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Alexandrina

Eurobricks Ladies
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Everything posted by Alexandrina

  1. Alexandrina
    So having had a good look at the leaflet, I think I'm quite disappointed in this range. Only figs 5 and 11 really interest me at all (and for 11 I'll be swapping out that ugly sword straight away). Maybe the butterfly girl as well. As for the rest, I'll obviously be buying up all the yellow heads for my collection but Basil is a real disappointment. A horrible textured cape, those terrible clip-on axe heads rather than a moulded weapon, and it doesn't even look like he has a proper yellow head.
  2. Alexandrina
    Wow, sounds like some people were horrible to you for liking Lego. Always astounds me the depths of cruelty some people can reach. I must admit, I had an easier time of things! My interest in Lego even as a kid was primarily in using it as a medium for my films (I had a mini-Dark Age between the ages of 7 and 10 before getting back into it for filming) - and my circle of friends at the time was entirely people who either shared my hobby (my best friend at school did exactly the same thing with Doctor Who action figures) or had adjacent hobbies (I had a lot of friends who were actors or musicians). This meant that I was able to avoid any sort of backlash for enjoying Lego, as it was a medium for my films. The only real impact came in the form of receiving fewer and eventually no gifts of Lego from family at holiday times. Up to about age 13 I'd receive multiple Lego sets for birthday and Christmas, and usually get a small one when my school report came back as a reward for doing well. That number dropped and from the age of 15 onwards I don't think I received any Lego as a gift until last year. Honestly I think my family assumed my interest in Lego was numbered - especially as I pivoted towards live-action film and pursuing it as a career - but of course when 2020 happened I began to buy up people's collections on Facebook Marketplace for excellent prices and ended up catapulting my interest far beyond what it had been before.
  3. Alexandrina
    This seems to be Lego almost taking steps to formalise the existence of all these factions as part of the same world - just in little nods, of course, so the specifics are still up to the FOL's imagination. I wonder if there'll ever be any direct line drawn between the 'classic' Castle themes (up to Fright Knights) and the 'modern' ones (from Knights Kingdom I onwards) - as far as I know there wasn't any reference to any latterly subthemes in the Lion Knights' Castle.
  4. Alexandrina
    Many reasons. They could have been planning for future throwback sets (though I suppose this doesn't explain the lack of Dragon Masters shields) or perhaps they have an idea of expanding out one of the generic early Castle shields that never really had a faction associated with it. Sadly the Dark Forest line seems to have been a US-only release. (I remember reading once that the sets were included in retailer catalogues in the UK but not directly available; no major retailers stocked them but theoretically there could have been small independent outlets that had them. No idea how much truth there is to this.)
  5. Alexandrina
    Don't forget his visor-ak for infiltrating the robot mech hordes.
  6. Alexandrina
    Honestly that reads to me like quite a positive update - given the circumstances, obviously. It makes it sound as though they're anticipating being back online in the next couple of days/week, rather than a timeline of months or more. Of course, I have no technical background so perhaps this reads differently to those in the know, but I'm choosing to remain upbeat.
  7. Alexandrina
    I'm not as familiar with Rebrickable as I am with Bricklink, but I had a quick squizz at the database and I can't find anything that matches your description. The closest would be 32211, a Znap connector from the late 90s, but Rebrickable has this as only being available in Purple, and it's not an exact match for your description. Nothing at all in Dark Turquoise seems to be a match. Possibly it's an off-brand, or else multiple pieces combined?
  8. Alexandrina
    While this is true, the colours are remarkably consistent in the instructions year-on-year - I know I've sort of built up an eye now for all the current colours, whereas my mum (who only builds Lego with me on a handful of larger sets, and does nothing on her own) still frequently mixes up for instance black and dark bluish grey. I don't think it's a case of Lego thinking kids are stupid, so much as Lego making the sets more easily accessible. It's frustrating trying to find a certain piece when there's a similar one in the same colour (I've recently been sorting a dismantled 10305, and the amount of times I've grabbed a grey 1x4 with 4 studs when I'm trying to pick out all the regular 1x4s is surprisingly large!) and using different colours for pieces which will be covered is a good way of alleviating this. It also means kids can have more variety in colour in their collections, which is a welcome thing. And as MAB said, the grey brick here was likely already in the set. In those instances it's more cost-effective to use another one than to add to the colour/mould combos the set uses.
  9. Alexandrina
    Certainly we are. Unless Majisto has a surprise stash of visors hidden in his workshop, but I think that's unlikely.
  10. Alexandrina
    This almost feels like a "what could have been" - a world where Lego's techniques developed and advanced just like the real world, but they never developed the minifigure beyond the Legoland design. It's an intriguing aesthetic. I love the beach colour scheme, reminds me of that one Paradisa baseplate.
  11. Alexandrina
    I don't have quite the same length of history (I got my copy of both in early 2020) but they were the only two complete sets I was able to build in a job lot of about 6k pieces, and sat together on my shelf for several months at the height of lockdown time, so they're pretty much interchangeable in my mind. (Oddly, my copy of 375 had four of the grey helmet/visor sets, rather than multi-coloured visors as the Internet would suggest the set should have included - unsure if that was an unaccounted-for variation, or whether the original owner of my set swapped with his friends to get a matched set of colours. Perhaps there's a copy kicking about somewhere with four blue visors!)
  12. Alexandrina
    Lol, yes!! This is what happens when I acquire both 375 and 377 in the same job lot, and then try talking about them from memory cos my Lego database of choice is down!
  13. Alexandrina
    You've got some good stuff in there, for sure - crucially, it's a solid plot which is plainly shown. On a technical note, what software are you using for post-production? If you're on Premiere Pro or something similar, I'd recommend setting up the sequence settings to match the size of the frames you're getting (or a similar measurement with a more cinematic aspect ratio, if that's your thing). Having such large black borders around all four sides is something which will turn a lot of people away before they even give your work a fair chance, and it's a fairly simple fix (you can also achieve the same after you've created and populated the sequence by amending the zoom settings of a frame so as to fill the screen, then pasting the formatting to the rest of the frames). This is the only "immediate turn-off" as it were which you have in your piece, so you're ninety percent of the way to breaking the big guns. I'd also personally recommend getting close-up/medium angles of key characters for every scene. Even if there's no conventional dialogue, these sorts of cutaway shots are a really useful trick for disguising moments where the camera jerks (I notice one point where you realise the supports for the set are visible and adjust the shot to remove them) and also for 'tricking the motion' - by which I mean, having a character get from location A to location B without loads of time spent on them walking all the way. But please, don't take any of this as a negative! I really enjoyed your stuff, and I'd be lying if I tried to act like I hadn't done far far worse in my time!
  14. Alexandrina
    Maybe Johnny Thunder can pay him a visit at the museum and "encourage" him to leave right away on urgent adventuring business. I recall Indiana Jones doing something similar to Doctor Liam Brody in The Last Crusade.
  15. Alexandrina
    That being said, the Imperial Trading Post came first iirc. It's entirely possible that the torso was designed with the intention of having it be a merchant, and then reused for Skull's Eye Schooner because it was a pirate-like torso that existed. Not as if Lego are opposed to reusing torsos outside their original context.
  16. Alexandrina
    Honestly, I disagree with that! I've done a lot of writing myself (nothing trad-published, but I've self-published a book and got a bit of a following on some web novels) and I'm forever filling it with details that have no more meaning than to be details - they're filling the world, and giving visual description to a scene that would be bare without it. That's not to say no details are ever important, but there's certainly no guarantee. For instance I have one character briefly described as wearing a purple dress in one scene. Entirely arbitrary; she's wearing a dress, and I picked purple at random to give the scene more life. To this I would bring up the point of the new Black Falcons, mentioned by someone earlier in the thread - their arms aren't the black of the original minifigures but pearl dark grey. Lego has a far broader colour palette than it used to; just like everyone was happy for 10305 to be a grey castle even despite its ostensible lineage from 377, the Black Falcons' new design takes advantage of a colour existing that didn't when the old guys were being designed. Similarly, the helmet of the new Dragon Master knight is in a new colour. If there's no deeper meaning than just "this is what the designer picked at the time", then having a better colour now existing in the palette is plenty justification for changing the colour imo. Even with Space, they've supplemented the original meanings with additional meanings from new colours (the colour range of the classic spacemen has doubled since the original run).
  17. Alexandrina
    Not only do we not reliably have any way of knowing the wherefores of these old sets' decisions short of asking the designers themselves, there's no reason to think that every decision necessarily had a deep rationale behind it. For instance, we know that the reasoning for the yellow castle being yellow essentially boils down to "yellow looked better than blue". How do we know, for example, that the Dragon Masters wore black helmets for any specific reason? The designers could just as easily have picked a colour from the palette that looked good, and that was the extent of it. Beyond Lego, I think there's a tendency for fans to look for deeper meanings in the media they consume, even when there is no deeper meaning. Surely everybody remembers studying literature at school and having to explain the symbolism of various choices, even though sometimes the author just made the curtains red because they liked red curtains.
  18. Alexandrina
    There were so many different shields that it almost felt like the designers taking advantage of the anniversary set's budget to get a whole load of designs into production for when they needed them.
  19. Alexandrina
    Mechs aren't really my thing but I love the spider. It almost feels like the sort of concept that could have been a real Fright Knights set - sort of like an Arachnoid Starbase but scaled down and medievalised. Lovely builds all of them.
  20. Alexandrina
    I believe some of that information comes from the designers themselves, though how much is a different matter. I seem to remember seeing a list created by one of the old school designers of various sets he'd been involved in over the years (I think he may have been one of the key figures in early Pirates or early Space).
  21. Alexandrina
    Lol, I'm the opposite, I can't stand Brickset because of the interface and their insistence on using TLG colour names which just aren't intuitive. I think looking at instructions that the fig could be seen as a civilian (and I personally think he is) because he's shown sailing a boat which bears a flag other than the skull-and-crossbones. The conceit of the Imperial Trading Post is obviously that there's trading going on, and that guy is shown as the captain of the trading vessel - which presumably isn't the pirates, else why would they be rocking up trying to steal everything from the trading post? Obviously those sets didn't actually name the minifigures so the names in the databases are going to be subjective, and since he's the only potentially-civilian fig, it's easy to see why he would be listed as a pirate.
  22. Alexandrina
    I think this is being unfair. It's one thing not to like a set for whatever reason (in this case, perhaps because you dislike the figures or wanted to see more dragon motifs) but I don't think that can be extrapolated to the designers not caring. As others have said, this set is a pretty good recreation given the parts that exist. Realistically this is a GWP. We were never going to get the full set of dragon plumes without a proper set to follow, so they're a non-starter. And we have plenty of evidence from other sets that Lego's designers very definitely do care. Just because this set doesn't meet your expectations doesn't mean the designers are phoning it in and deserve to be castigated for it.
  23. Alexandrina
    I'm specifically thinking of the minifigure with the red beard and that one torso which looks more formal than the usual piratewear (maybe it has a neckerchief? I can't remember exactly and I'm lost without Bricklink to check!)
  24. Alexandrina
    Isn't there a merchant trader in the Imperial Trading Post?
  25. Alexandrina
    IMO Fort Legoredo is head and shoulders above any competition in terms of how iconic it is - I'd go so far as to say that it's easily the most iconic classic set that still hasn't received any form of modernisation (with the possible exception of the yellow Castle if you want to argue that 10305 wasn't a representation of it). Gold City Junction is cool but not so immediately memorable.
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