Zeya

Where are you located? (Which country?)

I think each set has a different one of the glowing jewel things, each in a unique color. Some of them I can't quite make out, but I'll bet they're there somewhere in the blurriness. And then if you look at the biggest set (the vampire castle), up on the clock tower, it looks like all the jewels are plugged into a circle. Maybe Mr. Dracula has a copy of each jewel, and he's the mastermind controlling everyone? Perhaps the jewel things light up like the light brick from Creator and the winter village sets. Atlantis also had that sort of thing with different colored keys (a specially shaped mold kind of like a minifig accessory).

There's a female fig in the vampire castle set, and she has a printed dress. I'm going to have to get that one. (This thread inspired me to collect all the printed dress figs.) I really want to see final photos for these sets. I had been enjoying the monster and halloween-ish figs from the collectible minifigs series. I'll be a little bit sad if they use the exact figs from the CMF line however (and that would drive me to not buy those sets probably). I'm sure they'll use some of the same molds, but it would be cool if they change the prints and such. I will almost certainly buy the swamp man set to go along with my Pirates of the Caribbean crew. Davy Jones is going to need crewmen. (Atlantis baddies work for that too.)

There has been a leak of the 2012 Creator sets over on legotalk247: http://legotalk247.blogspot.com/2011/12/2012-creator-sets.html The house set is looking really nice to me. I think it's the nicest looking set of 2012, of what I've seen so far.

Your math is great. Reminds me of my probability and statistics class in college. That course was cool for the first half and kind of scary in the second half, lol. Practically speaking, here's what I think happens at the TRU shipping center for these large orders. Something like this... There's a guy with boxes of CMFs next to him. He fills up the order with loose packets (most people have this, sometimes they get a full box, but I think that's rarer because packets are smaller and lighter - less shipping cost for them.) So if I order 60 packets, the dude is likely somewhere in the middle of a box. So say he puts in the last 20 packets from his current box. Then he opens a new one. He grabs from anywhere in there and continues with the rest of the 40. He's not going in the same order, and he's likely grabbing at random, maybe even from the same area as the previous box he discarded. So then my order ends up with more repeats than expected and isn't the full set of what one might expect from a batch of 60 packets. He might be messing up the expected distribution of figs by grabbing "at random", thus screwing even an 80 packet order out of a certain fig type. So to help combat this next time, I'll just order 20 more. It sucks because that means a 33% increase in time spent bag-fondling. On the plus side, it means more potential duplicates of army builder types that I like to stash away to sell at a later date. (I only keep something like 4 dupes over my full set of 16, FYI, so I'm not robbing the market too badly.) Actually I met some people at work that also collect the CMFs, so I sell the dupes that identfy to them at cost, that way I get real money "back" instead of TRU gift card credit. Also one of them has kids and he wants certain ones, so I feel a little happy about that too. :)

No it hasn't. Not on the US site anyway. It's got its own little theme icon under "Products" and I can navigate in and see all the sets.

Thanks for blogging my MOC! I had a pleasant surprise when I was going through my RSS feeds this morning.

Does anyone know what became of this? Or is it still in the works? (It's been about 3 months now.)

I came out of my dark age in mid 2010. I bought up the two Winter Village sets at the time, and I learned about the holiday train set from 2005 and was wondering if I could still buy one somewhere (short answer is "no"). I signed up to the official Lego.com forums, thinking that would be the place to go to discuss Lego. Boy was I wrong. My post got denied by the moderator/post-screeners. I guess they don't want people posting questions about discontinued products, just enthusiasm for what is currently on sale. So then I did some searching around to find out where the real discussion was at. I found out that was pretty much this site (and maybe also FBTB, but I'm not into SW so I skipped that.) I joined up and asked my questions and got answers. And I've stuck around for more! Since then I've enjoyed that this community is mature, if not almost entirely adult. I have to say I like how EB is essentially free of flame posts and name-calling. I guess Lego fans in general aren't generally mean, or maybe it's just our wonderful moderators. I also enjoy "early information" and have engaged in some trading a couple times as well.

Ain't it always the way? Last round I bought 60 figs from TRU online, and of course they didn't send me an unopened box. I was still missing 3 figs after that batch and had to go hunting. Call me paranoid, but I suspected they had been picked through or something. I'm going to be ordering maybe 80 this time and hopefully that'll get me a better chance at a full set.

Damn, somebody's a real POTC fan! I don't remember anyone on that list except the last two. I'm glad to hear the theme is continuing. A large Dutchman sounds great. I wonder if it's large like the QAR or large like the IFS! I've got the Pearl and the QAR wrapped up by the Christmas tree right now. Only 8 more days until Christmas!

That's because I snuck into your house and photographed it, and then photoshopped it into my house. :) I got the shelves from Home Depot, probably the same place you did. We probably started buying them at the same time. Everyone gets the modular buildings, right? It's like required to be an AFOL or something. Like other people, I was in a dark age for the first 3 or so buildings (Cafe Corner, Market Street, Green Grocer). Sometimes I check prices for them on BL and eBay, but it's just too pricey.

You seem pretty sure about that. Care to share a source? I anticipate we might have a sad letter from someone at TLG soon, like the community got about Pirates when PotC was announced.

I think you're misunderstanding. Or rather, I have interpreted the press release a different way. From the release: I think they are just pointing out that the minifigures (characters) have a collectibility aspect to them. I don't think they will be blind-bag things like the CMF series. By the way, "Collectible Minifigures" (CMF) is a term that isn't used by TLG. They don't use the term "collectible" for those, they just name them like "Minifigures series 6". I think the community tacked on the "collectible" part.

thelordoftherings.lego.com I'm wondering if there will be a ring accessory like the one he's holding in the photo. I'm thinking there will be, and probably colored shiny chrome gold. They also haven't put the engraved words on the ring there, which I would be shocked if they did. So that also leads me to believe there will be a piece like that. (Meaning if it was mocked up just for a photo, they probably would have put engraved writing in there too.) I was previously thinking they might have used the new round 1x1 tile mold and print the ring on it, kind of like how Jack Sparrow's compass is a printed 1x1 square tile (no round tile at the time they designed those).

Come on guys. Just because there's a website and a press release, doesn't mean Lego LotR is going to happen. I'm waiting for real confirmation before I believe this. I don't know if I'm worthy of this theme. I don't know what "minas tirith" is, for example. Somehow I never read the books! I got all into Game of Thrones and started reading those, and I need to read the second one before the second season of the tv show airs this April.... And I have to play through Skyrim! Too much sword and sorcery stuff for 2012! I'm looking forward to images of the sets. TIme will tell if this will be the end for PotC, too. Lego has a lot of licenses going.

Yeah, I've been wondering. Is that bandana in dark red? As opposed to regular red, like other bandanas of the same mold.

What struck me from those photos was that the robot looks really good in non-CGI form. Also I now see that the key is attached to that neck bracket piece. The pink space woman (Barbarella) really pops, in a good way. I'm a little surprised at how few of these have back printing. I think the roman and the celctic warrior are suffering a little from a lack of back printing.

I posted this in the storage and sorting thread earlier. I didn't realize this thread existed. Here is my desk. I just put up these shelves above it a couple weeks ago.

Yeah they'll get filled up almost immediately, I'm afraid. What's not pictured there is that to the right is a huge computer desk that I need to break down and get rid of. Then I can put in more display shelves, and move the desk to the center of the wall with the sterilite drawers and storage to the side. Basically over the course of the next 6 months or so (maybe) I'll be freeing up some space in that room.

A couple weeks ago, I put up some display shelves. They're pretty good, and not too expensive. I also got some of these corner shelves (called like "architectural corner" or something), and I even left room for them. But when I went to put those in, I found out the corner isn't at a 90 degree angle! It's at a wider angle and I couldn't install them. Anyway I'll probably be putting up more of these shelves once I clear out the old computer and desk (laptop ftw). (cell phone photo)

Yeah he was at quite a distance. As I said, I haven't done the graybeards thing yet, so don't fully know everything lore-wise or otherwise. Actually I got him to aggro up close. He perched on the roof of the inn and started blowing fire. I knew that I probably couldn't beat him, and also I didn't want him killing the quest NPC I was trying to talk to right there. So I hustled my armor-clad behind into the inn and then healed up and exited again. When I came out, he was gone again flying around. At that point he was being buggy and kept popping away into the distance. Oh well, hopefully this fixes itself or they do another patch. They just released one that fixed the issue of dragons flying backwards; I would have thought these issues would be fixed by that patch. I guess not. I just need time to play this game! Something tells me I'll be hacking away at it for the next six months or so.

[pid][/pid]196B I made this before Halloween, but couldn't get around to posting it. Not quite as fitting for the Christmas season, but oh well! My original idea was to have a mermaid alone on a small island. I wanted to use the crying face of the mermaid, as if she's waiting for someone to return - a little bit of mystery. That idea changed as I went along, when I realized that I simply don't have the volume of bricks to make my vision come alive. So it became smaller, and it took a darker twist. I added some spookier heads in various levels of decay, maybe suggesting that hapless sailors that are lured here never return. The bird in this photo was directly lifted from 5770 Lighthouse Island, which I had on the shelf. The white studs on the rocks by him are supposed to be droppings. Thanks for stopping by!

Tyrant, I think part of the problem you're discussing is that we're muddy'ing up this Kingdoms thread with LotR talk. It can be hard to keep the two separate, but really speculation about LotR 2012 stuff should go in its dedicated thread. The poor moderators probably hate these types of threads! I think most people reading these threads are smart enough to realize that the swirling rumor mill is based on nothing very tangible at all. But I think it's okay for some people to get excited, even if most of our spirits will be crushed (or lifted) later this year (one way or the other). Maybe some solid info will come out soon to put an end to our misery, eh?