Monthly Archives: December 2009

Brothers-Brick.com turns three [Editorial]

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.

2009 stats 2008 stats
  • 8,443,203 page views
  • 4,272,847 visits
  • 1,407,194 unique visitors
  • 196,574 unique keywords from search engines
  • 10,077 spam comments
  • 6,194 real comments
  • 5,770 unique referring sites
  • 5,973,090 page views
  • 2,006,339 visits
  • 820,532 unique visitors
  • 119,524 unique keywords from search engines
  • 36,382 spam comments
  • 12,307 real comments
  • 4,824 unique referring sites

(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:

Top Countries Top Keywords Referring Sites
  1. USA
  2. UK
  3. Canada
  4. Germany
  5. Australia
  6. The Netherlands
  7. France
  8. Poland
  9. Italy
  10. Japan
  1. lego blog
  2. lego architecture
  3. lego news
  4. lego power miners
  5. lego atlantis
  6. custom lego
  7. lego castle 2009
  8. lego fire brigade
  9. lego star wars 2009
  10. 2009 lego
  1. Search engines
  2. StumbleUpon
  3. Flickr
  4. Eurobricks
  5. Nuklear Power
  6. Gizmodo
  7. BrickArms
  8. Brickset
  9. Mecha Hub
  10. Facebook

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:

Dragon’s Lair: If Indiana Jones were a samurai

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.

LEGO Kevin Fedde dragon's lair

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

I swear I walked past this place on my way home tonight

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.

LEGO Wojciech Scrat drinking den

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

A cozy cottage

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

LEGO

Fatbot rolls out

He’s really just stocky, you know…

LEGO Robot Mech

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

Sinking perspective

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.

LEGO pirate cat forced perspective

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

Building the impossible

Scrufulous Class 66

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.

GrayMud Security E.M.U. Mecha

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.

GrayMud Security E.M.U. Mecha

Flaming awesome!

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).

LEGO fallentomato Helios

Via The Living Brick. Good catch, OJ!

Temple of the LEGO Gods

Dylan B. posted this great temple a few days ago and I’m finally getting around to it. I especially like the stones around the pond, thought that’s not the only cool feature by any means.

LEGO temple by Dylan B.

Home, home on the... moon?...

Shannon Sproules Space house

Shannon Sproule (Shannon Ocean) brings us a sample of life in the year 2001. There’s nothing not to love in this but the transparent yellow plate in the spike is utterly perfect to my eyes. If I were that classic black spaceman I would be in heaven.

LEGOLAND Malaysia: the designers on the other side of the world

LEGOLAND Malaysia model designersOne of the interesting things about living in Southern California is that I get to talk quite a few of the model designers who are working on exhibits and installations for LEGOLAND Malaysia, which is scheduled to open in April of 2012. I get to hear about it, but I don’t get to see. I’ve also heard several of my friends here in SoCal talk about their own training process as well as the crew of Malaysian designers who have been hired and trained to work on the same projects. Bill Toenjes was nice enough to send us a link to an article in Johor Buzz, an English language Malay news site, which ran a great profile of several of the team in Malaysia.

We in the adult LEGO community usually get the (very interesting) perspective of adult fans who go on to work for LEGO or LEGOLAND, but the numerous straight-out-of-their-dark-age graphic designers, artists, engineers, and architects are kind of overlooked, though they seem to make up the bulk of the model and set design teams. It’s interesting to hear their perspective.