21 Knots, Sir

What happened was this: I was scrolling through my Instagram feed and past a Temu advert. I was distracted by what looked like a knock-off of the recent Lego Titanic, which additionally seemed to include an iceberg. Laughing at the tastelessness of including that, I tracked down the product page over at Amazon, AND BOY DID IT GET BETTER.

It’s not a knock-off of the Lego set at all, really; yes, it’s the Titanic, but it’s at a smaller scale (which does mean that instead of $680, its list price is $79, which makes it much more acceptable as something to actually buy). Here’s how my train of thought went as I went through the images:

• Oh, it comes with a break-apart mode so you can display it…as it went down? That’s silly, but okay…

• It has diorama bits inside…wait, is that the staircase? IT IS

• What is that…OH MY GOD, IT’S THE HEART OF THE OCEAN IN THE GODDAMNED SAFE!

• IT INCLUDES LEO & KATE MINIFIGURES????

• Wait, is that…THERE’S A PRINT OF THE PORTRAIT???

Reader, I bought it. It was also reduced to $65 with a further 10% off at checkout, so I felt that if nothing else, ~2300 pieces of Lego for under $60 is not that bad. And damn, so here’s the thing. In proper Lego sets, even expensive ones, you’ll often end up with a sticker sheet which you have to apply to blank Lego tiles, because actually investing the money to print thousands of tiles with a print bonded onto them is a lot, compared to just using blanks and stickers. The company behind this set went to the expense of printing an entire run of naked Kate Winslet tiles, and for that we can only sit back in awe.

(Honestly, the only thing the set is missing is a door for the Kate minifigure. Yes, just the Kate one)

Apparently the build is terrible, and the instruction manual is printed about a third of the size that it should be to make all the steps clearly visible, but I think that’s a fair trade-off for the insanity that the set provides. One thing, though: because it isn’t minifigure scale, it doesn’t really fit into the plans for our Lego city. Which led me to a different set of thoughts. I could, maybe, get hold of a knock-off of the Parisian Restaurant modular building. And then? REBUILD IT AS RENÉ’S CAFE I have even given thought as to how to make the RAF airmen work in the attic, and how to hide the portrait in the kitchen. WE CAN MAKE THIS HAPPEN.

I probably need to be stopped before I do.

Oh, and I did computer-y stuff during the week. BUT NONE OF THAT MATTERS NOW. I HAVE A QUEST.