AmperZand

I don't think that Wednesday Addams has any supernatural powers but still falls in the horror (as well as comedy) genre. As such, I won't have a problem adding this minifig to my horror ones. Mind you, I'll probably swap her legs for short ones and might give her a knife.

Not in my experience. LEGO takes a lot of room especially if a store's inventory is large. London has some of the highest property prices in the world, so not many people in the city can afford to maintain a BL store. It's almost impossible to run one economically. Most of the UK sellers I've bought from - and there have been loads - are located in small cities or rural locations.

Same for my old stuff. My white dolphin and polar bear are a little creamy but really not too bad. I keep them and the rest of my display collection in the dark. I could re-whiten the creamy parts using hydrogen peroxide + Vanish Oxi Crystal White + sunlight as I've done for some used parts but they're not discoloured enough to warrant it. The place I keep my display collection isn't very dusty. Occasionally though, I clean the exposed parts using a very soft make-up brush. I only have a couple of stickers in my display collection and they seem to be holding up just fine. I'm not a big fan of stickers and only use them when absolutely necessary.

I do much the same thing. I'm recreating/restoring an old set at the moment and relying on BL for most of the parts. I've been seeking quite a few rare parts that only a few sellers have. As none of the sellers has all the parts I want (at a reasonable price), I've been forced to place orders with lots of sellers, bulking out each one. I've either bought extras of parts for the set I'm recreating - on the assumption that some used parts won't be in great shape so will need replacing anyway - or getting minifigure parts/accessories. Minifigs are my main passion and you really can't have too many extra pieces for minifigs! So my suggestion is get extra parts that you think may be useful down the line. You'll soon find a use for them.

The problem with BrickWarriors is that they produce so much beautifully designed, excellently made castle/fantasy/mythology parts that I can't afford to get everything I'd like. There's just too much goodness!

I have one of the BW pavises. What you can't really see in the picture is that the central groove can accommodate a spear, spikes etc on the defender's side allowing you to create a shield-weapon similar to these: http://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Fechtbuch_(Talhoffer)/Kapitel_5

It's possible. Vanish Oxi Crystal White is a cleaning product after all, so it could be that using it makes the bricks super-clean, i.e. even cleaner than new parts or ones washed in washing up liquid. I don't think it's related to the concentration of the hydrogen peroxide. I could test the hypothesis by washing some parts in Vanish Oxi Crystal White and water instead of hydrogen peroxide and seeing if I got the same change of feel. If I have time, I'll try it and post the results.

I'm in the midst of a project to restore a set with quite a few white bricks. Some of the used parts I got from BrickLink were slightly yellowed - enough to make them stand out from new white bricks. So I bathed them in 6% (20 vols) hydrogen peroxide mixed with Vanish Oxi Crystal White in a glass jar in direct sunlight for a few hours and now they're practically white as new. Some of the pieces were printed and the process doesn't seem to have affected the printing at all. The only thing is that all the parts now have a slightly different feel. When you rub them, they catch your skin as if they're slightly grippy. I wonder if they look any different under a powerful microscope. Unfortunately, I don't have one to check. To the naked eye, they just look whiter. The shininess of the pieces is the same.

Your understanding of the timeline of Feminism is incorrect. The hypothesis I referred to was put forward much later than the movement for universal adult suffrage.

Exactly, hence my original objection to the author of the BBC piece's implicit presumption that the nurture argument was entirely correct. I don't know how many academic papers in English language social science journals are a "Feminist critique of [x]" or a "Marxist reinterpretation of [y]", how many professors and departments of gender studies there are, how strictly Political "Correctness" is enforced on university campuses these days and so on, but if anyone believes that there isn't a Left-wing agenda pervading much of academia in the English-speaking world, they're delusional. I do know that academic social scientists are further Left than most other professional occupations (that's proven), that they influence (indoctrinate) their students to become more Left wing (that's also proven) and at US universities that they ostracise colleagues who don't share their political beliefs (that's documented). Theoretically, yes, but in practice far from shying away from debate, the relatively few social scientists who are on the Right delight in engaging the arguments of their Left-wing colleagues. They're happy to do so because, by and large, Right-wing social scientists have been shown to be correct. It isn't always obvious at the time because social, economic, demographic, political etc events that are the acid tests of their predictions can take generations or lifetimes to play out. It's only once they have that the Left concedes defeat. Examples include the prediction of political scientists and economists that the Soviet block would collapse (it has), the contention by International Relations specialists that unilateral nuclear disarmament would not deter a Soviet nuclear attack (since proven correct by declassified Soviet military files and Western intelligence reports), the argument by economists that China would eventually adopt a form of free market economics (it has), and the prediction of economic sociologists that Feminism wouldn't make women happier (which has lead Feminists in the last 10-15 years to question the achievements of previous generations of Feminists).

You're conflating premises and hypotheses. Presuming that gender roles have no biological basis as the author of the BBC News article tacitly does isn't a rational premise. Feminists and other Leftists often take their positions as apodictic in the hope (or knowledge) that audiences aren't well intellectually equipped to suspect - let alone doubt - the assumptions underlying their arguments. That's false. Plenty of poor premises persist because those holding them have an ideological, philosophical or economic interest in their perpetuation. You mean like income disparities between the sexes for the same kind of work? For years that has been trotted out as proof that gender inequality persists. The media repeat it frequently. What the media fail to grasp and what ideologically motivated academics hide is that in the US and UK those differences disappear when you account for qualifications, experience and employee commitment (whether measured by the employer or the employee). Those same social scientists disregard compelling counter-evidence when it doesn't suit them ideologically.

I saw that article too. Like many pieces on the BBC News site, it's well written but poorly argued. The author assumes that gender roles are socialised without considering the possibility that they may be wholly or partly biologically determined. An argument that rests on an unproven premise is devoid of merit.

I usually all cap "LEGO" though sometimes I forget and write "Lego". I never pluralise is with an 's'. I knowingly mispronounce LEGO, that is, I say it as most native English speakers do. My brother-in-law who is Danish and a former employee of TLG has taught me to say it properly. It should sound something like LAY-go.

True but a bare torso is useful for so many different MOCs. I'm glad there's one in this series. I think I'm right in saying that we haven't had one in a CMF series since Poseidon.

I'm a yellowist, not a fleshist, but still appreciate the coolness of your minifigs. I especially like the zombie surgeon. Did you achieve the spattered blood effect by drawing something across a brush dipped in red paint, sprinkling it on the minifig?

They don't routinely ask to hold your products in the UK, though they will if you ask or if you're obviously struggling to keep hold of the products you have selected. Knowing now that it's to reduce theft, I would be offended if they offered.

I've bought extensively from both but not their guns (I'm into pre-firearms fantasy/mythology/history). BA's sculpts are a bit more delicate with thinner blades for example. BW parts are chunkier. BW's design tends to be more elaborate; BA's are simpler, more classic. Both are constructed from quality ABS to a high standard. I haven't bought directly from BA (I use their official UK re-seller, minifigforlife), so can't comment about their service, but do buy directly from BW and have always found their service to be very good: fast, friendly, good value and no wrong items. By the way, this thread definitely belongs in the Minifigure Customisation Workshop, not in General LEGO Discussion.

TLG itself uses "Minifigure Collection" in relation to CMFs, so it's likely it would suggest "collection" as the collective noun. Barring an official term from TLG, the Brickish Association should provide one. The BA is made up of (mostly) British AFOLs and is therefore better qualified than any other organisation to come up with the definitive term.

Very clever! I like it.

Clutch describes the connective strength between any LEGO elements, not just minifig hands. So "clutch" works well as the collective noun for bricks generally but not specifically for minifigs.

In the US, some branches of major chains ignore street dates so there's a good chance they'll start to appear in September. In the UK, it's likely to be late September or the official release date of 1 Oct. I can't really say about other countries.

If you can have a murder of crows and a comedy of errors, why not something abstract but illustrative such as a happiness of minifigures?

I do not think it means what you think it means. The stairs are an an example of a trompe-l'oeil, not forced perspective. But I agree that the illusion is very clever as is the rest of the MOC. Great job!

Are these pics of a vignette? I don't think they are. To my mind, a vignette requires some Lego-built terrain or background or both. Do these pics portray anything other than minifigs? Well, yes: there are horses and waggons, but the focus is definitely on the minifigs. As such, this thread belongs in the Minifig Customisation Workshop, not Pirates. That, by the way, is according to LuxorV, MCW's mod. @OP - great army! The size and detail of your forces is very impressive even to a non-fleshy collector who isn't into the Napoleonic period. Vive la France!

We got a witch in Series 2, so I suppose a male counterpart in the form of a wizard was always on the cards.