MAB

The problem is LEGO says we (in general as customers) do need them. So variety is better than no variety.

^ variety comes from different types of police each year, rather than just regular police every year. If we're getting police every year, then variety is better than no variety.

I'd make it so that it can be taken apart. Especially if you will need to transport it by trolley / handcart once you are there. Tall things topple over!

Same here for a UK order. I guess they are fast as no-one else can order!

It does look like that whip. You could always ask the creator of it - he is a member here @vitreolum. He is very well known for some amazing parts use but I think in this case it is the simple whip.

^ Yeah, I'd be on board with that. Especially if s/he changed clothes / skins / whatever (different torso parts) from year to year or era to era. And you are right about the humans in MF, they had some backstory but I ignored that (I also treated them as the villians). Although the humans in Atlantis and PQ were just boring, especially Atlantis!

Well it is quite bizarre that I have seen so many not attached. We must have a serial glove puller in the UK. Unless of course staff in some stores are putting them together, then customers are pulling the gloves off.

Although I prefer fleshies, I'm glad Shakespeare and Lincoln were yellow, and I'd hope that all CMFs in non-licensed sets were yellow, just to tie in with the past ones such as the Pharaoh, Egyptian Queen, Spartan, Romans, etc. However, if they can arrange that the torsos do not have yellow skin printed on them where possible, then all the better for reuse. It is easy enough to stick a fleshie head and hands on Shakespeare (and the similar actor) to convert him.

^ Sure, I would mind if they were badged in that way, or just completely separate themes. I guess one advantage of separate themes is that there would not be a recurrent character(s) appearing in all of them, whereas if LEGO did a longer running theme, chances are the same characters would pop up again and again. That said, often the human characters are less interesting than the "monsters" (as in MF, Atlantis, PQ).

Not hands or arms, but the baseball gloves. I've seen them in London Stratford, Westfield, Leicester Sq and in Leeds and Sheffield. All had loose gloves. The only one I saw where the glove was attached was a completed minifigure that someone had built and left.

Photography was expensive and often photos were for corporate use. So those were the days that if you were going to have a photo taken, you cleared up first. I have some more candid photos of me and my brother taken in the 1970s, where we are standing inside the mainframe at my dad's work when it was down for maintenance. Those things were huge.

Imagine if kids had bought those sets, built the buses and stuck the stickers on them and played with them in their garden. Happiness for them at the time, sad collectors later.

Yeah, Monster Fighters was great for the monsters, although I didn't like the heroes as much but the sets were fun. Same with PQ. I also have a similar feeling for Atlantis. I still love the fish but not the divers, but again the sets were great. And once done with them, they gave a fair amount of parts for historical buildings (especially in City of Atlantis) and also space (the underwater ships and base). I guess each could have carried on a little longer, but I'm glad they don't continue too long. Would I prefer PQ+MF+Atlantis, or just one theme running all that time? I'd go for the mixture.

No. That only matters if the person that will go on and sell the design believes you will do anything about it. I also doubt you would get that to stand up in a court. After all, removing some words about the instructions, you are saying "Any unauthorised modification of this model is strictly prohibited." That is implying that a buyer can only build the model exactly as you specific and does not have your permission to modify it, even for their own use. You do really need to split the instructions from the design. Of course. If someone can build a model with real bricks (which is the intention of the instructions) then they can build it in LDD or similar software and hence create their own instructions for it.

Even if you do copyright instructions, someone can always remake the instructions themselves. If they build someone else's MOC in LDD they can generate them again without copyright warnings. This has happened in the past. Proving something is your work is tough, especially if they change the design even slightly. Worse still if it a third party IP that you are making a design for.

Dublin is about half a million population. Not so different to cities like Leeds, Sheffield, Liverpool in the UK that have LEGO stores. And twice as big as Newcastle and Southampton (getting a new store). But worse than the city being mid-sized only, the surrounding areas (say within one hour by car) does not add much to the population. Whereas the population density is high enough to sustain stores in Liverpool, despite being close to another one in Manchester; similarly Leeds and Sheffield. And the five within / near London.

They do sell. But LEGO does them for a while then moves on to another story. It would be boring if their "story" theme was Nexo Knights forever, or Chima for ever, or Monster Fighters, or Atlantis, or Agents, or any of those type themes. They let their in-house theme run for a year or sometimes up to three years, then move on to the next before it gets too boring. I hope we see a return to the one year themes like around 2010-2015. We had so much variation back then and if you didn't like a theme it didn't matter as another would be along the next year.

While I am sure there are people that sell LEGO with no interest in it, there are plenty of people that sell LEGO that have an interest in it. I often buy three of a set (usually in 3 for 2 type sales) and will look to sell two of them at 50% markup so that I effectively get my one free. But I don't really see myself as any different to the guy that buys 3 (or 300) and sells all of them as he has no interest in LEGO. Of course, I could feel I am superior in that my profit is being sunk back into LEGO, but the other guy is presumably sinking his profits into something he enjoys (or food or housing). In that sense, we are no different - we are both buying a product to sell to someone else at a later date at a higher price. If I had just taken the last 20 sets off a shelf when the stock was being cleared at a deep discount and a kid was crying as he doesn't have it would I let him have one to buy? Probably, but just one. Would I leave one or more on the shelf in case that kid comes along after me? No. Although I typically buy clearance items online and collect them so it is rarely a problem.

Plus you know for sure if something is stable if you build it using real bricks / parts. Although for a competition where the model doesn't need to be built out of real bricks, that may not be an issue.

Sunlight doesn't dry, airflow does. Heat of course is good, so long as it is not humid. Drying time varies so much due to local conditions. Warm and dry with airflow in the shade is ideal.

I pretty much agree with all of the above. I wouldn't mind so much if they fixed the colours of some part ranges - so windows for example, you could have only white (for plastic PVC style frames) or reddish brown (for wooden frames), but you get all styles in those colours. But of course then they have a red train that needs this style in red, and a spaceship that needs another in grey and something else that needs blue ones and something needs green in another style and so on.

I doubt they would do a minidoll version of CMF as it would compete with the "normal" CMF. It would also be seen by many as the series of CMFs for girls, as minidolls are for Friends and the girly Disney type sets, not for boys. I imagine there would also be complaints about why have they done such and such as a minidoll but not as a minifigure. Plus the other thing is cost. I think minidolls cost more to produce. They are always consistently more expensive than minifigure parts if bought through B+P, and the Friends advent calendars (when they had minidolls) never includes as many figures as in the City and SW ones.

Very true. I guess they don't envisage people using these parts outside of LEGO's own sets. They don't seem to have a complete palette of existing similar parts in some colours. If grates me no end that, for example, they produce regular slopes for roofs in one colour and convex corner roof slopes in another colour and concave in yet another, but don't have uniformity in colours between these similar parts. For example in dark red the 2x2 convex corner was out 2004-2014, and the concave corner was 2010 then 2015-16. But with some of the newer colours such as dark orange, purples, lavender, azure, even good old green, all three don't exist. They'd probably do the same with windows. You can have this size in this colour, and that size in that colour, but not all sizes in the same colour. I think you are right that they produce something for a set or group of sets without caring too much if there is uniformity or consistency between matching with other parts in other sets.

I read a rumour that the designer of the tea garden was a LEGO employee and so was not eligible to enter.

Brilliant. But quite tidy compared to reality!