[kroltan]

> It also made me realize something: half the value of buying a kit these days is that you aren’t spending hours finding needles in a 300lb haystack.

What! That is the best part!

Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know, the clatter of a bajillion pieces of precision plastic, each with their different cavities and sonority, moving around each handful you scrape off to the side... Good times.

In the rare occasion I get a Lego set nowadays (no kids yet), the first thing I do is open every bag of pieces into a tray so I can do it on a smaller scale.

[mirkules]

> no kids yet

You will know no fury as when your kids intentionally mix up all the pieces for fun. We have hundreds of LEGO people, and my kids intentionally dismembered them into their individual pieces (including HANDS!). But how can you get angry at kids playing??? twitch

[nimajneb]

My daughter will be getting her own Lego and possibly a selection of mine. I organized mine for the first time in my life last year. Some of the sets I've had since the very late 80s and early 90s. Those aren't getting lost :P

She can play with them supervised, but she'll have her own. This is all assuming she's even interested, she's only 2 so who knows yet.

[Tade0]

Mine is also two and really into Duplo, so Lego will be a natural progression, especially considering that the blocks are compatible, so I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Also some the ones she's playing with are currently over 30 years old and still going.

[jmmv]

It sounds like you should watch The Lego Movie (:

[BanazirGalbasi]

I think having sets that you like to keep together and you don't want to mix up is fine. Too many people saw the Lego Movie and took it to mean that keeping sets as sets is bad. Note that the person you responded to isn't stopping their kids even as they cause more destruction than the Lego Movie showed, they're simply complaining about it here because what _they_ had is gone.

Yes, let kids mix and match and play. But also acknowledge that we all play differently, and for some people having a model of something that they built is where the fun lies. People who like organization can still have fun, let's not shame them for their preferences.

[jmmv]

Uhhh... the GP was written in a kinda funny way, so it just seemed fitting to plug a reference to the movie. If you want to keep sets together, power to you. My kids have a mixture of both (sets they want to keep as is and a mountain of pieces from other sets) and... that's just fine.

[fragmede]

That sounds... reasonable! We can't have that! Lord Business? Bring out the Kragle!

[davely]

> Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know

My friend, let me introduce you to this Spotify playlist: LEGO White Noise [1]

[1] https://open.spotify.com/album/6qZUya0mkucuxvoIp4akVT?si=RgH...

[fluxinflex]

That made my day! That's soooo incredibly unbelievably mindnumbingly stupid that I love it :+1:

[jjkaczor]

The sound of swishing through a mound/box/bin of LEGO has to be the most relaxing thing for me ever...

[bombcar]

The word 'Grüschteling' is a German word used by German Lego fans. It is used to describe the distinctive sound made when you sift through a large bucket of Lego, trying to find the right piece.

[lukebbutton]

My grandfather used to say that whenever we played lego as kids

[Waterluvian]

I looooove that sound. But with young kids there’s no point trying to sort. And without sorting, every piece takes a while to find.

[epiccoleman]

One of my "core memories" wrt Lego is meticulously spending days sorting small parts into some of those Sterilite multi-drawer things and then knocking it over, spilling all my hard work onto the floor and undoing it.

I was probably 8 or 9. From that point on, fuck it, they all go in one big box. My brothers and I would compete to see who could find the most valuable pieces. Mostly treasure chest coins, little gems, and basically anything translucent qualified - transparent single stud pieces, cone pieces, and lightsaber beams were very high value, since one could not build a respectable Lego sci-fi arsenal without all of them.

[TylerE]

I'm guessing that back in the day it all came in one bag?

When I built Titantic last year (first Lego I'd done in maybe 30 years) it was split out over dozens of small bags, and all the parts you'd need for one section would be in that one bag with no more than, say, 200 pieces in it. Often there's be a smaller bag inside for holding the 1x1 stuff.

So I built the whole thing with two tupperware containers..one decent size square "bowl" and s much smaller one for the tiny stuff.

Killed a month off and on putting that thing together. I was recovering from foot surgery so stuck in bed.

Luckily, the Titanic actually builds as 6 sections, with 3 pairs that join more or less permanently, while there are then a couple of pins and rods that hold the whole thing together (along with a rather clever tensioning gear... the main lines are there as strings, and do hang in a true catenary. )

So each of the 6 sections I basically built on a hardback book.

A few build pics:

https://imgur.com/a/yqHR3m4

Made for a very doable build, even given pretty hefty physical limitations.

[epiccoleman]

I tend to remember multiple bags, but I don't remember seeing the numbered bags where you only opened one at a time until I bought a few sets as an adult. That seems like a relatively modern thing.

Anyway like I said, we definitely always built the kit per the instructions first, it's just that the impulse to keep a TIE fighter a TIE fighter was never stronger than the impulse to build something new.

[kroltan]

Ha! That was a common competition between me and my friend around that age too.

He is very fortunate to be part of a reasonably affluent family, so he had like 6 60-liter boxes full of assorted Lego.

We would spill a couple at a time (who am I kidding we spilled all of them) on the floor, when the flow of pieces stopped, the game was on! So many arguments about the nature of the simple shapes, like "oh no this isn't a blue lightsaber, it is a cylinder of pure diamond!"

[dsr_]

My wife says that sound means that I'm happy and relaxed.

[kevmarsden]

I'm totally the opposite. That sound is grating to me. But I'm sensitive to other sounds too, so it's not just LEGO.

[gertlex]

I recently had the realization... I've carried this enjoyment onwards into how I store parts for hobbies. While I use compartmentalized containers for things, compartments are still a mix of parts. I can search for quite a while without getting frustrated, just knowing, "those servo mounting brackets are in one of these two containers in the garage..."

I don't buy or aspire to own new Lego as an adult, but I'm still basically doing the same thing I did as a kid: every time I decide to do a hardware project is me digging through my bins of assorted parts instead Lego parts.

Oh and of course, my desk is perpetually just as messy as the floor was as a kid, and I'm often fidgeting seeing how random things do/don't fit together.

(also, also... building the set? nah, building my own things without instructions, and similarly writing my own code...)

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

There's someone who's really into knolling (https://knolling.org/what-is-knolling) and hates this comment.

[semi-extrinsic]

Always Be Knolling.

[pbronez]

Agree! My partner disagrees though. She wants the LEGO organized by color or set. I find this blasphemous. It’s legit harder for me to find pieces when they’re sorted like this. My brain is tuned with specialized LEGO bin stirring techniques that reliably turn up what I need… but that doesn’t work at all when the piece has been squirreled away where it “belongs”!

[lostlogin]

> Wading through a mound of Lego has to be one of the most satisfying sounds I know

There are two sounds I associate with Lego. The one you describe and the other.

The words you can find and the tone you utter them with when you unexpectedly stand on a piece, or even better, when you kneel on a bit when trying to find the tv remote.