Given the subject matter of what I am about to write, you may wonder if I mean “pissed” in the Irish sense — getting drunk — or the American sense — irritated. You are right to wonder!
Last evening, after I returned from several days in the Old Dominion, Facebook hit me up with an ad tailored exactly to my interests.
A LEGO-like set of an Irish pub! With Guinness branding! The toucan! The familiar saying! Pints of stout! Men in flatcaps!
Of course I would want something like this! Facebook, you know me too well! First, the Borodino set, and now a Guinness pub?
Truly, it would be a lovely day… to build a Guinness LEGO-esque pub! I’d put on some Pogues or some Dropkicks or some Tossers, and build and build and build.
Oh, frabjous day!
I clicked through the link, to see how much it cost, and was pleasantly surprised that it wasn’t more expensive than it was. Then I notivced an almost complete lack of details, like now many pieces the set had.
Then I looked at the pictures, and something seemed off…
Do you see it? I didn’t, at first, and then once I did, it became inescapable.
The images are AI slop. The picture of the built set generally masks it, because your eyes focus on the set, and nothing about it looks off. There are words, the letters are formed properly, they’re spelled correctly.
Then you look at the product box, and suddenly it’s unavoidable. I’ve circled a number of the issues.
There’s a LEGO logo on the box… sort of. Except it’s not formed correctly. It’s more a blob that looks vaguely like the LEGO logo than actual letters that spell out LEGO.
The piece count is a bunch of lines that look like Phoenician squiggles.
The registered trademark on the Guinness wordmark doesn’t look like anything.
The text on the side of the box is in the neighborhood of letters, as are the signs immediately above the door to the pub. You wouldn’t necessarily look at that because they’re correct in the larger image of the assembled set.
Point is, this isn’t a real LEGO set, or even a real LEGO-like set.
And I am properly pissed. In the American sense. 🙂
At least I have the pictures. And the dream.