the vynsane asylum

That will fit right in with my Classic Space stuff. Good stuff. Loved the review.

I'm all moved into my apartment and finally got my main LEGO sets together. 2 of my modulars moved rather unscathed (just minor parts fell off) but one (The Emporium) was obliterated. I'm quite sure they dropped the box and kicked it about. I practically had to reassemble the entire thing from scratch. I also put together the SSD. That one I transported myself since I didn't trust military movers with a 4 foot LEGO set. Now I've just gotta find somewhere for the regular SD.

HOWWWWDY HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO FELLAS!!!!!!!!!!

Put together LL918 and LL924 for my brother as they were his all those years ago. Cleaned off 25 years worth of grime but the UV damage couldn't be fixed. Only missing one landing strut from LL924 which is pretty good going as we've never been too careful with old Lego. My bro was brimming with boyhood glee when i handed them over. Currently piecing together 6930 Space supply station. So far One support stanchion is missing presumed broken and thrown away. One white 2x1 with classic space logo is being elusive and two 4x1 four tooth hinge plates are proving more than elusive. Everything else is grand.

Got my step neice coming over once the schools break for summer. She's going to help create order from the chaos that is my brick pile. I'm paying her with spare minifigs and those ugly vac molded baseplates that take up lots of space but prove to be useless.

Moved into this house over two years ago and only just getting round to sorting stuff out.

Liking the look of the new Arctic sub-theme. I approve of its orangeness. Ultra agents has some nice touches but as a theme it's not that hot. I do really like the series 12 collectible minifigures though. Space miner has an orange ray gun WOOHOO!

k. bai.

vynsane wrote:jargs, i still owe you a couple of spartan warriors, i've not forgotten.

I totally missed that post, yes you doooooo.

I read today that The LEGO Movie sequel will probably be Benny-centric. Wonder is this will herald more neo-classic space sets.

While building my brothers LL9 series ships I dug out all our old instruction booklets. Seems I had more space sets than I thought. Mostly Futuron. On the smaller set end of the range. I recall my brother being jealous of the snazzy looking spacesuits the Futuron guys had. Especially the black one. Still have him. There's even some gold paint on the torso emblem. 30 years old and still snazzy.

I was doodling some designs earlier and one was looking pretty fly but I couldn't help thinking it seemed a bit familiar. Turns out it was your modular passenger transporter 'Tortuga Moon' I had in my head, Vyn. I'm just going to stop trying to do something different to anyone else and just build whatever happens at my fingertips. I wish i had the sort of brain that can innovate but I'm just a 'throw bricks at each other until something pretty happens' sort of guy. Intuitive rather than analytical.

Got Lord Business in the mail yesterday. Frickin sweet! I'm disappointed in the piss poor printing on Ice cream Mike and Jo though. It's like Lego just showed the plastic the paint rather than actually applying it.

Jargo wrote:I totally missed that post, yes you doooooo.

and i've still yet to send them... i'm a bad person...

I read today that The LEGO Movie sequel will probably be Benny-centric. Wonder is this will herald more neo-classic space sets.

well, with the aliens from planet duplo and all, that makes sense. and would be totally awesome!

Seems I had more space sets than I thought. Mostly Futuron. On the smaller set end of the range. I recall my brother being jealous of the snazzy looking spacesuits the Futuron guys had. Especially the black one. Still have him. There's even some gold paint on the torso emblem. 30 years old and still snazzy.

Futuron was pretty awesome. i recall having one or two Futuron sets, but mainly my SPACE collection goes from early 80's through the original Space Police. the earliest set i recall having was 6842 "Small Space Shuttle Craft" which i'm amazed is from 1982. i know i had http://brickset.com/sets/6890-1/Cosmic- ... c Cruiser" and it was one of the first vintage sets i purchased after emerging from my dark ages. i had 6930 "Space Supply Station", and the mother of all Classic Space, 6985 "Cosmic Fleet Voyager"... god, that set blew my mind when i was a kid! i also had a whole slew of the smaller rovers and flyers.

when they decided to sub-theme SPACE, my brother and i usually got unified factions, so when they started Futuron and Blacktron, he got the former and i got the latter. then i got Space Police when he got more Futuron the next year. by 1990, i had kinda lost interest in LEGO so he got a bunch of M-Tron and i got... clothes? idk.

M-Tron was, to me, the last good-looking space theme, everything after until MAYBE Mars Mission looks like utter crap. i might have jumped for Mars Mission had i gotten into the hobby earlier than i did, but Space Police 3 was what really drew me back in, frankly, and i've since collected every single set from each subsequent Space sub-theme. but, yeah, man, looking back in the archives of the SPACE theme in Brickset, the shit between 1992 and 2008 is just... awful. even Blacktron II, just nowhere near the coolness factor of the first one.

meanwhile, this past monday, i received a preview copy of the next LEGO Ideas set, 21109 "Exo-Suit" to review for Toys N Bricks! it's really freakin' awesome, particularly the green spaceman and spacewoman!

I saw. You get to keep the set? I'm quite annoyed with Mark Stafford for saying it was a short production run. That's like a green light to scalpers. Instantly driving the secondary market price through the roof probably meaning lots of people who might have bought the set won't be able to afford it. Irresponsible behaviour and I expect better of a Lego employee. Which isn't me moaning because I won't get a copy but just a general moan because I'm against the whole idea of Investing / speculating on Lego and kids toys in general.

I registered at TnB yesterday as Blackorange. I probably won't post much but I was booted out of Eurobricks for being norty I've missed having a dedicated Lego forum to post in

I got Benny in the mail today. The faux scruffy torso print looks a lot better when it's not in a macro photo.

I think what let Blacktron II down is that it went from the dark mysterious look to a cartoony clone of the good guys. It was a huge misstep on Lego's part. I think they recognise that now but the company did have an 'if it's not broken don't fix it' attitude for decades. They still do to a degree. The company is so resistant to change. I guess it's because they still have people in top jobs who were there all those years ago and there's still a family run business ethos. It seems such a paradox that a company making a creative toy stifles it's own creativity. And has a rivalry with another toy company that isn't even a manufacturer of building bricks. Playmobil is a totally different toy experience but Lego have this whole copycat war going with them. Insanity.

Jargo wrote:I saw. You get to keep the set?

yep, mine to keep. i've reviewed 7 sets to date, starting with Parisian Restaurant back in november, then a few of the first-wave movie sets (Getaway Glider, Flying Flusher, Lord Business' Evil Lair) between february and march , Benny's Spaceship, Spaceship, SPACESHIP! in june, then Super Cycle Chase, one of the leftover first-wave sets that Ice (the admin) didn't have the time to review, in late june, and now Exo-Suit. all in all, it amounts to about $450 worth of sets.

sometime mid to late last year,Ice started getting preview/review sets offered from the LEGO CEE (Community Engagement & Events) Team and he's distributed them amongst the moderators and himself on an as-available basis, trying to keep it relatively even. it's not a rigidly structured rotation or anything, like "you get this because it's your turn" but we all try to keep it even.

I'm quite annoyed with Mark Stafford for saying it was a short production run. That's like a green light to scalpers. Instantly driving the secondary market price through the roof probably meaning lots of people who might have bought the set won't be able to afford it. Irresponsible behaviour and I expect better of a Lego employee. Which isn't me moaning because I won't get a copy but just a general moan because I'm against the whole idea of Investing / speculating on Lego and kids toys in general.

yeah, absolutely. with the debacle that was the Mars Rover Curiosity, i'm hoping they have a plan to continue production above the initial 10K allotment. i agree that it was irresponsible of Mark to discuss availability/production run, since it's not really the business unit he's in, but i really do appreciate all the insight he's provided into the development process of this set.

the one thing that sets this apart from Curiosity is that it will be available in LEGO Stores. Curiosity never made it there, was only available on the website, and even then only for a handful of days over the course of three months before it was retired. ridiculous.

it would be interesting to see what happens if they do produce more Exo-Suit sets after the first allotment is sold out - Mark said the green spacesuits were the result of the number of 'color changes' he had left, and that if he pressed the issue to produce the spacesuits in white it would have messed up other color changes he had already requested - the torso alone accounting for three changes (hands, arms, torso). the available pieces being made were black (which he said disappeared inside the rollcage), blue (too much like Benny), or green (because of ninja turtles), so green it was. but what happens if there are different colors being produced the next time they need to produce the set? could we end up with 21109a with white spacesuits? or red?

I registered at TnB yesterday as Blackorange. I probably won't post much but I was booted out of Eurobricks for being norty I've missed having a dedicated Lego forum to post in

oh, no. am i going to have to put on the daddypants over there now that you've already exposed yourself as a rabblerouser?

I got Benny in the mail today. The faux scruffy torso print looks a lot better when it's not in a macro photo.

agreed, the impression of wear looks better from a suitable distance. looks very speckled up-close.

I think what let Blacktron II down is that it went from the dark mysterious look to a cartoony clone of the good guys. It was a huge misstep on Lego's part.

and the fact that BLACKtron was wearing mostly WHITE. plus the black/trans-red/trans-yellow color scheme and the all-black spacesuit/helmet/visor aesthetic was like the product of Darth Vader being hired as a LEGO designer.

The company is so resistant to change. I guess it's because they still have people in top jobs who were there all those years ago and there's still a family run business ethos. It seems such a paradox that a company making a creative toy stifles it's own creativity.

ha! yeah, i guess they do stifle themselves a bit, though they're breaking out of that - particularly with Mixels (which are all incredibly awesome).

And has a rivalry with another toy company that isn't even a manufacturer of building bricks. Playmobil is a totally different toy experience but Lego have this whole copycat war going with them. Insanity.

i think that's due to playmobil being the only other game in town for so long on the stylized little plastic people market, and being a very European product/company. there's not as much playmobil over here.

I finally cleared room for the Star Destroyer (10030) and that thing is the most fragile pice of carp ever. I didn't realize it but it's so flimsily put together. They did the best they could and I can't see a much better way to keep the shape but I would break off 5 parts in just trying to put one back on.

Too bad this is a SDCC exclusive. (even if it looks a little small)

An image of the Green Lantern/Sinestro set featuring Batman (...? ) has emerged but it's so small it's not worth shitting on. Also a similarly miniscule image of the Smaug set from The Hobbit. I'm underwhelmed. Smaug has decent wings but I'm not going to pay £129 for a set to get a crappy dragon just for the wings. The best part in the Green Lantern set is the yellow cockpit bubble canopy which will come in handy for NeoBlacktron I suppose. Expect really shitty out of focus pictures to flood every website under the sun once SDCC gets going.

Man, it's like 25 degrees heat here. 2.30 am and hotter than all damn hell. I've never felt so overheated. So excuse my cynicism.

So SDCC revealed another Unikitty as a tease for the January wave of sets. This one is sitting and has two faces. one mildly unsettled and the other with tear filled eyes so that I guess means the submarine will be the big set. It is the one everyone has been disappointed they didn't get.
I could see the Copper chopper being another set and the Octan supply spaceship being another. apart from those i can't think of any other vehicles besides the small neoclassic spaceship from the Benny movie poster and the Old West escape pig drawn wagon. Everything else from the movie is either already a City set or stuff like Larry the Barista's coffee machine aircraft. If lego are going to keep putting out movie based sets to maintain interest until the sequel they'll have to start doing buildings and location themed sets. Emmets apartment or the Old West saloon etc.

The other new stuff like the Smaug Hobbit set has failed to grab me. It's nice enough with all the usual stuff going on but the colours are drab and Smaug is too small. I would have preferred more dragon and less Dwarf foundry.

The Batman and Green lantern stuff is indeed underwhelming. I think after 20 or so Batman variants enough is enough.

New Mixels were shown. They look much like all the other Mixels to me. Neat idea with the tiny ball joints and printed eyes but I think a big box of mixed parts as a one off set would have covered it. The fun part is creating hybrids or completely new ones yes? Seems counter intuitive to keep churning out more and more with instructions for combining them. Are kids really that lacking in imagination that they can't be creative at a basic level? To my mind, a box of useful parts with some photos of various mixels on the packaging for inspiration purposes is all anyone should need. Either I'm dog tired or too old or something because for the life of me I just don't get the thinking behind the Mixels theme. It all seems arse about face. (translation: back to front)

In other news, I started building a spaceship using only stuff from a box of unsorted parts. I thought it looked cool so took a couple of photos with my phone. Put the photos on my laptop and when I looked at them closely the spaceship just looked like a speed boat with wings. Highly disappointing. I won't be sharing those pics anywhere. The only part that looked half decent was the tail fin arrangement. So at some point I'll rebuild the ship and try again.

Also bought a second sparkly cloak and used the CMF graduate cloak as a template to give Prologue Vitruvius something approaching a screen accurate look. Somebody somewhere is going to nd up never having a coak for a Vitruvius but fuck it, mine looks cool. ha!

Walmart has the Spaceship from the Lego Movie for $80 (normally $100). It would be great if they brought back that style of set for even just a short run.

I bought the Parisian Restaurant modular set last week and put it together.
Anyone know when the next Modular set is coming out? Announced?