NiceMarmot

Here's a revised version of the map: Enlarged the labels, added forests and swamp, cleaned it up, and prettified it a bit. Amazing how much info there is on the Internet regarding creating fantasy maps. I even found a whole set of brushes for PhotoShop, GIMP, and Seashore that someone had made to look just like features on Tolkien's maps... I don't want to clutter it up too much. Probably just name a few key features (suggested names anyone?), and add in Lost Vegga when someone figures out where it is. And that big southern island is looking pretty empty -- is it mountainous? desert? forested? big & empty? Anyway, suggestions are welcomed. Now that I've got the hang of it, if anyone wants a detailed map of a certain area, I'm happy to help, as long as it doesn't get out of hand. Next step however: design a few watchtowers!!

Wow! What a name! Is there a shortened version we should call you? I'll add Lost Vegga, as well as the forests in the west. Anyone want to suggest a location for Lost Vegga? We should probably also name the big island in the south, as well as the various oceans, rivers, and maybe the big cape sticking out in the east. If you all want to suggest names, I'll put them in an re-post later tonight.

Not sure if I qualify as talented in the cartographic department, but here's a quick revision of your map. Still have to put the forests in, and probably should make the label text a bit bigger. Realm of Kaliphlin by nice.marmot, on Flickr

Tafik Regex Marmota, reporting for duty, sir! That's TR or Gex for short. I'm sure you all are familiar with my story, so I won't bore you. What? You say you've never heard of me? Ahem, well, uh, I'll have to have a word with my publicist... "Gex Marmota was born the illegimate son of a minor noble on the Southern Ocean coast. After his mother fell out of favor with father, his stepmother sold them into slavery. He spent his childhood as a slave repairing hyperdrive engines... No, wait, wrong forum... He spent his early childhood as a slave owned by a master builder, learning the builder and stonemason's trades. That accounts for his penchant for building and architecture. He was then sold to a local crime boss, and spent his teens as a slave on smuggling and pirate ships, developing into an accomplished sailor, and a cutthroat fighter. After leading a slave mutiny and escaping, he led a gang of former slaves to sack the slave port of Mughraz, earning notoriety and a small fortune, as well as the enmity of key bosses of the slave trade. After a few years of seaborne smuggling around the Goolag Archipelago, he switched mostly to land-based smuggling and providing armed escort services for caravans and traveling nobles. (Apparently he is very good at persuading potential customers that they need his services...) Recently he has left the smuggling and escort businesses mostly to his subordinates. A spate of treasure-hunting in the Mystic Mountains brought even more wealth and notoriety. Some say he saw some unspeakable things in the tomb of Amon-Ka-Tuhamen that have affected his mind, but he was always a bit crazy. He then bought or seized a small province on the coast, and has spent his time building castles, towns, and fortresses, while still fitting in the odd quest here and then." Anyways, I'm mustering my men and other creatures. Will be a few weeks before they're all gathered and outfitted. It's a bit of a motley crew, and we've even got some green Dragon knights that deserted from Avalonia or somewhere. We'll be on the march soon, and glad to be of help.

I was coincidentally working on an MOC which with fit very nicely with the Guild. It will probably be ready in a few days. How should we be posting our MOCs, so that it's clear that they're part of the Guild, and we can easily find them later, etc? Should I post it to the forum, with something in the subject indicating it's part of Kaliphlin Guild ("MOC: name blah blah (Kaliphlin Guild)"?), and then post a link to that topic in this thread? And as far as the backstory, do I just make up the geographical names and locations? Do we have a general sense of the layout of the southern lands? I'm a bit lost geographically, and don't want to mention the southern ocean or the eastern mountains if it's actually the eastern ocean and the southern mountains... Or maybe it doesn't really matter and we just make it up individually. It probably makes some sense to have a shared sense of at least the major geographical features and names, and then everyone can make up their own stuff within that. I think there was a little bit of geography in the first post; maybe that's framework enough.

I've got eight Ramses Pyramids now, all of which I bought at $10 or less. They are great for the tan baseplates, the tan bricks, domes, the tiles, etc. At that price, it's a steal for parts, especially for castle / desert / egyptian MOCs. I bought two Pirate Codes on clearance a while ago at Walmart; they have a ton of gems, and a few other good parts. Just bought four Banana Balances on S@H for $4.99 each I think. Of interest there is the monkey, the tree leaves (which aren't cheap on BL), and the bananas (tons of bananas). I find that the games tend to go on clearance a lot more than the regular sets (and faster too), so you can sometimes pick them up very cheap, which makes them very effective for MOCing. It depends on the game and the price.

I agree. Lots of different possible styles: Middle-Eastern, Persian, ancient Egyptian, basic Mediterranean / Spanish style, simple adobe, Crusader-style castles, cliff dwellings, nomadic tents, etc. I think we should embrace them all -- the Southlands are big and diverse enough! Might be easier to discuss what styles we won't concentrate on: we probably don't have a ton of wood, so the half-timbered style of Derfel Cardarm probably isn't really our style. We probably build mostly with stone (tan, greys, some black and white marble), and adobe or brick with stucco. Since we get hardly any snow, except in the mountains, we don't need highly pitched roofs. In some cases our roofs probably tend to overhang quite a bit to provide shade via porches, porticos, and arcades. Narrow, winding streets provide shade except at noon, and minimize the effects of dust storms. They are also easy to defend. Time to start googling desert architecture...

There's a really nice black printed flag with a dragon on it (2335px1) that would go well (no pun intended) with our Oil. But unfortunately it's a bit pricey ($1.10 new, $0.50 used). Might be worth having a few for special occasions... Given our oil, sun, and deserts, black and gold/yellow might have made good colors, except that black flags are expensive. Definitely. Fits very well with my theory of buying whatever's cheap... Along those lines, one can put together a soldier on BL in roughly our colors for under $2. Torso 973pb680c01 is available for about $0.75. Decent yellow heads are about $0.20. 3844 helmets are about $0.30. Black or grey legs can be had for $0.16-0.25; blue legs are even cheaper. That's about $1.41 each, plus another $0.10-0.20 for a weapon. Some of the PoP torsos are cheap too, like 973pb645c01, 973pb646c01, and 973pb647c01. That last one has good blue arms to go with our colors. Unfortunately they have fleshie arms, which means you'll have to buy fleshie heads, which are a bit more expensive. Good, I just bought several PQ magnet sets and 'liberated' the minifigs from them. Will see if I can find some more -- they were on sale at the Lego store. And I just found some on BL for about $1.80 each. I really like the mountain mummies; will have to buy some more mummy heads. I suppose I'll have to find our camera... haven't seen it in a while...

PoP Desert Attack is available from S@H for $8.48. That gets you a Dastan, two Hassansins (mostly black), a horse, and a skeleton. Not sure if that's a good deal for southern army building or not. Horses on BrickLink are about $1-$1.50. Assuming in general we could buy or build army minifigures for about $2.50 each, you're getting about $8-$8.50 worth of army building value, plus a skeleton and some other pieces. The PoP magnets are sold out online. Too bad because they were $3.48 for a while (I bought four). And they're not glued. I did see a lot in the Anaheim store last week however, so there might be some at other Lego stores. That's a great deal -- for $3.48 you get Dastan with his double sword holder, Princess Tamina, and the Hassansin leader. The Hassansin's face is a bit freaky, but he's got a good torso and a nice turban. Now that I've joined the guild, I may have to go to the store and load up... BTW, Lion Knight archers are available for $3.49 in polybags at Target in the Xmas seasonal section right now. Not a terrific deal but reasonably good as there are some other pieces, like tree leaves, and reddish-brown box, two spears, a crossbow, etc. Plus a turkey drumstick. I bought eight, so I'll be running the Southern Gobbler Turkey BBQ concession for the Guild...

Hmm... the Southern Grassy Dark Chillands sound interesting to me Seeing as I have more tan than anything else, and I bought a bunch of PoP on clearance after last Xmas, sign up NiceMarmot for the Southern Deserts! Maybe I should buy some of those PQ magnet sets on sale and unglue them... Note to guild leader: I won't have time to do much until after the new year. But can't wait until then!

I think Derfel Cardarn will be responsible for singlehandedly tripling LBG, DBG, and reddish-brown 1x1 round plate prices on BrickLink as we all rush out to place orders for several thousand each!

Millenium Falcon 7965 at TRU for $77.49 before tax, thanks to a heads-up on the Toys-N-Bricks forum. Oh yeah!

Maybe I'm a complete idiot (highly likely), but I can't find an easy way to access Watched Topics. The only way appears to be to click on my username, then My Settings, then Forums, then Manage Watched Topics. That's a lot of clicks and basically makes a lot less usable. I don't want to get emails notifying me when the watched topics change, but I would like to check them occasionally. Anyone know of an easier way to do this?

How about the big conical building where the highway department stores the salt that the snowplows spread on the roads? What, not that attractive a set and not fitting with traditional theme, you say? Yes, but think of all the cool parts -- big horizontally curved slope sections! Plus scruffy looking minifigs drinking coffee while loading their snowplows! Or maybe a Christmas tree farm with ~20 of those old little pine tree parts arranged in a field. That would be a good parts set! Or perhaps Winter Village Super Bowl Party at Biff's House? More realistically, I like the idea of an ice rink, especially if it had a pickup hockey game going on.

Now that PLM-T1 is one good looking little spacecraft! Alright, I'll take two.

Very nice! Another technique to put in the toolkit... Especially if stability is not a concern. I also like the trees. Maybe I haven't been paying attention, but I don't seem to recall that technique either.

Hit the Santa Clara store on Monday early evening. Updated all the bins on Brickbuildr (http://www.brickbuildr.com/view/pab/side/off/16/) (except one where I couldn't make it out from my iPhone photo). Boy, was that a tedious chore; done my good deed for the year. Hopefully it saves someone a trip, or prompts them to go to Santa Clara. Here's the list of what I got: Didn't quite pack them in as well as usual. I estimate I got about the equivalent of about 148 2x4 bricks worth of stuff in there; usually I can get north of 175. And a few things probably cost more on the PAB wall than BrickLink, like the reddish-brown 2x2 bricks. But I still got a total 76% discount off the BrickLink quantity average price and a 46% price off the lowest BL price with decent quantity for each item. Those lattice window inserts are a huge ripoff on BrickLink compared to the PAB wall! Other items of note on the wall that I didn't get include: white horses 1x2x2 trans-clear panels 1x4 reddish brown logs, and 1x2 DBG logs reddish-brown and green 1x4 tiles a fair number of 2x4 and 1x4 bricks in various colors

This is really cool. I especially like the modular approach. I've done that to some degree with a few MOC starships, but you've taken it much further. The modular cockpit certainly could be applied to other spaceships too, even more mundane ones like tugs and small freighters. I like doing those sometimes as I think the non-fighter spaceships are very underrepresented. BTW, I've only played w/ LDD a little bit and the question that occurs to me is - do you work out the basic design with bricks and then create the LDD design, or do you design from scratch in LDD?

"Can you have that ready for deployment by Monday? I know we haven't done any requirements or design, but you should be able to handle it..." ;-)

I use BrickSet for tracking the sets I own. For some reason, I've never really gotten into Peeron. I don't track the tons of parts I've bought on BL. I suppose they're in BL's database, and I probably have the order confirmation emails. Plus there's PaB cup purchases -- I don't have those tracked anywhere either. It would be nice to track it all somewhere, but I don't want to invest too much manual effort in it. That would be awesome! (Re: a common set and parts tracking database between Peeron, Rebrickable, and BrickSet) Not quite my idea originally. I use TripIt, a web site that does just that for travel booking confirmation emails. You forward the emails to them, they parse them and put together a consolidated itinerary. It works really well. And they have to do it for tons of different travel vendors; you'd only have to do it for BrickLink order confirmations. I don't think it would be hard. The problem is that you'd have to modify the parser if BL changed their email format. But they don't appear to be changing anything very quickly these days... My personal feeling is that PHP just gets to be unmanageable as size and complexity of code grows. I found Ruby and Python to be much better. 300 PG databases is a lot! My company switched to Oracle (because they'd rather pay a fortune to someone I suppose), but I thought PG was great, and for us it was rock-solid for about five years. Never had a problem; never went down. I miss it. But I don't run the databases, I just have to use them. Anyway, good luck with this, and I'll definitely keep an eye on this thread and the site. Now I'm off to see what sets I can build!

Wow, this is a great idea. Can't wait for the loose parts section to progress a bit more; that's when I can really load it up. I know this will probably never happen, but my dream would be for you, Peeron, and Brickset to get together and build a common database for my sets and parts. Then you all can all offer services off the same dataset, and we don't have to export/import back and forth all the time. And then get a feed from BrickLink so every time I buy something there, the order is automatically added to my loose parts! Actually, you could probably parse the order confirmation emails from BrickLink and add them to my parts. How about that? We could forward the BL order confirmation email to something like new_bricklink_orders@rebrickable.com, you parse the email into parts and inventory, and then add it to our account? As long as we forwarded the email from the same email address as you have on file, you'd know which account to add it to. You could put the parsed order in a pending status until the user comes to the site, reviews it, and accepts it. Now that would be awesome. I'm sure you must be flooded with people suggesting ideas, but here's another to add to the list: (optionally) display the estimated price of the missing parts for each set on the Build page (or the You Can Build detail page), based on the average recent BL price for each part (since you're getting part inventories from BL anyway). Yes I might be at 95% for a set, but if the missing pieces on the 95% set are expensive, I'm probably not going to build it (unless I love it). You probably want to keep this page fast, so maybe it's an optional feature. If you're interested in open-sourcing the project, I'm sure you can find people to help you. I think you mentioned it's PHP; I'm more of a Ruby on Rails guy so I'm not much help there. Good move switching to PostgreSQL though!

If they re-release it, and hurt the secondary market for the originals, TLG hurts their market for future UCS releases. Some people won't scramble quite so hard to buy future UCS releases if they think that in 10 years TLG will just re-release it. And they certainly won't buy multiples. What's the point of buying more than one if you know TLG will just re-release it later? I think that the most we can hope for is that they do another UCS Falcon release that is similar but slightly different from the original. That way they don't compromise (too much) the value and market for the original. It would be a tough move -- they'd have to make it different enough, but not explicitly better or worse. Too obviously better, and they hurt the market for the original; too obviously lame and they'll have a harder time selling through the release. I think their best bet would be a slightly different UCS MF in a particular context, such as in the Death Star hangar, Hoth base, or Mos Eisley spaceport. The advantage is that it's obviously different than the original. The set would be bigger though, and therefore even more expensive.

I'll probably skip this one. Reminds me too much of last year's Playmobil Advent calendar, which had a cops and robbers theme too. BTW, this year's Playmobil calendars are castle and dinosaur themed; at $19.99, I think we'll picking up one of those for the kids instead of this.

So did you get about 400 bamboo plants in each cup? I've been picking up bits of them in various mixed PAB cups I've done, and been thinking about just getting a full cups worth and being done with it. Was wondering how many would fit in a cup. I imagine you can just toss them in and then compress it down a bit.

That's great! Looks like pretty good quality, decent sound, and fluid motion. Funny too. Looking forward to more adventures of the rookie ninja.