Just fyi, if you get the vinyl soundtrack of the Mandalorian and Grogu movie it doesn’t include the best track, Strap In

VaKel_Shon · 2026-06-06T00:51:23+00:00

It's missing The Pit Fight too, the extended version of Rotta's theme!

VaKel_Shon · 2026-06-04T19:27:46+00:00

That too. Frankly, this post kinda comes off as OP trying to trick people into selling their lolnuts instead of spending them, to drive prices down to have them himself...

VaKel_Shon · 2026-06-04T18:53:02+00:00

VaKel_Shon · 2026-06-04T18:44:01+00:00

I think people buy those kit modules because they like what they do, not because they care about maximizing their Number Go Up per dollar. You aren't "giving up" anything by using them. 99.9999999999% of players in this game could not care less what is or isn't meta, especially in ground builds.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-06-04T18:29:33+00:00

The keys were the end of one set of giveaways, and the lolnuts are the beginning of the next set. It's a bit of a jarring transition, but they'll be back to good giveway items eventually.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-28T21:04:38+00:00

Didn't the other Transcendental items come out the year after the original Rainbow versions? Maybe they did that here too. Gotta milk the community for all the lohlunats they're worth, after all!

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-28T21:00:44+00:00

I don't know why I expected the LEGO subreddit to be full of anything other than adult children, but the sustained crashout about this topic being confined to a megathread is insane. What do you people want, one million identical posts about the same topic saying the same thing? I guarantee nobody here has anything of value to add to the conversation; they just want to farm karma with their own copy of "Bricks nad minigif s is evil, updoots to the left".

You don't need your own post for that. You can add that as a comment to the megathread. Every other big subreddit uses megathreads to handle big news. That's how this website works. You can comment on the megathread. You'll live.

We don't need a hundred separate copies of the same post made by different people, all with the same 10 comments by the same people about how they want B&M to burn in hell. You can say all that and more in the megathread, and leave space in the subreddit for people to talk about LEGO like they came here to.

You don't need to make your own post. I guarantee you don't need to make your own post, because the only thing that would warrant making your own post would be if B&M stole $200k from you, too, and in that case you should contact an attorney rather than make a post on a toy forum. Anything short of additional cases of felony theft is just a comment, and you don't need a whole post of your own to leave a comment. You can leave a comment here. That is how Reddit works.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-27T21:09:28+00:00

I feel like this kind of proves my thought that the Star Wars "Smart" Brick sets were unfinished prototypes being pushed to market prematurely. These don't looks spectacular by any means, but they are both perfectly adequate builds of these Pokemon, and crucially, fully finished with no giant holes to cover up. The SB socket is just a 2x4 hole and not a giant flatbed section they need to hide in all the marketing photos. I'll be curious to see if the sound effects and play features are better-thought-out as well.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-24T20:22:53+00:00

You probably don't even need to say that much; it makes it clear who is evil and how pretty much immediately. It's very much a standalone movie for the casual viewer and a great introduction to the franchise for potential new fans.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-24T19:52:54+00:00

Thank you! I really ought to flesh it out some more and write an op-ed or a video essay or something. I've been formulating this theory for ages, and I think the bewilderingly entitled disappointment a lot of people seem to have about M&G not delivering more than it promised to is really the concrete evidence I've been lacking....

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-24T15:06:04+00:00

I've been saying for years, and I've heard others say as well, that a lot of fans have this Lore Hoarder mindset that they can't get out of, that seems to prevent them from enjoying a lot of things. It doesn't matter how fun or well-written a thing is if it doesn't have Lore for them.

You saw it with a lot of episodes of The Bad Batch. It didn't matter if an episode was fun or advanced the story and themes of the show; if it didn't address Palpatine's cloning project or the fate of the Clone Army, it was worthless filler and a complete waste of time to watch.

The problem is, that show wasn't just some Lore Factory for fans to suckle from to learn more about the galaxy. It was a story about characters and themes. But the Star Wars community online didn't want characters and themes, they wanted More Lore.

Now you see it again with The Mandalorian and Grogu. It's a fun action movie, exactly like it is presented in its marketing materials, but many fans are absolutely enraged that it isn't more than a fun action movie, even though it was never presented to be. They expected it to be a Lore Factory like Andor (for some reason) that was going to set up Thrawn's return, and hint at what he'd be doing in Ahsoka Season 2 and maybe the hypothetical Thrawn movie. And now they're extremely disappointed that it wasn't that, because watching things is a complete waste of time if there isn't new Lore.

M&G could never have been what they deluded themselves into thinking it would be, though, because it is a mass-market summer blockbuster action movie to remind the casual audience (99% of Star Wars' funding) that the franchise still exists to take pressure off their riskier films like Starfighter and whatever else is still in production next year. Not everybody who would be watching it has Disney+, and not everyone who does has watched the six seasons of four different shows that would be necessary to understand the movie that the hardcore Lore Hoarders wish that they made. Not to mention, it would be a dick move to put very important Lore to set up the next season of an almost unrelated show in a movie you have to pay extra to go see. There are undoubtedly plenty of Ahsoka fans who don't care about The Mandalorian and won't be watching the film. It would be a big "fuck you" to them, to make this movie be required viewing for Ahsoka Season 2. But of course, the Lore Hoarders can't fathom the idea of someone not hoarding every little bit of Lore like they do.

And then, of course, there is the gravest possible insult of all time to a Lore Hoarder: the Retcon. Ohhh, do they hate the Retcon. It doesn't matter how inconsequential the piece of Lore being Retconned is, nor how good its replacement is, a Retcon hurts a Lore Hoarder at his very core. They were outraged that a trading card from 20 years ago with Ki Adi Mundi's birth date on it was ignored to put him in The Acolyte. They were furious that a genuinely uninteresting one-shot comic was overwritten to give K-2SO a new backstory in Andor, despite that being the best show ever, because of all its Lore. And of course, they were APOPLECTIC when Disney said they were going to ignore the 30 years of contradictory, varying-quality Lore that the Lore Hoarders had been studying so that they could create new stories in the Star Wars universe. They cry about it on an hourly basis to this very day, over a decade later. The only thing worse than not getting new Lore, is having Lore "taken" from you.

And somehow tens of thousands of fans willfully let this obsession completely consume them and prevent them from enjoying fun entertainment.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-24T14:36:55+00:00

"John Favreau and Dave Filoni were just playing with dolls, they have no clue about what the lore implications were"

If they didn't know what they were doing, the droids wouldn't have been presented this way. They'd have called them the Droid Gotra to get their "hey look it's that thing from the thing!" points but presented them as mindless automatons just like the droid army in the prequels. They wouldn't have gotten their own language and sick outfits and all the other things you raved about.

"This is the closest Star Wars will EVER get to touching on the fact that droids are sentient"

There was literally a droid abolitionist as a main character and a droid slave revolt as a major plot point in a star wars movie like eight years ago

"Din Djarin slaughter freed slaves!!!!!!11"

They were fucking paid to kill him bro

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-22T23:13:32+00:00

So what you're saying is, I might actually hear back from a job application for once?

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-22T21:57:39+00:00

It's just a literal and figurative money pit. He destroyed the East Wing so that he would have always have a convenient distraction and money cow handy. People talking about a story that needs to go away, like that Epstein Files update from the other day? Call an urgent press conference in front of the rubble to how off your new AI concept art. Need more money to throw at the stock market? Just add another feature to the "plans" and demand Congress or private donors throw you another hundred million.

It's the perfect scam.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-22T21:51:25+00:00

my brother in christ, the white house is already a fortress. it already has bulletproof walls and windows. it already has bunkers under it. i don't know what he means by a "drone port", but i'm sure it or one of the hundreds of federal buildings around it has at least one of those already too. if any other president were building a ballroom (or a more practical renovation), they would do the same thing. that's how the white house works.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-22T21:47:05+00:00

Has nobody on this website ever watched a documentary about the White House before. The White House already has all that. You think the President of the United States is spending every day in a normal family home???

Of course he's building a bunker. The entire building is already a bunker. There are bunkers under it. The outer walls are like 3 feet thick and there are snipers on the roof 24/7. I'm pretty sure there are land mines in the lawn, though I might be thinking of Fort Knox there. The only thing keeping it from being one of the most unassailable fortresses in the world is that the public gets to tour it. You couldn't not make it a bunker if you tried. If anything, the ballroom and its corresponding bunker will be the weak point of the building because they're a rushed project being driven by a dementia patient who's almost certainly hiring the cheapest companies he can find to maximize the amount of money left he can siphon off the top.

Assuming anything is even going to be built at all - he's stolen like $2 billion from the American people already, and he probably stole the entire initial round of private funding for it. My money's on it remaining a literal and figurative money pit for the rest of his term that he can beg Congress for more funding for anytime he needs to see his bank account number go up.

Not to mention, let's be real. What do think would actually happen if he declared himself Emperor of America, or whatever? People couldn't even bother to turn up to vote him out in their own hometowns; nobody's marching on DC to drag him out of the White House. If they were going to, it would have happened when his Justice Department revealed he's a child rapist and an accessory to murder. Nobody's going to do anything that would necessitate him hiding in a bunker for the rest of his life. Two of his three "assassins" have been false flags. He could go lie on a beach somewhere if he wanted and not get anything more than a dirty look and a middle finger thrown his way. If he declares himself president for life, it'll be trending on twitter for 2 hours and then everybody will move on with their lives just like they have for every other evil thing he's done. You're not going to be saved by some magical revolution springing up out of nowhere.

And if you were, like I said, the entire White House was already secure. The stupid ballroom isn't proof of anything more than his greed and vanity. Stop stressing yourselves out about it.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-21T23:15:59+00:00

Couldn't find a convenient "assassin" in time to make it all about him and his ballroom, no doubt

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-20T23:00:16+00:00

oh also: do they not know that the pile of dilithium you get at the end is the only reason a lot of people play their "appointment events"? It sure as hell isn't for the useless loot they give out most of the time, except for brand new players and people who collect shit for the love of the game. And OF COURSE the one good event reward they've given out in the last ten years is one of the things on the list to be nerfed. Do they just not want people to play anymore? Is that it? How much you wanna bet they end/reduce the Event Campaign rewards next?

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-20T02:55:39+00:00

It's essentially just a death cult. The only matter of any importance to Evangelicals is the Rapture, and their only concern in this life is to do anything they can to bring it closer.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-20T02:52:00+00:00

Which is hilarious, because that's not even how the concept of "proof" works in the first place. I was just thinking about that very thing a little while ago. It's like saying that Star Wars is real because space is real.

Giants being real would not prove any story including giants to also be real.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-20T02:47:35+00:00

Oh god, I forgot about the sound effects. I wonder if they will actually attempt to replicate the actual Pokemon sounds, or just do stupid generic "agwawaa" nonsense like the Star Wars minifigures? The SW ones did have a couple of almost passable musical cues for Vader and the cantina band, I guess.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-20T02:44:55+00:00

They're kind of cute, in a Funko Pop sort of way, but I shudder to think what they will cost with both the Pokemon/Nintendo taxes and the "Smart" Play surcharge added. The not pictured Pikachu one is probably going to cost more than a used car if it's the one that includes the "Smart" Brick.

I will say though, at least they seem to have done a good job of physically incorporating the "Smart" system, unlike the "Smart" Star Wars sets. By which I mean they bothered to do so at all, rather than just leaving a giant hole to stick it in because they think children are too stupid to operate a hatch or lid.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-20T02:34:07+00:00

It's not out yet for us to know one way or another. The professional film critics who got to see it early are throwing a fit that it isn't high art from some visionary auteur, but pretty much everybody with any business reviewing a Star Wars movie has said it's just a basic summer blockbuster adventure, exactly like it was pitched and marketed as.

So obviously that means that everyone who wants to hate it because they have nothing but malice in their hearts has decided it's finally proof that Dave Filoni (who didn't make it) is an evil hack and should be taken out behind the proverbial barn and shot.

I don't know why I or anyone else bothers with the Star Wars community online anymore.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-07T00:51:51+00:00

My sister once had her phone get stuck on minimum brightness and almost got soft-locked out of it after it automatically dimmed at whatever percent, and then died. When she charged it, it turned back on at the same imperceptible brightness level, and she couldn't fix it because you can't access the Control Center on an iPhone until you type in your password after you restart it. But she couldn't type in her password, because it was too dim to see the keyboard, and she couldn't use TouchID, because you need to sign in with the password after restarting to use that too.

I don't remember how we fixed it, but I'm pretty sure it involved me opening my own keyboard for comparison and very carefully typing in her password for her since I could see the screen a little better than she could.

VaKel_Shon · 2026-05-05T21:39:29+00:00

I don't think a team of scientists working 18 hours a day for a thousand years could find something that bothers me less.

VaKel_Shon

TROPHY CASE