The Brothers Brick

Names: Bartholemew O’Hurlahey and Mario Fratelli
Occupation: Captain and first mate of the fishing vessel Pequod II
Notes: Capt. Bart fancies himself the long-lost descendent of Herman Melville’s Capt. Ahab. He insists on carrying around a harpoon, even though they mainly catch herring, with a little cod and pollack thrown in. He also affects a limp, despite being in peak physical condition. Whenever he spots another boat on the horizon, he screams at Mario that it’s “the white whale!!!” and forces him to haul in the empty nets and give chase. Mario just sighs and rolls his eyes, muttering under his breath that Huckleberry Finn is a better candidate for canonization as the Great American Novel anyway… Sometimes when Mario is drunk, he gets angry at Capt. Bart and reminds him that Capt. Ahab is “fictional, you crazy coot!” He then breaks down sobbing that he misses his long-lost brother, who dresses in green instead of red.

SpongeBob SquarePants! First images of our adorable invertebrate Bikini Bottom resident (via EuroBricks and I Love Cute LEGO!):

I know AFOLs everywhere will hate me for saying this, but I love this! I can just hear the foghorn blaring as Mr. SquarePants leaps off his bed yelling “I’m ready!” Off to the Krusty Krab, you!

Bricks in my Pocket has just posted the latest issue of Brick Journal, the magazine for adult fans of LEGO (AFOLs). There’s an article on the increasingly intriguing fan-created theme “steampunk” by local AFOL Dan Sabath, instructions for a cool mini V-wing, detailed pictures of Janey Cook’s awesome doll house, and lots of coverage of last year’s various LEGO events (Brickfest, NWBrickCon, and so on).

Thanks to VignetteBricks and Klasbricks for the heads-up as well.

Japanese LEGO blogger Sumi-Handy posts his own LEGO creations, along with those of his kids. He recently posted a kago (which means “box”), an enclosed sedan chair in which important people were carried around during the Edo period (1603-1867):

The sedan chair is by Sumi-Handy’s son, but what struck me about this creation is the fantastic cedar tree Sumi-Handy himself added in the background. Very, very nice!

Brickshelf user drabadan has just posted some really cool brick-built power suits:

I really like how it’s not just a minifig head stuck onto a robot body. The minifig actually fits inside! How awesome is that?

Name: Casey Lundquist
Occupation: Beach bum.
Interests: Backdooring a gnarly tube. Catching air. Hanging with the brahs. Trying not to cluck. Going off.
Pet peeves: The meatball flag. Squids. Poser gremmies. Wannabes. Getting worked.

Brickshelf user morgan19 recently posted several cool minifigs based on the wonderful (and short-lived) Joss Whedon TV series Firefly. That reminded me that I’ve been meaning to make my own.

Here we have the crew of Serenity:

Click the image above for individual shots of the characters (with accessories!). LEGO hasn’t released a female African-American head yet, so I couldn’t make Zoe.

Next, several other characters from Firefly. Left to right, Jubal Early, a “Two by two, hands of blue” guy (I only have one of these suits and two light-blue hands), and Adelai Niska:

Finally, a couple of characters from the movie Serenity, Mr. Universe and The Operative:

I did a little experiment a couple weeks back because I wasn’t satisfied with the quality of my LEGO photography. In the process, I discovered that I have very specific ideas about what makes for good LEGO photography and Brickshelf posting practices. This is pretty long, so skip it if you’re not interested.

When you take pictures of your LEGO creations (or MOCs):

• Use the right amount of light. It’s hard to see poorly lit MOCs, and over-lit MOCs are washed out and lack contrast.
• Focus. If you accidentally take an unfocused picture, take it again before you upload it.
• Unless you’re trying to be especially artistic, fill as much of the frame as you can with your MOC.

When you post your LEGO creations to Brickshelf:

• Size down your dang pictures! There’s nothing more annoying than clicking a thumbnail and then getting about one eighth of the picture on your screen. Use the software that came with your digital camera, or iPhoto, or Adobe Photoshop, or The GIMP — something! — to output your pictures no bigger than 1024×768 pixels. (I like 425×318 for my minifig pictures because they fit nicely in this Blogger template.) If you want to provide high-resolution pictures of your MOCs, put them in a sub-folder.
• Save your pictures in a compressed image format. Bitmaps (.bmp files) are uncompressed, and are a waste of bandwidth. Save your pictures in GIF, JPEG, PNG, or another “Web-friendly” format.
• Give your files meaningful names. I know your camera might use something cryptic like DSC10416.JPG for its file names, but change them to something that tells your viewers what the picture shows, like spaceship_front.jpg or joevig_party.gif.
• Control the order that pictures appear in your gallery by putting letters or numbers at the beginning of your file names. Numbers sort before letters, so if you want to use a specific picture for the folder thumbnail, you could use something like 00_spaceship_front.jpg. (I learned a cool trick from Antony Lau recently. Instead of naming new files you add to a folder by counting up, start with a number like 999 and count down! The new things you add will always appear as your folder thumbnail.)
• Add a description and folder keywords when you create your folders. A description and keywords make it easy for other Brickshelf users to find your MOCs.

I’m sure I’ve missed a few things, so feel free to add your own thoughts by posting comments. :-)

Stage name: Bobo the Clown
Real name: Thanh Nguyen
Occupation: Professional clown.
Interests: Juggling, miming, prancing, ventriloquism, prestidigitation. Giant shoes, lollypops, baggy pants, flowers that shoot water. Amusing children, frightening adults.

Mark Stafford (whose awesome “Cogitry Throckwood” I blogged about previously) has posted some amusing minifigs based on the BBC television series Little Britain:

FBTB and Classic-Castle Forums user lego2000 has posted a couple really cool brick-built minifig weapons for his Iron Reich creations.

First, the flamethrower:

And the sniper rifle:

I seem to have missed the last couple updates Michael Jasper has made to his wonderful Characters gallery, so let’s get caught up. First off, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (in honor of his 250th birthday today):

Next, St. Francis of Assisi (with some birds) and Oskar Matzerath (from Günther Grass’ novel The Tin Drum):

Name: Blaine McPherson
Occupation: Student.
Interests: Finding himself (hint: he’s somewhere between Oslo and Istanbul). Finding cheap beverages. Finding a girl, preferably in Spain. No longer having to pretend to be Canadian.

I was honestly a bit disappointed that the New Year’s LEGO creations by Japanese builders didn’t include any mochi-pounding scenes. A really fun New Year’s tradition I remember is to make hand-made mochi (rice cakes). You put a special type of sticky rice in a wooden pestle and literally pound it with a giant wooden mallet. It’s pretty awesome.

Thankfully, mumu’s wife has built a cute little mochi-pounding scene, complete with the mochi-pounding rabbit from the Moon*:

*Where westerners see a face in the Moon, Japanese people see a rabbit pounding mochi.

As regular readers of Pan-Pacific Bricks and VignetteBricks already know, Izzo has been posting LEGO vignettes based on Japanese proverbs. So far, Izzo has posted 30 vignettes on his Web site and in two Brickshelf galleries. I’ve translated the first twenty, and am genuinely looking forward to the next thirty. How do I know there are going to be thirty more? Izzo is posting the proverb vignettes in hiragana order, and there are approximately fifty hiragana characters.

So let’s get started with the next ten, shall we? :-)

Japanese: A bee to a crying face.
English: Misfortunes never come alone. / When it rains, it pours.

Japanese/English: He who runs after two hares will catch neither.

Japanese: Millet with wet hands.
English:Like taking candy from a baby. / Easy money.

Japanese: Wearing a cat.
English: A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Japanese/English: There’s luck in leftovers. (”Luck” sounds the same as “clothing,” so there’s a pun in this one as well.)

Japanese: Dumplings rather than flowers.
English: Function before form. / Better fill a man’s belly than his eye.

Japanese: Beauty and luck seldom go together.
English: The fairest flowers soonest fade.

Japanese/English: Candle in the wind. (To have one’s life hang by a thread.)

Japanese/English: He that shoots oft, at last shall hit the mark.

Japanese: If you’re in love, travelling a thousand miles seems like only one mile.
English: Absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Catching up on my cuteness fix, I clicked over to Adorablog from Cute Overload and found my Norse gods and goddesses featured in a post earlier this month, along with some great minifigs by fellow LEGO blogger minifig. Here’s the link to the Adorablog post:

http://www.adorablog.org/2006/01/everything_is_b.html

Very cool. It would seem that no matter how fierce you try to make your divine minifigs, little LEGO deities are always just plain adorable.

Known aliases: Mickey Tooth, aka Mickey Tums, aka Michael Fitzpatrick, aka Fitzroy Michaels, etc.
Occupation: Gangster.
Interests: Smuggling kittens.

Name: Jasbir Singh
Occupation: Rock star!
Interests: Filling stadiums. Being a positive role model. Lasagna. The music.
Pet peeve: Music journalists and critics who label him the “the Sikh Matisyahu.”