The Brothers Brick

This modified sphere by wnc.thomas is a great tribute to Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Kind of made me sad….I still miss Douglas Adams.

The Agents of the Imperial Crown contest is certainly contributing to an uptick in the number of LEGO steampunk creations I’m seeing. Here’s a quick roundup.

V&A Steamworks goes airborne aboard HMS Earl Grey:

Rod Gillies (2 Much Caffeine) takes steampunk to China and Prussia:

Jason “JasBrick” has been posting awesome custom steampunk minifigs for a while:

Finally, the airplane Philip Stark built for his steampunk version of Gold Hunt is worth a close look (and click the pic to see the accompanying wagon):

UPDATE: The newest LEGO Architecture sets are Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and Guggenheim Museum.

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The two newest LEGO Architecture sets are now available from the LEGO Shop.

I’m particularly pleased to find the Seattle Space Needle available, since I see it everyday here in, well, Seattle!

The Empire State Building is another iconic landmark now available as a set:

Update: As the locals in the comments indicate, $20 for our beloved needle seems a bit steep, so Ochre Jelly suggests this one for 30 cents instead! :-D

Skinny tie on Joel McHale, check. Bikini on Mankini (with big ole bellybutton), check.

As Ochre Jelly says on his MOCpages entry for this creation:

It you don’t watch “The Soup” then this creation won’t [make] much sense to you. Actually, if you don’t watch this show then you are missing the funniest show on US television! Perhaps you don’t own a television. Or haven’t figured out how to operate it yet. Or you are a fan of reality TV shows and are therefore unable to read the numbers on the remote control.

This great big orange Sno-Cat by Ciamoslaw Ciamek is cool enough on its own, but Ciamek builds an interesting story around the vehicle. Click the pic to find out what happens.

See more pictures on MOCpages and Ciamek’s website.

GFLUG will be displaying various LEGO creations in Orlando, Florida from February 27 to March 1.

Here’s the full announcement from Michael Huffman:

GFLUG will be doing MegaCon 2009, Feb. 27 – March 1, 2009 in Orlando, FL. GFLUG have a 50’x50’ display area, half of the area will be a LEGO MOC display and the other half of it will be an adult “play area”. The theme for MegaCon 2009 is “WestWorld”. There will be a city filled with rampaging monsters, super-heroes
fighting super-villains, & hungry zombies; a large scale east vs. west castle MOC battle scene; a futuristic space port; and robots shooting it out at the 64K corral; with other homages to the club’s favorite sci-fi/anime/geek shows! There will also be table-top games recreated in LEGO — KK Quah will have a LEGO-ize version of Command and Colors (by Richard Borg and GMT Games). This will be GFLUG’s first time displaying at MegaCon.


MegaCon is a spring-time event, so it’d make a nice spring break get-away!

But this one is really good. Cole Blaq has created a rendition of a ship from Unreal Tournament 3. I think he’s done a great job of reproducing the shape of the original, while putting his own spin on it. The central section has a chunky heavily armored vibe that I really like.

Moles are out. Figs are in. Get out your hammers and join Andrew Summersgill (Flickr) in putting down those uppity figs!.

This funky barnyard scene by Jordan Schwartz cracked me up. Interesting build, as we’ve come to expect from Jordan. I like that egg!

It looks like Niel’s box fighter, which I just blogged earlier today is already inspiring some imitations. Nathan Proudlove and Mark Sandlin have each already built copies. I always seem to miss out on these new group building trends and memes. I think I’m going to try to get in on the ground floor on this one and head to the LEGO room and whip up one of my own.

Nathan Proudlove has given The Matrix some renewed attention with his new sentinel creation. He took pains to make it simple enough that it can be built by almost anyone and from parts that are in most collections. He even took extra time to post some instructions so that we could each build our own.

Niels Bugge has built a very interesting creation for SciLug’s small starfighter contest. The contest requires the starfighter to fit within a small box when landed. Many entrants tried to deal with this restriction by making a craft with folding wings or a rotating engines, but Niels pushed these techniques to a new level. His craft folds into a box shape which barely fits into the space limitation, but when unfolded, you would never know that it had been a box. This creation is an excellent starfighter, regardless of its ability to fold into a small space. Better, still, Niels has provided some instructions, which can be found on his instructions page, here.

Hi everyone, Dan Rubin here, and I’d like to introduce myself as the newest member of The Brothers Brick team.  I’m thirty-ish years old, married, and an attorney.  I live in the Washington, D.C. area, where I’ve been helping organize local LEGO conventions for the past several years.

The spacers among you may recognize me as the main admin of the forums at classic-space.com.  Others may know me as the creator of the Galactic Inquisition space sub-theme.  I’ve been active in the online LEGO community since I joined LUGNet in 2003, which is also the first year that I attended a LEGO Convention.

I’ll mostly be blogging about space and mecha creations, as that’s where my own skills lie, and also what I see the most, because of where I browse online.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate a quality creation in any theme, though.  I’ll leave you with a photo of my most recent creation, and a promise to start blogging about cool stuff as soon as possible.

I’m very pleased to announce that Daniel Rubin is joining The Brothers Brick as a contributor.

We’ve featured Dan pretty regularly over the years (the yellow beauty to the right was the first, way back in 2006), and Dan has contributed enormously to the LEGO fan community — particularly as a CSF Admin and LEGO Ambassador.

I’ve also had the pleasure of hanging out with Dan at LEGO conventions, and he’s just as much of a great guy in person as he is online.

Without any further prattling from me, here’s Dan in his own words. Take it away, Dan!

Lunchtime conversation today turned to the various bats my coworkers and I have had in our houses. It didn’t occur to us that having Ozzy Osbourne around might’ve helped.

Rock on, Mr. Spielbrick.