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.

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.