The Penny Arcade iRacing league has grown to over 150 drivers now and our weekly races continue to be totally rad. Last night was especially crazy and I encourage you to check out the VOD because it was such a wild race but also because we’re working on some new tech. My eldest son Gabriel has discovered a real passion for setting up and producing our streams. He was elbows deep in Streamlabs yesterday working on some new features for the Gabir Motors show and even though we had a few hiccups last night, I think it was really cool.

There is no source of terror greater for a Grub than that of the Tooth Man. I can talk to him about it, but "it" lives within such a cognitive labyrinth that all the words get lost en route. And now, as a prerequisite for even seeing the Tooth Man, he has to get the megaswab way, way up in his Sinus Zone, which I think we can all agree doesn't constitute a value add.

Jerry and I buy probably 90% of the games and stuff you see us talking about in the comic or here in the post and I think that is important, but occasionally we’re sent cool stuff and I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t also pretty cool. When I do get goodies I feel like it’s my responsibility to make it clear it was a gift, but also let you know what I think.  Sending me stuff is no guarantee that something will get made as I am lazy and rude, and you are even less likely that when the thing gets made it will be kind. If it does end up in a comic, it will probably be next to a drawing of a butt or something honestly.  Still people send us stuff and we are very grateful! I recently received some gear from Logitech G and now that I’ve had some time to get it integrated into my setup and use it, I wanted to share. 

The iRacing cadre has much about it that makes it... distinct, but the level of insult game on display has clearly shifted into the eldritch. I love a good abdomen as much as the next man, but we've spent a couple days trying to figure out what he could have meant by the things he said, and ultimately I had to recontextualize the whole endeavor in order to discover meaning.

Gabriel and I agree on a specific band of media - imagine that this represents the middle line in the "tug of war," where victors are crown'd - and are constantly trying to haul the other toward their particular, contradictory brand of enlightenment.

I'm still hitting the track daily in iRacing and F1 2020. Sim racing has been the perfect hobby for this quarantine honestly. Last night was an especially wild couple of races. The first one was a Mazda road race that my son spotted for me and we got a great result but we also witnessed some truly evil racing. We dug into that little story in the replay after the race and actually discovered an epic tale of revenge. The second race of the night was on the dirt oval and Jerry spotted that one for me. I'm still struggling to understand this particular car but we got an absolute masterclass from one of the other racers.

Almost exactly five years ago we started a Nightlight story line called Grace. I still think this is a beautiful little story and seeing as this is the anniversary, I went looking for my old sketches. 

I couldn't make heads or tails of the Halo Infinite preview. I mean, yeah, we made a comic. And I literally do think about that kid all the time. But I'm mostly just confused by the reveal, as I think a lot of people are.

It’s possible that I was simply expecting too much from Halo Infinite but I was honestly shocked at the trailer they showed yesterday. Nothing about what I saw seemed especially “Next Gen” to me. In fact, there were parts that barely looked current gen. Had MS started with some sort of message letting us know that this is early footage (2016?) or that due to COVID they are not ready to show the final game. The long close up shot of your bad guy giving a monologue is what you do when you’re showing off just how incredible your tech is. Beyond the strange visuals, the game play was unbelievably boring. I understand that Halo Infinite is supposed to be a return to basics in some ways but what I saw felt regressive. Again, maybe I had set my hopes too high. There’s also plenty of time before the launch but you only get one chance to make a first impression and that wasn’t a good one. 

The first hot arc of cat shit struck at midnight.

I think that I really like to look at trailers for Paper Mario games, and that's my primary mode of interaction with the series. I put more actual time into the sorta-adjacent Mario & Luigi series. I'm not even saying they're better! For some reason, those are the ones I played more, probably because they tend to live on what were once called Portables or Handhelds, and in The World Before I lived a lot of my life on planes, or in the Hell Portals affixed to the fore and aft of such journeys.

Twitter is just something you kinda live with, like Herpes. I think there are probably a lot of parallels.

I read an article about some of the reasons movies aren't being released currently. There's a lot of finished ones I'd really like to see, chief among them Tenet, Wonder Woman 1984, and Black Widow. Two thirds of this list I can see being played in the literal living room for everybody in the house, and I expect purely from the trailer that Tenet is the kind of weirdo horseshit I'd be watching on a monitor with a cat at around eleven thirty at night.

I always hoped my mid-life crisis would be relatively mild.

Since Tycho is still out of town, I’ll be handling the Friday afternoon stream solo. I’ll be checking out the new “My Team” mode in F1 2020 from 2-4pt over on Twitch. I have not investigated this mode yet but from what I understand it’s a mode that allows you to create a brand new F1 team and race alongside the real teams like Mercedes and Ferrari. Just like Motorsport Manager, we will be designing a team, handling staff, upgrading our facilities and managing the cash flow. Unlike Motorsport Manager, when it’s time to hit the track I’ll be the one driving the car. We will be learning this mode together so come hang out and help me figure it out this afternoon. 

In my ongoing efforts to understand what in the fuck streamers are talking about, I occasionally disappear down this or that rabbit hole regarding auto aim or crossplay or bots or some other thing in Fortnite. I tend to emerge from these rhetorical thickets dumber than I was when I climbed in. So I don't know exactly what Gabriel is experiencing in the Switch fork of Fortnite, and it might not matter very much, but there's a case to be made that purely as a user experience BR games should throw you a bone every now and then.