This past weekend brought sad news about the death of Steve “Crocodile Hunter” Irwin. As Bruce blogged over on VignetteBricks, the LEGO world has responded with several fantastic tributes for this great conservationist, family man, and entertainer.
Melody Brown:
rogueyoda:
k-hatch:
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Here ye, here ye! A group of brickfilmers, including Lewis Chen, award-winning director of the film Repent, Zach Macias, 3rd place winner in the Fame, Infamy and Glory contest, and myself, 2nd place winner in the Fame, Infamy and Glory contest, have gotten together and begun a community project code-named Project Divinity. We are seeking better-than-average stop-motion animators, digial model builders (good with Ldraw), and voice talents. For more information, please go here, or check out the Project Divinity website. Those especially interested in voice acting should check out this thread.
Here is a synopsis:
Joel is a shy young man. When his student film becomes a success, he defies his parents’ wish for him to become a lawyer and pursues his dreams in film making. With the inspiration of a mysterious woman, he rises to fame in the film industry. But then, at the peak of his career, Joel’s life goes awry when he suddenly loses inspiration. With his job on the line, Joel must go on a world-wide journey of a lifetime to regain that to him was so precious.
This is your chance to be a part of a monumental project, so don’t hesitate if interested!
Okay, a quick post to highlight some of the creations I saw at the SEALUG meeting yesterday.
First up, Todd Kubo’s skull inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean:
(C’mon Todd, post new pictures with your wicked awesome voodoo charms!)
Next, Justin Pratt’s tank with urban survivability package:
Finally, Mark Neumann’s mecha inspired by Soren and Tim’s instructions:
Thomas Garrison graciously took photos of the meeting, and you can see a few more creations in his gallery. Here I am talking to Dan Sabath and Caylin Feiring:
That’s me in the green shirt. No, our faces aren’t intentionally blurred out — we just all happend to be moving our heads at the same time I guess!
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Phew! I finally registered for NWBrickCon, the annual west-coast LEGO convention held here in Seattle. This year it’s at Seattle Center on October 6, 7, and 8. I’m not sure what I’ll be building for the convention, but time is running short, so I better go on it.
For being the “smaller” convention (compared to the recently concluded BrickFest), it sounds like this year’s NWBrickCon will be a great success. Looking at the list of potential attendees (you can register on the site without making a commitment to attend, thus “potential”), I’m seeing many familiar names. Conference registration for all three days is $44.
There are also times when the show floor is open to the public, for a very reasonable $5. (For those of you reading this in Redmond, stop by my office for a coupon that’ll get you in the door for $4.)
I’ve worked in the neighborhood where the conference is held until recently, so I know all the best places to hang out and grab a bite to eat. I’d love to get together with our readers. See you all in October!
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Heh heh, I think you’d have to be blind and/or illiterate not to have noticed a few recent changes to The Brothers Brick. It’s taken a few days to get everything lined up, and there may be a few more changes in store, but without further ado, I’m pleased to welcome Linus Bohman and Nathan Wells to the Brotherhood of the Brick!
As he says in his own introduction, Linus joins us from Classic-Space Forums and From Bricks to Bothans. In his non-LEGO life (hey, we do have lives outside LEGO; more on that below), Linus is a student in Sweden and blogs his thoughts and photographs at Picturing the World. I’ve featured Linus’ creations here on TBB many times, and look forward to his coverage of all things sci-fi and the world of tomorrow — Space, Star Wars, steampunk, and so on.
Nathan Wells joins us from Classic-Castle Forums, Brickfilms, the wonderful Unique Brique Techniques, and his own blog, Behind the Redwood Curtain. Nathan and I have seen eye-to-eye on what makes a good LEGO creation for quite some time, competing and stealing liberally from each other. I expect Nathan will continue to highlight interesting building techniques on UBT, but I’m also overjoyed to have him taking on a role here, where he’ll be handling all things fantastical and real — Castle, Town, etc. One area of the LEGO world underrepresented here on TBB is LEGO-based animation, so I hope to see lots of brickfilms from Nathan (including his own).
I also hope Josh will be able to begin blogging here on TBB again soon, but real life (such as a new baby) is always the highest priority.
Which makes an appropriate transition to me. One reason I’m recruiting new contributors is that I’ve been neglecting the sort of Japanese-themed creations and overseas events that I had been blogging on Pan-Pacific Bricks. I have quite the backlog of interesting news and creations, but that takes much more time than posting the latest minifigs or mecha (which I’ll continue handling myself here on TBB). Handing off themes like Space and Castle — as much as I love them — will enable me to be a better bridge between English-speaking LEGO fans and our compatriots across the Pacific.
Unfortunately, I’ve also been neglecting my creative writing. Regular readers should know by now that I’m passionate about writing and literature, and a few of you may already know that some of my poetry has been accepted by a major literary journal (I’m sure I’ll find an excuse to let you know when it’s actually been published). As much as it pains me to say so, time spent blogging about LEGO has made it more difficult to take full advantage of that huge break. I need to spend more time writing poetry and to do a better job managing my creative writing career. All of you out there have been very loyal readers, and I thought you deserved to know one of the primary non-LEGO reasons I’m making these changes.
So, enough about the people. Back to the LEGO!
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I’ve been unable to access Blogger since my last post, but I think I have a workaround that will enable me to post now.
Stand by for some major updates to the blog (observant readers will already notice some changes on the main page), as well as the usual minifigs, mecha, castles, spaceships, and everything else wonderful and cool in the world of LEGO.
The Seattle Weekly reports that families hoping to leave their kids in the “LEGO pit” at Bumbershoot (our annual arts festival) while they run off to see Of Montreal or Rogue Wave will be disappointed this year. Just so ya know.
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This is the 500th post here on The Brothers Brick. Woo hoo! Last month, on July 24, this blog also celebrated its first birthday. Yee haw! (And a happy birthday to pootling today!) Let the long-winded, self-satisfied retrospective post begin…
A lot has changed in the LEGO blogosphere since my first post. When I launched “Dunechaser’s Blocklog,” as it was called back then, I was following the lead of bloggers like Bruce (of VignetteBricks), Jon Palmer (of Zemi.net), and Azumu (of LEGO-BINGO). A year ago, I could count the number of LEGO blogs I knew of on my fingers.
Today, there are over a hundred LEGO blogs in both English and Japanese, with an increasing number of blogs in other languages. Most blogs focus on a particular theme, with MINDSTORMS NXT a very popular subject (traffic to The NXT STEP absolutely dwarfs traffic to this blog). It sometimes seems like I run across a new blog just about every day. The number of blog posts Technorati has tracked that include the word “LEGO” should give you some indication of just how much the LEGO blogosphere has grown in the last year:
The online LEGO community as a whole seems to have changed somewhat over the last year. Although LUGNET, Brickshelf, and forum memberships continue to grow, I sense a shift toward blogging and Flickr (which itself includes many community features).
This blog has also grown substantially. I started out just planning to use my blog to feature my own creations but I quickly started featuring minifigs from other builders. I posted once or twice a week, and both comments and incoming links were rare. I installed StatCounter last December and was surprised to find that there were actually people reading my blog! When my Aztec gods were featured on Boing Boing, traffic spiked dramatically:
The Boing Boing spike hides a slow, steady growth in readership over the last eight months, especially in the number of regular, returning readers (the orange part of the graph):
As I started to post more creations from other builders and began finding and linking to other blogs, many bloggers returned the favor (along with an increasing number of non-LEGO blogs). And as I added more content and the links increased my Google page rank (4, according to PRChecker.info), people began finding this blog in both keyword and image searches:
Readers arrive here from other blogs (Unique Brique Techniques is the top referring LEGO blog), Technorati, search engines (mainly Google), and of course the forums where I post regularly. On any given day, about 250 to 300 of you who visit The Brothers Brick, from all over the world (this doesn’t include those of you reading posts in RSS/Atom feed readers and aggregators like ILENN):
On one hand, it makes me very proud that my little LEGO blog has found a measure of success, but on the other hand, it’s very humbling (and a bit overwhelming) to know that so many people rely on The Brothers Brick for their daily LEGO fix.
I don’t know what the LEGO blogosphere or The Brothers Brick will look like in another year, but it’s been an absolute blast finding and featuring so many cool LEGO creations. Builders, keep building great stuff. And readers, thanks for all your support!
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Mumu seems to have run across a new set on LEGO Shop@Home, G577 Vikings Chess Set. That link doesn’t work anymore, but Mumu lifted this picture before the set disappeared from S@H:
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Several people asked for a link to the steampunk contest on Flickr, so here it is:
http://flickr.com/groups/classic-space/discuss/72157594172210603
The contest is almost over, but the judging should be beginning soon, and it’s always interesting to see which creations are selected as the best.
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Seattle residents will always hold a special place in their hearts for Boeing, even after they ditch the city for Chicago. Oh well. From LEGO employee Steve Witt, here’s a new set — 10177 Boeing 787 Dreamliner (via mumu’s I Love Cute LEGO):
(More pictures in Steve’s Flickr photostream.)
