The last time I played with a slot car track would have been in the late 80’s and I guess I had not thought much about them since. It turns out that slot car technology has progressed significantly in the past 30 years. I was on the hunt for a family Christmas present and I was specifically looking for something that everyone would like. The Drive to Survive series made F1 super popular at my house to the point that we were watching qualifying and races every weekend they were on. For some reason I thought we all might get a kick out of a slot car track and I decided to investigate what they looked like in the year 2021. It turns out they look really cool. 

Racing, in all its chimerical forms, continues to dominate the mind of Mike Krahulik. I just sorta like it when people like things; my psychology is constructed in a way that makes the joy of others my own joy. I benefit when others are allowed to inhabit themselves with greater fidelity. The only subgenre in "car shit" that really gets me going independent of the contact high is Rally - some combination of the fundamentally co-op nature of the sport, the incredible danger, and the vowel-studded Finnish names toast in the pan to form a nutty roux. For him, it's different. If there are four wheels it registers as a "valid mind burrow."

Wait, it's the 27th?  Yeesh. For the last two years time didn't move at all, and now two days have elapsed wholly without my knowledge. Well, I guess I did spend a lot of yesterday in the hospital, that haunted and sterile labyrinth, where time is a suggestion.

I didn't leave it up all year, exactly, but it was up until April or so, which I think is still pretty long. Long enough to be really fuckin' weird in the window of your home.

Nobody wants this digital property to achieve efficient, scalable, trustworthy ubiquity more than me. Believe it! I just don't know how a digitally monogrammed Wolf Pants A in Ghost Recon gets us there. I 'm not sure this is the peal of dissonant horns that presages Earth's Final Hour or whatever but I also don't know what we as customers get out of it.

One of the major complaints about the first Witcher series that has been disinterred for this second go-round is that the episodes weren't a strictly linear affair. You don't even know that's what is happening at first. I think that's one of the decisions that elevated it, that gave it a lot of texture on a second watch, but sure. There's a lot of unseemly strangeness to The Witcher and having it built right into the structure helped sell that, too. I don't think the second season is better for being a purely linear affair, but luckily it's still good. Also, the kids found a couple bread heels the consistency of kevlar plate and these seem to have sustained them during their parents' disappearance.

Somebody told me about it on the Tweeter, this Babble Royale shit, and I've played it every day since.

I'll be racing the F3 with the Penny Arcade iRacing league tonight at Spa-Francorchamps! This is one of my favorite car/track combos and the show will start at 7:30PT over on Twitch. This is our last race before the break so come hang out and be merry with Gabe and I while I attempt to avoid the inevitable massive turn one pile up!

I haven't had a chance to play Halo Infinite's campaign at all. Well, mostly not at all. I have seen the introduction, and then I jumped up on a conveyor belt. As conveyor belts go, it seemed like a good one; it definitely had the belt on there. But that intro might be the best cinematic to ever find expression in a Halo game. Beyond that, I can't say too much about the single player stuff, except to say that Gabe thinks it's probably his game of the year. And he doesn't like shit.

I came out here to Philadelphia with the whole family this time, an excursion we haven't undertaken since the first PAX Aus, and this kind of thing is way easier when your child's vocabulary consists of more breadth and richness than just penguin sounds. They can tell you directly, with only the occasional chirp or trill, that they'd rather be at home.

D&D Beyond is back sponsoring Acquisitions Incorporated at the show, and I'm so pleased. If I were, perhaps, a more savvy businessman, I would have stopped using it for AcqInc or The "C" Team shows when our deal ended with them but no!

Morak and I were talking about this Saturday's Acquisitions Incorporated game, an authentically star studded affair that sees Jeremy "J-Craw" Crawford with his firm hand once again on the tiller. We did wonder what precisely Jim has been getting up to in the interim, a subplot I have every intention of raising incessantly at the table, but Gabriel has delivered concise answers to these questions with only slight prevarication.

I wouldn't have write about it if it didn't keep coming up.

I was watching a sponsored stream last week where, between rounds of Warzone, the streamer was engaging their audience with hydration trivia. Thirteen thousand people were watching it and they all seemed to have strong opinions on the water issue. I aged so quickly at this point that, in the space of perhaps twenty seconds, I became a few dessicated strips of jerky wrapped around a grey ribcage. My skull rolled under the bed and disappeared.

I know that I have certainly wondered why they don't just fuckin' 86 this Kotick guy. Life can be incredibly complex. Even an attempt to buy spaghetti sauce is confronted with an impossibility of options. Easy choices are an opportunity to celebrate, and this is the easiest one yet: Fire Bobby Kotick.

My eldest son Gabe got way into Arcane and once he had seen all of it he convinced Kara and I to watch it as well. I thought the first episode was cool but by the third I was 110% in love with this world and these characters! I just had to do some fanart of VI and Jinx.