653: I Drink And I Watch Things

Luke’s heroics at a pub meat raffle set the tone for this week’s episode. When a man grabs a woman’s arm on the dance floor he’ll be there, like a red bearded Batman. An 83-year-old man’s retirement fund - a warehouse’s worth of vintage Star Wars LEGO he’s been sitting on since the ’90s - is stuck in the middle of one of the strangest internet dramas going right now. Bricks and Minifigs, Antifa, a YouTuber getting arrested in corporate lobbies, a police raid on an Airbnb to search for stolen LEGO, and a Patreon CEO publicly telling a franchise to get stuffed. Nuts. That’s not all: Matt has sunk 131 hours into Dune: Awakening and it’s coming to Xbox and Game Pass in September, which means he and Luke might actually play it together (for about two weeks before their schedules implode). Uwe Boll is back with a potential Batman/Punisher ripoff that Warner Bros. forced him to rename. Luke cannot play Wolverine because Sony exist. And the Buffy the Vampire Slayer LEGO set - the library AND The Bronze, with minifigs - is officially under review after clearing the Ideas supporter threshold.

Luke Skywalker blowing up Jabba’s sail barge is the greatest war crime in Star Wars history. Not the Death Star - a military target, the sail barge full of slaves and service workers. Luke knew exactly what he was doing and he chose evil. This is the kind of analysis you get here.

Somehow a conversation about the Grogu movie leads to the discovery that Neighbours made a zombie spin-off in 2014 and it’s available on YouTube. That’s the kind of episode this is. Along the way: William Shatner publicly calling his own Magic: The Gathering card AI-generated garbage, Matt’s genuine distress over not being able to enjoy Stardew Valley, Luke owning 12 boxes of Heroes of Might and Magic 3 board game expansions and having opened exactly one, and a surprisingly interesting breakdown of why Spotify’s new fan-verification ticket system might actually dent concert scalping. Plus GTA 6 is still November, Destiny 2 is winding down, and Matt is running a local AI agent that reads obituaries so we don’t miss Geek of the Week candidates. ‘Neighbours: Zombies on Ramsey Street’ review coming next week.