MoonCheese

How does it stand up? Can the hook on the bottom fit over a stud? It's good otherwise though. The Lego world needs children too.

How did the blue-shirted guy have THAT much blood to lose? Assuming that's what the swath of red is...

I wish I had a big ship...my parents almost never bought me big sets (only one, Fort Legoredo, although I bought Imperial Trading Post with my saved allowance when I was like 7 or 8), so I just have Renegade Runner and like 15 rowboats.

Oh yeah, I'd do that all the time, shaking the Xmas presents...usually we left most of them out (wrapped) until Xmas, so it was easy. Too bad I almost never got bigger sets though. I think I only ever got 2, and one I bought with my saved allowance (the first thing I bought with it, IIRC). Although since not everyone celebrates Xmas, substitute Yule or Chanukah or whatever the Muslims have as appropriate, and add birthdays.

Aww, I want a kitty...they're so cute and soft... I'd need a bigger apartment though, to accommodate both the cat and the Lego.

Yeah, I understand. Building is fun unless it's something you had just built and have to rebuild.

Whoa, I just learned a new word, "sprue". I had no idea that that was what those were called. I had a silver-coloured shiny sprue too, of a different shape, that I think some knives or something were originally attached to, and apparently in the 80s those "headlights" (1*1 round plates) came attached to sprues too.

I definitely want a seaside town theme. Lego did well introducing "town"-like stuff in Wild West (except that they discontinued the theme so early), and I don't see why it wouldn't work in Pirates (or Castle, for that matter). Why should only the modern era sets (City) get civilian stuff?

Nothing today, but yesterday I bought Skeleton Ship, the Knight, and Crossbow Attack (sorry if the names aren't correct). I'm having a major Castle addiction and I was browsing the Lego sections of nearby stores, trying to tell myself to hold off buying more for at least, say, a week.

At least with Lego, you can put the pieces back together. Not like with your mom's vase or whatever. One problem with this room (it's school housing) is that Lego will easily slide across the floor and under the door to the shared kitchen, where the guy next door can pick it up. I want a real apartment...

I haven't had that happen (that I remember, anyway), but usually I built Lego creations in rooms with carpets. My current room doesn't have carpeting though, so such a fate may be in my future...

Minifigs are obviously minifigs. I also count figs that are designed to be used with a minifig-based system to be minifigs. This includes SW droids and non-humans, skeletons, and so on. The 4+ Juniors and Belville/Scala stuff isn't minifigs as they are designed to fit a larger scale. I also had a few "figs" that were essentially funnily sloped blocks with heads (no arms or legs or anything), which I don't consider minifigs. I think they came from some old Lego Basic set.

I'm hoping Lego will return to the days of long-lived themes. Castle has so much potential, especially within the fantasy setting. I think after a few years they should just introduce 1 new faction a year, plus continue making new sets for older factions (only not as many as in the faction's first year) and include characters from older factions so that all the new Castle sets fall under one theme. I think one big problem with Lego in the recent past was that they dropped a very large number of themes like Pirates and Castle, which had already endured for 10-20 years, in favour of introducing a theme and dropping it after just 1 or 2 years. I'm not saying Lego should never add new themes, I'm just saying they shouldn't make so many of them short-lived. Ooh, a Castle advent calendar...I had one of the first calendars, which was things like tiny airplanes and cars, and creatures made out of bricks. Basically, it was just generic bricks, the kind I already had a bunch of (although I was able to add to my small supply of clear 2*2 slopes) with some that had eyes and whatnot printed on them (not very useful unless you're building creatures out of bricks), although I also got a couple of cool Santa minifigs. The newer themed advent calendars look a lot more interesting and useful.

Did anyone else do this? When I was obsessed with Pirate sets as a kid, I would use more than just the gold coins for treasure. I would use the thing in the centre that the coins are attached to as a gold piece, and steal headlights from vehicles and such to use as jewels. (Of course, now Lego makes actual jewels...as I was putting together my new Castle set today, I remembered this aspect of my childhood when the instructions showed the jewels going in the chest.) Around Xmas, my dad cut up some tree tinsel which I used as gold and silver chains. I would also use those yellow goblets as highly valuable golden cups, and I had an Admiral minifig who almost always held one yellow (gold) and one grey (silver) goblet. Then, for a while I referred to just about anything yellow as "gold", even in patently ridiculous situations, like calling yellow 1*1 cylinders "gold cannonballs"! What kind of things other than the coins did you use for pirate treasure?

I remember a couple of years ago when I was browsing a store and decided to check out the Lego section. I had mostly stopped using Lego about 5 years before. I was really excited when I saw that there were finally new Pirate sets (as Pirates had been my favourite theme as a child)! But when I took them home, I found out they were those 4+ Juniors things. I got the island with the giant skull and found out that the whole skull was one piece! Most of the pieces were huge and putting the set together took almost no time. Then, the pirate figures weren't even proper minifigs! They were these huge one-piece things that are pretty much useless outside 4+ because of the difference in scale. So I voted for 4+ Juniors, although now that I looked at some pictures of Galidor sets, if I had owned a Galidor set I would have voted for that. Galidor is so...non-Legolike, it's mind-boggling. How did Lego honestly expect to sell them?

Castle! I'm trying to limit myself to one theme for now so I don't spend ALL my money. Then again, if Pirates comes back, that theme-limiting idea may not work so well. I'm a fantasy nut though, so the new Castle is perfect for me.

You know, for a minute I thought that really was a Darth Vader fig...then I looked at it more closely.

But if all Canadians are obsessed with hockey, then since French Canadians are a subset of Canadians, all French Canadians would logically be obsessed with hockey. So, blueandwhite, you just proved Caffeine RIGHT. (Although I'm sure there are some Canadians who are not obsessed with hockey. I've known many Canadians who wouldn't really care about it at all.)

I am Polish, Spanish, German, and Italian and live in Germany (but was born in the USA).

I was 6 years old and had a bunch of Lego out that my dad and I were playing with. The sets were a mix of Pirates and Castle (including an off-brand set, as I recall. Shame on me!) plus a wall we had made with black and white bricks. Anyway, we started role-playing with the minifigs telling stories and we went with Pirates rather than Castle for some reason...I think because we had more Pirate figs and we had a few boats. From there, we bought a lot of Pirate sets to grow the Lego world.

That's interesting, I never knew the hieroglyphs really spelled something. Although I think the actual Egyptians had a "TH" symbol rather than using a T and an H. The practice of using the letters TH for that particular sound started in Latin to transliterate the Greek theta, then it was used in English centuries later. Old English, when written in the Futhark alphabet, had a separate rune for "th".

Hey everyone, I'm MoonCheese! I've been using Lego for as long as I can remember. Some of my favourite themes have been Pirates, Wild West, and some of the space themes, and lately I've been getting heavily into Castle sets. Thank you, Lego, for bringing Castle back! I lost interest in Lego around 2000 but started getting into them again in 2007, at which time I managed to sort most of my brick collection. I just went to Legoland in Günzburg today. I always wanted to go to Legoland, but I grew up in Michigan, USA where there are no Legolands anywhere even remotely close. I moved from metro Detroit to Ulm, Germany one month ago, and now I'm really close to a Legoland, so I couldn't resist going there. I'm still trying to learn German, my first language is English. I really like it here in Germany. Some other things about me...I'm 20 years old, I'm a writer (or like to think that I am), I love cats and kittens, I love classic videogames like The Legend of Zelda, I like swimming and riding bicycles, I'm studying computer science, and I think One Republic is the most overrated band ever. My favourite types of music are techno, trance, pop, dance, and some R&B (NOT T-Pain!!!). I like Star Wars, although I prefer the originals to the prequels. Someday, I want to use my brick collection to make some gigantic Lego scene.