David Gregory's Block Blog

I can no longer recall how many times I've been to a LEGO store, and I imagine most readers here are in the same situation.  Trips to a LEGO store can often be a similar experience.  With the possible exceptions of Friday Night Binge Events at Brickworld or Brickfair, I always buy some of the Pick-A-Brick (P.A.B.).  Being the frugal guy that I am, filling a P.A.B. cup almost always involves some careful stacking of the pieces so that I get the most bang for my buck.  If I'm at a store during normal hours, there are usually parents and kids who are packing cups too.  They might not have the same mindset to maximize the volume of the cup as I do, but they are basically doing the same thing as I am.  The funny thing is that when you're an adult with no kid, and you're diligently packing a P.A.B. cup, some people will observe this and think that it is work.  Now I know what you may be thinking; "Taking the time to properly pack pieces in a P.A.B. cup is work," but what I mean is that these people think I'm a LEGO store employee.

Looking back on the times that this has happened, I must admit that I must place part of the blame on myself.  I often wear some kind of LEGO T-shirt when I go to a LEGO store, and sometimes I'm even wearing a brick badge.  I can't be sure, but if I had to guess, I'd say that the shoppers who presume that I work there are the ones who aren't even peripheral LEGO fans.  They didn't come in to buy LEGO or even look at a particular set.  They're the people who act as if it's their first time to see a LEGO store, and they see it as sort of a novelty item.  When they see me packing a P.A.B. cup, they realize that I'm doing something with the pieces other than playing.  If I'm not playing, I must be working, and if I'm an adult, and I'm working in the LEGO store, then I must be an employee.

The assumption that I work at a LEGO store has never really led to trouble.  People just ask questions, and I always know the answers right off the top of my head.  "How much is that [Green Grocer] set?"  "$150" I say before a real store employee can say it.  "What's the most advanced type of set?"  "The Mindstorms sets involve building something with moving parts plus computer programming," I answer.

During this past Brickworld, I went to the Northbrook LEGO store during normal business hours while wearing my brick badge and my Brickworld coordinator shirt.  I had brought Kenton Little with me to Brickworld that year, and he was with me on the trip to Northbrook.  As we walked into the mall, I told him that I was sure someone would assume that I worked there because of my shirt and badge.  There were plenty of oblivious non-Brickworld people there, but no one asked me any questions or did anything to indicate that they thought I worked there.  (I must interject that I had to correct an employee who I overheard telling a customer that Duplo and LEGO System pieces weren't compatible.)  As we were walking away from the store I told Kenton that I was surprised that no one had assumed that I worked there.

It was about 6:30, so we decided to eat there at the Northbrook Mall before we headed back to the Westin.  We went to some Italian place, and I ordered a pepperoni stromboli.  (That stromboli is another story all its own...one that would clog your arteries just by listening to it.)  When my food was ready, I made my way to the cash register.  The lady there rand up what I had.  Then she looked at my shirt and brick badge and said, "Oh, you work at the LEGO store?  You get a mall discount."  She entered something in the register and the total was less than it had just been.  "YEAH!  I don't really work at the LEGO store, but I just got a discount!  SWEET!"  I didn't really yell that out loud, but I yelled it inside.  I had just been mistaken for a LEGO store employee, and the result was nothing but good.

When you attend a LEGO fan convention, they'll tell you to remember to wear your badge.  They usually mean just wear it to classes and things throughout the convention, but I always wear mine the whole time I'm awake.  I wear it when I go to eat, when I stop to get gas and anywhere else I go.  Sometimes I just forget that I still have it on.  When you wear your brick badge outside of a LEGO event, only some people will say or ask something about it, but everyone notices it.  Wear yours with pride.

The Harry Potter line was one of the more successful licensing deals that LEGO has made.  In fact, I think it's probably second only to Star Wars, as far as longevity of the line of sets made.  Sets from the Harry Potter story were considered wonderful to many fans of the books, movies or both.  Even those who were not Harry Potter fans, loved many of the sets for their great assortments of parts.  Whenever a set is licensed and depicts a scene from a movie, it's much more likely to get new parts (from new molds; not just new colors or new printings).  Think of some of the many new parts that have come about from the Harry Potter line: We got a mermaid tail that's compatible with any normal minifig torso.  The heads of soft plastic for Dobby and the Gringott's Bank goblins let us make unique looking monsters.  It was the Harry Potter sets that introduced the owl, the baby dragon, the Hungarian Horntail, the dog and the standing rat to LEGO's lineup of animals.  The range of new parts from Harry Potter sets spans from the troll to the "snitch" 1X1 gold round plate to the feathered wing.

I do not believe that any of the aforementioned parts, however, are the greatest contribution of new parts from the Harry Potter line.  In order to fully appreciate a line of new parts, one has to look at their impact on a wider scale.  New parts such as hippogryph bodies may be highly unique, used by many builders and fetch a premium price, but they may not have nearly as deep of an impact on the whole population of LEGO fandom as other types of parts.  For example, Castle people will definitely find a use for those hippogryphs, but they aren't going to be used by many Space, Military or Town builders.  But practically everyone uses minifigs.  And while those minifigs will have wildly different torsos and handheld items across the spectrum of themes, all of them that aren't wearing a hat or helmet will have some kind of hair on their heads.

Almost a decade has passed since the first Harry Potter sets came onto the market, and I believe that all the new minifig hair pieces that came with them are the greatest contribution of new parts from that line.  My estimation of "greatest" comes from comparing broadness of use in the LEGO fan community, variety of parts produced and versatility throughout themes.  Take a look at the whole gamut of minifig hair pieces.  There are 32 different pieces (34 if you count different printings).  7 of the 32 originated from Harry Potter minifigs.  I'd say that 7 out of the 32 minifig hair pieces ever made is quite a big chunk for one theme to claim.

One of the best things about the hair pieces from Harry Potter sets is that LEGO has continued to produce all of them, with the exception of the Hagrid hair/beard piece, beyond the original line and used them in other sets.  When these hair pieces are used in other sets, they are often made in other colors which adds to their usefulness.  When the Hermione hair and Dumbledore hair first came out, they were some of the most sought after pieces LEGO had ever made.  (Of course, when those two pieces were introduced in 2002, they were 2 out of 16 hair pieces instead of 2 out of 32 like they are now.)  In the years since, we've seen the brown Hermione hair made in black, orange, reddish brown and clay orange.  The long light gray Dumbledore hair has been made in light bluish gray, black, dark red and tan.

You might be thinking that minifig hair doesn't really have as much impact as I've been giving it credit for.  If so, I ask you to consider what I believe is the most important trait the a hair piece bestows on a minifig: character.  Practically any minifig wearing the long Dumbledore hair will take on an appearance of age and wisdom.  The Gilderoy Lockhart hair gives the impression of an absent-minded or charismatic personality when worn.  Both the Ron Weasley and Harry Potter hairs confer a sense of youth and energy.  It's the wide array of characters and personalities that new hair pieces add so much to.  When you try to convey the personality of a minifig with a hat or helmet, you're really letting observers see the minifig for its occupation or duty.  This type of perception can usually be achieved just the same by the minifig's surroundings.  To create a minifig who is judged solely by his own constituent parts, you need to use the right hair.  The hair that sits atop a minifig's head in conjunction with his face often shows his character more than his surroundings, torso, posture or what he's holding in his hand.

The Harry Potter storyline is full of different characters with vastly different personalities.  Depicting these characters as minifigs had to be what led to the production of so many new hair pieces.  Set designers know, just as we AFOL's do, that making a minifig with a specific look that matches its character requires specific hair.  Try swapping hair on some Harry Potter minifigs to see what an impact it makes.  Putting Professor Umbridge hair on Hermione changes her look entirely.  Likewise, putting Gilderoy's hair on Voldemort makes him look disgruntled in a comical sort of way instead of menacing.  Even swapping Ron and Harry's hair makes them look completely different.  It's this ability to "make" the minifig with the hair and also the LEGO-inherent ability to swap hair pieces to make minifigs with entirely different characters that makes the new hair pieces in the Harry Potter sets so important.

Therefore, due to outstanding variety, continued production and one of the greatest potentials for enhancing minifig character to date, I give KUDOS to whoever designed the new hair pieces of the Harry Potter line.  Those 7 hair pieces have had a profound effect on minifig style, and I foresee them being used heavily for many years to come.

Now if I could only get my own hair to stop falling out... 

I LOVE going to LEGO fan events.  I loved going to the 3 Brickfests I went to in Arlington.  I loved going to the 3 Brickworlds in Chicago that have happened so far, and plan on going to them far into the future.  I loved going to Brickfair for the first time this past summer out in Virginia.  As much as I'd love to see some kind of AFOL event/gathering somewhere really close, like Indianapolis, I still think any of the events I mentioned are worth the moderately long to very long drive (12+ hours) to get there.

Even though some of the LEGO fan events I've been to may seem to be far away from each other, they are all in the United States of America.  I'm sure you're aware of the many other LEGO festivals that go on overseas.  The vast majority of AFOL LEGO events that happen outside the U.S.A. are located in Europe.  In fact, there's an event called "Skærbæk" LEGO Fan Weekend that's coming up at the end of this month (September 25-27).  Skærbæk is a town in southern Denmark.  The LEGO Fan Weekend event is sometimes reffered to as "Skærbæk" since that's where they have it.

If you've never seen any photo galleries from a European LEGO convention, you really need to go find some to peruse.  (Those of you who already know how sweet European AFOL MOC layouts can be are probably going to take a quick look at a European LEGO convention gallery anyway after reading this.)  Since Skærbæk is in Denmark, and Denmark is the home of LEGO, you would expect this event to have a little extra zing or some kind of heightened atmosphere that sets it apart from other events.  LEGO Community Development and Byggepladen (the Danish LEGO fan group) will be working together on the event, so I imagine that it will be a sight to behold.

I don't plan on attending Skærbæk, but out of curiosity I took a look at the site's link on prices.  I didn't know if the "Prices" link would have information on registration fees, hotel costs or both.  It turns out that the pricing information on the site was all about hotel costs—and what a list it was!

The cottages that they have set up for people to stay at in Skærbæk sound quite nice.  (Each cottage has it's own kitchen.)  However, it worried me just a little when I saw that the hotel price "includes electricity."  I guess I never thought of a separate bill for the electricity you use while staying in a hotel room or cottage.  Fortunately for those staying in Skærbæk, the electricity is included.

The break in flat rate, streamlined charges doesn't stop there though.  Right under the nightly cottage rate it says, "Cleaning - If you do not wish to clean the cottage yourself - it can be bought for kr. 375,-"
Wow...   leaving these cottages is like leaving an apartment that you're not going to rent anymore.

The extra charges keep going.  Immediately after the cleaning fee, it says, "If you want to rent linen and towels, it is possible for kr. 75,- per. package."    Who brings their own towels to a hotel or cottage?!  Europeans do, it seems.  At least you can take your rented towel to the pool for free, since swimming in the pool is included in the price of the cottage.

I suppose I should now sit back and think of how grateful I should be for the economic simplicity of staying in a hotel in the U.S.A.  I should think about how I take for granted all those clean towels, toilet paper in the bathrooms, sheets that the housekeeping ladies wash for no extra fee, and hot water that I can take a shower with for the same price as if I'd used the cold water.  ...but I'm not.  The hotels in which I stay still make a profit when I stay there and use all the amenities.  If anyone reading this is a Danish hotel or cottage owner (Hey—it could happen!), then I urge you to consider using the charging methods of American hotels.  Include everything you have to offer, besides free alcohol, and just charge a flat nightly fee for it.  Sure, you may have to increase your rates to cover the costs of those perks, but your customers will appreciate the simplicity of an easy-to-calculate rate and the peace of mind that comes from not having to pack your own towels.  Trust me...it will work.

I have to admit though; the people in Skærbæk look like they'll be eating like kings.

When you subscribe to LEGO's Brickmaster Magazine, not only do you get a magazine that has more pages than the free version of the LEGO Club Magazine; you also get a small exclusive set every 2 months.  Some of the sets aren't that great, like

         and         

but sometimes there are pretty neat ones such as

                  and         

Today I was taking apart the first Brickmaster set I received when I originally subscribed.  The set is a little blue and black robot:

   Take a look at the inventory of this set.  (My apologies to those who did not go through the on-site Pick-A-Brick at Brickworld 2009, as this will not make much sense.)  See anything familiar?  Do you see several familiar pieces?

It makes you wonder.  Did LEGO have plans to make many more of these little robot sets, but never did?  Or did they tell some set designer, "Hey, you...yeah you.  Make something cool out of these pieces, but just these pieces," and then he had to had to come up with something decent using around 100 of the parts?  My guess is the second option.  It's just one of those little coincidences that makes you wonder.

On April 3rd I reached 400 feedback on Bricklink.  (100% positive, thank you very much! )  The "My Bricklink" page that I use when logged in shows my feedback score right above the date that I joined.  Even though I look at the page where this information is displayed all the time, I hardly ever pay attention to it.

When my feedback reached 400, I noticed it (something visually different about the two zeros I guess), and I happened to also look at my "Member since" date.  I joined on April 1, 2001.  There must be some kind of April Fool's joke to be made there somewhere, but I was more intrigued that I had just completed my 8th year on Bricklink.  You could say that I've averaged 50 feedback a year, or about 1 per week, but truthfully there are many more from the recent years than there are from the early years.

Do you remember the early years?  Were you a part of them?  Back in the Day, Bricklink started out as Brickbay.  Back in 2001 I was living in Oklahoma, and I had just joined the LEGO Users Group of Central Oklahoma (LUGCO).  Todd Trotter was the person who first told me about Brickbay.  After hearing about Brickbay at our LUG meeting, I went home and checked it out.  Brickbay was a fairly new site at the time, but to an online-LEGO-buying newbie like me, it seemed like there were plenty of stores with plenty of parts for sale.  I had used lego.com and ebay for buying LEGOs online, and now I had another option—an option where you could buy whatever quantity of whatever pieces you wanted.

Do you ever think what your LEGO hobby would be like if it wasn't for Bricklink?  I believe that if Brickbay had never started, we would have many more individual LEGO-part-selling sites like there used to be years ago (Guild of Bricksmiths, Baylit, Auctionbrick, etc.).  I also believe that LEGO projects requiring large amounts of a certain part would mean scouring ebay for weeks or months on end, hoping that some seller would happen to list what you needed.  Bricklink gives us a centralized resource for worldwide LEGO buying and selling that is unmatched.  Ebay and lego.com's Pick-A-Brick give you a lot to choose from, but the enormous variety of parts and colors that LEGO has produced is only matched by the large variety of shops and parts on Bricklink.

I don't see the Bricklink site fizzling out anytime soon, and I hope it never does.  I look forward to my next 8 years on Bricklink and my next 400 feedback.

How many of you know how many LEGOs you have?  Most AFOL's have some general idea of how many pieces they own, but it's often some figure that's appended with the phrase "give or take about 50,000."  If you have a LUGNET membership, you can enter the number of each LEGO set that you own.  The site will then generate a set list for you that gives quantities of every set you own, sets you want to buy and sets you want to sell.  (To see this list, use the URL http://guide.lugnet.com/set/mlist.cgi?m= and enter your LUGNET membership number at the end.)  At the bottom of the list, there is a sum of the total number of sets and the total number of pieces.

My current set list states my piece total as 229,533 pieces.

That probably seems like a lot, and you're right—I've been collecting LEGO sets since I was a kid, and I never had a Dark Age, so I have accumulated quite a large collection.  Sometimes the little devil on my shoulder even tells me that I have too many LEGOs, but I usually toss him in the trash and then listen to the little angel on my other shoulder who tells me that God wants me to have more LEGOs.

Back when LUGNET existed, but Bricklink and ebay did not, the LUGNET set list was a good way to see how many LEGOs you actually had.  Back then all my pieces were from sets I had bought, so I could look at that list's total to know the size of my collection.  However, there are a few flaws in the LUGNET set guide.  They're not really "flaws," but gaps in information.  For instance, LUGNET does not yet have the new mini Clone Turbo Tank that comes with the Brickmaster mailing.  That's 64 pieces that I have in a set that doesn't show up in my LUGNET set list.  The sets that are missing from the LUGNET set guide are few and far between, so those sets don't make much of a dent in my piece total.  BUT there are several sets in LUGNET's guide that don't have any entry for how many pieces they have.  For example the 320 BASIC Building Set has 71 pieces listed on the pictorial inventory on the box, but LUGNET doesn't have any piece count for the set, so even though this set shows up as one that I own, it adds a big fat 0 to my piece total.  The same lack of information holds true to sets 337, 385, 537 (all BASIC sets from the 80's), several 3 digit sets from the 70's, and even several sets from the 90's.  So my current LUGNET set list is actually showing a smaller number of pieces than what I own due to the lack of piece counts on several sets.  Still, this isn't that bad when I've broken the 200,000 piece mark.

Now I know what most of you must be thinking at this point: What about all the thousands of loose parts you've bought that weren't from sets?  That is a valid question indeed.  With the advent of loose part sales on the internet, my collection was blessed with a rich variety of whatever I could find and afford.  LUGCO member Todd Trotter first told me about Bricklink in 2000.  I began using ebay the same year.  Since then I've pretty much been on one long LEGO-buying binge.  Two of the three main sources for buying loose parts are internet sites: Bricklink and ebay.  The third source is the Pick-A-Brick at LEGO stores.  If I wanted a big raw number for my Bricklink purchases, I could download it.  (Did you know you can do that?  Go to the Bricklink Download page, and you can download info from your entire Bricklink buying history, including number of parts in orders, shipping costs, year totals, etc.)

Loose parts certainly pose a daunting barrier to knowing how many parts you own.  Luckily I began a system of keeping track of this way back when I started buying loose pieces.  I have an Excel spreadsheet for each category of piece.  Whenever I get an order from Bricklink or bring home a batch of non-set pieces from P.A.B. or wherever, I add the quantity of each piece to the Excel sheets.  This may seem like an overly complicated and unnecessary task, but I have found it to be very helpful when I need to know how many of a certain piece I have.  I have also become very efficient with my piece assimilation system over the years, so it doesn't take as long as you might think.

Now it would seem that I have a simple method for determining the total number of LEGOs that I own.  I take the piece total in my LUGNET set list and add it to whatever the total is from the Excel sheets of loose parts...after all, Excel can add up all those numbers automatically, right?  ...RIGHT?  Unfortunately the answer to that is NO.  A couple of years ago, I decided to add up all the parts in those Excel sheets to get a grand total of what I had.  Excel has a sum function where it will add up the numbers in a row or column or whatever.  My Excel sheets had the quantities in a single column, so I figured that it would be pretty easy to make the program show me a sum in the cell at the bottom of the column.  I found out how to use the sum function, and I thought all was going well.  I tried to use the sum function on my Tiles spreadsheet.  The total was way smaller than I thought it should have been.  I double checked the Excel sum by taking a calculator and manually adding the numbers in each cell of the column.  The real sum was about 1,200 more than what Excel was telling me.  Just to make sure I double checked the sum by adding it all up on the calculator again.  Excel was still wrong.

There are times when I REALLY hate computers.  This was one of them.  I found it hard to believe that a complex program such as Excel could not do such a simple task as adding numbers.  I went to the Microsoft Office site and downloaded the update they had for Office.  "Surely this 27 meg of updates will fix the problem," I thought.  I was wrong.  Excel still couldn't ad!  I tried other spreadsheets and found that a few more of them had the same problem.  At that point I gave up.  I wasn't going to take the time to use a calculator to add up every single number cell in every spreadsheet.

Last week I asked my sister if she could open up my Tiles spreadsheet on her computer.  I knew that she had a newer version of Office than I did, and I thought that her version might do the math right.  She said that she had the same number in the sum cell that I did, but it showed her these tiny triangles in the corner of some of the cells.  When she clicked on the triangle it told her that the cell should be converted to a number cell.  When she did that, the sum cell had THE CORRECT SUM!    This was very good news to me.

I have absolutely no idea why Excel would convert random cells in my spreadsheets into non-number cells.  (I'm talking seriously random; they weren't grouped together or anything.)  I went through each sheet and made sure that each cell with a number in it was viewed as a number cell, then I redid the sum cells at the bottom of each column.  It took a while, but I was finally able to get an accurate count of how many loose pieces I had.

I admit that I still have some work to do with this.  I haven't made sum cells for my spreadsheets of minifigs, nor have I made sums for parts that are made of multiple pieces, such as elephants.  I still have thousands of P.A.B. pieces laying around that I haven't assimilated into the collection yet, and a couple of tubs of other random parts that I don't have a spreadsheet for...but short by a few thousand pieces, I have:

Insert drumroll here

I've been telling people "about 350,000" when they ask me how many LEGOs I have, so I guess I was fairly close. 

I freely admit it: my life is FULL of LEGO.  My apartment, my web surfing, my thoughts—there's LEGO everywhere in my life.  However, just like any other LEGO Maniac, I can't spend 100% of my time with LEGOs.  I have to go to work, eat, watch movies, etc.  Yet there are some times when LEGO just seems to find its way to me, even when I'm not looking for it.

Today I was looking for maps of Indiana on the internet.  The sites that sell new maps are really expensive, so I started searching ebay.  Guess what I find on the first page of results for "Indiana map"?  LEGO!  The auction was for a minifig of Indiana Jones' dad holding a 2X2 printed map tile.   Even when rendered in ABS plastic the face of Henry Jones Senior stared at me with a look that said, "What were you thinking David?  Did you really believe that you could spend even a few moments of your time on the world wide web without running across some LEGOs?"

Point taken Dr. Jones Sr. ... point taken.

I love sets from the 80's.  I'm not alone, as many AFOL's consider the 1980's the middle of LEGO's "Golden Age."  Specifically I have a penchant for construction sets.  (Yes, yes—I realize that all LEGO sets are "construction" sets.  I mean the Town sets where there's some kind of heavy machinery, and the minifigs are construction workers.)

Just like any other set collector, I love to find sets that are still sealed in their box.  As you can imagine, sealed sets from the 80's fetch a premium price on ebay.  A couple of weeks ago I was browsing ebay and came across a sealed 6686 Backhoe set.  I knew that this set would go for at least $20.  It could very likely go up to $50, and if the right people happened to be searching ebay during the auction, then it might get into the $70 to $80 range.

I put the set on my watchlist so that I could see what the final price was.  After 18 bids that 7-day auction ended at $152.50!  I've been watching LEGO sets sell on ebay for enough years to know that a small set going for over $100 doesn't happen very often.  If the set had some exclusive minifig or part, that might explain it, but the 6686 Backhoe doesn't have any rare items.  Being sealed in the original box after 24 years definitely pushes up the price on a LEGO set, but $152.50 is just crazy.  Even if I won the lottery and had money to burn, I wouldn't pay that much for such a small set.

In the last couple of years, I've seen ebay auctions that made me think that all the rich people have bought what they want.  What I mean by that is that rich people who have enough money to buy whatever they want have completed their "vintage LEGO I want to buy" checklists, and therefore they're not out there making high dollar bids nearly as much as they used to.  The people out searching on ebay for vintage LEGO today are the ones who are still trying to complete their own LEGO collecting checklists because they've been outbid so many times over the years by those who had scads of cash.  The reason I thought this is that I'd seen several vintage LEGO auctions go for a lot less that what they would have gone for just a few years ago.

...and then I see something like this recent auction, and I realize that I have to rethink my whole ebay/LEGO/online-economics theory.

Some of you in IndyLUG may know that before I was a member of IndyLUG, I was a member of LUGCO (LEGO Users Group of Central Oklahoma).

Meeting with the members of LUGCO was my first experience with other AFOL's.  I had communicated plenty online with AFOL's, but looking at pictures and messages on the internet is much different than having an actual gathering of people who love LEGO.  At a LUG meeting you can talk face to face with others and look at their MOC's firsthand.  You can make friendships in a single afternoon that are stronger than ones you spent years building online.

LUGCO meetings were always fun and laid-back.  There was also little to no pressure in LUGCO to build layouts to a certain size or by a certain deadline, since we never did any shows.  That's right—we never did any shows, and we always had a blast.  In the beginning there were just 4 of us: Todd Trotter, Jon Palmer, Michael Daniel and me.  Michael and I both lived in Oklahoma City, Todd lived in Moore in the southern end of the OKC metro area, and Jon lived in Tulsa (so he had the longest drive; about 2 hours).  We met once a month and usually took turns meeting at either Michael or Todd's house.

Besides us "core 4", we had a few other guys who came to meetings once in a while.  One guy, who I believe was named Jeremy Sproat, came from northern Texas.  He said that the Texas LUG was in the southern half of the state, and since Texas was such a huge state, it was actually shorter for him to drive to our meetings in OKC.  There was also a guy named Drew who would show up once in a while with his teenage son.  There was one meeting where us 4 original members, plus Jeremy, Drew and his son were all there for a total of 7 people.  That was the most people we ever had at a meeting.

Michael had one room in his house that he devoted to his LEGO collection.  Two sides of the room had tables around the edge for his town.  (He was basically into just Town.)  We never had a set draft in LUGCO, but we did do a lot of trading.  There was one of our earlier meetings where Jon and Michael had each brought a tub of colors that they didn't use much and wanted to trade.  Michael had a bunch of brown and dark gray in his tub, and Jon had a bunch or white and yellow in his tub to trade.  Both of them looked through each other's tubs Ooohing and Aaahing at what they found.  After several trades, Jon said, "you just want to trade my whole tub for your whole tub?" to which Michael replied, "Sure."

Michael's city was something he kept displayed all the time and would add to as he built new MOC's.  That made it neat to see about every 2 months, because you could look for what had changed.  When I moved from Oklahoma City, I knew that I might never see any of those LUGCO guys again, which was a total bummer.  However, at Brickfest 2003 I saw Jon again.  I asked him about LUGCO, and he told me that he didn't live in Oklahoma anymore; he had moved out to the west coast.  He said that before he moved, LUGCO activity had died way down.  He had kept in touch a little with Todd, and knew that Todd had had second child with some pretty bad health problems, which had kept him from spending much time with LEGO.  With myself and Jon hundreds of miles away, and Todd busy with Life's Hurdles, that meant that the only active member of LUGCO left would be Michael...and you don't have much of a club with just 1 person.

Since I've lived in Indiana, I've often wondered if LUGCO revived in any way.  You can still see the website, although it hasn't been updated since 2002.  (Todd made and ran the website, so I assume he has a way to keep it online cheaply &/or wants it to remain accessible for archive type purposes.)

Today I was building a gazebo, and I needed several of those hinge plates that are 1X2 on each half in white.  I went to Bricklink and found the seller who had the quantity I needed at the cheapest price in the USA.  That seller was MWD Brick Bytes, and I saw that the seller was from Oklahoma.  I thought to myself that because of the initials "MWD," this seller might be Michael Daniel who I knew from when I was in LUGCO.  As I looked through the pieces in the store, they seemed to be mostly Town type things.  I also noticed the statement "This is all I have none in reserve." in the Splash page.  I clicked the "Newest" link in the store to see when the seller had added most of their items.  Sure enough, their entire inventory had just been added to their store throughout the month of March.

I realized that Michael had probably decided to get out of the LEGO hobby, and this was his way of selling his collection.  In my head I muttered the blog-title-inspiring statement, "Well that just sucks."  I understand when someone doesn't have time for LEGO.  Things like kids, poor health and school can put building on the back burner for months or even years.  But it really saddens me to see someone give up on LEGO entirely.  I've always seen LEGO as a lifelong hobby for those of us who are really into it—and Michael was one of those people.  I'm sure he spent plenty of time, energy and money on his LEGO like the rest of us do.

The email that Bricklink sends you when you order confirmed my suspicions; the seller is Michael Daniel.  I guess that without really knowing the specifics of what happened in the OKC LEGO scene after I had moved, I had always subconsciously assumed that Michael, Todd and any other AFOL else who happened to come along to the LUGCO area had been building away all these years.  Maybe they had been building less frequently or had decided to stop buying new stuff, but it had been a comforting thought to me that maybe, just maybe all those LUGCO members who I hadn't seen or heard from in so long still had an inextinguishable passion for LEGO.  Today I learned the sad bitter reality that what I had hoped in the back of my mind just wasn't true.

Michael, if you're reading this, I just want to let you know that I really enjoyed all the time I spent with you and the other LUGCO members.  I have no hard feelings toward you about getting out of the LEGO hobby, and I hope you can find something else that's just as enjoyable to take up all of your free time and empty your wallet...oh wait—you're already married.

Please read ONLY if you are prepared to delve very deep into the world of LEGO nerdiness.

So we're currently in the midst of preparing our D&D characters for Jeramy's upcoming D&D game.  Of course, being a LEGO club, we're using LEGO for not only our characters and their weapons and gear, but also all of the landscaping and buildings.  As if that wasn't nerdy enough, I decided to learn the runic alphabet that dwarves would use, since my D&D character is a dwarf.  While D&D dwarves are fictional, the runic alphabet is/was real.  It's called "Futhark," because that's what the first 6 letters in the runic alphabet spell:

The Futhark alphabet is what people from the Scandinavian region of Europe would've used to write with during the Middle Ages.  Enter the 1X2 printed tile from the 3rd edition of Hogwarts Castle:

I'm not sure why this tile that's printed with Futhark characters comes in a Harry Potter set instead of a Vikings set, but we can worry about that later.

You can see that the gold runes are characters from the Futhark alphabet.  Ever since I was a little kid, I thought that runic characters looked cool, hence it's no surprise that I liked this printed tile and put it on my Bricklink wanted list.  However, until recently I had never learned the runes' phonetic equivalents.

Today I was browsing a BL store and saw this tile.  I had seen pictures of this tile before, but today was the first time that I had seen it since my eyes had been opened.  The gold letters say "LEGO".  But wait—that's not all!  Do you see that there are also lines of tiny runes along the top and bottom of the tile?  They're quite small, but you can just make out that they say "Leg Godt" (Danish for "Play Well"; the words that Ole Christiansen contracted to form the word "LEGO") and "Play Well" (in english).  That is SOOOOO COOL!!!  Whoever worked at LEGO and was in charge of making this printed tile actually went to the trouble of translating LEGO's name and motto into Futhark runes.

If you're shaking your head right now and think it's ridiculous that I think this is totally sweet, then you're totally lame.  This is SO super cool, whether you think it is or not.

As you can see from the picture of the set, the skeleton appears to glow in the dark.  Then from the inset image in the lower right corner of the box, the buyer is shown that, yes, this Duplo skeleton does in fact glow in the dark.

However, when I opened my Duplo Pirate Treasure, the plastic that made up my skeleton looked stark white.  I let it absorb a decent amount of luminescence (That's a sciencey word for "light") and then took it in the bathroom where there are no windows and closed the door.  It didn't glow.  My Duplo skeleton was not emitting a single photon (Another sciencey word for particles of energy that make up light).  My skeleton looks just like the one on Bricklink:

The plastic is just the regular white without any of that yellowish tint that glow-in-the-dark stuff has.  I still like my Duplo skeleton, but I'd like him a whole lot more if he glowed in the dark like I was led to believe he did from the box art.

I'm sure that everyone here is familiar with being outbid on ebay.  Some person has the high bid, you're willing to pay more, you place your bid, the other dude's bid was higher than yours, so ebay tells you that you were outbid.  Pretty simple.

I just bid on a Bricklink auction for the first time.  It works pretty much the same as ebay's bidding.  However, the "You were outbid" message seems like quite a tongue-twister:

Outbid!

You were outbid by the current high bidder. The high bidder's proxy bid was higher than your bid which is now the current bid but the high bidder is still the high bidder. You may try again and bid higher.

If I didn't know that Bricklink was a legitimate buying/selling site, I would have thought that this message was some kind of joke.  I think that they ought to edit it down to just the word "Outbid!"

Well, now I'm off to bid some more on the Bricklink bidding to see if I can outbid the high bidders, and then I'll be the high bidder, because my high bids will be higher than the other high bidder's bids........ 

Well I have to say that I saw this one coming.  Just very recently LEGO S@H clearanced out many of their bulk piece packs/sets.  With the advent of online Pick-A-Brick through LEGO Factory, I can see why they would make the change.

If you've followed the patterns of the S@H catalogs, you will have noticed that the 2 pages of bulk piece sets that used to be in the catalog's centerfold have been missing for about 2 years now.  As more and more pieces became available individually online, the number of bulk piece sets that had unique pieces unavailable through LEGO Factory dropped until it was at zero.  As it stands now, just about any of the pieces that you used to be able to get in a bulk pack are now available online through the P.A.B.

This is good and bad at the same time.  The good part is that you can buy whatever quantity you want.  You can buy 1 black 2X2 brick, or you can buy 582 black 2X2 bricks.  The bad part is the price per piece.  You used to be able to buy set 3457 which contained 100 red 2X2 bricks for $7, making each brick 7¢.  A red 2X2 brick on the online P.A.B. is currently 11¢, which is a 57% jump from the per piece cost of the bulk pack set.  The old 1X2 Tan Bricks set was 100 pieces for $6 (6¢ per piece), and now a 1X2 tan brick costs 11¢ online (an 83% jump in price).

Don't get me wrong—I love LEGO Factory and its online P.A.B.  I've ordered from them several times already.  The reason I love the online P.A.B. is the variety of pieces.  The number of elements currently available online is far more than what it was through buying bulk packs.  Some of them can be expensive, but you can often find new or rare parts there that would cost you a lot more through Bricklink.  (Actually I prey upon the ignorant by filling my Bricklink store with rare parts from online P.A.B. at prices that are lower than other seller's, but still plenty profitable for me...but that's material for another blog post.)  The variety keeps getting better over time.  There are all kinds of bricks and plates in many colors, and several types of specialty pieces.  The only area that they're really lacking in is minifig parts and accessories, but they are getting better.

It's sort of sad to see the bulk packs go the way of the buffalo, but I have to admit that what we have now is better than what we had then.  The situation tugged at my heart strings a little last night when I saw so many bulk packs on clearance on S@H for 98¢ a piece (or 83¢ if you bought 15 or more).  Sure, I've seen bulk packs become discontinued and clearanced out before, but that was always to make way for new bulk packs.  As I viewed the list of packs last night, I knew that I'd be buying those bulk packs for the last time.  [and indeed that is the truth, for tody all of the clearance bulk packs on S@H are sold out.]  The remaining bulk brick packs will probably go on clearance soon.  (I'm actually kind of surprised that the 2X2 "Sand" Red slope pack isn't on clearance, since it's a discontinued color.)  If I ever need bulk pieces in the future, I'll have to go to LEGO's online P.A.B., a real LEGO store's P.A.B. or Bricklink.  Will single baseplates go to a P.A.B.-only status?  I doubt that they would, but only time will tell.

As far as buying individual LEGO pieces goes, we have entered a new era.  We've had plenty of time to adjust to the changes, because they've come gradually.  We had the bulk packs from S@H for decades.  Around the turn of the millennium, ebay caught on, and we had some LEGO brand stores open up, which would later carry Pick-A-Brick.  Of course, these two entities still overlap through the present.  Soon after ebay we got Brickbay (now Bricklink), and I don't see that going away anytime soon.  The newest cog in the machine is LEGO Factory.  I believe that LEGO Factory's uniqueness, global scope and the fact that it is a source of pieces straight from the source will keep it firmly in place as a major player in the individual piece market.

There are enough resources out there that I can live without the bulk pack sets.  I do wish that LEGO could continue to offer both bulk pack sets and online P.A.B., but I realized long ago that in the world of LEGO, I most certainly do not always get what I want.  Let's face it—the majority of the bulk packs were just plain bricks or plates in normal colors, and as large as my collection is, that's something that I've accumulated quite a healthy stock of.

Oh yeah...and if you wanted to buy any of those packs of 50 green 2X4 bricks for 98¢...sorry.

The preview pics for the Indiana Jones (IJ) minifig that I have seen are pretty cool.  As far as I know, I have only seen CG images; no actual photos of bona fide ABS figs.

Several sites have recently reported on the upcoming IJ LEGO video game that's going to come out.  With those announcements has come some more CG artwork of IJ.  Now I realize that since the game will be a LEGO IJ game, the characters have to look like LEGO minifigs as opposed to the real-life movie actors.  Their hands aren't going to have fingers, their feet are going to be squared protrusions from the bottoms of their legs, etc., etc.  However, I think that there are certain instances where the people doing the CG artwork should be allowed to take a little...shall we say "discreet" artistic license on the way they visually represent the LEGO character.

As we all know, a minifig's "legs" are made of 3 pieces: the hips/waist, the right leg and the left leg.  Each leg can move forward and back but not twist or bend at the knee.  Any CG LEGO character, however, will have a greater range of movement, since the animation will let them have human-type realistic joints that LEGO people don't.  For instance the CG IJ can stand where his legs are sort of spread apart in a way that a real person could stand, but a LEGO fig could not.

I don't want to be too specific, but I think that they could have done a better job of representing the "hip" piece of his body that his LEGO legs snap on to.  It wouldn't be so bad if he wasn't supposed to be wearing tan pants.  In fact, that part in question is a little more flesh colored than the tan pants on his legs...if he's even supposed to be wearing pants that is.

The image gets even more disturbing when you notice the sly grin on his face...and the fact that he's holding a whip.

Holy crap—I've really dragged my blog into the depths this time.

After two trips to Northbrook on Friday and one trip to Woodfield on Saturday, I had bought up quite a supply of LEGOs.  Some fellow IndyLUG guys asked me if I wanted to go to the Northbrook store again on Sunday, but I passed.  I knew, however, that the special Brickworld discount went through Monday.  I still hadn't used up all of my BW LEGO budget, and the only thing I had to do on Monday was drive home, so as soon as I left the Westin on Monday morning I headed for the LEGO stores.

My first stop was the Northbrook store.  There were a few Pick-A-Brick pieces there of which I wanted to get a few extra.  Both the LEGO store and the mall as a whole were delightfully quiet compared to my other times there.  (Of course, this was no surprise since it was a Monday morning.)  Luckily for me the store still had dark tan 4X8 plates, dark red 8X8 plates and dark red 8X2 slopes.  Besides 2 P.A.B. cups I bought some of the old mosaic bagsof 1X1 plates.  (The partial-set parts bags were buy-1-get-1-free for BW attendees.)

At this point, fitting purchases into my car wasn't too hard.  The items I had just acquired at Northbrook only filled one medium sized bag.  While the day was still young, I drove on to the Woodfield LEGO store where I planned to buy several sets.

Total for Northbrook, Monday morning: $42.85

The people traffic at the Woodfield Mall was also light.  I didn't see anything in the P.A.B. that interested me, but I did notice that they had the new Market Street set.  The fact that there were only a couple of mothers and a few kids meant that I had plenty of room to start A Stack.  Besides the obvious Market Street, I got LEGO City Harbor (which is spelled "Harbour" on the price tag and receipt but "Harbor" on the box itself), the newest Creator House and the Heavy Hauler truck.  It turns out that I was quite lucky on getting the Market Street set.  One of the employees said that they had just gotten them in that morning.

Those sets alone were quite a stack of boxes.  To top it off, I got a few more Final Joust sets, a couple Droid Battle Packs and a couple of the Build-your-own-minifigs.  Then I rooted around in the partial-set bags and found a couple of the old mosaic bags with all the black slopes and a couple of the Creator house bags that had lots of white 1X3 bricks and red 3X2 slopes (buy the black slope bags, get the Creator house bags free).

I had been wanting to get at least equal numbers of Storm Trooper Packs and Droid Battle Packs.  More Storm Troopers than droids would have also been good, because there are 7 droids in a pack and 4 troopers, so an even number of sets gives you uneven odds when you set them all up to kill each other.  As my luck would have it, I had been able to fins plenty of the droid packs but not as many trooper packs.  When I finally went to check out, I noticed a crushed Clone trooper box on the counter.  I asked the guy if it was for sale.  He said yes, and then said that he could give me an additional 10% off of it on top of my BW discount, since it was all smashed up.  Boy, twist my arm; I guess I'll take that crummy trooper pack for a scant $6.74.

Total for Woodfield, Monday morning: $269.00

Now I had a lot of MOC's in my car to start with.  Then there were all the LEGOs that I had bought Friday, Saturday and earlier that morning.  When I got my Woodfield haul out to the car, I wasn't sure exactly how I was going to fit it all in there and still see out the windows.  After some rearranging, jamming and tucking I was able to get everything in the car...but I was unable to see out of all the windows when in the driver's seat.  But who cares, right?  I could see out the windshield just fine, and that's what really counts.  At least I thought that vision was all that I should be concerned about.

The air conditioning in my car doesn't work, so as I'm driving home on the interstate, I have the windows partway down.  This usually isn't a big deal, but when you have stuff packed to the ceiling in plastic bags, it can be.  When I packed everything in, I had tucked the open tops of the LEGO bags under the boxes so that they wouldn't flap around.  I thought I had tucked sufficiently.  I was wrong.  About every 20 minutes at least 1 of the bags would work its way loose and start flapping the back of my head.  Well, I'd say it's about time to stop at one of those Oasises to get the LEGO cargo situated better and get a hot fudge sunday.  With the bags packed better and a belly full of ice cream, I was back on my way home.