danny316p

I voted for DUPLO. Those designs have been getting exciting lately, and no one pays attention because it's DUPLO. It's like how I tell most people about Bionicle things...

I'm pretty sure everyone really wants to hear about other companies that have the same licenses as LEGO first, but they're going to have to wait until I get around to that...

Before someone calls me out on it, yes, I know, there was a similar event for kids recently as well. It brings me great shame that I did not put this news post together in time to alert you all about it.

I don't think we should read anything into "retired product" references showing up in related entertainment. Remember, the LEGOLAND parks routinely sell kid-oriented rides slathered in logos and references from lines discontinued before today's kids were born. I've thought of using this for shock value on occasion - imagine running up to the LEGOLAND Florida Aquazone Wave Riders ride (opened in 2011) and seeing someone flip out about how "it took me so long to get here from 1995!"

 

Can someone get a picture of this?

I'm not sure if that's legal, man. You have to watch the movie to see it.

 

We could argue the point, but security at the movie theater won't want to hear about it. Don't risk it - it's not worth getting kicked out of the movie (or worse).

That said, my least favorite thing about the movie is how quickly the in-jokes fly by. I felt like we got far less of the brick-built world and LEGO references than we got of close-ups of animated faces.

Come see us! We're fun, really! Well, I'm not, but a few of my LEGO models are, anyway.

I'll post more about this event as it gets closer.

I think I saw a shoutout for Bionicle fans in the LEGO Batman Movie, but it went by so quickly that I'm not even sure I really saw it. Now that the movie is out, I think we can talk about references in it (please try to keep this spoiler-free, though).

The reference I think I saw is in the first few minutes of the movie. We're shown various scenery in Gotham, including a movie theater. A few movies are advertised here, including "Two Shades of Bley". I think I also saw something along the lines of "The Bionicle Movie" listed next to that.

Was that there? Was I imagining it? Was there another reference later on? Am I really too cheap to buy a ticket and watch it again? Would it be worth it just for this?

 

Re-scanning uses up your ability to scan more quickly than scanning new powers does.

I have unlimited scanning? Also http://www.spyrius.org/nexo/ has the level five QR coad you can scan.

 

You can only scan so much in a short period of time. You only really notice the limits if you scan a bunch back-to-back.

Maybe I'm a bad person, but all I see are 54200 and 3023 in 312 Medium Nougat.

...and then I look those up, and realize Assembly Square has already made one of those things not seem impossibly exciting. Ah, 2016, it was a different time...

I'm er

 

not really sure you thought through this headline lads

Are you bashing their headline-writing skills?

Got any tips? I've heard some recent rumblings about Merlin negatively changing up other LEGOLAND facilities, but I'd still classify that as rumor instead of news... 

Sounds like a fun app for younger kids and teens. I would consider getting it if I wasn't an adult already.

We know from other announcements that LEGO will be putting some "content" exclusively on the app.

There are, of course, obvious reasons why it's unfortunate that they'd put anything exclusively on a kid-oriented social network...but having yelled at a few LEGO employees about this already, I don't think they'll stop putting things in places where they will be lost or forgotten...

Relax, I haven't actually gotten in to report anything yet. At this rate, we might be able to say I report the "olds" instead of the "news"...

It wasn't LEGO Tetris after all? You've betrayed me, LEGO. I'm officially boycotting your products until you give into my unreasonable demands! You'd better take a picture because you won't be seeing this handsome face for a long time!

Ahem. The definitive satire here has already been written, back in 2003: http://news.lugnet.com/general/?n=43860

Re-scanning powers is silly - you can also master powers by using them in the game more often. Re-scanning uses up your ability to scan more quickly than scanning new powers does. You're better off trying to scan as many powers as possible, and then rotating in powers during gameplay to upgrade them.

The random shield packs seem to mix in a few powers that previously only existed as "exclusives" in various locations last year. I'm about 90% sure off the top of my head that Pinball Magician was a LEGOLAND exclusive, and that it now has a tile in the blind bags. It also happens to be a fairly strong power with a memorable animation (and a veiled reference to The Who).

join me in congratulating him on the promotion!

Does this promotion come with a raise? What's 15% more of zero, anyway?

Looking forward to the great articles you'll dig up for the community!

Is that what the shovel's for?

Thanks, everyone, it's good to know that you're not afraid that I'll be the next Nick Bluetooth. Presumably I'll be told how many snarky comments I can make before I actually get access to post to the front page. 

We might as well expect to see plenty of refugees that decide to migrate and and make accounts here if they don't like use applications.

Last I checked, a substantial amount of Android devices weren't properly supported by the LEGO Life App, so that won't be an option for many.

BZP continues to work fine on mobile, though. Now if only it rendered nicely in lynx...

I had the WeDo question myself. I'm having trouble finding details on what's under the hood, too...it looks like this fills some pretty obvious gaps in what LEGO offers already, though. They haven't had any retail offerings to go with WeDo 2.0 before, and they needed to find a cheaper/faster/simpler way of delivering Mindstorms features. This looks like it does all that and does it with some system and constraction ideas thrown in too.

...from what I've read so far, I think the "speakers" might only be the ones on your tablet already. Which might be fine - it's probably cheaper than figuring out a speaker size and/or including output jacks. I wonder what the "3D printer" model actually can do...

On the Mindstorms discussion, it's overwhelmingly obvious in the hobby robotics space that LEGO has both priced their way away from their competitors and moved too far away from what they initially offered. The RCX and NXT were small, essentially real-time devices with firmware. The EV3 takes a minute to load up a custom flavor of Linux. In the hobby robotics world, people use Arduino boards to meet one of those needs, and Raspberry Pi computer-on-a-boards for the other. While being able to boot up a server on a LEGO product is awesome in my book, it's probably way beyond the needs and desires of the typical robotics team or amateur wanting to tinker with robotics. This may have been a side effect of how much of LEGO's product offering's can be tied up in robotics kids, but to stay comparable to how newbies approach robotics today, LEGO would have had to make something like the NXT and something like the EV3 available at the same time. Kids these days think nothing of hacking up a project that uses both Arduinos (for handling motors, sensors, and real-time components) and Raspberry Pis (for communication, networking, and ease of use), but someone wanting a similar capability from LEGO will have to mix in a platform that isn't widely available anymore.

...and $30 will cover the cost of either platform (Arduino or Raspberry Pi). Sure, you'll pay more for "shields", "hats", motors, sensors, etc, but most of the time that will add up to less than the cost of an EV3. As it stands now, someone buying a new LEGO robotics set is essentially purchasing the convenience of having things ready out-of-the-box and being able to use it easily with other LEGO parts. Someone who doesn't need LEGO compatibility isn't going to go to LEGO for easy-to-use robotics anymore, even though they would have when the RCX came out. WeDo has only been released in the educational market, and has (so far) been rather limited when not attached to a PC. We are definitely due for a new robotics platform - probably something fairly low end to complement the EV3 (similar to how Spybotics, Cybermaster, the Scout, and the Microscout complemented the more high-powered RCX). Bonus points if they find a way to deliver a passable robotics kit for under $100.

Then again, they don't listen to me, so we could be barking up the wrong tree entirely.

As for the Bionicle G3 rumor - I highly doubt it. Lines don't get cut that suddenly without a good reason. An awesome new platform out of LEGO Futura could do that, but seems unlikely. A new licensed line that Bionicle would directly compete with is more likely - and that category could include arbitrary changes related to the Star Wars figure line.

Have you visited this page lately? http://www.bzpower.com/bzpstaff.php

For those of us who have seen the staff in person in recent years, it's a bit of a blast from the past. I don't think I'd seen that page before, but looking at it now, I'm thinking "wow, everybody looks so young here!"

Not that anyone's all that old now...but you know what I mean. Also, maybe there should be some newer photos on there...

I've actually been to an off-brand Lego store in Singapore which had undergone a huge makeover when I last visited (this past summer, as opposed to 2013 and 2012). A quick check reveals that, yeah, it did become an LCS. Interesting initiative; I can understand Lego's commitment to consistent branding, but at the same time is it a bit of overreach?

I feel like it's a healthy approach to handling the monobrand store phenomenon.

Overreach would be requiring them to sell to LEGO Brand Retail, or suing the stores to oblivion.

An interesting side topic would be the role of LEGO's independent toy store distribution arm in the US. A few AFOLs have launched stores of their own and wanted to carry LEGO products, but LEGO has turned them down. Company policy says that an AFOL-owned store that primarily sells LEGO shouldn't be allowed to get stock directly from LEGO, because that would compete with LEGO Brand Retail (yes, they actually say this, even in areas that are hours away from the nearest LEGO store). 

I'm not angry, I'm just disappointed. As someone who's been to the park lately, it's not very surprising - LLFL has long been excessively geared towards kids at the expense of other LEGO fans. The stores in the park have had Kidz Bop recordings in rotation for some time now. I remember being offended by a kid-unfriendly Justin Bieber hit during my last visit.

Have we had headlines for other recent change-ups in LEGOLAND Florida partnerships? There have been some big ones in the past year, such as Pepsi being replaced by Coca-Cola, and Cartoon Network ending their sponsorship of the park (they didn't renew it after the end of the Chima and Mixels cartoons).

Edited to reflect that I only know about sponsorships at the Florida park. For example, Coke was still a partner in California while Pepsi was a sponsor of the Florida park. That was why the two Miniland New York Times Square scenes didn't match when the Florida park opened (replacement billboards for gaps left by Cartoon Network and Pepsi had not been installed when I visited the park in November - when I asked a master model builder about it, I was told they'll be designing new ones on-site soon).

The LEGO community has changed in many ways since the early days of Brickshelf and Lugnet, but it still hasn't really embraced this kind of fandom culture. In fact, many LEGO fan gatherings like BrickFair have more in common with specialty hobbyist gatherings like model train shows and quilt shows than with more pop-culture-based fan conventions.

You're hitting on my earlier point - LEGO has more of a hobbyist community than a fandom. There's some overlap, but calling us a fandom misses the point in many ways. Heck, it's trivial to find AFOLs who call themselves "brick artists" and have little or no admiration for the LEGO company. The very term "AFOL" is a misnomer, since many builders aren't "fans" in any traditional sense.

 

 

Yes 200 posts a day is definitely dropped and very much a bad sign of activity and definitely not like a million times more than what we get at another website I frequent hahaha help

 

If you were replying to me, I wasn't saying 200 posts a day was terrible in itself, I just used it to show that activity could and did drop even when the board was active and not simply because it went offline for a while.

 

 

The board often struggles to get 100 (counted) posts a day now, judging by the "Today's Top Posters" percentages.

 

I did all I could, ever since it hit me in June 2013 that things were dying down. I guess I could have done more.

 

Forums in general seem to be doing less well these days. People with short attention spans flock to "social media" instead. Those websites (that care little for any community) are cannibalizing many websites that are actually useful.

It's bad enough that BZP's had downtimes and data loss over the years, but Facebook is basically a black hole and most "social" websites don't hesitate to completely delete things that people spent years putting online (MySpace being the worst example, but it's not like LEGO ReBrick did much better at respecting users' time and effort).

The Metru torso does have a gear-shaped indentation in there, as if they intended for us to be able to use it as a gearbox with that size of gear in that position. The axle holes around it, however, would normally prevent you from using that spot for a gear at all (unless it was still and purely decorative). This could be an artifact of how that part was designed, or maybe there's some complementary part I don't know about. This trick, however, makes it more useful as a gearbox in larger Technic creations. It also provides some cheap clutch functionality, since the antenna piece isn't a firm connection like an axle would have (although this would probably wear out the antenna eventually if too much torque were applied over time).

...admittedly, it's little useless if you actually want to build Toa, although I could imagine some weird side-kicking mechanism being built this way. 

Is there a smaller piece that has a ball like that antenna element?

I think I can help, but I'd have to pop open a few sets to do so. Still, it'd make sense to price these at less than the cost of shipping...

I think I'm in the right forum area...

I'm on an e-mail list for "Flash Deals" from Booster Bricks. Their deals aren't generally that good, but today's "Bionicle" parts by the pound deal isn't bad: 

https://go.boosterbricks.com/order-form-9-bionicle-pack

This probably ends sometime tonight (or when they sell out, whichever comes first).

I've never bought any real quantity of brick from these guys, so I don't have any advice regarding how the brick shows up...

Neither of these is a full-blown MOC, but I thought people here might find them interesting. We always need new uses for old Bionicle pieces.

First up, a way to drive a gear through an axle hole in a metru torso by using an antenna piece instead of a Technic axle:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31633743645/in/dateposted/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31633743135/in/dateposted/

Video: 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31596751296/in/dateposted/

Second, a way to make something that opens and closes in a synchronized manner built out of Bohrok levers:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31596761676/in/dateposted/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31633740975/in/dateposted/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31596760926/in/dateposted/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31633740035/in/dateposted/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31596760036/in/dateposted/

Video:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dp3/31487030892/in/dateposted/

I think the next step would be to make something pop out from between the levers once they're opened up - but they're up here now, so let me know what you'd do with these techniques!