I just logged into my Brickshelf account and found it EMPTY
I heard recently that Brickshelf, the first website I ever lied about my age to join, was planning to shut down due to the death of its founder and owner. What a shock!
This site has been an image upload spot for Lego-related pictures since 1999. I used it as a kid, back when my entire online identity was "being a Bionicle fan." Looking through the galleries now is fascinating. I recommend checking out all the bizarre fan art you can find if you search for my favorite Bionicle from childhood, Onua. Amateur spritesheets, custom re-imaginings of the character with brief lore descriptions, collections of desktop wallpapers and promotional images and forum avatars downloaded greedily by child data hoarders... it's all here.
Luckily, however, it seems that Brickshelf and its ancient trove of fan culture may survive its operator's passing. The whole thing, the Bionicle fan stuff plus all the other traditional Lego creation images, has been purchased by a Bionicle fan site called "The Wall of History," which seems to be... a recreation of various Bionicle online materials? Including the incredible point and click web game???
I was curious to see if any of my stuff was still on the site. I spent about half an hour trying to remember my account name, and FINALLY got it. I got the password right on the first try, too, which is wild as hell.
And I found the account empty!!! What in the hell!!
I mean, it's not surprising. I didn't log in for 22 years. I'm pretty lucky I can even log in.
But I was poking around, trying to figure out what might have happened to my images, when I saw some scraps of reference to some ancient Brickshelf disaster from 2007 - a few years after I stopped using the site. It seems that Brickshelf shut down at one point in 2007. This link is full of other links to Lego fan blog posts about the shutdown... and a few of those sites are still up, too. It seems that Brickshelf was only down for a few days before coming back with a new payment model. I was even able to find a post from the owner, Kevin Loch, the guy who recently passed away, talking about the situation.
In hindsight I should have handled this differently but it's too late for that now.
I had long ago written off various ides for charging recurring fees because AFOLs and geeks in general expect everything on the web to be free.
What turned this around is the totally unexpected volume of email I received from what appear to be regular people. Many of these people expressed an interest in paying some modest fee to keep the site running, if only there was a way to do that.
So really I have no idea why my pictures are all missing from Brickshelf. Anything could have happened. The site could have gone down a bunch of times. There could have been multiple wipes. I could have been subject to a payment model change. There seem to be more old site announcements from Loch at the Lugnet link above, but the site doesn't play well with my modern browser.
If "The Wall Of History," the Bionicle fansite that bought Brickshelf, really wants to preserve Bionicle history, I think they should create historical records about Brickshelf, too! I'd be thrilled to read them, personally. I don't think about this stuff often, and my memory is not incredible, but I remember having so many intense and formative experiences with this online community when I was a kid. It made me into a Poster. I want the adults with the long memories to tell me the lore I've forgotten!
Anyway: I leave you with a picture from the height of my Bionicle years... a picture of my dog with a Rahkshi riding its back. Her name was Jessie, and she was very patient.
