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.

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.