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.)
Forbidden Cove is hosting a major pirate contest, know simply as the Jolly Roger Contest. Very similar to the Colossal Castle Contest on their sister site, Classic Castle, there is a plethora of categories and prizes. Go check it out and win yourself some loot!
I’m sending out a pre-Christmas reminder that the previously mentioned Brickvention 2010 is coming up fast so get registered if you want to participate in the Australia Day weekend.
So far Brickvention has people registered from all six states and a final full attendence of at least 50 is expected as well as a predicted 2000 people through the door on the public day (it was crazy last year). If you’re from Australia or the neighbourhood this is your best chance to catch up with a bunch of LEGO fans from the local region. I’ll be there for the whole time so drop by and say hello.
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.
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(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 |
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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:
One 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.
TT Games has released a trailer for their upcoming LEGO Harry Potter video game. It doesn’t show a lot of gameplay footage, but reveals the studio’s signature humor.
Via Kotaku.
I ran across this story on Thursday and thought it was interesting enough to pass along.
Put yourself in Jeremy Bell’s shoes. You’re a creative director at Teehan+Lax, a Downtown Toronto design firm and a lifelong LEGO fan. You’re having a quiet Tuesday afternoon at the office. Hey, you just got a custom BrickGun model kit of a semi-auto handgun in the mail. Why not build it at your desk? (I for one totally understand, I just did the same thing last week with the Space Police Smash ‘n’ Grab.) After you’re done, you show the model to a co-worker, he breaks it, you put it back in its box, then unwind with some co-workers by playing video games.
Photo above courtesy of National Post and Global TV
The problem is, handguns are illegal in Canada, and gun play at work is generally associated with disgruntled employee rampages, rather than good LEGO design. So that afternoon, a person with a condo overlooking Jeremy’s window office saw him assembling the model, thought it was a real handgun and called the police. (He has since apologize via Twitter, Facebook and a handmade sign put up in his window.)
About an hour after putting away the model gun, the gaming was interrupted by yelling in the hallway. Jeremy peeked into the hall and saw members of the Toronto Police Emergency Task Force with real big guns pointed at him. He cooperated, got ‘cuffed, told them to check out the LEGO gun in his office, and he was uncuffed in about 90 seconds. Done, right?
It became a slightly bigger deal because people in and immediately around the building were detained, had big guns pointed at them, the street was closed off by half a dozen police cars, a couple ambulances waited nearby, and a helicopter hovered overhead. For details on the basic facts of the story, the best details and perspective are in Jeremy’s blog, but also check out some of the local Toronto online news outlets like GlobalToronto and Torontoist, where I first ran across the story.
Jeremy is now obviously being pestered by media all across Canada, and even by US LEGO nerds like me. He was gracious enough to answer a few questions:
The Brothers Brick: How do you feel about all this attention over a bizarre misunderstanding?
Jeremy Bell: I could do without the attention, but I do find the whole situation hilarious. Don’t get me wrong, guns in the workplace aren’t cool, and I’m aware that people have been killed over similar misunderstandings—luckily this event didn’t turnout the same.
TBB: What form has your LEGO fandom taken? Collector, builder, sets, your own creations, just looking?
JB: I’ve been a fan of Lego since I was a little kid, but it’s not something I spend a lot of time playing with now. That said, I’ll usually assemble actual kits and then combine the pieces with the rest of my collection and build my own creations.
TBB: Was the ordering of the custom gun kit a bit of lark? How did you find out about the kit? Was it any good?
JB: I discovered the BrickGun kit on a design blog (if I recall correctly), so ya… it was a bit of a lark. The kit had about 250 pieces in it, plus some elastic bands. Was it any good? Well, I got arrested… that’s gotta count for something I guess.
TBB: According to the other news stories, you’re the Creative Director at a design company? How has this affected your professional relationships, since this went down at work?
JB: Excellent question about the work side of things… no one has asked that yet. At the moment, all of our clients seem to think it’s pretty humours (although we haven’t heard from all of them yet). We’ll see how this shakes out next week.
TBB: How about your family?
JB: My family’s always known I was a Lego fan, so they weren’t surprised to see what I built. That said, my wife wasn’t so thrilled when she found out.
Thanks, Jeremy!
From looking at BrickGun’s website, they’re a little overwhelmed by the media driven orders because of this story, so if this gets you all excited to order something from them, good luck trying to get it in time for the holidays.
Toys R Us is having another 2 Day Sale sale today and tomorrow. The LEGO item of note is that 7754 Home One Mon Calamari Star Cruiser
is 33% off — $73.69 instead of $110. To use the coupon online, you enter coupon code 933897 at checkout.
Unfortunately, the website is showing this item as out of stock, so check back over the next couple of days to see if they add any more.
Check out the post on FBTB for more ways to save money with this deal using more coupon codes, including free shipping so you don’t have to fight holiday crowds. Sweet!
A few of the 2010 LEGO sets are starting to show up online, both from The LEGO Shop and Toys R Us.
5981 Raid VPR and 5982 Smash ‘n Grab
were both designed by Mark Stafford, and include new alien minifigs.
I love the new shark-headed dude in 8060 Typhoon Turbo Sub.
8058 Guardian of the Deep and 8056 Monster Crab Clash
are also out now.
Railbricks is putting out a calendar for the first time! I’ve gotten a sneak peek of a couple of the pictures and they are gorgeous. Hopefully this does well enough to be an annual event. They are still working out the pricing and other such details, so look for more information to be forthcoming.
James Shields traveled all the way from Ireland to Manchester in order to audition for a master builder spot at the new LEGOLAND Discovery Center there. We announced the auditions last week, and James went to check it out. He’s posted photos for everyone, and graciously agreed to this interview about the process.
TBB: Thanks for telling us about your experiences in Manchester, James. Let’s get started: Was this an all-day affair?
JS: Yes, it ran from about 10am until nearly 5pm.
TBB: Did they give you a building challenge? If so, what was it?
JS: There were two building challenges. For the first round we had 15 minutes to build an animal of our choice. This sounds easy,. but 15 minutes disappears incredibly quickly. I built a polar bear (though it started out intending to be a gorilla). About half of the candidates got through to the second challenge, which was to build a face. Again, it was up to us what face we wanted to build, and what techniques we wanted to use. I went for the fantasy author Terry Pratchett because I’m a fan of his work, and I thought he looked distinctive. Again an hour is very tight for this, so I concentrated on the centre of the face, with a view to expanding it if there was time left over. I built upwards, using sculpting techniques, and was quite pleased with the result, although I only got from the lips to the forehead (it would have been nice to include the beard and Terry’s distinctive hat). There were some excellent builds, and I wouldn’t have liked to be judging, but I was very pleased to get through to the final four and the interview stage.
TBB: Were there a lot of other AFOLs there trying for the job? What about non-AFOLs?
JS: Most of the participants were AFOLs to some degree, and there were clearly some very talented builders. However, one of the finalists hadn’t touched a brick in ten years – he said that Lego had inspired him to become a professional modelmaker using other materials.
TBB: What did the non-AFOLs think of the hobby, assuming they were aware of it?
JS: The one I spoke to said he was seriously thinking of unpacking his old Lego collection.
TBB: Do you think that being an active LEGO hobbiest helped you out in this process, or was that not a factor in what they were looking for?
JS: Definitely. I think the biggest factor was the skills I’ve developed over the last few years. In the interview stage I also stressed AFOL activities I’ve been involved in and how they are (hopefully) relevant to the position.
TBB: The big question for me, was it fun?
JS: Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole day, especially the building challenges.
TBB: Is there anything else you’d like to add about the process?
JS: A major part of the event was to win publicity for the LDC, so everything was under the scrutiny of cameras, and we were all interviewed to camera several times during the day. It was made clear that PR was part of the modelmaker’s role, and as a result they wanted someone who can handle it.
The LEGOLAND Windsor website released the following image in a survey recently, depicting what is apparently a collection of minifigs that may be released next summer, starting around June 2010.
The collection appears to include the following 16 figures:
(At this point, I think there’s enough corroborating evidence to report this as fact. I’ll save the analysis for another day. Via Brickset.)
