Mylenium

No offense, but as I use to say on other technical forums: This is useless without even a hint of system info or for that matter even telling us what program you are actually using. That aside, your issues pretty clearly indicate a poorly maintained hard drive or a drive at the verge of dying and/ or external processes such as indexing and syncing functions, security tools and so on interfering. As a start definitely check out this stuff, do a little disk maintenance and if the issues persist please be so kind to provide info people actually can make sense of rather than just stating that something isn't working. Mylenium

Brilliant idea! Mylenium

Of course it wouldn't... Mylenium

Long and short: None of this matters unless the person claiming the copyright represents an US-registered legal entity. Instructions aren't even treated as books in many countries just like a MOC may not even fall under any intrinsic art copyright (e.g. here in Germany it's generally treated as a replicable technical process based on a modular building system). Sorry, but you're all wasting your time even pondering the possibilities. This is way more complex than saying "An evil guy just stole my precious instructions and is selling them on eBay." Just suck it up and move on. Mylenium Basically nothing. Unless you are terribly rich and have the money and patience to sit through years of litigation, this is utterly pointless. You already got the answer you didn't wanna hear from eBay: Unless you can prove (as in legally sane and court-proof) that a) the files in question truly belong to you and b) you took all technical and legal steps to protect it under whatever your country's copyright laws may be so they may be recognized by international rules according to IPO, a judge won't even bother to open a case and dismiss it right out of hand. Surely publishing stuff on personal blogs and sites like Rebrickable, people not even including persistent copyright disclaimers in their files and so on doesn't make a good basis for any claims other than the idealistic interpretation of the letter of the law... Mylenium

Well, tongue-in-cheek comment: LEGO will blame it on not being able to figure out what people actually want as in "If group A wants type X window frames in this color, group B will want type Z in another color and we can't cover all.". That and of course tackling this on a set-by-set basis gives them the perfect excuse for selling more stuff to people. They are on some level probably too deep into this and too afraid to really consolidate due to this bizarre mix of their own business interests and the horse literally having gotten too big to ride... Mylenium

Arguably, though, that's the problem with a lot of parts and their sub-types, not just windows. It always seems like they are merely advancing these issues on an "as needed" basis. It's alright to modify a part or create a new one if it solves an immediate issue for a given set, but one can't help but feel that oftentimes there are no long-term plans, leading to this all too well-known situation where parts disappear for years and/ or are ever only produced in small numbers and very few colors. Specific to the windows I don't see an easy solution without developing a ton of different shapes and types, though, especially if you want to reasonably represent real world types. There's just too many possible combinations. Settling on a few standard frames and arches is probably as good as it will ever get. Mylenium

Now that it's over, allow me to show my humble contribution to the LEGO Ideas Unleash your own genetically modified hybrid Dinosaur contest. More on how it came about and the thought process behind it as usual on my blog. Mylenium

As always it depends. Currently LEGO indeed seem to be doing a few things right in some of their product lines, but I wouldn't say that I would call it a "golden age". There is still this dichotomy of reasonably good, but usually expensive sets and a lot of mediocre or downright bad sets in lower tiers. You could argue that if you have enough money and can afford to always pick the best option, then indeed everything is roses, but if you have to make do with what you can afford it can just be as frustrating as it always has been, even more so since there has been a noticeable general LEGO price hike lately. Other than that I don't think there can ever be something as a "golden age" in the more general sense. I still think most people are simply to easily susceptible to nostalgia and associate stuff with their own life experiences, which then of course colors their perception. People call me overly critical and cynical all the time, but I think objectively it's never really been any different. E.g. people claimed that the sets for the original LEGO Movie were better than those for the second part, but personally I can't see anything that would justify this assessment. Similarly, combing through other older series I find that they are just as hit & miss as today's releases. So from where I'm sitting we're not necessarily living in special times, but more like business as usual. It also stands to note that 2016 through early 2018 haven't been LEGO's best years overall, so in my view it's also a matter of current sets perhaps just being that tad better than some of the really terrible stuff we got in this "dark age", if you will. Mylenium

I couldn't disagree more. There's just so much wrong with the Stud.io instruction builder... Mylenium

The toy store sounds promising, the rest doesn't get me pumped. It all sounds very run-off-the-mill like stuff we get in City/ Ninjago/ Creator all the time already, i.e. replacing an older set with a newer version in different colors. For me it will really come down to how useful the parts will be for other projects before making any buying decision. Mylenium

You misunderstand. Personally I have no issues with that. I'd be totally up for a Divine minifigure or a series based on "Drag Race" just for the fun of it. Still, I think you have to tread lightly in this department. We're not there yet... Mylenium

Well, TBH, showing up once a year as a sponsor for Pride is perhaps more a fashion statement than it would count as a genuine effort to support those communities. Personally I'm quite flabbergasted how commercial this has become when in the past many of those same companies couldn't be bothered to sponsor a free beer. On some level it still feels disingenuous and insincere... Mylenium We are all just people, aren't we? Simple steps like getting away from those fake, clichéed, hetero-normative pseudo-family ads would be a good start and they sure could include diverse characters in their comics and TV series. It's not like you would need to come up with butch dyke or flamboyant tranny minifigs just to get the point across... ;-) Mylenium

Dunno if it's true, but it's at least not impossible, given that only Modular buildings still use(d) them at all in official sets. I wouldn't be surprised if they scrapped them for good in favor of the more rigid standard building plates that can be assembled to nearly any shape as needed. In any case, there are enough third-party offerings out there even with a wider choice of colors, so why not give them a try? Mylenium

Looks like they shortened the tree quite a bit and "optimized" a few parts that likely didn't need it like the arched railing. I'll reserve final judgment until I see it for real, though. Mylenium

Sure, but I'm still skeptical. Running theme parks isn't a cheap business. And in the end the differentiation between Kirkbi & LEGO itself is more or less just a technicality, after all. Dunno, I could see this having all sorts of weird sideeffects, but of course we'll have to see... Mylenium

Perhaps not, but that aside, one mustn't be under any illusion that this is nothing more than the investors parking their money and writing off taxes. I doubt too much will come off it, even more so in such a competitive field as parks and attractions. And of course there's that dark cloud on the horizon - the Legoland parks were a not so minor contributing factor in the various LEGO crises and didn't exactly bring in a ton of cash. Personally I'm just stumped by this move and it seems to make little to no sense, at least where their core business is concerned. Mylenium

But then again, showing it in the movie perhaps isn't arbitrary? One could also argue that LEGO not doing more recolors is just their laziness and trying to get rid of their own overflow stock. You know, it's not like they were incapable of doing it from a technical standpoint. Not least of all knock-off products and competitors show how easy and quickly colors can be changed and adapted and open up new creative possibilities. (No re-opening of those boring discussions about logistics, production lead-in time, marketing etc., please!). Dunno, I just tend to see it differently and ultimately those inconsistencies don't help to make those sets more popular and attractive to some users. I guess it once more comes down to the old gag of nobody truly comprehending just why LEGO refuse or are unable to provide more consistent and varied coloring of their parts when it just seems so trivial to do... Mylenium

The Detective Office and Assembly Square are lovely. In contrast to many other people that consider it the best Modular, the Parisien Restaurant ranks lower in my world. The Brick Bank was kinda boring. Haven't built the diner and The Corner Garage yet. Mylenium

30% discounts are quite common and if a set is around longer than a year this can go even lower, especially with Creator 3in1. In any case, I'm not in a rush and can bide my time. Mylenium

It's still selling at almost full price (80 Euro) due to only having been out a few weeks, which IMO is way too much. Around 60 Euro will be okay. Mylenium

I have it on my radar, but I'm still kinda torn. It's a bit mundane and looks a bit messy. Well, in any case, I'm waiting for prices to drop and then we'll see how it goes... Mylenium

Sure, but doesn't negate the fact that promotional photos and pack shots need to have a predictable and reasonably accurate representation of the actual product. My favorite example for this are two Brickheadz: Iron Man (41064) and The Flash (41598). They both are actually Dark Red, yet they look completely different on the official marketing images. Similarly, a pet peeve of mine is the representation of Dark Cyan, Medium Azure and Dark Azure in photos. On the best of days they look almost the same. It's like there's a color blind person doing the color corrections and getting it wrong every time. And the less said about those abysmal glow, lens flare and motion blur effects slapped on to some imagery, the better.... Mylenium

From what I gather observing some other toy-related stuff on the Internet selling stuff at full price until the last minute seems common practice, only for the prices then to drop extremely near the end of life. So I guess overall the economics aren't that much different. You just have to wait longer. I'd also like to point out that in fact the US (and the UK) were the only countries where the movie was okay-ish-ly successful, so in my view the situation is kinda reversed: You have to pay higher prices simply because demand is greater to begin with while at the same time LEGO may have put the brakes on production of these sets, resulting in limited availability of some and further contributing to keeping the prices relatively high/ stable. Mylenium

If only... Honestly, LEGO's photo retouching work is terrible. It always looks like their stuff is done by unpaid interns that barely know where the Directional Blur/ Motion Blur is buried in the Filters menu, much less any advanced work. They can't even get a consistent rendering of their brick colors across different shots, so there's that, too. Mylenium

I honestly don't think so. The only thing where this would work realistically IMO would be a big exclusive set, but LEGO already have spent their ammo on Apocalypseburg. A second such expensive set for the same movie would be unlikely. Other than that with interest in the movie having plummeted to abysmally low values and only a low resurgence to be expected now that it's coming out on digital media there simply would be little sense in bringing out more sets. As I said already even the current ones already appear to be on permanent clearance discounts here in Germany and nobody is likely going to stock up on more TLM2 sets, no matter what. Mylenium