I just wanted to drop a link here to last night's Gabir Motors stream. We were finally able to show off the new stream overlay that Dabe and my son Gabe have been working on for a couple weeks now. It's still very much a work in progress but already I think it's the best looking racing stream on Twitch. I'm certainly not the best driver but they say you should dress for the job you want right? It's been about six months now since I started this sim racing journey which is hard to believe because my enthusiasm hasn't tapered off a bit. This is odd for me as my attention span means I spend about two weeks max on any new thing I try. The long running exceptions to that rule being golf, D&D, and now racing. You really don't need to know a thing about race cars to enjoy these shows. We try and break down the action so that anyone can understand what's going on. It's a shockingly complicated sport for something that looks like a bunch of guys turning left for a few hours. Last night's oval race is a great example of that and since these races are pretty quick, catching up on past episodes is easy. It's not like you have to back through months of 5 hour episodes to know what is going on with Gabir Motors. Every race is brand new and the only thing you can guarantee is that Mike Racecar is gonna leave it all on the track. See you in the Pit Crew!

We haven't announced the full lineup for the Acquisitions incorporated game at PAX Online, but you can take this as an announcement that an announcement is coming shortly. Technically, this might be considered an announcement that there even is a game, so if you were wondering, you can now take that part of your brain and put it back to where it was - tending a gnawing, monstrous dread which only seems to grow as you observe it, until the dread and the bedrock of your identity are commingled and inextricable from one another.

I wouldn't say our Comedy Weapon - the geoscynchronous platform I'm addressing you from now - strikes unerringly. But I would say that we have attempted to engage with the form often enough to suggest that we know something about its elusive dynamics, at least enough to propose that not everyone can do it and most attempts fail.

We have a few strips written out ahead at the moment because Gabriel firmly situated in his personal pit of horrors, that of being strapped to an inclined concrete wedge while dentists, warlocks, and necrophiles dance in frenzied arcs about the dias. You might think of this as an exaggeration, and it might be an exaggeration as a description of dentistry as practiced on Earth, but it is not an exaggeration of the terror it inspires. If anything, I have softened its terrifying, serrated edges.

I think I have had fun every time I've been golfing. That said, I rarely play; I'm there primarily to engage in anthropology.

Tonight’s Penny Arcade league race is going to be a doozy. We are racing the Dallara F3 car at Road America. This car is much faster than anything I’ve raced in iRacing so far and it’s also a brand new track for me. I’ve been practicing for a couple days now but there are so many blind turns and tricky sections to this track that just getting around it cleanly is a challenge for me. The league had a little practice race last night and I spent most of the time in the pit. I’m going to keep practicing as much as I can this afternoon but I also have to draw a comic strip today. We’ll see just how prepared I am when the Pit Crew opens up tonight at 8PT over on our Twitch. Come join me for what is almost certainly going to be an evening of “racing”.

I haven't seen Lovecraft Country yet - no spoilers! - but I don't even have the means to watch it, and being already subbed as fuck to a bouquet of digital horsehit I gotta start getting serious. I asked Gabriel what the breadth of the HBO Max offering was and then we had this conversation.

I feel like you get to choose a couple things to be precious about; for me, 1984 might be one of them.

Gabriel likes gadgets, this has long been a foundational aspect of the Gabriel IP, as seen most recently in the adoption of a substantial amount of racing hardware. The tipping point is always there, he's always in the middle of it. His tipping point is really more of a seesaw.

I like switching up my devices every few years. I’ve been back and forth between Apple and Android a number of times and even had a brief Windows phone stint that I honestly really liked. With that said, I was not thinking about replacing my iPhone X until Apple told me I couldn’t play my Game Pass games on it. The rest of my family had made the switch to Android years ago and never looked back but because I still used an iPad every day for drawing I felt like there was value in having an iPhone as well. Stadia didn’t interest me because they wanted me to buy all my games again on their service which I don't even expect to be around in a couple years. Game Pass on the other hand is tied to my existing Xbox account.

I like Avengers stuff. Well, I like good Avengers stuff. My favorite movies in that continuum are Guardians of the Galaxy and Winter Soldier, if that gives you any kind of guide for where I fall in these things. For lack of a better term, though, there are people for whom "Marvel" is like their Star Wars or something. It is definitely not my Star Wars. Shit, kid. Star Wars isn't even my Star Wars. And I think you might only get one.

I think of my own father, who was a kind of symbol whose every whorl and serif constituted an insoluble, male maze, and myself, who is essentially just unpaid IT, and I'm glad there's no licensing requirement for fatherhood because no dad I know would be granted it.

One more index of these corrupted times is that, like some Stygian behemoth, dreaded continuity has reared at least one of its monstrous heads.

I thought it might be funny to draw Gabe and Tycho social distancing in the strip. This was not long after we got back from PAX East and none of us had any idea how long this would last. Well it’s been five months now and I’m sick of drawing characters talking into phones. I hope that if you have been taking your public safety cues from our comic strip, you will continue to socially distance and please wear a mask if you’re out and about. With that said, these cartoon characters are going to take advantage of the fact that they don’t exist in this nightmare realm of ours. So when you see them on the couch together again don’t panic, they will be fine. Meanwhile in the real world, I have not been in the same room as Tycho since the final round of the Omegathon at PAX East. Fortunately our friendship works online with essentially zero signal loss. 

I'm so fucking done with this shit.

I really can't tell you how surprised I've been by Grounded. I mean, technically I can. I would use words. I guess I do things like that a lot. Maybe if I sort of chew around the concept I can get to it.