Back in March, we had a bit of a frustrating time here at The Brothers Brick, with several days of intermittent server downtime due to a software configuration issue. To have a little fun, I kicked off a brief contest. We got a number of great entries from TBB fans, which you can see in the photo pool on Flickr. Unfortunately, I became gravely ill just as the contest was ending, and I’ve been struggling to catch up ever since — focusing first on my day job (no, TBB is not actually my day job), and only then on LEGO and TBB.

With thanks to all our incredibly patient readers and contest participants (and yes, I do have a few words for the impatient and self-entitled after the jump), I’m pleased to finally share the winners of the contest categories.

TBB is Down Again!

As a techie, it was hard not to love these colorful, accurate server racks by Leopold Mao. The plumes of smoke, mice gnawing the cables, and distraught sysadmin, combined with the trans-clear bricks inside the servers, are all excellent touches. This is my pick for the top category. Congratulations, Leopold!

404 Page Not Found

We hope our readers don’t encounter this iconic webpage error too often. Blake Foster wins this category with this simple but brilliant idea — a double-sided 1×2 plate! If only…

A Lemur Did It!

Our Lemur has gone AWOL recently, but he was a frenzy of activity back in March, and some of us suspect he may have had a little something to do with the downtime. Our winning entry in this category was drawn by Sayre Blake, who illustrated an amusing scene of A. Lemur eating mangoes & PBJ while swooshing a LEGO spaceship.

We actually had a number of excellent entries in this category, so in addition to the three main prizes, I’d like to extend Honorable Mentions (with a small LEGO set as a prize) to “Server Error 223 – Hungry Lemur” by IamKritch and “A. Lemur is having some trouble pulling up TBB…” by Ashton6460.

If you’re a winner, contact me on Flickr and I’ll get your contact information to send out your prize!

Yup, I have a rant. But I’ll spare most of you and save it for after the jump…

The Clone on a Plate Contest wrapped up with an astounding 124 entries! This one day flash contest kept everyone here on the edge of their seat to see what the creative LEGO geniuses out there would come up with! This isn’t our biggest contest ever, but if we extrapolated the number of entries over a typical contest length of a month this would have generated a whopping 3840 entries!

With so many entries we had a very hard time determining what would be worthy of the COAP Prize Pack. It was a tough for the contestants as they were given just one instruction: “Clone on a Plate”, with multiple interpretations:

From an artistic side, I think we all agreed VerSen‘s “Walk on the Water” entry was simply gorgeous:

Equally artistic, with a very Shepard Fairey entry, we have Nick Royer (HJ Media Studios) with a cool rendered clone and some 3rd party weapons:

Many went for the puns on clone and plate, with entries ranging from: clone (brand) on a (dinner) plate, clone on a (tectonic) plate), clone (sheep) on a plate, or clone (food/GMO) on a plate. There were others that did a fantastic job adding their own personal flair to their clones, and a few less flattering entries.

But the winner of the Prize pack was the entry that made us laugh the most. Despite the fairly obvious method of creating entries, Jonas (Legopard) provided the perfect dead pan entry of “Clone on a Plate WITH INSTRUCTION”:

This made us laugh not once, not twice, but three times as Mr. Jonas proceeded to submit his entries to LEGO Ideas, and subsequently get rejected.

Congrats Jonas!

And on behalf of the TBB team, I do wish to apologize to LEGO Ideas for the extra work, though I assume that was definitely the highlight of their day, as it was ours.