The Brothers Brick

In his Flickr debut, Chris Malloy presents a group of wonderful mythical minifigures:

The fleet-footed Mercury:

Thor and Atlas:

Perhaps this post-apocalyptic trend as a whole is somewhat less hilarious now that Brickshelf is back, but that doesn’t change the fact that these two dioramas by Nick Dean are both cool and very funny.

Keith Goldman has always demonstrated the full capabilities of MOCpages — adding detailed descriptions that tell interesting stories to each set of photos. His latest photos tell this story: “Tri-pantheonic Alliance forces consolidate and withdraw to extraction point ‘Malcolm X’ following a predawn raid on the Central Asian Combine bunker complex near Jakarta.”

(Thanks for the tip, “Not Keith Goldman!” :-D )

A new message has graced the top of Brickshelf.com:

Notice: Brickshelf will not be shutting down!
We will be offering “featured” accounts for $5/month shortly.

We have received hundreds of supportive emails in the past few days including many who said they would like to contribute financially but did not know how. This has had us rethink the practicality of charging for enhanced features.We plan to do this without reducing current functionality for free users. Thank you for your enormous show of support.

IMPORTANT: do NOT try to download the entire site, it causes major problems, slows things down for normal users and you will be permanently blocked. We will make older folders public again after we see the crawlers go away.

UPDATE (AB 7/19 PM): IMPORTANT: Brickshelf.com is apparently not going away after all. Kevin Loch has asked everyone to stop trying to download everything, so please respect his request and suspend the efforts described in this post.

As we indicated in updates to an earlier post, a coordinated effort is currently underway to “rescue” as many of the images on Brickshelf.com as possible before they become unavailable after July 31.

In a beautiful, touching sign of how a community can come together in a time of crisis, members of Classic-Castle Forums, Classic-Space Forums, FBTB Forums, and Forum 0937 are showing a remarkable amount of cooperation and cross-collaboration. In addition to saving their own galleries, members are also attempting to ensure that the best LEGO images are saved — especially those originally posted by members of the community who are no longer active or who have since passed away.

If you’d like to participate, you can check out one of the threads on these four forums:

• Classic-Castle.com
• Classic-Space.com
• FBTB Forums
• Forum 0937

If you know of other efforts underway, please let us know.

UPDATE (AB 7/19 AM): Eurobricks is also participating:

• Eurobricks

Lowlug’s Mini MOC Madness is upon us again! The theme this year is weather, and there are already some great entries. Check out the gallery, and click “Lees meer” to see bigger pictures of each entry. A few of my faves:

(Thanks for the tip, Martin Jaspers! I’d link to your gallery like I usually do, but it won’t exist on August 1, so I’m minimizing future broken links. :( )

EDIT: Sorry about the broken images — I’ll fix them later.

Spot on color scheme, and nice use of the X-pod container, Serrater!

おそらく日本のレゴ ファンの皆様は既にご存知ですが、 Brickshelf.com （通常「棚」）が７月３１日後利用できなくなります。大変遅れてしまいましたが、このブログの日本の読者様にも一応情報を伝えておきたいと思いました。

「棚がなくなる！」ことは明らかに大問題ですが、問題を解決する三つのソフトウェアがあります。

はくしゃくさんのトコでご覧になられたかもしれませんが、ダウンロードツールの日本語版が発行されました。ダウンロードはこちらです。

Bob Kojima さんの英語版に挑戦してみたい方は、こちらからダウンロード。izzoさんの記事をお勧め致します。

マックをご利用の皆様は Jim DeVona さんからのターミナル（Mac OS X のみ）で走らせるコマンドライン・ユーティリテイ が使えます。

（日本語は最近あまり書いていませんので、言語能力が落ちているような気がします。下手な日本語で申し訳ありません。）

Okay, so the video’s a bit slow-paced, and we’ve seen plenty of video game pixel art in LEGO before, but this just makes me smile — that’s a good thing right now:

The accompanying commentary on Joystiq is also well worth a read. (Thanks again for the tip, RichardAM!)

FBTB Forums member “Glorious Kyle” wishes Brickshelf a fond farewell. I like how Kyle has turned the Brickshelf logo into tombstones. (Via VignetteBricks.)

I honestly believe that the LEGO community will bounce back stronger than ever after we lose Brickshelf, but part of me finds it highly amusing that the first creation I find myself blogging in several days is this post-apocalyptic, dystopian diorama from Carter Baldwin:

Brickshelf is now accessable through http://www.brickshelf.com/ or https://www.brickshelf.com/ (you may see a certificate error). At the top of the page in red text reads:

Notice: Brickshelf will be shutting down on 2007/07/31.
Please save your files to your computer.

Everyone who hasn’t backed up their files already, DO SO NOW.

EDIT (AB): Bob Kojima has created a tool that can back up files from Brickshelf. You can download the Zip file from BZPower (thanks for the tip, Kelly!) here (318 KB).

EDIT 2 (AB): Jim DeVona has created a backup tool for Mac OS X. You can download it and read instructions on how to run it in Jim’s post on LUGNET. You’re a lifesaver, Jim!

EDIT 3 (LB/AB): Interested parties have begun backing up important folders other than their own while they can. There are threads on classic-castle, classic-space, FBTB Forums, and Forum 0937 to do this as systematic as possible. Thanks to Bruce for the heads up. If this is happening on other communities as well, please let us know.

With Brickshelf.com currently unavailable and speculation still rampant about what this means for the future of the worldwide LEGO fan community, the mass migrations to other image-hosting sites have already begun.

The “Recent Folders” page on Maj.com (owned and operated by the same person who ran Brickshelf) is now full of LEGO. MOCpages now has image-hosting capabilities. Many of my Flickr contacts have upgraded to Pro accounts and have uploaded all their old pictures originally on Brickshelf. There are also several discussions underway to create new, LEGO-specific image-hosting sites.

However, I would strongly caution everybody reading this from making a decision now, without knowing what’s going on with Brickshelf itself. I’m concerned that, without a coordinated effort, premature migrations will result in unnecessary fragmentation of the community.

Perhaps asking this of tens of thousands of people is futile. Nevertheless, please, let’s hold off making any rash decisions until we know all the facts and can come up with some sort of coordinated effort.

—————–

EDIT: We now have confirmation that Brickshelf will be gone for good after July 31, 2007. My heartfelt thanks to Kevin Loch for the service he’s provided to the LEGO community over the years, and for giving the LEGO community this opportunity to back up our files and create a historical record of builders who are no longer with us in one way or another. Kevin: Thank you.

A word of caution for everyone, however: I don’t believe that a mass migration to Maj.com would be the right move, given that the same thing could happen there at any time. Personally, I’ve liked Flickr for more than a year and a half, but I understand that many people still want something free (an unfair requirement, I think, given how expensive bandwidth is for such a large quantity of images), they prefer something LEGO-specific (yes, that would be nice), and some people find Flickr to be slow (I’d suggest trying a newer or different Internet browser).

I’ll post something more comprehensive weighing all the image-hosting options tonight, but seeing the two directions people seem to be going already, I would strongly suggest Flickr over Maj. I’m also encouraged by Sean Kenney’s generosity in adding image-hosting to MOCpages, so that may be another alternative to consider. More later…

UPDATE (AB) (7/16 AM Pacific): Images hosted on Brickshelf seem to be working again. What this means I don’t know. More info as we find out.

UPDATE (LB) (7/16 AM Pacific): Keith Goldman pointed out that MOCpages is now offering free hosting for lego images. A note on the front page states that this service may not be free in the future – I suspect it depends on how much it will cost to keep such a service up and running. The old galleries don’t work since they simply linked to the pictures on Brickshelf before this transition, but it’s still a very kind gesture by Sean Kenney, owner of the site.

UPDATE (NW) (7/15 10:50 PM Pacific):  Troy Cefaratti has released similar posts on Classic-Castle.com as well.  Take a deep breath guys, not all is lost.  Remember, it’s only been less than 24 hours. Give it time.

UPDATE (AB) (7/15 3:30 PM): Troy Cefaratti (aka “Mnementh” on BrickLink and Classic-Castle) seems to know something we don’t.

(And my apologies to those of you got a page not found error when you clicked through from somewhere else today. I updated the timstamp and title for this post, and that seems to have changed its Web address. My bad.)

——————————–

Whether you host your own images there or not, Brickshelf is one of the cornerstones of the online LEGO community. As many of you visiting this blog will have noticed, none of the images hosted on Brickshelf are currently working, and if you’ve been to Brickshelf.com in the last few hours, you will have seen the following text — and nothing else — on the home page:

“Brickshelf has discontinued operation. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

I’m furiously reading discussion threads, e-mailing, and chatting with my sources, but I don’t have any information about this issue right now. Unfortunately, given the wording of the message, this doesn’t seem to be “scheduled maintenance”.

Discussions are popping up on LEGO forums all over the Internet:

• LUGNET
• Classic-Castle: Thread 1 (locked), Thread 2 (now also locked)  Additional threads, most of them also locked because of needless panic and namecalling, can be found.
• Classic-Space
• Eurobricks: Thread 1, Thread 2
• FBTB Forums
• Bricklink Forums: Thread 1, Thread 2
• Forum 0937
• Brickfilms.com
• Transformer World 2005
• Minifig Customization Network
• Saber Scorpion’s Lair Forums

Blog reactions:

• Brickley’s Words
• VignetteBricks and MicroBricks
• Klocki
• How Many Studs to LEGOLAND
• Paganomation Blog
• Biczzz
• The NXT STEP
• LEGO-BINGO
• Moyblik
• THE BRICK TIME
• Masoko Tanga
• Fascinating Lego Model of the Day
• Brick Town Talk
• Bill Ward’s Brickpile
• LegOficina dos Baixinhos
• Lego Brasil
• Bricktacular!
• rayhawk
• Tim Courtney
• Brick Star
• BrickJournal Journal
• Legoゲージ推進機構日報〜レゴトレイン・ブログ

Despite the magic of RSS, I won’t be able to monitor the entire online LEGO community for updates about this, so if you learn something definitive, please leave a comment on this post (I’ll see it in my e-mail) or use the Contact Us page to send a private message.

EDIT: (NW) Added discussion topic link to Brickfilms.com. Also, Ecto pointed out in the comments section that https://www.brickshelf.com/ works. Remember to put the ’s’ after ‘http’. I urge everyone who doesn’t have a backup of their stuff to back it up now, and not upload anything new. It’s not known how long this version will last.

EDIT: (AB) And now the SSL (https) site isn’t working either. Still no word from Brickshelf management as to what’s going on.

Brickshelfer Crises has two cool entries for the sports-themed contest over at Klocki:

(Via VignetteBricks.)

Most mecha don’t look especially organic — unlike this one by Aaron Andrews:

Here’s a little something to offset Friday the 13th — an excellent rose by BrickJournal editor Joe Meno.

(And the original Henri Matisse quote: “There is nothing more difficult for a truly creative painter than to paint a rose, because before he can do so he has first to forget all the roses that were ever painted.”)

My current obsession may be all about microspace, but Shannon Young’s obsession runs along more metropolitan lines. (Via MicroBricks.)

Says Earl: “Yeah, but he’s so cool looking!” (From How Many Studs to LEGOLAND.)

Oh, it gets better:

While we’re at it, here are a pair of Nnenn’s latest, wildly cool microscale space ships:

Thanks for the tip, reader Preda! :-D

The Brute Chopper is a new vehicle in Halo 3. For those of you sick of seeing poorly constructed LEGO Warthogs, here’s Alex Peacock’s chopper:

We just featured Josselin Guedes’s steampunky “L’invincible” three posts ago, but this latest from Josselin is too good to pass up:

This doesn’t go in the “News” category quite yet, but Kotaku broke the rumor yesterday that LucasArts will be announcing a LEGO Indiana Jones video game at E3.

Presumably, the game will be developed by Travellers Tales, creators of both LEGO Star Wars and the upcoming LEGO Batman. We shall see.

(Thought I’d post this now, since I still don’t see an update from Kotaku, LucasArts, or Travellers Tales. Thanks for the tip, ever-watchful RichardAM!)

This dragon by elex on Brickshelf is 80 cm tall, weighs 14 kg, and took 5 weeks to build. Be sure to check out the work-in-progress pictures as well.

Jausse presents a flying machine powered by the mysterious element “cavorite”.