MetroiD

Seriously!?... Let me break that down for you. 1. Start of the day; you keep repeating the same thing over and over again, and a few hours later you're telling us to dismiss it because it was just pointless drivel. All of us were talking nonsense, remember - but we weren't trying to follow some innocent vanilla-tinted pattern, like you seemed to. 2. You've defended Charles, even though you're trying to convince us you weren't, and in your next appearance you voted against him straight away due to the "lack of better evidence" and since you weren't going to vote for yourself. You say you know better than to defend people on Day One, but you should also known that you could / should at least have used a valid reason for voting, unlike the one presented above. 3. You've contacted multiple people on this ship, myself included, with basically the same desperate plea of "please please don't vote me off", with added "I'm not a member of the Royal family, but I'm also not an assassin either". Wow, great, so useful. Not a scumtell at all, especially on Day One. You obviously feel you have to do some speaking for yourself - well do it out in the open where you could convince other people and help each and every one of us see where our allegiances lie based on our reactions. 4. You've kept repeating you'd like to "center around Charles", yet have given us no reason whatsoever for that. Very convient, especially considering the presence of people who seem to want to "even out" the scales, or pass up on voting - as already discussed above. Also - very anti-Town. 5. You haven't cooked us anything all day!!! Is that good enough of a "case"?

Disagree. We still have the "luxury" of casting doubts on suspicious behaviour and judging where that leads us. Do not forget that voting against someone does not automatically equal lynching them. Bess has single-handedly landed herself in the mess she's in right now - and as her fellow 'suspect' Charles Pleasance has already suggested, her course of action reeks of not caring about the Royal Family. At the end of the day, those three are all that matters and we should go to any length in order to protect them as much as we can. Letting one day go without lynching would actually mean increasing the assassins' chances of getting a member of the Royal Family, so I really can't agree with your notion. It is also quite intriguing why you've jumped to the defence of Bess citing some rather general and vague not-wanting-to-vote reasons -- yet you did vote against Charles pretty much straight away... It has indeed been a very useful day full of interesting positions and statements on which to base our actions tomorrow.

Yes, but why vote against Charles when you thought there was nothing substantial on which to base a vote against him earlier today? In my point of view, he's supplied a brief but more or less reasonable explanation to his attitude, so why vote against him now when you were pretty much defending him earlier? And if you saw something else that was even slightly suspicious to you, why didn't you act on it? We don't have too much to work with on Day One anyway, so my vote against you could easily have been changed if you'd convinced me it was ill-advised, rather than saying "If you think my acting was scummy, then everything else earlier today was scummy"... Which, in turn, just makes you sound even scummier. I think this applies to all of us: obviously, it is convenient enough to use the premise of having a simple choice of two people to vote against; but if you have indeed spotted something and can still act on it, why not do so? We still have plenty of time to vote and unvote. I've cast my vote early on and done as I suggested above despite the risk of appearing to split the vote, as Fairon has aptly noted - so I don't see why Bess couldn't have tried and voted against someone else if she felt it would be a right move. Since she isn't doing that and has merely jumped on a convenient bandwagon, her whole defense of sorts seems to be based on nothing really.

Once again -- I'm not convinced by Charles' lack of more active involvement considering the current vote tally, and I'm also bewildered by some people's apparent desire to split the vote. Bess' weirdly pointless struggle in private conversations to get me to cancel my own vote is, however, convincing enough for me to actually keep it where it is. My initial vote against Bess was based on her toing and froing - which I personally saw as a pointless (yet continued) attempt to convince others she's Vanilla on Day 1 - and then on her decision to defend someone who should have actually stepped in and defended themselves personally. Her defense was then something along the lines of, "We've all just been talking nonsense so far, so there's no point in reading into that", which is also the kind of explanation I was given regarding the whole "Oh, look at me, I have no job" thing when she chose to contact me in person. And yes, I find it highly suspicious and rather pointless for someone to contact me asking to unvote her and "center around Charles" who "appears to have a better case against him", as she put it - all the while not sharing anything that could help me see why voting against her would be a wrong move. Which is precisely what Bess did. Out of respect for her, I'm not going to be sharing transcripts of how she contacted me for all to see, but I do believe that initiating that brief talk between us without presenting any sort of actual defense was... well, pointless of hers - and a bit desperate too.

Yup, that we are not - which is probably why you've found it convenient enough to leave a crack open so that you can point the finger in my direction in case my proactive approach backfires on me. Divisive vote? Well at least there was no division by zero, thankfully. Truth be told though - you're right, we're still on Day one of our adventure, so perhaps that's the kind of extra cautious / vigilant attitute that can be excused at this point in time. I'm not sure about Charles or Bess' attitude though - what I find quite intriguing is that Bess first stepped in to defend Charles (which was among the reasons why I was prompted to vote against her to begin with), however shortly after that she was more than happy to vote against him. Rather chaotic reasoning, if you ask me... But then again, Charles' "Ditto" wasn't really full of logic either.

Is that the 405 South / 10 West sign sticker from 8147 / 8495 (Tiny Turbos)?

I still hope Bess will cook for us... Speaking of which, I'd now like to Vote: Bess Bulton (Bob). She's been whining about not having a job all day long, then all of a sudden she starts lecturing people about being productive. What's worst, she won't even cook for me even though she's got nothing better to do. I've been in the kitchen for what, six hours now? No cooking whatsoever. Or sucking. Now that's counter-productive.

Just keep staring into the distance, I'm sure food will fly to you. Eventually.

You really oughtta stop making green faces. It's not becoming of an airfaring captain. Or whatever it is that you're doing on this ship. Brother, where'd you get the sausage? Did Bess cook, after all?

Raging about the onset of a dark age and moaning about having too much stuff to do? No. Just no. Best of luck though. Hope that helps. * Fin.

That's the spirit sweet Bess. I knew you wouldn't be able to resist this sixpack bod of mine! Let's get it on... What?! At least we could have some fun while we're out here...

Wait, are we playing cards? I thought we were counting them. One banana, two banana, three banana, bingo! Hey sweet Bessy, seeing as you don't have too much on your hands right now, how about cooking something for breakfast? Sausage-wise, I'd say we seem to be well stocked, soooo... pretty please?

Benny, your train station, as well as the KCR cars are absolutely awesome MOCs, but could you please resize your pics to 800x600? They're quite big right now and they're slowing down the page loading process. Thanks!

:cry_happy: And our suspenders are almost as awesomicious as our beards! Question is, who's Luigi and who's Mario now... Blood-stained six-pack-ripping sweatshirt vs. gloomy & techy work clothing?

Meahon Doughal here, and I gots me the coolest helmet available on this here veeheecle. Oh, don't stare at my beard, by the way...

Wow, thanks for all the pics mate! I love your Cereal train - and its original version too

Any pics from the event? I'd really love to see how it turned out...

Next time someone tells me that yellowed bricks and plates are useless, I'll refer them to this MOC. Yet another perfect example of how realistically these can be used. Nice job - and I like the understated /simple design of the post-war building. Very thematic.

Congratulations to all the participants for their marvellous creations - and hats off to the winners. As soon as I saw the water strider, I knew that this was so ingenious it just had to win. The fact that Splat would be willing to make it available to anyone via Rebrickable just goes to show that he is indeed a worthy winner, well done! Once again - I know I'm not a Techinc guy, but I'd love to see more Technic contests here on Eurobricks. The sheer awesomeness that Tech-minded people are capable of coming up is something absolutely great to look forward to, so here's to more of that!

I have to agree with Sieggy, that's very weird and quite a non-LEGO type of move. I'm looking forward to hearing more about this.

This is lovely, although I think it qualifies more under the category of "diorama" rather than being a complete layout. In any case, it is a brilliant scene and certainly shows once again that you have a great eye for detail. Could you please let us know some more about the trains / engines you've based your models on?

Oooh great, I could hardly wait for this one!!! 1. In brief, I've played 3 Mafia games: Scouty's Imperial Soldier's Mafia, your Fabuland Housewives and badboy's Yakuza Mafia and have ended up on the winning side on all three occasions, although I was shot down as Betsy Bunny in Fabuland Housewives. I've presented a short summary of those games through my own eyes on my profile page. 2. No conflicts whatsoever, I'll be 100% available. 3. I'd go with Bob's roleclaim on the last day of the Yakuza Mafia. Or rather, roleclaims, since there's hardly something he didn't claim. In terms of serious / effective roleclaims though, I thought Draggy did an absolutely great job in Baritones 3.

Well for starters, for an ambitious train line aimed towards train collectors, as this one was generally conceived, it had the 3-year lifespan of a LEGO set... The fact that the plug was pulled on it so quickly suggests that something was inherently wrong not just with the set designs, but also with the entire premise on which it was based as well. From what I've heard (conveniently enough, the My Own Train times coincided with my Dark Ages), the My Own Train sets were never particularly good sellers, even though there were umpteen of them available in all sorts of various combos. Considering how those were generally geared towards adult Train fans, their build was obviously way too basic and undetailed and had little improvements over the 'regular' 9V designs - which I'm sure must have contributed. Add to that the fact that pretty much each car had a different colour, not to mention the ludicrous idea of having the exact same engine available with just slight colouring alterations and marketed as different sets, which didn't make for a very 'adult' train experience either - yet contributed to substantially increasing production costs which were then never covered by ample sales. I'm obviously not an employee of TLG so would have no way of substantiating my presumption regarding the financial downfall of the My Own Train line, but I guess the most obvious sign that something didn't go quite right there was the fact that after the line was cancelled, retailers still had plenty of those sets lying around and were in a huge hurry to get rid of them ASAP (same as the case with the Santa Fe cars) - which led to serious discounts on sets that would in time become pretty darn valuable... Don't get me wrong, personally I have no gripe with the MOT line whatsoever and would have been more than happy to buy quite a few of those sets - some I found well designed, but most would go just for MOCcing purposes. I do believe that if given some more time and deliberation, it could have been a bit more successful. I don't believe it could have been successful enough to warrant replacing the currently available Exclusives Train sets though. ...Aaaand we now seem to have successfully derailed the topic from its original intent. Sorry for that, Andy. I hope we can continue discussing the "Buy"-triggering factors now.

Gryphon Ink, you seem to have gotten a bit overly excited about something that never was about "winning the Internets" in the first place. Besides, I really don't get what the problem is, the Emerald Night and the Maersk Train are easily within the suggested range (100 - 120 USD) - so there's your "entry" train, and it even doesn't have to be semi-crippled. If you want something else / more, you just need to pay 9 USD more for the Passenger Train Set. If, however, there's still some reason due to which you don't want to buy said Train set, that's probably not directly related to LEGO's pricing policy, and has more to do with your self-imposed limit on buying sets that cost over 100 USD. At the end of the day though, with those sets you easily get substantially more value for your money than with any one of the smaller sets, so I don't see what's the problem in passing up a few small sets in order to just save up for something that costs 20 USD over your limit. The point that Steinkopf was trying to make was that TLG would be hard-pressed to come up with any sort of viable motorized train set under the price point of 100 USD (or 100 EUR, for that matter). On the other hand, the point you made about TLG actually making money on train sets if they "lower the entry cost" would suggest either producing a substantially inferior product, or reintroducing a policy that TLG have officially abandoned - I'm talking about the "My Own Train" line which offered LEGO customers the option to buy different sorts of engines (well, one in different colours), and cars for those. It was, as you're probably aware, a financial disaster for LEGO. So back to the initial assumption - your only hope is for TLG to start producing Chinese-quality toys, since considering the current product manufacturing and development costs the company has, suggesting you'd gladly pay $100 USD for a LEGO set with "just an engine and one car, a basic track layout and PF setup", as you put it, really sounds rather humorous, shall we say - as you did notice yourself. At the end of the day, what's crucial here is that AFOLs use LEGO as a means for building train layouts for a reason. If all we wanted was train models, we could easily have started an N-, H0, O- or some-other-gauge layout and bought our products from Roco, Hornby, Märklin, Lionel, etc. At subsantially higher prices, I might add. A huge percentage of AFOL Train enthusiasts though find pleasure in the unique element of MOCcing, and I believe that TLG have finally realised that with their train products, aiming towards adult train hobbyists and still having a "toy"-priced product (as opposed to e.g. Hornby, Märklin, Lionel, etc.) would be immensely difficult. So what they're doing is primarily focusing on kids, like they should, and making sure they still have about enough of an offering on the market for AFOLs to build what they really desire. Which, if you ask me, is a very smart business model, and one that is exactly conceived in order to make sure that the entry level price for LEGO Trains is substantially lower than it would be for similar products. Notwithstanding the above, TLG have separately also introduced the Exclusives line and offered AFOL Train fans (at least) two gorgeous train sets at very decent prices. We really just couldn't / shouldn't ask for much more - or at least that's how I feel.

Stabbin Town is looking very well so far. If I could suggest something, it would be to go back to the "Garden Grove" roots and include some green plots here and there; even at this size a city needs those, so a central park would fit in great there. I was also wondering - is that glossy paper you've used to print the streets on? It works just a fine and looks like a great solution.