catwrangler

Thanks - I've reported it. :)

Hey, I didn't write the "<insert that tiresome argument>" bit - do moderators edit posts here? What exactly did I say that was wrong? I looked in the Eurobricks FAQ but I can't find anything about mods editing posts to make sarcastic comments... and if you're going to edit a comment, why not sign your edit to make it clear that it's not what the poster originally said?

When I buy lots of it from a charity shop I often wonder which stuff the kids liked best, and at what point they or their parents felt they'd grown out of it and could wave it off to the Oxfam... ah well, their loss is my gain! I'm also tickled by the state of the minifigures - did the kids keep them in one piece or dismantle them right down to separating the hands and arms? And what bits did they mix and match to make new characters? Of course, then I start fiddling with it and it ends up saying more about me - the last batch yielded Harry Potter's head and Leia's gold bikini, so as far as I'm concerned, Harry's cosplaying Princess Leia for all time.

I love the choice of scenes and how you combined them!

Not so much a set amount as a list of rules to follow, as I still find it hard to justify buying Lego! CMFs aside (and I only want two of series 15, then I'm out), I have a rule about not paying full price, whether that means waiting for discounts in the shops or taking advantage of Tesco points (I love Clubcard Boost), vouchers I've got from Argos after spending a certain amount on stuff we needed for the house, or gift cards. I avoid getting over-excited on Ebay by limiting myself to what's in our Paypal account from things we've sold on there - well, that and converted Nectar point vouchers... That said, I'll make exceptions for those rare discontinued sets that I absolutely want to have - but I'd rather get those on Brickset's marketplace or on Bricklink so I can find someone who's selling for a price I can live with. The fact I'm not fussed about original boxes makes that a lot easier - a lot of people seem to be looking for investment-condition unopened sets, which drives the prices up...

I had the impression that the last round of Pirates sets got a lot of flak; people seemed to consider them a sort of <insert that tiresome argument> retread of previous glories...

I never had a Dark Age in the sense of completely losing interest in/forgetting about Lego. There was a time (which roughly and not accidentally coincided with my relationship starting) when I didn't pay such close attention to new releases/didn't buy new Lego (one exception: they finally came out with Vikings, which had been my dream forever - I bought a set then alright!) because I had so much else going on which was vying for my time and money. However, it's significant that my partner was also a Lego fan - he still had his childhood bricks, and before we became a couple he once mentioned "always having wanted to find a girl to combine Lego with" (clearly he was the man for me). So his Lego would come out sometimes on bank holidays, and I'd get the catalogues and just never quite feel I could justify spending the money on it that I once could. I think the important context to this is that I was someone who always had a lot of interests that mainstream culture would, until recently, have pegged as childish and odd - comics, for instance. I still loved my old toys, and the older I got the more I appreciated them from a design/worldbuilding point of view. Discovering online fandom really made a difference - as Aanchir says, it's become so much more acceptable for people, particularly of my generation and younger, to be heavily engaged with fictional worlds and fan creations, regardless of what age group they were originally created for. And Lego courting the AFOL market with modulars and CMFs hasn't hurt things at all!

1. Orient Expedition, because of the range of sets and the fact that Lego doesn't seem to have produced anything like them before or since. I missed that theme completely and I'm gutted about it! 2. Hmmm, tricky. As was pointed out earlier, it's hard to come up with new pulp adventure themes without running into colonialist settings/issues that don't square well with making a children's toy for a worldwide market. Between that and the sheer visual impact, I'm tempted by the Jules Verne/Nautilus idea from upthread...

Just catching up on this thread, and I'm really excited to see the (apparently minifig-scale) plant-based monsters - I hadn't expected to see this kind of thing in Nexo Knights and it'll definitely keep the theme interesting. I've seen a lot of discussion elsewhere about how long NK could last, and if they keep developing it like this I'd hope we can get a few years out of it.

Hello from Belfast! I'm 34 and while I don't think I had a Dark Ages period as such (I never fell out of love or thought I was too grown up for it), there was a long lull where I didn't really buy Lego and kept only a lazy eye on the catalogues - for a decade or so, it just had too many other interests and expenses to compete with. That said, my partner is also a Lego fan since childhood, and every so often we'd dig out the chest of much-chewed Lego he used to share with his brothers and we'd build castles or motorised robots. A small rented flat kept our hobby modest, though - all my Lego was stored at my (very patient) mother's house for years... until we bought a house of our own big enough to swing a cat in! So in the past year I've catalogued our collection on Brickset (some of you might know me from the forums there) and my old obsessive interest has come back. I've started budgeting for large sets (the clincher was finally getting my hands on Medieval Market Village, which was my 10th anniversary present to us both ) and eyed up a space in the attic for building and displaying more ambitious displays. I've found that my tastes haven't really changed since childhood - my favourite themes are still Castle, Space and Town in that order, though I've dabbled in lots of other themes and I love anything historical like Adventurers or Vikings. I'm in the process of sorting my bricks into divided containers, and once that's done, we can start on our plan to build a medieval cathedral. Besides Lego, my hobbies are photography, zines, drawing and reading. I'm interested in history, archaeology, cinema, art, comics, folklore and mythology, and I lose large amounts of time to funny cat videos. It's nice to be here - I've been lurking on the Historic Themes forum for ages and I'm bowled over by the talent and imagination of the MOCs you guys post.