GregoryBrick

He's a seasoned veteran of monster-hunting; it's a crease on his neck. Just a detail, nothing more or less.

The heads look like I imagined they would and I have no problem with them. I figure the heads have to be proportional not just to the bodies but to the other heads in the series as well. In other words, even if a head for Homer could have been made smaller, it still has to be bigger than the head for Maggie, for example. So line up all the figure head molds you have to make, and it probably becomes apparent why some heads are the size they are. Then you have to consider the ability to print specific details, and making the heads structurally sound, along with every other practical issue. On top of that, it's quite possible the market doesn't care or prefers this size head to what many EB users would prefer. To be frank, I think the 'normal' minifigure head versions of the Simpsons family look rather poor, and that's even when they appear in a flattering sketch. Homer looks downright bizarre. I would not be surprised if the Simpsons owners require that the heads be a particular style which is accurate to the characters - even if previous licensed Simpsons products did not follow such a rule.

Thanks to everyone for the replies. No, LiamM32, I don't have any CUUSOO projects at the moment - but this is one place where I see the two styles of building, or at least a difference between AFOL MOCs and official sets. I much prefer the official BTTF DeLorean to the proposal model, and this includes the hood. Hopefully I will have some time to make a CUUSOO proposal of my own soon. I don't judge MOCs strongly on illegal connections (or any of the other criteria I listed), but when I do see such an approach it makes me wonder, did the builder have to do it that way, or does it mean that they missed an alternative solution? Some of my favourite builds are set alternates, as the constraints are fairly obvious and one has to be quite creative to stretch the limits of what you can do with one set.

I like creating things out of LEGO bricks which look like they could have been official sets. Most, if not all, MOCs I see do not do this. A recent exception on this forum is in the Sci-Fi forum where user Nuju Metru built an entire theme. Is there a term for this, or a group of builders who build in this style? Here's some clarification about what I mean: Official LEGO sets feature: an economy of parts, both in the number of elements used to create something and the variety of elements in a set. stability. They don't fall over or fall apart in the hands. visible studs. 'legal' connections only. Most MOCs from AFOLs I see feature or value the opposite: whatever parts the user sees fit, whether each element is only used once or a large proportion of the elements are all the same brick (e.g. 500 pieces of foilage). The same goes for colour - either a huge swath of colours or almost all bricks are the same. very dense construction. lots of greebles. no visible studs if at all possible. illegal connections, minifigure hands separate from bodies, bricks just laid in place or with fiddly construction methods. There's nothing wrong with either approach, but I prefer the challenge and aesthetics of the former. Is there anybody building in this manner?

This is a really great project. I too try to build sets which are playable and reasonably-sized. I think if you wanted to make it even more like an actual theme, you'd have to reduce your element count - not the number of bricks, but the number of different bricks in each set. There would also be a lot of elements appearing across sets - Monster Fighters really showcased this, IMO. Because of the detail, I can't tell if you've done that either. Again, well done. (You've also prompted me to start a thead I've been meaning to do in the general forum.)

Not too exciting? I am really looking forward to seeing this set; even more so now. Maybe you didn't use enough exclamation marks. A brickbuilt eagle! A quad! A cabin built on the side of a mountain! Thanks for the confirmation/description of the set.

9. Oscar Meyer Wiener by Wachutu Chief (1 vote) 23. Pisten Bully by dr_spock (1 vote) 56. TMNT Party Wagon by midi (1 vote) 60. Pencil Sharpener by Orsenway (1 vote) 69. VW Eaglevan vecchiasignoraceppo (1 vote) 101. TMNT Party Van by Oky (1 vote) 105. Mystery Machine by sparkart (2 votes) 119. ADU Headquarters by Oky (1 vote)

Well, yes, that is correct - and I also meant it relative to other Architecture sets, rather than LEGO sets in general.

I am not sure which element would work better at this scale. I don't know what the 'straight up pole pieces' are; could someone link to them? If they went with screwdriver pieces (which would be at least as hard to line up and keep vertical) there would be 19 tool wheels in the box, since the screwdriver isn't molded by itself. Thanks for the review; this looks like a very nice set without much repetition.

You would never see a green ninja on a sword-bicycle nor an octopus cyborg in an actual city either. There are plenty of graded curbs, ramped sections of asphalt, and curved structures in most cities - otherwise skateboarding as we know it wouldn't exist. It's a simple and fun play feature which locates the set in an urban environment for about 10 bricks. I think it's fine and certainly not evidence that it's not the final version.

I'm not sure if you're agreeing with me or not, as your bolded statements don't contradict what I posted. If TLG can allocate resources towards making Product A OR product B, they will go with whichever product has a better (predicted) ROI, all else being equal. Suppose it's Product A. The relative size of the risk for Product B becomes irrelevant, no matter how small that risk is. And this sort of calculation happens all the time - while TLG is very large, their resources are not infinite, and they will allocate their resources for maximum benefit. Again, the argument that TLG wouldn't lose much money on Japanese Old-Style Architecture if it failed sounds compelling only if you assume TLG has no alternative product (internally, CUUSOO, or otherwise) where they could invest those resources.

I don't follow. Suppose it's true that a Maersk container ship will be part of this Creator wave. Why would you then assume that it will be to minifigure scale? Why wouldn't you assume that it would be just like the Sydney Opera House, or any other Creator set which isn't to minifigure scale, or any other Maersk ship?

TLG is going to avoid risk as much as possible. The argument that they can handle a product tanking isn't a very compelling reason to produce said product. They'll just go with something more likely to succeed. Also, is there any precedent for unpackaging unsold sets and using the parts in other sets? I can't imagine this would ever be worth it. They would just sell at a loss or destroy the product instead.

Hi LukefromNJ. Thank you for your review! I had been eying this set in stores as it looks fun. However, it doesn't seem a great bargain to me - most of the other $20 US City sets have far more bricks. 140 elements for the Stunt Plane, around 200 or more for the 'Great Vehicles'. I still like the look of this set though.

Brickset reasonably said it was an 'alleged' and 'possible' set list, and was 'plausible'. Their source was another LEGO blog which cited a Reddit user whose profile is now deleted. That Reddit user claimed the info came from his friend in the UK who worked at a toy store. I still haven't seen any other source confirming this list. If memory serves, another source described the sets (Bart's Skate Trick), and that set was also a Reddit user who got an e-mail from a friend at a toy store. Given how thin these sources are, I am amazed at how people have convinced themselves of set details, somehow logically deducing how many walls the house set will have, what the figure accessories will be, etc. I am further convinced that it will be a minifigure line alone.

I own the Monster Fighters set The Werewolf (9463). Bricklink inventory and the instructions say it comes with element 7678 which is the large brown half-arch. However, my set came with older element 2339, which can't accept a stud underneath the end of the branch. It appears both elements are in sets as of 2013. Is this element variation a normal occurrence? I know that there a several threads on identifying parts, new elements - if this is better suited to an existing thread, please let me know.

Thanks for the info. I like the sound of the smaller trucks (like the lamp repair), and especially this: A LEGO 911 (even in shape only) is something to look forward to.

Set 377 had stickers on 2x1 bricks (well, 2x1 with hinge), about that proportion.

Well, without understanding what you mean 'feminism/feminist' to mean, then no, we probably can't communicate. So what is the only thing all women have in common which no men do, and how do we know this determines toy preference? Even things like karyotype are not exclusive to and universal to women (unless you think women with androgen insensitivity syndrome are obliged to identify as 'men' or something). I apologize if this appears off-topic, but if someone wants to assert that toy preference follows from essential and universal sex/gender traits which LEGO can and should use in their product development, I'd like to know what those traits are - I don't know of any. EDIT: Yes, of course men and women are different because of their gender, that is circular and self-evidently true. However, gender is mutable and not in a direct relationship to biology (which itself is not a binary system for all human beings). These complicated facts do not compel me to conclude anything about how LEGO should design and market toys.

I haven't read many (if any) posts where LEGO is 'against females and pro-macho-man'. There are much stronger and more sophisticated arguments about Friends and gender and I think it is better therefore to focus on them. If you think 'anti-female and pro-macho-man' is the central issue here, could you explain some more? I have no idea how this is 'very feminist'. Could you explain how? I understand feminism to be a form of thought and practice which sees gender as something which fundamentally structures people's lives and which historically (and presently) largely marginalizes women, though not universally so. Feminism aims at understanding the deep implications of gender with a goal on reforming the unjust divisions it entails. I think the conversation would be better served by either addressing other people's specific points or specific feminists' points (linked, quoted, whatever). Referring vaguely to 'some feminists' doesn't really get the conversation anywhere. Re: "Equal, not identical', I think this also applies to the wrong idea that all women have something in common which no men do, where this trait is somehow relevant to Friends and its implications. EDIT: Also, the idea of 'equal, not identical' sounds awfully like 'separate but equal', with the same implications. I don't see the use of it except to justify assumptions about men and women.

I'm still not convinced there will be any sets at all, and I bet it will be a figure series - every news report I've read mentions 'characters' and 'figures' but never 'set' or anything similar, or even 'theme'. Does someone have a link to a news release or other source that specifically says there will be sets?

Hi. It seems you're operating on the assumption that the better projects don't succeed on CUUSOO - how did you figure this out? Is there some independent metric of 'better' which we can use to evaluate how well or how poorly CUUSOO identifies the better projects? If not, then it just means the projects you like don't get the recognition you would like them to have. I don't see why self-identified LEGO fans warrant a greater voice than others, for the purposes of CUUSOO. If there are people interested in a set, there are people interested in it, period. Also, CUUSOO isn't zero-sum. If you reduce the ability of particular fanbases to participate, then CUUSOO won't be as popular, and that's all. Marginal non-licensed sets will still sit in obscurity. It's not like Purdue Pete supporters would allocate their approval to another proposal, because firstly, they can already do this if they want, and secondly, if Purdue Pete wasn't an option, they just wouldn't visit CUUSOO to begin with. I don't see any benefit to increasing the participation costs (e.g. questions about identifying elements, having to log in multiple times, having different evaluation options for different users, having to understand how 'repeat' support works). I think this would drive traffic away from CUUSOO, or would cater to highly dedicated users which wouldn't reflect what sets meet the business case. The negative/positive/neutral rating system is particularly problematic - why would TLG care about people who don't like or are disinterested in a product, if there are enough people interested to make it profitable? Also a problem is setting different criteria for how many supporters a project requires for review. How do you know that they didn't set the bar low, with 10k supporters the minimum for any project to receive initial consideration?

I don't know how much anecdotes will change your position, but would you believe me if my response is and would be 'Huh. Look at that, I guess I won't be able to get that set/figure/whatever. Oh well'? Because that's entirely my attitude. EDIT: Why does the use of 'unique and fairly popular characters for these exclusives . . . eliminat[e] any chance that they will be made in regular production mechanisms'? Apologies if it was already explained in the thread and I missed it.

As was already posted in this thread, the association of pink with girls and blue with boys is a very recent phenomenon, from the 20th century, and was arbitrary - there are plenty of sources from the early 20th century which recommended pink for boys (see Jo B. Paletti, Pink and Blue: Telling the Boys from the Girls in America). The anthropological record shows that all societies are structured around gender, but are so with massive variation in the roles and meanings associated with gender. Claims that a man's role is invariably and biologically 'to protect women' fails to explain: anthropological variation, men who don't protect women, same-sex couples, women who protect men, how 'protect' is defined, and more. To say that these examples are deviations from essential roles is to beg the question. As I said earlier in the thread, studies on neurological difference between the sexes are aggregate measures and cannot be applied universally to every member of the category. The distribution curves for all kinds of traits overlap substantially, so there are millions of women stronger, taller, etc. than millions of men. The fact that men dominate one tail of these distribution curves (e.g. Olympic-level 100m records) is statistically insignificant when it comes to understanding how those traits are distributed amongst the rest of the population, and Olympic sprinters and first-world childhood LEGO fans are both populations already complicated with all kinds of selection effects. This is not a claim made in ignorance of the neurological research; it's fundamental to interpreting this research correctly. Gendered sport segregation has occurred for all kinds of reasons, depending on the sport, and it includes the historical disenfranchisement of women as well as popular sports being ones where men tend to outperform women, not to mention an emphasis on professional sport. See also my comment about distributions above. I don't know how one can look at courtship practices for people who have spent 20 years being socialized ('putting one's head on another's shoulder') and confidently assert that social factors have nothing to do with this, especially when such practices (like pink for girls) are historically- and culturally- specific. Hmong and Inuit and Masai and !Kung and Rhode Islanders do not express physical intimacy between genders the same way and it has changed over time. Finally, toys are inherently political. They teach children about what in the world is salient and what is not, what roles are possible and preferable, how to interact with others, and more. To bring it back to topic, then, LEGO is operating under preference constraints: their market is divided roughly among gender lines. However, these rough lines are mutable and permeable, and LEGO (and their audience) are right to consider how their decisions reinforce or alter ideas about gender. They should not commit the naturalistic fallacy ('girls are like this, therefore it is just') especially when the evidence that these toy preferences stem directly from universal neural differences distinguishing every man (or even most men) from every woman is so thin. EDIT: It turns out I was posting at the same time as Aanchir; we state a number of points in common and I did not want him to think I was ignoring his contribution or just repeating it.

Thanks for the review - I always like to see the Creator robot sets. It looks like a good combination of functional specialized parts (like the ball-joints) and more basic parts with wider application.