The LUGlife - Where have I been?

Part of WisLUG's group display at Brickworld Chicago, 2014.

I started this blog almost two years ago as an outlet to write a little about my love of LEGO, but it recently fell to the wayside for several months because life got a little too busy to keep up with it and other responsibilities popped up. I'm easing myself back into blogging because I actually did enjoy writing about my AFOL experiences and I'm hoping to get back to a regular schedule.

During my hiatus, I was actually MORE involved with LEGO than I was before I went away. As I wrote about previously, I took over the administration of my LUG (LEGO User Group) about a year and a half ago. Since then, I have been actively trying to build the membership and the activities offered by the group, which has actually taken up a huge chunk of my time.

Between maintaining a main site, Facebook page, and trying to coordinate public displays, it's actually a fairly busy task. It's all paying off though. The LUG now has a core group of over 20 members who are pretty active, with another two dozen or so who are semi-present for our meetings or other events. I can only imagine that is going to grow as time goes by, as long as we keep up with our current efforts.

While reviews and random musings are fun to write, I'm actually hoping to shift the focus of the blog a little more towards my experiences running a LUG. Sound off in the comments if that interests you at all.

LEGO holiday gift guide - 2014 edition

It's that time of year again, where I share some of my picks for the best of what LEGO has to offer this holiday season. It's been a big year for LEGO collectors. I am hard pressed to recall a time when there were this many different sets and themes available on the market. In fact, there are so many products to choose from that my nearest LEGO Store can't even stock them all!

As with the past two years, I'm going to break this down into price ranges. This is mainly to help those who wander onto the blog figure out what's the best they can get for the money they plan to spend. Also, this is by no means a comprehensive list of what's out there right now. These are just some of my picks based on sets I've built, seen built, or read reviews on. They are what I would recommend to friends or family who ask "what LEGO set would you buy for so-and-so?"

Birds and Big Bang Theory pass LEGO Ideas review, fate of Doctor Who uncertain

After what feels like months of waiting, the LEGO Ideas team has finally revealed what the next two sets are going to be. You can watch the video below and then see my thoughts after the jump.

Doctor Who projects flood LEGO Cuusoo

It's been about a week since the LEGO Cuusoo team announced that previous licensing conflicts over Doctor Who based sets had been resolved, so they can now accept projects based on the property. As expected, it did not take very long at all for several proposal to make their way on to the site.

Doctor Who holds massive potential for LEGO to create a set with massive geek appeal. Rather than relying on a retro property, such as Back to the Future or Ghostbusters, you have the ability to release a set that's still very much a part of current popular geek culture, even if it is more than 50 years since the series started.

Let's take a look at some of the more popular projects that have shown up on Cuusoo and appear on track to hit the 10,000 votes needed for review.

LEGO CUUSOO Fall 2013 review results are in

The LEGO CUUSOO project has released the results of the latest review period, and fans of a certain movie should be rejoicing about right now. That's a pretty obvious hint...but watch the video anyway.


There were obviously many amazing projects this time around, but I'm not complaining at all about the decision the CUUSOO team made.

The Disney Princess, LEGO style

With a young daughter in the house, I am forced to admit that several of the more recent retail sets I have built are from the Friends theme. Introduced a few years ago, the line has become a favorite of my daughter and she frequently enjoys just looking at pictures of the sets online. Most of her collection is from polybags, although she did score the sweet Heartlake Pool for Christmas. Of course, I ended up building it, but she was quite happy with the finished product.

Now that LEGO has tested the waters a little with a girl-focused theme and had some success, they have moved on to a more licensed approach with the loved and hated mini-dolls. Hitting store shelves in 2014 is a line of Disney Princess inspired sets, complete with little versions of some of the franchise's most well-loved characters. LEGO and princesses is not exactly new of course. They have had DUPLO versions of the characters out there for a few years, and that line appears to be continuing. But moving them in to regular brick form greatly expands the audience and the final results look quite nice.

Let's take a look at the sets serving as the introduction to this line in their "big kid" brick form.

LEGO The Simpsons House revealed

The rumors have been going around for months. Images of the figures have been circulating on various forums for the past few weeks. Then, earlier this week, the first images of an actual set made its way on to EuroBricks. Finally, LEGO has confirmed that they are in fact doing a licensed theme featuring "The Simpsons," the gold standard of animated Sunday night programming for more than two decades.

I must say, I'm fairly impressed. Here is the press release, via Brickset.