Happy New Year

Nuclear Lego Man
Originally uploaded by bixentro

With the new year, I bought a #10193 Medieval Market Village... I haven't had time to put it together yet, but I'm looking forward to it... And from the time images of 2009 sets started to leak onto Eurobricks and Flickr, I'm really looking forward to this year's line up.

It feels like there's been a renaissance of sorts, that we've collectively have emerged from a dark age of product design & bad business decisions by the LEGO group. It seems like new life has been breathed back into themes like Town and Castle, we're seeing the resurrection of Pirate, and with the new year, there's rumors of a new Space line. I just got my new 2009 LEGO catalog; I'm seeing sets in it that I want to buy and build for the sake of the set & not buy because it sucks and I just want the parts -- this is saying something, I haven't felt this way about many sets in a long time.

I only have a few warnings/complaints for the LEGO group, but because the company is turning profitable, I don't see these things changing any time soon: (1) not everyone can afford $200+ sets; make more $3, $7, $12 sets; (2) stop producing sets that cater to the "collectors" market, then frown upon it when you see it's ugly side at LEGO conventions; by making these collector sets, you're feeding the monster; and finally, (3) don't make the mistake of treating all fans and collectors as being the same, we're not!

Anyway, here's to a new year! May this be a better year for you than last!

Happy Holidays

LEGO
Originally uploaded by postpac

It's Christmas Eve. Everyone should be opening the last of their advent calendars... I've been following and enjoying MisaQa's "Mythical Creatures" advent calendar... this is the third year I've followed MisaQa and look forward to it every year. And speaking of advent calendars, I saw on BrickSet's RSS feed today that there will be a #6299 Pirate Advent Calendar next year??? Let's just hope LEGO doesn't screw it up next year and not ship them to the US like they did with the #7979 Castle Advent Calendar! I bought my two and I'm jonesing for another one.

Was surfing around Flickr looking for something to blog about and stumbled across this Christmas LEGO display. I really wish I knew some of the history behind it -- I don't think I've seen anything on this scale in the US, except the there's a similar LEGO Santa at the Orlando LIC... And I'm starting to wonder what they'll do with the LEGO Santa after the holidays (put it in storage, ship it back to HQ, or something else).

Anyway, Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all!

Slowness with the Site

If you experience slowness with the BrickBuildr web-site, it might be due to Flickr having some technical difficulties. Within the last few weeks Flickr has lost a switch which prevented them from serving up pictures... and they seem to be having problems today as well. :)

Brickshelf RIP (2000-2007)

I've tried to resist jumping onto the bandwagon with this one... but I found this petition to be a little funny...

There seems to be a few different sides in reaction to Brickself going down: (a) those who feel entitled to knowing that BS was going down, (b) those wanting to help BS out (or buy it), (c) the clueless who doesn't understand how much effort goes into creating a site like BS and complain about it, (d) those who feel devastated that BS went down, (e) and those attacking Kevin personally. On one hand, it IS a blow to the LEGO community at large... but from what I understand, the images are not gone, but there is something in the works to preserve BS, so I expect to see a BS2 sometime soon... either the rights to BS will be bought and the web-site will be paid for somehow (either another volunteer or an business-smart group of investors); or another volunteer will fill in the the community gap.

But on the other hand, I really love Flickr and the tools/resources Flickr gives a person. Most people in Classic Space (and other fringe LEGO people) have moved to Flickr a long time ago, so it hasn't been that much of a blow. To be honest, I've stopped posting to BS over a year or more ago, in favor of posting to Flickr. I realized that not everyone got to see my pictures on a non-LEGO-community web-site, but I posted my Flickr gallery to LUGNET to get exposure. For awhile there, I favored my own image gallery -- I owned the images and it was easy to upload/maintain images on my own web-site -- but a few months back, I bought a Flickr Pro account, finding it worth the money.

The bottom line is that Brickshelf either needs to incorporate some of the features that Flickr does, otherwise not too many people will morn its passing.