I am Thanel, Andrew’s brother, and I am both honored and privileged to be accepted as the newest of new regular contributors to The Brothers Brick (TBB). As Andrew mentioned in his introduction, it’s true that part of the reason I’ve been brought on board is because of that familial relationship. But there’s another reason: I’m the noob brother.

As he and I have talked over the years and I have recently become more involved in commenting on TBB, going to my local LEGO user group (SandLUG) meetings, setting up a Flickr account (Yupa-sama) and extracting my LEGO from under my wife’s Barbie collection, the idea of becoming a regular contributor chronicling my journey out of my dim ages evolved. Gary McIntire, Legoland California Master Model Builder, deserves credit for giving me the term “dim ages” as the most apt description of the past fifteen years.

For you noobs, dabblers, non-builders, set-only builders, daydreamers, dismissed, “silent majority,” downtrodden and oppressed: You are my peeps. I will publicly humiliate myself in order to smooth your path toward enlightenment. Or the dark side. Whatever.

What you can expect from me:

• Tips, reviews and essays based on experiences like sorting my collection after years of neglect, building/posting MOCs for the first time, and exploring both the on and off-line LEGO community.
• Regional news reporting like Comic-Con, events at Legoland California, and Southern California LUG meetings.
• Posts of my “traditional” LEGO interests like classic castle, space, pirates, adventurers and Star Wars, though I am increasingly falling in love with modern and historical city building.
• My non-LEGO interests expressed in LEGO: Culture, sub-culture, counter-culture and multi-culture. I’m generally just fascinated by people and how they interact, which in this context will be about how those themes play out in LEGO. Oh, and Discworld.
• I hope to help expand the AFOL community into new under-explored fields, by promoting, inspiring and bringing in builders who want to do the same. Bring LEGO to the heathen and the heathen to LEGO.

Fresh blood is good (ask any vampire) and I dream that someday I’ll be an old AFOL fogey and when somebody else comes along to freshen things up I can be snarky about their noobishness.

Some of you may already know this, but “Thanel” is not my real name. Unlike many people, in my particular line of work (alas, not secret agency), online networking can be quite detrimental. Connecting with clients personally and repeat business are distinctly bad ideas, so I’d rather keep my real name on the D.L. as much as possible. I’m happy to reveal my secret identity if I meet you in person, and obviously online as Andrew’s brother. I would just like to keep my explicit electronic signature to a minimum and am going to withhold the location of my underground lair.

I exist and am a reasonably good guy.

Ever since I recruited Josh and we renamed our newly relaunched blog “The Brothers Brick,” I thought it would be awesome to have my real-life brother join us. Call me sentimental, but it just made sense.

Our LEGO brotherhood has been a circuitous journey that goes back more than 30 years. When he was barely walking, Thanel (not his real name; he’ll explain why) destroyed my 381 Police Headquarters by climbing up to my top bunk, where I’d built it, and pushing it off to the floor below. I was devastated.

When he was old enough to have his own LEGO, our rivalry continued.

My Crusaders and Forestmen waged endless battles against his Black Falcons on our bedroom floor, complete with movement rules and hit points to track who was winning — at least a decade before BrikWars. We also built collaboratively, combining our collections for moonbases and medieval landscapes that rival in size (if not in building skills) some of the largest dioramas we regularly feature here.

As we grew older and each entered varied levels of Dark Ages, LEGO remained a point of commonality — graduation and birthday gifts to each other, and conversations about the latest Wild West and Adventurers sets we saw in stores.

All that is in the past, though. Looking to the future, I’m very pleased to announce that Thanel is joining The Brothers Brick as our newest contributor. One of the main things he’ll be documenting with his posts will be his emergence from LEGO isolation into the broader LEGO fan community — both online and offline. I think this is a different perspective from that of our other contributors, each recruited for their deep ties to various LEGO fan communities.

It’s also a point of view shared by many of you readers out there. Where do I start? Is there a LEGO club in my area? What’s it feel like to post that first work-in-progress LEGO creation and have it ripped apart? Thanel will be working to answer those questions.

But enough from me! Let’s hear from Thanel himself.