Aanchir

Well, the new Lord Garmadon seems to have a black 2012-style samurai helmet, while this year's Lord Garmadon has a Titanium Metallic 2012-style samurai helmet. Other than that I believe they are identical, and it's not impossible to get the correct color of helmet for this year's Garmadon since it is also used for Samurai X.

I don't for a minute think that packaging and promotional images should be taken as solid evidence for TLG's attitudes as a company. In Ninjago's biggest set for this year, the elderly Spinjitzu master Sensei Wu is used as a captive inside a prison. This probably isn't meant to show that TLG thinks old people are helpless, but rather because in a theme about Ninja the Ninja themselves should be presented front-and-center. Besides, in the two images where we can see the female firefighter most clearly, she is alternately using either an axe or a circular saw to get inside the burning building, which strikes me as a lot more hazardous than putting out a flaming barrel with a fire extinguisher. There may be a bit of a double-standard in play here, but it's about marketing, not about TLG's perceptions. Namely, a lot of boys in LEGO City's target demographic don't really like girls, so TLG doesn't try to draw too much attention to them. Probably related to why in BIONICLE and Hero Factory the female characters rarely look too outwardly feminine unless you already know they're female-- female action figures traditionally sell poorly compared to male ones, so TLG tries not to draw attention to the gender of the characters.

It was in the Coast Guard helicopter, so it's been around for a while.

I count at least three: a civilian in 60001, a firefighter in 60003, and a firefighter in 60004. And keep in mind we haven't even SEEN the Great Vehicles sets yet, and those had some of the most balanced gender ratios of all this year. If we look at all of the 2012 sets which we first found pictures of, ignoring the Great Vehicles sets as well as store exclusives, which were revealed later, we find a grand total of two female minifigures. So in that respect next year's sets are already showing a better gender ratio than this year's sets would have if the same sets were revealed! Yep, because karate and soccer are totally about hairstyling and fluffy animals. As much as I agree that LEGO City did a great job last year by including lots of female figs and I'd like that to continue, LEGO Friends isn't half as stereotypical as some people make it out to be. Yes, it includes a lot of things that girls like, just as LEGO City has always included a lot of things boys like. Neither theme, however, is saying that only traditional gendered interests appeal to boys or girls. Rather, they're just including content to which the majority of kids within the theme's target demographic reacts favorably, and that includes "traditional" gendered interests as well as some things that break from tradition.

I like the one second from the right myself. It really evokes the set design while feeling extremely rugged and muscular. For leg armor I like the designs on the center left, though they could be more stylized to match the rest of the design.

Doubtful, since the villain sets have a picture of the brain slugs with a bit "x1" next to it on their canisters. If they were going to be in the Heroes as well I'd think they'd be promoting them the same way. What do you mean by "all have the same face"? They all do seem to have identical face-shields (besides Furno's, which as far as I can tell is printed), but underneath that they have unique helmet designs that strongly evoke their classic helmets. Generally nice designs if you ask me. I'm surprised that so many people are complaining about Ogrum's mask looking fleshy or organic. It does look out-of-place in Hero Factory, but I wouldn't describe it either of those ways-- its angular design reminds me much more of stylized Asian masks than of actual living creatures. In particular the texture reminds me of the Dragon King Nuo mask on which the creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender modeled the much smoother, more streamlined mask used for the Blue Spirit. Though of course the scowl on Ogrum's face is much more reminiscent of traditional depictions of ogres, demons, and Oni than of the typically grinning face of Dragon King Nuo. The only part of Ogrum's mask that really looks organic to me is its nose, and that's the part we can see in the least detail.

The set descriptions we got from a Japanese retailer's site specifically called the figure "Golden Ninja Lloyd", so it seems pretty certain to me-- especially since after all, he is the character the "final battle" will be focusing on in the show. Also, it would be quite odd if next year's sets had two Zane figures and no Lloyd figure. Did you post this in the wrong topic by mistake? Certainly it's possible that the Ninjago sets disappoint you as much as the City sets, but only listing City sets as examples of your disappointment makes me think you might have meant to post this in the City topic. Anyway, my thoughts on the sets: 70500 Kai's Fire Robot: Brilliant design. Great use of Hero Factory parts, and a genuinely awesome-looking small-scale mech in the grand tradition of the River Dragon and Mine Mech. The minifigures are gorgeous though the hilt of the Fire Blade used to attach it to the mech feels a bit contrived. 70501 Samurai Bike: Very imaginative design, and I love the Samurai helmet/mask motif. However, the Stone Army vehicles aren't nearly as refined-looking as the Skulkin and Serpentine vehicles were. If they appear in the show I imagine they'll look nicer, but as it is they don't have those well-defined contours that made the skeleton and snake motifs of the previous years' vehicles stand out in an instant. Jay's jetpack doesn't have much going for it in terms of parts, but it looks decent. 70502 Cole's Power Drill: I must say I'm disappointed in this one. The color scheme and minifigures are of course excellent, but the shape of the vehicle is underwhelming. It just feels so boxy, a far cry from the slick designs of this year's vehicles or even the brilliant drilling machines of the Power Miners theme. 70503 Golden Dragon: Gorgeous; just gorgeous. It definitely stands out from the previous dragons with its unique color scheme, blade-like wings, and split tail design. It's far from flawless, of course: this pic shows how awkward the claws look when the wings are outstretched, something the previous dragons avoided by having the claws run perpendicular to the "feathers". The minifigures in the set are great, though it's funny that the Golden Ninja seems to have unique, heavily stylized eyebrows. The inclusion of a sledgehammer for the minifigure catapult makes it feel all the more amusing, though it's hard to tell if it'll work very well. It looks like it would launch the minifigures upwards more than forwards, though as I understand it some minifigure catapults have had the opposite problem, and at least upwards makes sense against a flying foe. 70504 Garmatron: This one doesn't appeal to me as much as the bike does-- its stickered surfaces seem to distract from the contours rather than helping them, and the non-matching teeth are a bit strange. It and Zane's speeder are both unique in design, however, and the minifigures are stellar. Note that to make a Stone Warrior resembling the giant one from the episode "The Stone Army" you have to mix-and-match minifigure elements. However, the variety of colors that these Stone Army elements come in is nice, and I love their color scheme of black, bright red, and titanium metallic. Here you get a good look at the elemental blades, which are beautifully blended. Their build is inconsistent but hey, the same was true about the Nunchucks of Lightning, which had a build that varied from set to set. 70505 Temple of Light: It's not the work of art that the Fire Temple was, but the unique architecture of this set still makes it stand out as an excellent setting for the final battle. Minifigures are great, though I can't tell if Sensei Wu's design is new at all. The Golden Mech is quite substantial-looking, although its knees are a bit strange. Overall, I love what's being offered in next year's lineup. Not every set stands out as a masterpiece, but the same was true of every other year. It is a bit of a shame that to get all the new minifigures you have to get every set besides possibly the Golden Dragon, which is a set I certainly wouldn't want to pass up (though my younger brother has dibs on that one if I remember correctly, so that might save me some trouble).

Aw, shoot, the errors I reported got lost in the downtime. So let me make a brief summary: Hero Factory shells with ball snaps don't snap correctly to part 98577 like they do to 90607. Here are images of the parts in question, the way the shell should snap to both beams without rotation, and the way the shell fails to snap to 98577 without rotation. The ball in the center of 98590 can't connect to ball snaps or ball cups. Vertically-aligned "B" beams like 90615 can't connect to the ball snap of 87841. In fact, there are hardly any angles at which they can connect. Two sets actually require a connection like this 2232 Raw-Jaw and 6229 XT4. And neither use of the parts stresses them any more than any other ball-cup-to-ball-joint connection.

It looks like you used 37 Bright Green where you should have used 28 Dark Green (standard LEGO green). It's an easy mistake to make, so watch out for that in the future! It should be a bit easier to keep track now that TLG is using Bright Green in a lot more applications, such as this year's Garbage Truck and Recycling Truck sets.

The latest episode was indeed amazing. .

Heroes from favorite to least favorite: Furno XL: Somewhat simple legs and arms, but a very unique torso and complex weapon designs. Capes are always a good thing, and the medieval knight look is pulled off effectively without taking away from Hero Factory's trademark sci-fi tone. The sword has a nice new piece for the hilt, also in Pyrox. The new hero helmets are brilliant in how well they echo the classic helmets without feeling redundant-- with one exception which I'll mention below. The new torso shell is neat, though its use here creates the main flaw of the set: the lack of armor on the crotch. TLG should design some armor to connect to the lower ball joint of a Hero torso already-- it'd be great for MOCs that include waist articulation as well as for letting official sets use separate armor for the upper and lower body, allowing more diversity in armor styles and figure height. Rocka: Again, not too complex, but that's how I like it. 4M Warm Gold and Titanium Metallic (assuming they're not just silver) shells are a great asset. Helmet is nice. Weapons are great, although with these sets using the big Captain America shield element I'm surprised none of them have it printed. New torso shell looks just fine on the smaller heroes, though I don't see any signs of back armor. Breez: Great design and another creative custom weapon, although this time the weapon uses Technic pins that will make it flexible, which could be somewhat awkward in real life. 4M Transparent Bright Green shells are neat although Transparent Fluorescent Green would be more useful with many of the parts we already have. Lower legs could use cladding that offers some more coverage, but otherwise the armor situation seems OK. Bulk: This is the only Hero helmet I don't like. The chin sorta-kinda echoes his classic helmet, but then he's got that weird-looking nose... I'm already kind of warming up to it though, so I guess it's just the fact that his helmet looks the least like his classic one that made the nose seem so distasteful. His weapons are also mediocre. The drill needs some more bulk to it (no pun intended) if it's going to seem substantial, and the shield lacks any extra details like Rocka's has. I have no problem with the flick-fire missile launcher attached to the drill except that it doesn't make the drill any less boring (again, no pun intended). Bulk does offer 3M Transparent Orange shells, though it's hard to tell if they're Tr. Fluor. Reddish Orange or Tr. Bright Orange. The former would be more useful, but if it's the latter he also offers one in 5M on his shoulder. The Silver Metallic shell detail on his shoulder is also quite nice, though the armor on his legs feels a bit skimpy. Villains from favorite to least favorite: Bruizer: My goodness, this guy is brilliant. I don't really like how none of the new villains feel especially robotic, but this guy's rocky aesthetic is carried out magnificently. The asymmetry of his design is much more cohesive than Nitroblast or Drilldozer's asymmetry IMO, and his right arm reminds me of Hellboy (though that may be because I picked up and read the first Hellboy graphic novel last month when it was on sale at a local comic shop). Moreover, the guy perfectly captures the personality of a lumbering behemoth who eats rocks for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The brain-slug-bug-things are very neat-looking, and I hope they're as flexible as the promotional images make them look. I also hope that they and the villain mask elements can be integrated well with other LEGO pieces other than each other. Pyrox: Again, the mask doesn't feel especially sci-fi in design, but it still looks nice and integrates well with the brain-slug-whatever. This guy has a nice color scheme and makes good use of other parts from this wave. The poses of all the sets this wave are pretty questionable. Here you can see the cool new hilt piece that would have been excellent for Stormer XL's sword. It's incorporated into an imaginative weapon that also uses elements from Furno XL and looks a lot more formidable than Bulk's oddly-proportioned drill. Ogrum: This fellow here is a mixed bag. He uses Reddish Brown and Earth Green, colors I totally didn't expect to see used in Hero Factory but which are well-integrated. He's got a symmetrical design but still a very organic flavor. The things that really bother me about him are his mask (which is nice, but like the others almost feels like it belongs in a totally different theme than Hero Factory), his awkward fingerless right hand, and the way the bulky hands and spindly feet, each of which would have been alright on their own, totally fail to work together. Scarox: I was going to rate this guy higher than Ogrum, but on closer examination... no. He does feel a lot like Waspix, but if you eliminated the effectiveness of that set's proportions and replaced it with awkward, non-cohesive Technic constructions and a severe deficit of elbows. The color scheme is also organized somewhat awkwardly, and just draws further attention to how bare-bones this set is. Overall, these sets are a bit hit-and-miss, and certainly fail to surpass the brilliance of the two Breakout waves. At the same time, they do continue to demonstrate innovation, so hopefully that will prove useful for MOCs and future waves of sets.

That's true. We've seen some set names for sets based on those themes, but some of them are preliminary, vague, or both, so they could wind up being Ultrabuilds.

All right! I'm definitely going to enter this one, since I have most of my Ninjago collection from this year with me! So glad the theme month happened to tie in with the collection I have with me at college. Might be tricky to come up with something that will really knock people's socks off, given that a limited supply of LEGO that happens to be ninja-related is still a limited supply of LEGO, but I'll do my best!

The only way the cheese wedges could get caught in the brick if you make them plate-to-brick, in a way that you could not later fish them out with, say, a paper clip, would be if either they put tremendous stresses on the brick (enough friction that the paper clip would bend before the cheese wedges give way) or if they fit snugly enough to recede all the way into the brick. And in the latter case, that would suggest a brick-to-brick connection using the 1x2 cheese wedges could theoretically be possible. I have never heard of this or tried it myself, so I couldn't say for sure.

As far as I can tell the Creator Expert line is simply going to be applied to any of the D2C sets that would previously have been non-branded-- things like the Shuttle Expedition, Modular Buildings, Taj Mahal, and Emerald Knight. I'm quite glad for the change, as previously sites like Brickset had to categorize these sets somewhat haphazardly (for instance, for many years putting the Modular Buildings in the Town theme which has been defunct for going on one year now). Presumably sets that directly tie into current themes like the Haunted House will still have their current theme branding. There's absolutely no reason to worry about the complexity of the sets decreasing. The LEGO Creator theme has never been known for simplicity-- in fact, one of the main purposes of the theme is to demonstrate the many unique things you can build with non-specialized bricks, which is something the Modular Buildings series exemplifies. Plus, the designers who worked on the Modular Buildings were already on the LEGO Creator team, so the design team should continue to have the same level of understanding when it comes to what AFOLs are capable of building.

No, but Titan has hydrocarbon seas. Though I suppose I was drawing a blank on my astronomy/chemistry, since those are things which in Earth's environment would be considered natural gases-- usable as fuel but probably not to make plastics in any environment. You want to find dead dinosaurs in space, you'd have to look elsewhere.

Did you use the seven-digit Element ID or the five-digit Design ID? Searching by the Design ID in either mode works for me, but the element ID doesn't work in either mode. Normally, searching by Element ID should be effective at least in LDD mode, but at the same time there are some complications. For instance, if a certain mold in a certain color has more than one Element ID, it's possible that only one will be effective. I'm not sure if that would be the case here, though.

Are we allowed to modify our entry after we've posted in this thread? I've gone ahead and changed my avatar to get into the spirit of the month, but I may make further changes before the contest deadline ends, so I want to know if I should delay posting my entry.

Awrite! I haven't been this excited about a Eurobricks theme month in quite a while! It's a great way to tie in with the new episode airing in the US tomorrow! It will really cap the month off if we started to get more Ninjago 2013 info this month (of course, at this time of year, that could really be said for any continuing theme ).

Now the real question is, does enough crude oil exist on the planet to make that much ABS plastic, and how much would it end up costing TLG in raw materials to obtain it? Or would we have to go to Saturn's moons for this kind of endeavor? Very neat observations. I've never seen people calculate this kind of thing. It almost makes some of the LEGO Star Wars dream projects, like a minifigure scale Executor, seem feasible by comparison.

I'd assume that it is, since (to my knowledge) it has been in the other avatar contests.

I don't think I've ever replied to this topic. Soooo I guess I should put together a list. The only comics I've ever really gotten in single issues are the ones that come in LEGO Magazines (BIONICLE and Hero Factory primarily). In terms of graphic novels, I love Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, and also own Watchmen, the LEGO Ninjago graphic novels, the Axe Cop graphic novels, and the Girl Genius Omnibus Volume One. Webcomics I read regularly include Axe Cop, Dr. McNinja, Brawl in the Family, Girl Genius, Questionable Content, and most recently the hilarious and adorable JL8. I also read a lot of the My Little Pony tumblr comics, if those count. Not digging for links right now, but examples include Slice of Pony Life, Moonstuck, Ask Pinkie Pie Solutions, Ask Filly Twilight, Ask The Crusaders, Ask My Little Chubbies, Ask The Pie Sisters, That Scootaloo, and Dr. Adorable's Ask-Along Blog. I think that's everything...

How long do you think it will be until TLG uses that strategy for a wrecking ball in a theme like LEGO City? Though the Star Wars planets are pretty enormous for that purpose (11x11) unless you're willing to create a crane to scale. So I suppose it's fairly unlikely we'll see that application used by any but AFOL MOCists, except perhaps in the Technic theme.

Ah, OK. I didn't watch the video because I was waiting for a higher-quality version for better visuals. Thanks for informing me.