The Brothers Brick

This life-sized red squirrel by the Vuurzoon family has a puffy tail and looks just like the real critter. Check out the gallery to see more shots of this LEGO creature in its natural environment.

This CDA agent from Monsters Inc. by Dave & John Xandegar is ready to clean up any contaminants, even if it means popping a giant cone around your head.

This pumpjack diorama by Miles Finlay is quite an interesting build. It’s larger than minifig scale and takes on the theme of industrial realism that’s rarely depicted in LEGO.

Eric Hunter‘s 2ft. tall LEGO Peter Griffin sculpture has a grin that’ll crack your television set, in a good way that is.

…or, at least it’s melting for Artizan. Not so much on the East Coast right now. Anyway, Artizan has posted this fantastic Russian Orthodox Church for that contest over at Classic-Castle.

I’m particularly fond of the curved roof-lines. They really help make this creation work for me. The spindly crosses in the graveyard give it an ghostly feeling.

Francesco Tavella (Tavernellos) posted this great windmill a couple weeks ago and I’m finally getting around to it. He provides plenty of detailed shots and a video so you can check out more of its features, including the moving functions. Good stuff.

Brothers-Brick.com turned three a couple days ago, and as our regular readers will have noticed over the last 24 hours, solid growth has resulted in a few new growing pains (thankfully since resolved). We appreciate all of you who’ve stuck with us over the years, and stay tuned for more great LEGO creations and LEGO news in 2010!

I hereby dedicate this post to all you stat-monkeys out there.

(Implementing our Terms of Service and requiring registration back in January 2009 have had a clear effect on the number of comments — both spam and friendly — that posts received in 2009. We’ll evaluate whether the significant drop in discussion was worth it and revisit that decision in the coming weeks.)

There are Brothers-Brick.com readers in 207 countries and regions around the world:

As we’d hoped, we’ve added half a dozen or so readers in central Africa, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Still no North Korea or Turkmenistan…

Here are a few of my favorite lists, based on statistics from this past year:

Like 2008, nearly all of our most popular posts in the past year have been news items (driven mainly by search engine traffic):

1. Zombie Apocafest 2008
2. Howl’s Moving LEGO Castle
3. 10193 Medieval Market Village
4. Pictures of 2010 LEGO sets at festival RFFL
5. First pictures of 2009 LEGO sets
6. LEGO and Brickstructures present LEGO Architecture
7. Angus MacLane’s LEGO Wall-E (and interview)
8. 2009 LEGO Star Wars box art
9. The crazy steampunk machine
10. Should LEGO release modern military sets?

Finally, here are some links to historical posts:

• Fourth anniversary post
• Brothers-Brick.com second anniversary post
• Third anniversary post
• Brothers-Brick.com first anniversary post
• Second anniversary post
• First anniversary post
• My original welcome message

This diorama by Kevin Fedde (Crimson Wolf) is just packed with too much hot stuff. Spend some time scoping out all the fun details and techniques.

I don’t know what’s up with me and flames lately.

This vignette by Wojciech Scrat captures the ambiance of drinking dens all over the world. I’ve been waiting to blog it for a while, but it is sort of timeless. Sad peasant face is sad.

I love this for so many personal and professional reasons, which will remain terribly mysterious.

Ricardo Prates wishes you a Merry Christmas with this adorable little scene.

He’s really just stocky, you know…

(L.D.M. built it. Blame him.)

This is just a fun new creation by pirate cat. In addition to the most obvious effect created by building in two different scales, he builds in some nice wreckage, captures the action, and my personal favorite: wiggling legs sticking out of the water.

[Edit: This has been blogged here before. It's just that good. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!]

Recently I ran a challenge in LEGO Train MOCs which I and the other organisers considered to be virtually impossible. Mike Pianta (scruffulous) proved us wrong in spectacular fashion with his version of the Class 66 locomotive. The details, subtle angles, stickers and everything are just fantastic. I’m happy to have been proved wrong.

Builder Tsan-Nien added me as a contact yesterday, and I couldn’t get over his latest creation. This is a great mecha, I really enjoy the mechanical exo-skeleton feel.

It has some style similarities to to a Matrix APU, or some smaller exo-suits we’ve seen before, but it also has a lot of cool, unique features. I especially like the fan/vent/cylinder things on the sides, and the gorilla-like proportions.

Bright. Colorful. Creative. Life-like. Suntastic. Not quite a loss for words, too many adjectives to describe this cool sculpture, Helios, by David Pickett (fallentomato).

Via The Living Brick. Good catch, OJ!