Lego Ideas Typewriter
lego.com
lego.com
I don’t think I’m more at peace than the few times a year I sit down with a new LEGO kit and build it. It’s a delightfully enjoyable break from just about everything else that keeps my mind busy and is such a calming activity.
The Saturn V set is excellent, BTW.
The playing features are cool (several stages that can be separated and put back together), but way too fragile to actually have children play with it.
It's a very fine display model, though. I've put it on a bureau right when you enter my apartment.
The ISS is superb, too (and rather cheap), but the new Space Shuttle was where I eventually drew the line. My pocketbook is very thankful for that.
Used in box sells quite well - especially if you sell after they’ve gone from store shelves. eBay or BrickLink.
It’s actually not as bad as it seems especially if you have space to spread out and roughly sort while working (special memory works well).
When you assemble something like a working pneumatic articulated motorized digger, 99% made out of the same basic 200 interchangeable parts, it's incredible.
As far as I can tell, the model - which has a "LEGO first" - Black and red ink spool ribbon is a new fabric element. - and each key has a letter, and the carriage moves, etc ... doesn't actually type.
Good times.
I fail to understand the appeal of "adult non-toy" Lego sets like these, however. It's impossible to replicate real-world stuff at any serious level of detail (the smallest brick is far too large), as mechanical devices they are flimsy (no greasing, no bearings, clumsily-weighed movements), separate sets do not stand well next to one another due to different scales and wildly varying subject matters. I do know that it is fun to build a Technic race car with steering, suspension, differentials and pistons, but such model-like stuff doesn't bring much value, IMO.
The joy of Lego is taking generic bricks and figuring out how to represent the thing you want to build out of them. With pre-designed kits like this, many people find pleasure in seeing how the designer figured out how to use piece X to represent object Y, or used a particular building technique to create a particular effect. e.g. the Lego Empire State Building uses the generic grille to great effect to render the windows of the building, and generic yellow tiles to make convincing little taxis, and some neat building tricks to create the setbacks in the tower without making it look 'lego-like' (with abrupt, brick-size shifts).
People like different things for different reasons. Guitar Hero is not the same as playing a guitar, and comparing the two with the expectation that they will offer the same rewards will lead to disappointment. But, some people like both.
Instead, Legos is obviously fulfilling/creating a need.
There's certainly been a shift in marketing (e.g. Ninjago) but if you want the raw build your own experience it's still there, the offer has just expanded.
The result is smallish, expensive, huge-brick-count sets that're cramped (hard even for kid-hands to play in), hard to non-destructively add on to (you have to rip bricks off to find nubs to attach to, sometimes doing a lot of damage before you've got much useful nub-area exposed), and really hard to repair without the manual and a ton of time if part of it gets smashed.
Some of my older castle sets have a brick count similar to modern structures (again, ones aimed at kids, not architectural models or whatever) but are over twice the size and came with like a dozen minifies and horses. The per-piece price may not be much different on modern sets, but there's been some serious size deflation.
The new ones look better (I'm guessing they sell better, too, for that reason, especially to adults making the buying decisions). The old ones were much better LEGO.
The highly detailed sets really takes nothing away from those.
It is also my understanding that those free play sets sells well, so they really are complimentary.
I don't know when you were a kid, but when I was a kid Lego sets _were_ like jigsaw puzzles. Lots of big single-use pieces that were hard to adapt into something new.
Modern Lego sets may look like they can only go together one way, but they are made of a bunch of smaller general-purpose pieces. There is much more room for reusing those for your own creations than there used to be.
For kids they still have their regular simple or mildly complex sets, depending on age and franchise.
(You can't take that for granted, even the 700 Euro set #75252 comes with a sticker)
Part of is also that they did a study and realized that stickers piss kids off because they’re hard to apply correctly.
I had to decide between doing it myself and having it look like crap, or getting my parents to do it and feeling embarrassed that I didn't do it myself.
Supposedly the best way is to float them on with a bit of water and use a pin to arrange it before it dries.
Either way I really want one!
I don’t develop for iOS, so I’m speculating here, but could it be a URL handler for YouTube URLs exists and you don’t have the app it’s set to? (As in, iOS says YouTube urls get opened in the app, but you don’t have the app?)
https://hackaday.com/2017/12/12/connecting-cherry-mx-key-swi...
Is this popup a GDPR notice?
For anyone who doesn't see it: There's a giant blue box on the left that just says continue to lego.com, and then a giant yellow box on the right for going to their "Play Zone" for kids I guess.
Then in microscopic text underneath they only describe their cookie policy but say nothing about what you're agreeing to.
[EDIT] Okay, it seems there is a cookie-control thing underneath after you click. Only discovered it by meddling with the Inspector. But that whole first thing just really looks like a dark pattern.
The worst part is that this model-kit design style is spilling over and infecting their actual toy themes. It's harder for kids to repurpose a set that's built 40% out of small tiles and cheese wedges and little greebly bits.
e.g. https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/creative-building-bricks-...
It's a less than useful selection of pastel colors to really do anything with.
Even the varied array of "one-off" weirdly specific pieces always find an unexpected application in a pinch somewhere. I've been recently quite entertained by the creative work of a Dublin lego-er making pubs (with many many small 1x1 round pieces, and a selection of weird one-offs for signage/etc.) https://snapwidget.com/embed/927292
I think you're underestimating the percentage of bricks in modern sets that can be described like this. They're very hard to mash up (e.g. "I'm going to use these two castle sets to build a totally different GIANT castle!" or "Now this pirate base is an oceanographic research center!"), to add on to, and to repair if damaged. Plus they're just damn tiny for the part count.
They do sell the buckets still, which is always the retort to complaints about modern sets, but it makes me sad that the entire way I played with LEGO sets when I was growing up is nearly impossible with (most) modern sets (the ones intended for kids, I mean—I don't care if the ones plainly marketed to adults aren't good for those things, of course).
– https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/bricks-bricks-bricks-1071...
- spring actuated forklift loaders
- boat hulls that actually float in water
- airplane/helicopter rotors (incompatible with technics because they predate it)
There was a period in the late 90s/early aughts when Lego really went adrift with the single function pieces. I got my kids a Lego airplane set from that era that consists basically of plane parts. No matter what you do with those pieces they look like they're parts of an airplane. It's pretty sad.
Fortunately, Lego corrected course. They still make specialized pieces, particularly the minifigs. When you're working at that scale, nearly all the minifig tools are going to consist of a single piece. But most of the sets now consist of largely of pieces that are flexible enough to be assembled into anything. Sets from the Creator line come with a booklet to assemble whatever is on the box (eg. a robot or a dinosaur), but none of the pieces are so specialized that they can only be used for one thing.
There was a terrible period in the late 90s/early 2000s when they did make a bunch of really chunky large pieces that were impossible to do much with. Now the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, and designs are littered with a ridiculous number of miniscule pieces, which do little but bulk up the part count and add baroque detailing.
A terrible example of this style of design is the most recent X-Wing (https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/luke-skywalker-s-x-wing-f...). Clearly a model marketed at children. But the whole thing is incredibly fragile, made up of fiddly bits, with a couple spring-loaded shooter thingies tacked on to give it a modicum of play features. The entire segment aft of the cockpit is a complicated mass of technic beams and pins with a facade over the top, to make the wings fold open, except that the wings don't actually lock open. It looks really pretty, but as a Lego set, it's a big failure.
I like living in a society where playtime isn't just for kids!