wendyw

I'm surprised they won this actually. The argument I've seen before was that because they patented the design (which then expired) they couldn't trademark it, the same design could not be covered by both patents and trademarks. To be covered by a patent it must be a functional design and that functional designs could not be trademarked. By applying for and receiving a patent on the minifigure they essentially ruled out the possibility of getting a trademark on it.

Any still boxed Lego sets I have are just that way because my brick room is tiny and disorganised and I need to sort it out before I can open them up. Oh, and one small set that was a freebie, which I haven't felt the need to open yet. I have a few models which I've kept built, a couple of classic space vehicles mostly, but a lot of it never ends up built to the instructions in the first place. As for keeping things in their packaging generally? Eh, I have a couple of things, but they're things like action figures that even if I opened them would just be sat on a shelf looking pretty and hey they have transparent packing anyway, so why not have them hanging on the wall looking pretty instead? Lego though, that gets opened and played with.

I'm definitely a geek, because none of my knowledge is even vaguely useful except for answering other geeks' questions. It does?

That really doesn't surprise me. I've seen listings on eBay before for bundles of 20 or 30 of the same promotional polybag.

Yeah, there's really no reason to worry about the quality of any replacement materials. Trying to find something with the same qualities as ABS is why the time scale is so long and the price so high. There are plenty of plastic substitutes available already, but they just don't behave the same way.

There's another one with a minifigure as a little kid and one with one as a doll from '78 as well, so I guess they might have been designed to be used as both adults and kids. http://brickset.com/sets/208-1/Mother-with-baby http://brickset.com/sets/297-1/Nursery

Yeah, definitely. They can be really useful structural pieces. Arguably you could use plates instead of bricks, but sometimes thicker floors/ceilings/whatever make more sense and stacked plates can be a pain in the butt to get apart again sometimes.

That is brilliant. :)

I finally got around to watching it last night and it was interesting, but I definitely got the impression there was a strict list of things they were and weren't allowed to discuss and I don't just mean company secrets. Also it would have been nice to see more of the design process, if not things people were actively working on then things like sketches and sculpts and prototypes for existing items.

I agree with the 1x2x2 but I like 1x1x(whatever) bricks because it's so easy for a stack of 1x1s to end up all misaligned and wonky looking.

I'm not sure about the current ones, but Star Diamond used to make the old Click Brick sets. Their sets tend to be really good. Character Building (which are made by Cobi) are another really good one, particularly their Doctor Who sets. I agree about Enlighten. The first few things of theirs that I got weren't that great, but they've really come far since then. Mega Bloks are usually really good. I don't really care for their game licenses other than for parts, but I'm a big fan of their Hello Kitty sets and the Barbie line has some great animal sets.

That is one cool hover car. : )

A non-battle based animal theme with Chima style heads, but more of a modern City theme with houses and families and... basically Fabuland mark 2 please. Also, a new space theme that isn't Star Wars. That would be nice too. Ooh, and some Danger Mouse sets to go with the new cartoon. That would be awesome (and hugely unlikely).

Those helmets are really cool. Not sure if I know what I'd do with them, but they do look really cool.

I don't know. Hour glasses are pretty commonly associated with the Reaper. Death of the Discworld has an hour glass for every living thing, it's pretty common for the Death card in tarot parks to depict Death with one and there were multiple pirate flags that used a skeleton with an hour glass, or sometimes just an hourglass alone, to represent death.