I recommend you Dragon´s Crown

[Hammerskjold]

On the whole Brave, girl stereotyping, this is why I feel it is an issue, that as a father I take seriously.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/17...17704.html

For a while, in the.... oh, 50's, it was bad. Then it started to get better. And now, we're swinging back the other way. Just look at the ad. You don't have to read the whole article. But that's my point.

And while I do agree that there are far bigger issues in the way we treat women globally, This is an issue that I care deeply about, as it has direct effects, and impacts within my home. My four walls.

So, while others fight the good fight to end sex slave trades, and the like, I can lend 10 minutes of my voice a day, speaking out, about how we treat our little girls, as it relates to my own.

EDIT:
Hell, age the girl in that ad a year or two, give her brown hair and bangs, and it IS my daughter staring at you in that lego ad.

Slight detour with lego:

There is\was definitely something weird with Lego's marketing turn. I did have legos when I was a kid, and I don't remember Lego at least at that point, pushing the blocks as male\female sets. Mostly just sets. Here's a farm set, here's a town set, there's duplo for younger children, there's the general lego line, there's the technics line for advanced.

My parents bought some sets for me and my siblings when we were kids, because it was nearly gender neutral. (Read: easily shared among squabbling siblings. At least in theory) We can 'build our own' after we finished building the set plan, and in general it lasts nearly forever.

Short of pitching it in a fire, dipping it in gasoline, or our dog chewing it, physically it's a pretty good piece of plastic. Physically, there was one quality lego had over other brands. (At least when I was growing up.) If it says lego on it, it's 99.9% guaranteed to fit with other lego blocks.

When I first heard about the change in marketing, I was a bit surprised, because this is lego. Well I thought it was lego, I dunno what exactly the marketing turn is supposed to accomplish. The Lego I knew and grew up with was mostly gender\sex neutral, and fairly all ages. Choking hazard aside etc.

There is one other aspect that makes me go hmmm. Over time, lego sets and pieces became more specific. While you could still build things other than the included set plan, more parts became 'custom'. I learned that this might not be an accident.


http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/12/1...so-popular

But Lego did find a successful way to do something Mega Bloks could not copy: It bought the exclusive rights to Star Wars. If you want to build a Death Star out of plastic blocks, Lego is now your only option.

The Star Wars blocks were wildly successful. So Lego kept going — it licensed Indiana Jones, Winnie the Pooh, Toy Story and Harry Potter.

Sales of these products have been huge for Lego. More important, the experience has taught the company that what kids wanted to do with the blocks was tell stories. Lego makes or licenses the stories they want to tell.

Now when I was playing with legos, I did play out 'this is supposed to be a Luke Skywalker in his x-wing'. But I didn't have an officially branded Starwars set, so I built something sorta resembling an X wing, and made do with 'let's just pretend\imagination' that this is an X-Wing, the figure that came from another toyline was Luke.

After a while, I got bored with just re-enacting a star wars movie scene, and I started altering the story and characters. A while longer, it was altered and re-made from scratch so many times, that it was no longer starwars. It was my own story and scenarios. I doubt it would sell as big as SWars, but it was my own story.

Lego or anyone else trying to corner the market on 'official version of playing', I think is at risk of alienating an important part of playing as an exercise in developing a person's imagination muscle. That and 'too customized' pieces, frankly sucks to me.

I am curious, if I'm the only one who wanted a big box of 'generic blocks'. Because with that, I just increased my building potential vs 'customized pieces which fits best with this specific set'.

Anyhow, shoju have you looked at other lego alternatives\competition? When I was growing up I did looked at a few of them, unfortunately most of them seem to have either poor quality polymers, poor fit, or both.

Supposedly it has improved now, the patent expiry situation may have something to do with it but anyway.

There was one that caught my eye, but I read mixed reviews. (Unfortunately some of the clones\competitions seems to also want to ape legos, IMO counterproductive marketing direction as well.) Though a few seems intriguing enough that I would like to see and feel it first hand. You really only need 2 random pieces, to get a good guess on the quality of the plastic and how well the fit goes.

/just another brick in the wall