About Andrew Becraft (TBB Editor-in-Chief)

Andrew Becraft is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Brothers Brick. He's been building with LEGO for more than 40 years, and writing about LEGO here on TBB since 2005. He's also the co-author, together with TBB Senior Editor Chris Malloy, of the DK book Ultimate LEGO Star Wars. Andrew is an active member of the online LEGO community, as well as his local LEGO users group, SEALUG. Andrew is also a regular attendee of BrickCon, where he organizes a collaborative display for readers of The Brothes Brick nearly every year. You can check out Andrew's own LEGO creations on Flickr. Read Andrew's non-LEGO writing on his personal blog, Andrew-Becraft.com. Andrew lives in Seattle with his wife and dogs, and by day leads software design and planning teams.

Posts by Andrew Becraft (TBB Editor-in-Chief)

#lego

RT @OchreJelly “@Fredoichi made an amazing shift from super-sharp mecha to adorable cwute animals, in this case, the accursed Twitter Bird…”

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10210 Imperial Flagship now available; exclusive to LEGO Shop [News]

Announced at BrickCon 2009, 10210 Imperial Flagship is now available from the LEGO Shop online.

The ship measures 29.5” (75 cm) long and 23.6” (60 cm) tall, and includes 1664 pieces and 9 minifigs. Yes, the cannons do fire.

Happy New Year 2010, Year of the Tiger!

かわいいレゴずき (I Love Cute LEGO) has a great roundup of New Year’s best wishes from our LEGO friends over in Japan, starting with one of their own:

Here are a few more of my favorites.

muntax has built a tiger truck (“寅っく” for a lovely bilingual pun):

Hiro’s tiger burns bright in the forests of the night — or at least in a thicket of bamboo :

Satoru’s tiger bust would look great on any mantle, in any year:

Check out I Love Cute LEGO for the full roundup — click the links in the second half of the post.

Tigers are, of course, the most awesome animal in the Chinese Zodiac. 2010 looks to be a pretty good year.

2010 LEGO sets now available from LEGO Shop@Home [News]

As several readers noted regarding the clearance on 2009 LEGO sets, the 2010 sets are also now available.

The much-anticipated LEGO Atlantis sets are now available.

And LEGO Toy Story sets are also now available.

Massive clearance sale from LEGO Shop@Home on 2009 LEGO sets [News]

The LEGO Shop online has updated its Sales & Deals page with nearly a hundred deeply discounted items, including most of the first wave of Power Miners sets, Racers, and Bionicle.

We’ll update this post with more specifics soon, but wanted to let you all know as quickly as possible. (This probably means the official launch of the 2010 sets can’t be too far away.)

Holiday cheer, Lino-style

Lino Martins wishes everyone a very happy holidays, as Santa and Natasha make a second appearance next to this sweet 1966 Ford Galaxie, part of this month’s LUGNuts challenge, A Galaxie of Possibilities.

Click the pic to read Lino’s full write-up.

LEGO entomology

I’m more into etymology than entomology, but I can still appreciate these lovely bugs by Peter Fendrik (pupipupi).

Check out the full photoset on Flickr for shots of the individual bugs in their beautiful black boxes. (This last sentence was brought to you by the letter B.)

Via The Living Brick.

Ralph’s General Motors FM-1 Wildcat has scored a kill

Though it’s unlikely to supplant the F4U Corsair as my favorite plane in real life, I love Ralph Savelsberg‘s rendition of the venerable General Motors FM-1 Wildcat (also built by Grumman as the F4F).

As much as I appreciate the plane, I also really like Ralph’s presentation, complete with wheel chocks and the textured surface of an aircraft carrier (hmmm, sounds like another potential collaboration with Ed Diment).

Even more impressive at minifig scale, Ralph’s fighter has fully functional folding wings and retractable landing gear:

The palace of TenderShadow’s dreams

I think reader ShiYue is right that we’ve never blogged anything built by a LEGO fan from mainland China.

With an impressive palace measuring 92 x 42 studs and 59 cm tall, Beijing builder “TenderShadow ” (zgreenz on Brickshelf) helps us introduce the world to a community of LEGO builders with whom we might not usually interact.

Looking over the pictures, I’m impressed with how much Technic TenderShadow has incorporated into the build. We all use Technic for structural integrity and studs-not-on-top (SNOT) construction, but it’s unusual to see quite this much Technic in the detailing for a LEGO Town creation.

For those of you reading The Brothers Brick in China who might not already know this, Lelezhen.com is a LEGO fan site with hundreds of active members.

Thanks for the tip, ShiYue!

Soviet ZIL-131 pumper by Aleksander Stein

As Aleksander Stein notes in the photo’s description, North American and Western European fire engines are fairly common in LEGO form, while those designed eastward of the old Iron Curtain are more rare. Aleksander remedies this with his Soviet-era ZIL-131 pumper:

Both the front and rear wheel well designs are impressive. Inverted chairs enclose the rear tires, and I suspect that much of the rear half of the vehicle is built upside down.

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
USA UK Canada Germany Australia The Netherlands France Poland Italy Japan	lego blog lego architecture lego news lego power miners lego atlantis custom lego lego castle 2009 lego fire brigade lego star wars 2009 2009 lego	Search engines StumbleUpon Flickr Eurobricks Nuklear Power Gizmodo BrickArms Brickset Mecha Hub Facebook

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

Finally, here are some links to historical posts:

MacLane scores 1,000,000 Points to become Campeon del Mundo

1,000,000 Points is what Angus MacLane wins for building the cast of my favorite show on TV, 30 Rock. Here’s Frank Rossitano (Judah Friedlander), complete with trucker hat:

…plus four more, including the lovely Liz Lemon:

I want to go to there.