afol fun for everyone (as long as you're 18+ LOL)
I have been working on my holiday cards (late as usual — this is why they are more often than not digital cards rather than physical cards).
The miniature TV with the yule log video is from TinyCircuits.com (not an ad). I also did this as a brief video so folks can see that the TV was actually playing.
Opinion Piece. Just my own opinion is all.
Don’t get me wrong here, donating LEGO is a good thing. In fact, we have taken several generous donations at the Pagoda Brick Builders club and they are greatly appreciated. I just don’t know if I like the idea of LEGO spearheading this Replay program.
I really think people need to do a small amount of research and find someone in their local area to donate them to. There are plenty of after school programs, libraries, churches or even doctor’s offices that would take them. Just look for LEGO clubs in your area. Doing it locally helps reduce the amount of waste involved in shipping the parts out and them then shipping them back out to the final destination.
While Replay is a good alternative to simply dumping unwanted bricks at Goodwill (which should never be anyone’s go to solution), I feel your local community would be better served by doing that research and finding a place to take your bricks (or have someone come to you to pick them up).
Also the LEGO company’s involvement with Replay feels like a conflict of interest to me. They sold the product in the first place and now they are asking for it back. Questions get raised even more so now that they have purchased BrickLink, the number secondary market on the net to buy used parts and pieces.
All I ask is that you take some time and try and find a place in your local area that would be more than happy to use your unwanted bricks before you box them up and ship them off to LEGO.
Last month LEGO announced that they had purchased BrickLink, an AFOL community of buyers and sellers.
I had and still have MANY concerns about this. First look at their history of dropping support for something with a huge fan base. I am speaking of LEGO Digital Designer and to some extent ReBrick (which was a LEGO pinterest-like site for sharing MOCs you loved).
They still offer LDD but it is no longer supported (meaning it will soon no longer work on PCs as they evolve). ReBrick is completely gone. It was a great resource for sharing LEGO MOCs that you loved with fellow AFOLs and for keeping all your favorites in one place. I used my account on that site as a way to store ideas for future MOCs of my own. Then LEGO came in and changed the format, removed all the saved, or rebricked, posts and turned the site into a contest based one. Eventually, the moved the contests over to LEGO Ideas and killed ReBrick altogether.
Here’s hoping they continue to develop and support Studio and leave the Studio gallery alone. I am not holding my breath on that one though.
BrickLink is already seeing big changes and the sale isn’t even official yet. Anyone selling custom items had all those items removed from their stores over night. A new TOS was posted and you can’t even log into your account unless you agree to them. I highly recommend fulling reading all the text and not just blindly agreeing to the new TOS.
Terms of Service
Designer Terms of Service
Seller Terms of Service
Just don’t be shocked when you log in and are faced with this prompt…
