ShaydDeGrai

Rebrickable can certainly tell you how close you can come to realizing any given official model with your existing collection but there will always be spanners in the works (custom sticker sheets, printed parts, unique minifigures, etc.) In some cases new kits will rely on new parts or unique colors. The New Elementary is a nice little blog dedicated to spotting and reviewing new parts as they emerge from the shadows (or polybags, as it were…) In other (admittedly rare) cases, parts that, at first glance seem to be the same, are actually newer or older revisions and certain models require a specific mold revision to work properly. This was a problem with the recent revisions to a number of the arch bricks where techniques used in some of the older modular buildings only worked with the previous revision and kits like Bag End from The Hobbit line required the new one. Of course this is really just an academic discussion because, in truth, no true AFOL ever has "enough" LEGO, that would be like a woodworker claiming to have too many clamps or Donald Trump deciding he has enough money. The curse of LEGO is that our imaginations usually exceed our means.

I've always been fond of the concept of 2-in-1 or 3-in-1 "B models" in Creator and Technic sets. I think it's a great reminder to kids (and parents) that they're not just building a model, they're buying into an infinitely expandable (give or take an infinite amount of money, space and resources) system for creative play. Extending this idea to other themes makes perfect sense to me. I'd love to buy a new edition of a Star Wars TIE fighter and get instructions for building a small AT-DP walker in the same kit, for example; or an Avengers Quinjet that can be rebuilt into a Jeep with SHIELD markings. Sure the B Model might mean including a few parts you might not otherwise need and not use a lot of the parts needed for the "A" model, but I think the former is a minimal expense that can be passed on to the consumer without serious complaint and the latter is just motivation for the builder to come up with something of his/her own to create something unique. In some cases, maybe the "B" model is very similar (and not that "dumbed down" at all). I remember the way TLG marketed the train cars for the Santa Fe Super Chief model. There were two passenger car packs. One (10022-1) let you build either the Dining Car, Observation Car or Sleeping Car; the other (10025-1) had instructions for building either a Mail car or a Baggage Car. All one had to do was pick up a few copies of each kit and you had a very impressive, varied and complete train model (that the motor could barely pull, but that's a different story). I remember really liking this approach to marketing rolling stock at the time and I wish TLG had done more along these lines. Iria's point about including printed instructions, though, is a very good and important one. I build with LEGO to get away from computers, the last thing I want is to have to go on-line to either fetch a PDF that I'll then have to print (and work in grey-scale as I don't have a color printer), or, worse yet, refer to interactively on a screen when I'm trying to build. I did that once with a technic "B" model and hated the experience so much that I vowed never to bother with on-line instructions again. For me, if the alternate build doesn't have a printed instruction book in the box, it might was well not exist at all.

I don't want to get into the middle of this, as I think this exchange is really starting to drift off the rails of the original thread more than a tad, but since you seen to be dwelling on _actual_ history you might as well have all the facts: Joan of Arc was only a teenage girl when she wore full armor and broke the Siege of Orleans in a mere 9 days during the 100 Years War. She was a brilliant strategist and was eventually burned at the stake for witchcraft and heresy because the English could imagine any other explanation for why she was so much better at prosecuting a war than the male nobility. Artemesia of Caria was an ally of Xerxes, King of Persia and served as his supreme naval commander at the Battle of Salamis. She had a reputation for being ruthless, cunning and extremely intelligent and was feared by sailors and soldiers alike across the eastern mediterranean. Queen Boudicca of Britain united the Celtic Tribes in a revolt against Roman occupation and personally lead her warriors in a campaign that cost Rome and estimated 70-80,000 troops and support personnel before finally being defeated by an overwhelming force in both numbers and technology. While she didn't drive the Romans from the island, the economic and psychological damage she inflicted had ripple effects across the empire and is considered a contributing factor in both future rebellions agains the romans and the assassination of the Emperor Nero ( one whose watch a "mere" woman embarrassed the greatest empire Europe had ever known ). And speaking of women who stood up to Rome, Zenobia was queen of what would become Syria. She was considered a fierce warrior who lead from the front and fought both on foot and one horseback in campaigns that crippled key trade route for Rome. When she was finally defeated, Rome paraded her through the streets in golden chains to prove to the people that she was mortal and had been beaten, but she was so respected by the Generals who had faced her in battle that the Emperor is said to have pardoned her in exchange for a pledge of allegiance as they feared her execution would spark an even greater rebellion and they'd rather have her fighting for them than against them. Grace O'Malley was a warrior "cheiftan" of the Umaill Kingdom of Ireland around the 16th century and maintaing a pirate navy collecting tariffs on English shipping in defiance of Queen Elizabeth (who, in her younger days was no slouch either, not exactly your Disney Princess there. Eventually, she struct a deal with the Queen of England to use her fleet as privateers attacking England's enemies and so long as she left English ships alone, she could keep whatever she could capture and Elizabeth would allow her to remain an independent state. In the East, Lady Trieu is considered to the the Vietnamese Joan of Arc. At the age of 20 she raised an army of more than 1000 again the Chinese. She's said to have fought with two swords and road a war elephant into battle. In Japan, Tomoe Gozen and Nakano Takeko were actual female Samurai. Given the culture of the day, you can just imagine how accomplished these women must have been to earn such a title. So, you asked for examples of historic females warriors, this is just a sample of some of the more famous ones. True these aren't all technically "knights" from the middle ages, but I don't think anyone who went up against Joan of Arc was really worried about her title or standing in the feudal system of the day. Boudicca may have come a few centuries too early for your taste but I don't think that made much of a difference to the town and fortresses she sacked. Brining this back to LEGO, if a girl wants to play lord of the castle and put swords in the hands of her female mini-figures, more power to her. While most of the histories dwell on what the men were doing there's plenty of precedent and wiggle room for a girl to role something other than a damsel in distress or lowly milkmaid waiting for a man to rush in and save the day.

I am totally in agreement with this. I have the entire Discovery line and thought it was great. I would love to see it revived with a sort of "Architecture" flare, detailed models, perfect bound instructions books with all sort of extra information and nice packaging. We could get all sorts of rovers, landers, probes and launch vehicles. It also wouldn't have to be strictly Discovery Space either, there's plenty of room for undersea exploration vehicles/robots as well. Oh well, and old engineer can always dream I guess...

I just popped over to look at the reddit images. I was skeptical when I first heard the rumors, then I saw the images, now I remain unconvinced. I just don't know that the cityscape concept works for me. For all the pretty packaging and high price per part ratios, the Architecture line started with some pretty humble beginnings and a few really lame kits (Sear Tower, Rockerfeller Center - I could have built those on a good day at the pick-a-brick wall). I like the revised Empire State Building in the New York set, but honestly, I rather have just that building in a cheap ($8-$10) set. The trouble is, I think the Architecture line has grown into something where it can't sell a cheap $10 kit anymore. After big sets like the Robie House or the Imperial Hotel, and highly detailed little models like The Louvre, Trevi Fountain and the White House, it's hard to look at tiny abstractions like the original Empire State Building or even The Gugganhiem (which looked great in their day) without seeing the Architecture equivalent of the classic yellow castle sitting next to Helm's Deep. If the cityscape models didn't share a common base, I'd think of most of the offerings as candidates for Architecture-themed polybags, free with a $100 purchase or some such; but Architecture is too mature for mass market poly-bag promotions, so we're left with a collection of 'not-quite good enough to be sold as stand-alone models in this line' lumped together in search of some sort of added value. Now, of course those are just preliminary photos of unknown pedigree, so maybe seeing actual kits will change my mind, but I have to say, with all the amazing architecture out there to draw upon, I'm a little disappointed that it looks like 2016 is going to feature a rehash of a model that wasn't that interesting the first time round, and skyline collections that are too small to be interesting individually and too eclectic to be interesting collectively.

I feel kinda bad that Birds (as of this writing) hasn't gotten any votes in the poll. Technically speaking it's not my "favorite" set, but I enjoyed it, and found it more interesting to build than Big Bang Theory, The Rover, Back to the Future and Ghostbusters; in fact, I'd give it a clear number 2 slot in my list of favorites to date. Seeing it come up empty in the polls really doesn't do it justice. Number one goes to the Exo-Suit in my book, but I thought Birds was reasonably well done, an enjoyable set of builds and a refreshing take on Ideas as a crowdsource for cleaver builds, not just a popularity poll on overlooked IP licenses. Still, I'm hoping to get my hands on a Doctor Who set in the near future, but I wouldn't vote for it until I'd actually built one even though I really like the look of it so far.

Amazing job! My grandfather would have loved this. He was an engineer on the Flying Scotsman for decades and was especially fond of the A3 incarnation of the engine. The scale and detail of the station are just wonderful, wish I could see this in person.

In a previous career I was a professor at an engineering school with one of the highest (percentage-wise) female enrollment in the world (sadly, most engineering schools don't set the bar too high in that regard). Our university also had a college dedicated to child development and education, and I had a number of grants working with the child study gurus to address STEM education curriculum development, gender bias in basic skill acquisition and other factors that ultimately spoke to the question of "why are there so few women of note in engineering and the (hard/dry) sciences (as opposed to life/wet sciences, which, by comparison have been far better at attracting/producing accomplished practitioners who happen to be female)" One factor (of, admittedly, many) is early development of 3D spatial reasoning skills. Traditionally, males have scored much higher than females and for decades the generally accepted explanation (given by male 'experts' in the field and affirmed by their male colleagues in related fields as intuitively obvious) was that it was an evolutionary bias: millions of years of men having to hunt, build traps, make tools and build shelters while women sat around breast feeding babies and cooking dinner had, supposedly, resulted in a gender based natural selection of brain development. Since women were "genetically incapable" of developing strong spatial reasoning, they were destined to be bad drivers, terrible engineers, and generally dismissed in the "male professions" whereas males were considered to have a natural affinity for such things (and even those who couldn't handle the math could at least go on to be brilliant painters and sculptures). The giant hole in these age old theories is that there isn't a single bit of hard evidence to support it. We know where 3D reasoning "lives" in the brain; we can scan for activity and structure and if a million years of evolution had really differenced men from women in this regard, we should have been able to find something by now -- but we haven't. Unlike many other evolutionary, gender-biased traits (strength v. stamina, body chemistry, skeletal proportions, etc.) men's and women's brains aren't built all that differently, we just don't exercise them properly/equally. Spacial reasoning is predominantly a learned skill (and, like language, best developed prior to the onset of puberty). Statistically boys _are_ better at it than girls, but that's because they are given far more opportunity to explore and exercise those skills than girls are. Studies have been done comparing "tom girls" who played with "boys' toys" (Lego, lLincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, Erector Sets, etc.) at a young age and, guess what, they test out just as well as boys with a similar background with respect to spatial reasoning. (And as an aside, recent studies on boys raised on video games and screens rather than "hands-on" toys are showing significant retardation with respect to spatial reasoning compared to the age-peers a generation ago - so much for a million years of evolution). More so than any wage inequality or glass ceiling being imposed by some cigar smoking old-boys-club (which are certainly issues, I'll grant you), the single-most thing holding (most) women back in Engineering and (certain) Sciences is the societal expectations and stereo types. We "expect" girls to play with toys of limited educational value and that may actually limit early brain development, then saturate them with messages (both overt and subtle) that bias future career options and interests at a ridiculously early age. Don't bother blaming the toys, blame the society that makes those toys seem desirable to young girls. So back to LEGO... Clearly there is a gender bias in their themes (and clearly it is driven by marketing and profitability), as a former educator for whom the question of women in engineering was a key issue, I'm generally okay with that, but I have my reservations. The big win that I see in TLG's latest effort is that (unlike prior pushes such as Scala, Belville and Clikits), Friends and Elves are "real" in-system building kits, take out the mini-dolls and you still have a set worth putting a LEGO logo on. Paradisa flirted with this status previously, but a "complex" Paradisa build was the order of a promotional polybag for typical Lego fan. Even the "high-end" offerings like Poolside Paradise or Fun Fair were more on par with what one would get out of a Lego Juniors set from a building experience standpoint ( and just to be clear, that's a condemnation of the Paradisa designs and their unwillingness to offer girls a real building challenge, not a slam against the Juniors line - for what it is and who it's targeted at, I think Juniors is a great Idea ). Friends, in contrast, is a more typical Lego line-up and I know a number of middle aged men who rushed out to get the Dolphin Cruiser, not because it was a good "girls" set, but because it was a "good set" in general. Personally, I really like the Elves sets, good build experience, reasonable designs, excellent color palette (as opposed to the gut wrenching preponderance of Belville pink); the mini-dolls don't work for me, but other than that I think the line is respectful and educational for children in general even though it is nominally aimed at girls. And speaking of mini-dolls, I really don't like them. I recognize that they serve a purpose in trying to market a construction toy to a Barbie-brainwashed consumer market, but, socially, psychologically and educationally I see them as a hold-over to an era when toys reinforced the notion that girls were supposed to look pretty, play house and, if they were really gifted, learn to cook. I don't blame TLG for them in that, without mini-dolls, many girls might never discover LEGO at all, but if I were buying and Elves set for _my_ daughter, I'd pull the mini-dolls out and replace them with mini-figures with pointed ears before she ever got her hands on them in the first place. In terms of other lines and other sets, I think it's easy to point to lots of instances of kits with a distinct "boy-bias" or/and (often patronizing) pandering for the girl market, so I'll flip the question around and look in the opposite direction. I think, based purely on my own observations, that the Castle theme has really had the best track record for drawing boys and girls in for creative play. Certainly there have been sub-themes within castle from time to time where you couldn't find a female minifigure without a spy satellite, two blood hounds and a clairvoyant, but in general I think it has been pretty fertile ground for boys and girls to approach creative, constructive play on a pretty level footing. There are knights and princesses; castles and horses; swords and flower bouquets; siege equipment and farm animals. In general (and yes, I know there are some pretty marked departure from this in the various sub-themes) the theme creates a context for kids to run with the narrative of their choice and a setting to build aspects of the world that are of interest _to them_ based on their personalities and interests more than their gender. By comparison, City, Space and Pirates tend to have a very "designed by big boys for little boys" feel. Castle, despite it's many obsessions with dragons and ninjas, has always struct me as a more balanced world and one of the few ares where, prior to Friends, I recall seeing little girls getting excited about Lego.

I was talking to a couple contacts from my local Lego store (US) and they said that their (local) year-to-year sales for the first week of October were really off this year and a lot of people were complaining about the train offer not overlapping with the double VIP bonus. They had passed on the datum to corporate. I wonder if this was just anecdotal or if the "EXTENDED - VIP Double Points!" promotion was an abrupt reversal of course because some new marketing strategy looked like it was backfiring on a larger scale. I know I've always been a bit torn about the double VIP cycle in October. I tend to buy a lot to get the bonus points, but then I spend so much that I get invited back for the Pre-Brick Friday private sale, and, because I bought so much in October (and usually the next wave of things I want don't come out until December) my wish list is pretty empty for the Brick Friday event. The one year I held back in October in order to have a bigger shopping list for November was also the one year I didn't get the invite, oh well...

Other than a few chewed up finials, spars, light sabers and other cat magnets, my cats have rarely done permanent damage to the parts themselves. MOCs and Kits, however, have had their fair share of feline inflicted injuries. Sadly, I've learned that if I really care about a MOC, I need to keep it under lock and key or boxed up. As for kits, my latest victim was the UCS Batman Tumbler which was about 90% complete and sitting on my dining room table (where I was working on it) when my youngest cat bolted into the room, leapt up onto the table, slide across the polished surface and knocked the tumbler off the far end of the table where it shattered across the hardwood floor. The individual pieces seem okay (the cat was startled and flew off the table in the other direction) but I'm pretty much going to have to start over on the build. It was yet another case of CAT:1, CLUTCH POWER:0. Other than chewing, most of the model destruction is accidental (or at worse, cats conducting experiments with gravity and models just being "handy" inertial masses) The one exception is the annual tradition of the winter village around the Christmas Tree. I set up my trains and various other powered animations and my youngest cat takes it upon herself to play Godzilla to my unsuspecting winter villagers. She'll derail the trains, rip up the lamp posts and trees, tear roofs from houses, etc. I think she enjoyed the carousel set more than I did. It's annoying, but at the same time, she's just being a cat and only does this when I'm watching (clearly there's no fun in it for her if she doesn't have an audience) so I don't worry about her swallowing small parts. On the flip side, I have been known to accidentally drop small parts while building and often, if she's nearby, she'll bat them back to me so I don't have to reach as far to pick them up (comes from years of training her to play "fetch the catnip mouse")

I'll throw my backing behind Dr_Spock's and Peppermint_M's suggestion of a make-up brush. I used to use compressed air a lot but if you build big complex things those cans can get expensive and wasteful; and, to be honest, it doesn't do that great a job (especially on black). Then one day I was setting up for a show and ran out of compressed air and someone loaned me a theatrical quality make-up brush. The results were fantastic and it was at least as fast (if not faster) than the compressed air approach. I still keep a can of compressed air handy for the really tight spots, but my go-to dusters these days is a one inch diameter professional make-up brush (the bristles are sable if I recall) and a double zero size artist brush (also sable) for stubborn spots. To keep dust from redepositing, when I'm at home I do the dusting under a plastic sanding/vapor hood connected to a shopVac with a Hepa-filter (which I happened to have handy because I also do woodworking). It create a negative pressure around the air space with a slight electric charge to pull particulate matter toward the vacuum hood rather than letting it just settle back down on the model. Usually I only clean before shows or when anticipating guests; dust is a fact of Lego - you can't obsess over it or you'll go crazy.

I used to maintain a "junk" bucket of pieces that were scratched, broken, cracked, discolored, whatever as I didn't want to build with them but I couldn't bring myself to throw them out either. Over the years I amassed about a kilogram's worth and really didn't know what to do with them. Later, however, when I started really pushing the edge of my MOC'ing aspirations with things like Barad Dur I realized that even crappy bricks can serve as filler and no one ever need know they're there. If I hadn't had my cache of junk brick, I would have had to shell out even more money for good brick (or Duplo) that would have just gotten buried in a base or mountainside.

Personally, I thought your review was spot on and I very much enjoyed your tone. I'm not usually much of a mini-fig person, but I will admit I bought this set mostly for Dr. Doom (and considered Nova a bonus). Growing up, I was a big fan of the Fantastic Four and an even bigger fan of Dr Doom. I hope that someday the film rights will revert to Marvel and we'll finally get a FF film that respects the original source material and features a Dr Doom worthy of the name. As for the set itself, I don't have much use for playsets (not that there's anything wrong with them, I think the Marvel Lego line could use more of them in fact) and I didn't even realize it was linked to a specific show as I've fallen a bit out of touch with the franchise of late. I bought it; I built it; it sat a shelf for a while; I scrapped it for parts. I think most of it wound up as a greenhouse for my winter village set-up. It's not a _bad_ set, but I think you summed things up nicely when you called it mediocre. Thanks for the entertaining review.

Welcome Frank! It's good to hear your story of Lego re-discovery. I, too, was very fond of Lego in my childhood, but I didn't have the means to afford very much as a child and once things like college (and paying for college) got into the picture I was pretty much pushed into a dark age. For me, the thing that really brought me back was the Technic Space Shuttle 8480, then to follow that up with things like the sculpture of the Statue of Liberty 3450 and I was hooked. Lego became my vice of choice. It's become a very rewarding hobby and I've met some great people through it. May you have similar fortune. Welcome aboard.

It can be built bigger (like 2x4 or 2x6, etc) but the proportions of the wedge brick make it harder to do 2x2. You can do a 2x2 if you use only two wedge pieces in opposite corners of the plate but the connection isn't as strong (may or may not matter depending on how much weight you're trying to support).

The cable guy who came out to fix my modem the other day assumed that I worked for TLG and started telling me what his daughter felt was wrong with the Friends sets but how happy she was with the new Elves line. When I finally got word in edgewise and told him it was just a hobby, his next reaction was "A hobby? Are you an internet millionaire or something? This stuff must have cost a fortune. S***, I would have bought a boat or a Ferrari, you know, something fun." So much for cable guys…. Usually reactions are more supportive variations on amazement and awe. One of my favorites was from a friend who was a big fan of Science Fiction who channeled Arthur C. Clark's 2001: "My god, it's full of bricks…"

I don't have a camera handy to illustrate at the moment, but I'll try to explain this as well as I can... It is possible to make a four plate high, reverse stud assembly by combining a 2x3 brick with a 2x3 plate using 4 cheese wedge parts. I've used this often for my sculptures. The trick is to flip the plate over and put the cheese wedges (on their sides) into the corners of the plate with the diagonal face of the wedge pressed up against the the round stud catcher ridge on the underside of the plate and the right angle edge of the wedge snugged into the corner. It'll be a tight fit (and likely "illegal" connection) but it works. The wedge parts are not symmetric. Align the longer edge of the wedge with the long edge of the plate. Once you have all four wedges in place, the 2x3 brick can be slid down on top of the plate, creating an assembly with smooth sides (no gap) and studs on top and bottom. As a side note, I prefer to use polycarb wedges (the trans-clear parts) with ABS ("normal" Lego) bricks and plates, as it holds better than ABS on ABS. If you do poly-on-poly (all clear parts) you might break something trying to get it apart later.

I could see a scaled down version of this passing. The original had a ridiculous number of brick built "dominos" that would make for a very tedious build and run up the part count while adding very little (unique) value. They could include just a few in the official set to illustrate the concept and let kids hit a PAB wall if they want hundreds. I think the "concept" of a 3D marble run as a sort of mini GBC could work though; there are already third party K-6 lecture kits that repackage Lego bricks to build such things for classroom use, so at the right price point it must be viable to someone. Overall, I don't have much passion about this review batch. The sets I'd buy don't really stand much of a chance (as least not in their current form) and the others don't really appeal to me (that's a question of personal taste and the various subject matters - BTW- not a critique of project quality). In any case, best of luck to all.

There was this one time, I think it was in 2005 or so, when I got a Lego catalog in the mail and was disappointed to find that I already owned every set in the catalog that I was even remotely interested in. I thought to myself then, "Is this it? Do I already had all the Lego I could ever need or want?" I'm happy to report it was a very short-lived thought. I've come to realize since then that my collection will never grow fast enough to keep up with the ambitions of my imagination (either that, or I'll have the right part, but in the wrong color…)

My personal favorite image editor is GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) but maybe that's just because it's free and I'm cheap when it comes to software. My basic method for watermarking begins with making a small signature image with a transparent background. If all you want to do is sign your image with text, you could used the text tool repeatedly, but I prefer to just have a finished logo I can paste in at will. I save this file at a couple different resolutions from about 72-100 dpi for online images to 300-1200 dpi for print publications. When editing a file for sharing, I crop, scale and otherwise adjust the image until I'm happy with it, then I use the add layer feature to create a space to receive the signature file. The new layer allows me to play with the signature after the fact without having to worry about screwing up the main image. I paste in the copy of the sig file with the resolution that most closely matches that of the base image, position it to my liking, and maybe play with opacity. Then I just save as PNG. This will flatten (merge all the layers together) the image automatically. I'm sure there are other ways of getting from A to B, but this is the path that works for me (not that I'm an expert by any means…)

I don't know how marketable the '200 dominoes' aspect of this project would be (that's 600 parts and a highly repetitive build right there) but the marble run/not-quite great ball contraption is certainly something they could do in a ~500 piece version and be both fun to build, interesting to display and cool to interact with. I also know a few GBC fans out there that would probably welcome an official kit or two in the hopes of: a) raising awareness / inspiring a new generation of GBC MOC'ers, and b) getting more soccer balls in production.

I very much enjoyed the review, thank you for that. The subject matter, however, doesn't do much for me so I'll skip the poll entirely - I know I'm not the target audience and would probably just things unfairly. The only real appeal of this set for me would be to part it out to pad my brick supply, I can always use more decent sized block, jumper plates and large plates in neutral colors. Even then, though, I suspect I'd only buy it if I found it on clearance somewhere.

US Criminal Law has the concept of "Inevitable Discovery" and, I suspect, the feudal nature of TLG's design teams may work on a similar basis. ASIDE FOR THOSE WHO WONDER: The constitution of the US has laws preventing illegal search and seizure and protecting the "right to remain silent" if, through police misconduct or even simple human error, a defendant's rights were violated (say, they were interrogate before being told that they had the right to a lawyer or someone searched their apartment without a warrant) any evidence discovered becomes inadmissible in court as "fruit of the poisonous tree." Inevitable Discovery, however, creates an exemption for this if the evidence found is something that _clearly_ would have been found anyway because the circumstances were already in place to discover it at the time the infraction occurred. For example, if the police pull-over someone wanted for murder; they arrest him and impound his car, but then an overzealous cop takes the man aside and scares him into confessing that that he did it and the body in in the trunk of the car - the fact that he confessed and that he told them where to find the body is inadmissible, but the body itself and autopsy findings could still be valid because the cops already had the car and once it started to smell bad they'd have probable cause to open the trunk even if they didn't get a search warrant. END ASIDE What does any of this have to do with Lego Ideas and licensed themes? Well, from a legal perspective, TLG can safely say that by having a dedicated Star Wars (or Heroes, or whatever) design team in place and having a licensed IP of prior art to draw upon, ANY Ideas project related to this material is something that TLG _could have_ eventually come up with on their own - it's discovery was inevitable and therefore it should fall to the theme team to produce a set of their own design under the umbrella of existing contracts with the IP holders. Whether the concept for a set came from an Ideas proposal, a MOC posting on Flickr or a random Tweet somewhere in cyberspace, since the concept was inspired by a (finite) IP TLG was already mining for kit ideas, the Star Wars Line design team can claim inevitable discovery for just about anything that is recognizably Star Wars related. If the Ideas team needs to get the Star Wars team to sign off on letting a third party get paid to make them look bad (after all, these people are on salary to think this stuff up, so why didn't they think of it first), I just don't see that happening very often, if at all. Obviously licensed sets can get (and have successfully gotten) made, but we've never seen one for an existing IP where TLG already had a standing design group. And let's face it, Ideas is a novelty gimmick, a small sideline business unit compared to the juggernaut of Lego Star Wars. I find it really hard to envision the day when a fan proposed, 10,000 unit production run of a Star Wars property is going to ship under an Ideas banner - and I find it very easy to imagine a similar model shipping under the licensed theme banner sooner or later with no acknowledgement that there had ever been a prior Ideas project - the argument for inevitable discovery is too easy to make. It would be different if TLG were actually licensing fan MOCs directly (brick for brick), but Ideas projects are just considered prototypes to show a concept (not the execution of that concept). TLG redesigns the actual models, owns the execution, and rewards Ideas submitters a small commission for their "suggestions". Outside of an advertising or PR stunt, paying someone to suggest something you were considering doing anyway doesn't make a lot of sense. Claiming "originality of concept" against an existing body of prior art while remaining within the canon of that IP is a tough sell. Whether TLG disallows designs based on existing licensed IP or not, I think our energy would be better spent coming up with truly unique and original proposals - rejecting the next Jedi Temple or life-sized lightsaber is just to easy compared to the amount of work _we_ have to do to get the project to 10K support in the first place.

Let's face it, this has been an issue for Ideas since the first days of Cuusoo. People mistakenly think that it's a site for sharing MOCs - it isn't. TLG even went so far as to create Rebrick to highlight the difference between a MOC sharing service and a product crowd sourcing venture, but all that did was give people a new outlet where they would go to beg for votes. "Unsuitable" (I hesitate to say "bad" but there are certainly cases to be made for that adjective too) projects still wound up cluttering Cuusoo. I'm not a fan of the kickstarter model - though I never vote for anything I wouldn't be willing to buy at a reasonable price - I think that paradigm is too much of a departure from the established way of doing business for the site. I can appreciate the idea of a small refundable submission fee, but my concern is that the same people who rush to submit what, for lack of a better term, I will call Creativity Retarded Artless Projects (or C.R.A.P. for short) will think of this not as a filter mechanism, but as a lottery ticket price and will gladly pay it for the chance to "win". I think fixing the problem has to start with: setting user's expectations; being open about what _really_ has a chance of getting made; and, being better about culling weak offerings while highlighting strong ones. On Expectations: I've lost count of the number of people I've met or read posting from who think that if TLG buys their Idea, then they are going to get rich. Most of these people are not only weak/lazy builders but apparently bad at math as well. Let's say your project gets approved. It sells for 35 USD and has a production run of 10,000 units for a total revenue stream of $350,000. Your cut is 1% of that ($3,500) or more correctly $3,498.25 plus five copies of the kit. While this sum might cover a mortgage payment or two, it's a far cry from life-long financial security. If fewer people looked to Ideas as their path to fame and fortune, there'd probably be fewer C.R.A.P-py ideas posted. On Openness and Viability: I once asked someone who worked on Cuusoo why they allowed project they knew would never pass review to get posted in the first place. I was told the the official answer was they they didn't want to stifle creativity, and unofficially even "doomed" projects (like The Winchester from Shawn of the Dead) were great for generating site traffic. For internal political reasons, Ideas will likely never get permission to release a Star Wars kit so long as a Lego Star Wars design team exists, but if they banned Star Wars (or Superheroes, or whatever) themed proposals from the outset, a huge chunk of their audience would lose interest, so we're left with: "Come for the cool Star Wars MOC, and while you're here vote for something else that we might actually get permission to make." I find the practice of letting people post stuff that TLG knows doesn't stand a chance of becoming product just for the sake of keeping the site active a bit disingenuous. I actually appreciated it when they cracked down on stuff like "My Little Pony" and the "Dark Bucket" of stormtroopers - they knew they could never legally release such products and they should have been more upfront about that in the first place - but those were the early days and hundreds of people signed up for Cuusoo just to vote for one of those projects (at least initially). I don't want to stifle anyone's creativity, but just as they have prohibitions on sex, drugs, religion and rival IP, they should have more realistic and stricter guidelines for what will pass the initial review in order to get a public posting. If an existing license is off limits, just say so, don't dangle it like a carrot when you know 10,000 votes later it will be DOA at review time. If you never plan on approving a set with more that 600 parts, give yourself a 100% margin for error and say more that 1200 parts is forbidden. Publicly saying "(almost) anything is possible so get all your followers in Twitter to sign up and support you" when you know it's basically a fool's errand and you just want the traffic, might be good for the web stats but it's still poor form and a bit exploitive for my tastes. On Barrier to Initial Postings: As I said, I'm not in favor of a submission fee (mostly because I'm not convinced it would work) but I wouldn't object to making one part of the initial proposal be a short essay making the business case for the idea. The guidelines could stress that, like poor photos and a lack of meaningful narrative for the project, failure to write a compelling business case is grounds for rejection. I realize that having to read all the business cases (let alone assess them) could be a daunting challenge, but the mere suggestion that you have to write an essay to submit to Ideas might dissuade a lot of people from trying to post the LDD doodle-of-the-day. The business case essay would also give the Ideas team a polite way of rejecting a weak idea (i.e. it's not that you're a lazy builder, your marketing plan needs work; do some research and resubmit…) On Culling: I used to track Cuusoo statistics fairly closely for both my own projects and others. It was very rare that a project that failed to make an initial splash really took off. I haven't been playing as much attention with Ideas, but it _feels_ like it holds true there as well. In most cases, it seems more than half the votes a typical project will get in its lifetime happen in the first week that it goes live. Some projects creep along at a steady pace, true, but most see a small initial bump and then languish. This is not always a function of project quality; the recommended/related projects selection is not the best in the world and as fresh clutter accrues sometimes good stuff gets lost in the shuffle. Still, it's probably safe to say that if a project can't get to and sustain some fairly low threshold of support in for reasonable period of time it should go away. Since we know they give you one year to reach 1000 votes (a rough average of just under 3 votes per day) I wouldn't oppose a rule that says you have to average a rate of two votes per day for any given 30 day window or you get de-listed. That would cull out any project that can't get at least 60 vote after the first month. Even if the project makes that bar, if the rate of support suddenly drops (say everyone on your bowling team has already voted and no one else cares) the project may go away a week or two later for failing to maintain a plausible rate of completion. On Finding Good Projects: I've never been happy with the algorithms the site uses to recommend projects to me. In the early days, it was a rich get richer sort of scheme where it only picked from the most popular projects (which I could have found easily anyway). Then it seemed like they switched to a keyword based association ("You just supported a Lord of the Rings project; here, let me show you this really terrible proposal that used many of the same hashtags…") Now I'm not sure what the logic is, but it's good at suggesting things I don't care for. I don't know what the right answer is here, but if the site could give me better recommendations based on _my_ tastes I'd have a lot more tolerance when it comes to the amount of unsuitable projects littering the site. Maybe they need something like Amazon - if you support a project, they could look at all the projects that other supporters of that project have voted for and return a handful of the most commonly supprted ones you've yet to visit. Or maybe the site needs to get to know its users better and should have a sort of "who's hotter?" page where two random projects (just title and signature photo) are shown side and, without a committal to support or not, you just click on the one you like better. Do this as often as you like. The site could start to learn what individual users like as well as which projects just aren't cutting it. The site could then use the aggregate data for both better personal recommendations and targeting unpopular projects for culling. I don't know that there is a good answer, but I do know that, given the state of things right now, my enthusiasm for the site in general is waning and, unless I'm totally alone in this, that can't be a good thing for Ideas. They could do better.

Thank you for this wonderful review. As a Lego set I'm kinda on the fence about this as I think there are better values to be had for my Lego Dollar, but I've been a fan of the show for years (and voted for this project when it was first proposed) so I'll probably pick one up just as a display piece. It's nice when two of my interests overlap so completely.