One can buy white only Lego bricks at bigger toy stores, such as Toys R’Us. In fact any colour. Unless, one would require white only Lego Technic bricks, I guess that would have to be a special order.

However, that is why most of the Lego robots I have seen (and built) are yellow and black & grey. Because most of the Lego Technic sets are yellow, and one needs the bricks with the holes.

At least that was the case when I was a teenager. Can’t see how things have changed though.

Is there any other thing about white Lego, besides the friendly look?



By the way, there is a guy who built a Difference Engine out of LEGO.

Ahh... just discovered that there where white Lego Mindstorm (NXT) set(s).



Mindstorm was long after my time.

they lack lego-ness.

Is this some kind of spoiler?

Maybe it's time for (spoilers) and (non-spoilers) versions of the Spook Country forum, like there were for PR.

Was considering to tag it spoiler when I opend it. But then, just like the GPS device thread, it is not really reviling anything of the plot itself.

Spoiler: Beside the title of the first chapter.

Should somebody post an answer that would reveal part of the story, I will mark it as spoiler. (By renaming the thread title.)

So far it is only a discussion about what is special about 'white lego'?
Basically, I was wondering, if it is a reference I wasn't getting.

You used to be able to order blocks direct from Lego (I've never seen blocks available in store by colour), but some colours were not available because they were "licensed" to particular sets i.e. Harry Potter.

Lego has changed a lot since I was a kid, not all for the better. In those days it would have been sacrilege to have so many specially shaped blocks rather than using skill and imagination.

I know. I look at all the kitstuff available these days and feel nothing. That isn't Lego. It's just a flag of convenience.

Now I have the book and I've read the first chapter heading I can see how much of a non-spoiler White Lego is

I suppose we are here because we somehow prefer this:



or even this:



to this:



And noticeable how only the official X-wing has mostly white pieces...

When I was deep into Lego (the seventies) you could get grey, green, blue and red assorted pieces. No whites back then.

I wasn't out looking for Lego recently. But I am certain that, at one stage, you could get single colour sets of basic bricks in bigger stores. Will keep my eyes open next time I am in one. (Probably before Christmas.)

I know what you are talking about it. All this franchise stuff seems plain wrong. All this special non-reusable bricks are not Lego that is just not the idea.

But then, even at the beginning, Lego Technic never had this simple feel to me. Lego Technic bricks always appeared to be designed for a specific purpose.

we had a big bin of lego, as big as we were, just loads and loads of bricks, different sizes, different shapes, but bricks. again that was the 70's. wasn't until we were older when they started to do the "set" pieces, the technic stuff.

my nephew has some kind of kid blox, brighly coloured, probably the equivalent of the lego-junior=duplo stuff. so he gets to do the traditional stuff of building huge towers with every block you can get hold of, whether its stable or not. but then he is only 3.

There is some kind of non-Lego system for Knights and Dragons that I see in the stores. I'm trying to recall the non-Lego building sytems that was around when I was a kid.

I gave all my Lego to my younger step-brother when I was about 11, although I probably have almost as much again now since I bought a lot of the Star Wars Lego when it came out.

I remember how it used to frustrate me that I never had enough bricks of one colour, so my walls were always patchworks. I even stole - well, "swapped" - a few from school to try and get enough grey and white ones for a Saturn V.

I remember building a Battlestar Galactica-esque spaceship out of the mostly puke yellow components of a large Lego castle set in younger days. Why isn't that fun now? That was tremendous fun back then.

As for the special qualities of white Lego, at least some of them are explained by a character. Chapter 13, p. 63 in the ARC.

And may I just say that goddamit, it's fun to have a new book to discuss.

quote:

Originally posted by Splitcoil:
As for the special qualities of white Lego, at least some of them are explained by a character. Chapter 13, p. 63 in the ARC.

I was opening the thread after reading chapter 13. The explanation wasn't very satisfying. And as it was a recurring 'pattern', it felt like there is more behind it.

I thought that there might be some robots made out of white lego in the real world, and tried to google them on the net. But couldn't really find anything. (Found the difference engine though.)

Maybe I am overanalysing and it is just what it is. Or maybe I am missing something. This thread was to figure that out.

I’m still waiting for the new book, but I remember references to boy-girl legos in the last one.

From my experience with lego:

You can bulk order general lego bricks from the mainstream sites. However, this is a relatively recent development - because money is made from buying in sets this fact is not publicized much. You can also bulk order less obvious bricks. The (fanatical) (and often better than LEGO designers) builder clubs that exist may have that link. It is not generally promoted to the public. Small specialized theme sets = more money made.

Different bricks cost different amounts to produce. Some of this has to do with volume of production, some of which has to do with the cost of materials and process needed to make different color and shape bricks. So the basic brick colors are cheaper to produce, while anything not basic is more expensive. There was a bucket of standard lego bricks containing one gold lego. It is not very often that they try this type of sales pitch - that one gold brick costs a lot to make and hurts profit. If you design, design with the cheaper bricks. Special bricks are by far the most expensive.

Profit is important because whatever greatness a lego brick has is also its weakness. They are near permanent. It is very difficult to break them. They last close to forever. So if you are making a living selling them, and people only have to buy them once, how then do you sell more? The general answer is licensing. You package the lego with someone else’s intellectual property.

Also the different age categories of the bricks have different design rules. Anything that takes away from the LEGO look (anything basically round) is discouraged, not allowed in almost all cases. You get more room to play with in Technic, but at least lip service is given. Ideally, lego bricks should not be specific in intention. Specific purposes in construction should be achieved by building. (NoReply, but I think Newromancer already understands all of this.) Technic moves away from this for older kids. Mindstorms, unfortunately, without its educational context, is a business dead end.

So back to licensing. Some may say licensing is an exercise to see which company screws the other - basically business. Companies like Disney have instituted mandatory language to be used to diminish this preconception. This language runs something along the line of partnership talk - we profit - you profit. Hold your breath.

The cricket - what the Disney park workers call management - is everywhere.

Specialty bricks are a no-no, with few exceptions. You really have to argue for them. Licensing relationships can sometimes get them through, but lego does not like it. I have a ‘molded’ Darth Vader ‘helmet’ for a Technic Vader. ‘Molded’ (rounded) is a big awful. Expensive beyond belief, and it hurts the lego distinctive look.

Lego relying on licensing kills its potential margin. Less is better. But without it, then what?

Take Star Wars. Lego is a privately owned company. George Lucas just happens to be a major shareholder of HASBRO. It doesn’t take a genius to see this is an odd sort of relationship. (Aside, Lucasfilm just exercised some warrants on HASBRO, driving sharply down the stock price, which was sky high on Transformers, before the recent small crash that’s happening.)

Much ado about nothing. Not sure if any of this adds anything to the conversation.

I am being automagically drawn to all this spooky action at a distance--

spoilers are like ... like the open window on the 113th floor.

But I refuse to read about white lego. I do.

Tomorrow with any luck I get my copy. So there.

Aha! Two or three pages in and I already know about the lego reference...

Douglas Coupland on White Lego:

"That same year, at Montreal’s Canadian Centre for Architecture, he created “Super City,” an exploration of the way children’s building kits have influenced modern architecture. The exhibition goes on tour this year. The artist’s catalogue that accompanied the show is vintage Coupland. An unlikely autobiography composed of short essays and text, it is filled with reminiscences from his Legoholic childhood and iconic images from the 1960s and 1970s—American interstate freeways as convoluted as a plate of spaghetti noodles, space needles, disaster films and the first image he ever remembers photocopying: a photo from Andy Warhol’s Exposures of Warhol and Catherine Deneuve eating at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center’s North Tower. A white Lego sculpture of a human skull has this caption: “I’ve always thought that Lego was the opposite of death. Everything in the Lego universe is perfect and crisp and anti-death. When I was young I always thought death wasn’t heaven or hell but simply a Lego building taken apart and tossed back into the whisky box and rattled around a bit.” And another statement that (like Holzer’s Truisms) seems like a truth that conceals a joke as its dagger: “I also think that the future is like white Lego. Clean. Plastic. Stainless.”"

http://www.canadianart.ca/articles/Articles_Details.cfm?Ref_num=480