Slashdot Mirror
Staggeringly Amazing Church of Lego
rcharbon writes: "This link brings you to yet another of the web's compulsive personalities. Almost 18 months in the making, the lego church is astonishing. Christened as a monument to dead cats, no less." I know we post Lego things often, but this is an amazing project from Groundbreaking ceremony to completion. I was especially impressed with the mosaic works. The artist also has a number of other Lego works to check out while you're at it.
This is one of those people that I'm very happy to have seen on the web, but are too scary to meet in real life.
Brings up thoughts of Misery.
where's the lego tv crew and the lego phone number overlay?
Tim Dorr
Owner/Manger
A Small Orange
So this is like the second or third post, and the link is already slashdotted. Sigh. Mirrors anyone?
Do you not check those links?
You should be going here: http://www.amyhughes.org/lego/church/
My Journal
I guess their server was built from lego too...
Next on "let's bring the Slashdot Effect down on the kind, poor and hapless," the readers of Slashdot bring down the servers of three orphanages, a school for the blind, two hunger project centers, and a sweet little old lady's home-based DSl-linked web server that she uses to organize day trips for the terminally ill.
I hate to suggest it, but perhaps links to sites that can't sustain a /. load shouldn't be posted? Besides the fact that nobody can check this site out after 2 minutes, it's undoubtedly difficult for the webmaster of said site (especially if they have bandwidth limitations, etc).
-- Patience is a virtue, but impatience is an art.
I will live in a house completly made out of lego blocks, fully automated and linked to my computer for additionnal control. I'll even have a lego dog running around. Yeah!
I'm just a bit curious as to how much it COSTS to build a castle out of LEGOs... I remember when I used to play with LEGOs, (like 4 years ago...I'm not that old ^_^) I had a hard time scraping enough money together to build a decent castle (for the little LEGO people, that is...) The site is /.ed, so I can't see if it says there - does anyone have figures as to how much the Church of LEGO cost?
-Jaybird144
Lego Porn...
not necessarily on topic, but a good point
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Just press your refresh button as fast as you can. And don't give up. Just keep on pressing it. Faster!
Make sure nobody enjoys it if you can't.
Let's not stir that bag of worms...
Since it is already slashdotted, here is the main page. I managed to grab one overhead of the church, you can see it here
"This project is dedicated to my cat, Precious, who passed away January 8, 2002, the same day construction was completed. May this church, of such amusement to My Little Chirper, express some of the joy she brought me.
"I thank my God upon every remembrance of you" Philippians 1:3
About this project
I got back into LEGO building after a twenty-year "dark ages" as a means of dealing with grief after my first cat, Murray, passed away in June, 2000. I also adopted Precious, my third cat, at that time. She loved to be amidst my building from the start. She didn't disturb partially assembled LEGO objects, or even piles of bricks, so I only had to concern myself with cleaning up loose pieces when I was done working, and I could leave her to play around my assembled work without too much fear of damage.
My first project was to be a large house, about 4 feet by 2 feet in size. I drew floor plans, and then built much of the front wall as a test of concept. Then I set about creating a pattern for the floor that was to become the living room. I quickly came up with a double row of crosses that reminded me of the center aisle of a church, and building a church suddenly seemed like a more interesting project.
And so the Abston Church of Christ was conceived as my first LEGO project in twenty years. As the picture above shows, Precious continued to enjoy my building, and as you'll see in the Cats in Church pictures, she and her sister, Anya, made this project quite a lot of fun. Read about it in the construction log.
As chance would have it, I only had a few hours of work to complete after Precious passed away, so in her honor I wrapped it up that same day. I didn't have a chance to do some small revisions or to build a piano for the church because I wanted to leave it as it was on that day.
I hope you enjoy this church, because that's how I get to share the memory of My Little Chirper with you. I like to think of this as Precious's Church. "
Honestly, this is an amazing project, but the site gives me the creeps for some reason.
Here's a picture:
http://129.7.201.70/xcomputerman/legochurch.jpg
Am I a hipster-doofus?
And on the eighth day, God created plastic, and he saw that it was good, and he made little teeny-tiny blocks out of it to give geeks something very cool to play with.
sorry but for every story now comments like this are
getting put up.
moderators?
They are the ones with the legs on backwards, for obvious reasons.
"And like that
This AC thinks starvation was the cause *rimshot*
1) Created by FrontPage
2) Cheezy colour scheme
3) Obviously "personal project" type page
4) "Server IIS running on Windows NT x.x"
Others?
If you don't want to repeat the past, stop living in it.
Does this make the 102nd use for a dead cat?
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Check out The Brick Testament
Complements it quite nicely.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
the lego church is astonishing Christened as a monument to dead cats, no less
This may not be made of lego but its one hell of a shrine to dead cats
Anyone else have a mirror? What I want to know is when will Lego go public! Keep buying, keep building. :)
Garth
This is pretty cool. But would've been a lot cooler if it was a Lego concert hall with these guys playing.
"Michael, I did nothing. I did absolutely nothing - and it was everything that I thought it could be."
the lego church is astonishing Christened as a monument to dead cats, no less
The comment Does this make the 102nd use for a dead cat?
Question: How was his comment offtopic ?
Answer: Crack smoking trolling moderators
How long until the Lego church folk start to attack the Harry Potter lego for evil wizardry? Or until little Lego missionaries try to convert the pirates and the spacemen to their side?
That ain't nothing. My ex-brother-in-law done built hisself a entire house down by the river under the old bridge using some cardboard boxes and some newspapers he found in the dumpster.
There really wasn't any need to start subscriptions here on /. now was there, Taco, when you could simply have charged hapless siteadmins in exchange for rejecting submissions linking to their machines...
Gah, do I have to do all the thinking round here?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Check here. Please be kind... 8(
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
from her site: It contains approximately 75,000 pieces, including almost 4000 windows, seats 1372 minifigs and is about 7 feet long by 5 1/2 feet wide.
Actually, it's amazingly comfortable once you get settled. All the little bumps and points sort of massage you if you distribute your weight. (Still hate stepping on bricks, though.) I used to do it when I was a kid, and would nearly fall asleep. I guess it's kinda like laying on a bed of nails.
Some people deal with their emotions, some go into denial, and some build lego cathedrals.
I guess we should be more sensitive though, those must have been some cats and must have meant a lot to her.
Really good work, though; astounding detail on the pews, lights, crucifix, lighting...
I just hope she didn't actually entomb the cat there.
PS: I now realise that it is not a guy, I just thought that such obsession is usually a guy thing.
I don't visit websites who's forums are in the Chinese language and make an ass out of myself, so why don't you do yourself a favor and and learn the language first?
mmmkay?
For the (hopefully) last time:
Lego is the plural of Lego. Lego is the company. If you must add an 's', use "Lego bricks." The bastardization "Legos" grates on any true fans nerves. Please don't use it.
Ideas in this comment are smarter than they appear.
How about this fellow? Equally scary, yet interesting . . .
The Brick Testament
Very funny, if a bit irreverent . . .
How about building the cache on top of Squid? Write a program so links would reference, say, http://slashdot.org/cache/www.amyhughes.org/lego/. This program then requests the URL through Squid, which takes care of making sure that the site receives the appropriate number of hits. (Squid checks to make sure the data hasn't changed, and if it hasn't, the data isn't downloaded - this results in the site registering a hit, but not having to transfer any data other than the header response.) If a site seems like it might get slashdotted (and I can usually guess when a URL will be slashdotted), the editor clicks a button and POOF - the URL in the story is automatically changed and the cache program lists it as a valid site to cache (so that people can't use it to bypass pr0n filters at work). This can't be THAT difficult, can it? Squid does all the work for you, and who needs permission from the site to use Squid? Are there any implications (described in the FAQ or otherwise) that I haven't addressed (besides non-relative links in the HTML needing to be rewritten)?
If you want irreverent, look closely at the figures in the background of the first image in the Flood story.
o od/gn06_11.html
http://www.thereverend.com/brick_testament/the_fl
(there's not supposed to be a space in 'flo od', I don't know why Slashdot is putting one there, but the link works)
The guy in the striped shirt is a mime, but his face is too blurry to see that it's painted white. And yes, that's Jar Jar back there, and a guy in a tree stump, and an unfortunate sheep...
Hehe... see? Now I'm gonna have to go over the site carefully, lookin for stuff like this.
There goes an hour or two.
Hilarious.
Great idea. Even better, slashdot (which needs the money) could charge the sites for this service. The conversation might go like this:
Hapless Victim: Hello?
Cmdr Taco: Hey, I about to post a link to your site which will cause it to get blitzed, causing your ISP to charge you big bucks for bandwidth usage. Howz about you pay me to cache it instead...
Ya get the idea...
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you
Sometimes, amongst the thousands of posts about how We hate Copy Protection, Lawyers Stink, I oppose the DMCCYAYYCCY Law Which Prevent me from Downloading Phr33 StUph, there is actually an article about News For Nerds with some cool pictures. I suggest that out of common courtesy, or compassion perhaps, Slashdot will kindly mirror sites with such pictures on the SlashCache, and have the Slashdot article refer to the mirror.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
In the last Q&A CmdrTaco and Hemos held, this question brought up, and the simple answer is, they cant, because of copyright issues
Would a caching proxy really constitute a copyright infringement? Does the one in my house, or the one at the office? What about the ones that many ISPs set up to cut down on their upstream bandwidth costs? How about the browser cache on every computer? For that matter, what about the Google cache?
My theory is that /. doesn't want to increase their own bandwidth consumption when they can let others handle part of the load they generate.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Wait a second. Her first cat passed away in 2000, and the second one just two years later? Maybe this person thinks the cats are also constructed of Lego bricks, so they don't need feeding, and can be locked up in Lego structures for extraordinary amounts of time :)
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Amazon.com, Riaa.org, Blizzard.com - These can handle a slashdotting.
o s. html, 123.34.56.256/shinything.html, ServerrunningonaC64.net - these cannot.
geocities.com/someguy123/manganatalieportmanleg
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I'm not karma-whoring, honest. If I am moderated up, well, I'm on a 33.6 and I could very well be Slashdotted worse than the original host of this web site. =)
Not to get picky or anything, but nobody is going to be slashdotting 123.34.56.256... it's not a valid IP address. Now if it was 123.34.56.254 they might have some serious issues with a slashdotting.
There's no place I can be, since I found Serenity.
so then how does google get away with it? they have cached versions of pages. and what about http://web.archive.org/ ? It seems like slashdot could easily do something similar.
I did that on purpose just to be sure i didnt put a valid address :P
Tim
Omnia vestra castrorum habetur nobis.
I thought that it was a religious-themed site to promote Christianity through Legos, then I read "Treatment of slaves" and "Women in the Church"
Funny stuff.
STOP MISUSING APOSTROPHES, YOU MORONS!!!
Even better are the Instructions for Marriage.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
The site actually has a pretty fat pipe, but traffic started to spike a couple days before slashdot even got the story. It looks from emailed comments and the web log like it's being discussed in email, "online journals" and other forums. Traffic has been doubling every day. Would it have survived a slashdotting a week ago? I dunno. I'll get a fatter pipe before I announce the next project :-)
In any case, when the server comes back up there'll be no church pictures for a while.
Amy
Still, I think that /. would want to run ads or have subscriptions pay for each page view. I certainly think that it is one thing for someone to simple cache a page. It is another to cache it and show your own ads.
I don't think that Taco & Co. are worried enough about this problem to do anything about it. If they were they would have done something long ago. The copyright problem seems like an excuse. It would be a simple thing for them to contact small site owners and ask for permission to take a snapshot of a portion of a site and leave it up for a few days. They could even show the sites own ads in addtion to any ads that non /. subscribers see. Heck, if /. actually made $$ they could pay small sites a bit for the right to cache their content for a while.
Interestingly at least two stories today were from small sites that got hammered within seconds of hitting the front page. In fact, all the Lego (tm) stories that I can remember recently got /.ed so fast that I had to wait until a day or two later to view them.
I don't seem how anyone is harmed by temporary caching if done with some thought, do you?
Lasers Controlled Games!
..Gaudi had had Lego. Maybe he would have got finished with Barcelona.
<fnord>OBEY</fnord>
I was kinda afraid to look in the first place.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
An (assumed) American telling us how to speak English! Ha ha!
Correct assumption. I have been speaking English for as long as you assuming that we're the same age so your point is?
It's 'some lego', not 'legos' because it's not 'a lego', it's 'a lego brick'.
My point is that "some lego" sounds stupid.
The proper way to say it would be "Some Lego brand building bricks". This is ungainly hence you simplify this.
The vast majority of people simplify this further to legos. Does the Lego company make anything besides legos? No. Hence there is no ambiguity.
I'm making cookies using (some) 'flour', not 'flours'. Jeez.
Of course. A mass of ground wheat is called flour. Where's the problem?
She knows.
http://news.lugnet.com/announce/?n=1589
Or an even less serious one: Lego Porn!
Han-Wen Nienhuys -- LilyPond
Another point of view might be this:
When someone says they are going to photocopy something, they might say "I'm going to Zerox this". Or they might ask for a "Klennex" instead of a facial tissue.
Lego wants to protect their name. The problem is that people go to the store to buy "legos" and get Mega(crap)blocks. After all they are building bricks so they must be "legos". Or at least that is their train of thought.
Help Protect Lego's brand name, call them "Lego Bricks".
-J
For those who don't want to cut'n'paste:
http://www.amyhughes.org/lego/church/
*does the fish slapping dance and then smacks BrightBlade with a wet trout made of many lego*
These cats are not even dead, they put airholes in the glass-tubes!
Damn, and I though MY apartment was cramed.
amyhughes.com is TOTALLY down right now. The NAMESERVER isn't even working. And the /. admin KNEW that might happen. And what if poor Amy Hughes exceeds her allocated bandwith and has to pay out the wazoo for it? She may not have ads on her site, and now she has a large bill to pay.
I'm not trying to flame anybody (and IANAL), but.... it sounds like negligence to me. Maybe they figure that the people who can't handle the load don't have the resources to sue them, either. I guess that's a valid point. But it's still not very nice.
First off, the church is tre's cool and tre's spooky.
/.ed and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt!" t-shirt to the owner(s).
Second, everytime a site gets slashdotted, slashdot should send out a "I got
Sigh. The poor lady.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
We Slashdotted the hell out of her site! Yesterday it said that connections were being refused. Today it says: 'no address for host www.amyhughes.org'. Whatever we did must have killed her server. And, unfortunately, she set up her "robots.txt" file to ban all robots. Now, we may never get to see this goddamn Lego church!
The church site (amyhughes.org) is down for the count. I over-stayed my welcome
at my previous host, and now I'm looking for a fatter pipe. My needs are
variable, and pretty extreme on the upper end (but nothing like BS, BL, etc)...
My normal traffic has been about a half gig per month, but I think it's going
to be in the 2-4 gig range for the forseeable future, with peaks of 2-4 gig per
*day*, about once per year for a duration of a few weeks. Summary: 4 gig/day
peek for a few weeks per year, 4 gig per month normal traffic.
My storage requirements are more modest - perhaps 50 meg.
I need all email addressed to @amyhughes.org domain routed to me, regardless of
address. I currently have access to procmail for mail sorting and don't want to
lose that capability.
I'd like to be able to control URL re-direction based on referer, and I know
how to do this in Apache, so I'd like an Apache host. I'll consider other,
working alternatives, but my requirements are...
1) prevent other sites from inlining my images
2) block links from some sites, using regular expressions or something similar
that is just as flexible
A Linux box running Apache meets all these requirements, provided the host
gives me access to procmail, directory-level htaccess and the apache rewrite
module.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Amy
...Create something incredibly cool and lose your site. Thanks to thesolo for mirroring a couple of pix - this thing is AMAZING. Two weeks ago I sold my collection of 60,000+ LEGO bricks (re-entering my "dark ages"), but I never managed to do anything that cool with them. I did get around to a 100 square foot train layout with pneumatically powered switches, compressor, and regulator (all LEGO) but this puts my stuff to shame.
For those who have been out of LEGO for a while (15+ years), there is some pretty amazing stuff out there now. Mindstorms is quite cool, some of the larger Technic sets are amazing, and LEGO seems to be catering toward its growing Train fans by releasing neat sets like the Sante Fe Super Chief. On the other hand, unfortunately, they are also licensing Harry Potter and Star Wars. Feh.
Some other links to Slas^H^H^H^Hview are:
Lego Castles
The Pacific Northwest LEGO Train Club
the Brickshelf Gallery
The LEGO Users Group Network
Hopefully the traffic'll die down soon so I can see the rest of Amy's site. Nice work, Ms. Hughes, and may your cat rest in peace.
DoC
Perhaps I already know the difference between "who's" and "whose" but I didn't remember it when I typed this reply. Does not remembering something make me an idiot? No. I'm sure that you've forgotten things in the past, are you an idiot?
Thinking that you know everything makes you an idiot because everyone knows that nobody can know everything.
I do not appreciate being called an idiot because I do not pretend to know everything. You, on the other hand, must think that you know everything to be calling me an idiot. Therefore, it is you who is idiotic, not I.
You are also (obviously) a Coward.