It's absolutely true that there is still an Xbox 360 with a Kinect hooked up in the living room. How else do you expect me to watch my Two Towers Director's Cut on DVD? Hang on, I gotta change the disc.

The first episode of The Book of Boba Fett was fine, but - like The Mandalorian - the first two episodes combine into the Actual Thing and now I'm in. This is pretty fun. It also seems like the people making it think Star Wars is kind of cool and don't feel ashamed of that, but they aren't so enthralled by it that they won't explore the margins of it and contribute. Dream job shit.

We had hit a point with the first versions of Valheim where we'd done a bunch of cool stuff, but monsters were always pecking at it because it was live 24/7 and this was before we had Wards. There's sort of an upper bound on how many times you want to come back to a pile of crafting materials instead of a house.

That is, in fact, why I mentioned Wordle - because I thought he would be good at it. I didn't know he was even into this kind of shit, since it is generally considered my purview, but… maybe that's why he never told me. He got very cagey about it when I sent him the link, and then never revealed his performance, which would bolster the original theory. But I'm actually super bad at word games!

Just for comparison's sake, if we're talking about lists:

The last time I played with a slot car track would have been in the late 80’s and I guess I had not thought much about them since. It turns out that slot car technology has progressed significantly in the past 30 years. I was on the hunt for a family Christmas present and I was specifically looking for something that everyone would like. The Drive to Survive series made F1 super popular at my house to the point that we were watching qualifying and races every weekend they were on. For some reason I thought we all might get a kick out of a slot car track and I decided to investigate what they looked like in the year 2021. It turns out they look really cool. 

Racing, in all its chimerical forms, continues to dominate the mind of Mike Krahulik. I just sorta like it when people like things; my psychology is constructed in a way that makes the joy of others my own joy. I benefit when others are allowed to inhabit themselves with greater fidelity. The only subgenre in "car shit" that really gets me going independent of the contact high is Rally - some combination of the fundamentally co-op nature of the sport, the incredible danger, and the vowel-studded Finnish names toast in the pan to form a nutty roux. For him, it's different. If there are four wheels it registers as a "valid mind burrow."

Wait, it's the 27th?  Yeesh. For the last two years time didn't move at all, and now two days have elapsed wholly without my knowledge. Well, I guess I did spend a lot of yesterday in the hospital, that haunted and sterile labyrinth, where time is a suggestion.

I didn't leave it up all year, exactly, but it was up until April or so, which I think is still pretty long. Long enough to be really fuckin' weird in the window of your home.

Nobody wants this digital property to achieve efficient, scalable, trustworthy ubiquity more than me. Believe it! I just don't know how a digitally monogrammed Wolf Pants A in Ghost Recon gets us there. I 'm not sure this is the peal of dissonant horns that presages Earth's Final Hour or whatever but I also don't know what we as customers get out of it.

One of the major complaints about the first Witcher series that has been disinterred for this second go-round is that the episodes weren't a strictly linear affair. You don't even know that's what is happening at first. I think that's one of the decisions that elevated it, that gave it a lot of texture on a second watch, but sure. There's a lot of unseemly strangeness to The Witcher and having it built right into the structure helped sell that, too. I don't think the second season is better for being a purely linear affair, but luckily it's still good. Also, the kids found a couple bread heels the consistency of kevlar plate and these seem to have sustained them during their parents' disappearance.

Somebody told me about it on the Tweeter, this Babble Royale shit, and I've played it every day since.

I'll be racing the F3 with the Penny Arcade iRacing league tonight at Spa-Francorchamps! This is one of my favorite car/track combos and the show will start at 7:30PT over on Twitch. This is our last race before the break so come hang out and be merry with Gabe and I while I attempt to avoid the inevitable massive turn one pile up!

I haven't had a chance to play Halo Infinite's campaign at all. Well, mostly not at all. I have seen the introduction, and then I jumped up on a conveyor belt. As conveyor belts go, it seemed like a good one; it definitely had the belt on there. But that intro might be the best cinematic to ever find expression in a Halo game. Beyond that, I can't say too much about the single player stuff, except to say that Gabe thinks it's probably his game of the year. And he doesn't like shit.

I came out here to Philadelphia with the whole family this time, an excursion we haven't undertaken since the first PAX Aus, and this kind of thing is way easier when your child's vocabulary consists of more breadth and richness than just penguin sounds. They can tell you directly, with only the occasional chirp or trill, that they'd rather be at home.

D&D Beyond is back sponsoring Acquisitions Incorporated at the show, and I'm so pleased. If I were, perhaps, a more savvy businessman, I would have stopped using it for AcqInc or The "C" Team shows when our deal ended with them but no!