I wish they'd get away from IP-based specialty bricks and go back to making really interesting and innovative general-purpose bricks in generic sets.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/13/167055503/why-legos-are-so-expensive-and-so-popular
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LEGO Americana Roadshow: Building Across America I just checked out this traveling exhibition from LEGO and was quite impressed. The scale ... -
Merry Christmas, everyone!
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When we let politics trump science, people are needlessly put in harm's way. http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/self-censoring-fears...
Agree completely Craig Froehle. I've tried to buy LEGO for kids this year for Christmas and all the stores have are those that belong to specific sets.
ReplyDeleteAnd seriously... I don't think those count. "Oh look! I made an X-wing" Yeah... with parts DESIGNED to look like an X-wing. You want to impress me? Do it with the generic blocks. Otherwise yawn.
I hate the silly lego sets they sell now. There is no imagination needed to follow the instructions given for the project and a lot of them are overly complicated, causing parents to build them for the kids.
ReplyDeleteHolly Estrada and you can't do anything else with them! Oh look. I made the same thing... again... because I just spent 70 bucks on it and by God I'm making it over and over again until I get my money's worth!
ReplyDeleteLEGO still sells bulk bricks. The problem is nobody buys them. The specialty stuff sells because kids can see exactly what they're going to build, and that's a big deal to visually oriented kids.
ReplyDeletebtw one of the reasons LEGO bricks are so expensive is they have really high-precision plastic injection molding dies. Back in the '70's their injection molding tech was better than medical-grade injection molding tech in the US.
ReplyDeleteLEGO = Plastic squares and rectangles that you can attach to each other, not those sets with Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings or whatever stuff kids like these days.
ReplyDeleteBack in my day...
ReplyDeleteWell, back in my day, I got a LEGO railroad kit in 1970 and a boat kit in 1973. The rails and wheels, and the boat sections and ballasts, were completely useless for anything other than building trains and boats. But boy I sure had fun with them...
ReplyDeleteLEGO IP-based sets: Another sign of the apocalypse.
ReplyDeleteNow in MY day (mid-60's) we thought getting wheels and a motor drive was pretty special. I built cranes. Lots of cranes for some reason.
They do have the generic blocks but sometimes they're hard to find. My older son loved/loves LEGOs as much as I did. He has several sets. After he'd build what it was supposed to be, he'd crash it and then "make it better" with his own design.
ReplyDeleteCraig Froehle: Back in my day... indeed. Generic LEGOs was all we had to play with.
ReplyDeleteWe also would take small scraps of wood from my dad's workshop combined it with some cut up soda cans and cut up plastic to create crude but fun space ships and airplanes. Thing definitely NOT compatible with LEGOs.
Jarrod King -- I have probably 20 Technics sets and use them on a weekly basis for mechanical prototyping. We even use them at work. They're astoundingly useful for modeling mechanisms before committing to rapid prototyping.
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