time to figure out what I want to do with them. The middle floors, too--should they also be brown to suggest wood? I have some tan 2 x 2 tiles--maybe I could make it look like a stone-tiled floor? Comments are appreciated!

When you say that only official stickers can be used, is that limited to stickers from a set? Can I use stickers from one of the DK books or any other source that uses licensed Lego stickers?

Go for it, if you've got the cash to spend on two houses. I'd suggest adding some bricks with technic pin holes if you're going to make it a giant modular. That way, you'll be able to plug it into the Creator modular houses. Of course, it might look really out of place on a modular street, but who knows. Make sure to put the whole thing on a 32 x 32 base so it could connect with other modulars. Also, I'd take advantage of all the zombie heads in your second house. If you don't plan to duplicate your front porch, you could get at least four minifigure bodies (six if you want to put the extra chef and butler heads on something different) and have a load of extra zombies about the house.

The Skydiver looks oddly endearing, even though he has no practical use. (I mean, it'd be really hard for Lego to make a functional chute.) I'm half-tempted to have him lying in my City street, but I'll probably just have him posed on the side of my 3178 Seaplane. Other thoughts: - Trendsetter will probably work well on one of my City sidewalks. I'm working on a small water ice store, so I could see her sitting outside it with her iPhone. - Decorator will go on my large billboard as though he's painting it. - Grandpa will be running our MOC general store (which I may not unveil until next year's Winter Village contest, should EB have one). - Roman commander will go...with my other Roman, I guess. I have a small Easter scene up in our kitchen for Lent, but Easter will be over by the time this is out. - Bee Girl will go somewhere with the other animal-people. We still haven't found a practical use for the animals, but they've become almost like a sub-line that my daughter and I collect. (She really wants an Owl person if anyone at TLG is listening.) - I may have to buy two revolution soldiers so I can MOC one into a Headless Horseman for Monster Fighters. I'm not sold on the other characters yet, so we'll see.

That's pretty good! Here's some of mine. Zombie Chauffer car parked out front. Jack o' lanterns on the front porch, with a classic happy ghost to offset the spooky ones. Cobweb out back (from the MF Accessory Pack): Giant Spider from Monster 4 on the roof: Lord Vampyre wants NO GARLIC in his snake stew. LV has some skeletons in his closet. The consequences of partying too hard. (Also, that top hat doesn't fit in the attic trunk as Lego envisioned.) Hmmm, I'm intrigued. Do you have pictures?

I took my daughter to the Club Meeting at the Lego Store today. Today's theme was Police-based: build a crook-catcher for Chase McCain. She had fun, and walked away with a cop minifig, the t-shirt, and Police Helicopter 7741 in her goody bag. Anyway, while we were there, I overhead a customer talking to the cashier about upcoming events. He mentioned that April would be a "Creator" club meeting, despite the April calendar not being available yet. (I imagine it'll be out in a week or two.) This got me wondering: is there a pre-made schedule of the Club events for the year anywhere? It seemed like the Store clerk had them all tabbed out in a big binder, although I don't know how far in advance it went. She really seems to like these events, so I'd like to know if we can forecast these when we plan events, summer camps, etc....

Thanks for the feedback, I decided to try the other side of the attic just to see how it looks. Here we go... The darker piece on the left is just a sub, because I needed something to fit in there. Here's both sides of the attic together: I'm still not entirely sold in this, and I may go through the tedious process of popping out all the tiles. I like the regularity and the smoothness. However, because the floorboards are the same color as the other browns in the house, it feels like they all blend together--it's not very appealing to my eyes. If I had a whole bunch of tiles in the darker brown color, I think it might work better. Or if I had a ton of those 1 x 4 brown tiles with the wood pattern printed on them--like the ones on the windows out front--that might look more realistic. I am curious what other tweaks people have done to their haunted houses. The only other significant changes I've done is to accessorize it. You can see my polybag clock where everybody else has put theirs, and I have a few extra ghosts floating around. Out front, I added a few jack-o'lanterns from the Monster 4 game. I also added in bits from the Monster Fighters Accessory Pack and the Halloween CMF pack around the house. (You can see a bit of white in the bedroom closet. I shoved a skeleton in there.) I would like to know what the rest of you are doing to make your houses better--do share!

So, over at Toys N Bricks, they're having a contest where they want people to build a classic movie scene using a CMF. I mulled and mulled over this before I settled on "The Artist." I don't know how widely this film circulated outside the U.S., but it won the Academy Award for Best Picture last year and was a pretty entertaining film. Anyway, I just finished up the set today, and then I double-checked the rules... ...turns out the movie has to have been made in the last 20 years. Darn. So I can't enter it and need to come up with something else. So I'll post it here. "The Artist," folks. Enjoy!

Oh, good...I can attach the spreadsheet here. It's in MS Excel format. minifigures.xls

Just for fun, I decided to calculate out the percentage and numbers of the Collectible Minifigures by theme. In other words, what are we seeing in the CMF line? Is it an equal distribution of City, Castle, and Space figure, or is the deck stacked on one particular subtheme? Actually, it's pretty City-heavy. Maybe you could tell that by looking at the lineup, but I was pretty surprised when I ran the final numbers, which I'll give in a moment. I'll admit that my groupings of figures are a little arbitrary. I've identified the broad themes of minis as: City, Sports, Monster, Historical, Western, Space, Castle, Fantasy, and, um, Pirate. (Hey, Lego had its own gigantic Pirate line, so the guy in CMF Series 8 gets his own mention.) I originally just had "City" for all the modern occupational figures, but I was shocked at the number of sports figures, so I split them out. Even then, I still had to make some arbitrary determinations of who fit where. For example: do we consider the Elf and Evil Dwarf to be Fantasy or Castle? I decided to stick them in "Castle" because they both seem to go into that sort of medieval look, while "Fantasy" would really be more for fantastic characters like the Mermaids, Minotaur, and Cyclops. Others got tricky: the two Robots, I put in "Space" for their sci-fi feel, but the Clockwork Robot went in "City" because he looks like a big toy. Santa and the Leprechaun, I put in "City" because they generally look like modern people you'd see in costumes (and Santa is re-appearing in next year's City Advent Calendar). Same with Grandma Visitor, although I can see an argument that she should go in "Fantasy." Anyway, here's the numbers I came up with for up to Series 10 (but not the overall chart of who I put where--that's huge). - City has 71 collectible minifigures. (44% of the line.) - Sports has 29 CMFs. (18% of the line) - Monsters have 9 CMFs. (6% of the line) - Historical has 19 CMFs. (12% of the line) - Western has 7 CMFs. (4% of the line) - Space has 11 CMFs. (7% of the line) - Castle has 6 CMFs. (3% of the line) - Fantasy has 7 CMFs. (4% of the line) - There's one Pirate. (less than 1%) I guess we might disagree on some of the individual determinations of who gets categorized, but the numbers wouldn't change too much. The point is that the CMFs are pretty City-heavy; City plus sports combined gets you 100 figures total, or over 60% of the line. So...I guess if you feel like the CMF line is unbalanced, here's your evidence. (Not me--I get a lot of City stuff, so I'm fine with it.) This is your useless information for the evening. Hope you find it helpful!

These seem to be kinda scarce in Maryland, USA. My Lego store is pretty low, if not out of them. So is the local TRU. Fortunately, I stopped at a Giant grocery store and found them in the seasonal aisle with the Valentine's/Easter stuff at $3.00 each. Which is a great place for them--I put some CMFs in my daughter's plastic Easter eggs last year and she loved them. Same plan this year! I haven't opened them, but I'm fairly certain that I found Hollywood Starlet and Forest Maiden.

Hmmm, good point. I've always taken the Calendar as a hint of what's to come. 2011 had the police calendar; 2012 was police-heavy (with some fire). 2012 was a fire calendar, 2013 is fire-heavy (with a lot of police). So 2013 is...more space? Also, I had to take another look at the Spaceman. I don't take him to be a "fairy" as some people said--I think he's just supposed to be topping the tree. (Remember, this year's calendar also came with a want which was intended as the tree-topper for the previous day.) Spaceman flies, so it's a cooler way to top the tree than a set of stairs. What the heck is that vehicle, though? A car for that Octan driver? (I think I see some wheels in the background between the spaceman and fireman, so maybe it's a split-day vehicle like the fire buggy from this year.)

Well, would you rather that they had kept using the traditional Pirate Santa? Once they made CMF Santa, I don't think there was any way they could have continued with Pirate in good conscience. I really can't figure out the theme of this year's calendar, though. 2010 was a "family Christmas" with a build-a-train. 2011 was "cops and robbers" with a build-a-station. 2012 was firemen with the, er, "build-a-wall." (After 2011 gave us a whole building, I was pretty disappointed, even if this one is made of brick-bricks.) 2013 is...what...a grab bag?

Well, I'm pleased with that Advent Calendar. I take it the LAAT/R attaches to the six-legged walker, so that's pretty cool. Also a good lineup of army builder figures--a Phase I Clone, a Scout Trooper, a Geonosian (no wings?)--all look great. I wish Santa Jango had his Mandalorian backpack instead of the sack, but otherwise looks great.

Hey, good news...looks like CMF Santa, complete with sack, will be part of the 2013 Advent Calendar. Unless that's a really lousy mock-up and they stuck CMF in there because they didn't have enough Santa Pirates. CMF Santa is such a vast improvement that it'd be inexcusable for Lego to ever use Pirate Santa again in the future. (Although according to Bricklink, this year's winter set looks like it uses a Pirate. Grrr.)

I thought they were doing a rehashed Slave-1 in Episode II colors, no? Hmmm.

Gah! Where did you find it? The lowest I've found it for is $25 (and the City one for $20). I haven't opened it yet, as I keep checking Target to see if they'll clearance it further. Unfortunately, they've been slowly disappearing from Target shelves.... And yeah, I'd hold out for the 2013 calendar to be cleared as well. I'm just curious if Lego would make Boba an exclusive to the calendar, as that might force more people to buy it. (A lot of people could live without Santa Maul, but if people who buy the new Slave 1 can only get YB through the calendar...well, they'll have to choose either the calendar or the secondary market, won't they?)