It's a very good time to have a new obsession. Well, let me rephrase that: it's a very good time to have a new obsession that it's even possible to enjoy. Optimally one you can embroider and revisit completely alone, in the night.

I have to be very curious about something to try and harangue somebody for a code, because it doesn't feel good. Plus, people know they shouldn't give me codes, and that's sort of how it should be all the time. I should be slightly ashamed that I'm asking, and if they think they might send me a code, their pointer should hover with trepidation over the "send" button, their mind clouded with unlikely death scenarios, like in Final Destination.

There's a lot of physicality being ported to these digimal realms lately, something you know if you have to find some new way to work or if you have mewling, molting larvae at home trying to figure out what school means when you have six teachers, no firm guidance, a lot of buzzwords, and school is functionally illegal. Spoiler: it fucking sucks.

We actually had to take a break from Tiger King, for the same reason we had to take a break from fuckin' Love is Blind - the emotional payload of these programs is too fucking high.

I think there might be something to Doom Eternal's Battlemode; I'd like to spend more time finding that out. It's got deathmatch dynamics, pace, and terror, but with weird asymmetries that it seems like wouldn't even work on paper but actually feel kinda right. The ideas are much bigger than some Ritually Appended PvP (details to follow) exercise.  Somebody loved this and it's easy to tell.

I understand the idea of a Midlife Crisis as it is usually imagined, but "an emotional crisis of identity and self-confidence" is what my identity itself is based on. My inner life is a video feed of a video feed of a video feed of a mind fracture extending forward, perpetually devoured and devouring. I am a matryoshka of self-hate. Is that… is that not life?

I genuinely don't know if Animal Crossing could have arrived at a better time. I do have other games, I guess. I'm just about done with Doom Eternal, which I think is about two hours too long. Definitely like it, will purchase the DLC, ready to try the multiplayer, but we've reached the game's humblebrag phase now and it's interminable. I just want to pick up the tab and go home. I bought The Division 2: Warlords of New York before East because I love that game but I haven't been in the mood to play a game about humanity descending into urban fiefdoms as the result of a pandemic. Right? That doesn't sound like a recreational activity at the mo.

I'm up against it now, at the very end of the new Doom, which as things come to a close almost has a kind of bullying energy. Maybe these demons had a chance or whatever before I was carrying an arsenal with me everywhere, now I'm on some Destiny-tier immortal Guardian nonsense and the choice matrix for hell monsters is fucking stark. There are only two choices. And both involve me taking some part of them and putting it inside some other part of them, killing them instantly.

I watched Ford vs. Ferrari on the flight to PAX East and now I have this in my home office. 

Of course, today this powerful technology isn't required - that's why we put the strip out early. Now, you can just play it. But anyone born today won't know what we went through, the strange tunnels of force we traveled. The creatures we saw there and the oaths we were made to swear.

Last Friday, I suggested that I'd be heading over to Gabe's house to check out his new obsession with Motorsport Manager, the Playsport Games developed/Sega published slab of autoerotica. I did go over. And it ended up being way, way more interesting than I expected. What I expected was "zero interesting" and what I got was a deep, dark time hole with no bottom.

First they paused school, and then the two week pause became a six week pause. Then events of more than 250 were a no go, then the threshold was fifty. Now all restaurants have been transmuted into the take-out shops, and the things that can be open are "retail locations" that adhere to "some rules," grocery stores, and pharmacies.

Tycho's description of my descent into the car racing rabbit hole is correct. oh how I love the early stages of a new all consuming obsession! the only thing I want to do is learn about racing right now and I can’t get the knowledge in fast enough. I’m watching documentaries, reading books and playing games all about racing. I traveled through a number of different games but eventually I landed on Motorsport Manager for the PC. Even though I was terrible at it, I could not stop playing. I had to show it off to Torko on the stream yesterday and we both had a blast. Fortunately we had some folks in the chat who knew the ins and outs of racing and we learned a ton! 

Ori has a very particular kind of difficulty that I haven't seen since I played the last Ori. I was jumping and then jumping and then dashing and then gliding at a certain point and I was like, "Ah, yes. There you are."

At some level, at some future point, game streaming is gonna be a thing. I can imagine a universe where that's the case. I do imagine things professionally, though, so that might not necessarily be an index of its inevitability. It might instead be a reflection of my capacity - honed over decades and bolstered by entheogens at varying levels of legality - to birth the impossible.

School is completely shut down where Gabe lives; they've got a no-school situation and he's at home now being scourged by it.