Faefrost

FanDom and social media isn't a problem with CuuSoo. It's a core element of the platform. CuuSoo is meant to be a crowd sourcing based undertaking. It's bundled into it's very DNA. Cross promoting via other forms of social media is part and parcel. As is leveraging other social media comunities in support of your ideas.

Some neat ships with different shaping and nice greebling. Although I think I kinda like the old nose better, but that may just be me. I see the cool effect you are going for with the new one, but it still kinda makes me think of a space fighting trombone.

Dude, I hate to be critical, but you seem to be spending the past two days spread across several message boards tearing apart some Internet girl that you claim to have only just discovered. You complain about the rage of Her 12 yo fan boys but are doing exactly the same thing? This entire thing is between her and CuuSoo. It has nothing to do with us. It certainly has nothing to do with whether or not she chose to use Cosplay in a Star Wars review video. What? She's an evil woman seducing all of these naive Lego fans with her feminine wiles? Give me a break already. She may or may not have her own personal issues. But honestly that's none of our concern. If you look around here you will find that most AFOL's are at best mildly unbalanced, and more often crazier than a bag of cats. (Except me. I'm perfectly sane and have the papers to prove it). What is our concern is how we treat our female fellow fans. I would certainly like to hope that at a minimum we treat them better than the video game community does. Although looking at your post I fear I am way too optimistic.

$50,000 to $80,000 is the bare minimum cost for a mold. That would be the cost for a less precision required item, such as a minifig hand held accessory or softer custom hair piece. Things that only have a single point of connection. These types of molds are not as precise and they aren't expected to produce high volume over a longer time. A new mold for an actual construction element starts around $300,000 and goes upwards from there. Much more precision is required, and the molds are designed for higher production volume. Higher pressure higher temperature plastics, and to last many more years than the specialized part molds. There is not that much cost difference in changing the color of a piece. Their machines these days inject the color into he neutral plastic just before molding. So within limits any color change is really just a matter if factory changeover and runtime costs (which can be hard to come by. Factories are kept tightly scheduled.) the main exceptions are when dealing with certain specialized colors such as metallics and chromes or different plastic types, such as trans clear polycarbonates. I could swear that when they cleaned up their all over the place color spectrum, and retired a bunch of colors a few years back they put in place some sort of limitation on new colors. Something to prevent the pallet from getting out of control again?

I mostly agree. The Batman sets were dead on arrival. (Seriously guys ANY Batman set is DOA.) The first JP set had some hope as it was a good and reasonable size and layout for the key scene in the movie. Her builds aren't the absolute best, but they were presented well enough and she had a good community mechanism to get her project known and supported. Which is the bulk of the battle on CuuSoo. It isn't who can make the best MOC. It's who can drive the most positive eyeballs to look at your project.

For Canada it isn't hat they are importing from Europe. It is that they are importing at all. Canada drops an 18% duty on import products that directly compete with domestic products.... And Megabloks is made in Montreal, is it not? The difference between US and Canadian pricing is largely attributable to that. With a few other minor factors. Yes because of population, customer base, etc Canada is consider a secondary market. But technically so is Nebraska. The only difference is Lego's North American branch is allowed to view Nebraska, Texas, New York and California all as one market, thus buffering Nebraskas secondary sales status. But they cannot do that across international and currency borders. The price of Lego in Canada must reflect the costs of delivering goods to Canada and not be subsidized by foreign markets. Otherwise Megabloks has a trade complaint.

OK the Monkey just joined my "must buy" list

Awww! That was a spectacular MOC. It really reminded me of the main station I used to work at. (As EMS it also made me only mildly jealous of the UK approach to that branch of the service. I mean Dr's cars? Actually garaging the Ambulances? What novel ideas? In my world the Ambulances normally had to park out back next to the dumpster.)

Some interesting and hopeful news today, albeit of a technical sort. SW VII's Director of Photography will be regular JJ Abrams collaborator Dan Mindel. No problems there. But here's the good news. It will be shot on 35mm film. NOT digital. Yep FILM!!!! Joyous! Glorious! Film! Real colors! No native 3d! It's better and easier to use practical effects and models with film than to just do everything CGI! My hopes for this one just went up a great deal. (Granted Phantom Menace was also shot on 35 mm. But at least it looked like a movie. RotS looked like a cutscene.)

That might stop them from making a City theme "real world" type Nuclear Power plant. (Although even with that I am not sure that Fukushima would interfere anymore than the BP gulf spill stopped them from releasing an Octan truck this year.) but in a satiric theme appropriate way, I can't see them avoiding it. Isn't one of the rumored sets Homers Nuclear Plant Console? The real reason we will not see such a set is one of scale. While Lego are masters of selectively compressing the scale of things, Nuclear cooling towers just don't compress well at all. No matter how you try. One of the Model Railroad model makers had a Nuclear Plant set in HO and N scale. And no matter how hard they tried, the cooling towers just could not be made big enough to fool the eyes. To even begin you would need a model as tall as Orthanc sitting on a 48 by 48 baseplate. And it would still look not right. (Plus lets be honest? Have you ever seen an actual cooling tower? There is literally nothing inside. Zip! Nada! All they are are the round walls that you see from the outside. Nothing goes in, nothing comes out except air and the occasional pigeon.)

YouTube comments are the teaming rancid cesspit of the Internet. They make 4chan seem sane and well balanced. As a general rule I have learned to not hold the YouTube video makers to task for anything the teeming masses might say in the comment section. Either in support or outrage over them. Yeah Brickqueen may have a streak of Internet drama queen in her. But there sure are worse ways to feed that beast than by posting Lego set reviews. As far as being blocked? Ummm did she know who you were from any prior exchanges? Because if not than I kinda doubt that she went and pre-emptively blocked you. There is either some sort of blanket blocking going on to cut down n the nastiness, or perhaps she did not want to debate or argue her guilt with yet another poster. If you were the one in the middle of all of this, would you want to be dealing with your "post if reason"? I don't know the truth of any figure design claims. But I think I only ever saw the one accuser. One thread here. In which the accuser seemed to descend into such a spiral of nastiness, absurdity and over the top trolling when directly questioned on some of his claims that it greatly undermined his claims and I think cost me several IQ points. mearly playing Devil's Advocate here. Are there any other claims of this outside on the one Dragonball one?

I think the wheel bike set is my biggest disappointment. The build of the bike looks interesting. But it really did need Obi WANs ride as well to be a cohesive scene or play set.

True. But the product doesn't just how up. The store staff does have to know what is coming so they can order in quantities appropriate to their individual store and plan for shelf layout.

If it's declined it won't be directly because of messaging. It would rather be because it is viewed as conflicting with current product lines such as the CMF's or Friends sets. And more likely it will simply get steamrolled by the pop culture projects that it will be reviewed alongside. I know I am not saying this well. And this is just my gut feeling on this. But when it hits review one of the key things that happens to any project is that the Lego designers look at it and distill it down to "what is the product"? In this case the product dances around being the message, more than it does being the project. I'm just not sure that TLG will see it as the best way to go to box up a message like that? Even a good message.

I don't think we will ever see a big inclusive Rivendell set for one simple reason. In the movies it is pretty much a matte painting. It wasn't a full scale set like Hobbiton or Dale. It was a 2d image viewed from distance. There is no reference model for it from other angles. I think the best we can hope for is the individual sets and scenes.

Actually the decisions on this wave were probably still mostly done within Lucasfilms before anybody knew Disney was taking over. Now the Wave after this is probably 100% Disney influence. So expect a Darth Goofy minifig.

Most clear paints will not actually bond to regular ABS bricks. (Trans clear polycarbonate pieces are another matter and clear acrylic can be used to rehab them). The paint will make the bricks feel weird and just rub off. The yellowing is ultimately caused by the flame retardant added to the plastic. The peroxide oxyclean trick will help, but really it is in the plastic itself, and will probably return.

I am sure that I will never be able to give a good or clear written explanation for my concerns on this one. It comes down to this. Pretty much every other CuuSoo project is really focused on simply producing a product or subject that the various specialized fan bases want. Yeah, some of them have some subtle underlying messaging (ie Science! Good!). Whereas this one, while extremely positive has an undertone of non product purpose. Of sending a message to the manufacturer. It's dancing on the line between "fan base" and "political or social special interest". Even in an extremely positive light, is it in TLG's interests to see CuuSoo used as an instrument of social protest or to allow the door to grievance politics to even slightly open on the platform? I don't want the project to fail. By best possible outcome I refer more to looking at it from TLG's point of view as an international business. Because of the underlying social nature of the project (not to mention the fact that, yes, it really is aimed directly at the company themselves, even if it was not intended. Google, Anita Sarkeesian, Lego, to see an example of why this is a conversation they would probably prefer not to have pounding on their doors.) it would probably be in their best interests to simply let the project itself get buried in the review process. (Competing Lego product, Friends Polybags and CMF, and oh look, Ghostbusters!) while taking away the core lesson of the project and starting to include more female roles themes and role models in regular system sets. This way thy don't start getting inundated with cause based projects.

Ok I'm impressed. You have managed to upset the CuuSoo community? The comments sections over there tend to be notoriously softball at best. GlenBricker suggested you make appropriate use of tags so your project can be found. He truly is the expert in this area and I would take it as worthwhile advise rather than criticism. I would not worry about the origin of the minifig opinions. Other than to note that it is a sub build that found some controversy. The comments section is in fact for comments and feedback. Read it, and use it to get a feel for what does and does not work in your project as it heads towards 10k. What you put up on the first day is not what the final project will be. CuuSoo is not a MOC site. Unless your goal is to put forth some artistic vision of evolution in Lego form, than there is a good chance that the problem issue in your project is not something that is core or critical. Don't be afraid to rethink it. You are developing and proposing a project. Not trying to get the general public to validate the artistic and creative vision of your MOC. As far as the "copying someone else's project" subject. Honestly? A certain well known member of the Lego community happened to post two projects last week that rapidly garnered support. Enough that both are sitting on the sidebar for most supported in the past week. Yesterday you post a LDD project that lines up almost perfectly element for element with those two projects. Now you may simply be seeking to express your artistic vision, and came up with this design months or even weeks ago. But I gotta tell you, visual similarities to what has become a pair of very popular projects is striking. Enough so that even members of CuuSoo, who are quite used to "jump on the bandwagon" type projects, actually commented. Now as I said there may be nothing to this, but honestly the first impression that one is left with is one of staggering lack of originality. The feeling of "what she proposed but better'er". It's allowed under CuuSoo (note the number of look alike Batman Tumblers) but it is considered to be somewhat tacky by a good chunk of the community that would care to vote. Once again CuuSoo is not a MOC site. It is not who can build a better Lego model. It is who can build a better presentation and audience for their ideas. Intentional or not your JP project gives the impression of trying to poach someone else's presentation for its own vote benefit.

rather than make a full custom baseplate, why not make some varied basic crater pieces that may be positioned on a base plate however you see fit?

I wouldn't bother putting any Rohirim in a Gondor set. We get enough assorted Rohirrim characters from existing sets to stage the battle should we choose. Just an armored Faramir some Gondor soldiers, a horse, Pippin in Gondor garb. Gandalf the White, Denethor, Gothmog with a few orcs and a troll would get the scene across nicely. It could then be enhanced with a smaller Eowyn vs the Witch King set with Eowyn, Rohan garb Merry, Theoden and the Witch King and mount.

Yeah but Purdue Pete is easy to explain given the close nature and tight interest of a University. I'm actually surprised that we have not seen a rush of similar projects.

Yes. It looks to be a very crowded review. We'll probably hear the results sometime after the next US Presidential election. PS, someone please explain the Atlas project getting 10k in 2 weeks to me? I mean I know what it is, and yeah, woohoo! Science! But still... It Looks Like A Beer Can???

I'm thinking that getting a half dozen or so DS battle packs will allow for some stunning Imoerial MOCs just from the colors of the figs. Just think of the nice prosessional scene with a dozen red guards. And some of those nice black gunners manning the assorted consoles in the Imperial fleet? Short of getting a new full pack of classic OT stormies, these have lots of OT possibilities.

The store clerk just told e today that October would have a double points deal. So I assume that's what Herky meant.