I myself have tried many of the non-Lego lego sets over the years. One that has been holding my attention recently has been Lumibricks, which integrates lights into the sets, and is also cheaper than official Lego sets for similar part counts. One of the big things I've found is that where Lego wins a lot of points is on their instructions and build steps. Many other companies either make their instructions hard to read or parse, or don't do a good job with progressively building up subassemblies so they don't collapse in your hands. But there are some Chinese companies that are now making the entire experience a similar quality level as Lego does. A lot of the 'knockoffs' also focus more on the visual of the model rather than the play. Lego itself is often willing to sacrifice some realism to make sets be more playable, much to the chagrin of some fans.

Lego used to have a huge moat in manufacturing. They made good molds, they perfected the processes for making pieces (barring a few problematic colours....cough brown and dark red) and they invested heavily into clear design targeted towards accomplishing a certain level of play and excitement from those buying and building the Lego sets. Now though, those things are not a moat, they're just basic table stakes, and there are a lot of other new players entering the market who are doing just as good. I've seen multiple stages of Lego's evolution over my life, and I think they're going to need to come up with something new that's not just a silly expensive noise/light brick to continue to command the price premium that they do. Sure, their IP deals will probably float them for a while, but without bringing something new to the recipe, they might slowly start to go the way of jello deserts.

> The LED string was ~$60 and it was a silly amount of work but I have it sitting over my left shoulder during conference calls and people ask about it constantly so it was fun.

My first experiment with adding lights was to the Technic Porsche set, and interestingly, in meetings it doesn't get blurred as much as the rest of the background (probably due to the lights I put in it) so I often get asked about it as well.

Thanks for sharing!

Could they make a bigger version of this set that is more closely resembling the real thing? More than likely, yeah they can; look at the displays they have at Legoland. But would that more detailed version be accessible for even the well off AFOL? Most likely not. It'd be too big, too expensive, and too unwieldy, and will probably still fail to capture some of the details of the real thing.

Back in the aughts, they redid their philosophy of having large single-purpose pieces and went to having those large pieces be replaced by subassemblies of much smaller pieces that were much more general purpose. That's when SNOT became huge in Lego's official sets.

As someone with multiple decades of experience with Lego, things now are much much better than they were back in the 90's and early aughts specifically because of this pivot that Lego did. There is something to be said about part count inflation, and how many of the parts nowadays are tiny little pieces rather than the big 2x2 or 2x4 bricks. And also, some sets and some themes do require their unique pieces. Friends has their little minifigures that are different from the standard minifigs. The Mario sets might need to have some specific pieces -- there's no standard 'mario mustache' tile. But overall, Lego has done a pretty incredible job of increasing the utility and decreasing the single-use aspect of many pieces.

So I kinda wonder, what is the scaling like if you account for the actual build phases. How many pieces would you have to do on each of those 200 days to match the real-life progress of the basilica.

Bricklink has a wonderful feature that you can take a set and then part it out into a wanted list, and then search seller inventory to find those parts. That's how I built that giant Imperial Star Destroyer set from the aughts for a little over $200 instead of the like $1000 that used copies of the set were going for at that time (it's probably even more now.)

Just for funsies, I looked it up, and you can get the whole 21050 set for about $150 now on bricklink, which is a pretty good $/psc price. Considering what the set is, and the lack of stickers, means it should be easy to wash a used set to get all the pieces nice and clean; a laundry bra bag with a fine mesh works great for this.

I find it particularly endearing how a single system of toys can provide decades of experiences to a single human. I don't think I've ever encountered another toy that is like that on such a massive scale. Yes there's other construction toys out there that strive to do the same, Knex was another one that I was into for a while, but there's nothing that quite scratches that same itch that Lego does.

These days I much prefer the large Technic theme sets because they are not so repetitive and require a deeper immersion to actually complete; harder to just space out while building the set. Certainly more meditative for me.

All that is to say that if you're going to consider this set, be aware that the build experience might not be the level of fun that the part count seems to indicate.

Would I love to see CHP or OHP fine every left lane trucker in the 'no trucks in left lane' zones? Hell yes, but until that happens, I understand the trucker behaviour.

And in inclement conditions, it can make the difference between losing control of your vehicle or not. When you brake, you decrease your steering ability in most cars. Fine when its calm and sunny in CA, not so much when it's icing over near Ashland OR on the pass.

When flows merge, there's turbulence. There's less turbulence if the flows are more closely matched, including speed.

So for the love of gods, if you're merging, even if you signal, match speeds for merging. If you're too slow to match speed, then suck it up buttercup, and hang out in the right lane until there's an opening.

There are plenty of ramps on I5 and 205 that I merge to the left for because I know they will spill into the right and (when it exists) middle lanes. Because of how traffic also reacts to brake lights (some people brake too hard even when they have sufficient distance to let off the gas and coast to a slower speed) it seems like it ends up making my experience through those stretches a bit better.

Ultimately, any individual behaviour is largely irrelevant, it's what the whole mass of cars moving along does that affects things the most. Often you don't want to be the (significantly) odd one out regardless of the situation.