puddleglum

A little update - I decided that getting into PF wasn't urgent for me, and that I could just wait for an opportunity to get a Technic PF set on sale. I figured that would probably mean waiting until the next after-Christmas sale, but I was okay with that. Then I was in my local TRU the other day, and they had Monster Dino on sale for $70! I remembered you recommending it and decided to go for it, espeically since it has every PF part but the lights and pole reverser. The PF parts alone would be $50 to buy separately, so I'm pretty happy about this. That's getting the nearly 800 other parts, including Technic stuff I don't have much of like gears, cams, and lift arms, for $20! Not to mention the instructions for three different models should help me get on my way towards learning how to us PF. So yay! The only thing is I promised my wife I would finish my current sorting/storage project before cracking this thing open.

First, thanks for the reviews. Maybe it's just the pictures, but I can't help but think these look more like Megabloks than LEGO. I also have to agree that these don't seem to put LEGO in a good light at all - they look like cheap toys! Sure, they are OK considering that they are "free", and I understand that prices dictate that there is no way to put "real" LEGO in a cereal box without losing money. My feeling is that if that's the case, they probably should just not be doing this promotion. But what do I know!

In store, yes. On the website, they seem to have randomly selected which sets it applies to.

The ROCCK The Remotely Operated Covert Cut-n-Kill is one of the Rock Monster's more devious defenses. Disguised as a Power Crystal-laden rock formation, it has an advanced targeting system, can be operated remotely, and uses recovered Power Miner saws as ammunition. The targeting system is designed to be accurate at up to 100 yards, but it has never been tested at that range in combat situations. Power Miners, in their greed, are inevitably drawn to point-blank range before the firing mode is deployed. This is an entry for the Monster's Revenge contest going on at FBTB. Photoset: http://www.flickr.com/photos/matthew_raehl...57616251116259/

Thanks for the input everyone! Blakbird - If I'm every in the Pacific Northwest I'll be sure to hit you up for a tour.

That stupid thing has been lingering around on their website forever, it's really annoying. That set was released in 2006!!

Thanks for the heads up. For whatever reason, it looks like it is only available in countries not named "Canada" and "United States".

Thanks! That is actually my favorite detail in the whole thing. Depending on who you ask, they are called "corn poppers" or "pusher poppers". Anyways, my son has one, and I got really excited when I got the idea for how to make it in LEGO.

Thanks everyone! I fiddled with something at Flicker yesterday that seemed to have broken the photo link, but it should be working again now.

This is a little vig I made for the Job Muller's Contest going on over at Classic-Castle.com Pitchfork Procurer When the FARMWELL Supply Company decided to stop manufacturing their iconic pitchfork, peasants were forced to turn to the second-hand market and pay inflated prices. Berwick has made a name for himself as the village Pitchfork Procurer, always scooping up the best deals on Picklink.

I've been seeing this a lot lately, especially with cheese slopes. Anybody else had this problem? All the parts are from 4996 Beach House:

Thanks for the kind words guys, glad you liked it!

The LEGO Store at Potomac Mills, VA has a modest selection of large sets for 20% off, due to dented boxes. The sets were Market Street, Green Grocer, Eiffel Tower, Death Star II(10143), Town Plan, and I believe the Sandcrawler was there as well. The "damage" on most of the boxes amounted to little more than a long crease on one side of the front. Basically just enough that they couldn't put it on the shelf and sell it for full price. So, it's a nice opportunity to pick up some of the pricier sets at a discount, if you haven't already. (I finally got a copy of Green Grocer!)

Oh I definitely requested replacements. It's just unsettling, since a) I don't do QC on every little 1x1 bit I get in a set, and b) some sets I buy for parts and don't ever even build, so it could be that by the time I noticed something like this, the part is OOP. But at least that probably is not going to be the case with cheese slopes.

The pricey Cloud City Boba Fett will still fetch top dollar due to it's rarity - it has the printed arms and legs.

I really doubt it, as it has already been mentioned that the HP line is gone and the last set came out a year ago. Spiderman is even more unlikely, considering Megablocks now has the license.

How can you tell most buyers are international? Just anecdotal evidence, or is there some way to see this on BL?

I also got the lime green crystal. I plan on contacting LEGO to get the proper green one. As for the set, I will echo what someone else said, which is that I did find the heavly-SNOT construction of the body interesting for such a small official LEGO set. I really don't like the legs on this thing, though. The two huge 2x2 bricks with sockets make them look silly. Really the only angle they look good from is the angle on the box. That being said, I bought this and the bike to get a taste of the PM theme and I can say I like them more than I thought I would, but I probably won't buy any more. It's always nice to get more parts in unusual colors like lime green, but there is too much technic and bionicle stuff in them for my tastes.

Yeah, buying any LEGO on eBay other than something advertised as MISB by a seller with highly positive feedback is a gamble. Used LEGO, even when being sold by a reputable seller, is risky because it is likely they will not understand the importance of missing parts or figures, damaged parts, etc. That being said, prices are usually lower on eBay so if you're in the mood to gamble you can land some nice deals.

Actually the wings were still in common use in sets as recently as 2003-2004 timeframe. But I really think the newer wedge pieces that have notches for studs are much more versatile and I'm glad LEGO made the change.

Care to explain this a little more? I'm sure there are optimizations over what I described, as I was just trying to give an idea of the difficultly of the problem. But it seems like the kind of "proper" indexing that would be needed to speed up this process would be crazy - wouldn't every single part have to have a sort of price-to-store and quantity-to-store index? And even then it seems like it would be hard to eliminate "most" 5-store combinations based on that data. I'm very willing to learn here because I'm by no means an expert on this stuff.

Well done, Joebot! But, if we're going by sheer number of different minifigs, I would say that Daniel Radcliffe has everyone licked - according to BL there are 19 distinct HP minifigs. Mark Hamill isn't too far back with 16 forms of Luke Skywalker.

First, one thing to keep in mind is this: Bricklink - eBay fee comparison BL has very low fees and I think everyone likes it that way. I am in general agreement that the BL user experience could be improved. It took me quite a bit of fiddling and poking around to figure out how wanted lists worked, how to search by shop, etc. Yes, it would be amazing if that sort of thing existed, but I want to help you understand that it would require a very large amount of work by the BL developers, and a very large amount of processing power by their servers. Right now, just for the basic wanted list "by shop" feature, every time you hit that button, BL has to go through every single store, and check for every single item on your list to get the info you want. So if you have a large wanted list, say 50 lots, it has to go through all 2000 stores and check for each of those 50 items. I don't know if you've noticed, but even this feature by itself can take a few seconds for BL to process and return a result. Now, for the feature you want. It might start with just finding the fewest number of stores, reguardless of price. The simplest way would probably be to start with the store with the most lots. Then, go through every single other store that has any of your wanted items, see how many missing lots that store has. Whichever has the most, add it. Continue until all lots are accounted for. So maybe your 50 lots can be bought from 5 stores. Calculating the price for that particular combination would be easy, but we want to compare the price to other 5-store combinations. So it needs to find every single possible 5-store combination from which your parts can be bought. This is where it gets ugly. Let's say only 200 stores have items on your wanted list. That means there are 200!/(5!*195!) = roughly 2.5 billion 5-store combinations to be processed. For each of those combinations, BL must go through each item on your list, determine which of the five stores has the lowest price (or if none have it), add everything up, and save the total price for that set of stores (assuming that set has all your wanted parts). Now, assuming it could process 1 million of these combinations in a second (I'll go out on a limb and say it couldn't), the whole process would take 40 minutes. And all you would have is the cheapest possible 5-store combination, never mind what price you might be able to get out of a 6 or 7 store combination. More stores means exponentially more processing time. Now imagine several hundred BL users hammering the BL servers with these requests all at once. All that being said, I'm not saying that something *like* what you want couldn't be done. I'm just saying it would certainly require a lot of development time, and a lot of processing power, both of which would mean BL would need to raise fees. And in the end it would have to take shortcuts, meaning you wouldn't really get the for-sure-cheapest-way, just the cheapest way that was easy to find. I'm not sure what you mean - BL has this exact feature. When you're looking at the list of items in a store that are on your list, click "Auto-Fill Cart Min" and it will enter your wanted amount. But I will admit it could be labled better, like "Auto-Fill Cart Wanted Amt" I agree that there should at least be an option to save a cart before leaving a store, even if it doesn't happen by default. I think for "simple" purchases of a few lots, BL is straightforward, and it's quite easy to find what you're looking for. But creating a list of parts in specific quantities and colors, and coordinating the purchase of those parts from multiple sellers is an inherently complicated task, and I think it's unreasonable to expect BL to make the process dead-simple.

I still haven't seen anything LEGO clearanced at any of my local Targets. But many Walmarts still have 2008 Indiana Jones and Castle sets for ~25% off. Also, King's Castle Siege (7094) is down to $30 (70% off!!) if you can find it - I managed to snag four of them just the other day!

I noticed the same problem with that part (yellow 1x1 plate with clip) in the set Cool Cars (4939). The set includes 6 of these parts and they are all kind of a more mustard, almost greenish color like you describe. They must have had a bad batch of these around the time these sets were created. Interestingly, this exact part and color don't seem to be in any of the new 2009 sets (but I guess they're not all inventoried on BL yet).