Community LEGO Thread

Wellington was a goddamn mess on Wednesday because of the Hobbit movie premiere in town, but at least there was some nice Lego at the airport:

On another matter. We have two nieces who are now old enough for the Lego and Duplo and I've been thinking about the Friends series a little bit. I've come to the conclusion that it's sexist and condencending, because why the hell should girls not be into Monster Fighters and space rockets and Lord of the Rings and cars and ninjas? There's little chance we'd buy it for our boys, so why would I buy it for a girl?

Am I insane and reading too much into it?

NO.

See http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/1reasonwhy.4172/

See http://brokenforum.com/index.php?th...d-the-nashville-music-scene.4175/#post-351033

See http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/unintentional-gender-discrimination-by-good-people.4073/

Buy them the ninja set! I want the ninja set. This way I can live vicariously through them. If they want something less stereotypically "boy", try the very excellent City collection, or the castle stuff (harder to find in stores, but Amazon has them).

Is there some kind of law that says you can't buy them City, Monster Fighters, Ninjago or Lord of the Rings? I mean, if they're into Friends-type stuff then get them that, if they're not, then get them a set from one of the other themes.

For fuck's sake, why is Mindstorms ~$300? Hubby has been wanting one for some time now and I considered it as a Christmas gift for him, but that seems a bit steep.

Maybe I'll just have to learn how to eBay or something and get an older version for cheaper. Ugh.

That's always been my take. People seem to think that by releasing the Friends line LEGO is saying that little girls can ONLY play with those sets. The other stuff is there if you want to buy it for your kids. Why exactly do people feel the need to deny sets featuring cafes and beauty parlors to kids* who actually want that? Because hey, LEGO actually asked a bunch of focus groups, made up solely of girls, what they wanted LEGO to make. They did this specifically because they had been accused of being too male-centric with their choices of theme, so they wanted a focus group with no input from boys. The LEGO Friends line fits exactly the results of that focus testing.

And you know what? The line's been a huge success. And maybe all those little girls who were previously not playing with LEGO at all because of all the "boy" lines like Power Miners and Ninjago think hey, this is fun, what other kinds of sets are there? Criticizing the Friends line because it's "sexist and condescending" is remarkably short-sighted, along the lines of the people criticizing Harry Potter for its content and completely missing the benefits of it being the most successful series ever at actually getting kids to read.

So who the fuck cares if LEGO releases a few sets that are pink and purple? It's still LEGO, and it's still fostering creativity in a way that Barbie can't touch.

*And adults, because who am I kidding, I've bought a bunch of those sets.

Exactly Dufresne. I mean, maybe there's an argument about nature vs. nurture or gender role reinforcement to be made here but the way I see it, unless a parent is actively discouraging their children from playing with toys that aren't 'for' their gender then I don't see any real harm in girls (or, indeed, boys) playing with 'girls' toys.

Something else that's struck me recently (and I think I'm right in saying this) is that LEGO ads these days don't tend to show the face of the person playing with the toys - at most you see an arm or hand.

On my last trip to the USA I picked up the first Lego Master Builder Academy (MBA) kit for my oldest kid and we opened it today. It's really impressive and I think it'd be a fantastic buy for anyone with a kid who is into Lego who wants to break out from just following the instructions. Braeden is still a little young (he's 6) and impatient but I was able to work on the first model with him and explain some of the more detailed parts that the book was teaching to him as we went along.

Sadly, it seems Lego have stuffed with the MBA program a little bit, but I'm still thinking about importing the next set of MBA kits for his birthday.

Finally took the time to upload photos of a few things I built over the last year to Flickr. This one I wanted to share. I built it for my mom as a birthday present last July. (Goes to show how long it's been since I uploaded anything.) She works at Dartmouth College, so I built Dartmouth Hall. She currently has it on display in her office, and she tells me she gets comments about it every day.



I tried taking the photos with a portable lightbox I have, and I think the lighting on the building itself came out well, even if I don't like all the background noise that comes with it.

This giant, minifig-scale Hogwarts Castle is making the blog rounds today. Holy shitsnacks.



Flickr set here.

That's awesome. The interior details are great. I especially like the Slytherin Common Room.

I have been spending a lot of money and time on Lego lately. I just bought the excellent Vermin Vaporizer & Sith Fury Interceptor, along with a bunch of sets to bolster my available pieces for messing around with my own designs. I went on a Lego blog binge and got really stoked on the viper and mech designs, and now I'm trying to bumble my way through putting something respectable together on my own. I can tell it's going to be a while yet, but I'm really happy to have something that I can sit down and just play with that isn't a game.

I keep clicking on this thread hoping to see minifigs of Jeff, Britta, Annie, Abed, Troy and Shirley and the study room.


Maybe Pierce.

I realize I don't have a cool picture of something I built to post with this, but my son turns 4 years old on Sunday, and he is getting his very first "real" lego set (he has Duplos, but this is his first true set). I won't say it's my proudest moment as a father, but it's one of the moments I was definitely looking forward to.

He said he wanted something with trucks (he's always been more toward the "city" stuff than the fantasy stuff), so we got him a Mining Dump Truck.

The best thing about the Lego mining sets is that two of the figures are clearly based on the hosts of Mythbusters.

That one looks pretty complex for a 4-year-old. How convenient that Dad's going to have to help him a bit!

My dad gave my son this for Christmas when he was three. It took me three hours to put it together. In fairness to my boy, it remained mostly intact for a couple of months and then one evening he called me up to his room to show me something, which turned out to be a completely disassembled Sith Infiltrator in his bed.

4 is right about the age when kids start to be able to handle such things on their own (aside from prying the blocks apart without a tool). Whether they can handle it or not is mostly a matter of whether they're interested.

So I went to Bricks Cascade last weekend here in PDX land and it was pretty cool.

This link contains my album

Here is a sample:

Sent email to my accountant today to find out if I can write Lego purchases off as an expense against my book income. FINGERS CROSSED!

This is a great article on Lego and how licensing has made them (arguably?) the worlds most valuable toy company:

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertis...became-most-valuable-toy-company-world-148578

Highlights:

In other news, I, uh, might have acquired some Technic this month. 5666 pieces, to be precise (thanks Brickset).
OTOH, BIRTHDAY MONTH IS AWESOME.

God I want that trainset. I also want people to buy me anything to do with underground stuff so I can build a Lego Dwarf Fortress.

WOW!.

More images: http://geekologie.com/2013/05/insane-insane-insane-lord-of-the-rings-b.php

My biggest complaint about the LEGO Friends set is that stores like Target segregate it to the girl aisles. My son might be interested in some of the sets, but he never gets the chance to look at them, as he's drawn in by Star Wars and City sets.

Man, the Sarlacc pit set is a heck of a deal, by the way. Three awesome minifigures and a sarlacc that can eat people? Plus Kithaba and a skiff, goodness.

LEGO customer service is the best. One of the Technic sets I acquired from my friend didn't have the sticker sheet included and he hadn't applied them earlier. I emailed LEGO about paying for a new sheet and yesterday one just arrived in the post. Awesome. They admit in the included letter that they can't actually figure out how to handle selling replacement parts themselves and actually recommend approaching places like bricklink.com.

I am probably late to the lego party, but a friend of mine just pointed me to a new lego store in one of our malls. It was nearly too much lego for my brain to handle, and I forgot to get a picture. For those that have not seen one, it is basically a medium sized retail store with nothing but legos, including the massive sets like Death Star or Star Destroyer as part of the regular stock. I didn't get to spend much time in there due to the crush of small children or big children running around. One of the coolest things they is have is a "build you own lego figure" stand. They have bins of heads, legs, torsos, and accessories for one to just fool around with. It was 9.99 for 3, no discount for only making 1. They also sell bricks by the cup, and you can simply pick and choose colors, size, etc. Pretty cool store for any fan. I plan to go back and will hopefully be allowed to take pictures.