Hye Jin: Great effort initiating the discourse into this week's LEGO theme. I have been anticipating this week on a number of fronts and cannot wait to read (and construct) the ideas that curators and participants bring to play with. First off, I want to thank you emphatically for including the Community clip that I remember seeing the first time it aired but would never have remembered to use. The sentiments expressed by Michael K. Williams's character Professor Marshall Cain echo the displacement individuals can experience when time and progress march beyond perceptions of fixedness, especially in the intimate spaces we hold for experiences like childhood memories. What makes this clip even more cunning is Annie's attempt to raise her hand (in what could never amount to an adequately whole response) and Jeff's immediate nonverbal blockage. The double bind in Cain's question is not only rhetorical but also individual or perspectival. I would argue that Jeff's silent actions communicate how perspectival questions like those raised regarding LEGO's metamorphosis become too complex for adequate response, a painful irony in that this transaction occurs in the supposed intellectual safe space of the college classroom. Of course, the question is also a meta one that the writers room likely digressed over for some time, which supplies yet another throughline to LEGO's own postmodern turn in their products and specifically in 2014's The LEGO Movie. What an appropriate way to ignite our conversation this week. In response to Hye Jin's questions, I identify with Jeff Winger's complicated silence when purchasing LEGOs. As a child all enjoyment came from playing with the LEGOs (as sets or as original constructs) and gazing at the advent magazines that were tucked inside boxes. As an adult I still experience the same allure through the gaze (now a "twice experienced" phenomenon) of LEGO's advent work on boxes, the Internet, in magazines and in stores. Yet I often feel loss and lack once the box has been opened and the construction complete (Lacan would have more to say on this.). If I leave them on display the sets collect dust. If I hide sets away, they break and become absent (the theoretical dualism between "presence and absence" comes to mind). The liminal solution I have is one I did not fully anticipate, parenthood. Piggybacking Nedda, I fit the Gen X demo and locate a "second life" in my four-year-old son's growing love for LEGOs. The limited ranges of consumer/fan emotional experiences still function, including all the acts of longing, pursuit, and the conquest of acquisition. The process of construction and the exploration of contemporary technologies like moving parts and interactive set pieces still bedazzle as well. That said, there is a threshold of adult vacancy where childhood play once existed (As a solution I fill play vacancies with scholarly approaches to thinking about these processes.). Yet I am ultimately afforded generational luxury and sit back to watch my son(s) develop his own creative senses. Perhaps this process exposes some of how legacy functions within consumerism since I affectively reenact updated versions of similar sociocultural-industrial rituals my dad shared with me.