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Lego To Produce Three Box Sets Featuring Female Scientists
vossman77 writes: 'According to the Chicago Tribune, "Lego will produce a limited-edition box set called Research Institute, featuring three female scientists in the act of learning more about our world and beyond." The concept received 10,000 supporters on the LEGO ideas site. Creator Ellen Kooijman writes in a blog post, "As a female scientist I had noticed two things about the available Lego sets: a skewed male/female minifigure ratio and a rather stereotypical representation of the available female figures. It seemed logical that I would suggest a small set of female mini-figures in interesting professions to make our Lego city communities more diverse." LEGO says, "The final design, pricing and availability are still being worked out, but it's on track to be released August 2014."'
hee hee hee
There have been at least four different Princess Leia Lego minifigs.
Four!
Will the Madame Curie set glow in the dark?
As I read the announcement, it is one set with three figures, not three box sets.
Star Wars, Lord of the rings and now this ? Cmon Lego, you can do better.
I heard these sets would cost 30% of the sets with male scientists.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
reflects the real world
Does it come with a Lego Dean who can pay them less and deny them tenure when they have children?
Reducing great women to objects! Mere playthings!
Two curved lines on the chest? Eyelashes?
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
Lego's aren't even Lego's anymore. When I was a kid, they required imagination.
kind of funny that slashdot accompanied this with a picture of a male scientist.
as a scientist we have more females here than males.
Why is it a limited edition?
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Talk about picking your "fights" from how simple they are rather than how important they are. What a great step towards equality...
Dying of radiation poisoning?
Time for the militant LGBT brigade to raise hell until they are represented as well.
Science Its a Girl Thing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
I eagerly await the future Lego bird-wildlife sets!
So my crocodiles can feed on something.
Well played.
Just imagine that the Lego world is filled with many, many women with butch features (and sometimes stubble). While the obviously and stereotypically female figures are actually men in drag fondling their inner maiden.
I came from the days before they made female looking faces with lipstick and long eyelashes. The basic emoticon-like smiley face could be male or female. The major identifier of gender was the hair. If you wanted a female police officer, take a male one and swap out the hair.
Or maybe you don't. Leave the hat on, and just SAY that is a female officer. What? Can't women wear hats? Gender was left to the kids' imaginations. And isn't fostering imagination what Lego's about?
The way I see it, this move kills creativity and entrenches the preconceptions of how a woman "should" look like more than it would encourage girls to be interested in science.
Take scientist body . . . add 10x lot of female hair: Female Scientist.
WTF?
I always thought lego characters were asexual.
So am I right, if it's bald it's male if it has hair it's female. How do they mate?
Lego had a factory in Conneticut, USA that employed hundreds of workers, then they shuttered it in the 2000's and relocated to Mexico. Funny thing is, they also jacked up the price of their toys A LOT. A mid-size Lego box is in the hundreds of dollars. They seem to be doing okay with a Lego movie and all those superhero Lego's. So Lego has more profit and all those American workers can go jump in the lake as far as Lego is concerned. Just think about what you are supporting. Just another business that could have afforded to stay in the USA. Now, if Lego were to give the Mexicans fair, living wages maybe I would support them. But really, Lego is just like any other business that manfactured/es there. I can pick up another toy, thank you.
"SO we bide our time, waiting for a purer kick to bloom and the future is still bleak, uncertain and beautiful" -GSYBE
you still have to use your imagination until they release their famous woman pornstar 3 pack
Based on my experience with Lego sets, the set will probably feature a lego shark in a cage with some kind of death ray looking thing pointed at it.
And with a more recent Lego shark, you can indeed put a frickin' laser on his head!
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
LIke when owning legos was about building some fantasy fortress (we were the forest and castle types) and playing with them.
Now it's just block you put together cool stuff with for kids who skipped shop class.
I found it interesting that for the URL for the article someone found it necessary to use the word "girl"
/www.chicagotribune.com/features/la-sci-sn-lego-girl-scientist-set-20140605,0,873917.story
Girl scientist...
The most impressive thing to me is that they haven't finalized the design, yet they can release them by August. That's quick turnaround!
Social Justice Warriors want to parade about the most trivial crap I tell you.
Most female characters are supporting roles - they are rarely heroes like Xena.
Kids want the hero action figure.
Now, why aren't there more female heroes is the question that should be asked.
This is the one I really want them to make.
Considering the major difference between a male or female minifig is the plastic hair gotta say, meh.
Also:
Tiny set of few pieces
Can't wear hats because of plastic hair
i didnt know doing the dishes was a fucking science
Some of the problem is projection.
The original Lego minifugure and a large portion of the current city lineup are androgynous. It's people assuming that unless they can see boobs or heavy makeup it must be male that accounts for most of the disparity.
Similarly, it's nearly impossible to make a "female minifigure" without resorting to exaggerated feminine features.
march, comrade, march towards the radiant socialist future!
Unfortunately, this is the only way to reconcile the existence of both sexes with political correctness. This is why it's so toxic to both.
Apparently I'm the only one who read Sex Bots.
But in Soviet Russia, you show your boobies to my momma
I can look at that two ways... I can watch TV and it requires no thought. Or I can choose specific interesting things on politics, nature, or other sciences, and actually think about it.
So LEGO sets come with instructions, and require little thought to put the sets together the way they've laid it out in the book. That doesn't differ from how it used to be. Oh, you used to be able to just buy buckets of bricks, though! Which, of course, you can still do. The imagination happened when you took those bricks, and you took those sets apart, and made what you wanted instead of what you were told you could make.
That's the same as it is today. Why don't you visit the ideas site (link in TFS) and see where people's imaginations take them. They're not all works of art by any stretch, but some of the sets offered there are phenomenal. Also take a look at ReBrickable for other models people have created.
It's true they make some simpler sets aimed at younger kids, things with big molded pieces that "real" LEGO enthusiasts hate, but that's not representative of all that's available.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
I heard this story on NPR yesterday and they said the idea came from a 7 year old Dutch girl who wrote LEGO a letter complaining about the lack of girl figurines doing the cools things the boys figures where doing.
Hey baby, get ready for this antenna!
Serious question - have you _TRIED_.
Me and my son have. We made all sorts of things. We had 2 sets - one had a beach buggy style car (with kick ass big wheels) - the other was a motorbike (with even bigger kick-ass wheels). We made a kick-ass Trike.
Yeah - we kick ass.
The way I remember it from 30 years back is I had only a small selection of things. Blocks, roof tiles, window frames, doors and some sort of fence. Fine if you want to make a house.
Now we do have an entirely pre-fabricated chassis and several pieces that make a bonnet. However, that bonnet piece can make a car roof, a lid for something (just attach a hinge) or even a breast plate for a monster robot.
If anything the curse of choice is rearing its confusing head!!
Not to mention the number of little coloured pieces and what have you - we even made a nice blue pond surrounded by all sorts of plants (actually the plants we made were originally supposed to be flames for a monster truck but made damn fine red-hot-pokers like plants).
I think the point is to use your imagination.
'nuff said.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Well, if I was Mr Lego, I'd be making them with a Lego cock that could be attached/detached as required.
I wonder if enough requests could influence Lego's decision?
Actually Lego had already licensed and sold SW products when they were going bankrupt. SW didn't save them from going under, reforming their business practices did. They cut costs by radically reducing their part pallet for example. But, you are completely right about the fact people will bitch about anything. Many people complain about the cost of Lego sets, but the price per brick has stayed at almost .10 since the 1970s.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
You are just....stupid. As an active member of the AFoL community, I suggest you go do a Google image search for 'Lego Convention' or something similar to see all the really amazing stuff you can build with all the 'useless' bricks they make these days before you say anything else on the topic that is just wrong. There is even a subset of the community that deliberately acquires highly specialized bricks to challenge themselves to find creative uses for said pieces.
If you cannot build new models out of modern Lego sets, it is because you have no imagination or creativity.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
When I was a kid, you simply replaced the hair to make a male figure female. It worked fine for figures with fairly generic clothes (as a scientist would have).
I don't recall sets being a big thing either. Then again, that may be because my family always treated LEGO as a creative building toy rather than models.
If you'll look, you'll notice that you didn't really say anything worse than the AC you responded to. You, however, are sitting at -1 Troll while said AC hasn't even been modded. Next time post actual troll posts as AC. Your karma will thank you for it.
An attempt from Logo to try to get mentioned on IFLS ?
Also, you can totally take LEGO figurine apart and reassemble them with a female head on a doctor body...
We have apparently arrived at a point in time where people think that a bunch of colored plastic bricks can override "millions of year of evolution" or "God's design" (pick your preference - they both fit here) and counteract the basic built-in instinctive behaviours of little girls and little boys. Next up: Einstein Lego characters to eliminate stupidity, Ghandi and MLK Lego characters to eliminate violence, a Lego Picasso to "awaken the artist in every child", etc.
This air-headed idea that we can change people and "make them better" through various symbolic gestures (rather than things like SERIOUS education efforts) and that innate human tendencies are actually so tenuous that they can be overridden this easily will lead down a path of mind-blowingly stupid, feckless, ineffective policies. Perhaps the "housing crisis" can be addressed with "Lincoln Logs" and we can address all the problems at NASA with some "Matt Mason" toys...
Tomorrow travesty, transexual, black, chinese, and retarded. The possibilities....
With lego you can create your own minifigs. Females, males, aliens, hybrids...
(No kid I know uses the official "box instructions" for more than 10 minutes before breaking things up and creating something new.)
Let me dumb it down for you - when I was a kid we didn't need instructions with our Legos