Tereglith

I've become a fan of B.R.I.C.K. (Bradford Rant Ins... you get it, right?) on facebook, and they sent me an e-mail saying that Pod 2 will land in Florida in early December! The box made by the coordinates includes Disney World- which includes the Downtown Disney Lego Imagination Center! AMAZING!!!! I might be able to get a pod!!! :D :D :D :D

Pretty good, pretty good! I wouldn't say that you're far away from all the entries, you're just a smidgen away! Fortunately, that smidgen should be pretty easy to make up. All you need to do is make the structure at the back of your MOC better. I know that this will be difficult to do, since the largest set that you have is (from what I can surmise) Shipwreck Hideout. If I were you, I would go buy a soldier's fort and build up the wall using it's 1x2x5 white pieces, and bulk up the governer's balcony while I was at it. However, you might not have enough money available to do this, and there's not enough time left in the contest to order the parts of bricklink or anything. If that's the case, you've done the best you can with the pieces, and I salute you. Working with such limited parts is not easy in the least. And no matter what, this entry is certainly VERY original. Great job (However, I would make suggestion about your pictures. Include maybe one of the swordfish gag, and five of the banana duel - this is your actual MOC and it doesn't do any good to post only half of the pictures of it. Where's the view of the back?) (Also, I just realized that you have a swordfish. You have an advent calendar, don't you. Lucky.)

Way to make us feel better about it I see this as a step forward. The Inika build is getting belabored (although 2008 was a bright spot on that front), I lost the story two years ago, and the prices for canister sets was going through the roof. Hopefully the new line will recapture some of the awesomeness that was felt during the first few years of story, while incorporating the awesomeness that was there in the designs of 2008. Plus, if I give a couple years, my Takanuva with flying machine thing set will probably by all my textbooks for a semester of college

I can't say much that the others haven't said, except: I love the papoose!

That's an amazing Rahkshi MOC - I loved the first ones when they came out because they had the very first bended knees. The flexible spine is an ingenious substitute for the rigid spikes of the orginals, and those feet and legs look great! The Av-Matoran torso was a good choice, too. Also, welcome to EB, RedStar!

Great job! I hadn't expected to see many boats in the medium category, and this one is a nice surprise. And you even did an interior! Astounding. My only suggestion for improvement would be to add some action to the rest of the MOC, the part not occupied by the ship. Take out the rock and put in a diagonal dock, perhaps with some barrels, a chicken or two, the obligatory monkey, and a dockworker mooring the ship, and I'd say you have a first place medium on your hands.

Interesting topic. I've never really been very open about it, but then again, I'm never open about anything. Seriously, I got 100% introversion on the Meyers-Briggs. But anyway, I used to openly talk about LEGO with my classmates in elementary school, and I was able to watch as they stopped playing with it and lost interest, and I learned to keep my mouth shut, because to them progress was good, and whatever was left behind was bad. Through middle school I was pretty quiet about it. I had another friend who fancied himself a lego fan, but he made really poor MOCs and spent all of his money on video games instead of LEGO, so I never thought of him as a fellow TFOL. I've only spent a semester in high school, and I've sort of established myself as the uber-nerd of the campus, so I'm not certain how people would react... perhaps I'll include an awesome MOC in my social studies project, see what people do.

Those links are cool. I was sort of inspired by reading the wikipedia article on Marvel 1602.

(I'm not certain that this should go here... Steam Reaper is pure steampunk, but Mistmatched Mage fits more with fantasy. Have fun deliberating, mods!) My first work with making special figures (aside from Conrad, of course). I wanted to make someone to fight Conrad in Alternate London, so I made London Samurai. And then I wanted to make another villian, so I spent a few hours creating Steam Reaper. And I couldn't just have one human, and one giant robot, there needed to be more humans, to balance it out. So I ended up creating a big, Marvel-like group of villians. Most of them are doofy. Steam Reaper is a little disturbing. All in all, I'm rather proud of them and the little backstories I cooked up for them. Enjoy! London Samurai Formerly a ruthless businessman, notorious for decisions that benefitted himself and left peasants destined for the poorhouse, and attempt on his life took his left hand and his peace of mind. He went to Japan to study self defense so that he would no longer be in danger from assassins and others. While there, he fell in love with Eastern culture, and began to despise his London home. He trained until almost invincible in a fight, and then moved back to London to attempt to purge it of its worst influences, that it might achieve the same heights of knolwedge and refinement as his beloved Japan. In order to reach this goal, he founded the Mideival League of Evil, gathering together outstandingly evil and strange people from around Alternate London to help him in his quest. Iron Maiden An enigmatic, armor toting femme fatale, she was the first person recruited to London Samurai's League, and it's rumored that they have romantic connections. Her armor is forged of finest steel, and her guns are the most high-tech weapons in the League outside of Steam Reaper's suit, capable of being reloaded quickly, holding whole clips of bullets, and able to have a number of add-ons attached that allow her to shoot different types of shot, shoot silently, or aim more correctly. She is an expert with them, capable of shooting a target the size of a tuppence piece from one hundred yards. Mis-Matched Mage On the run from the law for his alleged effeminacy (a charge which he vehemently denies, saying that he just likes good clothes), he began to see the London government as wholly corrupt, it it would attempt to arrest someone for wearing a purple cape and holding one's hand at a forty-five degree angle from the wrist. He met up with Iron Maiden on one of her missions, and demonstrated to her his prowess with magic (which always comes out trans-pink for some reason. He's been working on that...). After he espoused his anarchist views, she took him back to London Samurai, who agreed that he could join the team. His name was coined by the London press after his first raid, in which the foremost thing that the bank guard could remember about him was how horribly the purple, blue, and trans-pink had clashed. Sargeant-At-Arms A former tactician and combat specialist for the British Army, Sargeant-At-Arms became disenchanted with the governance of the army after visiting a base not on the front lines in the war against France and seeing how much waste was occuring at it when the resources in his former base were spread thin. These were his last thoughts before a blow from the eager private he was training at the base knocked him unconscious. A subsequent trip to the barracks hospital, which was less than sanitary, left him with a mind-altering fever. He awoke half-mad, retaining the knowledge of how to kill someone from ten feet with any weapon ever invented (including the twenty-seven that he invented himself), but not knowing much else aside from the fact that he had been thinking about how wrongly the general had been acting. He fought his way out of the base, stealing dozens of weapons and hiding them on his person as he went, and wandered into London, looking for whoever was in charge. London Samurai found him, and after a drawn-out battle in which Samurai was barely the victor, he brought him back to the League headquarters, and questioned him. Sargeant-At-Arms began to remember who he was, and demonstrated to Samurai his proficiency with all the weapons he had stolen. Impressed, Samurai explained to the Sargeant the League's mission, and offered him a spot in it. Sargeant accepted, and has become the League's best fighting force, able to keep eight weapons in play at once. Steam Reaper During one of Iron Maiden's raids, she accidentally blew up a kerosene warehouse, the basement of which had held the laboratory of a mad scientist that the League had been trying to locate to sent an invitation to join. He was mortally wounded in the explosion, but had luckily been working on a serum that could preserve life when submerged in it. Iron maiden rushed to help him, and, using her not-inconsiderable knowledge of mechanical science, constructed a basic life-support unit for him to reside in and took him back to League HQ. In her workshop, the two collaborated on constructing a steam-powered suit for him, and the result was Steam Reaper, a man-machine hybrid with eight spiked legs, a melded-steel scythe, and a magic-enhanced flamethrower. Since he had only been a scientist for the love of blowing things up anyway, Steam Reaper has become the League's most destructive, and most feared member. The League The League as it stands today. In the front-left of the group is The Swarm, a group of semi-intelligent bugs bred by Samurai from spiders and ants he had found in Japan. The League uses them to create diversions, hold off coppers, and send messages between members. Thanks for viewing! C&C welcome. The League may swell in ranks in the future as I get more inspiration.

Your third poll is superfluous - the Phoenix lander found solid proof of water ice an inch below the surface of Mars. Unfortunately, it sublimated before we could get a much better look to see if there were polutants, but we know there's water there anyway.

Wow, thanks for the links to the reviews, Alywin! I want Guardian of the Deep sooo bad now.

Ok, those prices sound much more reasonable than the ones on the Amazon pages. TRU is usually sporadic with their markups, and I think that most of these are probably at their final prices. Thanks for the information!

What were the sets priced at the Dallas TRU, and what's the usual markup there? I want to know if the amazon prices are correct! Also, reviews would be very greatly appreciated. As you may have guessed by my lack of review posting, the Daytona TRU was sadly lacking in 2010 sets. But hope springs eternal! There's still Christmas shopping to do!

...you can tell the vintage of any piece by looking at its subtle color variations ...you are actively trying to come up with a LEGO- related acronym for FART, to complete the triumvurate with BURP and SNOT (guilty. Any suggestions?) ...you can look at pictures of upcoming lego sets and, without any prior knowledge, tell what price point they will be at. ...you know precisely how long after or before an official release time all stores within a ten mile radius stock new waves of sets ...you are completely unaware that steampunk is a literary genre, and think that it's just a theme for cool MOCs. (decidedly NOT guilty, ever) ...everyone else thought they wanted to be astronauts when they were five, but you wanted to be a lego set designer ...you have in your head the exact image of rare and esoteric parts, but have great difficulty describing them to your out-of-touch former FOL father (definitely guilty) ...you automatically calculate price-per-piece ratio for every set that you know the statistics for, adjust for what theme it's in, and pass judgement on whether or not it's priced reasonably ...you know the difference between micro scale, minifig scale, and technic fig scale, and can automatically convert any object into all three in your head ...you have made a custom chess set out of lego (guilty) ...you have a sigfig that you even use on non-lego sites ...you actually own some Znaps

Actually, most UFO pictures are taken against cloudless blue skies, including the most famous and enigmatic unsolved pictures, the Passaic photos: Signed, Your Friendly Neighborhood Ufologist and Architeuthologist Great work on the UFO by the way, I would love to see a closer picture to take in all the little details. (You know, perhaps with all this frontpage pod mayhem, we ought to start an annual consipiracy-themed month, where we give all the whackos in tabletown something worry about with things very like this)

Meh, I was forgetting that great-granddaughter has to grow up first. You're right, it's another near future one.

Based on the forum page that strider406 posted I'm almost certain that this is a LU promo. It has the right colors (sand blue and orange) and everything, even that rounded, no-studs LU asthetic, and the deciphered names on the plaque are the same as some of the ones that have been released about LU. Even the figs on the plaque are flexible like they are in the game. I think I'll pass on this, unless the coordinates appear right over Downtown Disney. The tone of the site reminds me of Paul Adshead's old Justin Thyme puzzle site (which he has since changed), althoug considerabely less complex.

It's also interesting to note that, according to the journal, these sets are set in 1991. FINALLY a theme that's set in the past and not in an unrealistically short-term future. I mean, it's quite obvious that we didn't land on an ice planet 7 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that Earth isn't going to be overrun by dinosaurs next year. This just makes it all the more realistic that instead of being a well-publicsized thing in the future, it's a secret, covert thing from twenty years ago. I'm beginning to love the story as much as I love the sets! If it weren't for the lego zaniness of the journal, I would think that it was the set up of a James Rollins novel!

WOW! This is looking great. I love the SNOT deck of the ship, and snaggletooth random dock that you have is great too. \ If I had a suggestion for the ship, it would be to play up the light blue even more and add more chrome silver like the two 1x1 rounds that you have there - light blue and silver would give the ship great personality when most are decorated with dark red and pearl gold accents. For a name, I might put forward "The Rebirth of the Eagle", since, in the US at least, the Eagle can often be seen as a symbol for warlike times and actions, the opposite of the peaceful dove. If The Eagle were being reborn, it would symbolize the peacefullness and tranquility that this contest has brought about.

I much prefer the Broadway version (Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Lovett = EPIC WIN), but you've captured the building pretty well. I would like to see a version of the setpiece from the play too, which looks considerably different and has even more crazy features. Very good job on the chair, there.

Journal makes it sound like there's a main protag - and it's a girl! GO LEGO! You're only fifty years late...

I agree, did you take pictures with a disposable camera and scan them in or something? It's REALLY blurry. Also, I don't see much going on in the water. If you wanted, you could take just your island and enter it into the medium category, where the competition is less fierce, and you would have a better chance of winning... I'll offer better advice when I can see more of the entry

I'm going to TRU in Florida tomorrow. Fingers crossed for early sets I guess that the Nov. 24 on the back of the mag is the date for more content on the site, not the launch itself.

minisite worked five for me. I was especially intrigued by the old, rotting submarine and expedition journal. Perhaps a former mission will play into the plot, and maybe into some second-wave sets? That would be ver' cool.

They were in the original line too.... I'll throw in my 2 cents, now that I've started this. A few that haven't been mentioned -The tube system on the old LOM base and the newer MM set. -Any of the multitudinous Bionicle launchers, which are sometimes used in system as well -Triple blow of rubber-band battering ram, bashed-in wall, and collapsing floor in Tower Siege (best $30 I spent on LEGO) -Monorail on Sentai Fortress and Dr. Inferno's volcano base -Utterly cool collapsing bridge on Tygurah's Roar... I thought this thing was the bee's knees when it came out -The sabotaged jewel drawer on Yeti's Hideout -The collapsing bridge, used in many, many sets. Just to sort of show how broad the definition of play feature can be. Sometimes the whole set is based around it, like with Tygurah or the LOM tubes.