News You Can Bruise for 2003 July 12

Brendan is now using NewsBruiser, and gushes about it a bit. Eg. "Switching my journal software was like walking into a dealership with a wheelbarrow and driving out with a red Ferrari." It's more grist for the NewsBruiser mill, which, as they say, bruises pretty quickly, and exceeding fine.

• You thought there was only one of these pictures.
• But there's a bunch.
• There's more.
• etc.
• What's he doing?
• OK, enough elephants. Here are some elephants.
• And an elephant.
• And some safety elephants.
• How'd he get in here?

Brickshelf is great; it's got user folders in which people put up pictures of the things they hammered together on the Lego forge. It's also got scanned instruction booklets for a lot of the official Lego sets, but it's more interesting to see peoples' fire engines, Ferris wheels, large-scale reproductions of individual pieces, enormous, messy spacecraft cobbled together from the remains of other spacecraft, where the crew just sit around in vacuum while travelling at superluminal speeds, like in the really old sets, etc. etc.

If I were doing an article on Brickshelf I would have to do stupid journalistic things like talk about how people were using Brickshelf to sell Lego paraphanelia. But since this is just a weblog entry, I can point you to the Lego trilobite and the Lego soccer game, complete with Lego soccer hooligans.

Ray-Traced Lego Mania is also great; its glorious raytraces of retro Lego sets take me back to the days when I had to do a bunch of yardwork to get a really cool set. It's also got some funny joke sets: the Blacktron Ice Cream Disseminator and my favorite, the satirical BURP Adventure.