MAB

Not only was there L.L.A.M.A. in Vidiyo, and the llama suit costume, and excluding the llama figures and sets in Minecraft, they also recently did a range of llamas/alpacas in different colours for Friends. Someone at LEGO thinks llamas are popular.

It is not just indicating that it is not available any more, it has now been totally removed online. I wonder if it is coming back, or gone for good now as you can buy a larger range of PAB parts anyway. They seemed to come in the same bags as PAB parts, so presumably were just a subset of parts of what is now called the standard range.

I don't think the Aquaman 2017 set sold at all well. It was possible to get huge discounts on that one. I'm not sure about the others in the range. When Batman sells and the others don't, they tend to sway towards more Batman.

I bought one each of the Chinese Witch King and Sauron figures. I'm pleasantly surprised at the quality of the helmets. There is a tiny bit of mould flare along the seams, but that can be trimmed before I paint them. They look very similar to expensive custom ones I've seen online, and much better than I can sculpt. Sauron's armour is pretty decent too. I don't use the fake figures but just use the accessories. The microfigure Sauron is quite cute too.

They look like prototypes for Minecraft heads, one even has a face!

I guess it really depends on what you want the seer to look like. You could take any of the recent viking torsos and use it with a hood and cape. Or if you want something looking a bit more fancy / clean, one of the the McGonagall outfits from Harry Potter. If you want a darker version, something like Palpatine's outfit (and even his head if you use fleshies). Or if you wanted it to be a white witch type character, then the torso from the Battle Goddess, again combined with a white hood and skirt/dress.

Yeah, I think it went over the weekend. If / when it comes back, I don't think it can get any worse than it has been for months!

I think there should be an X-wing and landspeeder, as well as a Millennium Falcon, on the shelves at all times. They are iconic ships/vehicles likely to be wanted by any new LEGO SW fans. There are plenty of other SW sets available for those that already have them.

I guess the real issue with stories about why such and such happened is that there is no paper trail of proof, just what the company now says or what people that work or worked for the company say. I can understand there being the idea that green and grey bricks could be turned into tanks or other military vehicles, but there is unlikely to be anything written down to prove it and so we have to go on what is said by people maybe years afterwards. The two big myths for me are these - one unlicensed and one licensed: Why are minifigures yellow. The company now says this decision was to avoid assigning any specific ethnicity, hence avoiding all race issues. To me, this is a retro-fitted story. I assume it was because of the colours available at the time, it was either yellow or white and they went yellow. And they had been using yellow for homemaker figures for some years before that too (aside from the very red Red Indians). Yet they managed to have realistic skin tones in Duplo quite early on in the 1980s, replacing the colour white used for a few years before that. They also did not shy away from racial stereotypes in the printing of faces on yellow heads. Why are there no Star Wars CMF / single figures sold. I have never seen anything concrete about LEGO not being allowed to produce and sell single SW minifigures. There are myths that it is down to Hasbro stopping them due to their action figures license but there is no proof of this. To me, there is little similarity between a minifigure and an action figure, no more than an action figure and a Funko pop or similar toys. LEGO did stop doing the normal minifigures in the SW magnets, instead gluing them and this is often cited as Hasbro's fault for demanding they stop producing individual minifigures as they encroach on their action figure license. But was that because of Hasbro, or was it because people were buying the magnets instead of sets that the minifigures appeared in. For me, it was the latter. LEGO benefits from this as fans assume that the Hasbro license stops LEGO from producing single minifigures, when the alternative could be that LEGO doesn't want to do SW CMFs (or even battle packs containing characters such as Luke, Han, Leia, Chewie, or Vader, Emperor and 2x stormtroopers) because it would stop people buying the large sets that those characters appear in.

I find neat washing up liquid left for a couple of hours usually helps to shift residue, followed by a wash.

Why does he need a sorted collection? A sorted collection is great for someone (like an AFOL) that has a large collection and knows what they want to build, plans in advance and knows what parts they have in their storage and what parts they are likely to use for a particular function and also is willing to replace the parts in the correct places once they are done. Whereas a kid should be allowed to play, free from the constraints of a well sorted collection. Maybe sort into regular bricks, plates and tiles, modified bricks, wheels, car parts, minifigures, or whatever based on what the kid has / regularly builds but don't worry about colour. Such simple sorting is easy enough to let a kid return parts when they are done and they can have fun building and explore parts, rather than having to have an encyclopedic knowledge of what bricks are available and sticking to a cataloguing structure. As to the colour issue, either be happy with using lots of shades of the base colour, go full-on BOLOCS (built of lots of colours) or buy bricks in one colour only on bricklink, like the old architecture kits. Many kids really don't care about having all the same colour, but if they do then instead of a set, buy them bulk bricks in a single colour (just make sure they like that colour).

I'd go for other colours. But the good thing about black is that dye works well, you cannot fail to colour match if you leave too long. There are threads on using RIT dye here. Once dyed, it does scratch like paint.

The Queen's torso is unlicensed and has been / is for sale at the online PAB.

I thought that was excellent parts usage, to make a victorian style bow window with many small panes. Like this ...

Animal Crossing also has one torso that might be of use to some people. Although probably expensive unless it slips through on PAB.

Yes, I've had cheese slopes of many colours crack. Only 1x1s though. Never a 2x1.

It depends if they are wired in series or parallel. These cheap ones are often wired as a combination of both, so that the voltage is about equal to the forward voltage of the whole thing so they can avoid adding even a very cheap resistor. So if you cut it, you need some extra resistance. For red ones (that have low voltage, there are often two LEDs in series as this gives a forward voltage of about 5V, then lots of these pairs in parallel. However, white LEDs are typically about 4-5V anyway, so you might get away with cutting them without using a resistor. They are cheap enough, just try it. The worst that can happen is you blow the LEDs. Heat from LEDs every 10 cm apart is minimal. Personally, I find they look a little better if you cover the LED with a bit of diffuser - either a posh one cut from an old phone or laptop screen or just a bit of scratched up clear or translucent plastic or even a blob of hot glue. That helps to spread the light a little.

Given the part count and the number of minifigures included, this is likely to be at the upper end of the price range like the ruined house of the last round. I hope they bracket it to have a few more smaller sets this time around. When it first opened, only 2 or the 9 had less than 1000 parts, and the other 7 were all 2000+ parts (four of them above 3000 parts).

Narsil is just one (well, two) bits on a weapons sprue they were creating anyway. It was probably just as easy to do that than design an extra sticker. Which figure is this? I have never been able to find a cheap Witch King.

Is it? I haven't had any LBG parts crack and I haven't seen widespread reports of it. Unlike the 2010-2015 reddish brown issue.

Sauron does have long legs though, he is about nine foot tall in the movies. So longer legs would work and would look even better is paired with an extended torso, but that would need to go between legs and torso unlike the Garmadon ones that go on top. But even without extending the torso, longer legs would be fine to give him some height above the men/elves.

I bought some of the plain heads earlier. They were easy to work out without pictures, plain are cheaper than printed and you get the colour info by clicking them.

There are instructions for a CNC style plotter for mindstorms (the 51515 kit) available on their app. It is sort of impressive what you can do with LEGO, but actually not a very good plotter at all. There is a lot of kickback, meaning the lines are not particularly accurate. I guess really the question is do you want to build it for fun / for a project, or do you want to build it to use it more seriously. For a project, they are great. For professional output, not.

Interesting projects! I also learnt to program for the first time on a speccy. And I remember the old sinclair printer. I only had a small bedroom and the metallic smell generated after printing for more than about a minute used to hang around all evening.

I'm still waiting for the tin foil hat storage facility modular. Half of it could be a LEGO designer's office where it is just someone with a 2x2 tile depicting a computer open on the IDEAS webpage with the upper rooms being full of cash. The other half could include lots of small rooms, each with someone sitting at a computer again with a 2x2 tile depicting an internet chat room and the occupant would be wearing a chromed hat. The upper section could be full of more chromed hats. These sets are nothing like each other, other than the subject is a submarine. If being the same subject is a barrier to making a similar subject again then in the 1970s, I built a car, a train, a truck, a house, a shop, a train station, a rocket, a space ship, ...