Mylenium

White space is the oxygen of any print design or for that matter even classic paintings. Nothing wrong with that per se. Yes, they could have used a different style and framing, but overall it's okay. But then again they clearly have used more than one software and there may have been other restrictions and preset requirements. Somehow your comments feel like you don't understand much of the technical side of print production and package design and you also don't seem to acknowledge that at the end of the day the client is always right. The design actually even tells the story in a way - standardized package size and placement of elements to keep things cheap and the dark brown text just didn't work in this case, but would be just fine on a red rose or whatever other flowery stuff they may have. I'm certain the designer was fully aware of this. It was just a restriction that the client imposed. Mylenium

Yeah, it looks okay for a 5 dollar job. Not sure what you expect. Not every design job is luxury brand level where you spend weeks with meetings and design iterations. Many times it's really just a job done by a freelancer who needs to fire out twenty designs in a week to make a living and who works with clients that don't appreciate the finer points. They just want functional packaging that communicates the selling points at as low as possible cost. And let's be real: LEGO's box designs won't win awards, either. Given how much money the company throws around I'm always baffled by how bad some of that is. Mylenium

And you appear very defensive of it. I won't use certain words here, but your stance doesn't make it any better, either, no offense. Really depends on how you think about that stuff. That's an eternally ongoing debate in creative circles and at the end of the day there's no satisfactory resolution to the dilemma. I work in the graphics business, but I've never cramped my megablocks over someone copying/ imitating my work and to a degree I don't even mind them making money of it. It's just a matter to what extent. Sure, getting ripped off without even a mention sucks, but I'm not losing sleep over it. There's more to life than worrying about this and it's a matter of whether you are in it for the joy and fulfillment you get out of creating stuff or if you are just doing it for the money. At least in the creative industries there's also a self-cleaning effect and those hacks that just rely on copying work will only get so far. I would apply the same logic to brick-built projects. Why would I care about some weird company at the other end of the world using my designs when I have no way of getting to them or it is too much of a distraction to even hunt them down? I got better things to do. Mylenium

CaDa has had such beams since the beginning of eternity (and by extension other alternative brands that copied CaDa), so your interpretation doesn't make much sense. I would agree, but ultimately we have to take the facts for what they are: LEGO are weaponizing the protected designs exactly for that reason. It's the old debate of whether it's an inevitable, natural technical solution or a conscious decision to pick this exact design. And since this is based on the "first come, first served" principle, it's all an effed up mess. Whoever beats the others to the punch can basically dictate what's right and what's wrong and abuse the system. That's why we are in this mess, after all. 10000 % agree. It's just disappointing that so far no court has ordered LEGO to even provide a FRAND licensing option and spare the legal system all that annoying trouble and cost. Mylenium

I don't think so. It's not his responsibility to know all of the hundreds or thousands of products. That is up to some sub-sub-sub wholesale manager or whoever. Likewise, it's not their responsibility to check the package design of a competitor. This is once more a case where LEGO are simply pulling the "nuclear" option based on questionable claims. One can only hope that the court shows some measure of common sense... Mylenium

https://brickset.com/sets/5002801-1/Friends-Brick-Light-(Purple) Only LEGO-fied keychain pendant I ever bought. Only did so as sort of an emergency solution when MAGLite mini broke while I was on medical rehab back in 2013. Couldn't walk those beach paths at the Baltic Sea without some extra light in the middle of November when it was getting dark early... Still have it today, but of course the edges are all rounded off and I apparently had to change the batteries once or twice. Mylenium

I could think of a few things using sideways building to create a pin vice like setup to clamp stuff in, but it will never be fully invisible. Really depends on what the table is actually supposed to look like and how organic it needs to look as apparently there would be limitations placing stuff at an angle and some areas of the table would still be unusable. Mylenium

Secure the brick with a T-style bracket ( https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?P=4585#T=C ). Also see my old post for how to use such sideways pin connections: https://myleniumsbrickcorner.wordpress.com/2020/05/03/egged-all-over/. You just have to plan for a little more space. Mylenium

You probably dropped off their suggestion list. They will try and push new channels for a while, but if they don't grow enough over a given period of time or a video doesn't accrue enough views they will stop doing so. Happens all the time even to bigger channels. Sometimes there also apparently are major glitches in the system and channels just completely get ghosted because the suggestion algorithm messes up. That said, with only twenty videos to date it's too early to worry about anything. Just keep chugging along. I don't see anything there that would interest me, but there may be others. From following other channels and their complaints about the YouTube machine it seems to help to focus on specific subjects and develop a consistent style. I don't think video is ideal to promote MOCs in the first place, so you may want to reconsider. Your videos might do better if they are embedded in a blog that also has the instructions and perhaps discusses some pros and cons. I don't think that kids thing has anything to do with it. That would be a oversimplification and I'm pretty sure the metrics wouldn't support it. Mylenium

I think you are overthinking this. There is nothing wrong with >>>some moisture<<< since it stabilizes the polymers (water attaching to open ends of molecules and preventing them to break down and all that good stuff). You just don't want it to be too high. I probably should have written "excessive moisture" from the get-go and now that I think of it the proper better term is relative air humidity. Anyway, I wouldn't worry too much. Even though summers get hotter in Canada, too, it probably will never reach a level where you need to put minifigs in cold storage. just keep them in some nice dark boxes or a shadowy room not exposed to direct sun and you should be fine. Mylenium

Not necessary. There may be a few million oxygen molecules in the bag, but there are many times more polymer chains. Whatever reactions happen will happen slowly and over time, a.k.a. normal aging. It's not like your minifigs will burst into flames over rapid oxidization of every molecule. Also you cannot evacuate enough air in a meaningful way, anyway. That would require lab equipment and/ or replacing the oxygen with non-reactive/ lazy gases. With that in mind it's much more important to take care of other factors like exposure to light, heat and moisture. Just keeping your minifigs in a dark box in a not so hot room will do more for their longevity than just putting them into bags. Mylenium

Not sure about that. When we were visiting Deutsche Bücherei here in Leipzig, which also has one of the largest book restoration facilities, we were told it would contain some special ingredients. Might be some mild tensides to "soften" the water, a bit of glycol or even certain alcohols. Might also use complex salts to stop the stuff from re-growing. Anyway, barring deeper research I can only repeat what we were told. They definitely use a lot of purified water for sure, but also other stuff depending on the use case. Mylenium

It's a debatable point, though, since none of this is an intrinsic problem inherent in the system. It has more to do with LEGO being extremely reluctant to introduce elements that would facilitate compensating these offsets or in a similar fashion give us simple direction inverter plates like other companies have. Not trying to re-open those endless old discussions, but it's more about their design philosophy than a limitation per se. Mylenium

In professional book restoration they use gas chambers to kill this stuff and then gently wipe it off with their specialized liquids. For home use it would probably be good to put the instructions in a vacuum sealed bag and indeed freeze them as cold as possible. I'd go easy on the baking soda, though. Cellulose is, after all, just a complex hydrocarbon that would respond to alkaline materials. Exposing the paper too long could make it brittle and cause additional gilding. If at all I would use such a process only in the open like covering the pages for a few minutes to draw out moisture and then brushing away the magic dust. Wearing a filter mask is of course advised. Mylenium

Cause and effect, I suppose. As long as models are "soggy", as you put it, any extremely rigid connection throws this system out of wack. Funny enough I do understand why some models are built this way when I put my mechanical engineering hat on with regards to force loads, torque and other factors. Not saying that it's perfect and they always get it right, but occasionally it makes perfect sense (beyond LEGO just trying to cut corners). For me it's the other way around. Since I'm only doing LEGO since 2016 and started out with Technic it feels just as natural. No doubt having been involved in engineering stuff before and having seen some odd solutions probably also pre-conditioned me. That said, I would agree that the number of special elements has exploded in the last few years and it often feels like they are designed to make it easy for newcomers and/ or contribute to the visual appearance rather than being genuinely necessary technical solutions. Mylenium

In certain markets they apparently outstrip LEGO by a mile and CaDa has made massive inroads in Western markets as well. At the end of the day it's one of the reasons why LEGO are so hyper-sensitive and are weaponizing their trademarks and protected designs. Apparently there's quite a lot going on behind the scenes and LEGO take notice of people buying alternate brands more and more... Mylenium

I think the biggest issue is simply that they cannot come up with a future-proof motor and drive system. That's why we don't see "true" Technic sets any more. It's all tackled on a set by set basis and last year's version of Powered Up is basically deprecated and useless a few months later. Tying everything to app usage doesn't help. I also feel that ultimately Technic has merely become an alternate way of creating display models and they hang on to it so they can make life difficult for competitors by copyrighting their parts designs... Mylenium

I don't think they'd ship two versions of a set. They'd all be without instructions and if you want it, they'd hand it over. The boxes could even have prepared compartments for that accessible without actually opening the main package. The rest we can agree on. There would be zero cost savings since they'd still ship stacks of instructions and doing so separately increases the risk of something going wrong. The alternative to that would be on-demand printing on location, but those machines also cost money and need to be maintained, not saving any cost at all. Overall the idea of getting rid of printed instructions is just weird and doesn't make too much sense no matter how you spin it. Mylenium

That would be the glue only and that can be influenced by purchasing only cases that don't use these materials. Acrylic by its nature is a very "pure" plastic that doesn't contain harmful additives or only very few to chemically stabilize it. If at all I'd be concerned about it crumbling to dust when air humidity is too low and the sun light too intense. It does not use sulfur, chlorine, chrome oxides and so on like other plastic materials to create more stable polymer chains. You're worrying about nothing, basically. Acrylic is one of the least toxic plastic materials right out of the gate. Unless it's been mistreated and been tainted by using the wrong glue and paint it won't do anything. I'd be much more concerned about the ABS of the LEGO pieces themselves... Mylenium

It could be highly problematic when you think of controlling committees, having a blocking minority vote on everything and a lot of other stuff. There are also much stricter requirements on reporting, controlling and filling critical positions, so ultimately the company would not be entirely owned and run by the family one way or another. That's cute, but extremely naive. Will this even be still relevant in a few years? What is the measurement scale and reference point? Would people even care? The world keeps changing, you know. Of course they could lay out rules and instate controlling authorities, but this is simply completely unpredictable. It could also be utterly counter-productive. Forcing them to hold on to ill-perceived "traditions" and legacy products could go counter the companies business goals and actually be damaging. That and of course Disney/ Star Wars could collapse tomorrow and then what? Anyway, it seems to me you haven't really thought through anything. You want to have it both ways and that cannot work. There are consequences and repercussions you haven't considered at all. Unlike many of the others I don't think going public would spell all doom for LEGO, but there's a lot more to it than just cashing in, expanding your business and dominating the world. Mylenium And what does this achieve? A pissed off member of the family could still sell his equity share and in the long run over generations they could end up scattered all over the place. Your assumption of the children of the current company holders even wanting to take over is also at best questionable. Even if they want to enjoy the benefits of being wealthy, they may have no interest in actually being part of the corporate world. And then there are also rules. For every core equity share there have to be an X number of preference shares by legal mandate, shares can be split and merged, their value can be reassessed and reassigned by the corporate bodies and what not. Same as my previous post - my impression is that you haven't really thought this through. Mylenium

If you replace the bricks with stacks of 1 x 1 plates, clips and brackets the stud from the bracket should end up as a spacer for the bars. Other than that a minifigure "backpack holder" piece might be the right distance, but such unusual constructs are usually best built for real to check. The digital tools are notoriously unreliable with this. It might also help to know where this sub-assembly is supposed to sit on the model. Maybe there are surrounding elements that could be used. Mylenium

Silicone gloves probably would help. ;-) Otherwise I'm not sure what to think of the whole thing. Those bricks are probably not going to age gracefully and the process would no doubt be difficult to replicate to get exact colors every time. It's still cool on some level, though. Mylenium

You have to attend LEGO's official courses and be certified to officially advertise yourself as an authorized LEGO professional. The process is pretty rigorous and last I heard they only accept a handful applications every year, anyway. Otherwise of course you can offer your services, you just cannot use their trademarks and certain words. You could write "Years of experience with brick-based models on a professional level", but not much else. It sucks having to dance around words, but LEGO are known to send their lawyers even over tiny misrepresentations of their brand and with an exclusive club like the certified builders they'd shoot you down quick and hard. Mylenium

Perhaps not, but most of what you describe points to DNS, (server) cache and proxy issues. Maybe your service provider is terrible, you are using one of those awful over-advertised VPNs or some other software that messes with your network, perhaps it's just a major misconfiguration on your router or computer. Impossible to say since you haven't provided any actual relevant technical info. The least you could do is to reset your router and also configure a new network connection in Windows with the assistant (unless there are very specific requirements like a fixed IP or any such stuff), deleting/ overwriting the old one. Sometimes this fixes a ton of problems by resetting some security stuff deeply buried inside Windows (you could fix that manually, too, but would spend much more time even finding it). Mylenium

I don't think there are any hooks in Stud.io that could be addressed and neither is the code open source, so that pretty much settles it. Mylenium