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Comment by 83457 | Hacker News Reader

There are two types of people in this world. Lego shelf and Lego bucket.

I bemoan having gone from being a bucket person, to shelf person, to not even playing with Legos anymore person. Adulthood kinda has a way of doing that.

My friend and I wanted to start a Beer, Brats, and Bricks night, but right when that was gonna materialize, the plague struct. I should hit them back up. I still have buckets on buckets.

Sounds like a great time! From the brats comment I’m guessing you’re in Wisconsin or may Chicago.

Upstate NY, like Albany ish. We have bratwurst here. Actually being at the nexus of historic Dutch, German, Polish, and Italian immigrant populations, we have quite the selection of tasty cured pork products.

Sindoni Italian sausage is world-class. Aldi has a good selection of brats. And my family is from Western NY so we get Salen's hotdogs occasionally. I forget the name but there's a really good kielbasa at the grocery too.

Wow, sounds awesome! I’m from Chicago and there’s a lot of similar stuff around here. Maxwell polish, brags beer with onions and mustard, Italian meats… I’m salivating! I haven’t really been to the eastern parts so I’m unaware of what it has to offer but from your description there’s a lot!

Keeping it on topic… when is Lego releasing a Chicago dog? :)

Brats being children or hotdog sausages [Bratwürste]? (Or brothers [in Anglicised Russian]?)

Either sounds good.

I meant sausages, but I guess both, it's a double entendre :p Grilling and also we would involve his young son who is a big Lego fanatic.

He doesn't get to sample the beer, of course.

And then there's closely related Venn diagram of any-color-will-work-lego-house people vs. single-color-walls people

EDIT: the current two child comments are of parts in that diagram, great. No judgement, I just wonder what type my son is going to be :-)

Haha, didn't even realize the second kind existed until I watched my wife build from the big bucket with my son, I was like "What is THIS?"

That's the core beauty of Lego, I think. There are so many meta games one can decide to play with a single bucket, and at least one caters to pretty much everyone under the sun.

And then you get amazing synergies when people who play differently combine their efforts.

Which is one of the reasons I'll admit I cried during the first Lego movie ending. They nailed that aspect.

Ok now I need to see that movie.

I saw it on a plane, and IMHO it was way better than it needed to be.

Tip: Just kind of relax into the goofiness and have fun, but make sure you watch the entire movie if you start

Saw the 1st Lego movie on a plane once, did not expect to tear up. Spaceship!

I never understood the any-color-will-work people. When you were a kid and were painting something, did you cover all surfaces do random blotches of color?

Bad analogy: If you dipped your brush in the pot and it came out a random one of a small selection of colours, would you wash it off until you got the "right" colour when the only requirement was to put paint on the paper?

Do you build with lego by picking random pieces and sticking them together? If you are choosing the next piece by shape, why not add color to the selection criteria?

Not random, but functional equivalence is fine.

I always cared about how it looked too.

I know! I remember as a child spending forever digging through the Lego pile looking for the right color. I had to reluctantly teach myself that it was okay to build with any color first and then go back and swap out with matching colors afterwards once I was happy with my design.

Think of it like dithering. Not all of us could afford full 24 bit color displays and had to make do with 256 or 16 colors or 8 colors instead. Sometimes the right color brick isn't there and it's better to have the odd colors spread throughout the whole thing than one brick that's off.

I lived near a Samsonite factory (they manufactured Lego in Canada) and my bricks were purchased in giant shopping bags. They were all seconds which means some parts had color problems, some were a bit melted, some were cracked, etc... Mostly they were fine and I had a lot of bricks.

I appreciate the construction process of an intricate shelf piece, but I wish I had the creativity of a bucketeer.

I think there's a reason bucketeers skew younger: imagination is replaced by knowledge as we age.

We look at a pile of bricks and see whatever it's supposed to be.

An 8 year old looks at it and sees whatever pops into their head.

There is a less common hybrid third type: design a model in bricklink studio then buy individual bricks to build it, then shelve it.

Do the "Lego bucket" people buy $500+ kits? Do the "Lego shelf" people ever disassemble the $500+ kits?

They'll be disassembled when they want to resell the kit.

If the 500+ price kit is a huge bucket of random pieces, then I guess the bucket people would. =)

> Do the "Lego shelf" people ever disassemble the $500+ kits?

I've turned into a Lego Shelf person. I like to buy the architecture kits. I put them on the shelf in my office, but every so often when I get frustrated and no one is watching I will take one and smash it to bits on the floor like a child. It's great because it lets me vent, and it gives my future self the gift of building a Lego set. Really, it's an act of self-care.

I disassemble some of mine. I'm a Lego shelf person because I actually like the intricate designs and attention to detail of modern Lego sets AND because I don't have enough free time to be a bucket person in a way that would be satisfying to me as an adult. I think I'm pass making approximate version of my ideas and using them as toys.

I've never sold a kit and I don't intend to ever do it.

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