Zeya

If you see "Let The Right One In", you will be experiencing a different type of vampire movie. I also enjoyed that one. It's Swedish and has subtitles (for some people this is a dealbreaker apparently). It also has a slow build up but it's worth it to see until the end, and I enjoyed the pacing and feel of the film so I didn't mind. I have not seen the American version "Let Me In", but a coworker said it's not quite as good; maybe that is if you've already seen the original. I saw another foreign vampire movie by Park Chan Wook that was also a different type. It's called "Thirst" and I saw it on Netflix (I think it was streaming, even). That one was okay. I keep watching his movies hoping for another "Oldboy" experience. He never really disappoints at any rate. But for most films, I think you've nailed the two types more or less. Oh yeah, the girlfriend and I watch True Blood on HBO, which is basically a trashy novel put to the screen, lol. (The most recent season was pretty bad though.)

Yeah they all seem to have sensitive feelings and hair gel these days.

I saw Horrible Bosses. Very funny and enjoyable.

TLG is "hanging up the old shako hat"?

Oh and another thing. I found it amusing that they were touting Lego Universe as a big important investment for Lego. The show was clearly made months ago, because LU is shutting down about 6 days from now. That was kind of awkward.

I got a Meteor Strike game for $6 last night at Target. Also from Amazon: PoP Desert Attack at about 20% off MSRP Friends Heartlake Vet I want to buy some series 6 CMFs, but nobody has them online at MSRP right now.

I watched this last night, and it was pretty good. I didn't realize their factories were so automated! The storage robot was pretty cool in particular. I liked seeing the designers at work. The one thing that bugged me is the same thing that gets me with other TV shows - they kind of gloss over some details that I wish they would go more into. It's fun to hear the stats of how many bricks per day a certain area puts out. But after a while it gets repetitive and I'd like to know more how the machines work. Did anybody else think they played up the part about the line holdup? They talked about how serious it could be, but the workers looked pretty calm and even bored. Then they said it was like 10 minutes away from shutting down everything. I wonder if they were exaggerating a little bit there. Another part I liked was how they come up with a story for the sets. The little City robber supposedly has that gray jacket on, and they said it's as if he pulled on someone's jacket over his jail clothes after making a jail break. All that footage of bricks being carted around made me drool. My girlfriend said "what would you do if they let you have 15 minutes in there and let you take whatever you want?"

I'm digging that curved piece on the cactus. I wonder if you could use that as some architectural styling on a building overhang or something like that.

Whoa! I'm going to start doing those surveys now. Is there a special code printed in the instructions that you enter when taking the survey? Because otherwise you could just take it over and over...

Maybe it's the case that there's a unique mold (part type) that has only been in that color. Then go and look up that mold by number in the LUGBULK list (if there is such a list) and maybe you'll deduce the color. I've never been a part of LUGBULK, so I don't know the ins and outs. I asked my local LUG about joining to participate in LUGBULK and they wouldn't allow it. I guess it's meant to be for the purposes to putting together large displays for the public. Was worth asking. I wish I had the spare time to join a LUG. Maybe when I'm retired.

I think this will help you: http://www.peeron.com/inv/colors "BLName" is the bricklink color, and "LEGOName" is what TLG uses.

That's it. I'm officially starting the rumor about Friends figs in the CMF packets. "Just feel for the heart shaped hair clip. That's when you know it's Olivia. You can tell because she doesn't have a surfboard." Edit: Wait a minute. Series 7 in March? This can't be. That would mean they're upping it to 4 series a year. I haven't even seen Series 6 around here. Maybe they just used the wrong photo.

Bad news, Joe90, but there's a third one as well. Besides Cafe Corner and Market Street, there is also Green Grocer, which was the most recent one to disappear from shelves. Fire Brigade might very soon be going away as well, and you would be well advised to get it now, if you can. I think I saw Grand Emporium in a Lego catalog recently, so maybe that will be around for a little while longer as well. You should have plenty of time to save up for Pet Shop, which just launched in the middle of 2011. A Town Hall set will be coming out very soon (Feb 1st I think). Welcome to the empty wallet club.

Perfectly reasonable to doubt, considering the circumstances. I heard it 3rd-hand anyway. I was told by a well-respected EB member in a PM. I don't want to "out" the person because I don't know if it was meant to be semi-confidential. And I also don't know where they learned about it from either, although I suspect this person has some friends in high places in the Lego community. They told me that part of the Warner Bros. / LotR license was a non-compete clause pertaining to similar Lego themes. But they also told me that castle would be back one day, which sounded encouraging. They also stated in the PM that once the current supply of Kingdoms is gone, it's gone (except the exclusives as we know). They told me that at a time when people were still throwing back and forth whether Kingdoms was possibly continuing with new sets into 2012, so that tells me they have some solid knowledge there. All in all, I wouldn't doubt what they say, especially since people have said the same non-compete thing was true with Star Wars for quite some time. I think that's just how these contracts are written. There's probably a similar thing in place with the DC/Marvel contract, making sure that TLG won't hold a concurrent contract with some other comic book maker, and also won't make some generic Lego superheroes line.

I'm not a mint collector or very much of a reseller. But I can't help but think that the short run given to the second Kingdoms wave is going to mean that these sets will command a high price on the aftermarket, especially a few years down the road. The MVR in particular should fetch quite a pretty penny in a couple years or so. At the same time, I'm kind of surprised that TLG is continuing with selling MMV. I heard as part of the LotR licensing deal, that TLG can't sell competing products. But I've been thinking, maybe that just applies to general retail stores - no medieval/fantasy stuff sitting on shelves next to LotR (looking cheaper and more imaginative, stealing sales). I guess TLG can still sell exclusive sets and not break that contract somehow, and so they can continue to sell MMV and the Kingdoms joust set. But it just feels so odd as an observer that MMV is going on, what, year three of sales (?) when the second wave of Kingdoms just flew by. They hit shelves back in March/April and now they're gone. I guess I'm glad that they managed to squeeze out the joust set before LotR hits the streets.

Looks pretty solid! I'm really loving the archer in the tree! He really blends in with the leaves and gives this scene a sense of action. The trees themselves are very well done. You could make this MOC a little better by adding some variation to the gray path. You can lay down round studs in grays and earth tones to make it seem like a stone path. More flowers and grass on the ground would help too, if you have it.

Looks pretty good! I wouldn't mind seeing some closer shots. I'm wondering how you did the bowsprit. Welcome to Eurobricks!

There's also a large castle set in the Monster Fighters theme. A lot of gray bricks, but the rooftops look like special "<insert that tiresome argument>" pieces, kind of like they did with the Harry Potter castles.

I have a question. I'm slowly over time accumulating a small number of polybags and impulse sets that I don't necessarily want to open. And maybe a few used things from the occasional eBay purchase. My question is, would it be worth it to open a Bricklink store even with a very small amount of stuff? I'm not familiar with what sort of costs associated with setting up or running a BL store. How big of a cut does BL take out of your sales, is there a monthly overhead, etc. Most importantly, would it be worth the time and effort with such a small amount of stuff? I'm talking something like 20 polybags and less than 1 pound of bricks, two or three random keychains, stuff like that.

Wow, you did a great job! I thought for a second they added cloth sails to LDD, but you cleverly used bricks and cropped the photo just so. I like the cross-dressing pirate there!

They are? You mean this one?

You will occasionally read about someone molding their own pieces. I've seen threads like that get locked down quickly, and rightfully so. If someone's doing that, they can conceivably mix their own colors. Those situations are probably pretty easy to spot, at least in person. It's hard to fake the logo and part identifier, I imagine. Another thing I saw somewhere is that people sometimes will take a printing off a piece and act like it's a rare defect, trying to sell it at a high price. You can remove printings with some kind of chemical and I'm sure that's very easy to do. So beware of that case. Don't buy a plain minifig torso or something with only a back printing; good chance it's a fake. And there was a case recently where parts got leaked on an asian ebay-like website and were actually up for sale. These were collectible minifigure parts, and were available way before the release. They were obviously smuggled out of the factory. I believe in that case they were not prototypes, so it's not that exciting today. But conceivably if TLG doesn't lock that down, there could theoretically be prototype parts that make it out of a factory. But as for legitimate unreleased parts, I've also seen really hardcore Lego geeks end up with them. I suspect they have connections with Legoland park people or even in Billund. For instance, there are people who make it a hobby to collect every color of 3001 (two by four brick) and even the rare/unreleased colors such as trial bricks to test out translucent colors. In other cases they are simply really rare or old parts, sometimes for sets that even TLG has "forgot" about. Some of them were made by Samsonite for a brief period in the 60s or 70s and only sold in Canada (iirc), for example. Situations like that.

If I had to approximate it, I'd say around $1100 USD. That might be a low estimate and could be as high as $2k. For 2012, I'm planning to cut back just a bit on Lego, mostly because of some household financial issues. We'll see how that goes, heh.

Then they'll skip 13 and go straight to 14, just like in hotels.

Oh really. Now that's intriguing. Do you remember who composed that email? Was it customer service?