Lego is still Lego

So, @jeff on the Go Rig Or Go Home expressed the common "old man" complaint about the popular interlocking brick system "Lego." Yes, they still sell boxes of bricks. Hearing that part of the stream just now, I admit this post will loose a bit of bite, but I think there's still something more to say.

Naturally selling "Harry Potter" Lego is much more marketable then selling boxes of bricks. Something they've been selling for ages. So that's what gets talked about lately. And of course the adult collectors are going to be raving about the new expensive Millennium Falcon. The type of people that I'm sure dominate Jeff's social sphere. I'm not sure how many kids he knows.

Now I don't know too many kids, so maybe any parents out there can confirm my suspicions. When I was a kid these sets didn't say together very long. I lost pieces and maybe even the instructions. At some point it all just gets mixed in with the big bin of Lego. At that point all it's good for is building from my imagination. The same thing Jeff loved about Lego from when he was a kid.

The Lego movie is set in that great big mixed bin of Lego full of the old generic themes to all the modern licenced sets. It was great about celebrating all the ways to play with Lego. If you're awesomely creative, that's sweet! There's also nothing wrong if you only like to build the sets and stick to the instructions.

Lego, as a company has also been pretty rad about nurturing creativity over the years. Mindstorms introduced kids to programming. Cuusoo/ideas allows builders from the community to submit designs with the possibility of becoming packaged sets. And just look at all the things they are doing over on this page.

Also please, people, stop saying "Legos." It's like taking drill to my ears every time that word is said.

I'm going to leave with this picture I took last month at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition at the toy exhibit. Two friends and I were engrossed in making little star fighters, three 30+ dudes creating with these little plastic bricks. Please note, one friend smashed his ship before this picture was taken.

@tom_omb: I downloaded your image, tried to put it in without doing anything to it, upside down on my part as well. I flipped it over in MS Paint so that the actual image is upside down, tried uploading it, and it didn't flip over. Out of all the computer nonsense I've ever come across, this makes the least sense. How? How is it that Giantbomb flips a rightside up picture upside down when you're uploading it, but when you flip the source picture upside down and save it and then upload it, Giantbomb leaves it alone?@rorie, is there anyone who can answer this? Is there some kind of algorithm or something that tries to determine where the top of the picture is and, in this case, it's messing things up?

On topic, I need to see the Lego movie at some point, it's been on my list of things I need to watch for a while now. I haven't actually looked at actual Legos in a long time now, maybe a decade.

@justin258: Thanks for the effort. I'm just exhausted with dealing with it. My last topic, about the end of miiverse, was a nightmare.

I highly recommend the movie! Phil Lord and Chris Miller are simply my favorite film makers working today.

I just remember having to get a Technic set to build sweet Lego mechs properly (where the legs would remain in an upright position), but I know all the damn talented kids have done way crazier shit since.

I remember trying to buy a big thing of just "legos" a while back but I couldn't find any of it. I will have to look again.

You can still buy tubs of "generic" legos if you don't like the branding stuff (Heck you can order individual bricks from the Lego Store's website). They aren't cheap though and I wait for a sale when they are at least 10 cents per brick. There are "Educational" packs of legos on Amazon as well that you can get for dirt cheap when they go on sale as well.

I love the specialized sets cause I treat them like model kits and never mix the parts. But I have a separate tub of legos for creativity as well.

@justin258: @tom_omb: The image is displayed correctly if you click to open it in a separate window. I assume the photo was taken with a mobile camera that embedded some dumb metatag about what orientation the phone had, and the phone had recently been flipped but the UI/camera hadn't bothered to update that yet.

I know my phone can take upwards of 10 seconds before flipping the UI after turning the phone at times.

@dudeglove: Yeah, I heard there was a drop in sales lately. Shame people had to loose their jobs

I actually vastly prefer the Lego playsets, as opposed to just tubs of bricks. I find building shitty amateurish spaceships to be extremely unfulfilling. I like the structure. It's the same reason why I prefer Dragon Quest Builders to Minecraft. There's no satisfaction in knowing I've completed a goal because there's no finite end to that goal. It just keeps going and going.

In my adult life, this knack for completing jigsaw puzzles and instruction-based Lego sets has translated into a deep love for the process of building Ikea furniture. I'd say that's a pretty convenient side-effect, considering the course my life has taken.

I like both aspects of Lego. I have a bunch of random pieces, but honestly I'm just not very creative when it comes to the things and everything I try to "freehand" just ends up blocky and weird looking. Some of the sets though, the building techniques they use are so crazy inventive its actually more fun for me to see them come together than it ever would be for me to try to force everything together. The new Saturn V rocket is probably my favorite Lego set ever, and there is NO WAY IN HELL I would be able to come up with all of the intricate ways those things snap together to make a 4 foot tall, completely smooth rocket.

@elmorales94: @cornfed40

Yeah! It's rare that I sit down and get creative with Lego, but that day at the PNE was a blast. My mom still gets me Lego every Christmas. They are pricey and hard to justify buying for myself, so they make perfect Christmas gifts. It's become a Boxing week tradition to listen to the Game of the Year podcasts and build a big 'ol Lego set. I also have a Lego Christmas village.

I will never accept Legos as a legitimate pluralisation.

I have a ton of Lego from my childhood still, I loved building with them to death, and back then was right when they started to do branded stuff(I know for a fact I have most of the original line of Star Wars ones, including the original Millennium Falcon which looks primitive compared to any of the last few). For a while I did feel every time I saw Lego sets at the store I would see like 95% branded stuff, but looking at it now it seems like they actually hit a good balance. I don't pick them up really, maybe get a set once or twice a year, but they have a line that I really like called the Creator line. It's essentially just generic sets with instructions for 3 different builds with it, for example the one I have is a lakeside cabin with a couple different designs, and I've seen ones that were like an airplane/boat/car set too.

That Saturn V build was freaking amazing and there's no way most of us could even think about building something like that without plans. The interior structural design, the color coded connectors, the clips, you have to live, breath, and eat Lego to think of that. The old lego designs were really basic. Anyone with a bucket of parts could have made something very comparable to the early 2000's lego X-Wing. But the newest episode 7 X-Wing? Probably not so much.

As an adult, UCS models are built and stay built. Playset stuff gets built, broken down and put into a bin. One day, my kid will have that bin. Until then, if I want to "freehand" stuff, I have a huge assortment of pieces. But, outside of castles, cathedrals, and other buildings that sort of click in my head, trying to build frames to build elaborate space ships isn't something I can mentally do.

There are places like Bricklink where you can straight up get the pieces you need. A decade ago, I had the idea of building an obsidian castle supported by flying buttresses. The central tower was mostly glass pieces and I had translucent green and red 1x1 pieces to make a big rose. Spent like $200+ on those parts from Bricklink, but it was a bigger set than the two of the $100 sets put together...

Our campus librarians used to (Still do?) play an RPG where their DM builds the dungeon rooms out of lego. The heroes are lego. The monsters are lego. Movement is measured by the little round holes and even their character sheets are made out of lego. Brickquest, I think it's called?

I have so much Lego from the good old days.

Those things have always been a bit too expensive, and I can't really get into the whole thing were most of the sets are just sets of popular franchises. I feel it lost a bit of the magic when it isn't their own weird stuff they come up with. I get that this makes sense, but I can't help but feel 50% of their stuff is just star wars ships now.

@panfoot: Yes! I intended to collect every Star Wars set they released at the outset too, but that wave overtook me. The first gen Falcon was a let down, even at the time. The main body was made of giant unique plastic pieces! I still have a few custom Star Wars things I built at the time. My Falcon was junk, I think I fared a bit better with the AT ST, Blaster and Lightsaber.

@zelyre Maybe you had the talent and the pieces to build a gen 1 set, but my attempts don't come close. That Lego DnD campaign sounds rad though.

I built these each at least 15 years ago:

@cheappoison At the moment the biggest Lego marketing push is the original property, Ninjago. It's now a major motion picture! And I see a ton of City Lego from the good old days on store shelves. Bought a police set last year for my RCMP friend for Christmas.

@tom_omb said:

I'm going to leave with this picture I took last month at Vancouver's Pacific National Exhibition at the toy exhibit. Two friends and I were engrossed in making little star fighters, three 30+ dudes creating with these little plastic bricks. Please note, one friend smashed his ship before this picture was taken.

.... I don't know why it's up-side-down.... I give up trying to figure out this forum's image posting issues...

Did you take it with an older iPhone (you didn't so the apple part is wrong, your exif data says Samsung.)? Apple did a dumb and the volume button to take a picture has the aperture upside down, but instead of just legit flipping the picture they put a flag in the meta data that tells programs to flip it for them. So unless you remove the flag (which I'm not sure how to do) the picture will be the wrong way in places that don't support, but if you use paint or whatever and flip it the flag is there to still say flip it. The result is it will always be wrong on some viewing platforms.

As a result when I look a the full sized photo it is right side up, but the thumbnail is wrong.

Edit: I tried to remove the exif data and failed sorry mate.

Another edit: Did this work

+1 for the Saturn V build being amazing. There's no way in hell I could have figured out how to build something as internally secure as the inside of that rocket. Also on a side note, the customer service for Lego is fantastic. My Saturn V rocket was actually missing a piece (first time ever this has happened). The automated system for getting missing pieces is top notch. I actually fucked it up twice, first time I selected the wrong piece, second time forgot my apartment address, and they still sent me the missing piece the third time, no questions asked.

@slaegar: Awesome! Thanks. Edited the above post.

Anyone else decorate their house with LEGO sets for seasons?