Well, so, it sounds like Pokemon Legends: Arceus is both a cool, new direction for Pocket Monsters and the environments are… you know, they're environments. Right? That ain't nothin'!

Something I've always held as an article of faith is that life is not a purely local phenomenon. Its origins in my mind are strange, but the fundamentals have been retained: the church I went to as a young person told me that telescopes had recently identified the Gates of Heaven approaching the Earth.

2020 has progressed unabated. The treacherous Gary Whitta - merely this era's wet vessel for the perfidious and eternal sorcerer Gar'Whita - has unleashed his naughty Wordle clone, Lewdle, where morally wrong answers are always right. Will this lead to an age of license and perversity in the young? Undoubtedly, yes. This was almost certainly its purpose. Such are his workings that they may take centuries to come to fruition - his was the bony hand behind "Fruit By The Foot," too long the fuel for rough teen behavior, a crimson snack that is somehow also, improbably, a whip. It is the very icon of his wickedness.

I still haven't had a chance to get into this fuckin' Valheim server - maybe I'll do it today. It will definitely require that I scroll up my text history with Gabe until it reaches the cached portion. That's the kind of sacrifice I'm willing to make, and I think it's an indication of my vigor and resolve.

I'd actually decided not to read this Joss Whedon article; I'm not super interested in a piece that layers bullshit retcons of his behavior with flaky pastry and tender rabbit. I'm not in the market for some kind of artisinal rehabilitation. But… it's not that. It's something that is, in fact, truly revelatory. It's a confession, lurid and ornate; it's the last ten minutes of a procedural where the villain can't help himself anymore. He has to make absolutely certain that you know just how smart he is.

Sometimes on the Internet sometimes "thing happens" and all you can see are the ripples out, not the inciting event. Microsoft's move to purchase Activision Blizzard was in that category. There were a lot of one and two word tweets; I couldn't help but get in on it myself. The headlines all seem to say slightly different things - Microsoft bought them, they intend to buy them, those are pretty different. It's possible that those who say it's already done are simply saying the FTC isn't even gonna look at it. That's a charitable interpretation.

Pokemon Legends: Arceus hits on the 28th, which means it's time to ritually cleanse our decrepit equipment and prepare ourselves mentally, physically, and spiritually. It's such a whacked out interpretation of the series I genuinely wonder how people are gonna take it. On the one hand, it's hard to imagine a lightning mouse as controversial. On the other, people have played these games their whole life and the developer appears to have made Breath of the Wild. I'm just saying, there's sides to this thing.

This Boba Fett show can't figure its shit out. First episode, show hadn't started yet. Second episode, okay, now I sorta get it and I like it even if the end was kinda abrupt. I feel like if you end the show during a flashback it's a little disorienting, but whatever. This third episode was like the first two put together - really cool stuff, some nostalgia, commingled with truly bizarre decisions I'm still trying to puzzle out.

I was reading about the TV Meta, where millionaires watch television shows on stream and then get banned, and it sounded like a lifestyle I wanted to be a part of - so I consulted with an artist friend of mine about what it would take to get that shit poppin' in our neck of the woods. It's not impossible, but it's also not super possible either. We could do it, but he would have to draw twenty-four hours a day for over a year. By that time, hopefully the meta will switch to artists livestreaming themselves killing their writers because we will be well positioned to take advantage of it.

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."