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Nearly a year after writing the first article onsite, I've finally returned to express what I believe should belong here, the most invaluable gift that this project has provided.

There's a rule of thumb out there that in order to be at a consistent professional level of skill for something, you need to have spent 10,000 hours cultivating that skill. That amount of time gives you the opportunity to make plenty of mistakes and mull them over, to develop methods, styles, and philosophies. So a director, in order to be able to consistently frame a shot as it is imagined, needs to have spent 10,000 hours pointing a camera, filming, and learning from such.

Researching US LEGO Samsonite has been my 10,000 hours, in which I've gained a deep appreciation for those who do historical work. During such, I have been able to develop my own methods and philosophy. While admittedly challenging in parts, it was essentially an example of both the best-case and worst-case scenarios for research. The ephemera was plentiful in certain subjects and weaker in others, but the community is dedicated and happy to help—it was a perfect training ground.

I'd encourage anyone to do the same, provided they hold themselves to the highest standard, in which everything you claim is well supported by contemporary materials. It's one thing to cite a single textbook or newspaper, it's another to cite an entire body of evidence. And the goal should never be to support what you already think is correct, all proper research starts with an open question that allows for the converse to be potentially true even if it feels impossible. It's only when sources begin to be triangulated that one can begin to claim impossibility.

Now that I have my sights set on this project being much, much bigger than originally anticipated, not out of obligation but out of love and passion, I'm incredibly thankful for having been able to gain that experience.

I do not mean to imply that I've reached some sort of professional peak, that I have somehow become unquestionable. Only that I've learned how to seek answers to questions, built from contemporary sources or logical reason based on those same sources. I've also learned how to ask these questions.

We cannot just ask ourselves the questions we will have an answer to. We must also stand by the questions that have no answer, and document them. History is naturally fragmented, and the missing pieces must not be secretly filled in.

That's how a field moves forward.

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The original postface has been preserved below.

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I feel compelled to construct the initial postface to the site as we've made monumental progress, far beyond my original intention when I first began this project.

This site was first a small place to hold my fiction writings, a simple blog-esque site just to compile everything in one place as well as to demonstrate technical competence. As I got into the project, however, inspired by Gary Istok's Unofficial LEGO Sets/Parts Guide, I realized that I also wanted to talk about general LEGO topics, including LEGO Samsonite.

In April of 2025, I first decided that I wanted to cover about the 005 Discovery Set. I had the brochure and thought it would make an insightful venture.

But I couldn't for the life of me find a consistent, cited source for its release date, to the point where that became the goal of the article instead. I was eventually able to reach an answer (one that has held up through rigorous examination and the compilation of the most sources on the subject ever), but at the time I still felt I didn't have all the evidence and wasn't sure I'd reached the correct conclusion.

All those gaps were stripped away when I began writing about my newspaper clipping. It sounds weird to say, but I didn't realize before that newspapers would be such a pivotal resource. At that point, I made the decision to start the deep dive.

In the past, if you'd asked me why I was so interested in this niche of LEGO specifically, I'd probably have answered that it was just because it was old. But through all that I've done, I've realized I'm so much more invested in the story than anything else.

And because you're here, you likely have a similar interest.