Prairie

One consistent pattern: if I go to S@H website and haven't been there for a day or so, if I want to view more than the first page of Sales and Deals, I have to click Sales and Deals, click on page 2 but get dumped back to the main list, then click Sales and Deals again and click on page 2 again, to see the actual second page of Sales and Deals. Same applies to others like Friends, Elves, etc. I use Firefox.

Thanks! Hopefully the Terms of Service will get updated at some point.

I was eager for a Friends grocery and also found the pictures a little underwhelming, though I still plan on getting it. I guess I was hoping for something more like the Kwik-E-Mart: single-story and more than 16 studs deep. The actual set resembles many previous Friends sets, with a tiny store on the first floor, a place to sleep on the second floor, and some store items out in front. 41094 Heartlake Lighthouse first comes to mind, with 3185 Summer Riding Camp and 41037 Stephanie's Beach House also having this general design.

When signing up, on it asks you to choose a username, password, etc. and read the terms of service. The terms of service say to choose one's display name carefully. because it can't be changed. A thread discussing display names makes clear that they are separate things: I don't ever remember being able to choose my display name, only the username. I want to be able to choose my display name but I'm not seeing how to (I just want my username with the first letter capitalized, i.e. "Prairie"). Thanks for any insight on this.

Even simpler, upload to imgur. No account needed, just upload and copy the stuff already prepared for posting.

I bought an old set recently and the tires had melted the plastic as well! Gallery of close-ups of the damage.

Same thought I was having. It's not like physics are different in China, or they have a different periodic table of the elements there, or that they can only produce crappy products. About the only difference is that the government places different restrictions which affect the formulation of their plastic slightly. The rest is based on what level of quality etc. the company who sets up the factory decides on.

I haven't been wild about the Disney/Belville ice-themed LEGO but this is quite pleasing and I'm going to add Elsa's Ice Castle to my list of sets to get. It reminds me of some of the ice themes in old video games. I've compared your photos to the stock ones of the set and yours really bring out the color and contrast. Did you basically use two copies of these sets to build this larger version?

I'm watching local stores in the USA for clearance of Friends/Disney sets when the new August Friends sets come out. Regarding price drops, the one that's baffled me is Friends 41037 Stephanie's Beach House, which has been at $30 in many places for many months now, $10 below MSRP, unlike basically all the other Friends sets (of course when I go look to verify, it's a little higher).

Olivia by far is my favorite. She's me in my LEGO play. I didn't expect such a strong identification with any of them because at first I wasn't wild about their facial designs. Without realizing it Olivia came to strongly occupy this place for me. I feel kind of weird because I've accumulated at least four Olivia minidolls, three of which are all her in her "standard" dark pink shirt with hearts and lavender skirt. I don't like seeing more than one of her together! In contrast, I find that I dislike Emma significantly, and it's not any particular aspect either. I just look at her and have dislike! It's funny. I've gotten Emma's House recently and am going to see how I feel after building that and seeing what her home life is like. I know I already like Olivia's house better becaues it's more classic and unsophisticated (other than having a flat-screen TV in the living room), rather than modern like Emma's house.

A couple of months ago I missed the Green Grocer on Craigslist for $100 apparently complete. I hadn't really looked into modulars much so didn't know what I was looking at so didn't act faster. Someone got an enjoyable deal that day.

Friends 41039 Sunshine Ranch. December of last year I noticed the LEGO Movie in the library and expected it to look fake and boring, but gave it a try. I was surprised that it looked just like actual LEGO stop-motion, so neat and fun. I pulled some Belville fairy-tale sets out of the garage to see whether I'd enjoy them again. Out of curiosity I searched Craigslist for LEGO and this set popped up and HORSES!!!! It was all over for me.

Googling lego stored assembled lose clutch power yielded these, among others: Storing parts "in click" Can clutch power increase over time? Storage and Sorting LEGO How do you maintain Clutch on Built Sets? Does longterm storage in a connected state harm the studs/tubes?

Indeed! I had to take that set apart a day later because I didn't even want to look at it and have its lifelessness rub off onto my perception of LEGO. I still have images of it in my mind that I hope abate soon. Increased respect for LEGO's designers was the most unexpected part of this. I see that there is an immense gap between the two, which no amount of technical improvement in the Mega Bloks themselves will address IMO. I feel almost shame that I kept wondering whether the other brands of sets on the shelves might be nearly equal to LEGO in terms of experience, whether I was just being a snob about LEGO. These were the main reason I felt such a review of a Mega Bloks set would be valuable to others here, who might have had similar nagging questions.

What's shameful about an AFOL liking Elves? I wasn't wild about it at first but seeing the upcoming 41077 Aira's Pegasus Sleigh and 41078 Skyra's Mysterious Sky Castle, I can't wait to get those. I got 41075 Treetop Hideaway recently and really like the purple foliage and general color scheme.

I recently got into LEGO again, focusing on and loving the Friends sets. I've noticed the Mega Bloks My Life As series of knockoffs in Walmart for a while and keep getting tempted to buy one. The Valley High School has shown up on clearance for months now, but it hadn't gotten low enough to be worth the likely waste. A few days ago I saw it at $10, a 75% markdown off the $40 original price, and I gave in and got it. It has 583 pieces, four minidolls, and was released in 2014 as I believe a Walmart exclusive. From the start I kept my expectations low. I primarily wanted to give Mega Bloks a chance and just see what they had to offer, especially as people had said that the qauality had improved significantly over the years. The Friends Heartlake High was the first Friends set I built a few months ago, and I really enjoyed it. Even on the box, this Mega set looks sterile and dull in comparison, almost like a prison or castle with the gray brick walls. On opening the box, I found that the minidoll bag's poor seal had broken and leaked them into the box. Some of them had gotten under the front page of the first instruction booklet, crinkling the front page badly. At first I thought that the bags had no numbering until I had laid them out and noticed faint numbers. One bag oddly had no number, even though it had several large pieces and an inner smaller bag of more pieces. The instructions didn't show which bag number to open, so I started with #1. I didn't even get past step 1 as pieces weren't present. Looking through the bags, I found them in #3. The second substep of step 1 required opening a few more bags. By step 2 or 3, I had to open every bag. So the bag numberings are apparently just to help them prepare the set, not to help with building. They don't say anywhere on the box how many bags there should be, so I couldn't verify that they were all there without building the model. Putting it together I paid close attention to how well pieces fit together. At first I noticed some significant variation in clutch strength, but as I got moving I really couldn't say that it was much different than LEGO. Perhaps a little more clutch strength, as the recent Friends sets I've built have felt "oily" rather than "squeaky" as my childhood LEGO bricks' clutching feels. I'm still undecided on whether I like higher or lower clutch strength, so I have no critique of Mega in this regard. Along the way one plate had a noticeable bend in the molding, though to be fair I encountered something similar in a recent LEGO set as well (second picture showing proper plate that doesn't lift at edge): Mega has matched LEGO in colors being slightly off in the instructions. These tiles are navy blue but look purple in the manual, and the these light gray pieces look a noticeably darker gray in the manual. I finished the model without a hitch, without missing any pieces. There were a few left over, and I don't think I missed using these. The arch pieces were noticeably thinner than the normal bricks. Otherwise the tolerances on pieces seemed good. Interestingly some props like the apple and juice carton have a little handle so a minidoll can hold it. I didn't apply the stickers beause stickers are stressful and I'd like to keep it pristine for now. Looking at the stickers, I'm not sure they'd help. I don't like their style. Looking at the finished model, it looks just as sterile and uninteresting as on the box. Everything about this is just off in some vague way. The scale of furniture, the sparseness of the rooms, the colors, the slight translucency of the plastic, random studs having little dimples, the general design of the set seeming jumbled and uneven. I tried mixing Friends minidolls with these Mega Bloks minidolls, but the Mega ones' studs are smaller so that they aren't compatible. I'm glad I determined with certainty whether I like Mega Bloks and am missing out on anything by ignoring them. It gives me more respect for how well LEGO gets it right, at least for my taste.

On S@H I swear I saw an Elves keychain a few days ago, and the Friends horse and dolphin keychains available again at $4.99. But now it's as if none of this was ever the case. I was baffled.

I visit LEGO's website as little as I can. It seems their web designer uses a heavy-handed approach that makes the site brittle. * Seems to use server-side or at least cookie-encoded state to keep track of browsing through products, so if you wait too long before going to the next page, it silently dumps you to browsing the entire set of products. Way too often it fails like this immediately, e.g. clicking SALES AND DEALS, then trying to go to the second page, results in being dumped into the second page of every product. * When looking at a set, it uses a sluggish zoom system that's a pure pain to use. * When arriving at a set page, it always fades the set image *out* first, then back in. I assume this is some remnant of an attempt to be stylish and have the image fade in, but it is utter fail and looks clunky. It's been like this for months so it says a lot about a state of disrepair to me. Switching images also takes a full second for the slow cross-fade. Form over function, ugh. * I remember wanting to give some feedback about the site directly to them and it requiring that I give my full name, address, phone number, etc. It's a good measure of a website how easy they make it to give feedback about the website. * Things like Retiring Soon and similar seem unreliable, as some things clearly retired aren't marked.

I recently bought a cardboard box of misc LEGO parts and when I got home, I saw a few tiny pieces dropped. I traced this to inherent holes in the corners of the box, and found a trail of little pieces leading to the car. I can only imagine a similar trail from where I parked to get it up to their front door and inside their house. This had a good number of small technic pieces. :(

I'm entertained by how similar this is to the kinds of things one does when crafting cycle-perfect machine code, trying to super-optimize it, or trying to get it to fit within a particular number of bytes or some other severe constraint. Having done way too much of this kind of thing in the past, I see the effort going into something like this in the LEGO realm and just scurry away.

A few months ago I saw the May 23 release date for some of these new summer Friends sets and was anxiously visiting all the local stores in anticipation of them clearing out 2014 Friends sets to make space, but nothing. Must be all in August. So now two months of watching for the first signs of clearance! I just found out about the large 41109 airport set set by seeing it on eBay. I had the private jet as a low-priorty set to get, but I really want this jumbo jet set (despite it having what look like only three passenger seats hah). I find that I'm oddly a little hesitant about the Grand Hotel. I think it's the pearl gold parts, which I noticed that I have a significant dislike for in the Disney sets as well. I love the classic pirate gold pieces, perhaps because they're shiny rather than matte like pearl gold is. /ramble

I enjoy this. The self-contained nature gives me a satisfying sense of closure and completeness. The layout of everything seems coherent and purposeful. My mind sort of fills in non-physical details like what sorts of things are done there, how people might move around and what the place might look like throughout the day. I want to see more shots of the restaurant.

I use numbered bags. If unavailable, I sort into a few groups (plates, bricks, etc.) so that it's obvious which group a piece will be in and there aren't too many pieces in each group to search through. Either approach means that I don't spend more than a few seconds on average finding each piece. I find it tedious to be searching through a big pile of pieces over and over, knowing that the time spent is merely due to having everything jumbled together. I find that I like building from instructions at a brisk pace, keeping my mind and hands constantly busy. Usually this means fetching pieces with one hand, firmly pressing them in place them with the other, and looking at the next step before the current one is completed.

Also, it's safest to re-upload any images to something like imgur. Sometimes if you view an image directly on a website or blog, it's already loaded in your browser so it shows fine for you. But when you copy its URL and put it in a message here, it will count as "hotlinking" so the next person to try to see it from your message might not get it.

I had thought that the horrible pixellated digital instructions must have been to thwart companies who make exact copies of LEGO sets. I couldn't grasp how they could otherwise have allowed them to be so bad. But the newer instructions being better invalidates that theory.