Tag: LEGO

SubscribeStar Saturday: Nativity Bricks Nativity Build and Review

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Back on Epiphany (6 January 2024) I built a Nativity from Nativity Bricks, a company that makes Christian-themed LEGO® knock-offs (I also composed an Epiphany-inspired original piano composition).

Nativity Bricks Nativity - Complete

The build was very good, and the quality was as close to LEGO® as I’ve seen from knock-off bricks. Seriously, I was blown away with how excellent the pieces were, and how intuitive the instructions were to follow. Most of these cheap copycat building blocks are just that—cheap. But Nativity Bricks’ pieces actually felt like LEGO® bricks. Even Mattel’s attempt to compete with LEGO®, Mega Bloks®, don’t stack up (no pun intended—hey-oh!).

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Some of the links in this post are links through the Amazon Affiliate Program. If you make any purchase through these links, a small portion of the proceeds go to me, at no additional cost to you.

Phone it in Friday XLVIII: YouTube Roundup IV

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Shockingly, I haven’t done an installment of YouTube Roundup since August 2023.  Since then, I’ve uploaded a ton of content, so it’s time to catch up on some videos.

I’ve selected three videos for this YouTube Roundup, all of a different type.  There’s a piece of music; a toy construction video; and something completely frivolous and fun:

Before we get to the videos, though, you should definitely subscribe to my YouTube channel.  I know for many readers, “subscribe” is a dirty word—God forbid we support our favorite content creators!—but trust me, it’s totally free to subscribe to my YouTube channel.

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LEGO® Star Wars™ 2023 Advent Calendar Part I: Days 1-8

The Portly Politico4 Comments

For the past couple of years or so I’ve been treating myself to a LEGO® Star Wars™ Advent Calendar.  I enjoy the ritual of building each day’s tiny set, and it’s cool getting some unique builds and minifigs (the name of the little LEGO® people).

I seem to recall the calendars being around $20 on sale.  This year, the full-price MSRP was something like $46, which is outrageous, but I got mine on sale for about $33. That’s honestly not terrible for a LEGO® set, which is essentially what this calendar is.

Of course, yours portly never lets anything go to waste, and I’ve turned my calendar into an opportunity to churn out YouTube content.  As such, I thought I’d catch everyone up on the first eight days of Advent calendar fun.

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Phone it in Friday XXXVII: Heroes of Endor

The Portly Politico2 Comments

LEGO has gone woke.  Actually, they’ve been woke for awhile, but they released an “A-Z of Awesome” of fan-built sets to push wacky gender ideology on their consumers.  A host of LEGO fans with alphabet soup “identities” built the sets (which I doubt will be made available as purchasable sets, because most of them are not that good or creative).

If child grooming among the LGBTQIA2+etc. community isn’t a thing, as our pedophilic elites insist (methinks too much), why are these queer activists pushing so hard to market “alternative lifestyles” to children?  In the past we could at least isolate this indoctrination to public schools.  Sure, a four-year old might see their teacher put a condom on a banana (it’s hyperbole, folks, to prove a point), but they weren’t going home and building the “4K Sex Ed Classroom” LEGO playset.

Nothing, it seems, is sacred, even my beloved LEGOs.

Now, some might say, “Tyler, you’ve gotsta stop feeding the beast.”  Honestly, the sheer expense of LEGOs—which have embraced inflationary pricing and jacked up the prices on their sets even further—is probably the bigger reason to scale back the hobby.  I can avoid a great deal of the LGBTQIA2+etc. foolishness, at least for now.

Honestly, though, I’m just a hypocrite.  What can I say?  I like LEGOs.  If I avoided every product from every company engaged in civilizationally self-destructive behavior, I’d be living an ascetic life without Internet access.  Naturally, there’s some happy middle ground between those two extremes, but as much as I abhor their policies, I can’t resist the the sweet, sweet hit of those little plastic bricks.

Which brings me to the real point of today’s post:  I had the pleasure of building the LEGO set Battle of Endor Heroes (40623) in their popular Brickheadz series.  It MSRPs at around $40, which is typical for a Brickheadz set, which charges around $10 per figurine, or $15 or a regular-sized figurine and a half-size one.  This set consists of three full-size figurines from Return of the Jedi (1983)—Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Lando Calrissian—and two half-sized ones—R2-D2 and Wicket, the feisty Ewok.

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Phone it in Friday XXXIV: Obi-Wan’s Starfighter

The Portly Politico2 Comments

After my LEGO habit hit a fever-pitch in 2022, I’ve tried to cool off a bit.  I’m a grown man with important things to do!

… but the appeal of building a good LEGO set is hard to ignore, and I can’t resist a good sale.  So it was that I picked up LEGO Star Wars 75333: Obi-Wan Kenobi’s Jedi Starfighter:

I’m not doing very well at putting aside childish things.

This set appealed to me right away.  The prequel trilogy is obviously inferior to the original trilogy (and both are vastly better than the execrable sequel trilogy), but I always loved Obi-Wan’s little Starfighter, and his trip to that planet with the long-necked aliens.  I particularly liked that I’d get one of the long-necked aliens (Taun We) and a plucky astromech droid (R4-P17).

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Phone it in Friday XXXIII: Bigfoot Build!

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Today’s post is a bit of a special surprise for Audre Myers, regular reader and contributor, and resident Bigfoot expert here at The Portly Politico.  While visiting Myrtle Beach this past weekend, my brother and I stopped into The Gay Dolphin (not a gay nightclub, but a schlocky tchotchkes-and-bric-a-brac merchant) to poke around at the various beach-themed gifts.

Amid the poking, I found this guy, and knew it was destiny:

Bigfoot - Box - Close Up

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TBT: Getting Medieval… with LEGO

The Portly Politico10 Comments

Over the last year, my childhood (and childlike) passion for all things LEGO reignited with all the intensity of a nearly-middle-aged man with disposal income and no children.  It all started with the Medieval Blacksmith (#21325) set, which I purchased for myself as a self-indulgent birthday present (and probably as a way to distract myself from a recent breakup… maybe there’s a connection there somewhere).

That splurge resulted in quite a few more, both for myself, friends, girlfriends, and family.  I’ll soon be starting on a very cool build that I will detail here soon.

I haven’t documented every build over the last year, but I’ve tried to give readers a glimpse into a world in which it is increasingly socially acceptable for a grown man to play with toys.

Regardless, in casting about for a good throwback post for this week’s edition of TBT, I settled on this detailed retrospective of my build of the Medieval Blacksmith set.  It was an incredibly engrossing and fun build, and I still admire the detail and craftsmanship that went into the design of the set.  Eventually, it will be the centerpiece of a hodge-podge LEGO world I’m currently constructing and planning.

With that, here is 18 January 2022’s “Getting Medieval… with LEGO“:

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Deposing Bib Fortuna… with LEGO

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Remember Bib Fortuna, Jabba the Hutt’s oily Twi’lek consigliere with the tentacles coming out of his head?  Thanks to the power of imagination and LEGOs, you can now roleplay his downfall!

Like any self-respecting man-child, I’d been lusting after set #75326, Boba Fett’s Throne Room, for some time.  To me, it’s Jabba the Hutt’s iconic throne room, just without the lovably disgusting, sluggish crime lord.

Unfortunately, this bad boy MSRPs for a whopping $100.  Fortunately, my brother found it at Costco in an example of mercantile serendipity—he didn’t even know I wanted it—for $60.  Finding any new LEGO set for 40% off is like, well, finding forty bucks on the ground—it doesn’t really happen.

I finally got around to building this bad boy over the weekend, and it was a pretty fun build.  It wasn’t as deeply satisfying as some other sets I’ve done, but it also didn’t become tedious.  All in all, it was pretty fun to put together, and I love the variety of mini-figures—especially the porcine Gamorrean Guard and the aquatic Quarren.

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Bull Terrier Tuesday: Balody Bull Terrier Build

The Portly Politico6 Comments

Regular readers know of my boyish love for LEGO sets of any kind, and that I’ve been building more and more of them over the past year.  Those same readers will know of my dog, Murphy, an eight-year old female bull terrier that I adopted last summer from The Bull Terrier Rescue Mission.

Apparently, there exists a bull terrier building set from Balody, an Asian (probably Chinese) company that makes a LEGO knock-off, with a twist:  the pieces are extremely tiny.  Indeed, they’re called “micro building blocks” on Amazon.

That’s where the inscrutable East gets that much more inscrutable:  on Amazon, the company selling this set is called “Larcele.”  I can only assume it’s a classy French rebranding to make the toy sound more European (LEGO is Danish).  There’s also a site called mylozblocks.com that sells the sets.

I can’t find anything about Balody or Larcele online, other than the latter’s Amazon page.  If any toy enthusiasts are reading this blog and can weight in, I’d appreciate it.  Granted, I spent a grand total of maybe seven minutes searching the web, so who knows what I missed.

Regardless, a new lady friend gifted me this Balody/Larcelle bull terrier set for Easter, an incredibly thoughtful gift.  It was also incredibly difficult to build, despite the box boasting a difficulty level of three out of five blocks (whatever that means).

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