ShaydDeGrai

I've had a Darth Vader keychain in active use for about the past quarter century. I picked it up when they first came out and decades of cohabitating with metal keys in pockets and backpacks have taken their toll. The printing is almost entirely gone, all the crisp edges have been rounded. Both legs have broken off (from the hip hinge, not a separation of the leg assembly itself) and one hand is missing. My wife got me a replacement Vader about a decade ago but as I was considering replacing the old one, it dawned on me; no legs, only one hand, pretty scratched up and barely recognizable, I couldn't have mod'ed a more authentic Skywalker / Darth Vader if I tried, so I stuck with the original.

As a former engineering professor sitting in a very cluttered office/Lego room I can see plenty of opportunities for design projects ranging from simple product improvements to robotics and automation to better software depending on what sort of things a student would like to focus on. These include: Storage: I use trays, bins, boxes, baggies, parts cabinets and pick-brick-wall cups and there's never enough. Moreover access is a problem, I can only have so many things open on my work table at one time so I'm constantly shuffling. A (very) long time ago I took a class in printing (as in movable lead type loaded into a shoe printing not send the pdf to the laserjet printing) and I remember how we'd have a call sheet that told us we needed 17 'e's and 12 's's etc. and we'd just go to the font cabinet and fill up a tray in one go with exactly the parts we needed then sit down assemble the shoe. I've always thought it would be nice to have my collection so organized with convenient storage systems that I could do that with Lego rather than spending more time rummaging and swapping parts trays than actually building. Sorting: There must be several Megs worth of posts on this site alone about sorting; by color; by shape; by function; by family; It is an endless (and often thankless) task. Wouldn't it be nice to have a machine where you could just take a scoop of random parts, set a few preferences on a control panel and have the parts all sorted exactly the way you feel would be most useful for you and your building style? Just doing a fraction of the job would be a help (I had one student once who used Mindstorms to build a machine to sort Technic pins, perfecting that design took an entire semester). Cataloging: There comes a time in every collectors life when s/he doesn't remember what he or she owns anymore, or worse, is absolutely certain that s/he has some of Part X in color Y but can figure out where, in a sea of bins, trays, baggies, old MOCs and models, the damned things are. Decades ago I thought Brickset was an answer to this problem, but years of experience has taught me that, while it helps, it's no silver bullet. It would be great if I had local cataloging software that interfaced with my theoretical sorting machine, scanned barcodes on kits and instruction books and could update inventories based on parts usage in Stud.IO and other MOC design software. Display: There is never enough display space and the space I have is rarely used efficiently. Bookcases are readily available but the shelfs are often not adjustable enough (sometimes it would be nice to have half depth shelves, stepped tiers or sloped mounting surfaces rather than flat shelving. Shelves are often designed for the weight of books and are (distractingly) overkill for delicate Lego models. The opaque nature of most bookcases with solid shelves makes lighting the interior of the "box" an issue, defeating the point of displaying the model in the first place. And, in the case of my office (and I'm sure others may have this problem as well) if the Lego room is in a converted attic space the knee walls might not be tall enough to accommodate a 6-7 foot tall (~2 meter) bookcase. Something more modular and stackable would be much more versatile. Dust: I have to believe that when Phillip Pullman wrote His Dark Materials series, he was thinking of trying to keep his Lego collection clean when he came up with the concept of Dust. I'm pretty sure the three laws of thermodynamics declare that where there are Legos, there will be dust. From an engineering project standpoint this makes it a target rich environment for inventing mitigators. How do I reduce the amount of dust that gets to my display models? How do I clean the dust off my models? How do I reduce the amount of dust in my Lego workspace? How do I retouch my physical MOC photos to eliminate dust artifacts? How do I retouch my virtual MOC rendering to add dust and make the model appear more real? Photography: Building a better light box and the world will beat a path to your door. Mine is always too small with too few lighting options to do justice to large models with lots of small details. I need something with multiple, positionable light sources (both directional and ambient). Adjustable brightness and warmth, color gels. A featureless backdrop that scales for larges models. And the whole thing needs to collapse into a compact storage bin when not in use as I can't afford to commit a couple hundred cubic feet of space to a dedicated photography studio; I'd like to be able to (easily) set it up, tear it down or even take it outside on a sunny day.

I guess I'm just a Lego-purist at heart, I'm told that the quality of clone brands have improved a lot in recent years but I'd still rather have a genuine Lego part (even a customized one) than mixing in third party stuff. (Old biases die hard)

I'm pretty sure my journey started somewhere around here A Samsonite - Lego stocking stuffer Kit 363 with all of 38 pieces. From there I seem to recall getting a number of other Samsonite offerings through some sort of mail in promotion with Kraft Valveeta "cheese". It feels like that was half a century ago, oh wait... damn I'm old.

Sand red issues aside, have you considered milling a masonry pattern into 2x2 corner (2357) piece? Or adjacent faces of a 1x1 (3005) ? I could use a good end cap/corner exposed solution in about half a dozen different colors (tan, light bley, dark bley, sand green, dark red, etc) and the base stock are readily available.

The term "sponsored" can hide a multitude of sins, anything from early access to a set, to cash in exchange for reading scripted ad copy written by someone else. Personally, I couldn't care less if a company provided a free copy of something for review versus the reviewer spending their own money to go out and buy something. This strikes me as on par with press screenings of a movie (I'd worked a few of those decades ago), a studio rents a theatre, invites a bunch of reviewers in to see a movie, possibly handing out some promotional materials at the same time and it costs the reviewers nothing but their time. Moreover, the quality of the review doesn't impact who gets invited to the next screening. If TLG sent me a kit to review for free, I'd give it an honest review (within my own sets of priorities and biases) without worrying about whether saying something critical would blackball me from future "free" kits, and I'd publicly thank Lego for making the review copy available to me. I think nearly all the reviewers I follow are in that same boat. Is there a quid pro quo going on there? Well, yes and no, if I only have so much time to do reviews then by sending me a particular (free) kit, the company is sort of steering the narrative, say, getting me to "ooh" and "aah" over a free copy of the Botanical Gardens rather than gripe about how much the X Men Mansion cost me (personally) and pointing out that exterior lacks detail and looks a little "meh". Of course any review is advertising, and for the amount of effort that goes into making a review that people actually want to pay attention to, a lot of reviewers don't bother posting reviews for kits they don't (generally) like, so if a company can get reviewers to put sets in front of eyeballs, it's usually a good thing for the company's bottom line. I do think a reviewer should disclose if they got the item being reviewed for free or paid for it themselves, but getting a free copy isn't inherently disqualifying in my mind. Getting paid by a third party to create content that attracts views (either via explicit product placement or via injected ads) is also fair game so long as the cash isn't coming from the company whose product is being reviewed. Content creators invest their time and effort into making videos and blogs (making money for their host platforms) and deserve a piece of that action. In the early days of the web, I belonged to a Science Fiction forum that used to award cash prizes every week for the top ten most read posts; I used to make a couple hundred bucks a month just sharing my opinions on various topics. The people running the website never gave me editorial direction (they didn't even complain when I mocked some of their advertisers) my posts were generating traffic which was generating revenue for them, and they were just sharing the wealth because they knew that without users volunteering content, they'd have nothing. Getting compensated by a company for saying positive things about that company's products, however, is an entirely different kettle of fish. At that point you're only pretending to be a reviewer, you're a marketer. Marketers pretending to be reviewers are usually so disingenuous that they aren't fooling anybody; they don't even have to tell you that they're being paid. The moment they start glossing over obvious issues or give glowing reviews for a set no one else is bothering to even mention, it becomes obvious to anyone with a genuine passion for the hobby that they aren't on the level. It's just a matter of time before you realize that they aren't worth your time.

My family has a cleaning person who comes by about once every two weeks to help reset the household to a tolerable state of chaos (between pets, a young child and two parents with full time jobs, it can be hard to keep entropy in check without bringing in reinforcements periodically). The cleaning person knows that my home office / Lego room is a "no clean" zone. I deal with that space myself and she is not to enter. However, sometimes I display my MOCs in other areas of the house or in some cases even let my daughter play with them (with supervision - my daughter can do as she pleases with her collection but knows ask me before playing with my creations (just as I ask her permission before touching her MOCs)). SO I was very surprised when one of my MOCs disappeared from its display space in the living room. I was even more surprised to find about half of it mixed in with my daughter's parts bin. I questioned my daughter and she had no explanation; the MOC had disappeared on the day the cleaning person had been there so I asked her as well, she also claimed ignorance. So I checked the nanny cam footage to see if it had happened to catch anything and I find that the cleaning person's assistant had jostled the table. The MOC (a monster truck - mostly System, not Technic ) had rolled off the table and been reduced to its technic frame and a few bigger chunks (the parts I found in my daughter's bin) and several hundred smaller fragments. The cleaner then put the recognizable parts in my daughter's toy bin while the assistant swept up the loose pieces and threw them in the trash (probably over hundred dollars worth of parts). My gut reaction when I discovered this was to charge them for the parts and then fire them for lying about it, but my wife tells me I'm overreacting. Accidents happen (our marriage survived the utter destruction of the Death Star II and a smashed star destroyer (which was barely held together with magnetic train couplings in the first place) which she, herself had tried to blame on the cat). She says good help is hard to find and I should just let it go. I, however, can't help but think that yes, accidents do happen, but "good" help takes responsibilities for their actions, and doesn't try to frame a little girl for their own carelessness. I'm a bit torn, should I let to go? Should I confront the cleaner with the fact that I know what happened and that she lied? Should I risk my wife's wrath and be in the market for another cleaner (in fairness, other than this incident, she's very good at her job compared to others we've had; her assistant is more ... meh), Maybe I'm just older than dirt and getting crankier by the year, but it really bugs me that they tried to both cover up the accident and make it look like my daughter was to blame (the MOC was clearly not the work of a preschooler, so if you're going to sweep half the MOC into the trash, why salvage the other half and mix it in with my daughter's parts then claim complete ignorance of the whole affair? ) I'm sure I can't be the first person to get upset by a smashed model/MOC and a poorly executed cover-up. Would anyone care to share their experience?

This engine is absolutely beautiful; the attention to detail is very impressive work. Well done indeed.

I'm a Lego purist. I have a small collection of modern clone bricks that have snuck in with inherited collections from others (dark age salvage, attic clear-outs, etc), but I never deliberately buy them (or use them). When I pick up a cache of random bricks of questionable provenance, the first thing I do is filter out all the non-Lego.

The possibility of buying retired sets was tempting and a few of the other "selling points" sounded like they might have potential to be worthwhile, but there was nothing there that I'd be willing to pay for on a recurring basis (and given the amount I already spend on LEGO, that's saying something). A lot of the ideas were either things that we already get for free from third parties (inventory management (e.g brickset), alternate builds, "expert" tips, MOC showcases, etc.) and other things were features that, in the interests of a decent brand loyalty program, they should just be/once did/occasionally are doing as part of the free VIP program (early access, GWP, free shipping, etc.). Even where they cited potentially interesting bonuses (ordering retired sets, free gift with purchase with every purchase) recent experience with their notion of "VIP Rewards" makes me think the teaser would be more interesting than the actual implementation. I doubt they'd open up their entire back catalog, more likely, they'd offer a handful of highly popular kits from the recent past (that most die-hard fans already own) based on stats gathered by the service about where most subscribers interests lie. As for a "gift with every purchase" they never said it would be a free lego set with every purchase, just "a gift" I don't need/want posters, trading cards, mini-comic books, sticker sheets, discount coupons to LegoLand, wrapping paper, digital cheat codes or any of the other "clutter bling" TLG has sent me over the years as "gifts." Maybe I'm being cynical here, but I'm still jaded by their "upgrade" to the old VIP program and seriously question that this proposal would be any better. The proposed services also seem to want to cater to families with young kids (or maybe the survey engine just biased my questions because I told them I have one) but most of what they are offering for the younger audience is digital content (effectively, a slightly more interactive but ephemeral take on the old lego magazines they used to give out free subscriptions to in years past). After nearly two years of school closures, remote learning, zoom sessions, and situations where an iPad was the only available nanny when mom and dad have to be on a call, the _absolute last_ thing I want to do is have another reason to put my daughter (or myself for that matter) in front of a screen. If you cross everything off the list that is connected with digital content delivery (quizzes, videos, tutorials, building instructions, etc.) there isn't much of a program left. So, at least for me, as an AFOL, I wouldn't subscribe because I see little value in the offering and what is there, I fear they would implement poorly. As a former educator and current parent of a child who loves LEGO, I wouldn't subscribe because it's too biased in favor of digital content rather than physical building and in-person socialization. And FWIW, that's exactly what I told them on their survey.

I've been staring at computer screens professionally for over four decades now. Nothing sucks the joy out of an activity like needlessly putting a computer in the middle of it for me at this point (I don't even check in here as often as I used to...) Lego is my way of GETTING AWAY FROM computers. I'm physical bricks all the way. I also want printed instructions not digital ones and I've stopped buying Technic sets that require smart phone apps to control them. I'd rather have the limited options of a simple pullback motor than corrupt my lego experience with the presence of a phone or tablet in the mix. (The Hidden Side kits were at least interesting even if you ignored the app, but Control+ is a big step down from PowerFunctions as far as I'm concerned). I've used digital design software (and written some for that matter) and was a designer of an IDE for MindStorms programming, so I have a pretty good idea of what I'm "missing" by shunning the digital side of the hobby, but if you add it up, I've spent many unpleasant years of my life dealing with computers and they just aren't _fun_ anymore. Give me a bucket of physical bricks any day.

I've been at this long enough that I still recall how excited I was when they introduced things like tan and sand green. For the first decade of my Lego playing experience, I could count the number of colors in my collection in on my fingers with digits lefts over. Earth Blue and Dark (Brick) Red were fantastic additions in my mind. Finally, I could start drawing from a color palette that made me feel like an artist rather than an adult playing with kids toys (don't get me wrong, the classic red, blue, white, yellow, black, clear with green pre-fab trees were great, but the expanded, less in-your-face-Beyer-primary-color selection just opened up a new world where I didn't need to stretch my imagination to a land where bricks and coverts were the same shade of red and dessert sands could be mistaken for cheap mustard stains. I look at my daughter's collection (mostly drawn from Friends, Trolls and assorted Disney sets) and realize she has more color variety in her parts than I do, even though, by shear volume, I easily have her beat by over a million parts. On the downside, though, we really can't build anything of any real scale with a monochrome color palette in most of those wonderful colors. They are great for accents but many of them fall flat on the basic-brick-variety and volume scales. A Classic bin of exclusively contemporary colors in classic form factors (1x2's, 2x4's, etc) would help with this. The palette is broad enough now you could even give bins particular color themes "spring pastels", "special dark", "color explosion", etc. on the more AFOL side of things, I remember being enamored with the 21050 Lego Architecture Studio ( well, the concept and the parts, not so much the price). I wish they had taken the basic concept and turned it onto an "Adult Creator" bin under the guise of "architecture"; lower the price, sell the book separately (as, while I liked the book I don't need - or want to pay for - six copies of it) and just bundle up a large number of very useful parts in limited color options. The original 21050 was basically a box of white, just do the exact same thing for Tan, Light Bley, Dark Bley, Dark Red, Sand Green, Pale Yellow, Nugart, etc. (each color variety sold separately) as core "architecture" colors (say 1000 parts in commonly used, very versatile form factors) padded out with another couple hundred plates and tiles in accent colors (clear, trans-light blue, black, white, brown, green - the usual sort of things one might use for windows, water vegetation, etc). I think it would have been a nice way to buy a "buildable set" worth of a particular color without having it come off as a box of "random" parts. This might not be an effective way to market bulk buys of _every_ color in their (now extensive) palette (sorry fans of pink and pearlescent gold) but I could see it working for fans of Architecture and Modular Building style MOCs for some of the more "mainstream" colors.

I'm pretty much in the same boat here. I've been amassing parts for the better half of a century now. My BrickSet registry is always incomplete (I'm terrible about updating it) and I rarely bother registering duplicate copies there, but after decades of pick-a-brick cups, buying parts by the k-box, bulk bricklink buys, assimilating other's collections after they/their kids have lost interest in the hobby, and just generally scooping up targets of opportunity, I have no idea how much I have these days, let alone what the individual parts are. I've spent enough of my life just sorting parts, I think cataloging them all would push me over the edge (how many cheese wedges are there in a kilogram again??) plus, now I have a little one at home who routinely supplements her collection with parts "borrowed" from my own so even if I tried tracking everything, the complications caused by my beloved source of domestic entropy means any given part might well now be part of the furniture in her dolls' house or inside the vacuum cleaner, and not associated with any other Lego at all. I'm pretty organized about the stuff I use on a regular basis for MOCing, but I don't really "track" my consumption (other than thinking thinks like, "hmm, running low on white 1x4 tiles, better pick up a couple hundred to fill up this slot in the tray before I actually need them..." and add them to the "watch list" for my next trip to a pick-a-brick wall or brick-link surfing trip. As for the more esoteric stuff, I gave up keeping track of that a long time ago. I've got a pretty good memory so I'm usually pretty good at recalling the basic, "don't I have some of those?" sorts of questions, but the further removed any given part is from something I use in bulk in a color I favor, the more likely it is that I'll just order a new one off the web if I need one rather than spend a week trying to find it in my shoeboxes of one-offs and odd-balls.

Did you _have_ to point that out. I remember watching the original at a Drive-In Theatre... Oh, and I'm pretty tired of building X-wings at this point, same for snow speeders and AT-ATs. Been there, built that, stepped on a brick barefoot... (Maybe I should put that on a T-Shirt)

I'm not going to get too worked up about this at this point. I have baseplates that date back to the days when they were rectangular and had some of the studs painted white to show where the first tier of bricks was supposed to attach. Baseplates have been around for a long time and even if TLG stopped making them tomorrow, between existing stock and clone offerings, they're not going to become as rare as monorail track overnight. That said, I think it's entirely possible that TLG is just going to bring them in-house and continue to offer a "new" part with the existing form factor. They certainly have the resources to get into the thermoforming business if they chose to. This might also be their chance to do more with their soy plastics. If they are looking to "improve their numbers" from a ratio of ABS to "greener" plastics standpoint, baseplates would be a good way to up the amount of material used on the green side of the scale. Existing baseplates are already a bit flexible, so that's not an issue; there are no bottom connections so precision molding and design for clutch strength can focus entirely on the array of studs. The DOTS line has already flirted with alternate manufacturing techniques for stud arrays with their rubber wrist bands; it's not hard to imagine that someone at the TLG is at least considering a different way to make a baseplate out of a different material while keeping the same basic form-factor and functional tolerances (clutch strength, stiffness, durability, etc.) If they go with traditional plates (at full plate thickness), I could see a lot of Modular collectors getting very irate. (Imagine the shift to 8-wide for Speed Champions backlash on steroids...) Aside from the backwards incongruity (which, to be honest, wouldn't phase _ME_ much, I live in a neighborhood where the sidewalks are all different level and the roads are speckled with pothole patches so a slightly higher curb on my next modular would just be art imitating life), I concur with other here that they'd likely have to use four 16x16 plates and piece them together. The smaller plate solution could introduce weakness when moving models around (or constrain design to compensate for those seams. Given the occasional warping I've seen on some larger plates, I'm skeptical of TLG attempting to introduce a 32x32 ABS plate as a baseplate alternative. It feels like a large, but thin, form-factor compared to their typical injection molds and might even require different timing and/or post-processing to ensure that it cools flat without warping or cracking. And once it's in the field I'd worry about its brittleness and the risk of torquing or twisting the surface. Two plates thick with appropriate webbing and flanges on the underside, I could see; one plate thick with full anti-stud connectors across the entire bottom sounds problematic to me. Assembling a base out of smaller sections is probably the better idea. But as has been said before, this could be nothing more than a ploy to move production of an identical baseplate in-house. We just have to wait and see.